Abstract
Discussing Victorian women writers’ fascination with depicting Arthurian romance in 1850s fiction, this chapter explores two children’s texts which were popular and influential at a time when juvenile access to medieval Arthurian literature was limited: Dinah Mulock (later Craik)’s ‘Avillion; or the Happy Isles’ (1853) and Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Arthurian fairy tale The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (1855). Revealing considerable knowledge of Arthurian romance, these texts helped rehabilitate the legend in the popular consciousness. Garner argues that although antiquarians were wary of recommending Malory’s Le Morte Darthur on moral grounds, Mulock and Yonge offered both girls and boys a Christianized Arthurian myth that they could uncomplicatedly admire and endorse.
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Notes
- 1.
After the publication of William Stansby’s edition of Malory in 1634, no new edition was offered to the public until 1816, when two rival cheap editions appeared: the first printed by Walker and Edwards (two volumes), and the second by Wilks (three volumes). A more upmarket quarto edition by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown followed in 1817, with a scholarly introduction by Robert Southey.
- 2.
See Faulkner 16.
- 3.
A possible addition is the anonymous collection of verse, Arthur’s Knights: An Adventure from the Legend of the Sangrale (1858). I have not been able to identify the author, but the volume’s educational aims suggest that it may be the work of a female poet. Like Yonge’s The History of Sir Thomas Thumb, the volume was ‘printed for the amusement of those young people who have some curiosity about the early English romances, and few means of gratifying it’ (Arthur’s Knights iv).
- 4.
- 5.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 12-book epic King Arthur appeared in 1848.
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Garner, K. (2018). Cultivating King Arthur: Women Writers and Arthurian Romance in the 1850s. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_14
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