‘The Poetry of Married Life’ reflects on poetic descriptions of the quotidian reality of married life in the light of idealistic notions of ‘companionate marriage’ emerging from contemporary Socialist and Utopian thought and the prevalent sense of what Matthew Arnold called the ‘poetrylessness’ of modern life. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House begins by attempting to dignify the mundane events of married life, but finds, like the other poets whose work is examined in this chapter, that ‘[the] poetry of married life is almost invariably a poetry of postponement and evasion’. The result, in the work of Patmore and others, is a poetry which combines a typically Victorian focus on what Robert Browning calls the ‘moment, one and infinite’ in which the meaning and value of life are revealed with an equally characteristic search for forms capable of embodying the poets’ continual reflection on and reassessment of experience.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.