ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 considers how debates over language and political sovereignty informed the Victorian poetic engagement with the Empire. I demonstrate how Alfred Tennyson’s monodrama Maud (1855) and his epic Idylls of the King (1859–1885) take up debates about human and animal language in light of contemporary works by Robert Chambers, Müller, Darwin, and other scientists and anthropologists who speculated on the language of ancient homo sapiens. This chapter shows how scientific and philological debates inform the Idylls’ critique of a democratically reforming society that continues to perpetuate atrocities in the Empire.
