Poets and Antiquarians

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter discusses the continuities and changes in the interpretation and recreation of Chaucer’s work that occurred between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates particularly on the work of Thomas Tyrwhitt, William Lipscomb, George Ellis, William Godwin, William Hazlitt, Charles Cowden Clarke, and Leigh Hunt, and on the collection of Chaucerian translations edited by Richard Hengist Horne as Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernised (1841). The chapter suggests that writings on Chaucer in the early nineteenth century cannot easily be categorized under such conventional headings as ‘Romanticism’, ‘Medievalism’, ‘the Gothic’, or ‘Historicism’. Biographies of Chaucer—most extensively that of William Godwin (1803)—continued to relay misinformation from dubious sources. Chaucer’s obscenity continued to worry some critics and editors. The times in which he wrote were still dismissed by some as ‘barbaric’. An interest in the ‘Gothic’ elements in his poems was by no means thought incompatible with an interest in the ‘classical’ dimension of Chaucer’s work or the classical interests of some of his earlier critics. No absolute distinction in the period can be maintained between poetical, antiquarian, and historical interest in Chaucer. Godwin’s attempts to ‘contextualize’ Chaucer’s work are often dubiously grounded, and some of the more memorable parts of his Life present Chaucer not as merely a fourteenth-century writer but as a model of the ideal poet for all times: ‘the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world’.