William Godwin (1756-1836), father of Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley, reflected this new adoration of the Gothic allied with Romantic heroism in his biography of Chaucer (1803). Moving his reader’s imagination further back in time, past the already remote sixteenth century, Godwin pointed to the “times of Chaucer” as more obviously and unquestionably barbaric than the times of that other English barbarian, Shakespeare. Chaucer, unlike Shakespeare, had the “single mind” to effect a restoration of poetry and the Muses to England’s rocky shore by “fix[ing] and naturalis[ing] the genuine art of poetry in our island.” Chaucer thus became the uniquely rugged and effective individual, the man of genius every Romantic heart claimed for its own. In the hands of William Blake, in his engraving of the Canterbury Tales pilgrims, Chaucer becomes the “great poetical observer of men,” as well as master, father, and superior. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, according to Shelley. Adoration of Chaucer’s realism, aided and abetted by widely readable editions of his work, made him into a figure of his time who was ironically not only capable of transcending it but friendly to his readers in the bargain. What better definition of iconic status?
Mass production in the nineteenth century enabled an enormous monumentalizing of Chaucer’s iconic status. His cause was taken up by the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press produced an illustrated Canterbury Tales of enormous popularity. The signal temperament of English nostalgia can be summed up in the phrase “Merrie Olde England,” and Chaucer was made to stand at the head of this nostalgic attitude’s parade. Not unlike the Romantic gestures that certified Chaucer’s individual genius in the early part of the nineteenth century, the mid-nineteenth century identified him with the beginnings of English literary enterprise in relation to moral truth. John Ruskin, prolific Victorian critic, teacher, and moralizer, considered Chaucer for the English the equal of Virgil for the Latins, teaching the purest theology. This feat could be accomplished, of course, only by leaving The Canterbury Tales out of the curriculum. Be that as it may, Chaucer’s iconic identity with the English mind was a mainstay of nineteenth-century appreciations of the poet. Other assessments followed the changing currents of nineteenth-century literary aspirations, such that the literary aesthetics of Chaucer’s poetry began to take primary position.
The nineteenth century saw another change in its intellectual landscape that affected the way Chaucer was read and understood. Nineteenth-century philology and linguistics made the recognition and description of a language’s predictable changes in sound a scientific enterprise. Moreover, manuscript studies in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century professionalized the reading of Chaucer’s poetry and led to a disconnect between those who read Chaucer for pleasure and those who studied his poetry in the academy. The Modern Language Association fought for the reading of the “modern languages,” such as English and French, alongside classical Greek and Latin, which were the stuff of a college education (in 1900 only 10 percent of the American population pursued a high school education, let alone attended college). Although a nostalgia for “Merrie Olde England” kept a mostly modernized form of Chaucer in the public eye, including in children’s books, in the first part of the twentieth century the professionalization of literary criticism began to take hold.
World History
