ABSTRACT
The above extracts, the first from Tennyson's 'The Holy Grail' idyll (1869), the second, said by the Anglican preacher F.W. Robertson in 1852, highlight the tensions in Victorian literary reworkings of the legend of the Quest for the Holy Grail, in relation to the wider cultural discourses which generated those texts. The reactions of Arthur's knights to the 'vision' ofthe grail, as described by Tennyson, allude to cultural anxieties concerning loss of faith and the duality of the social and the spiritual - should contemporary 'human wrongs' be left to 'right themselves' whilst a religious vocation is pursued? This passage also reminds the reader of the difference between the Quest in itself (as process) and the Grail (as object achieved or vision perceived) - both motifs were employed by Victorian writers with different degrees of emphasis and to underscore particular points of religious doctrine, as this chapter will explore.
