Tennyson's Idylls of the King

The nineteenth century's Arthur begins with a young man reading Malory when Malory was barely in print (the Morte had not been reissued between 1634 and 1816) and ends with the matter installed as the moral furniture of an empire. Tennyson worked the vein for sixty years: "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, rev. 1842) — from a medieval Italian novella, not Malory — made the tower, the mirror, the curse, and the river-borne body the century's emblem of art's fatal remove from life; the 1842 "Morte d'Arthur" turned Malory's ending into blank-verse elegy (framed, tellingly, as a poet's apology for reviving old matter); and the Idylls of the King, published in stages from 1859 to 1885 and dedicated to the dead Prince Albert, grew into a twelve-part epic tracing the Round Table from Coming to Passing — a ring of seasons, spring to winter, in which the adultery at the realm's heart spreads like rot through every idyll until Arthur's order dissolves in mist at Lyonnesse. Tennyson glossed his design as "Sense at war with Soul": Arthur is conscience, Camelot "built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever."

Read the Idylls with double vision. As Victorian self-portrait: the poem broods on its own society — doubt, adultery, the fragility of institutions founded on ideals — and its Guinevere-blaming moralism tells you as much about 1859 as about Camelot (Swinburne's jibe — "Morte d'Albert" — registers the contemporary pushback). As transmission: Tennyson fixed the images through which the matter reached the modern world, and the visual culture he seeded — Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones and the Oxford Union murals, Julia Margaret Cameron's photographic illustrations, Doré's engravings — remains the matter's default iconography. When Unit 32's moderns break the mirror, this is the mirror they break.