The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson's Poems, New York, 1903)

Engraver John Thompson British
 After William Holman Hunt British
 Publisher New Amsterdam Book Company American

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In 1857 Edward Moxon published a new edition of Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson illustrated by William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais. Their striking Pre-Raphaelite designs puzzled the author and many readers but soon were seen as iconic and republished several times--here in 1903. Hunt’s illustration for The Lady of Shalott imagined the poem’s climax—precipitated when the heroine hears Sir Lancelot singing and leaves her loom to look at him from her window. As a result, a spell that bound her breaks, her tapestry unravels, and a mirror she relied on to view the outside world "crack’d from side to side."

The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson's Poems, New York, 1903), John Thompson (British, Manchester 1785–1866 London), Wood engraving

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