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Amateur hours: the visual interpretation of Tennyson’s poetry in two manuscript albums
This article seeks to gauge Victorian readers’ responses by looking not at how readers wrote about their experience of texts, but at how they responded to their reading visually. To this end, the article presents a case study of two Victorian manuscript albums from the Tennyson Research Collection in Lincoln, in which Tennyson’s poetry has been transcribed alongside amateur illustrations. While these items improve our understanding of nineteenth-century manuscript culture in a similar way to commonplace books or scrapbooks, their sustained attention to individual texts is distinctive. The private nature of amateur illustration, and the fact that the amateur illustrator’s interpretations remain implicit, can encode responses to texts that are less articulable in other media. The first album, which contains Tennyson’s ‘The Day-Dream’, sheds new light on the problems of signification posed by the poem’s multiple endings; the album shows a reader who uses amateur illustration to create the ‘meaning suited to his mind’ that is mentioned and then dismissed by Tennyson’s narrator. In the second album, a talented group of sisters, including the amateur artist Ella Taylor, illustrated the 1859 Idylls of the King. The sisters’ pairings of word and image interpret the original four-poem Idylls in significant ways, for example, mitigating Guinevere’s guilt through the editing of extracts, and tacitly revelling in Vivien’s triumph over Merlin via an arresting illustration of Vivien in motion. As such, the album intervenes in Victorian debates surrounding female character, as the Taylor sisters sympathize even with the villainesses of the Idylls.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Journal
Journal of Victorian CultureISSN
1355-5502Publisher
Taylor and FrancisExternal DOI
Issue
4Volume
21Page range
471-499Department affiliated with
- English Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2016-03-21First Open Access (FOA) Date
2017-12-24First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2016-03-21Usage metrics
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