ABSTRACT
One section, The Sleeping Beauty, was published 1830; the whole sequence was published 1842. R. J. Tennant wrote to T., 8 June 1834: ‘Send me the new Sleeping Beauty and whatever else you have written since the glorious three days of my Christmas sojourn at Somersby’ (Letters i 111–12); meaning either The Sleeping Palace or the sequence from that to The Departure. The Prologue and Epilogue (and therefore presumably also Moral and L’Envoi) were ‘added after 1835 (when the poem was written), for the same reason that caused the Prologue of the Morte d’Arthur, giving an excuse for telling an old-world [Fairy-] tale’ (FitzGerald). This resemblance to The Epic might suggest 1837–8 for the Prologue and Epilogue. Perhaps it became tinged with T.’s feelings for Rosa Baring in 1833–4. The whole sequence is in T.Nbk 26 (except that The Sleeping Beauty, already published, is represented by its title only), where Moral was at first called Epilogue, and where L’Envoi at one stage concluded the sequence. All variants are below.
