POPULARIZING CHAUCER IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY by Charlotte C. Morse Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877), Charles Knight (1791–1873), and John Saunders (1810–1895) were the most effective boosters of Chaucer’s common readership before the university in the mid-1860s took over the care and promotion of Middle English language and literature, includ- ing Chaucer.1 All three popularizers came of age in the wake of the French Revolution, which reinforced and magnified whatever nationalist impulses were already at work in nascent pan-European Romanticism. Ideas of a people united by shared culture rather than by allegiance to a king made the invention and promotion of a literary tradition a desideratum for every nation. Thanks especially to J. G. Herder, the nationalism produced by and in reaction to the French Revolution gave language a newly impor- tant role in defining the nation and granted exceptional political value to the nation’s literary and folk culture for its capacity both to unify and to stimulate continuing negotiation with tradition, essential to the per- petuation of the national community.2 In England the Revolution exerted contrary pressures, to reaction or to reform. Those in favor of reform understood that the political class, those with political rights, had to expand. Some asserted literacy as a basic human right.3 In this yeasty atmosphere, Cowden Clarke and Knight came of age; Saunders came to manhood in the run-up to the Reform Bill of 1832. All three identified with the reformist politics of the early decades of the century, when Henry Brougham, later Chancellor, led the parlia- mentary committee that aimed to improve mass education in England.4 The three popularizers believed that Chaucer’s poetry, like Shakespeare’s drama, should belong to all Englishmen. They saw its value in cultivating a natural style, educating the feelings, developing moral judgment, con- necting with their English ancestry, and supporting reform. The proto- nationalism of Dryden’s characterization of the Canterbury pilgrims took on a new value, that of representing an inclusive model of the English polity, a polity in which ordinary folk would increasingly participate as eli- gibility to vote broadened. In such a climate of political and social change, THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 100 THE CHAUCER REVIEW perpetuating the canon of English literature by encouraging new read- ers for Chaucer’s poetry felt like urgent as well as pleasurable work. Cultivating a readership for Chaucer now belongs to the university, as contemporary scholars of the literary canon acknowledge.5 Whether, under very different political, geographical, and institutional circum- stances, twenty-first-century professors of English literature will regard Chaucer as worthy of teaching, and of teaching as a medieval poet, is a question with a less certain answer than in the twentieth century.6 That question makes the work of popularizing Chaucer in the nineteenth-cen- tury an engaging subject, slantwise though it is to contemporary cir- cumstances. Arguably similar is the middle-class character of Chaucer’s readership. Cowden Clarke, Knight, and Saunders reached their audi- ence through two institutions founded with the backing of Henry Brougham in the 1820s: the Mechanics Institutes and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (hereafter SDUK) that effectively served a middling class of tradesmen, artisans, and lower professional ranks, not factory workers or the rural poor.7 Twenty-first-century universities, some selective and some not, are now middle-class institutions with very broad potential audiences, adept at converting working-class students to mid- dle-class workers. Should the university cease to value the reading of Chaucer, Chaucer would effectively drop out of the twenty-first-century canon of English literature—to a place no different from that of Ennius in the Roman canon after Virgil wrote the Aeneid: named, but unread.8 To celebrate Dryden’s translations of Chaucer, eighteenth-century crit- ics linked Chaucer with Ennius, but we would not now accept that any writer has outdone Chaucer as Virgil outdid Ennius. Virgil did so not only by modernizing the language, but by recasting the story/history of Rome effectively to represent Latin speakers to themselves, his Aeneid becom- ing a fixture in the school curriculum. By the nineteenth century, how- ever, Dryden was no substitute for Chaucer. Chaucer’s place in the canon was not, however, so secure in the eigh- teenth century before 1775 as it was after, and signs of a very broad read- ership do not emerge until the 1860s, the very decade when schools and universities begin to encourage the reading of Chaucer’s poetry.9 Trevor Ross traces the beginnings of the English literary canon to the fourteenth- century invention of the poet laureate, which Chaucer advertises in the Clerk’s Prologue and which his fifteenth-century successors award to him, in the first assertion of a self-conscious English literary tradition. In con- trast to scholars like Jonathan Kramnick who regard canon formation as an eighteenth-century innovation with roots no further in the past than seventeenth-century battles of the ancients and moderns, Ross explains how laureation and the canon produce lists comparable in cultural value but different in the logic of their formation. He argues that laureation primarily serves producers of literature, or poets, while the canon pri- CHARLOTTE C. MORSE 101 marily serves consumers of literature, or critics and readers. The one con- stitutes a presentist list, rhetorical and harmonious, of use to writers in producing poetry; the other an historical list, objectivist and plural, of use to consumers in reproducing cultural identity. Ross’s analysis makes clear that the relative neglect of Chaucer in the seventeenth century owes less to the disruptions of civil war or the difficulty in understanding his English than to the inutility of his poetry as a model of refinement and style.10 To recuperate Chaucer, then, Dryden translates his poetry into contemporary style, inaugurating a tradition of translation that involves Pope, then George Ogle and others in the early 1740s, and finally, in 1795, William Lipscomb. John Urry’s handsome and posthumously pub- lished 1721 edition of Chaucer’s Works, treating him as a classical author, was a failure, derided even at its publication. Perhaps the reaction was so terribly strong because a Middle English edition of Chaucer was really not much desired at that point.11 Remarkable in Kramnick’s analysis of the sequentially interlocking crit- ical controversies attending canon formation, controversies in which the valence of terms like “gothic” could slide from negative to positive, is the almost complete absence of Chaucer—until Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, 1774, and Thomas Tyrwhitt’s edition of the Canterbury Tales, 1775 (glossary 1778).12 When Chaucer comes back, he comes back not translated into contemporary idiom, but in his antique form, a form that the nineteenth-century popularizers sought to preserve largely by mod- ernizing rather than translating. Desire for the pure, original text was an effect of the new valuation of sincerity, the overriding (and complex) virtue that emerges during the shift from the aristocratic, universalist, pro-French culture of the earlier eighteenth century to the middle-class, nationalist, and determinedly native culture of the early nineteenth cen- tury.13 To be sure, William Lipscomb in 1795 did a new edition of trans- lations of the Canterbury Tales, incorporating most of George Ogle’s 1741 edition, and it is Lipscomb’s edition that Maria Edgeworth’s characters read aloud in The Modern Griselda (1805).14 But Warton and the larger cultural pressures of early Romanticism stimulate a desire for the pure text that Tyrwhitt made it possible to satisfy, if only in the cheaper edi- tions published by John Bell in 1782 and by Robert Anderson in 1793, the first two of many publishing ventures to present the British poets in multi-volume, sometimes subscription, editions.15 Even had books been more affordable than they were, the difference of Chaucer’s language from Modern English limited his readership. Yet the neoclassical translations, from Dryden to Lipscomb, no longer answered to contemporary taste, which was attuning itself to the more natural plain style of the Lyrical Ballads, published by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. In the preface to the second edition, 1805, Wordsworth remarks how easy it is to read Chaucer in Middle English, 102 THE CHAUCER REVIEW but in 1834 Coleridge was still urging readers of Table Talk to read Chaucer in Middle English: “if you read twenty pages with a good glos- sary, you surely can find no further difficulty” even reading an unmod- ernized text, though Coleridge supported modernizing Chaucer’s spelling: “surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned even by black-letterati for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity.”16 Coleridge’s concession to moderniza- tion implies the difficulty of Middle English, discouraging to readers as early as the seventeenth century. The modernization Coleridge and Leigh Hunt condoned involved not translation, but modernizing orthography and making other limited changes for intelligibility. How many readers did Chaucer have in the earlier nineteenth cen- tury? Enough, Eric Stanley suggests, in remarking