This copy of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems belongs to the edition published in May 1857 and known as the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ or ‘Moxon Tennyson’.

Edward Moxon (1801­–58), a poet and one of London’s foremost publishers, had already produced six profitable volumes of Tennyson’s works. He convinced Tennyson that a richly illustrated edition would appeal to a growing readership.

The fifty-four illustrations were drawn by eight artists onto woodblocks cut by six professional engravers (W.T. Green, William James Linton, John Thompson, Thomas Williams and the Dalziel brothers). In addition to five Royal Academicians who produced harmoniously conventional Victorian illustrations (Thomas Creswick, John Calcott Horsley, Daniel Maclise, William Mulready and Clarkson Stanfield), Moxon involved three Pre-Raphaelites: John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

Millais made the greatest contribution to the volume, providing eighteen images. A successful illustrator of magazines and books (Anthony Trollope praised his images as ‘the best I have seen in any novel in any language’), Millais was attuned to the practicalities of printmaking. He adapted his style to the needs of both engravers and readers, favouring clear composition over rich detail. Holman Hunt’s illustrations are fewer and more complex. Rossetti’s five images (out of seven promised) are the most elaborate. Unwilling to sacrifice the exuberant detail of his drawings to the exigences of printmaking, Rossetti demanded the highest fee (£30 per drawing) and continuous corrections to the engravers’ proofs. The delayed publication missed the Christmas season, taxing Moxon’s nerves and budget.

Criticised as a ‘bundle of splendid incongruities’, the volume was a financial failure. The lack of coherence — both in style and illustrative approach — was the result of combining works from rival artistic schools. Intended to please a wide audience, it disappointed both those with traditional tastes and the Pre-Raphaelites’ champions (John Ruskin found their illustrations’ terribly spoilt in the cutting’). Furthermore, the approach even within the Pre-Raphaelites’ images seemed disparate to contemporaries: ‘Millais has realised, Holman Hunt has idealised, and Rossetti has submilated’ while attempting ‘to overpower the text’.

Tennyson had proposed Rossetti and Holman Hunt to Moxon, probably on John Ruskin’s recommendation, but expected all images to convey the meaning of his words and no more. The poet advised Holman Hunt that ‘an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text’. John Ruskin disagreed, writing to the poet in defence of the Pre-Raphaelites’ contribution to the Moxon Tennyson: ‘Many of the plates are noble things, though not, it seems to me, illustrations of your poems. I beleive, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet’s conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect vairous minds.’ To Ruskin and to modern-day audiences, the Moxon Tennyson is an artistic breakthrough. Its diverse approach to the text-image relationship is a defining component of its modernity.