Despite his aptitude for staying put, Tennyson often felt a duty to progress. An abstract idea of progress was a part of the Zeitgeist: like many intellectuals of his time (the lingering dogdays of Enlightenment perfectibilism) Tennyson entertained a stirring but hazy faith in the general thought of advancement. (‘No idea perhaps occupies a place in his poems so central as that of the progress of the race’, was how it struck one contemporary (CH 326).) Progress was inextricably tied up with contemporary improvements and scientific discoveries – ‘As we surpass our father's skill, | Our sons will shame our own’ (‘Mechanophilus’, R. (i). 197, ll. 21–2) – but could easily assume a compellingly vague universality and become a cast of mind: OED defines a telling Victorian sense of ‘future’, ‘A condition in time to come different (esp. in a favourable sense) from the present’, as though onward were almost necessarily upward. Thackeray was refreshingly sardonic about it all: ‘ “Bless railroads everywhere,” I said, “and the world's advance[”]’.

Nothing was safe from what Tennyson himself called ‘the great progress of the age’. W. J. Fox, for example, launched his review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical with the cheering reflection: ‘It would be a pity that poetry should be an exception to the great law of progression that obtains in human affairs; and it is not … progressiveness is merely a consequence from, a sort of reflection of, the progressiveness of [man's] nature’ (CH 21). No aspect of the nineteenth-century spirit is likely to strike us as more offputtingly bumptious. Chambers's Vestiges of Creation, which Tennyson knew, interpreted evolutionary history as a long sequence of providentially ordained improvement; and Tennyson approved of attempts to project that sense of incremental advancement into futurity, such as that he found in the naturalist Wallace, who showed that ‘man has a prospective brain’ (IR 109). Tennysonian progress at its most outspoken is often, redeemingly, at its most giddily cosmic or mystical, imagining immense and impersonal time schemes of advance: ‘Move upward, working out the beast’, In Memoriam counsels, to little conceivable effect (cxviii. 27).