“Snakes within the grass”: The Fall of Camelot A Study in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien”

In his The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter Houghton says: [that the Victorian age was an age of transition] is the basic and almost universal conception of the period. an‎d it is peculiarly Victorian. For although all ages are ages of transition, never before men thought of their own time as an era of change from the past to the future. (1) The Victorian mind, however, perceived change as a threat to its inherited centuries of tradition. (Timmerman 62) Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is an attempt to revive this legend in an effort to find a “model of kingship and political leadership which might be applicable to his age.” (Timmerman 62-3) The Idylls exists as a spiritual search for the order of “political justice” in the life of men. (Timmerman 63) Joanna Richardson stresses the same fact in The Pre-Eminent Victorian: