ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1874 Alfred Tennyson asked the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), his friend and neighbor on the Isle of Wight, to do photographic illustrations of his Idylls of the King. These photographs were to be reproduced as wood-engraved frontispieces to a new cabinet edition of Tennyson’s Works. The eventual result of Tennyson’s seemingly casual request of a friend was Cameron’s only publication of her original photographs in book form: Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems (London: Henry S. King and Company, 1875, two volumes). Cameron’s photographic illustrations of literature were related to the Victorian interest in tableaux vivants and fancy dress. The interplay of fantasy, role-playing, and social self-importance active in Victorian family theatricals figured in the production of the Illustrations; in her photographs of the Idylls of the King Cameron featured the experiences of the women characters of Camelot: the women exert power over the men, without challenging the order of Arthur’s kingdom. This examination of the Illustrations gives an account of the production and content of the volumes and considers how a prominent woman artist applied Tennyson’s interpretation of the Arthurian story—and its tremendous contemporary popularity—to her artistic program.
