Although there are several comprehensive studies of the mid-nineteenth- century Arthurian revival, critical studies of pre-Tennysonian Arthurian literature are still remarkably few. This is, I believe, for three interrelated reasons. First, there is the absence of any Arthurian text written by a notable English literary ‘star’ of the Romantic period. Second, what literature was produced is difficult to reconcile with the reverent, romantic and ahistorical Victorian use of the legend. The idealized versions of the legend in the work of Tennyson, Morris, Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelite painters is unrecognizable in the bawdy burlesques, mock epics and satires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And despite the efforts of certain critics, the works of Fielding, Thelwall and Frere should not be seen as anticipating the later conservative use of the myth. Whereas the Arthurian legend from the middle of the nineteenth century was essentially a national epic, which was closely and obsequiously associated with the British monarchy and produced a visual spectacle that would decorate the halls of governmental splendour, the Arthurian story in the nineteenth century before Tennyson and William Dyce was essentially a comedy – a source to be plundered by the most amusing writers of the day.

The final reason, I believe, is that the irreconcilability of the Romantic and Victorian uses of the legend is not only generic, but also nationalistic. What emerges in early nineteenth-century Arthurian literature need not be, as Stephanie Barczewski has claimed, a notion of an inclusive British national identity. Rather, the work of Scottish, Cornish and Welsh writers reveals, a series of anti-colonial manoeuvres that actively seek to resist Anglocentric conceptions of culture, society and imperialism. This anti-colonial trope, however, is not only to be seen in the work of non-English writers, but also in the writings of several English poets and novelists – most notably in Thomas Love Peacock's The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), which is the most thematically sustained and satisfying Arthurian text of the Romantic period. Indeed, it is the only full-length reworking of the legend before Tennyson. Nonetheless, the novel has been frequently ignored or disparaged by critics either for its satiric use of the myth or because of its employment of Welsh poetry and literary traditions.