The photographs:
Idylls and Fancy Subjects
Julia Margaret CAMERON
British, 1815–79
Mariana, 1875
From Idylls of the King and Other Poems, volume II, plate VIII
albumen silver photograph
35.0 x 45.0 cm
The Wilson Centre for Photography
96:5406:05
This image was also titled Mariana at the moated grange and it is the
eighth plate in the second volume of Idylls of the King.
The reference is to the poem Mariana that was included in one of
Tennyson's earliest collections of lyrical poetry, published in 1830,
a year before he left Cambridge University. Tennyson scholars note that
the poet drew inspiration for this poem from Shakespeare's play Measure
for Measure. In the play Mariana is engaged to Angelo, the disreputable
aid to the Duke of Vienna who rejects her. She retreats to seclusion in
'the moated grange' for five years. According to Shakespeare, Mariana's
trials end with happy reconciliation. However, Tennyson's Mariana is doomed
to loneliness and despair.
The fevered
emotions of tragic heroines inspired the Victorian imagination. The verse
that this picture illustrates begins with the lines, 'My heart is dreary/ He
cometh not she said'. And, on the mount of this print we see the following
lines inscribed in Cameron's handwriting under the image, 'I am aweary,
aweary, / I would that I were dead'.
On other prints of this photograph, the
model for the picture has been identified by Cameron as Agnes Mangles.
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