"A Completely Funny Story": Mary Eliza Haweis and the Miller's Tale

Abstract

“A Completely Funny Story”:Mary Eliza Haweis and the Miller’s Tale Mary Flowers Braswell The sentiments of Chaucer are often more indelicate than the lowest vulgarity, the most boorish rusticity will now be found to authorize. And although in paraphrases like the [Miller's Tale], the gross as well as the obsolete phrases of his language may be softened; so interwoven is the tenor of his stories with indecency, that no subterfuge can be devised by which that blot may be absolutely obliterated. Anonymous (1791) Such tales shall be left untold by me. John Dryden (1700) [The Miller's Tale] is one of the most completely funny tales ever conceived. Mary Eliza Haweis (1887) The archives of the University of British Columbia Library contain a manuscript written in a small tidy hand in black ink on cream-colored paper with footnotes in red. It is one of seven similar manuscripts in an acid-free folder in a gray "Hollinger" archives box. It was written, revised, and intended for a publication that did not come about, and it is likely never to have been read outside the family. Entitled "The Story of Alison," it begins, "Once upon a time there dwelt in Oxford a rich old fellow who took in boarders."1 It is the work of an obscure Victorian writer, Mary Eliza Haweis (1852–1898).2 Unlike her male colleagues, Haweis tackled the Miller's Tale head on. She translated and adapted it for adult males, adult females, and children; published two different explications of the story; and discussed it at length in separate articles. To Haweis, the tale was thoroughly amusing and suitable (with some revision) for a wide-ranging audience. Almost uniquely among her peers she savored its complexity. She [End Page 244] praised the "incongruities beneath [its] surface" and the deliberate contrast among its characters. She found its historical and antiquarian aspects to be of the "greatest interest,"3 and she praised Chaucer's skill and his comic power. It is perhaps not exaggerating to suggest that during this period of its nadir, the Miller's Tale was kept alive by Haweis, and that, with obvious support from her husband (himself a writer and clergyman) she unflinchingly showcased it. Haweis's work on this tale has never been examined; yet no review of its critical reception can be complete without an investigation into what she wrote. The pilgrims may have "loughe[d] and pleyde" (I 3858) after hearing the Miller's Tale, but most Victorian critics did not find it funny. William Lipscomb's turn-of-the-century modernization of the Tales omitted those of the Miller and the Reeve.4 Wordsworth excluded the tale as well, even though he had once sat "comfortably" around the fire with Dorothy while she read it to him.5 In The Tales from Chaucer Told for Young People, published in 1833, Charles Cowden Clarke struck the tale without comment;6 and in his 1835 edition of The Riches of Chaucer, he wrote to his audience that the Miller's Tale is "good of [its] kind, but not such as you would care to hear, so I will leave [it] out."7 In 1878 it was omitted without explanation, along with the Reeve's Tale, from Francis Storr and Hawes Turner's Canterbury Chimes.8 In his 1841 Cabinet Pictures of English Life, John Saunders noted that the story was "one of Chaucer's richest and broadest" and the "laugh at its conclusion [was] loud and long," but he gave not a detail of elaboration. Saunders's Miller's Tale reads as follows: "For I will tell a legend and a life/ Both of a carpenter and of his wife," &c. when he himself was interrupted by the Reeve.9 In his edition of 1889, Saunders boldly included the tale—heavily excerpted—at the back of the book, along with those of the Reeve, Merchant, and Shipman. Walter W. Skeat, hoping to exonerate the poet from an obvious "lapse," suggested that the death of Chaucer's wife Philippa in 1387 was responsible for the "coarseness" of the Miller's Tale and others, but he does not explain why this would...