The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration by Simon Cooke (review)

Reviewed by: The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration by Simon Cooke Richard L. Stein (bio) The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration, by Simon Cooke; pp. xvii + 236. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2021, $80.00, $79.99 ebook. Simon Cooke's detailed account of the famous 1857 illustrated edition of Alfred Tennyson's works, "the Moxon Tennyson," as it has long been known in tribute to its organizer and publisher, sets out to "modernize" our understanding of the book (3). This means, in part, acknowledging the work of the "multiple hands" that contributed to its making, including the publisher, engravers, binding designer, and "the technicians who produced the material object" (34, 3). It also means recognizing the edition as a product of consumer culture, an elegant volume that helped create the market for lavish gift books in the decades to come. Primarily, modernization means reconsidering what often has been called (by me, among others) the Pre-Raphaelite Tennyson, replacing a traditional narrative of Pre-Raphaelite "dominance" of its visual contents with a balanced survey of a book "illustrated by eight, rather than three, artists" (3). The result is impressive. The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration thoroughly considers all the contributing artists, analyzing all fifty-four engravings and exploring how they respond to and illuminate qualities of Tennyson's verse. Emphasizing those qualities (rather than, for instance, following an illustrator-by-illustrator or illustration-by-illustration approach) produces a new sense of the book's significance. Cooke considers particular examples and cumulative effects, connected patterns of illustration that comprise "an extended visual montage designed to complement and enrich the writer's messages in the form of a binary or dual text" (189). If "designed" seems too intentional (I will return to it below), the strategy is nuanced: reading illustrations in sequences, as related series of extended commentary. The sense of sequence produces some of the best readings of the book—of individual illustrations, groups of related images, even poems that require reconsideration in light of the emphases illustrations create. The Moxon artists were "remarkably unified in their approach to Tennyson's primary concerns and provide a coherent interpretation of key aspects of the verse" (55). Cooke reads back and forth between poems and images, not so much to determine the accuracy of visual details as to recognize elements of Tennyson's work that stimulated and profited from visual representation. Cooke organizes his book around those elements: motifs like time or light, medievalism or landscape, Englishness or gender. The illustrations highlight and explore these patterns in the poetry. Cooke's approach makes it possible to appreciate how even a painter like John Callcott Horsley, "often disparaged as the weakest of the Moxon [End Page 367] artists," develops an interpretative engagement with the emphasis on time in poems like "Circumstance" (1830) and "The May Queen" (1842) (62). Tennyson's "treatment of the temporal" recurs through such works, and "Horsley crystalizes its essentials" (64). Similarly, the conventional landscapes of Thomas Creswick, "[e]ngaged as a ruralist whose bucolic vision broadly corresponds with the poet's naturalism" (89), help define a "reassuring iconography" of English identity "to match and extend the poet's aestheticizing of nationalism" (90). Despite attention to less-noted artists, Cooke still emphasizes the Pre-Raphaelites. They had been engaged "to refresh and modernize Tennyson's poems, to frame them in the zeitgeist of 1857, to make new, topical connections between the verse and contemporary readers, and to make a direct appeal to the (primarily metropolitan) readers of the period" (97). John Everett Millais, above all, creates the volume's modern look in the restrained style of his line drawings ("Stripped of all extraneous information," as Cooke describes a drawing for "Edward Gray" [1842] [108]), dressing Tennyson's characters in contemporary fashion and portraying even the most melodramatic scenes with simple, naturalistic gestures. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's modernism is evident in different ways, especially given his inclination to allegorize on his own hook. His "Sir Galahad" (1842), much disparaged in contemporary reviews for liberties with the text, "foregrounds the poem's interiority, representing its psychological ambivalence as much as its physical setting" (138), its density reflecting...