Poetry in the Victorian marketplace: the illustrated Princess as a Christmas gift book.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen

In December 1859 Emily Tennyson recorded the arrival at Farringford of the illustrated Princess (1) whose complicated, prolonged, and treacherous birth had almost killed Tennyson's decades-long relationship with the House of Moxon the previous year. "Beautifully got up," Emily admitted, "but the Illustrations we cannot admire." (2) In contrast, the critics received the illustrated volume with open arms, predicting a deserved popularity: "Mr. Moxon has produced, as a Christmas-book, the Laureate's 'Princess,' with twenty-six drawings from the hand of Mr. Daniel Maclise--an exquisite medley of imagination, lovingly and thoughtfully illustrated by a poet of form," declared the Athenaeum. "This will evidently be the Christmas favourite." (3)

The illustrated Princess was not only the Christmas favorite of 1859; it remained so for the next ten years. Reissues sold well and reviewers continued to praise it as the ne plus ultra of the seasonal gift book. (4) This is a remarkable fact in the Golden Age of Illustration (1855-1870) when wood-engraved books of poetry dominated Christmas sales, but what is even more remarkable is how a book so central to Victorian publishing could disappear from critical view in the almost 150 years since. With the exception of the Moxon Tennyson of 1857, literary critics of our own day have paid scant attention to the illustrated editions of Tennyson's work. The immensity of this oversight shows how committed we remain to Tennyson's own romantic ideology of poetry as the creative expression of individual genius--the disembodied voice and inspired breath of the poet. But breath cannot exist outside a living body, and bodies are always enmeshed in human social relationships. The work of many makers, a book is both a material object and an event whose process through time and space is ongoing. Considering the illustrated Princess as an historical event gives us insight into a critical moment in Tennyson's career and the changing conditions under which poetry was produced and received in an emergent mass market. Examining the illustrated Princess as an object opens up interpretation to the weight and heft of its material form and cultural context. As I hope to demonstrate, the production of The Princess as a Christmas gift book bears very materially on its textual and social meanings as a multi-media, worldly event. Manufactured as a package deal of poetry and pictures by an enterprising publisher for a target market, the illustrated Princess illuminates a significant shift in poetry's distribution within the Victorian system of cultural production while self-reflexively commenting on the power relations embedded in its own pages.

I

Most critics would identify Moxon's publication of the first series of Tennyson's Idylls of the King as the poetic event of 1859. The appearance of this important work was delayed, however, because disputes over the illustrated editions of the Poems (1857) and the yet-unpublished Princess strained relations between publisher and poet to the breaking point. Disagreements began in the months following Edward Moxon's untimely death in June 1858, reached a climax around Christmas, and continued unresolved through the winter and spring of 1859. In April Emily Tennyson complained to Edward Lear that although Tennyson's four Idylls were ready and "waiting to be published," his "endless trouble with publishers these ten months" meant that "his poems have no publisher." (5) The parties finally reached an uneasy truce in late spring of 1859. In June, Moxon published the wildly successful Idylls of the King. In November, the firm brought out the illustrated Princess, the "bone of contention" (6) that almost drove poet and publisher apart permanently the year before.

The contiguous, and contingent, publishing relation between Idylls of the King and the illustrated Princess usefully demarcates two divergent directions for poetry in the late 1850s, each a response to its small share of the market relative to other genres, particularly fiction. (7) Combining narrative pleasure with the Victorian enthusiasm for the middle ages, the first way was to use poetic story and romantic, medieval settings as a lens through which contemporary issues could be examined. (8) This formula proved enormously successful with The Princess in 1847, whose high sales in multiple editions showed that this kind of poetry could command a significant readership in the age of the novel. In his subsequent installments of the Arthurian cycle, Tennyson returned to the form of medieval romance but dispensed with the contemporary frame in an attempt to move poetic narrative from the world of the real to the realm of the ideal. As Dino Felluga has compellingly argued, "Tennyson's Idylls of the King can be read as a last-ditch effort to accommodate the conflicting demands that were being directed at poets" to write poetry that was at once "pure"--that is, "untainted by the demands of the market"--and worldly--that is, connected to "social concerns of the day" (pp. 784, 783).

The other direction for poetry had no pretences to purity and was unabashedly commercial in conception and methods. As a way of expanding into the popular market, a publisher would package poetic selections or collections with decorative bindings and illustrative wood-engravings for the Christmas sales season. This new form of Christmas gift book emerged in the 1850s to replace the literary annuals popular since the 1820s. While the annuals' steel-engraved plates, rarely more than twelve in total, were typically reproductions of paintings, the gift books characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century were profusely illustrated with original wood-engravings made specifically for their textual environment. (9) The works most often cited as ushering in this Golden Age of Illustration--the Moxon Tennyson and the Dalziels' Poets of the Nineteenth Century--were both produced by their respective publishers as gift books for the 1857 Christmas market (though the former famously failed to meet its publishing deadline). That year also witnessed the final issue of The Keepsake, the last of the Victorian parlour albums, a fact remarked on with some interest in the Christmas review columns. The Illustrated London News, for example, bid farewell to "the last of the brilliant bevy" of annuals and welcomed the new, more substantial Christmas gift book. Contrasting the two illustrated genres, the critic suggested that annuals died off because "their literature grew weak, and the public tired of their sentimentalities, though embellished with steel-plate engravings at the rate of a hundred guineas a page." "The new class of Gift-books," according to this reviewer, was a "hardier race of books." The gift book's strength came from the guarantee of cultural legitimacy constituted by its status as a reprint of standard authors, coupled "with the combined advantages of picturesque illustration, fine printing, and the ornate excess of bookbinding." (10) The mass production of Christmas gift books moved poetry into popular culture and increased its readership but, in the process, eroded the poet's autonomy and authority. The struggle between the period's foremost publisher of poetry and its most popular poet over the publication of the illustrated Princess is symptomatic of the pressures poetic production experienced at this highly charged moment in publishing history.

When Tennyson was ready to publish his Poems in 1832, Edward Moxon's firm was his only real option. After the booktrade crisis of 1826, established publishing houses like Constable and Murray had all but ceased accepting poetry manuscripts. In 1830 Moxon moved into this vacant publishing niche and soon established a reputation as the publisher of poetry priced for middle-class consumption, printed in clear type and bound in simple but elegant covers. (11) At the same time, with the publication of illustrated editions of Samuel Rogers' works, Moxon made a name for himself as a publisher interested in combining pictures and poetry for a specialized, up-scale market. By the end of his first year in business, Moxon had brought out (in collaboration with T. Cadell) Rogers' Italy with steel-engraved illustrations after Turner and Stothard for the Christmas market. (12) Later, he published Italy and Poems in two volumes with 128 engravings. (13) The illustrations drew special praise from Ruskin as examples of the "lovely service line engraving might be put upon, if the general taste were advanced enough to desire it." (14) For Ruskin as for Moxon, illustrated books were symbolic repositories of the nation's art, literature, and industry that could improve the aesthetic sensibilities of their middle-class owners.

An enterprising publisher, Moxon sought to capitalize on poetry's cachet as a symbolic good by producing it in combination with a sister art similarly associated with restricted production and thus with cultural legitimacy. (15) For this he received high praise from Leigh Hunt, who responded to the illustrated Italy in the Tatler by commenting on its elite audience: "Mr. Moxon has begun his career as a bookseller in singularly high taste. He has no connection but with the select of the earth'" (qtd. in Merriam, p. 29). Between the 1830s and the 1860s, however, the poetry market shifted and with it, the method and meaning of combining verses with visual art. Whereas the illustrated quarto of Rogers' Poems sold for two guineas (42s.) in the 1830s, two decades later Moxon found it all but impossible to sell Tennyson's illustrated Poems for 31s. 6d. and it was remaindered as a Routledge guinea gift book. By this time, as Lee Erickson has shown, poetry was produced primarily for "a giftbook market centred on Christmas"; in this format, poetry became a middle-class consumer object rather than an elite product for the fashionable and wealthy as it had been earlier in the century (pp. 355, 350). Moxon's illustrated books of the 1850s and 1860s effectively negated poetry's putative autonomy from the demands of the marketplace. In its very material existence within the bindings of a mid-century gift book, illustrated poetry became middle-brow--a commodity for mass consumption, an object within Victorian material culture. A body, in Tennyson's view, that prostituted the pure poetic voice and therefore played fast and loose with poetry's elite standing in the cultural hierarchy. Like Arthur Henry Hallam, who opened his review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical with a sneer at poetry that extended its shelf life "by the help of some pretty illustrations" and then staked a claim for genuine poetry as an art that existed outside the laws of supply and demand and free of "that hydra, the Reading Public," Tennyson wished to keep his poetry pure of commercial taint. (16)

Tennyson's antipathy toward the illustration of poetry is well known. However, it is important to recognize that the poet was aware of his publisher's interest in producing illustrated books from the start. He was not only familiar with Moxon's illustrated editions of Rogers' Poems, he also approved of the old poet's method of dealing with illustrators, even if he did not emulate his practice of breakfasting with artists and explaining his ideas to them. (17) Given the combination of Moxon's predilection for illustration and Tennyson's highly illustratable, picturesque poetry, it seems likely that the publisher raised the possibility of an illustrated edition early in their business relationship. Certainly the idea for the book that has become known as the Moxon Tennyson was floated well before either the fame of the laureateship or the technological changes that ushered in the Golden Age of Illustration made the edition inevitable.

In 1849, after Tennyson's Poems of 1842 had reached their fifth successful edition, Moxon drafted a contract proposing to reissue the book as a modest version of the elaborate Rogers' editions, "in one volume octavo illustrated by 30 vignettes engraved on steel." This proposal for an illustrated edition came to nothing, possibly because of Tennyson's objections. (18) However, in February 1854, after bringing out a collection of Keats's poetry with 120 designs on wood by George Scharf, Moxon renewed his proposal for an illustrated edition of Tennyson's Poems. (19) The moment was auspicious. Tennyson was now laureate and his poetry commanded high sales. An illustrated edition of Poems would secure a second market and extend the readership, given the increasing popularity of books with pictures in the mass market. The switch from steel to wood-engraving at mid century had decreased the price of illustrated books, making them an affordable and desirable commodity to give as Christmas gifts and to display in middle-class drawing-rooms. Convinced an illustrated edition of the laureate's Poems would be a hit with the Christmas market, Moxon guaranteed Tennyson 2000 [pounds sterling]. (20)

This guarantee ensured that the poet would profit by the venture but did nothing to protect the publisher's speculation. Owing to delays with the pictures, the illustrated Poems missed the Christmas market by many months (the book was published in May 1857 rather than autumn 1856) and failed to generate the sales Moxon had counted on to offset his costs. By the end of the year, only 2,210 copies of the optimistic print run of 10,000 had sold. When Moxon died in the summer of 1858, the new management tried to claim nearly 9000 [pounds sterling] from Tennyson for losses from the illustrated Poems. It was at this highly contentious moment, Tennyson claimed, that he first learned of the publisher's plan to bring out a Christmas edition of The Princess, illustrated by Daniel Maclise. The realization was brought home to him when, in late October, proofs of the wood-engravings arrived unexpectedly at Farringford. With no prior agreement about an illustrated Princess, Tennyson was incensed. After consulting with friends and seeking legal advice, Tennyson let the publishers know he was ready to take his work to another firm unless both an apology and a new agreement were forthcoming. (21)

Tennyson's anger over the illustrated Princess, which almost caused a complete breakdown in relations with his publisher, can be characterized as a crisis in authority. On a textual and hermeneutic level, the illustrations by Maclise challenged the poet's ability to direct interpretation through the power of his poetic voice. Tennyson found the artist's designs "too wide of the text," (22) but this apparent disparity only highlighted a more general issue in authorial control. Unsettlingly, the illustrations provided ocular proof of a suspected infidelity to the poet's intentions in the visual imaginations of his readers. Culturally and commercially, the unauthorized packaging of his poetry as a Christmas gift book undermined Tennyson's ability to determine the material conditions in which his verses reached their public. His preference was always for moderate prices, unpretentious bindings, and clear typography set on good paper with ample margins (Hagen, p. 101). There could be no pretence of "pure" poetry when it was tricked out in the elaborate trappings of an illustrated gift book for Christmas consumption. Unable to put a stop to the edition because the Moxon firm had already invested over 550 [pounds sterling] in payments to the artist and engravers, Tennyson insisted on a deferral until the following year. (23) Thus the illustrated Princess appeared for Christmas of 1859, rather than for the 1858 season as the publishers had planned.

II

In claiming he had no knowledge that an illustrated edition of The Princess was in the works Tennyson was being somewhat disingenuous. By his own admission, he had heard a rumor "that Maclise was in Italy or had been in Italy (I forget which) making drawings for an Illustrated edition having to the best of my belief never had a word with Moxon on the subject except that he once said in a casual manner, 'We must get Maclise to illustrate the Princess' to which I as casually answered 'Oh ho' and thought no more about it until the news of Maclise came." (24) While Moxon may have been remiss in formalizing the proposal with the poet, he must have let him know--perhaps in casual conversation as Tennyson's memory suggests--that he began the publishing process for the illustrated Princess at the same time as the illustrated Poems. The record indicates that he gave Daniel Maclise the commission for his two "Morte d'Arthur" designs for Poems at about the same time as the larger commission for The Princess. Certainly the artist worked on the two books, with their related medieval themes, concurrently--if while in Italy, this would have been 1855. (25)

In early 1856 the engravers began cutting designs and pulling proofs for Poems and The Princess as part of the same job lot from Moxon. The Dalziel Brothers' proofs book, which was made up at the time the engravings were done, shows Maclise's design for the northern King pasted in the midst of 10 other designs by various artists for the illustrated Poems (Fig. 1). (26) This proof is dated February 6, 1856. In the spring of 1857, five proofs for the Moxon Tennyson, including one by Maclise for the "Morte d'Arthur," are immediately followed by four proofs for The Princess in the Dalziels' book. (27) Maclise seems to have sent in his illustrations for engraving between winter of 1856 and autumn of 1857, although the remaining engravers--W. Thomas, E. Williams and W. T. Green--left no archive of proofs books to consult as did the Dalziels. Nevertheless, Moxon's account for the illustrated Princess shows payments made to the four engravers on different dates within this time period: to the Dalziels in February 1856 and August 1857; to Williams in June 1856; and to Thomas and Green in October 1857. Maclise was paid 378 [pounds sterling] for his 26 designs in February 1858. (28)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

If the publisher failed to establish a formal written agreement with the poet for the illustrated Princess, this was entirely in keeping with the casual business arrangements they had practiced for over twenty years. (29) And despite his selective memory, Tennyson was certainly told about Maclise's illustrations for The Princess, just as he was kept informed about the various artists' and engravers' work for the Poems. In an undated letter written sometime in the first half of 1856, Moxon speaks of the two illustrated projects in virtually the same breath. After regretting that "Millais' first illustration to the Miller's Daughter [for Poems] is certainly not good," Moxon goes on to say, "You will I think be pleased with Maclise's designs for The Princess. The whole (20) are ready, but two only have yet been engraved. In justice to him I must say that he has taken on an immense deal of pains with them." (30)

Although William Holman Hunt's recollection that Tennyson himself suggested Maclise to Moxon as a potential illustrator for his Poems is probably faulty, (31) the publisher had every reason to expect the poet would approve the choice. Tennyson and Maclise had met socially and shared a friend in John Forster. Moreover, in both public stature and artistic interests, Maclise and Tennyson were a good pair. Primarily a history painter, Daniel Maclise was one of the most popular and prolific artists of the period, particularly admired for his medieval, romantic themes (32)--a perfect match, the publisher must have thought, for Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" and The Princess. Even twentieth-century commentators have assumed that Tennyson would have understood and approved Maclise's designs for his medieval poems. (33) In 1847, the same year that Tennyson first published The Princess, Maclise painted The Spirit of Chivalry for the House of Lords. Like Tennyson, Maclise turned to medieval subject matter in order to contrast present degeneracy with former greatness, while at the same time emphasizing the continuum of history as a way to reclaim the nobility and heroism of a chivalric age. As Richard Ormond says in words that could be easily transposed to a discussion of Tennyson's poetry,

 It is difficult to think of a history painter more
 characteristically Victorian than Maclise. The fascination with the
 past, fed by nostalgia and an omnivorous appetite for knowledge, a
 patriotic sense of national identity, and the belief that history
 could illumine the moral as well as the political progress of
 mankind, all find expression in Maclise's painting. (Daniel Maclise,
 p. 3)

Attracted to his subject, and finding the poet's work congenial to his own aesthetic/political inclinations, Daniel Maclise did, as Moxon stated, take "an immense deal of pains" with his illustrations for The Princess, the last book commission of his career and the one closest in style to his history paintings (Daniel Maclise, p. 105). Maclise prepared for his commission by reading and annotating the fifth and most recent edition of The Princess, probably given to him by Moxon at the time of commission. (34) Marking selected passages with vertical scores and occasionally underlining a word or phrase, Maclise created a system of pencil notations within the text to guide his representation of characters, scenes, and events. All of this careful attention is lavished on the embedded medieval fairy tale of Princess Ida and her university of women. There are no textual notations of any kind in the contemporary frame setting of Sir Walter Vivian's fete, suggesting that the artist's primary interest lay in the medieval section of the poem. Maclise took extreme care to include in his illustrations the details Tennyson describes in his narrative. Although the poet found the designs "wide of the text," in fact Maclise's compositions demonstrate a commitment to literal representation that appears outmoded after the innovative approach introduced by the Pre-Raphaelites in the illustrated Poems of 1857. Looking back on this work forty years later, art critic Gleeson White rightly recognized the Moxon Tennyson "as the genesis of the modern movement" in illustration. Published two years after the watershed of Poems, the illustrated Princess seemed retrograde to White, belonging "essentially to the fifties or earlier, both in spirit and in style." (35)

In addition to marking passages descriptive of the scene he had selected to illustrate, Maclise also noted those that conveyed the mood, tone, or theme the picture was to capture. For example, Maclise highlighted the verses in Part II that describe Lady Blanche, of "faded form and haughtiest lineaments, / With all her autumn tresses falsely brown," for pictorial use in Part IV, when she makes her first appearance in an illustration--the image of the hateful crone among innocent maidens (Fig. 2). This composition also incorporates details from passages Maclise marked in Part IV. His notations highlight verses describing the Prince and Florian standing before the Princess, who is seated on her throne under a lamp, with "a single jewel on her brow." Other marked passages include those referring to the Princess' wet hair being combed by "a handmaid on each side" while "Eight daughters of the plough" stand guard behind. Maclise also marked lines about Psyche's child lying before the throne "Half-naked as if caught at once from bed," with Melissa weeping on her knees while her mother, Lady Blanche, delivers a tirade. Maclise depicts each of these textual details in his illustration, setting the scene within a series of gothic arches and pillars reminiscent of the theatrical setting for The Spirit of Chivalry, which shows a similarly enthroned high-born maiden.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In the illustrated Princess, the medieval archways become a visual trope that carries the past into the present, for the design immediately following this half-page illustration of Princess Ida is a contemporary vignette set within an arched frame (Fig. 3). Four of the six vignettes illustrating the songs from The Princess are in similarly domed frames, thus repeating in the domestic Victorian scenes a visual motif from the gothic designs for the fairy tale. (36) Like the six lyrics interspersed between the sections, which Tennyson added in the 3rd (1850) edition, the vignettes that illustrate them appear to be a later addition to Maclise's series of drawings. In his letter to Tennyson in 1856 about Maclise's designs for The Princess, Moxon refers to only 20 illustrations, but two years later he paid the artist for 26. All the extant proofs of the wood-engravings are for the poetic narrative, not the lyrics. It seems probable that Maclise initially produced the 20 half-page designs exclusively for the narrative sections, leaving the interspersed lyrics unillustrated. After all, his interests and predilections were for the romantic and the chivalric, not the bourgeois and contemporary. Whether Maclise later produced the six designs for the lyrics at the publisher's instigation or his own initiative is unclear, but it seems likely that he was prompted.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The artist's ideas for these vignettes are recorded in the book he used to plan his Princess designs. With few exceptions, Maclise's annotations of the medieval fairy tale are limited to marking descriptive verse passages to guide him in his future drawings for the half-page illustrations. In this section there are only a handful of sketches in the margins, all of them very rough. In contrast, Maclise's annotations of the interspersed songs are exclusively pictorial. He draws each of the six vignettes directly on the page on which its accompanying lyric is printed. These drawings are not preliminary artist's notations; rather, as is evident from the comparable engravings, they represent finished ideas, right down to the framing devices. For example, the vignette for the first lyric, sketched in pencil at the bottom of page 29 of Maclise's working copy (Fig. 4), is identical (apart from being reversed) in its compositional details to the cut printed on page 31 of the illustrated Princess (Fig. 5). Responding to the two-verse, ten-line lyric (37) in which a male speaker describes a falling out and subsequent reconciliation with his wife, Maclise depicts a man embracing a woman. The nineteenth-century figures are positioned beside a small grave and set against a rural backdrop with fields and farm buildings in the distance. Their linked right hands hold a flower plucked from the vine covering the burial mound. This tender scene is given an added sanctity with the addition of the arched frame reminiscent of a church window. Through this opening the viewer becomes a privileged witness to a private domestic moment tinged with grief and love. The bourgeois realism of this picture and the other vignettes is very unlike the visual vocabulary Maclise usually employed in either his book illustrations or his paintings.

[FIGURES 4-5 OMITTED]

Tennyson did not see Maclise's vignettes for the songs until he received his copy of the book from the publisher just before Christmas 1859. While these designs were apparently completed by February 1858, when Moxon paid Maclise for the commission, they had not yet been cut when Tennyson received the preliminary proofs for the edition the following autumn. Only the 20 half-page medieval designs are included in the proofs preserved in the Tennyson Research Center in Lincoln; there are no proofs of the contemporary vignettes. Even more significant, in the trial book showing the proposed placement of the illustrations, which have been cut out and pasted onto proof sheets, there is a blank on page 31 where the first lyric is printed. (38) Directly below the last verse, the handwritten word "cut" identifies where the engraving should be placed (Fig. 6). The indicated location is identical to that of Maclise's pencil sketch in his working copy of The Princess (Fig. 4), but in the published edition the cut is moved up from the bottom of the page and placed between the two verses (Fig. 5).

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Tennyson recorded his intense dislike of this engraving in his copy of the illustrated Princess, which is unannotated apart from his signature on the flyleaf and the single, emphatic word, "Wrong!" in the margin beside the first vignette (Fig. 7). (39) His disapprobation is clear, but is it directed to the illustration itself, its placement, or both? By dividing the first verse from the second, the intervening cut effectively slices the poem in half, disrupting the balanced measures of its lyrical rhythms, both poetic and temporal. The poem poises inexplicable marital discord--"O we fell out I know not why"--against inexplicable human loss, represented by the early death of "the child / We lost in other years." Incremental repetition and anaphora hold the poem's temporal movement fast to its single moment of assurance--"We kiss'd again with tears"--while locating that moment in a world of change and recurrence represented by diurnal and seasonal cycles. The interpolation of the vignette between these balanced verses effectively skews the lyrical exploration of time, change and repetition:

 As thro' the land at eve we went,
 And pluck'd the ripen'd ears,
 We fell out, my wife and I,
 O we fell out I know not why,
 And kiss'd again with tears.

 For when we came where lies the child
 We lost in other years,
 There above the little grave,
 O there above the little grave,
 We kiss'd again with tears.

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

Tennyson's angry "Wrong!" might well have reflected the outrage of a poet who understood the role of typography and page design in conveying meaning and resented the disruption of lyrical pause with pictorial defacement. (40) But it might equally have reflected his view that the composition itself was "wide of the text," despite the many details that conform to the song's representation of character, setting and mood. As the lyric describes, the couple in the vignette are embracing over a child's grave in a rural evening scene; Maclise could not simultaneously have shown them plucking "the ripen'd ears." The problem, however, is not simply that of representing a temporal art with a spatial one; it is also interpretive. The difference between the poet's visualization and the artist's might be traced to their respective understanding of the lyric's landscape. For Maclise, the text's twilight autumn fields seem merely to provide a poignant rural setting. For Tennyson, they might well have symbolized the couple's advancing age as they approach their own deaths. In this case, of course, Maclise's young couple would be seen by the poet as completely and definitively wrong for his own image of the poem.

Given Tennyson's objection to this vignette, he must have found the publisher's decision to crop it for use in the binding's decorative design particularly offensive (Fig. 8). The cover is the poem's public persona. In a book produced as a Christmas gift and designed for display on the drawing-room table as part of the room's decorative furnishings, the cover conveys the work's initial, and--in the case of those visitors who never actually open the book to peruse its pages--sometimes only, communication with readers. Insofar as the medium is the message, one does indeed judge a book by its cover. As Nicholas Frankel comments, "In a world of objects, a book's binding announces and grounds the text 'within' since it constitutes the face or front that the text presents to the world at large (as opposed to the more private face that the unbound text presents to the individual reader)." (41)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

In its red morocco cloth, elaborately blind stamped and blocked in a gold pattern surrounding a central sunk panel containing the design of an embracing couple, the decorative binding for The Princess is an integral part of the gift book's meanings. As the only representational feature in the ornamental design, the delicate gilded figures of the cream-colored cameo carry particular interpretive weight. Located between the lettering announcing title and author, the cropped close-up taken from the first vignette introduces and comments on the work as a whole. The cut-and-paste constructs new associations for both individual picture and narrative poem. First, the cut literally severs the picture from its poetic context, as the cropping discards the grave of the original vignette along with the accompanying verses. Second, the paste-in creates a new context for the contemporary image by attaching the ivory cameo to the medieval Princess, whose name is emblazoned in gilt letters above.

The gilt design of the onlay, encased within a decorative medallion frame, functions like the locket containing Princess Ida's image, which the Prince wears next to his heart (I.37). (42) Encasing an object of desire both erotic and economic, the locket sets the seal on a contract established by kings of adjoining realms for the future marriage of their infant heirs. Centered on the cover of The Princess, the gilt miniature of the embracing couple foretells and celebrates the happy ending of the fairy tale in which the Prince marries the Princess. The positioning of the man bending over a clinging woman who looks up to him while he holds her hand aptly illustrates the closing lines of the medieval narrative:

"Indeed I love thee: come, Yield thyself up: my hopes and thine are one: Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself; Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me." (VII.342-345)

Spoken in the voice of the Prince, the final lines seem retrospectively haunted by the lyric speaker of the first song through the associations imprinted on the front cover. The image transposes itself easily from vignette to cover and from contemporary middle-class moment to imagined medieval past. In its effacing and overshadowing of the woman's features by the man's, the cover image replicates the narrative's focus on the Prince rather than the eponymous Princess, represented textually in the passage quoted above by Ida's silence--a sister silence to that of the first lyric's addressee, the speaker's wife. At the same time, the cover image cannot help but retain its trace history of the marital discord for which it was designed, and thus proleptically troubles the narrative promise of the fairy tale's "happily ever after" ending. In this way, the cover announces the work's intention to resolve its interrogation of the woman question in favor of the patriarchy even while acknowledging its tactic will be to evade the real issues. (43) In the physical features of The Princess' binding, lyric, narrative and visual design combine to announce an age-old story about the structures of power and representation.

III

The ornamental cover of The Princess also functioned as an advertising come-on for the middle-class Victorian gentleman shopping for a suitable present for his wife or daughter. By developing sales strategies aimed specifically at female readers and male purchasers and by identifying the seasonal giving of books with national character, the Christmas gift book market established a new direction for the publication of poetry. This direction took advantage of a significant shift in the book industry in the 1850s, when the three-month period leading to the Christmas season came to represent the year's highest book sales (Eliot, p. 34). While books of all kinds were bought at this time, the gift book trade enjoyed particular success by marketing its volumes primarily as material objects rather than poetic expression. These handsomely bound illustrated quartos and octavos were designed for display as visible tokens of the middle-class owner's taste and cultivation. As Margaret Oliphant wrote in a Christmas book review for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, "Books are books in these wintry days--not voices, however charming may be the voice--but tangible productions, intended for the gratification of more things than the mind." (44)

Unabashedly market-driven, the illustrated gift book effectively placed material, sensuous and social values over the abstract power of the poetic voice, thus knocking the poet off his elevated pedestal by associating him with the crudities of commerce and trade. As we have seen, Tennyson strongly objected to this direction in the production of poetry. However, his desire to retain poetry's purity was not without ideological contradiction. The poet, naturally enough, also wished to earn a living. He was not above taking advantage of the annual orgy of book buying, but wished to do so genteely, in quiet covers and unadorned letterpress. The first public appearance of The Princess in 1847 modestly set out the poet's preferred course. Bound in plain green cloth boards and set in clear type, The Princess charted Tennyson's future direction in the Idylls by combining the worldly (in the form of contemporary gender issues) with the ideal (in the form of the medieval fairy tale). But it also capitalized on the emerging Christmas sales season in two important ways. First, it came out for the gift book market, as it was first published on December 25. (45) Second, its content, like that of Charles Dickens' successful series of Christmas books, took advantage of the season in both its setting and its thematic concerns. In this sense, the work itself invited Moxon's republication of it as an illustrated Christmas book twelve years later and even made Maclise, who had contributed to Dickens' popular series, an obvious choice as illustrator. (46)

As in the "Morte d'Arthur," a modern frame narrative in The Princess establishes a Christmas context and story-telling motive for the embedded chivalric tale. This Christmas context may not be immediately obvious, as the narrative frame is set on a summer fete day at Sir Walter Vivian's country place. However, the story told by seven college men home for the holidays is one they had invented the previous Christmas, when they had all stayed at college to study. Walter the younger introduces their narratives to an audience of women, including his feminist sister Lilias, as "Chimeras, crotchets, Christmas solecisms" (Prologue, 1. 199). There is serious intent beneath the sport, however. Unspoken and unseen in this Christmas context, but crucial nevertheless, is the presiding image of the Madonna and infant, the season's most potent symbol--a Victorian icon materialized in the designs Maclise made for the lyrics in the illustrated edition (see Fig. 3). Maclise's domestic vignettes celebrating the maternal are entirely in keeping with Tennyson's later claim that "The child is the link through the parts, as shown in the Songs (inserted 1850) which are the best interpreters of the poem." (47) Viewed from the contemporary perspective of the songs, the fairy tale reaches its happy conclusion when the Princess' nurturing instincts and overwhelming desire for a child defeat her feminist aspirations and secure her submission to the Prince. This lesson about gender is one Lilias is meant to absorb as the textual surrogate for the female reader who is simultaneously being schooled in home duties and responsibilities. The Christmas context is integral to the power relations played out in The Princess. It defines what is possible in the Victorian present and looked for in the future by validating a past heritage and its domestic, national, and institutional traditions. (48)

In celebrating the conquest of the Princess by the Prince (that event to which the whole poetic creation moves), the poem reaffirms not only patriarchal hierarchies, but also nationalistic ones based on the assumed superiority of Teutonic peoples--the very folk viewed by Victorians as the moral custodians of Christmas as a domestic festival. (49) The Prince comes from a northern country. His father the King seems the epitome of barbarity, but also represents (like Sir Walter Vivian in the frame) hearty northern strength and power. The Princess' father, who rules the southern kingdom, is represented as small, weak, and ineffectual, easily "mastered" by his daughter's poetic declamations on the theme of women's rights (I.145). Closely following Tennyson's text, Maclise's illustrations for the Christmas book effectively realize the physical contrasts between the kings and insinuate moral ones (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 9). The illustrations illuminate what the poetic narrative itself does not wish to acknowledge. The union of this northern Prince and southern Princess appears to represent the harmonizing of the best in each "race" as in each gender, but in fact the medley remains unmixed: men are men and north is best. Moreover, the gendered geographies of north and south support the implicit masculine/feminine hierarchy not only in the embedded narrative of The Princess, but also in its modern frame. The poem concludes with Sir Waiter's oldest son praising "the narrow sea" that keeps the northern British isles separate from their dangerous neighbor to the south. With its "Revolts, republics, revolutions," France is a country only too like "our wild Princess" for his Tory taste (Conclusion, ll. 51, 65, 69). (50)

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

The Princess' affirmation of such bourgeois British values as northern and masculine superiority and the Christmas comforts of the hearth were materially embodied in the work's publication as an illustrated gift book in 1859. As described by one reviewer, the typical Christmas book consisted "of some established favourite, done up in a very smart binding, with a profusion of graceful little woodcuts." As a good seller for over 10 years in 7 editions, The Princess had certainly established itself as a public favorite, and this popularity made it eligible for movement into the mass market as a piece of portable Victorian property representing important cultural values. Its production in an illustrated edition participated in a nationalist agenda, for as the Christmas book reviewer explained, the gift book's literary content ("some old favourite") showed "our English reverence for the past," while its "get up" (woodcuts and bindings) demonstrated the nation's entrepreneurial and manufacturing prowess. (51)

Recognized by the 1860s as a staple "branch of national industry," (52) the Christmas book was deemed characteristically British both in its manufacture and its purpose. From a technological point of view, it demonstrated British superiority in the art of wood-engraving and book binding. As an object of exchange--a present--it demonstrated British superiority in moral character. Significantly, the press drew these distinctions in stark north/south gendered geographies, positioning a masculine and moral Britain against an effeminate and trifling France. As one reviewer wrote, "let France celebrate its Christmas ... by sumptuous outlay in bronzes and jewels, and ... bonbons and chocolate. Be it ours, as befits the solidity and strength of the manly English character, to spend our money in a way which shall do us credit.... So let us go decently to Paternoster-row." (53)

Spending money creditably at Christmas was primarily the responsibility of the citizen who enjoyed the dual privileges of disposable income and dignified reputation. Typically, this was a middle-class gentleman who wished to present a gift to a female member of his family. Pretty illustrated volumes were "the customary gifts of the ... season" because, an Illustrated London News writer explained, "no more elegant and convenient form [has been] yet devised for a token of friendship or family affection." (54) Christmas books were therefore designed for "the tables of every boudoir and drawing-room in the kingdom" (55)--domestic spaces in which occupants, furniture, and objects displayed the householder's cultivation, wealth, and respectability. The gift, of course, reflected on the giver as much as the recipient. "To give a book," one reviewer enthused, "looks so lofty and dignified; and when we give, we like to realize the fact both that we are giving and that we are doing good." Gift books, therefore, could be regarded "with a very lofty feeling by the model Paterfamilias of Christmas." (56)

In this context, the production of the illustrated Princess for the Christmas gift book market seems as much a foregone conclusion as Princess Ida's marriage to the Prince. In presenting this gift, Paterfamilias could feel certain he was laying out his money in an approved British way as a credit to himself and a tribute to his nation. A popular work by the poet laureate--illustrated by an artist presently engaged in painting frescoes celebrating national greatness on the walls of the Houses of Parliament (57)--The Princess as a Christmas gift book could not fail to be the "Christmas favourite" in 1859 and for many Christmases to come. The Christmas Book became "a British institution" because it reinforced Victorian values: "To give mere luxuries and carnal material enjoyments is thought to argue a low moral standard both in the giver and receiver. A present is not thought to be right unless it affects the useful as well as the ornamental." (58) In its material form as a Christmas book, The Princess met these institutional and ideological requirements perfectly, from its elegant binding to its chivalric wood-engravings and instructive narrative. In its fairy tale subject matter purporting to deal with the contemporary woman question but silencing feminist aspirations through the institution of marriage and the biological imperative of maternity, Tennyson's The Princess was just the thing for ladies, who would also, no doubt, admire Daniel Maclise's romantic illustrations. Indeed, there is a way in which the destined female readers of this gift book are schooled in their domestic responsibilities by perusing its contents, just as Princess Ida "lessons herself in the conventional women's roles" by reading a book of poetry while nursing the Prince (VII.158ff). As Herbert Tucker points out, the episode is remarkable "for its implication that a poetry anthology is the proper hornbook for Ida to spell her new self by" (p. 367)--though not, of course, a poetry anthology of her own making: the scene of instruction marks the moment that the poet Ida disappears and the domestic Ida emerges. What is also remarkable is the way in which the illustrated Princess performs this gendered cultural lesson for its audience in its material features while, at the same time, demonstrating to the poet his lack of agency in the institution he serves.

Just as the plot of the poem hinges on Ida's submission to a marriage contract established without her consent, so too the publication history of the illustrated Princess revolves around Tennyson's ultimate yielding to a commissioned gift book edition he did not approve. In terms of the power politics involved in this publication history, Tennyson's position as author is feminized: like Ida, he loses authority and autonomy through a forced relationship to a representing Other and becomes incorporate in an economic partnership not of his choosing. Moxon's production of The Princess as a Christmas gift book demonstrates the limits of authorial agency in the mid-century marketplace in which "books were books," not voices. Packaging poetry with elaborate bindings and numerous woodcuts made it a saleable commodity in a new mass market but, in the process, it involved the poet in the taint of trade. Objectified as a piece of domestic furniture and associated with a female readership supposedly as interested in decor as in verses, the poetic gift book moved poetry out of the elite position it had enjoyed for centuries in the restricted field of cultural production. As an ornamental piece of material culture, Poetry herself, and not only the poet, was feminized, and this feminization foretold the marginalization of poetry's prestige and power by the end of the century. Although Tennyson had, with his publication of Idylls of the King in 1859, temporarily established a different direction for poetic production, this failed to gain permanent ground in an emerging mass culture dominated not only by fictional narrative but also, increasingly, by the image. (59)

Notes

(1) Alfred Tennyson, The Princess, illustrated by 26 engravings after Daniel Maclise (London: Edward Moxon, 1860). The book was forward dated in conformity with Victorian publishing practice. Unless otherwise noted, I cite my own copy of the 1866 reprint of this edition.

(2) Lady Tennyson's Journal, ed. James O. Hoge (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1981), p. 140.

(3) Henry G. Bohn, "Our Weekly Gossip," Athenaeum 1677 (December 17, 1859): 815-817.

(4) See, for example, the review of a reissue of the illustrated Princess in the Saturday Review 20, no. 530 (December 23, 1865): 795-796.

(5) Unpublished letter from Emily Tennyson to Edward Lear, April 16, 1859, located in the Tennyson Research Center (hereafter TRC), Lincoln.

(6) June Steffensen Hagen, Tennyson and his Publishers (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1979), p. 108.

(7) Richard Altick's Appendix on Best-Sellers in The English Common Reader (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957) indicates the overwhelming sales of novels as compared to even the best of best-selling poetry, such as Tennyson's Enoch Arden. In "Some Trends in British Book Production, 1800-1919," Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), p. 36, Simon Eliot shows that poetry held about 7.6% of total book sales at mid-century. See also Lee Erickson, who discusses poetry's marginalization in comparison with other genres in his essay on "The Market," in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 345.

(8) Dino Franco Felluga, "Tennyson's Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market," SEL 37, no. 4 (1997): 783-803.

(9) Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books 1850-1870: The Heyday of Wood-Engraving (London: British Museum Press, 1994), pp. 12-13.

(10) "Illustrated Gift Books," review article in The Illustrated London News, January 10, 1857.

(11) Harold G. Merriam, Edward Moxon: Publisher of Poets (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), pp. v-vi.

(12) The illustrated edition of Rogers' Italy was published December 18, 1830. See Merriam, p. 27.

(13) Samuel Rogers, Poems, Illustrated Edition, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Moxon, 1834).

(14) John Ruskin, The Cestus of Aglaia, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), 19:151.

(15) My analysis here and throughout the paper is indebted to Pierre Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," repr. in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. D. H. Richter (Boston: Bedford, 1998), pp. 1232-53.

(16) Arthur Henry Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry and On the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson," review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) in The Englishman's Magazine (August 1831); repr. in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), pp. 1193, 1191. Hallam's reference is to the illustrated second edition of Robert Montgomery's Oxford: A Poem, with engravings by Joseph Skelton.

(17) The Letters of Alfred Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1981-1990), 2:456. Hereafter cited as Letters.

(18) Draft "Memorandum of an agreement with Alfred Tennyson 25 January 1849" in the TRC. The amendments to the printed contract concerning the illustrations are written in Moxon's hand. The drafted contract is unsigned but there is a stroke through Moxon's autograph addition that the publisher is responsible for directing the mode of "illustrating," and the verso is embellished with Tennyson's doodles, so it is clear that the poet considered it.

(19) For the connection between the illustrated Keats and the Moxon Tennyson, see "A Statement of Facts Respecting the Illustrated Edition of My Poems" in Letters, 2:210. As a companion book to the illustrated Keats, Tennyson's Poems was initially to include George Scharf as one of the illustrators, "with a few gems from the antique." Letter to Tennyson from Moxon dated February 27, 1854, in TRC.

(20) See "Statement of Facts," Letters, 2:210-211.

(21) See "Statement of Facts," Letters, 2:210-211. (The editors of the Letters have "Edition" in singular form; however, in the manuscript in the TRC [7902A], "Editions" is plural in the header. This is confirmed in the body of the statement, which devotes equal space to the illustrated edition of the Poems and the illustrated edition of The Princess). See also letter from Charles Weld to Tennyson dated October 27, 1858, in which the Moxon firm's financial claims against the poet are elaborated, TRC 2419.

(22) Alfred Tennyson to Emily [November 17, 1858], in Letters, 2:211.

(23) The payments to Maclise and the engravers (Williams, the Dalziels, Green and Thomas) are recorded on an account statement located in the TRC [7939]. Hagen (p. 106) inaccurately connects this statement to the payments Moxon made for the illustrated Poems of 1857.

(24) "A Statement of Facts," Letters, 2:211.

(25) Chronology in Daniel Maclise: 1806-1870 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1972), p. 17.

(26) The Dalziels added the pencil note, "NOT Moxon Tennyson. The Princess 1860, p. 17," beside the proof as well as the information that it was later recut for the book by W. Thomas (Dalziel Brothers' Proofs Book for 1856, Dalziel Collection, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London). In the published copy of the illustrated Princess, the engraving is signed by W. Thomas, who cut the design after Maclise altered it, perhaps in response to Tennyson's request. In the Dalziels' proof book, the composition is similar to the published engraving, but the figures have slightly different postures, facial features, and head gear, and the design lacks many details. The recutting seems to have occurred late in the process. In the trial book with some pasted-in proofs of engravings in the TRC, there is a blank space on p. 17 where the picture is to be placed, with the words, "cut not yet finished" written in hand.

(27) Dalziel Brothers' Proofs Book for 1857, Dalziel Collection, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London.

(28) Moxon's account for the illustrated edition of The Princess [inaccurately labeled as Poems] in TRC 7939. The Dalziels engraved 5 designs, only 4 of which were published (as described above, one was redesigned by Maclise and recur by W. Thomas for the book); W. T. Green engraved 4; W. Thomas engraved 17, including all the vignettes; and E. Williams engraved 1.

(29) See letter from Emily Tennyson to Charles Weld, November 2, 1858, describing the business transactions of Tennyson and Moxon as casual agreements contained in letters and conversations rather than contracts (The Letters of Emily Tennyson, ed. James O. Hoge [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974], p. 121).

(30) Letter from Edward Moxon to Emily Tennyson (1856?), TRC 7882.

(31) William Holman Hunt's recollection is reported in George Somes Layard, Tennyson and His Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustrators: A Book About a Book (London, 1894), p. 5.

(32) Richard Altick, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain 1750-1900 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1985), p. 5.

(33) Forest Reid, Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties: An Illustrated Survey of the Work of 58 British Artists (1928; New York: Dover, 1975), p. 36.

(34) Maclise's personal copy of The Princess, with the artist's notations and pencil drawings, is located in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings. It is the 1853 (5th) edition of The Princess and contains Moxon's List of Books dated February 1854. In a letter to Tennyson dated February 27, 1854 in which he writes of prospective artists for the illustrated Poems, Moxon indicates his intention to call on Maclise (TRC 7869). It seems likely that this initial meeting with the artist also resulted in a commission for The Princess, and that the publisher supplied the illustrator with the most recent edition of the work at that time.

(35) Gleeson White, English Illustration: "The Sixties": 1855-1870 (1897) (Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1970), pp. 105, 112.

(36) Twelve of the 20 half-page illustrations for the medieval tale feature gothic archways in their compositions.

(37) The lyric is comprised of two verses of five lines each, divided by a space between, in both Maclise's working copy (1853 edition) and in the illustrated edition of 1859. In the reprint of The Princess in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987) the lyric is printed in a single block of 14 lines (2:205). The additional verses are inserted at ll. 6-9 and constitute a generalized reflection on the temporal moment the lyric celebrates. Tennyson included these lines when he added the songs in the 1850 edition of The Princess, but discarded them in every subsequent edition between 1851-1861 (see Ricks's editorial notes, 2:205 and 2:185-186). My citations of this lyric are taken from the illustrated edition of 1866.

(38) The TRC has the proofs of pages 1-32 of the illustrated Princess, with pulls of the engravings cut out and pasted on trial sheets in the planned location (where available), as well as proofs of the illustrations without letterpress, printed directly on paper of the same weight as that used in the edition. The 27 proofs in this trial book actually represent only the 20 designs for the medieval tale, not the complete run of 26 illustrations including vignettes, as proofs for some engravings are pulled more than once.

(39) Author's copy of the first illustrated edition of The Princess, with 26 designs on wood by Daniel Maclise, in TRC.

(40) His subsequent reinsertion of ll. 6-9 between the two verses, closing up all white space between them, may have been to ensure the impossibility of defacing the lyric with future pictorial colonizing.

(41) Nicholas Frankel, "Aubrey Beardsley 'Embroiders' the Literary Text," The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2002), p. 268.

(42) All further line citations of The Princess are taken from Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols., unless otherwise noted.

(43) Critics have long deplored the inadequate treatment of the subject of women's rights in The Princess. See, for example, Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Collier, 1972), who reckons that the problems with The Princess stem "from its innumerable evasions" (p. 189); W. David Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Poet in the Age of Theory (New York: Twayne, 1996), who acknowledges the poem "both defends and makes fun of Victorian feminism" (p. 17); Marjorie Stone, "Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh," VP 25, no. 2 [1987]: 101-127, who remarks on the poem's ideological conservatism, despite its apparent gender reversal; and Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), who calls it a "textbook Victorian compromise" that avoids taking a position on the contemporary gender issue it addresses (p. 351).

(44) Margaret Oliphant, "Merry Christmas!" Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 89 (January 1861): 107-108.

(45) Peter Levi, Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 187.

(46) Maclise contributed illustrations to three of Dickens' Christmas books: The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), and The Battle of Life (1846).

(47) Note to poem in Ricks, Poems, 2:186..

(48) James R. Kincaid notes that Princess Ida's chief enemy is time, "most specifically the past": "The past controls in the most outrageous forms, and eventually the prince--or his father--or time--wins. There is, from this point of view, no possibility of change" (Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975], pp. 67, 68).

(49) Mark Connelly, Christmas: A Social History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 11.

(50) Tennyson's note to the poem indicates that these lines, which were added in the edition of 1850--i.e., the same edition to which the women's intervening songs were added--were "Written just after the disturbances in France, February 1848, when Louis Philippe was compelled to abdicate" (Ricks, Poems, 2:294).

(51) "Christmas Books," Saturday Review 6, no. 164 (December 18, 1858): 613.

(52) "Christmas Books--No. 1," Saturday Review 22, no. 578 (November 24, 1866): 653.

(53) "Christmas Books and Christmas-Boxes," Saturday Review 4, no. 112 (December 19, 1857): 557-558.

(54) "Illustrated Gift-Books for Christmas," Illustrated London News 49, no. 1403 (December 15, 1866): 582.

(55) "Furniture Books," Fraser's Magazine 59, no. 349 (January, 1859): 98.

(56) "Christmas Books and Christmas-Boxes," p. 558.

(57) Maclise began work on The Meeting of Wellington and Bliicher for the new House of Parliament in 1860; three years later, he painted The Death of Nelson for the same national institution (Daniel Maclise, pp. 17 and 107). These large public works consumed all his energy in his last years, which likely explains why The Princess was his last illustration commission.

(58) "Christmas Books, No. 1," Saturday Review 16, no. 423 (December 5, 1863), p. 738.

(59) I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which generously provided the support that made the research for this paper possible; to my research assistant, Jennifer Douwes and Abigail Godfrey; to Grace Timmins of the Tennyson Research Center; and to my colleagues in the Works-in-Progress group at Nipissing University who commented insightfully on an early draft of this paper.