Dates of Medieval Material Published During Their Lifetime

T: 1830 Poems: "The Ballad of Oriana," "The Lady of Shallott" (early version)

T: 1842 Poems: "Sir Galahad," "Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," "St Agnes Eve," "The Lady of Shalott" (later version), "The Day-Dream" "Morte d'Arthur," and "Godiva"

T: 1847 The Princess

M: 1857 The Defence of Guenevere, Arthurian poems:

T: 1859 The False and the True (Idylls of the King, first part): "Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinvevere"

M: 1868 The Earthly Paradise, vol. 1, medieval tales: "The Wanderers," "The Man Born to be King," "The Proud King," "The Writing on the Image"

T: 1869 The Holy Grail and Other Poems: "The Coming of Arthur," "The Holy Grail," "Peleas and Ettarre," "The Passing of Arthur"

M: 1869 Translations from the Icelandic: The Saga of Gunnlaug-Wormtongue and The Story of Grettir the Strong

M: 1870 Translation, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs

vols. 2 and 3 of The Earthly Paradise, medieval tales: "The Lady of the Land," "The Watching of the Falcon," "Ogier the Dane," "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon," "The Man Who Neer Laughed Again," "The Lovers of Gudrun," "The Fostering of Aslaug," "The Ring Given to Venus," "The Hill of Venus"

T: 1871 "The Last Tournament" in the Contemporary Review

T: 1872 Gareth and Lynette

M: 1872 Love Is Enough, a masque in a medieval setting

T: 1873 Revised version of Idylls

M: 1875 Translations entitled Three Northern Love Stories. There are actually six stories: "The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue and Raven the Skald," "The Story of Frithiof the Bold," "The Story of Viglund the Fair," "The Tale of Hogni and Hedinn," "The Tale of Roi the Fool," "The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Smitten"

T: 1876 Harold, drama on last Anglo-Saxon king

M: 1876 Sigurd the Volsung, Morris' epic prose using Volsunga Saga materials

T: 1880 "The Battle of Brunanburgh," a translation

T: 1881 The Forresters, a drama of Robin Hood and Maid Marian

T: 1884 Becket

T: 1885 "Balin and Balan," in Tiresias and Other Poems

M: 1886-87 A Dream of John Ball, in Commonweal, the Socialist League newspaper

M: 1888 Signs of Change, including lecture, "Feudal England"

T: 1889 "Merlin and the Gleam"; complete Idylls in final form

M: 1890 Lecture, "Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century"; News from Nowhere, in Commonweal; The Roots of the Mountains, prose romance.

M: 1891 The Story of the Glittering Plain, prose romance

M: 1891-95 with Eirikr Magnusson, published the 5 vol. Saga Library of Norse translations

T: 1892 Tennyson's death

M: 1892 Translation, "The Order of Chivalry"

M: 1893 Translation, The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane.
In collaboration with E. B. Bax, issued Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, a Marxist account of English economic history from the middle ages to the present.

M: 1894 Translations: The Friendship of Amis and Amile, The Tale of King Coustans the Emperor and The History of Over Sea

M: 1895 Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, 2 vols. based on Havelock the Dane. Translation of Beowulf, with A. J. Wyatt.

M: 1896 The Well at the World's End, prose romance; unfinished romance, The Sundering Flood
      Morris' death

Tennyson and the PRB, 1849-1858

1849    Coventry Patmore persuades Tennyson to sit for Woolner.
1850    Tennyson, hearing that Millais is doing painting of Patmore’s “The Woodman’s Daughter,” remarks “I wish he would do something from me.” 
            Hunt paints first version of “The Lady of Shalott.”
1851    PRB “toast in the P.R.B., Tennyson and Browning.”
            Woolner with Tennyson in the Lakes.
            Millais paints “Mariana”; Tennyson is “delighted” by it.
1852    Millais’ diary records his “veneration” for Tennyson; he begins an illustration of Tennyson’s lines “Two lovers whispering by a garden wall” which evolves into “The Huguenot.”
           Millais meets Tennyson on October 23.
            Lear, living with Holman Hunt, writes to Emily Tennyson to suggest an illustrated edition of Tennyson’s poetry and to recommend Hunt, who “knows all Alfred’s poems by heart,” as an illustrator.
            Tennyson admires Millais’ “Ophelia” and “The Huguenot.”
            Hunt champions Tennyson against the criticism of Oxford undergraduates.
1853    Tennyson discusses an illustrated edition of his poems with Millais, indicates “a willingness” to give the greatest part of the work to the P.R.B.
1854    Tennyson and Moxon visit Millais to discuss illustrated edition.
            Millais writes to Tennyson in August postponing a promised visit and indicating that there are “some questions I wish to ask you about the poems I am to illustrate.”
            Millais visits in November, sketches Emily and Hallam, discusses with Tennyson “the limits of realism in painting.”
1855    Tennyson and Moxon visit Rossetti on January 23; Tennyson learns from Woolner that Elizabeth Siddal admires his poetry, suggests to Moxon that she be allowed to do an illustration.
            Rossetti sketches Tennyson reading Maud.
1856    Oxford and Cambridge Magazine contains laudatory review of Tennyson’s poems written by William Fulford: “Lady of Shalott” seen as an illustration of “a faculty very desirable, if not absolutely requisite in poetry—painting in words.”
            Tennyson responds to the Magazine: “I find in such articles as I have read, a truthfulness and earnestness…. May you go on and prosper.”
            Hunt meets Tennyson at Cameron’s house in Roehampton.
1857    Tennyson spends “much time….studying Holman Hunt’s pictures” at the Manchester Exhibition in the summer; Hunt invited to spend Christmas at Farringford.
            “Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition” is on display in Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, London.
            Millais sees Tennyson at the Prinseps'.
            Illustrated Edition published by Moxon in summer, with 5 illustrations by Rossetti, 6 by Hunt, and 18 by Millais. Allingham writes to Rossetti that Tennyson “praised the P.R.B. designs to his poems in a general way….”
            Murals painted in Oxford University Union Society by P.R.B., among whom is Valentine Prinsep.
1858    Woolner writes to urge Tennyson “to do the Maid of Astolat.”
            Tennyson stays at Princeps’ Little Holland House at the same time as Ruskin.
            Hunt at Farringford in summer admires Tennyson’s paintings.

APPENDIX II

“The great principle which the Pre-Raphaelites took up separately, and which became the bond of their union, was that they should go to Nature in all cases and employ, as exactly as possible, her literal forms…If they were to paint a brick wall as part of the background of a picture, their notion was that they should not paint such a wall as they could not put together mentally out of their past recollection of all the brick walls they had seen; but that they should take some actual brick wall and paint it exactly as it was, with all its seams, lichens, and weather-stains.” David Masson, “Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature,” British Quarterly Review, 16 (1852), 197-220, in Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James Sambrook (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p.74.

“If art be nothing but a literal transcript of nature, then is picturemaking mechanical, and the painter’s vocation drudgery. Art is no longer the rendering of what one poet-mind perceives or feels, but the manual and servile transcript of detail…. This is a naturalism which defeats itself…a naturalism which is, in fact, materialism.” J.B. Atkinson, “Manchester Exhibition of Art Treasures,” Blackwood’s, 82 (1857), p. 170.

“The second danger of Pre-Raphaelitism is that detail and accessory should be insisted on to a degree detracting from the importance of the chief subject and action” of a painting." William Michael Rossetti, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” Spectator 24, no. 1214 (4 October 1851), 955-57, in Sambrook, p. 67.

The Pre-Raphaelites have recognized “that as a man works in a setting of earth and air, all the beauties and fitness of that setting must be rendered—the more truthfully the better—and that the most accurate rendering of these need not detract from the crowning work—the creation of the central interest which sums itself in human expression.” But, the critic goes on to warn, “if roses and garden in a painted love-scene are more important than the faces of the lovers, then the painter has reversed the true order of his painting.” Punch, 24 (1853), p. 207.