The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism 9780199669509, 0199669503

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

VICTORIAN MEDIEVALISM

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ................................................................................................................................................................................................

VICTORIAN MEDIEVALISM ................................................................................................................................................................................................

Edited by

JOANNE PARKER and

CORINNA WAGNER

1

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in  Impression:  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press  Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number:  ISBN –––– Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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A ..............................................................................................

For sage advice in the early days of this project, we would like to thank Tom Shippey. For invaluable advice from beginning to end, including an incredibly detailed review of the entire final manuscript, we owe a great deal of gratitude to Nick Groom. For their enthusiasm and much patience, gentle prodding, and professionalism, we thank our editors at Oxford University Press, Aimee Wright and Jacqueline Norton. We are grateful, too, to our copy-editor Jane Robson, project manager Shanmugasundaram Balasubramanian and our research assistants, Rosa Berman, Josh Jewell, and Jo Esra, all of whom handled complicated editing tasks magnificently. Finally, we would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for providing financial support for a project on Victorian Medievalism in the South West. The project’s collaborative research, conferences, public events, and exhibition, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic, provided much inspiration for this volume.

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C .............................................

List of Illustrations List of Contributors

xi xiii



Introduction J P  C W

PART I

MEDIEVALISM BEFORE 

. King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty



P S

. Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century



T G

. Validating the English Church



G P

. The Diggers and the Norman Yoke



C A. S

PART II

ROMANTIC PERIOD MEDIEVALISM

. The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History



D M

. Medieval Forgery



J L

. Grímur Thorkelin, Rasmus Rask, and the Origins of Philology



K W

. The Romantic Gothic Imagination



J C

. Gothic Ruins and Revivals: The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past T D



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

. Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel



J W

PART III

SOURCES

. The Study of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in the Victorian Period



M. J. T

. Chaucer among the Victorians



R U

. The Later Victorian Recovery of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture: George Forrest Browne, Proctor, Professor, Bishop, and Anglo-Saxonist



J H

. The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period



H P

. Scottish Neo-Medievalism



S D  G C

. The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne



E S

. Eddas, Sagas, and Victorians



C P

. Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany



F G. G

. The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain



E E  J T. M

PART IV SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND RELIGIOUS PRAXIS . Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity W A



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

. Toryism and the Young England Movement

ix



R A. G

. The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire



D J

. Illuminating Propaganda: Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era



I H

. Bodies and Buildings: Materialist Medievalism



C W

. Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism



K D  N R. A

PART V

ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE

. Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism



W W

. Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design



J C

. The Gothic Revival beyond Europe



G. A. B

. The Pre-Raphaelites: Medievalism and Victorian Visual Culture



A L

. William Morris and Medievalism



J M

. Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement



R I

. Medievalist Music and Dance J H



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

PART VI

LITERATURE

. Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism



E H

. Women Writers and the Medieval



C B S

. Building Utopia: The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere



M W

. Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry



A H. H

. Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers



H O’D

. Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel



J P

. Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur



I B

Index



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L  I ......................................................................................................

I.. St Pancras, London. Photograph by Corinna Wagner.



.. C. R. Cockerell, RA, ‘The Professor’s Dream’, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.



.. Émile Sagot’s view of the ruined abbey church of Cluny in Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, vii (–). By permission of Northwestern University.



.. Le Vieux Paris, Paris  exhibition, in the public domain. Photograph by Elizabeth Emery. By permission of Northwestern University.



.. Les Salles des Croisades, Château de Versailles, . Licence by CC BY-SA ..



.. Basilique de Fourvière, Lyons, –. Licence by CC BY-SA ..



.. John Leech, ‘The Kidnapper.—A Case for the Police’, Punch ( March ): .



.. Philip Hermogenes Calderon, St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation, , © Tate, London .



.. Joseph Lyne as part of a ‘characteristic group’ at Llanthony Abbey, undated photograph in Beatrice de Bertouch, The Life of Father Ignatius, O.S.B., the Monk of Llanthony (London: Methuen, ), opposite p. .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, a page from Part One, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, title-page of the privately printed version, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Henry VIII as the Poor Law commissioners, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, ‘Sundry friars . . . ’, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Queen Bess and the Poor Laws, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Bob in his workhouse cell, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, the impish cotton bobbin, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Edward Duncan, the ‘Place of Games’, .



.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, William Bell Scott, a village scene, .



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  

.. Willey Reveley, Elevation, Section and Plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary, , in The Works of Jeremy Bentham,  vols, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: W. Tait, ), iv, postscript ii.



.. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, Contrasts,  (nd ed).



.. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Public Conduits’, Contrasts, .



.. ‘Abbey Mills Pumping Station, Stratford, London,’ The Illustrated London News, .



.. Interior of Crossness Pumping Station, photograph by Corinna Wagner, .



.. George Gilbert Scott, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, c.–, photographer unknown.



.. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Modern Gothic Decoration’, in True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, .



.. G. G. Scott, Convocation Hall, University of Bombay, –. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, photograph by Francis Frith (–), acquired from F. Frith & Co., .



.. Joseph Reed, Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, –, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.



.. R. C. Carpenter, St John the Baptist, Prosser Plains, Tasmania, –.



.. Reed & Barnes architects, The Scots’ Presbyterian church (left, –), and St Michael’s Independent (Congregationalist) church (right, ), on Collins Street, Melbourne, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.



.. Jacob Wrey Mould, All Souls Unitarian Church, New York, –.



.. William Emerson, All Saints’ Cathedral, Allahabad, India, –.



.. T. G. Jackson, Patteson Memorial Chapel (St Barnabas’s church), Norfolk Island, New Zealand, – USPG Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, courtesy of United Society Partners in the Gospel.



.. Edward Medley, Christ Church, St Stephen, New Brunswick, –, photograph by Peter Coffman.



.. Charles Decimus Barraud (lithographer), Interior of Rangiātea Church, Ōtaki, New Zealand, –.



.. David Wilkie Wynfield, John Everett Millais as Dante, c. early s, National Portrait Gallery.



.. Edward Burne-Jones’s painted wardrobe for William and Jane Morris, c..



.. Frontispiece from Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies ().



.. ‘Parody of the Singing Minstrel’, Punch,  (): .



.. ‘England’s War Vigil’, Punch,  ( May ): .



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L  C ......................................................................................................

Will Abberley is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sussex. He is author of Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (), English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, – (), and co-author of British Nature Writing: – (forthcoming). He has guest-edited a special issue of : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century on the theme of ‘Replicating Bodies’ (, ). He has also published in Victorian Studies, The Journal of Victorian Culture, Critical Quarterly and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Nadia R. Altschul is Senior Lecturer of Hispanic Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Geographies of Philological Knowledge (), Literature, Authorship and Textual Criticism (, in Spanish), and co-editor with Kathleen Davis of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ outside Europe (). Her new book is Politics of Temporalization: the Medieval and the Oriental from the Underside of Modernity (). G. A. Bremner is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests centre on the history and theory of Victorian architecture, especially in its relation to the wider British world. His books include Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c– (), and the edited volumes Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire (), and (with Jonathan Conlin) Making History: Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics (). He is currently working on a history of Edwardian Baroque architecture in Britain and its empire. Clare Broome Saunders is a member of the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s poetry, nineteenth-century uses of history, and nineteenth-century women travel writers in Europe, in which fields she has published widely. Her most notable recent publications include: Louisa Stuart Costello: A th Century Writing Life (); Women, Travel Writing, and Truth (); and Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (). Current projects include a book on medievalism and politics in the nineteenth century. Inga Bryden is Professor of Cultural History and Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winchester. Her research interests

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span literary, visual, and material cultures, with a focus on interdisciplinary ways of interpreting places and spaces. Publications include the books Reinventing King Arthur (), Domestic Space (), and The Pre-Raphaelites (), as well as a range of chapters and articles, more recently on fashion, literature and architecture, practicebased doctorates in the creative arts, Indian domestic interiors, mapping, the kitchen and the street. Gerard Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the Oxford edition of the works of Robert Burns and co-editor (with Colin Kidd) of Literature and Union, Scottish Texts, British Contexts () and (with Liam McIlvanney), the Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (). Jim Cheshire is Reader in Cultural History at the University of Lincoln. His most recent monograph is Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing: Moxon, Poetry, Commerce (). He co-edited a special edition of History of Photography: ‘Photography and Networks’ in  and has written chapters on ‘Public Buildings’ for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Interior and ‘Stained Glass’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion of William Morris (). Joseph Crawford is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of three books on the history of Gothic and Romantic literature: Raising Milton’s Ghost (Bloomsbury Academic, ), Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (Bloomsbury Academic, ), and The Twilight of the Gothic (). He is currently researching the cultural history of altered states of consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Kathleen Davis is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (), Deconstruction and Translation (, ), and co-editor with Nadia Altschul of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ outside Europe (). Her current work investigates the relationship between the creation of ‘the Middle Ages’ as a historical category and current struggles regarding secularism. Tom Duggett is Associate Professor in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong—Liverpool University. His first book, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form () won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. He has published essays in journals including Romanticism, Review of English Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle. Recent work includes a special issue on Wordsworth’s Excursion () and a scholarly edition of Robert Southey’s  ghost-dialogue, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (). Sarah Dunnigan is Senior Lecturer in English and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University. She has written about medieval and early modern Scottish literature;

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traditional ballads and folktales; folklore and fairy tales; Scottish women’s writing; Robert Burns; and J. M. Barrie. She is currently exploring the history of Scottish children’s literature. Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French at Montclair State University, and the author of books, articles, and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in nineteenth-century France and America, and to the links between early photography, journalism, and celebrity culture. Recent books treating medievalism include Telling the Story in the Middle Ages, co-edited with Karen Duys and Laurie Postlewate (), Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France, co-written with Laura Morowitz (, ); Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, coedited with Richard Utz (, ). Richard A. Gaunt is Associate Professor in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His research concentrates on aspects of British Toryism/Conservatism in the period between  and . Publications include Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy () and work on the UltraTory peer, the th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne. His new monograph is, From Pitt to Peel: Conservative Politics in the Age of Reform. Dr Gaunt is joint editor of the journal Parliamentary History. Francis G. Gentry is a Professor Emeritus of German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively on medieval German literature and culture as well as on the cultural and literary reception of the Middle Ages (‘medievalism’) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany. As a ‘sideline’ he has also published on mystery novels with a medieval background as well as on the depiction of the Middle Ages in American film. Timothy Graham is Timothy Graham is Distinguished Professor of History and Regents’ Professor in Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico, where he served as Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies from  to . His research focuses on the study of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts by scholars of the early modern era; he has written numerous articles on the pioneering work of Matthew Parker’s circle and other early Anglo-Saxonists, including Robert Talbot, William L’Isle, Abraham Wheelock, and William and Elizabeth Elstob. He is the editor of The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and co-author of the widely acclaimed Introduction to Manuscript Studies. John Haines is Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published on medieval and Renaissance music and its modern reception in a variety of journals, both musicological—from Early Music History to Popular Music— and non-musicological—from Romania to Scriptorium. Recent books are Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy () and The Notory Art of

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Shorthand (Ars notoria notarie): A Curious Chapter in the History of Writing in the West (). Antony H. Harrison is Distinguished Professor of English and Department Head at North Carolina State University. His authored books include Swinburne’s Medievalism, Christina Rossetti in Context, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture, and The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold. Most recently, he is co-author of Victoria’s Lost Pavilion: From Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics to Digital Humanities. He is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, The Culture of Christina Rossetti, and Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the ACLS. He is a completing editor for The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (vols –) and serves on the Advisory Board of the NINES and the Dante Rossetti Hypertext Archive, as well as the Editorial Boards of RaVoN, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Review , and the Victorians Institute Journal. Jane Hawkes is Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of York where she lectures in the Department of History of Art and the interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies on late antique and early medieval art and architecture, with a particular focus on the early medieval sculpture of Britain and Ireland. Her current research interests, growing out of her expertise in the early medieval art and architecture of Britain, Ireland, and Europe, concerns the historiography of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. Ian Haywood is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton. Among his books are The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People – (), Romanticism and Caricature () and three edited volumes of Chartist fiction for Routledge. He is co-editor of Spain and British Romanticism () and Romanticism and Illustration (). His most recent book, will be The Rise of Victorian Caricature (), is a study of radical caricature in the s and s. Elizabeth Helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (), Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain – (), Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (), and most recently, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (). She has also edited or co-edited volumes on the Woman Question and on the etching revival in Britain, France, and America. She is an editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. Rosie Ibbotson is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research mostly centres on the long nineteenth century, and principally concerns the entanglements

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of visual culture and environmental change. This is the subject of her forthcoming book, Picturing the Imperial Anthropocene: Visual Representation, Environmental Change, and Migratory Imaginaries in and around Long Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa New Zealand. Rosie has a long-standing interest in the transnational Arts and Crafts movement, which her current research examines in relation to ecocriticism. Dominic Janes is Professor of Modern History at Keele University. He is a cultural historian who studies texts and visual images relating to Britain in its local and international contexts since the eighteenth century. Within this sphere he focuses on the histories of gender, sexuality, and religion. His most recent books are Picturing the Closet (), Visions of Queer Martyrdom (), and Oscar Wilde Prefigured (). He has been the recipient of a number of research awards including fellowships from the AHRC and the British Academy. Ayla Lepine is a specialist in the intersections of theology and the arts in Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. Following her MA and Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Courtauld and Yale, and was a Lecturer and Fellow in Art History at the University of Essex. She has published widely including articles on the British art and religious visual culture in Architectural History and British Art Studies, and co-edited books including Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias () and Architecture and Religious Communities –: Building the Kingdom (). She is a contributor to the Visual Commentary on Scripture (www. thevcs.org) and a trustee of the charity Art and Christianity. Jack Lynch is Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark. He is author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (), Deception and Detection in EighteenthCentury Britain (Ashgate, ), and editor of Samuel Johnson in Context () and The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, – (). He is at work on a study of William Henry Ireland. Janet T. Marquardt is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Art History and Women’s Studies at Eastern Illinois University. She now teaches for Bard College and is a research associate in History at Mount Holyoke College. Marquardt rethought the traditional art history survey course with the thematic textbook Frames of Reference: Art, History, and the World (). Other publications trace the ideological function of cultural heritage: From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (, ); Medieval Art after the Middle Ages (, ); and most recently, Zodiaque: Making Medieval Modern – (). The annotated translation, Françoise Henry: The Inishkea Journals, received an Irish Heritage Council Grant in . Marquardt was awarded an NEH senior fellowship –, was a Visiting Professor at the CESCM in Poitiers , and a  Humanities Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. She is currently working on New England Protestant missionary women in the Near East during the nineteenth century and how their ‘hagiography of humanitarianism’ affected attitudes about the Middle East in the United States.

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Jan Marsh is past President of the William Morris Society UK, exhibition curator, and author of books and papers on William Morris’s political and social ideas, the PreRaphaelite Sisterhood, biographies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and the Bloomsbury movement. Recently, she co-edited, with Frank Sharp, The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Black Victorians (–); Jane Morris () and Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (–). David Matthews teaches in the English department at the University of Manchester, where he is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies. He is the author of Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England, – (), and Medievalism: A Critical History (). Heather O’Donoghue is Professor of Old Norse at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College. Publications include Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative, From Asgard to Valhalla, and English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History, as well as individual articles about the influence of Norse myth on poets such as Blake, Morris, MacDiarmid, Auden, and Heaney, and novelists such as Thomas Hardy, Hermann Melville, and Gunter Grass. Current research explores the meaning of time in the Icelandic family saga. Joanne Parker is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are focused on Victorian medievalism, the Victorians and the prehistoric, and the relationships between place, history, literature, and identity more broadly. Her publications include Britannia Obscura (, ); England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (); The Harp and the Constitution (); Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments (); and with Corinna Wagner, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic (). Graham Parry is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York. Over the course of his career he has taught at Columbia University, New York, the universities of British Columbia, Leeds, Toulouse, and York. He has also been a visiting professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Specializing in the cultural history of seventeenthcentury England, he has published eight books relating to this period, including The Golden Age Restor’d on the culture of the Stuart Court, The Trophies of Time on the antiquaries of the seventeenth century, and Glory, Laud and Honour on the culture of the Anglican Counter-Reformation. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Carl Phelpstead is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, where he teaches Old English and Old Norse. He has published extensively on medieval literature and on its reception and influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books include Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas () and Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity ().

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Huw Pryce is Professor of Welsh History at Bangor University. He has published widely on both the history of medieval Wales and the historiography of Wales, including Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales (), a major critical edition, The Acts of Welsh Rulers – (), and J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (). He is currently writing a book on Welsh history writing from the early Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century, and is co-editor of the Welsh History Review. Eleonora Sasso is Associate Professor in English at the ‘G. D’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). She has published on Victorian literature, the Pre-Raphaelites, literary, intersemiotic, and audiovisual translation, as well as on cognitive stylistics, Canadian literature and language. She has translated into Italian W. M. Rossetti’s Some Reminiscences and is the author a number of monographs including The PreRaphaelites and Orientalism . Philip Schwyzer is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, and the author of books including Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (), Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (), and Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (). He is currently co-editing Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion and preparing an edition of the complete works of the Welsh historian and cartographer Humphrey Llwyd. Clare A. Simmons is a Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She has published extensively on medievalism in nineteenth-century British literature, including Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature () and Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (). M. J. Toswell teaches Old English, early medieval codicology, and speculative fiction at the University of Western Ontario, and researches early medieval psalters and medievalism. Recent publications include The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (), co-winner of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Book Prize in ; a translation of Jorge Luis Borges’s Ancianas literaturas germánicas, Old English Publications  (), Borges, the Unacknowledged Medievalist (), and Today’s Medieval University (). She is preparing an edition of the Old English metrical psalter, and various articles. Richard Utz is Chair and Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, and President of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. His scholarship centres on medieval studies, medievalism, the interconnections between humanistic inquiry and science/technology, reception study, and the formation of cultural memories and identities. His contributions to the field of medievalism include Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman, ed. with Tom Shippey (), Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Critical Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, – (), Postmodern Medievalisms, ed. with Jesse Swan (), Medievalism. Key Critical Terms, ed. with Elizabeth Emery (), and Medievalism: A Manifesto ().

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Corinna Wagner is Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published chapters and articles on Victorian medieval architecture and Gothic literature, photography and nineteenth-century visual culture, art and anatomy, and the relationship between medicine and the arts. Her books include Art, Anatomy, and the Real (forthcoming), Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture () and with Joanne Parker, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic (), which accompanied the AHRC-supported exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. She has also edited A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine, with Andy Brown () and Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory (). Marcus Waithe is a University Senior Lecturer and Fellow in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (), and has published widely on John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Two co-edited publications are forthcoming: with Michael Hurley, Thinking through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, ); and, with Claire White, The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, –: Authorial Work Ethics (Palgrave). He is completing a book titled The Work of Words: Literature and the Labour of Mind in Britain, –. James Watt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict – (), and his other work on the Gothic includes an Oxford World’s Classics edition of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron. He has also published widely in the field of Orientalism and empire and his most recent book is British Orientalisms, – (). William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History at St John’s College, Oxford. His publications include Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities () and Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (). Kirsten Wolf is Kim Nilsson Professor, Thorger Thompson Chair, and Associate Chair of the Department of the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her area of research is Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature and hagiography. She has published editions of several sagas and written articles on a variety of topics pertaining to Old Norse, including non-verbal communication, colour, and gender issues. Her most recent publications are The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry, together with Natalie M. Van Deusen, and The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose

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

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    

M  

.................................................................................................................................. I the mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone world, two great national libraries opened their doors for the first time. One was the British Museum Reading Room, opened in , with its geometrically precise domed ceiling and oculus, modelled on the remains of the Pantheon in Rome. The other was the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Canada, built to resemble a twelfth-century chapter house with flying buttresses, structural polychromy, vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, and elaborately carved gargoyles. Work began on the building in —though problems with its construction delayed its opening until . The two libraries encapsulate in their architecture one of the great cultural binaries of the nineteenth century: classicism versus medievalism. In nineteenth-century Britain, both architectural styles flourished—sometimes on the same street. But classicism and medievalism were not merely architectural styles. In , the year that work on the Canadian library began, Lord John Acton pronounced: Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society.¹

As Acton here explains, either ‘antiquity’—the cultures of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations—or the values and practices of the Middle Ages could be identified as underlying many of the religious, political, social, literary, musical, educational, scientific, and economic ideals of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. This was part of a pervasive fascination with history. In , looking back across the nineteenth century in a speech given at the British Museum, the historian Frederic Harrison asserted, ‘if ours was the age of progress, it was also the age of history’.² It was ¹ Acton, unpublished draft, quoted in Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ² Alfred Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary: A Record of the National Commemoration (London: Macmillan, ), .

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

    

a fascination that also manifested itself in a boom in history publishing and the rise of historical anniversaries as events in the English calendar.³ As Acton himself demonstrates, there was awareness of the influence that both medievalism and classicism were exerting, during the Victorian period itself. Indeed, it was in  that the word ‘medievalism’ was first used to describe the impact of medieval culture on modern society. In August of that year, the seventh issue of the Anglican magazine The British Churchman (published in response to the growing Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement) opened with an anonymous article on monasticism, which complained: ‘there is many a one who fiercely denounces mediævalism, yet whose heart is tainted with the monastic or antisocial poison’.⁴ Most other early uses of ‘medievalism’ were similarly negative. In , the Virginia-based Southern Literary Messenger grumbled about ‘Toryism, feudalism, medievalism, all manners of retrogradism and rottenness in opinion’, while in  the periodical th Century protested about the impact of ‘mediævalisms’ on the English language.⁵ The perception that medievalism was a negative, retrograde phenomenon became more dominant with the end of the Victorian period, and the development of modernism.⁶ It was perhaps because of this that, for the first half of the twentieth century, the movement received little attention, whereas Victorian classicism became the focus of considerable critical analysis and survey, and was readily acknowledged as having been an influential movement in European cultural history.⁷

T     V 

.................................................................................................................................. A central aim of this Handbook is to demonstrate that medievalism was as influential a cultural force in Britain—if not more influential—for much of the nineteenth century as was classical culture. Victorian medievalism was broad-ranging and diverse. It was not only embraced by different political factions and drawn upon for a wide variety of social agendas, it also looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods, together making up nearly a thousand years of history. While the Anglo-Saxon culture of the fifth to the eleventh centuries was credited in the nineteenth century as the source of Britain’s jury system, free schools, and representative parliament, the Norse ³ In , for example, Thomas Gill’s volume The Anniversaries was published containing a commemorative poem to be read on each day of the year, and in  every single edition of the Cornhill Magazine carried an ‘anniversary study’ of an historic event. ⁴ Anon., ‘Monachism’, The British Churchman, / (Aug. ): . ⁵ See the Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com. ⁶ T. S. Eliot famously attacked medievalist authors as the ‘forces of death’. See Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (London: Macmillan, ), . ⁷ One exception to this general trend being William Gaunt’s publications on the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

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and Danish ‘Viking’ raiders who first began to attack Britain in the eighth century were acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy and empire, and the Anglo-Norman society of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was admired and emulated for its feudal system, its religious rituals, its architecture, and its craftsmanship. Of course, the grouping together of all these phenomena as ‘medievalism’ is to some degree a modern and retrospective phenomenon. While we have a broad consensus that the medieval period lasted from roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century—from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, or the conversion of the emperor Constantine, to the fall of Constantinople, or the beginning of the Renaissance—there was no clear agreement about what precisely was and wasn’t ‘medieval’ for much of the Victorian period. Indeed, it had only been in  that the word ‘medieval’ had been coined from the Latin ‘medium aevum’, meaning literally ‘middle age’, by the antiquary Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, in the preface to his second edition of British Monachism: Or, Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England—where it was used to refer specifically to Anglo-Norman monastic doctrines.⁸ In the mid-nineteenth century, in particular, the period prior to the Renaissance was often divided into the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, with the latter being carefully and favourably distinguished from the former, and with either the Norman Conquest of  or the first Crusade of  serving as a period boundary.⁹ Increasingly, however, as first Saxons and Danes, and then Danes and Normans, were identified as part of the same Northern people, the multiple centuries and cultures that we now class as ‘medieval’ began to be viewed collectively—as did the Victorian reception of them.¹⁰ If Victorian medievalists differed significantly as to what precisely they categorized as ‘medieval’, their work was also expressed in a wide variety of forms. It was pervasive in literature, with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse, to triple-decker novels. It became a dominant architectural mode—transforming the English landscape, with  per cent of new churches built on a ‘Gothic’ rather than a classical model, as well as museums, railway stations, town halls, and pumping stations. But it also permeated everyday life—influencing the popularity of beards, the naming of children, and the design of homes. Tennyson’s uncle, who added a moat, drawbridge, and portcullis to his home, was part of a venerable minority, but the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris & Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms, as did the

⁸ Oxford English Dictionary. ⁹ On this development see E. G. Stanley, ‘The Early Middle Ages = The Dark Ages = The Heroic Age of England and in English’, in Marie-Francoise Alamichel and Derek Brewer (eds), The Middle Ages After the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, . ¹⁰ On the merging of Danes and Saxons in the late Victorian imagination see Joanne Parker, ‘The Victorians, the Dark Ages, and English National Identity’, in Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle (eds), The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, ), –. On the merging of Saxons and Normans in the late Victorian imagination, see Andrew Sanders, ‘Utter Indifference? The Anglo-Saxons in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, in Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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    

lush allegorical paintings and stained glass of the Pre-Raphaelites, while the massproduced ‘Gothic’ furniture produced in factories such as Barnstaple’s Shapland & Petter allowed middle-class homes to also assume a veneer of the Middle Ages. Many of these individual aspects of nineteenth-century medievalism have been addressed in detail elsewhere. This Handbook is an attempt to draw together for the first time every major aspect of Victorian medievalism, and to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant today, including intellectual history, religious studies, social history, literary history, art history, and architecture.

T   

.................................................................................................................................. As a diverse movement, which influenced not only religion and architecture, but also politics, literature, art, and social thinking, ‘medievalism’—the reception history of the medieval period—began to attract serious attention in the late twentieth century with the publication of monographs such as Arthur Johnston’s Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century () and Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English (), and the founding in  of the journal Studies in Medievalism by Leslie J. Workman. In , Workman also established the annual International Conference on Medievalism, and in the following decade a number of key figures spearheaded the study of different aspects of the medieval revival in the long nineteenth century—among them Andrew Wawn, Christine Fell, and Geraldine Barnes on Old Northernism, Tom Shippey, Alan Frantzen, and Clare Simmons on Anglo-Saxonism, Stephen Knight, Richard Barber, and Elizabeth Brewer on the revival of Anglo-Norman chivalry and balladry, Peter Faulkner on the Arts and Crafts movement, and Chris Brooks’s wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work on the Gothic revival. Gradually, work such as this overcame an old prejudice that the reception history of the Middle Ages was a ‘light’ subject for established academics to dabble in, and not a specialism on which one might establish a career, and since then numerous theses on many different aspects of Victorian medievalism have ensured that the field continues to flourish—indeed the subject is now taught at undergraduate level.

M  

.................................................................................................................................. Although the focus of this Handbook is the Victorian period, when medievalism became a dominant cultural force, retrospective interest in what we now know as ‘the medieval period’ began far earlier—indeed, it commenced almost as soon as the Middle Ages ended. The first section of the Handbook therefore focuses briefly on medievalism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century—when Old English and Old Norse began to be studied as subjects, and when medieval manuscripts

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were first collected, edited, and put to a range of political uses—in order to provide a sense of the ways in which Early Modern texts often served as lenses through which the nineteenth century viewed the Middle Ages. Philip Schwyzer’s chapter ‘King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty’ begins this process, by introducing a subject that will be returned to in later chapters—the political and cultural uses to which the figure of King Arthur has been put. Schwyzer traces the evolution of this figure through the Tudor period—from a national hero widely assumed to have been historical, who was represented in state pageantry and invoked in legal proceedings, to a medieval figure generally dismissed as fictional, who yet continued to inspire enthusiasm on a popular level and would return again with force in the nineteenth century. Timothy Graham’s chapter, ‘Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century’, also focuses on a Renaissance movement which laid the groundwork for much Victorian medievalism. The chapter charts the study of the Old English language in the sixteenth century and the study of Old Norse a century later, revealing the techniques employed by early translators, the motivations which lay behind their enterprise, the way in which translation fed into the later concept of the ‘Norman yoke’, and the gradual emergence of dictionaries, grammars, and typefaces for the languages. ‘Validating the English Church’ by Graham Parry also focuses on early interest in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts—but in this case considers the nationalist use to which they were put in asserting an ancient heritage for the newly created Anglican church, during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I. Parry’s chapter not only considers the collecting, editing, and printing of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts during this period, which laid the foundations for much of the Anglo-Saxonism of the nineteenth century, it also discusses how analysis of the Germanic roots of the English language, appreciation of Gothic architecture, and finally an appreciation of medieval Catholicism, developed at this time—pre-empting three important strands of Victorian medievalism. A central underpinning of much Victorian Anglo-Saxonism is examined in Clare Simmons’s chapter, ‘The Diggers and the Norman Yoke’, which outlines the development of radical understandings of the Norman Conquest from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. The chapter begins by considering the appeals to the Middle Ages made by John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers, in the s and then traces the ways in which this seems to have fed into the rhetoric of the Diggers and then resurfaced in the nineteenth century, in the works of such key medievalist figures as William Blake, Major John Cartwright, Thomas Spence, and William Morris.

R  

.................................................................................................................................. Romantic medievalism might best be defined by the activities of collectors, poets, novelists, and artists in the era that gave rise to Victorian medievalism proper: they recovered past languages, literatures, and histories; they revived and began to define Gothic architectural style; they referred to the feudal and religious institutions of the

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    

Middle Ages to renew national and regional identities. Histories like Richard Hurd’s  Letters on Chivalry and Romance began to illuminate what was a very murky Middle Ages, thus stimulating more historically sound studies of the political and cultural life of feudal society. At the same time, James Macpherson’s  Fragments of Ancient Poetry (ostensibly a transcription of poems by the third-century Gaelic poet Ossian), the poet-forger Thomas Chatterton’s verses of that same decade, and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry of  did as much to recover past literatures as to stimulate new Gothic and medievalist forms of poetry. These acts of recovery and imaginative creation defined what would become Romanticism. Supposed medieval authenticity is fused with what we identify as distinctly Romantic priorities: sublime and/or picturesque landscapes, a deeply introspective self, and the expression of an effusion of emotion and spontaneous feeling. All of this is part of what David Matthews describes as the important prehistory of Victorian medievalism. In his chapter ‘The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History’, he traces how a corpus of ancient ballads, romances, and early verse was formed through the efforts of Percy and the antiquarian Thomas Warton, and later, Sir Walter Scott and Joseph Ritson. Matthews notes that medieval literature was seen as ‘an undiscovered territory ready to be enjoyed and colonized’. Like Matthews, Jack Lynch encourages us to reconsider our conceptions of how history was and is made, reminding us that, until the nineteenth century, medieval literature was largely ‘terra incognita’. Lynch details how Richard of Cirencester’s De situ Britanniae influenced countless other texts, from its ‘discovery’ by Charles Bertram in  until its debunking as a purely fictional concoction in . Bertram’s deception sent ripples of uncertainty throughout the antiquarian and historiographical enterprise, and as a result, the whole ‘basis of understanding early British history was in doubt’. There were other outcomes to forgery cases, including new attitudes to authenticity and the emergence of a more sensitive, attentive readership. Another important ‘discovery’ was Beowulf, which features in Kirsten Wolf ’s account of early nineteenth-century Romanticism and the recovery of the ancient Nordic past. Grímur Thorkelin and Rasmus Rask, the principal founders of Anglo-Saxon and Norse philology, were instrumental in resurrecting the shared Germanic past of Britain and Scandinavia, and in bringing that past to a modern readership. As Wolf reveals, this endeavour was deeply embroiled in personal politics and professional jealousies, as well as natural disasters, which are also an important context for Romantic literary history and the shaping of Victorian medievalism. The next generation created a new body of work that reached a wider audience, and expanded the medievalist remit. This included the Ossian-influenced novels and romances of Walter Scott; Coleridge and Keats’s sexually charged medieval poetry; the troubadour poetry of women writers, of which Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Troubadour () is but one example; and nationalist poetry, including the Scottish ballads of Robert Burns, the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (–), and the Welsh Melodies of Felicia Hemans (). Much of this literature stimulated, or was stimulated by, visual culture. The Swiss Romantic painter Henri Fuseli and the German

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painter of ruins Caspar David Friedrich provided a Gothic visual vernacular that helped define the atmospheric settings we associate with the s Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe or Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. William Blake’s illuminated plates merge ancient types and medieval-styled marginal details with Gothic spires and arches, the latter of which recall his early study of monuments at Westminster Abbey. The Tintern Abbey that features so famously in Wordsworth’s  poem had been represented in watercolour by J. M. W. Turner a few years earlier and was painted in oil by William Havell in . Engravings of these and other works inspired tourism to sites of ruins as well as to Horace Walpole’s ‘new-build’ Gothic pile at Strawberry Hill and William Beckford’s hastily erected and ill-fated Fonthill Abbey. All of these historical, literary, artistic, and architectural enterprises negotiated between past and present, authenticity and invention, history and imagination. Even in this earlier phase, medievalism was less insular and more outward-looking than has sometimes been assumed. In his chapter on Romantic Gothic literature, Joseph Crawford traces the influence of the fantastical, terror-filled German Gothic tradition on the early—and often rather edgy—writing of British poets, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and on the novels of Scott and Matthew Lewis. However, as the political climate changed, so too did literary tastes. Crawford argues that, in the first years of the nineteenth century, nationalist feelings produced a patriotic form of Gothic that turned away from the continent. Both Crawford and Tom Duggett remind us how in this revolutionary era, when politics touched almost all spheres of life, medieval history was interpreted and employed to new ends. The collecting activities of eighteenth-century antiquarianism gave way to politically urgent historiography. The Middle Ages were conjured in heated debates about individual rights, the structure of government, and the nature of class. How one viewed the past determined and was determined by one’s political allegiances. In his famous lament that the French Revolution demonstrated that ‘the age of chivalry is gone . . . and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’, Edmund Burke gave impetus to a conservative political agenda that sought to rekindle the inherited traditions, values, and institutions then threatened by working-class radicalism and liberal philosophies.¹¹ For their part, radicals and liberals tended to view those same feudal institutions as either the source of political, religious, legal, and class tyranny or as the origin of enshrined rights and liberties. The word ‘tended’ is significant, for many of the chapters in this book challenge the traditional view of medievalism as characterized by distinct battle lines: divisions may have existed between political and aesthetic opponents, but they were also obscure at times, and liable to be redrawn. Burkean conservativism and a belief in the importance of local traditions rooted in regional landscape characterizes Wordsworth’s Michael, a text at the centre of Tom Duggett’s chapter. The architectural ruin is the focus of fears about global expansion, and is part of a poetic reinvention of a distinctly English medieval past, against an enigmatic East—or more specifically,

¹¹ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, ), .

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    

China. Wordsworth’s ‘“insular” Gothic ideal’ would seem just that then, but Duggett also identifies surprising connections between Wordsworth’s Lake District and China. These negotiations were part of the important process of defining national and regional identities. Walter Scott’s historical novels were particularly influential, James Watt observes, for they had a considerable number of imitators who shaped Victorian writing. By bringing to life remote and partially unknown events such as the Norman invasion for readers and writers, Scott’s Ivanhoe became ‘enduringly formative for modern imperial Britain’. By detailing the entanglements between the personal lives of characters and larger historical conflicts, Scott explored questions that would become central to Victorian authors about the relationship between the individual and the nation. His novels established a tradition of recruiting the past to negotiate values and priorities for the modern age.

S  

.................................................................................................................................. Many expressions of Victorian medievalism—from historical novels, to paintings, to ornaments and architecture—were dependent in the first instance on the collection and preservation of source materials from the Middle Ages. The nineteenth century saw the establishment of many learned, literary, and antiquarian societies whose aim was to make the remains of medieval culture accessible to the public, and to protect them for future generations. Without the groundwork of these organizations, little of the reimagining of the Middle Ages that proliferated in the Victorian period would have been possible. While the majority of Victorian medievalism looked to rediscovered Saxon, Norman, and ‘Viking’ culture (because of its importance to nationalist discourses), however, there was also significant interest in the medieval pasts of other European countries. This section of the Handbook will therefore allow some of the interconnections and relationships between Victorian antiquarians, editors, and translators and those working in other European countries to be highlighted. In ‘The Study of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in the Victorian Period’, Jane Toswell considers the shift that took place in the early nineteenth century from deep interest in the history of the Anglo-Saxon period to serious study of its texts. In particular, the chapter examines the work of John Josias Conybeare, John Mitchell Kemble, Benjamin Thorpe, and Frederick J. Furnivall, who were together responsible for producing some of the first critical editions of Old English poetry, and it reveals how the work of these men fed into popular medievalism: through the societies that they established, which were attended by members ranging from poets to politicians; and through the articles that they produced for popular periodicals. Richard Utz’s ‘Chaucer Among the Victorians’ shifts the focus to the afterlife of Middle English literature in the nineteenth century—though Furnivall, the prolific, self-taught editor and social reformer, surfaces again in this context. Charting the rediscovery of Chaucer from the eighteenth century,

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to Furnivall’s important editorial and popularizing work, to Walter Skeat’s professionalization of the study of Middle English, to the appearance of penny dreadful and children’s versions of the Canterbury Tales, Utz reveals how the medieval poet became celebrated as the founding father of English literature and as an embodiment of Englishness by the end of the nineteenth century. It was not merely medieval texts that were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, however. Jane Hawkes’s chapter traces the study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture to the work of George Forrest Browne in the s. Browne’s interest in preserving Anglo-Saxon sculpture was underpinned by his concerns about the role of the Church of England and its relationships with both the State and the papacy. The chapter reveals that not only did Browne play a crucial role in saving some of England’s early sculptures from neglect, and in identifying, by his meticulous comparative research, the unique qualities of Anglo-Saxon sculpture, he was also involved in a number of contemporary art projects which took their inspiration from Anglo-Saxon works. Just as there was interest in Anglo-Saxon and in Norman culture in Victorian England, so too attention was given to the Welsh and Irish Middle Ages in nineteenth-century Ireland and Wales—though this fascination has seldom been considered in the wider context of Victorian medievalism. Hugh Pryce’s chapter considers the idealization of aspects of the medieval period in both countries, highlighting similarities—such as the portrayal of the two countries’ early ecclesiastical history as an age of saints—but perhaps even more importantly, the differences in treatment which meant that while one nation drew on medieval history to justify political self-determination, the other used it to vindicate union with England. In the late nineteenth century, there was a coalescence of Irish and Scottish medievalism which is outlined in Sarah Dunnigan and Gerard Carruthers’s wide-ranging chapter on ‘Scottish Neomedievalism’. Focusing on ‘vernacular’ medievalism in Scotland—in other words, on that which was based on Scottish or ‘Celtic’ subject matter—the chapter traces the emergence of the editing societies in Scotland which first made medieval Scottish texts widely available to both Scottish and English authors, and which importantly established the significance of medieval Scottish literature as a distinct literary culture—and not merely a dialect of Middle English. The chapter also traces the emergence of the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland, which both drew on Victorian medievalism and also fed into it, as Scottish artists who were part of this ‘Celtic Revival’ movement illustrated works by William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti among others. The late nineteenth-century Scottish painters John Duncan and Anna Traquair both drew on Italian medieval art and manuscript illumination for some of their most important works. The culture of the Italian Middle Ages was also influential on medievalism in nineteenth-century England. Eleonora Sasso’s chapter on ‘The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism’ looks at the importance of Boccaccio’s works in the writings and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne. Examining how not merely the content but also the form of Boccaccio’s writings profoundly influenced Victorian medievalist works, the chapter surveys

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    

the reuse and reimagining of his eroticism, his paradisal gardens, and his female musefigures, in the nineteenth century. Besides that of Italy, the literature of medieval Iceland was one of the most influential non-English literatures to feed into British medievalism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Carl Phelpstead’s chapter outlines, during the Victorian period, Icelandic literature became more central than it has ever been since to British culture. His chapter surveys the major Icelandic texts that were translated into English in the Victorian period, as well as the original-language editions that were produced to facilitate the study of Old Norse, revealing that religious, national, or local allegiances often influenced the choice of texts for these projects. The chapter also charts the production of dictionaries, primers, and grammars for Old Icelandic during the Victorian period, as well as the growth of tourism to Iceland, charting how these developments fed into a British enthusiasm for the sagas that lasted well beyond the end of the nineteenth century. While Victorian Britain was rediscovering its Anglo-Saxon past and using that heritage as a cornerstone of national identity, similar processes were also under way in the European kingdoms that now make up Germany. Francis Gentry’s chapter on ‘Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany’ investigates the different ways in which the culture of the German Middle Ages was drawn upon to aid the formation of a united German national identity, in the years leading up to and following the  unification of Germany. Covering beliefs about early constitutional freedoms, the rediscovery of the myth of the Nibelungs, and the completion of the medieval Cologne Cathedral in , the chapter reveals how medievalism allowed nineteenth-century German thinkers to define their nation in opposition to romance cultures, and in particular, the French. The French Revolution is often cited as one of the key events which initiated the medieval revival in nineteenth-century Britain.¹² What is less often considered in British studies of medievalism, however, is the impact that that same Revolution had upon the evolution of French medievalism—or the important cross-fertilization that developed between the parallel cultural movements on each side of the Channel. In their chapter on ‘French Sources’ Elizabeth Emery and Janet Marquardt chart the rediscovery of French medieval culture and its impact upon key figures in the Victorian medieval revival. They also stress, however, that influence worked in both directions: just as English artists travelled to France to be inspired by medieval art and architecture, so French scholars journeyed to Britain to transcribe manuscripts. And the creative medievalism of both countries was also mutually influential: Walter Scott’s novels and Edward Burne-Jones’s paintings were just as popular in France as were Victor Hugo’s novels and the medievalist works of J.-K. Huysmans in Britain.

¹² See, for instance, Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale, ), .

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S, ,   

.................................................................................................................................. At times, medievalist forms of expression conveyed loss and regret—loss of liberties, the fading of past glory, the passing of a time characterized by intense religious and aesthetic experiences. Yet, even in its most nostalgic forms, Victorian medievalism answered to the demands of the present. This is particularly true with respect to such weighty concerns as contemporary political events, social problems, and philosophical and religious questions. Architects and designers, writers and artists lifted the religious, legal, and political remnants of the past and transposed them onto the present (and vice versa). The chapters in this section are concerned with the way medievalism worked in concrete and pragmatic ways, as political or social activism. It explores, too, how philological and theological study sought to recover or resurrect liberties or identities that were thought to have roots in the Middle Ages. In ‘Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity’, Will Abberley shows how medievalists identified liberty and independence as national values, which could be traced to their supposed Anglo-Saxon origins through the history of the English language. However, as Abberley points out, ‘Victorian visions of Anglo-Saxon language as a pure national origin were haunted by the philological reality that it was only an arbitrary point in a continuous chain of mutation and intermixture.’ Thus, Abberley’s chapter shares a theme with others in this Handbook: that a search for origins and authenticity often produced something very different. Richard A. Gaunt contributes to overturn established misconceptions about medievalism in his study of ‘Toryism and the Young England Movement’. He challenges the characterization of Young England—largely public school Tories that included George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Richard Monckton Milnes, and the group’s figurehead Benjamin Disraeli—as the ‘last hurrah of romantic Toryism’. The caricature of them as an ‘introspective, retrospective and elitist’ group that succumbed to modernity, capitalism, and individualism, obscures their rather valiant efforts at social and moral regeneration. In this the Young Englanders were allied (despite their religious differences) to the Oxford Movement, and the teachings of its founders, John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Bouverie Pusey.¹³ In his chapter ‘The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire’, Dominic Janes focuses on a lesser known aspect of the revival of Catholicity in the Church of England: monasticism and the new religious asceticism. Although Victorian monasticism had, as one might expect, a generally conservative moral agenda, it was cast by some as ‘peculiar, exotic and threatening’. This was because, as Janes’s case studies reveal, monasticism was a way ¹³ The religious ideas of the Oxford Movement took architectural form, through the efforts of the Cambridge Camden (Ecclesiological) Society (founded ), which advocated Gothic revivalism in church building. For more on this, see Bremner’s chapter in this volume.

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    

of life that refused to conform to many of the social, sexual, and domestic imperatives of the Victorian age. The last three chapters of this section push forward the revisionary agenda by challenging deep-rooted perceptions of medievalism as a basically conservative reaction against modernity, liberalism, and radicalism. Ian Haywood, Corinna Wagner, and Kathleen Davis and Nadia Atschul examine more closely the nuances of medievalist politics. In ‘Illuminating Propaganda: Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era’, Haywood argues that the scholarly focus on the more usual suspects—William Morris in particular—has obscured the political activism of earlier medievalists. Morris’s socialist remaking of medievalism was a major triumph, as is aptly demonstrated by Jan Marsh’s essay in this volume, but Haywood brings to light a neglected work of ‘poetic vision and political practice’, W. J. Linton’s Bob Thin; Or The Poorhouse Fugitive. This text might be nostalgic, but in its use of an imaginative vision of history to promote political and social reform, it is distinctly political or radical nostalgia. In ‘Bodies and Buildings: Materialist Medievalism’, Corinna Wagner argues that it is something of a misconception that values such as chivalry, valour, fidelity, and community had little in common with utilitarianism and materialism. In fact, Wagner argues that Victorian medievalists such as Thomas Carlyle and utilitarian thinkers such as William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, put forward surprisingly similar proposals relating to political and social reform. In particular, there were significant points of agreement on issues surrounding the body—an area of concern not often associated with Victorian medievalists. In a chapter that further extends the borders of medievalism, Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul demonstrate how orientalization was at the core of neo-colonial medievalism in other parts of the globe. Early nineteenth-century Chile and late eighteenth-century India might not seem an obvious pairing, but as the authors point out, both areas were defined as ‘Moorish’ and were associated, in the European imagination, with its own medieval past. Through their examination of British travel writing about Chile and India, Davis and Altschul show how medievalistOrientalist discourse supported efforts to incorporate these nations into Britain’s mercantilist empire. This chapter, along with others in this volume, demonstrates the methodological value of paying attention to under-examined materials and to looking beyond the more familiar national contexts of medievalism.

T    :       G

.................................................................................................................................. The chapter title ‘This Will Kill That’ in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (), refers to a time when print took the place of architecture as ‘the great book of mankind . . . the great script

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of the human race’.¹⁴ Through a long stretch of human history, people had recorded and acquired their values through buildings, but the arrival of the Gutenberg printing press in the fifteenth century changed everything: it was ‘the greatest event in human history’, Hugo writes, ‘It is the mother of revolutions’.¹⁵ Itself a product of the popular press, Notre-Dame de Paris placed that titular cathedral in the public eye and helped to initiate something of a revolution in architectural taste. Hugo’s Romantic Gothic roman played a key role, too, in a conservation movement that had far-reaching effects on the built environment, including the preservation of important Gothic monuments and the reconstruction of Notre-Dame under the guidance of architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In the British Isles, print also inspired and sustained a revival of Gothic architecture. Sir Walter Scott’s novels, A. W. N. Pugin’s design treatises, and the theological-architectural writings of the Cambridge Camden Society influenced a generation that included the prolific architect Sir George Gilbert Scott. Besides restoring countless medieval churches and cathedrals, Scott designed some  buildings in England and many more across the globe, from Bombay to Newfoundland. In an effort to rekindle an appreciation for then-unfashionable Victorian architecture, Kenneth Clark declared in  that the Gothic revival was ‘the most widespread and influential artistic movement which England has ever produced’.¹⁶ Whether an accurate assessment or not, the revival’s influence on the landscape, on the urban built environment, on the history of fine art, on interior design and craft, and on the dizzying realm of everyday goods is nothing short of remarkable. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid superlatives when describing the richness, variety, and visual impact of medievalist art and architecture; in fact, for many of us, the terms ‘medievalism’ or ‘Gothic’ tend to conjure buildings, designs, paintings, or films, even before they do novels, poems, or other literary texts. A number of the essays challenge the exceptionalism of Victorian revivalism, by looking back to pre-Pugin design and forward to fin-de-siècle Aestheticism and beyond. William Whyte’s chapter on ecclesiastical design does the former, but also cautions us from swinging the pendulum too far away from views of Victorian revivalism as an exceptional movement, since it ‘was every bit as revolutionary and as distinctively Victorian as contemporaries believed it to be’. Medievalism borrowed from the past, but it also innovated or expanded—sometimes dramatically—upon what it borrowed, much like language. Jim Cheshire’s chapter on civic design also expands the chronological perimeters of the Gothic revival, by showing how the very principles forwarded by Pugin motivated designers and collectors to identify good design in Greek, Roman, or Renaissance styles. The influential design theorist Owen Jones, for instance, identified ‘family likeness’ between the Alhambra and Salisbury Cathedral, while architect E. W. Godwin’s early Ruskinian medievalism gave way to Anglo-Japanese Aestheticism. ¹⁴ Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) –. ¹⁵ Hugo, Notre-Dame, . ¹⁶ Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste. rd edn, , ed. J. Mordaunt Crook (London: John Murray, ).

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    

This global turn is precisely the theme of G. A. Bremner’s chapter on ‘The Gothic Revival beyond Europe’. The aims of empire and the expansionist policies of political and religious institutions were often carried vis-à-vis architecture to places as far flung as Tasmania and Sri Lanka. Importantly, however, Bremner makes the point that Gothic was also a nuanced style that merged with other national styles, and was often adapted to other climates, landscapes, and civic uses in America, Australia, Canada, and India. Malleability is a dominant characteristic of international Gothic revivalism, as is indicated by the variety of architectural languages, including ‘Bombay Gothic idiom’. The next three chapters in this part focus on art, and more specifically, the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement, and Aestheticism. Ayla Lepine’s chapter examines how the Pre-Raphaelites borrowed from a much wider range of sources than we might assume. By blending identifiably medieval material with mythological, classical, early modern and contemporary themes, the Pre-Raphaelites ‘conscientiously refused easy categorization’. As Lepine does, Jan Marsh considers carefully the issue of method in her chapter on that giant of Victorian medievalism, William Morris. His method ‘was not to describe or copy the Middle Ages, but to imaginatively inhabit them’, she observes, ‘and then make new things in the same spirit’. Using the past to make things new is a theme, too, of Rosie Ibbotson’s chapter on the British Arts and Crafts movement. Ibbotson challenges the scholarly inclination to consolidate, generalize, and to favour certain practices in the Arts and Crafts movement, thereby neglecting methods and objects deemed peripheral. To address this, she investigates the careers of, among others, turn-of-the-century figures William Lethaby and C. R. Ashbee (with Janet Ashbee), and focuses on certain lesser considered themes in their work. Ibbotson’s description of the Arts and Crafts movement as ‘a nebulous, inconsistent, and internationally widespread constellation of ideas, people, and practices’ develops important themes raised throughout this Handbook. John Haines’s chapter addresses music and dance, a sometimes overlooked facet of Victorian medievalism. He also challenges Victorian exceptionalism, or more accurately in the context of music, presentism. Victorians may have seen themselves as discoverers of medievalist musical forms, but their projects of recovery very often had early modern roots. Still, Victorians developed distinctive styles by blending medievalism and modernity in music hall entertainments and by importing American vaudeville. Haines’s chapter is a fitting end to this part, for he encourages us to think about the legacy of Victorian tastes, by calling attention to the way the medievalism of the Victorian music hall transmuted into cinema, from George Méliès’s Le chevalier mystère () to Monty Python and the Holy Grail () to Shrek Forever After ().

M 

.................................................................................................................................. Literature was one of the most pervasive forms of the medieval revival in the Victorian period. It was also one of the most diverse, including poetry, novels, plays, children’s

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stories, and even pantomimes. In some cases, works were influenced by medieval texts and literary traditions—from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s imitations of fourteenthcentury rondels, to William Morris’s masque based on the Mabinogion, to W. G. Collingwood’s Norse-style ‘sagas’ set in the English Lake District. Far more Victorian medievalism, however, took the form of modern literature that was simply based on events and figures from the medieval past. While some major figures in this movement—Charles Kingsley or Alfred Tennyson—are still read and studied today, there were also many other medievalist authors such as Charles Whistler or Dinah Mulock Craik, whose work enjoyed popularity in the nineteenth century but is now largely forgotten. This final section of the Handbook will consider the wide range of medievalist literature produced during the Victorian period—from popular to literary—and the relationships that this textual medievalism had with other aspects of the Victorian medieval revival. Elizabeth Helsinger’s chapter, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism’, which opens the section, examines the relationships between literary imitation and the translation into modern English of Italian, French, German, and Middle English texts, in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite author and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The chapter also considers the connections between textual and artistic medievalism in the work of both Rossetti and William Morris, and how Morris’s study of medieval architecture and music informed his literary medievalism. Revealing that both the poetry and the artwork of these writers was often driven by the same impulse, it analyses the ways in which Morris and Rossetti redeployed old literary forms in order to estrange the modern reader. Morris, Rossetti, and a small group of other male writers are the names that today we tend immediately to associate with the literature of the Victorian medieval revival. However, as Clare Broome Saunders’ chapter on ‘Women Writers and the Medieval’ reveals, medieval history and literature was also drawn upon throughout the nineteenth century by an interesting and significant body of women writers—many of whom were attracted to the period as a time when women seemed to have enjoyed a climate of greater rights and freedom than in their own nineteenth-century present. Revealing the different ways in which women employed medieval images and settings to reflect on the problems of modern society, the chapter analyses the uses of this medievalism not only in fiction, but also in accounts of contemporary political events— from coronations to wars. Relationships between literary and non-literary medievalism are explored again in Marcus Waithe’s chapter ‘Building Utopia: The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere’. The chapter examines the important role that both medieval and medieval-revival architecture play in Morris’s best-known medievalist novel, analysing the ways in which Morris de-historicized the medieval Gothic style in order to make it serve as a revolutionary architecture of the future. Morris’s manipulation and refashioning of medieval cultural forms is also considered in Antony Harrison’s chapter on ‘Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry’, which analyses his  poem ‘The Defence of Guinevere’ alongside other key medievalist poetry: Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ and Tristram and Iseult, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,

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    

Dante Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, and Swinburne’s ‘Laus Veneris’. Focusing on the ways in which these works variously deploy medieval culture both to advocate and to challenge dominant Victorian values, the chapter argues that late nineteenth-century medievalist poetry can be distinguished by its peculiarly ideological uses of the medieval. While Arnold and Tennyson were reworking Arthurian material, other Victorian writers drew on rather different medieval source material: on the Norse sagas which had begun to be translated into English in the nineteenth century. As Heather O’Donoghue reveals, in her study of the saga-imitations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and W. G. Collingwood, when nineteenth-century authors imitated the saga form or recycled saga material into new narratives, one motivation was the close fit between the interests of their own Victorian society and the typical concerns of the original saga authors—family ties, civil and political freedoms, sexual mores, and the relationships between paganism and Christianity. Even more importantly, though, the chapter reveals that the motivation for creating new saga narratives also often involved beliefs about national or regional heritage. National identity was also an issue that was investigated and questioned in Victorian novels about the Anglo-Saxons. ‘Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel’ argues that an interest in heterodox and complex identities was a feature of Anglo-Saxonist novels throughout the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses in particular on the two most significant novels of the genre—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s  historical novel Harold, and Charles Kingsley’s  Hereward the Wake—identifying these as importantly different from the works of Sir Walter Scott and as distinctively Victorian rewritings of Saxon narratives that should not be overlooked in discussions of the Victorian medieval revival as a whole, or its legacy today. Inga Bryden’s ‘Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur’ also looks forwards from Victorian medievalism to the modern day. The chapter draws on objects as a means of reconsidering the Arthurian texts which formed such an important element of the Victorian medieval revival. Focusing on Excalibur, the Grail, and the Round Table, the chapter reveals that the function of these artefacts in Victorian texts was far from merely decorative, and it analyses the often contradictory social and cultural attitudes that they embodied. Looking forward to the reinvention and packaging of the Arthurian narrative as cultural heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the chapter also sounds an appropriate note on which to end this book about the growth and development of medievalism through the course of the Victorian period.

T   V 

.................................................................................................................................. In a concluding section about the legacy of Victorian medievalism, one might expect to find something about the everlasting appeal of Morris & Co. wallpapers,

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Arthurian legend, or Robin Hood. There may also be reference to Monty Python or Umberto Eco or The Da Vinci Code. Some mention, too, could be made of contemporary political uses of the term ‘medieval’ to denote brutal acts and irrational people who are ostensibly outside the realm of the modern. Along these lines, there might be discussion of journalistic and political descriptions of Islamic State terrorists as ‘medieval’, and perhaps also analysis of the phrase ‘getting medieval’, which, following its use in Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, has referred to swift and merciless violence. Related to these linguistic evolutions is the term ‘neomedievalism’, most often applied to a branch of political philosophy concerned with modern global politics and world economics in the digital age. A discussion of legacy should include this growing area, and might also consider how medievalism underpins the work of twentieth-century continental theorists, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Georges Bataille—subjects which, in the last few years, Bruce Holsinger has brought to scholarly attention.¹⁷ All of these possibilities indicate something of the vibrant and multi-faceted afterlife of Victorian medievalism, but there has also been another, persistent, legacy: the view of medievalism as nostalgic and escapist. In his study of medievalism in modern theory, Holsinger challenges this perennial characterization: ‘In its variegated assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment’, he writes, the ‘critical generation’ of the twentieth century ‘turned to the Middle Ages not in a fit of nostalgic retrospection, but in a spirit of both interpretive and ideological resistance to the relentless inevitability of modernity’.¹⁸ Why is it that Victorian medievalism has been, and continues to be understood as largely nostalgic? Why is it that literary, architectural, and cultural historians find themselves still countering this charge, as many of us have done in this Handbook? One answer, offered here, has to do with Holsinger’s description of the march of modernity as relentless and inevitable. It could be argued that medievalism has been labelled as negatively escapist because moderns find it difficult to imagine a movement such as this—largely literary and visual arts-based—as having any real effect on the world. From a twenty-first-century perspective, we may find it difficult to imagine that figures cast in the mould of a Pugin, a Ruskin, or a Morris could actually challenge, in any meaningful way, such monumental phenomena as capitalism, industrialized labour, ecological disaster, or social injustice. Many people are—perhaps justifiably—rather cynical about the idea that the arts could mobilize history in ways that would change practices and institutions which seem so inevitable and unmovable. But Victorian medievalists refused to accept the inevitability of urban poverty or the ugliness of mass production and consumption; they challenged the this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-things attitude

¹⁷ On this, see Bruce Holsinger, ‘Neo-medievalism and International Relations’, in Louise d’Arcens (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, ); The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). ¹⁸ Holsinger, Premodern, .

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    

Figure I.. St Pancras, London. Photograph by Corinna Wagner.

by demonstrating, via the medieval past, the spuriousness of that perception. Victorian medievalists offered blueprints for ways to realize utopic visions—so succinctly expressed by the title of one of Morris’s essays: ‘How we live and how we might live.’ There is also something ‘ineffable’ about the Middle Ages that accounts for its durability and diversity. John Haines uses this word in his chapter to capture the endurance of medievalism in such forms as the capitalist Gesamtkunstwerk that is contemporary cinema. Arguably, Gesamtkunstwerk—which attempts the total or ideal synthesis of the arts—characterizes as much the all-encompassing medievalist design project of William Morris as it does the utopian urban vision of Le Corbusier, whose ‘emphasis on urban cells reflects the monastic influence on his austere modernism’.¹⁹ And those with perhaps less encompassing schemes than Morris or Le Corbusier—say, for example, the poet Felicia Hemans, the French art collector Alexandre Lenoir, the engraver W. J. Linton, or the novelist and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (all of whom are represented in this volume)—were also transformative and forward-looking, dissenting and inspiring.

¹⁹ See Marcus Waithe’s chapter in this volume.

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In this world of global politics, environmental calamity, economic expansion, rapid urban growth, and unfettered consumerism (existing alongside dire poverty), we could learn something from Victorian medievalists who sought to make things with integrity, to produce ethically, to conserve their built and natural environments, and who insisted that happiness, truth, and beauty matter. They remind us to strive after ideals because, to borrow Simon Jenkins’s phrase, ‘Sometimes, just sometimes, beauty wins.’²⁰ The win to which Jenkins refers was the long-awaited and much-needed restoration of George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece of London architecture and design, St Pancras (Figure I.). Beauty, in the way the Victorians understood it, may sound an oldfashioned and rather meaningless term to our jaded ears, but it was at the heart of a movement that believed beautiful words, objects, places and spaces were the means to health, well-being, and happiness. We think that is monumental.

²⁰ Simon Jenkins, ‘Sir George Gilbert Scott, the Unsung Hero of British Architecture’, The Guardian,  July .

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   .............................................................................................................

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  ......................................................................................................................

     

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 

H’ voluminous Chronicles (, expanded ) are justly regarded as the greatest repository of historical lore of the Tudor age. Detailing the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland from misty antiquity down almost to the present era, these enormous volumes provided Shakespeare with material not only for his history plays but for tragedies like King Lear and Macbeth. Yet if Shakespeare ever contemplated a play on the theme of King Arthur, he would have found the usually reliable Chronicles of scant usefulness. Only a handful of pages are devoted to the famous Arthur, and even these are hedged with apologies and undercut by scepticism. suerly such one there was of that name, hardie and valiant in armes, though not in diuerse points so famous as some writers paint him out . . . This is the same Arthur, of whom the trifling tales of the Britains euen to this day fantasticallie doo descant and report woonders: but woorthie was he doubtlesse, of whom feined fables should not haue so dreamed, but rather that true histories might haue set foorth his woorthie praises, as he that did for a long season susteine and hold vp his countrie that was readie to go to vtter ruine and decaie . . . ¹

Here we find the chronicler struggling to preserve Arthur as a historical British hero, without committing himself to any solid fact about this much-storied figure. The sheer impossibility of the fantastic tales told about him is presented, paradoxically, as the greatest testimony to his actual existence. Yet the historical Arthur is bought at the price of nullifying the narrative tradition. The vast and complex body of Arthurian lore is reduced to a tautology: Arthur was Arthur. Holinshed’s brief account is indicative of the radically problematic relationship between the Tudors and King Arthur. In no century did Arthur loom so large as a figure of national and imperial identity. Yet no century found itself with so little to say about him. ¹ Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, ii (London, ), .

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 

A  T 

.................................................................................................................................. To many observers in Britain and beyond, the year  must have looked like a gateway opening onto that Arthurian future promised in the phrase ‘rex quondam et futurus’. The newly crowned Henry VII was conscious of the degree to which Arthur had been his ally in his rapid and unlikely rise to power. For several years before Bosworth, years in which few in England would have regarded the Earl of Richmond as a plausible claimant to the throne, the Welsh authors of prophetic poetry had been praising Henry Tudor (or Harri Tudur) as a reviver of Britain’s ancient glory. Henry was not always explicitly associated with Arthur in this tradition; indeed, Arthur’s name carried less weight in late medieval Welsh literature than might be assumed, and Henry was more importantly the offspring of the Trojan Brutus and the last British king Cadwaladr.² Yet among the English, the idea that the Welsh were awaiting the revival of King Arthur was firmly entrenched; to the extent that such a thing existed, Arthur was the acceptable face of Welsh nationalism. In Worcester in May , a pageant prepared for the arrival of King Henry welcomed him as ‘Arture the very Britan kyng’.³ Four months later, Henry’s Queen, Elizabeth of York, gave birth to a son at Winchester; with a differently inflected nod to both national communities, Henry named this son Arthur. King Arthur figures fairly prominently in the iconography of the early Tudor era, both before and after the untimely death of Arthur Tudor in . Given the lustre of his international reputation, far exceeding that of any other home-grown hero, Arthur could be useful in smoothing relationships not only with the Welsh but with a range of continental powers, especially the Holy Roman Empire. When Henry VIII met with Charles V in a magnificent pavilion outside Calais in , a resplendent statue of Arthur stood at the outer portal; the accompanying text identified Arthur as ‘Principal leader of all valorous hearts’, and encouraged the two monarchs to ‘Follow my deeds and my knightliness’.⁴ Arthurian references and imagery likewise studded the pageants that welcomed Charles V to London in June ; at Winchester, Charles was treated to a view of the newly restored and redecorated round table, upon which the painted figure of Arthur surmounted a brilliant Tudor rose.⁵ In the swiftly changing circumstances of the late s and s, Arthur strove to adapt himself to the new political and religious climate, albeit with mixed success.

² See the discussion in Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ³ ‘First Provincial Progress of Henry VII’, in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klausner (Toronto: Toronto University Press, ), . ⁴ See Martin Biddle, ‘The Painting of the Round Table’, in Biddle (ed.), King Arthur’s Round Table (Woodbridge: Boydell, ), –. ⁵ See Stewart Mottram, Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer), , –; Biddle, ‘Painting of the Round Table’, –.

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     



Where previously Arthur had been used to symbolize the bond between England and the Holy Roman Empire, now he helped drive a wedge between them. When the Duke of Norfolk met the imperial ambassador Chapuys to argue the case for the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, he invoked the example of Arthur as head of a historic British empire; the inscription on Arthur’s seal at Westminster, which identified him as Britanniae, Galliae, Germaniae, Daciae imperator, was produced in evidence. Though we have only Chapuys’s side of the story, it seems Norfolk’s gambit was met with barely disguised scorn. Professing never to have heard of Arthur, the ambassador declared himself sorry to hear he had not also been Emperor of Asia.⁶ In general, reliance on the example of Arthur in Reformation diplomacy and legislation was less explicit. The crucial Statute in Restraint of Appeals () noted in its preamble that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world’.⁷ The content of these chronicles was not specified, but the case for a historic British empire would have rested primarily on the emperors Constantine (thought to have been born in Britain) and Arthur. As the Arthurian past was placed at the service of Reformation policy, the British king became increasingly associated with a pristine Christianity uncorrupted by Roman superstition. In a tract deriding the doctrine of purgatory, Simon Fish urged his readers to reflect that Arthur would never have been able to lead his armies against the might of Rome if his realm had been sucked dry by chantry priests and indulgences.⁸ After the s, Arthur began to retreat from the political stage, though never entirely. Later in the century, John Dee assured Elizabeth that she had a rightful claim to all the islands of the north sea, from the coast of Muscovy to the New World, basing his case ‘cheiflie vppon our Kinge Arthur’.⁹ Like the legislators of the s, Dee associated Arthur not only with ancient glory but with a long obscured truth that must be revealed and restored to actuality. Although Elizabeth could not and did not adopt Dee’s ambitious programme for Atlantic expansion, his claims were taken seriously enough to be included in Richard Hakluyt’s compendious Principal Navigations . . . of the English Nation (, –). Indeed, in the second edition of Principal Navigations, even as he excised other fabulous medieval materials such as the travels of Sir John Mandeville, Hakluyt gave Arthur uncontested pride of place on the opening page of the volume, which begins with ‘Certain testimonies concerning K. Arthur and his conquests of the North regions, taken out of the history of the Kings of Britain . . . ’¹⁰ Arthur, then, retained ⁶ See Richard Koebner, ‘ “The Imperial Crown of this Realm”: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great, and Polydore Vergil’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research,  (), –. ⁷ See Koebner, ‘Imperial Crown’, . ⁸ ‘The nobyll kinge Arthur had never ben able to have carried hys army to the fote of the mountaynes to resyste the comynge downe of Lucius the Emperor yf syuch yearely exactions had ben taken of his people.’ Simon Fish, A Supplicacyon for the Beggers (Antwerp?, ), v. ⁹ John Dee, Brytanici Imperii Limites, BL Add. MS , p. . ¹⁰ Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation. nd edn, i (London, ), .

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

 

a national-political significance from the beginning to the end of the Tudor era, having successively embodied dynastic, ecclesiastical, and finally imperial ambitions.

A  

.................................................................................................................................. At the dawn of the Tudor era, the printer William Caxton made the case for the historical Arthur in the preface to his edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur, noting that ‘in dyuers places of Englond many remembraunces ben yet of hym and shall remayne perpetuelly and also of his knyghtes’.¹¹ Among the Arthurian relics he cited were the King’s seal at Westminster, and the round table at Winchester. ‘[I]n the castel of douer ye may see Gauwayns skulle & Cradoks mantle . . . in other places Launcelottes swerde and many other thynges.’ The skull and mantle at Dover do not appear to be mentioned again in later lists of the wonders or tourist attractions of Britain, but other objects mentioned by Caxton had a longer Tudor career. Arthur’s seal at Westminster, as we have seen, was invoked by the Duke of Norfolk in his interview with Chapuys— uniquely, this artefact provided testimony both to the King’s historical existence, and to the extent of his extraordinary achievements (though, as Chapuys’s response implies, the latter tended to undermine the former). The round table at Winchester was undoubtedly the most famous sight in Tudor England associated with Arthur’s reign (especially after , when the monuments commemorating the discovery of Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury were lost in the dissolution of the abbey). Recent archaeological and historical study has shed a great deal of light on the table’s origins and history, though some aspects still remain mysterious.¹² It appears to have been crafted in the fourteenth century, and perhaps to have played a role in Arthurian entertainments under Edward III. The decoration of the table that is visible today, featuring a seated Arthur at the apex, a Tudor rose at the centre, and places for twenty-four knights around the circumference, belong to the early years of the reign of Henry VIII; the table was repaired in , and the new painting was certainly done before Charles’s visit in  (when, indeed, it provoked some scepticism about the relic’s antiquity). The first forty years of Tudor rule were undoubtedly a heyday for Arthurian pageantry, followed by an apparent lull, with something of a revival in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Arthur and his legendary associates featured in major Elizabethan pageants, including the famous appearance the Lady of the Lake at the Kenilworth entertainment of . Even as late as , Prince Henry’s Barriers would feature the Lady of the Lake, Merlin’s tomb, and Arthur in the form of a star. Yet Arthur in this era was more commonly a participant in civic entertainments than in royal pageants; and for Londoners at least, he would have been associated first and ¹¹ Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (London, ), iiv. ¹² Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table.

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     



foremost with an archery club. As celebrated in Richard Robinson’s The Auncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthure, and his knightly armory of the Round Table (), the company of Prince Arthur’s Knights, composed of prominent London citizens, presented public shows of archery in which each member took on the persona of a different knight of the round table. These festive presentations are recalled by Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow when he declares, ‘I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show.’¹³ A place in Arthur’s show was undoubtedly honourable, and the Queen herself was said to have stopped to watch one of their performances. Nonetheless, Arthur had declined in rank from the days of Henry VII and Henry VIII; no longer a fit companion for kings and emperors, he had become comparatively common.

T   A

.................................................................................................................................. It is tempting to link Arthur’s apparent social decline to the decline in faith in his historicity over the course of the Tudor era. The story of the battle of the British books and the assault on Arthur’s historical existence has been told often enough, and marks a significant episode in the development of early modern historiography.¹⁴ Yet it is important to stress that Arthur’s existence remained a matter for debate throughout the whole of the Tudor era, and he had both his ardent defenders and his contemptuous detractors in , no less than in . Caxton in his preface to Morte Darthur had noted that ‘dyuers men holde oppynyon that there was no suche Arthur and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym ben but fayned and fables by cause that somme crony|cles make of hym no mencyon ne remembre hym noo thynge ne of his knyghtes’.¹⁵ Against these, he argued ‘many evidences of the contrary’, including Arthur’s sepulchre at Glastonbury, the account of his body’s discovery in Higden’s Policronicon, and the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as well as the objects and artefacts at Dover Castle, Westminster, and Winchester. The substance of the longlasting Tudor debate is already present here, with the positions of both the defenders and the detractors concisely mapped out. The first hammer blow against Arthur is often said to have been struck by Polydore Vergil in his Anglica Historia (). In fact, though Polydore made no secret of his contempt for Geoffrey of Monmouth and the tradition of the Trojan foundation of

¹³ William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part , .., in Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, ). ¹⁴ See e.g. Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –; James P. Carley, ‘Polydor Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books’, in Edward Donald Kennedy (ed.), King Arthur: A Casebook (New York: Garland, ), –; Frederick Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, ). ¹⁵ Malory, Morte Darthur, iiv.

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

 

Britain, his remarks on Arthur are less than damning. Arguably, it is more the brevity of his account than its content that conveys the insult: At this time Vtherius departed owte of this world, after whome succeeded his sonne Arthur, being no doubte suche a mann as, if he hadd lived longe, hee surelie woulde have restored the whole somme being allmoste loste to his Britons. As concerninge this noble prince, for the marvelus force of his boddie, and the invincible valiaunce of his minde, his posteritee hathe allmoste vaunted and divulged suche gestes, as in our memorie emonge the Italiens ar commonlie noysed of Roland, the nephew of Charles the Great bie his sister, allbeit hee perished in the floure of his yowthe; for the common people is at this presence soe affectioned, that with woonderus admiration they extol Arthure unto the heavens . . . Not manie years since in the abbey of Glastonburie was extructed for Arthur a magnificent sepulchre, that the posteritee might gather how worthie he was of all monuments, whearas in the dayse of Arthure this abbaye was not builded.¹⁶

This ambiguous and slight account formed the most notorious attack on Arthur’s historicity in the course of the Tudor era. It was neither entirely damning nor very original in its analysis. Yet it gave rise to a series of passionate and learned retorts by English and Welsh scholars, some of which, for all the hopelessness of the case they were defending, were more important in the advance of historical method than Polydore’s own history. John Leland’s Assertio inclytissimi Arturii () was the first major defence of Arthur in the period. Leland was a devoted adherent of Henry VIII, and of what he perceived as the King’s mission to reclaim the glory and independence of the British Empire. For him, the spirit and meaning of the Reformation had less to do with changes in religious observance (he may, indeed, have been a traditionalist at heart) than with the opportunity to restore the splendours of British antiquity. Arthur was the key to a past that, in the excited intellectual atmosphere of the immediate post-Reformation era, seemed ready to live again. Leland’s arguments for the historical Arthur rest in part on material evidence (the round table at Winchester, the seal at Westminster, and above all the bones discovered at Glastonbury), and in part on the testimony of older British writers. That Roman and Saxon writers fail to mention him is unproblematic; the Romans were distracted by barbarian invasions in Arthur’s era, whilst the Saxons, as enemies of the Britons, would have avoided praising them in any way. That Polydore the Italian should write so slightingly of Arthur is, for Leland, part of a long history of foreign slander and neglect. ‘He handleth Arthures cause in deed, but by the way, he yet is so fainte harted, luke warme & so negligent yt he makes me not onely to laugh, but also to be angry (as while he is contrary to truth, and filled wt Italian bitternesse) . . . ’¹⁷ The anti-Italian and

¹⁶ Polydore Vergil’s English History: From an Early Translation, i, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London: Camden Society, ), –. ¹⁷ John Leland, A Learned and True Assertion of the Original, Life, Actes, and Death of the Most Noble, Valiant, and Renoumed Prince Arthure, King of Great Brittaine, tr. Richard Robinson (London, ), sig. v.

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     



anti-Roman feeling that animates Leland’s defence would have resonated with readers all the more strongly in , when the treatise was translated into English by Richard Robinson, a citizen of London and proud member of the Worshipful Society of Archers. A far more capable and learned defence of Arthur’s existence was undertaken by the Welsh scholar Sir John Prise, whose Historiae Britannicae Defensio was published some eighteen years after the author’s death in . Like Leland, Prise cited the evidence of Arthur’s tomb and the many medieval English chroniclers who refer to him in some way. Yet Prise was also able to bring forth early Welsh references to Arthur by the bards Taliesin and Myrddin, and to cite the evidence of Welsh place-names and oral tradition. As Prise points out, ‘If all those famous men, about whom it will never be possible to produce so many and such great pieces of evidence or records as are available for Arthur, were to be totally erased from our collective memory, a huge crowd of distinguished people would undoubtedly have to be got rid of in a mighty jettisoning of antiquity.’¹⁸ Prise was not alone in this perception, and it must have been shared by many, like Holinshed, who found themselves able neither to defend Arthur nor to discard him. For if Arthur were to be jettisoned, how many other figures of British antiquity—from the Trojan Brutus to King Lear, King Lud, and old King Cole— would fall with him?

A  T 

..................................................................................................................................  was a year no less important in the history of Arthurian literature than in the history of the Tudor dynasty. Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur was printed at Westminster on  July . A day later, Henry Tudor set sail from France with a small army of French and Breton mercenaries. Caxton’s preface may well have been printed and bound with the new edition only after the Battle of Bosworth on  August.¹⁹ It must have seemed fitting to welcome a new monarch with an account of the deeds of his supposed ancestor, after whom he would shortly name his first-born son. Further editions followed in , , , and . Each of these editions retained Caxton’s prologue, with no significant revision or updating of either the frontmatter or the text. By the middle of the sixteenth century, it is clear that sophisticated readers had come to see Arthurian literature, and Malory in particular, as relics of a bygone and rather disreputable age. As the censorious Ascham wrote:

¹⁸ John Prise, Historiae Britannicae Defensio/A Defence of the British History, ed. and tr. Ceri Davies (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, ), p. x. ¹⁹ On the date and cautious politics of the preface, see Terence McCarthy, ‘Old Worlds, New Worlds: King Arthur in England’, in Arthurian Studies,  (), –.

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

  In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: as one for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye: In which booke those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarell, and commit fowlest aduoulteres by sutlest shiftes: as Sir Launcelote, with the wife of King Arthure his master: Syr Tristram with the wife of kyng Marke his vncle: Syr Lamerocke, with the wife of king Lote, that was his own aunte. This is good stuffe, for wise men to laughe at, or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know, when Gods Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure receiued into the Princes chamber. What toyes, the dayly readyng of such a booke, may worke in the will of a yong ientleman, or a yong mayde, that liueth welthelie and idlelie, wise men can iudge, and honest men do pitie.²⁰

Arthur was clearly moving downmarket, but there is ample evidence that he retained his popularity among the less educated, though precisely which oral or textual traditions they drew on is difficult to determine. Sir Philip Sidney in the Defence of Poetry comments that ‘Honest King Arthur will never displease a soldier.’²¹ The term ‘honest’ here is double edged, as Sidney clearly does not regard Arthurian literature as ‘honest’ in terms of relating the truth about the past. Nonetheless, a work like Morte Darthur might indeed be considered honest in the colloquial sense of plain-speaking and unpretentious, and as such a fit companion for a soldier. As if to validate Sidney’s thesis, amongst the most enthusiastic Elizabethan works in praise of Arthur came from the hands of an old soldier, Thomas Churchyard, whose The Worthiness of Wales () was published a year after Sidney’s death. In his poetic tour of Wales, Churchyard pauses at Caerleon, once the site of ‘King Arthur’s golden hall’, but now, like its former master, fallen into obscurity.²² The poet appeals to the Queen, ‘Who came from Arthurs rase and lyne’ (Dr), to redress the situation, restoring both the Welsh town and the British King to their former glory. Yet, conscious of swimming against the tide of modern scepticism, Churchyard lacks confidence in his own (admittedly limited) poetic power; he is thus driven to supplement his verses with a substantial extract from older chronicles in both English and Latin, which he regards as irrefutable: Than you that auncient things denyes, Let now your talke surcease: When prose is brought before your eyes, Ye ought to hold your peace. (Dr)

²⁰ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London, ), r-v. ²¹ Philip Sidney, Defence of Poetry, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). ²² Thomas Churchyard, The Worthines of Wales (London, ), sig. Dr.

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     



Whereas the subject of Churchyard’s verses was the splendour and gaiety of Arthur’s court and the mysterious wonders of the Caerleon, the chronicle passages centre rather on Arthur as a military leader, and in particular his defiant response to Roman aggression. The reader cannot avoid impression that the Arthur of poetry and the Arthur of history belong to different worlds. Although Churchyard, Dee, and others promoted Arthur as a figurehead for British imperialism, the Arthurian tradition could also be mobilized for other ideological purposes. The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play produced in the Inns of Court in , seems designed to demonstrate the dangers more than the enticements of imperial ambition. Although the Prologue arguably sets up expectations of a chivalric Arthurian entertainment of the sort that would have been familiar to courtly audiences, the ensuing play shows the downfall of an overextended British empire, undermined by the monarch’s own past indulgence in incest.²³ At the conclusion of the play Arthur and his line are irredeemably extinguished and Britain set to fall prey to a host of successive invaders, although the vengeful ghost of Gorlois does acknowledge that a thousand years hence Britain will again know peace and prosperity under a virgin queen. If Tudor England can be credited with an enduring contribution to Arthurian literature, it is Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (; expanded ). In this sprawling, episodic, and unfinished epic romance, composed of six books featuring a range of knights and heroines, Arthur is the unifying thread. Self-consciously modelling his poem on the Iliad and Aeneid, which celebrate the heroes of Greece and Rome respectively, Spenser selected Arthur as the exemplar of national (British) virtue. As he explained in a prefatory letter to his friend Raleigh, ‘I chose the historye of king Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time.’²⁴ Spenser’s insistence that Arthur, being so long dead, should not be associated with any present-day figure or cause, is unconvincing, and perhaps meant to be so; certainly it did not prevent early readers of the poem from scribbling their own identifications of the modern Arthur in the margin, be it the Earl of Essex, Leicester, or Cumberland.²⁵ Although Spenser claims to have selected Arthur because of his famous deeds, recorded in so many past works, The Faerie Queene recounts none of them. Its hero is not the potent British monarch with his seat in Camelot, but rather Prince Arthur, a young and apparently isolated figure who wanders Faerieland in a fruitless search for its elusive queen. Neither the familiar knights of the round table nor the conventional geography of Arthurian romance feature in his quest. By focusing exclusively on the young Arthur’s ‘lost years’ Spenser had arguably found a solution to the problem ²³ Curtis Perry, ‘British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Studies in Philology,  (): –. ²⁴ Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the Authors’, The Faerie Queene. ²⁵ ‘MS Notes to Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” ’, N&Q  (), –; Graham Hough, The First Commentary on The Faerie Queene (privately published, ).

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

 

adumbrated by Holinshed and others before him—that Arthur was the indisputable and indispensable centre of national history, yet that almost everything reported of him was clearly false. Yet the Arthurianism of The Faerie Queene is ultimately self-erasing. In book  of the poem, Arthur reads with delight a chronicle of ‘Briton Moniments’, leading from the conquest of Britain by Brutus the Trojan down to his father, Uther Pendragon, but fails to find his own name; a few songs later, the subsequent history of Britain, down to the reign of Elizabeth, is revealed by Merlin, but again Arthur goes unnamed, his place taken by the fictional knight Artegall (a name suggestive of ‘Arthur’s equal’). Like Faerieland itself, Arthur is at once the essence of British history and external to it, a centre and a blank.

C

.................................................................................................................................. With its complex and conflicting attitudes to the Arthurian tradition, the Tudor era seems to constitute a bridge or way-station between the Arthur of the Middle Ages and the Arthur of more securely post-medieval (and, hence, medievalist) eras. Whether sixteenth-century celebrations of Arthur can themselves be seen as early examples of medievalism is a complex question. Elizabethans were aware, certainly, that military technology had changed since Arthur’s time, and the tournaments and archery contests of this period seem drenched in nostalgia for a simpler era of elite masculine prowess and chivalric combat. When Shakespeare’s Shallow recalls playing ‘Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show’, he is recalling his participation in a medievalist re-enactment. Yet for many Tudor writers, Arthur was not really a figure from the Middle Ages at all, but rather a hero of British antiquity. When John Leland or John Dee expressed a wish to revive the glory of Arthur’s day, the sentiment was not so much medievalist as antimedievalist, for the Middle Ages were seen as the era in which Britain had declined from its Arthurian apex into superstition and subservience. Increasingly, the Arthur of history and the Arthur of poetry and romance inhabited different worlds, and indeed different epochs. The historical Arthur of ancient Britain, buffeted by the scepticism and indifference of forward-thinking historians, was approaching his eclipse. The fictional Arthur of medieval England, on the other hand, had a glorious future ahead of him.

S  Biddle, Martin. King Arthur’s Round Table (Woodbridge: Boydell, ). Carley, James P., ‘Polydore Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books’, in Edward Donald Kennedy (ed.), King Arthur: A Casebook (New York: Garland, ), –. Escobedo, Andrew. Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ).

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     



Koebner, Richard. ‘ “The Imperial Crown of this Realm”: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great, and Polydore Vergil’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research,  (): –. Levy, Frederick. Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, ). McCarthy, Terence. ‘Old Worlds, New Worlds: King Arthur in England’, Arthurian Studies,  (): –. Mottram, Stewart. Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Perry, Curtis. ‘British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Studies in Philology,  (): –. Schwyzer, Philip. Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

         

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 

V medievalism reproduced, reinvented, and transformed selected aspects of medieval literature, history, art, and architecture. In doing so, it rested upon the endeavours of generations of scholars who, beginning in the sixteenth century, applied themselves to the study of the Middle Ages. Originating in the Reformation period, those scholars’ efforts were linked to a burgeoning sense of national identity as well as to the assertive separation of the English Church from its Roman Catholic ties. Among the themes most characteristic of Victorian medievalism were admiration of the freedoms believed to have been enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons prior to the Norman Conquest and celebration of Anglo-Saxon England’s most vaunted king, Alfred, who had held the Vikings at bay while reviving the cultural life of his kingdom. Ironically, the Vikings themselves also became frequent subject matter for Victorian writers and artists. The Victorian popularization of Anglo-Saxon and Viking themes would have been impossible without the committed scholarship that, beginning in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, facilitated the recovery of Old English language and literature and, about a hundred years later, applied itself to the study of Old Norse texts including the Poetic and Prose Edda and the saga literature.

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     



O E    - 

.................................................................................................................................. By the late Middle Ages, the language of the Anglo-Saxons was effectively a dead language, understood only by isolated individuals with antiquarian interests.¹ Old English texts began to generate sustained attention only with the Reformation, when Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries threatened the very survival of the contents of the great monastic libraries while also provoking the efforts of dedicated collectors who were able to acquire manuscripts of varying provenance. Already in the years immediately preceding the dissolution, the self-styled antiquarius John Leland (c.–), apparently acting under commission from the King, travelled throughout England surveying the contents of monastic libraries; his lists of their holdings include several references to Old English texts and there is some evidence that Leland made an effort to learn the language. It was Leland’s contemporary and acquaintance Robert Talbot (/–), a prebendary of Norwich Cathedral, who applied himself most assiduously to the study of Old English materials. His collection of medieval manuscripts, admired by the Protestant polemicist and bibliographer John Bale (–), included at least ten containing vernacular Anglo-Saxon texts, among them copies of the Old English Hexateuch and Gospels, the vernacular translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary and Catholic Homilies, and a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that also included the Old English version of Paulus Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans; this latter manuscript Talbot lent both to Leland and to the mathematician and antiquarian Robert Recorde (c.–), who demonstrated his interest in Old English by transcribing excerpts from the Chronicle into a manuscript in his own collection and referencing the Orosius in one of his mathematical treatises.² Talbot’s endeavours included his compilation of a list of Old English words with Latin definitions that reveals one key method he used as he set about acquiring knowledge of Old English: he compared vernacular translations with their Latin originals, using the Latin as a key to the Old English and thereby reversing the purpose for which the translations had originally been made.³ Subsequent scholars were to use

¹ Old English texts in just a handful of manuscripts have late medieval additions indicating that they were read with understanding. Exceptionally, the mid-fifteenth-century Winchester monk Thomas Rudborne quotes the Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Old English text of King Alfred’s will in his Historia maior. See N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. xlix. ² See Timothy Graham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, at –. ³ Talbot’s word list is in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS , fol. rv. See Timothy Graham, ‘Early Modern Users of Claudius B. iv: Robert Talbot and William L’Isle’, in Rebecca Barnhouse and

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

 

this same method to good effect. Like other early modern antiquarians, Talbot annotated the manuscripts that he studied, and his notes help us to understand what motivated his interest in Old English. The notes reveal an engagement with religious issues—Talbot realized that the manuscripts provided key evidence for the early practices of the English Church—but above all they demonstrate an interest in the Anglo-Saxon forms of English place names; when encountering such forms in a manuscript Talbot frequently copied them out in the margin. A similar preoccupation with historical place names characterized the work of a major Anglo-Saxonist of the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Laurence Nowell (–c.), who, following several years spent on the Continent in the s, had by early  joined the household of Elizabeth’s Secretary of State Sir William Cecil (/–), where he served as tutor to Cecil’s ward Edward de Vere (–), seventeenth earl of Oxford and future playwright. It was during his time with Cecil that Nowell dedicated himself to Old English studies, up until his departure in  on further continental travels from which he did not return; he died two or three years later under mysterious circumstances, probably in Germany.⁴ Nowell is apparently the first identifiable owner of the manuscript containing the sole surviving copy of the great Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf (London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv)⁵ and the only one of the early Anglo-Saxonists to leave evidence of any interest in Old English poetry, demonstrated by a few glosses and titles that he added to the Exeter Book—another of the handful of codices containing the bulk of surviving Anglo-Saxon verse—and his transcription of a homiletic verse text, The Seasons of Fasting, that he found in the now largely destroyed MS Cotton Otho B. xi. More central to Nowell’s Old English studies, however, were the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings. He made extensive transcriptions of these, working from several different manuscripts. In the margins of his Chronicle transcripts in London, BL Add. MSS ,–, he wrote out place names mentioned in the text; and into his copy of Richard Howlet’s printed Latin– English dictionary, the Abcedarium Anglico Latinum of , he inserted blank paper leaves on which he compiled an alphabetical gazetteer of more than four hundred English place names, accompanied by information about each place that he drew from Anglo-Saxon and later historical sources.⁶ Nowell was also a skilled mapmaker—a talent that recommended him to Cecil—and one of his major cartographic undertakings was a set of maps of the different regions of England (London, BL, MS Cotton Domitian A. xviii, fols v–r) on which he entered Benjamin C. Withers (eds), The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ), –, at –. ⁴ On Nowell’s career and scholarly activities, see esp. Carl T. Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell (–ca. )’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Literature and Philology, vol. ii of Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline (New York: Garland, ), –. ⁵ His name and the date ‘’ entered at the top of the manuscript’s first page imply his ownership. ⁶ See Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), ch. .

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     



many of the place names in ‘Old English’ forms and in script imitating Anglo-Saxon minuscule.⁷ Talbot’s and Nowell’s fascination with the early forms of English place names associates them with a major movement in Tudor antiquarianism that originated with Leland, reached full fruition in William Camden’s Britannia of , and expressed the growing nationalism characteristic of England in the wake of the Reformation; the researches of the early Anglo-Saxonists made a unique contribution to this movement by solidifying its historical basis. Leland planned, but never completed, a vast chorographical account of Britain that would describe the island’s geography and history county by county while also recording the landholdings of the great families. Such a work would epitomize England’s unity and growing selfconfidence and remained an antiquarian goal following Leland’s demise. Research on the historical forms of place names could play a fundamental part in such a project. Nowell’s own efforts in this area were continued and extended by his friend and associate in Anglo-Saxon studies, William Lambarde (–). It was to Lambarde that Nowell entrusted his scholarly papers when he departed England in , and Lambarde made a landmark contribution to the chorographical enterprise by publishing the first English county history, A Perambulation of Kent (), into which he incorporated his Anglo-Saxon researches. Of even greater long-term significance than Nowell’s and Lambarde’s chorographical endeavours was their work on the Anglo-Saxon laws. Nowell made a detailed study of the laws both in their original language and through their twelfth-century Latin translation, the Quadripartitus; he prepared a handwritten edition of the laws of King Alfred that rested upon the careful comparison of different manuscripts and that included an accompanying Modern English translation on facing pages.⁸ Lambarde, himself a trained lawyer, expanded Nowell’s work and in , combining Nowell’s and his own materials, published an edition and Latin translation of most of the surviving Anglo-Saxon laws, along with a glossary elucidating the meaning of Old English legal terms, under the title Archaionomia, sive de priscis Anglorum legibus libri. Lambarde believed that sixteenth-century English common law was ultimately rooted in Anglo-Saxon law. His work influenced leading legal theorists such as Sir Edward Coke (–) and John Selden (–) and contributed to the legalconstitutional debates that prefaced the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century; it helped establish the context for the concept of the ‘Norman yoke’, the belief that the pre-Conquest English had enjoyed basic liberties subsequently overridden by their Norman overlords. Lambarde brought his deep historical perspective to the meetings of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, founded in London around  to investigate the history of English institutions, offices, and customs but disbanded ⁷ In many cases the place names are Nowell’s own conjectural back-formations from the sixteenthcentury form of the name rather than actual Old English forms he found in Anglo-Saxon sources. For a detailed description and analysis of these maps, see Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention, –. ⁸ See Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell’, –, and Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention, –.

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

 

in , perhaps because its researches were unwelcome to a Stuart monarchy increasingly keen to emphasize royal prerogative independent of historical precedent. The investigations of the Society’s members often included an etymological component that might encompass Old English.⁹ Contemporary with the work of Nowell and Lambarde was that of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury (–), and individuals associated with him in his archiepiscopal household at Lambeth—especially John Joscelyn (–), who became his principal expert on Old English. Parker took Anglo-Saxon studies in a new direction that persisted well into the seventeenth century and rested upon the magnificent collection of manuscripts that he assembled after becoming archbishop: some five hundred altogether, of which around seventy dated from the Anglo-Saxon period. A scholar by training—between  and  he was successively Bible Clerk, Fellow, and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to which he bequeathed the great majority of his books—Parker realized that Anglo-Saxon texts attested to the earliest ascertainable practices and beliefs of the English Church and concluded that the evidence they presented helped justify the stance of the newly independent Anglican Church against Rome. That conclusion impelled him to publish the first printed edition of Old English texts, issued in  or  under the title A Testimonie of Antiquitie, shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord.¹⁰ Initiating a tradition in typography that was to last into the eighteenth century, Parker had a special Anglo-Saxon font designed for his printer, John Day, who used the same font for Lambarde’s Archaionomia, printed a year or two later. The centrepiece of A Testimonie was an edition of an Easter Day sermon by Ælfric that in Parker’s mind established that this most orthodox of AngloSaxon churchmen held views relating to the transubstantiation of the eucharistic bread and wine that were consonant with those of the reformed English Church. Also included in the publication were Old English versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed, to demonstrate that it was ‘no new thyng’ to turn the basic texts of Christianity into the vernacular—another practice that differentiated the Anglican from the Roman Catholic Church. Two further Anglo-Saxon editions appeared under Parker’s auspices. In  John Day issued The Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes Translated in the Old Saxons Tyme, an edition of the Old English version of the Gospels with a preface by John Foxe, most celebrated of English Protestant apologists, whose account of Protestant martyrs, ⁹ The content of the Society’s studies is discussed in Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, –: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹⁰ See John Bromwich, ‘The First Book Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, / (): –, and Theodore H. Leinbaugh, ‘Ælfric’s Sermo de sacrificio in die Pascae: Anglican Polemic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (eds), Old English Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –. On the difficulty of assigning a precise date to the publication, see Erick Kelemen, ‘A Reexamination of the Date of A Testimonie of Antiquitie, One of the First Books Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types’, ANQ, / (Fall ): –.

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     



the Acts and Monuments, Day had first printed in .¹¹ The  publication incorporated Old English liturgical rubrics that in Parker’s view attested to the actual reading aloud of the vernacular text within the Anglo-Saxon Church. The outer margins of each page carried a Modern English translation taken from the Bishops’ Bible of , the version overseen and organized by Parker himself and adopted for general use in the Anglican Church. For most readers, the translation provided an essential key to the Old English, but equally, the juxtaposition made the point that a venerable tradition of translating the scriptures into the vernacular lay behind and justified the Bishops’ Bible. In  Parker published Ælfredi regis res gestæ, an edition of Asser’s Latin Life of King Alfred accompanied by editions of Alfred’s will—the earliest Anglo-Saxon royal will to survive—and of Alfred’s preface to his Old English translation of the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory the Great, a document in which the monarch lays out his plan to restore the educational and cultural level of his kingdom by having key works translated from Latin into the vernacular. Parker’s Præfatio ad lectorem praises Alfred for combining prowess in battle with unceasing dedication to study and sets the stage for his later emergence as an iconic figure within the national consciousness. While assisting Parker with these publications, John Joscelyn completed, in manuscript, two resources essential for the study of the Old English language: a dictionary and a grammar.¹² Both remained unpublished but circulated among scholars of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the dictionary, which included some , entries, was, as transcribed by Sir Simonds D’Ewes (–), a principal source for William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, issued at Oxford in . Somner’s was the first published dictionary of Old English, but more than fifty years earlier an Old English word list of over six hundred entries was included in a work that stands on its own in the early history of Anglo-Saxon studies, Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, in Antiquities: Concerning the Most Noble and Renowmed English Nation ().¹³ In distinct contrast to other early Anglo-Saxonists, Verstegan (c.–) was a committed Roman Catholic. Of Dutch descent, he spent the first thirty years of his life in England and received his university education at Oxford before fleeing to the Continent in the early s. Settling in Antwerp, he worked as a Catholic ¹¹ See Kees Dekker, ‘Reading the Anglo-Saxon Gospels in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg (eds), Anglo-Saxon Books and their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’ (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ), –, esp. –. ¹² Both ended up in Sir Robert Cotton’s library. The dictionary is now London, BL, MSS Cotton Titus A. xv–A. xvi; see Timothy Graham, ‘John Joscelyn, Pioneer of Old English Lexicography’, in Timothy Graham (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ), –. The grammar, loaned by Cotton to William Camden in , subsequently went missing and was never rediscovered, despite attempts to locate it by scholars of the later seventeenth century. ¹³ See Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ch. , and Richard W. Clement, ‘Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent’, in William Gentrup (ed.), Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –.

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

 

publicist, writing accounts of the martyrdoms of English Catholics illustrated by engravings from his own hand. His Restitution of Decayed Intelligence is unique among his publications. Its purpose is to demonstrate the Germanic origins of the English nation and thereby to provide a counterpoint to the narrative of the foundation of Britain by Brutus, great-grandson of Æneas, that featured prominently in Camden’s Britannia and other antiquarian writings. Verstegan’s work is notable for its description, with accompanying illustrations, of the pagan gods worshipped by the Saxons before their conversion.¹⁴ In addition to the glossary of Old English words, A Restitution includes chapters analysing the Germanic derivations of some three hundred English personal names, surname elements, titles of offices, and terms of contempt. Written by an émigré who, forced to leave England because of his religious views, subsequently smuggled books for and provided intelligence to the Catholic Church, it expresses huge pride in the heritage of his birth country. Less scholarly than the work of the Parker circle, Verstegan’s book nevertheless seems to have made a stronger impression on the reading public, for within seventy years it underwent four reprints. Notwithstanding Verstegan’s work, it was largely a Protestant impulse that continued to drive Anglo-Saxon studies during the seventeenth century. The raw material available to Anglo-Saxonists grew significantly through the collecting activities of Sir Robert Cotton (–), who, beginning in the late s, assembled a manuscript library about double the size of Parker’s and including such choice items from the Anglo-Saxon period as the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, BL, MS Cotton Nero D. iv), in which the Old English gloss constituted the earliest surviving vernacular translation of the four Gospels, and a copy of the Old English Hexateuch (London, BL, MS Cotton Claudius B. iv) which, with its more than four hundred pictorial representations of the biblical text, was the most extensively illustrated of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.¹⁵ Cotton maintained his library in his London residence which, from about , was adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. Wishing the library to serve as a national repository of knowledge, he welcomed scholarly visitors to his home and was generous in providing them with access to the library and permitting them to borrow books. Among those to benefit from his generosity and that of his son Thomas (–), to whom Sir Robert bequeathed his library, were two Cambridge scholars whose Anglo-Saxon endeavours had widely differing outcomes. William L’Isle (c.–) planned to publish whatever portions of the Bible existed in Old English in order to demonstrate to Catholic detractors that the Church of England had the scriptures ‘so long agoe in her Mother-tongue’.¹⁶ His project would have included a

¹⁴ See Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Pantheon According to Richard Verstegen ()’, in Graham, Recovery of Old English, –. ¹⁵ On the formation and use of Cotton’s library, see Colin G. C. Tite, The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton (London: British Library, ). ¹⁶ The phrase comes from the subtitle of L’Isle’s A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament (London, ), wherein he provides an edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Sigeweard and announces

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     



parallel Modern English translation of his own. He completed full translations of the Old English Hexateuch and Psalms; he also transcribed and translated Old English homilies on the books of Job and Esther, as well as any quotations from the scriptures that he came upon in the homilies of Ælfric and others. But he died before he could bring this all to publication. By contrast, Abraham Wheelock (–) published the most extensive set of Old English texts yet to see the light of day when, in , he issued an edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in both Latin and Old English (utilizing six manuscripts variously in Cambridge and the Cotton collection), accompanied by a complete edition and Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (based on one of the Cottonian copies compared with the version in the Parker collection at Corpus Christi College).¹⁷ Wheelock’s title-page proclaimed the vernacular translation of Bede to be the work of King Alfred, and the edition privileged the Old English text by the use of a larger font and wider column as well as by its placement on the left of each page, where the reader’s eye encounters it first. Wheelock supplements Bede’s text with extensive notes in which he quotes from numerous Anglo-Saxon homilies and other sources in order to provide additional evidence about key doctrines and practices of the early English Church. For, as he notes in his preface, a central goal of his work was to demonstrate the essential conformity between pristine English Christianity and the reformed Anglican Church—to which, along with the triune God and the University of Cambridge, Wheelock dedicated his book. Wheelock was an ordained member of the clergy who from  served as librarian to the University and from  as Cambridge’s first lecturer in Arabic. From  he started providing descriptions and transcripts of Anglo-Saxon texts found in Cambridge to the antiquary Sir Henry Spelman (/–), who was then gathering materials for the first volume of his Concilia (published in ), a monumental collection of documents that would chart the development of the Church in Britain from Roman times onward. Spelman found Wheelock’s services so valuable that in – he negotiated with the University to establish a lectureship in ‘British and Saxon Antiquities’, the first university-level appointment anywhere in Anglo-Saxon studies, which Wheelock then occupied until his death, after which the funds that had supported the position were channelled instead toward the publication of Somner’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Spelman—whose son John (–) published an edition of the Old English Psalter in  and wrote a Life of King Alfred that appeared posthumously, in Latin translation, in —was a driving force in the promotion of the study of Old English, agitating for the production of a grammar and dictionary and entering into correspondence with continental scholars whose study of the historical (sigs br, er) his intention to publish at a future date all that he can find of the Bible in Old English. See Graham, ‘Early Modern Users’, –. ¹⁷ Abraham Wheelock (ed.), Historiæ ecclesiasticæ gentis Anglorum libri V. a venerabili Beda presbytero scripti (Cambridge, ). On Wheelock and his work with Old English, see J. C. T. Oates, From the Beginnings to the Copyright Act of Queen Anne, vol. i of Cambridge University Library: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), chs  and .

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

 

dimension of the Germanic languages led them to an interest in Old English. Among these scholars were Johannes de Laet of Leiden (–), who aspired to produce an Old English dictionary, and Ole Worm of Copenhagen (–), one of the pioneers of medieval Scandinavian studies.

T   O N   E

.................................................................................................................................. Spelman’s interest in Worm’s work was first stimulated when a member of the retinue of Palaemon Rosencrantz, the Danish ambassador in London, showed Spelman Worm’s interpretation of a runic monument located in Scania (then part of Denmark, now the south-western province of Sweden). In April  Spelman wrote to Rosencrantz, who forwarded his observations to Worm, who responded directly to Spelman in July, initiating a correspondence that lasted until Spelman’s death twelve years later.¹⁸ Both men recognized the kinship between Old English and the Scandinavian languages; Spelman was even able to suggest an etymology for rune superior to that proposed by Worm by relating the word to Old English ryne and geryne (‘mystery’/ ‘hidden thing’).¹⁹ Spelman expressed interest in the ancient laws of Denmark; Worm sent him a codex of the laws lent by his countryman, Axilius Julius. The two exchanged copies of their own books, with Worm sending Spelman his Fasti Danici ()— which includes a detailed discussion of runic calendar sticks or primstave—and his Runir seu danica literatura antiquissima (). In May  Worm sent a further fifty free copies of the latter work to Spelman’s London bookseller, hoping to receive in return English publications that would assist his studies. Worm’s Danica literatura antiquissima helped to spread knowledge of Old Norse literature in England, though the work has the peculiarity that Worm prints in runes texts that in their original manuscripts occur in the Roman alphabet; like other scholars of the time, he believed that all Old Norse poetry had originally been written in runes (and that runes in turn derived from Hebrew, reckoned the most ancient of all scripts). The book ends with an extended essay on the nature of Old Norse poetry in which Worm provides editions and Latin translations of two skaldic poems: Krákumál, often referred to as The Death Song of Ragnar Lothbrok and said to have been uttered by the legendary Viking hero Ragnarr as he lay dying in a snake pit, and Höfuðlausn, a praise poem purportedly composed by Egill Skalla-Grímsson to ransom himself from the clutches of Eric ¹⁸ The complete sequence of letters, including Spelman’s initial letter to Rosencrantz, is published in Olai Wormii et ad eum doctorum virorum epistolæ,  vols (Copenhagen, ), i. –. For the points mentioned in the text, see pp. – (derivation of rune),  and  (ancient Danish laws), and , , and  (exchange of books). ¹⁹ See Christine E. Fell, ‘Runes and Semantics’, in Alfred Bammesberger (ed.), Old English Runes and their Continental Background (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, ), –, at –.

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     



Bloodaxe (d. ), the last Viking king of York. Both poems came to enjoy considerable popularity in England and were among the items rendered into English prose in Thomas Percy’s landmark Five Pieces of Runic Poetry translated from the Islandic Language (). Although Worm’s antiquarian labours were later satirized by Alexander Pope in the Dunciad,²⁰ he was a key figure in the revival of interest in Old Norse texts that took place in Scandinavia in the middle and late decades of the seventeenth century.²¹ Another pioneer was Worm’s fellow Dane Peder Resen (–), who in  published editions of the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (–) and of Völuspá and Hávamál, all with Latin translations.²² Völuspá (‘The Song of the Seeress’) constitutes the first part of the Poetic Edda, the compilation of which was believed in the seventeenth century to be the work of the Icelandic priest and scholar Sæmundr the Learned (–). Consisting of some sixty stanzas and taking the form of a seeress’s address to Odin, the poem tells of the creation of the world and its coming end, and is a major primary source for Norse mythology. Hávamál (‘Sayings of the High One’), presented as a single poem uttered by Odin himself, offers advice on right living and ends with an account of how Odin received the runes, followed by a list of runic spells. The inclusion of Latin translations was crucial for the reception of these works in England, for very few English scholars yet had the slightest knowledge of Old Norse. Between  and the end of the seventeenth century nine saga editions appeared at Uppsala, Sweden, issued by Olaus Verelius (–) and others.²³ The first four of these editions included only the original Old Norse text accompanied by a Swedish translation, but beginning with Jacob Reenhielm’s edition of The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason () these saga publications commonly included a Latin translation. Another significant work was Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentibus mortis libri tres, written by Danish royal antiquarian Thomas Bartholin (–) and issued at Copenhagen in . Aimed at explaining the courage and cheerfulness with which the Scandinavian peoples had faced death while still pagan, the ²⁰ Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, rd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), III.– (p. ): ‘ “But who is he, in closet close y-pent, / Of sober face, with learned dust besprent?” / “Right wel mine eyes arede the myster wight, / On parchment scraps y-fed, and Wormius hight. / To future ages may thy dulness last, / As thou preserv’st the dulness of the past!” ’ ²¹ See Andrew Wawn, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, at –. ²² Peder Resen (ed.), Edda Islandorum (i.e. the Prose Edda), Philosophia antiquissima NorvegoDanica dicta Voluspa quæ est pars Eddæ Sæmundi, and Ethica Odini, pars Eddæ Sæmundi vocata Havamal, all published in Copenhagen. ²³ () Olaus Verelius (ed.), Gothrici et Rolfi Westrgothiæ regum historia (); () Olaus Verelius (ed.), Herrauds och Bosa saga (); () Olaus Verelius (ed.), Hervarar saga (); () Jacob Reenhielm (ed.), Thorstens Viikings-sons saga (); () Jacob Reenhielm (ed.), Saga om k. Oloff Tryggwaszon i Norrege (); () Petter Salan (ed.), Fostbrödernas, Eigles och Asmunds saga (); () Guðmundur Ólafsson (ed.), Sagann af Sturlauge hinum starf-sama (); () Guðmundur Ólafsson (ed.), Sagan af Illuga Grydar Föstra (); () Olof Rudbeck (ed.), Ketilli Hængii et Grimonis Hirsutigenæ patris et filii historia ().

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

 

study included excerpts from some two dozen Icelandic sagas, cited over twenty eddic poems—all the Old Norse being accompanied by Latin translations—and quickly established itself as the standard handbook of Nordic mythology; much of the material was provided by Bartholin’s collaborator Árni Magnússon (–), the era’s most prolific collector of Icelandic manuscripts. At the very end of the century appeared Johan Peringskiöld’s edition of Heimskringla, the massive sequence of sagas about kings of Norway attributed to Snorri Sturluson, published at Stockholm in two volumes in  and . The first English author to make substantial use of Old Norse material published on the Continent was Robert Sheringham (c.–), whose De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio appeared at Cambridge in .²⁴ An expert on Semitic languages and an ardent royalist, Sheringham spent most of the Interregnum period (–) in the Netherlands, where he made the acquaintance of his fellow émigré Thomas Marshall (–), an enthusiast for the Germanic languages who was later to return to Oxford and assist with the establishment of Anglo-Saxon studies there. Sheringham’s Disceptatio sought to demonstrate the historical basis for English institutions, but much of its interest lay in its account of the movements of the Gothic peoples, from whom Sheringham derived the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had invaded the British Isles in the fifth century. Making use of a copy of Resen’s Edda Islandorum sent to him by Marshall²⁵ as well as of continental histories of the northern peoples such as Stephan Stephanius’s edition of the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus (–) and Johan Locken’s Antiquitates Sueo-Gothicæ (), Sheringham postulated that the Goths— whom, like many of his contemporaries, he identified with the Getae mentioned in classical sources—were descended from Noah’s son Shem, had settled in Scandinavia after the Flood, had subsequently migrated to eastern Europe and western Asia, and had returned to northern Europe from Asgard under their great leader Woden/Odin, who was also a soothsayer, the first to carve runes (which he used for spells and incantations), and the father of the skaldic poets of the Old North. Sheringham’s is the first English publication to print texts in Old Norse, for which he used a regular Roman font (in the process introducing several typographical errors not found in his Scandinavian sources); all texts are accompanied by a Latin translation (taken from his sources). In the course of his work he provides a table of the

²⁴ On Sheringham’s Disceptatio, see Parry, Trophies of Time, –, and Christine E. Fell, ‘The First Publication of Old Norse Literature in England and its Relation to its Sources’, in Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (eds), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, ), –, at –. ²⁵ Robert Sheringham, De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio (Cambridge, ), sig. br: ‘Usus etiam sum Edda Islandorum, vetusto monumento, quam mihi insignis vir, & summus meus amicus Thomas Mareschallus S.T.D. ex Hollandia misit, de cujus antiquitate & authoritate multa à me suo loco dicuntur’ (‘I have also used Edda Islandorum, an ancient record, which the celebrated Thomas Marshall, Doctor of Sacred Theology, my very great friend, sent me from Holland, concerning the antiquity and authority of which I will say many things in their place’).

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     



twenty-four runic characters (listed in alphabetical rather than futhark order, p. ); describes how skalds would accompany kings into battle in order to witness their heroic deeds and then record them in verse (p. ); quotes extensively from Ynglinga saga (pp. –), the first portion of Heimskringla, which he knew from Stephanius’s citations in the notes to his edition of Saxo; references the fearless attacks of Woden’s berserker warriors (p. ); suggests that Woden’s appointment of a council of twelve lies at the origin of the twelve-man jury system (p. ); and offers the first extended discussion in a work published in England of the nature and content of the Poetic and Prose Edda (pp. –), following his Scandinavian sources in attributing the former to Sæmundr the Learned and the latter to Snorri. He stresses the originality of the Old Norse mythology and its independence from classical influence. He is fascinated by the pre-Christian Old Norse view of the afterlife, according to which those who die of illness or old age after leading a soft life are consigned to the realm of Hel, goddess of the underworld (p. ), while those who fall valiantly in battle will greet death with laughter, joining Odin in Valhalla, where they will drink beer from the hollowed-out skulls of their enemies (pp. –, ). On that last detail, Sheringham was misled by the erroneous Latin translation, within the edition of The Death Song of Ragnar Lothbrok printed in Worm’s Danica literatura antiquissima, of the Old Norse kenning ‘ór bjúgviðum hausa’, which describes nothing more ghoulish than drinking from the horns of animals (‘the curved trees of skulls’).²⁶ The error had a long life in England.²⁷ Much of Sheringham’s Old Norse material was rendered into English in Aylett Sammes’s Britannia antiqua illustrata: or, the Antiquities of Ancient Britain of .²⁸ Sammes had his own elaborate racial theory—that the British Isles were originally settled by Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean— but he agreed with Sheringham in seeing the Goths as the ancestors of the Germanic invaders who entered Britain in the fifth century and he has much to say about Woden in his chapter ‘The Antiquity and Original of the Saxons’. He offers the first English translation of the stanzas of the Death Song that reveal Ragnarr’s attitude to his mortality (p. ): In Wodens Hall there Benches be, Where we may sit and drink. ²⁶ The edition and Latin translation of the Death Song in Worm’s work were based on materials provided by Magnús Ólafsson (c.–): see Anthony Faulkes, Magnúsarkver: The Writings of Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás (Reykjavik: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, ),  (I am most grateful to Rory McTurk for providing this reference). The Latin note to the text printed by Worm comments that the verse describes warriors drinking ex craniis eorum quos occiderant (‘from the skulls of those they had killed’): Olaus Wormius, Runir seu danica literatura antiquissima (Amsterdam, ), –. ²⁷ See Christine E. Fell, ‘Norse Studies: Then, Now and Hereafter’, in Anthony Faulkes (ed.), Viking Revaluations: Viking Society Centenary Symposium, – May  (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ), –, at –. ²⁸ See Parry, Trophies of Time, ch. , esp. p. , Fell, ‘Norse Studies’, –, and Fell, ‘First Publication’, –.

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

  There we shall Tope our bellies-full Of Nappy-Ale in full-brim’d Skull. . . . . . . With Asians there in highest Seat, I merrily will quaff, Past-hours I care not to repeat, But when I die I’le laugh.

The heroism implicit in such an attitude exercised a strong fascination over Sammes’s contemporary, the diplomat and author Sir William Temple (–), respected in his time and throughout the eighteenth century as one of England’s leading essayists. Temple’s pair of essays ‘Of Heroick Virtue’ and ‘Of Poetry’, both appearing in the second volume of his Miscellanea (), set out to celebrate those two endowments of nature and art—heroism and poetic composition—that in his estimation raised humanity to the level of the divine. Each essay reveals how Old Norse material had now become subject matter for literary discussion. In the first, Temple praises the Gothic peoples for their cheerfulness in the face of death as well as for their commitment to principles of liberty and representation as embodied in their manner of government, wherein, according to Temple, their leaders were always advised by a council. Discussing the Death Song, Temple notes that ‘such an alacrity or pleasure in dying, was never expressed in any other Writing, nor imagined in any other People’; and he acknowledges ‘a vein truly Poetical’ both in this poem and in Egill SkallaGrímsson’s Höfuðlausn, also published by Worm.²⁹ In ‘Of Poetry’, however, Temple’s attitude is much more ambivalent. On the one hand, he recognizes that Old Norse verse takes multiple and complex forms, ‘some Composed in longer, some in shorter Lines, some equal and others unequal, with many different Cadencies, Quantities, or Feet’.³⁰ But on the other hand, knowing that some of the verse was rhymed, he blames it for first introducing end-rhymes into European poetry—in Temple’s view, a debasement of the poetic art—and even proposes the novel but false etymology that rhyme derives from rune:³¹ another sort of Runes were made, with the Care and Study of ending two Lines, or each other of four Lines, with Words of the same Sound, which being the easiest, requiring less Art, and needing less Spirit (because a certain Chime in the Sounds supplied that want, and pleased common Ears); this in time grew the most general among all the Gothick Colonies in Europe, and made Rhymes or Runes pass for the modern Poetry, in these parts of the World. ²⁹ William Temple, ‘Of Heroick Virtue’, in Miscellanea: The Second Part, in Four Essays (London, ), . ³⁰ Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, . ³¹ Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, ; for the derivation, see p. . Temple’s apparent belief that much of Old Norse poetry used end-rhymes may have resulted from the fact that two of the three complete poems published by Worm in his Runir seu danica literatura antiquissima were rhymed (the Rune Poem and Höfuðlausn). See Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

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     



The misconception that Old Norse verse commonly used end-rhyme played its part in the broader seventeenth-century discussion of poetics and the relative merits of rhyme as opposed to quantitative or blank verse.³²

T    O S

.................................................................................................................................. Old English and Old Norse studies converged in a remarkable collaborative effort centred on Oxford in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that marked the high point of premodern English scholarship on the ancient northern languages and literatures.³³ The University had long held that it owed its origins to King Alfred, who according to a fourteenth-century account had founded University College in the s. Soon after the Restoration of , the College commissioned a portrait of Alfred to be hung in the Master’s lodgings; presenting a crowned, bearded monarch clad in ermine, the picture influenced much of the eighteenth-century iconography of the king.³⁴ In  the College’s Master, Obadiah Walker, published his own Latin translation of John Spelman’s Life of King Alfred, which Spelman had completed while serving in the royalist camp in Oxford in . Spelman’s work presented Alfred, ‘First Founder of the English Monarchy’, as a model of good kingship and was dedicated to the -year-old Prince Charles, son of Charles I. The publication of the book—which in  was issued in its original English version by the Oxford scholar Thomas Hearne—significantly shaped subsequent treatments of Alfred’s accomplishments.³⁵ Oxford’s Alfredian preoccupations served as the backdrop for an interconnected web of scholarly initiatives that began in the s and lasted for about forty years. In  Thomas Marshall, who had lived in the Netherlands since , returned to Oxford as the newly elected Rector of Lincoln College. An expert on the Germanic languages who had collaborated with the great Dutch philologist Francis Junius (–) on an edition of the Gothic and Old English Gospels published at Dordrecht in , Marshall persuaded Junius to spend his last years in Oxford; on his death in , the Dutchman bequeathed to Oxford University the types and punches he had procured in the Netherlands for the printing of Old English and ³² See Judy Quinn and Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Image of Norse Poetry and Myth in SeventeenthCentury England’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, ), –, at –. ³³ See David Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’, in L. S. Sutherland and Leslie Mitchell (eds), The Eighteenth Century, vol. v of The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –; and Richard L. Harris, A Chorus of Grammars: The Correspondence of George Hickes and his Collaborators on the ‘Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium’ (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, ). ³⁴ See Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England,  (): –, at – and plate VIIIa. ³⁵ Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, –.

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other ancient Germanic texts, a sizeable number of manuscripts and printed books— including his own transcripts of numerous Old English texts in the Cotton collection and elsewhere—and his draft dictionary of the northern languages, which focused on Old English but included entries in Gothic, Old Norse, and ‘Runic’ (treated as a separate language).³⁶ The acquisition of Junius’s materials coincided with a desire to promote AngloSaxon studies among key figures within the University, notably John Fell (ViceChancellor –; Bishop of Oxford –), a tireless promoter of the University who in  revived its press, establishing it in Christopher Wren’s newly constructed Sheldonian Theatre adjacent to the Bodleian Library. Two years after Junius’s death, with Fell’s support, The Queen’s College created a lectureship in Anglo-Saxon, awarding the position to the -year-old William Nicolson (–), who had spent the previous year studying in Germany under the patronage of Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson, the founder of the lectureship. Scholars who made their first acquaintance with Old English at Queen’s, whether under Nicolson or his inspirational successor Edward Thwaites (–), holder of the lectureship from , were among those who contributed to a remarkable series of publications on Old English and other Germanic languages that issued from the university press beginning in , using Junius’s types. First came a grammar of Old English and Gothic, Institutiones grammaticæ AngloSaxonicæ, et Mœso-Gothicæ, by George Hickes (–), who had been an associate of Thomas Marshall at Lincoln College. The volume provided an essential tool for those who wished to study texts in Old English and Gothic (which was regarded as the root of all the northern languages);³⁷ it offered further assistance to interested scholars by including a catalogue of manuscripts and printed books that contained texts in Gothic, Old English, Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old Norse. Between the grammar and the catalogue Hickes included a reprint of Grammaticæ Islandicæ rudimenta, the grammar of the Icelandic language published by Runólfur Jónsson at Copenhagen in , augmenting it with an alphabetized glossary of the Icelandic words used in Jónsson’s text;³⁸ Hickes pointed out in his preface (sig. cr) that because of Iceland’s isolation the contemporary language was essentially identical with Old Norse. Hickes’s work was followed over the next decade by a series of Old English editions based on materials in the Bodleian Library (including Junius’s transcripts made from manuscripts located elsewhere): Edmund Gibson’s Chronicon Saxonicum (), intended to surpass Abraham Wheelock’s Anglo-Saxon Chronicle edition of ; Christopher ³⁶ On the organization of Junius’s dictionary, see Kees Dekker, ‘ “That most elaborate one of Fr. Junius”: An Investigation of Francis Junius’s Manuscript Old English Dictionary’, in Graham, Recovery of Old English, –. ³⁷ Gothic was known from a single text, a fourth-century translation of the Gospels that survived only in the sixth-century Codex Argenteus, given to the library of Uppsala University by Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie in . ³⁸ This glossary was originally compiled by Junius but Hickes adjusted and expanded it. See Fell, ‘First Publication of Old Norse Literature’, –.

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     

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Rawlinson’s edition of King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (); and Edward Thwaites’s compendium of biblical and apocryphal texts that included Old English versions of the first seven books of the Old Testament, the book of Job, the gospel of Nicodemus, and the surviving fragment of a poetic rendition of the book of Judith (). In  Thwaites’s pupil Thomas Benson published a Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum that was intended to supplant Somner’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary of , copies of which had become scarce. Other projects were planned but not brought to completion, including editions of the Alfredian translation of the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory the Great and the vernacular version of Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans, which the Oxford scholars believed to be the work of Alfred. William Elstob (–), another product of Queen’s, prepared a complete transcript of the Old English Orosius; a brief printed specimen of the planned edition was issued by the press in , but the project went no further. The Orosius specimen was, however, sufficient to stimulate an interest in Old English in William’s sister Elizabeth (–), who went on to add her own important contributions to the work of the Oxford Saxonists, becoming known to her contemporaries as ‘the Saxon nymph’.³⁹ In her own estimation, Elizabeth was the first woman to acquaint herself with Old English ‘since the time when it was the current Language’.⁴⁰ Following her brother’s appointment as rector of the united parishes of St Swithin and St Mary Bothaw in , Elizabeth lived with William in London where, in addition to collaborating with him on a projected new edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws that was intended to surpass Lambarde’s, she issued two publications of her own. First came An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St Gregory (), an edition of Ælfric’s homily on Pope Gregory the Great, the ‘apostle of the English’, that included a substantial preface in which, before underlining the purity of the teachings of the Anglo-Saxon Church and emphasizing its similarities to the Anglican Church of her own day, Elizabeth offered a spirited defence of women’s education. Her second AngloSaxon publication, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (), has the distinction of being the first grammar of Old English to be written in English rather than Latin. Targeted specifically at a female readership, the work begins with a preface in which she delivers an impassioned apology for the study of Old English and the northern languages as a whole, taking aim at Jonathan Swift, who, in his A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue of , had demeaned the Old English tongue as ‘so barren and so barbarous’ and those who studied it as ‘laborious Men of low Genius’.⁴¹ Elizabeth’s most ambitious project was a complete edition of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, accompanied by a Modern English translation

³⁹ See esp. Mechthild Gretsch, ‘Elizabeth Elstob: A Scholar’s Fight for Anglo-Saxon Studies’, Anglia,  (): – and –. On the impact that the sight of the Orosius specimen had upon her, see Elizabeth Elstob, An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St Gregory (London, ), pp. vi–vii. ⁴⁰ Elstob, English-Saxon Homily, sig. Av. ⁴¹ Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, nd edn (London, ), .

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and critical notes. Although the university press at Oxford announced publication for the autumn of , a mere thirty-six pages of proofs were printed; but Elizabeth’s immaculate transcriptions of the homilies, described by Hickes as ‘the most correct I ever saw or read’, still survive, executed in a finely controlled script that imitates Anglo-Saxon minuscule.⁴² Hickes himself was the driving force behind the Oxford Saxonists’ magnum opus, Antiquæ literaturæ septentrionalis libri duo, issued by the university press between  and . Initially planned as a second edition of the Institutiones grammaticæ, the work was expanded to include new chapters on Old English dialects and poetics; a grammar of Franconian (the language of the Franks, known from a handful of surviving texts of the ninth to eleventh centuries); a masterful dissertation on the potential applications of knowledge of the northern languages; a study of Anglo-Saxon coins; and a vastly enlarged catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and printed books accompanied by lists of Old Norse and Franconian works, both manuscript and printed, in continental collections. Several of the Oxford Saxonists contributed to the publication, which also drew upon the expertise of Scandinavians visiting England or corresponding with Hickes and his collaborators—including Ole Worm’s grandson Christian, who advised on Old Norse material until he was obliged to leave England amid allegations of pawning or selling items borrowed from English acquaintances.⁴³ Hickes assigned the catalogue to Humfrey Wanley (–), whose detailed manuscript descriptions are models of precision and palaeographical acumen. Wanley’s work, Librorum veterum septentrionalium . . . catalogus historico-criticus, appeared as a separate second volume in ; the first volume bore its own title, Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, and the work as a whole is usually known simply as Hickes’s Thesaurus. The massive accomplishment that it represents is the more remarkable in that Hickes, as a nonjuror whose conscience would not allow him to pledge allegiance to William III, was in  deprived of the deanery of Worcester, which he had held since , and forced for several years to live in hiding, changing his place of residence repeatedly until his reprieve in ; it was nevertheless during those years that plans for the Thesaurus took shape and much of the work was conducted. Hickes’s Thesaurus represented the culmination of the scholarship of the previous century and a half while also establishing the groundwork for future investigations. On one level Hickes, like the other Oxford Saxonists (most of whom were ordained churchmen), was motivated by the perception that Old English texts could provide ⁴² The transcriptions survive in London, BL, MSS Lansdowne – and Egerton . Hickes’s comment occurs in a letter of  Dec.  to Arthur Charlett; see Harris, Chorus of Grammars, . For a fuller discussion of Elizabeth Elstob’s transcriptions and planned edition of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, see Timothy Graham, ‘Female Agency in Early Anglo-Saxon Studies: The “Nuns of Tavistock” and Elizabeth Elstob’, in Helene Scheck and Christine E. Kozikowski (eds), New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Honour of Helen Damico (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, ), –, at –. ⁴³ Harris, Chorus of Grammars,  and .

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     



historical justification for doctrines and practices of the Anglican Church; in this respect his work continued the trajectory for Old English studies initiated by Matthew Parker in the s. But more important was Hickes’s broader realization, explored in the dissertation ‘De linguarum veterum septentrionalium usu’ (‘On the Use of the Ancient Northern Languages’), that the study of northern texts was crucial for the exploration of the history of political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions as a whole. The chapters on dialects that he added to the Anglo-Saxon grammar represented the first scholarly attempt at a history of the English language from its origins,⁴⁴ while the new chapters on poetics offered the first sustained analysis of the principles underlying Old English verse, which scholars had long failed even to recognize, as a result of the Anglo-Saxon habit of not laying out vernacular poetry in verse lines. The chapters ‘De dialecto poetica’ and ‘De poetica Anglo-Saxonum’ draw substantially on the Old Norse texts published during the seventeenth century to establish parallels for the language and versification of Old English poetry, for example in the discussion of kennings, the compound circumlocutions that are among the major devices imparting their special stamp to Old English and Old Norse verse alike. At one point Hickes directly juxtaposes an Old English with an Old Norse text to illustrate their metrical similarities (‘De poetica Anglo-Saxonum’, pp. –). His edition of the two poems had abiding significance: the manuscript of the Old English text, the Finnsburh Fragment, which offers a parallel to Beowulf, is no longer extant, leaving Hickes’s edition as the only witness, while the Old Norse text, the verse section of Hervarar saga known as ‘The Waking of Angantyr’—telling the story of how the shield-maiden Hervör summoned up the ghost of her father Angantýr to implore him to give her the cursed sword Tyrfing—had a long-term impact on the English poetic imagination. Hickes’s English translation was, indeed, reproduced almost without change, under the title ‘The Incantation of Hervor’, in Thomas Percy’s influential Five Pieces of Runic Poetry of . The scholarly endeavours of the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries laid the essential foundation for the exploration and exploitation of Anglo-Saxon and Norse themes in the Victorian period. Tools for the study of Old English and Old Norse were made available; a broad array of texts in prose and verse appeared in print. King Alfred’s image as model English monarch took shape, while both the Anglo-Saxons and their Scandinavian counterparts became associated with heroism, independence of spirit, and the promotion and defence of basic liberties. An enthusiasm for the northern world and its literary productions was kindled that would fire the imagination of writers and artists far into the future.⁴⁵

⁴⁴ For Hickes’s discussion of dialects, see esp. Christopher M. Cain, ‘George Hickes and the “Invention” of the Old English Dialects’, Review of English Studies, / (): –. ⁴⁵ I am most grateful to Professor Rory McTurk for reading an earlier version of this chapter and offering several valuable suggestions.

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S  Berkhout, Carl T., and Milton McC. Gatch, Old English Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, ). Brackmann, Rebecca, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Clunies Ross, Margaret, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Faulkes, Anthony (ed.), Viking Revaluations: Viking Society Centenary Symposium, – May  (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ). Graham, Timothy (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ). Graham, Timothy, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. Keynes, Simon, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England,  (): –. Magennis, Hugh, ‘Not Angles But Anglicans? Reformation and Post-Reformation Perspectives on the Anglo-Saxon Church’, parts  and , English Studies,  (): – and –. Niles, John D., The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England –: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ). O’Donoghue, Heather, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Page, R. I., Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ). Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Roesdahl, Else, and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (eds), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, ). Wawn, Andrew, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.

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   

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 

B the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages had been reformed and the authority of the Pope had been rejected, but many radical protestants insisted that the Reformation had not been thorough enough. The Church of England was still governed by bishops, many ceremonies of the Roman Church had been retained, and the Book of Common Prayer contained many traces of Catholic worship. From abroad, Catholic theologians poured scorn on the church that had been created in England. It was a novelty, a new-fangled religion that had been put together with a lot of modern ideas from Germany and Switzerland. ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’ was a gibe sometimes flung against English Protestants. Catholics would maintain that the English Church had no roots in antiquity, could not claim descent from the Apostles, and lacked the traditions of worship sanctified by long ages of practice. In order to justify the character of the Elizabethan Church, English scholars were forced to think about the early centuries of Christianity in Britain. The faith had come to these islands in Roman times, and it had survived among the Britons after the Romans departed. There had been a British Church that had flourished before St Augustine came from Rome to preach the Gospel to King Ethelbert and the people of Kent in . The Saxons had distinctive ways of worship, and many holy men and women of Saxon times had been recognized as saints. These Celtic and Saxon Christians with their primitive piety and simple modes of worship were surely the ancestors of the reformed Church of Elizabethan times. One could argue that it was only with the Norman Conquest that England came under the full control of the Roman Catholic Church and the Papacy. But where was the evidence, how could one document the existence of purer forms of Christianity in Britain from which the modern Church could claim descent? Most of the records of the history of the Church had been in the monastic libraries. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge possessed small collections of early manuscripts, as did some of the ancient schools, but the monasteries, especially those of the

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Benedictine order, had been the principal custodians of the national past. At the Dissolution, the manuscripts and books of the monastic libraries had been jettisoned: dumped, sold, used for base purposes, some shipped abroad to foreign dealers or even used as ballast in ships. The books like the monks were deemed worthless. The accumulation of centuries had been dispersed in a few years. As the humanist scholars of early Elizabethan times came to realize what had been lost, the movement to preserve the survivors of the great destruction began. In , while the monasteries were still intact, the antiquary John Leland had received a commission from Henry VIII to search their libraries for ‘monuments of ancient matters’ that could be removed to the King’s library. Some three to four hundred manuscripts were saved in this way. John Bale (–), the first great bibliophile after the Reformation, devoted himself to gathering up as many stray manuscripts as he could, and recording the whereabouts of many others. He looked out for chronicles, ecclesiastical histories, epistles of medieval churchmen, works on councils and synods, and liturgical material. He published a summary of British writers of the Middle Ages and a catalogue of hundreds of their books that he had encountered, mostly by title only, a great proportion of which have vanished without trace.¹ Leland and Bale were both overwhelmed by the scale and diversity of the rescue attempt that they undertook. It was Matthew Parker who took a more purposeful approach to the recovery of the surviving manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and who envisaged a practical use for them. Parker had been the Master of Corpus Christi College Cambridge before he became Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury in , so he had both a strong scholarly background and a supreme position of authority from which to superintend the recovery of scattered manuscripts and give them a renewed life. He recognized the need to learn to read texts written in AngloSaxon, as the language was no longer comprehensible, so he encouraged young scholars to join his household with a view to deciphering the language and assessing the value of the manuscripts they collected. Parker also saw the need to print significant texts from Saxon or medieval manuscripts in order to make them more widely available. Materials should also be accumulated towards the history of Christianity in England that he contemplated. He wished to fill out the religious history of Saxon England, and document the slow decline of doctrine and worship from its simplicity at the time of St Augustine’s mission. He would trace the growth of complexity and error in the post-Conquest centuries until the return to the principles of the Gospels in King Henry’s times.²

¹ Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Bryttaniae . . . Catalogus.  vols (Basel, –). The phase of manuscript retrieval in the time Leland, Bale, and Parker is usefully reviewed in the introductory section of Timothy Graham and Andrew G. Watson (eds), The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, ). ² The basic documents for the study of Matthew Parker remain J. Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker,  (repr. Oxford, –) and The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (Oxford, ).

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From the manuscripts he had amassed, Parker was able to publish in  De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae, a collection of documents and excerpts from chronicles that partially fulfilled his ambition to construct a history of primitive Christianity in Britain and its subsequent delinquencies, but it is a disjointed work, lacking a clear narrative. Inevitably, one might think, Parker began with the story of the arrival in Britain of Joseph of Arimathea, sent from Gaul by the apostle Philip.³ It was essential that someone who had had direct contact with Jesus should bring the Gospel to Britain, so that the link with apostolic times could be established. Joseph’s mission also provided a source for Christianity in Britain that was independent of Rome. Details of the early centuries are so sparse that Parker had to grasp at legends to keep afloat. We learn very little about the character or practices of the early Church. Parker did produce one work that demonstrated the value of Saxon writings. In  he published, with the help of John Joscelyn his secretary, an edition of Aelfric’s ‘Homily’ under the title of A Testimonie of Antiquitie. Here he was able to show that the tenth-century abbot at Cerne Abbas in Dorset held a position on the eucharist that was similar to that professed by the Elizabethan Church. Aelfric did not hold the doctrine of transsubstantiation. He also provided evidence that services were conducted in the language spoken by the people. That the text of the Gospels was freely available in the native language in late Saxon times was made evident in Joscelyn’s edition of The Gospels of the Four Evangelists Translated . . . into the Vulgar Tongue of the Saxons, published in . The edition was prepared at the request of Archbishop Parker, and printed by John Day in his fine new Anglo-Saxon typeface, with an introduction by John Foxe. Parker wished to promote his belief that the Anglo-Saxon Church had a fair degree of independence from Rome in matters of doctrine and discipline, and access to the scriptures, a situation that held good until the Conquest strengthened papal authority. He was pleased, for example, to find manuscript evidence that clerical marriage was permitted in early Saxon times, a practice that was personally significant to him, as he himself had married, even though Elizabeth disapproved of married clergy. In general, however, Parker seemed more attracted to the broad history of the Middle Ages than just to its ecclesiastical history. He edited a number of chronicles: the Flores Historiarum attributed to ‘Matthew of Westminster’ (a patchwork compilation from several chronicles) in , the chronicle of Matthew Paris in , and that of Thomas of Walsingham in . He also published an edition of Asser’s Latin Life of Alfred in . The large project to construct a history of the early Church in Britain faltered from lack of appropriate evidence and Parker’s deepening involvement in ecclesiastical affairs.⁴

³ Parker probably took his account of Joseph of Arimathea’s mission to Britain from the twelfthcentury chronicle of William of Malmesbury, a manuscript of which was in his possession. The story does not appear in the earliest chronicles of Gildas and Nennius, nor in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, the source of so many medieval national legends. ⁴ The scholarly activities of the Parker Circle are described by May McKisack in chapter  of her book Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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The fullest account of the growth of Christianity in England was provided by John Foxe, in his long historical introduction to his Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, more commonly known as ‘The Book of Martyrs’, first published in  by John Day, the printer who was always willing to advance the cause of reformed religion. A much expanded edition followed in . Working mostly from printed sources, Foxe asserts that the faith was widespread in Roman Britain from a very early date, having been brought here by Joseph of Arimathea. He can tell us nothing of the practices of those British Christians beyond what he learns from Bede. He pieces together an extended account of the progress of the faith in the Saxon centuries, noting the readiness of so many Saxons to accept the Gospel, but saying little about doctrine or modes of worship. Foxe is however reluctant to praise Saxon Christianity, probably because the tide of conversion coming from the south originated in Augustine’s mission, and Augustine came from Rome. There is little mention of conversion by the Celtic missionaries working down from the north. Foxe deplores the enthusiasm of the Saxons for the monastic life, and is particularly scornful of those kings and princes who entered monasteries, because they renounced thereby the duties and responsibilities of their station. Yet Foxe, like Parker, acknowledges that the hand of Rome lay lightly on Saxon England. In Foxe’s scheme of history, the great change came when Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII in , and began to raise papal power and control to unprecedented heights. The reign of Hildebrand, who to Foxe was one of the heads of Antichrist, coincided with that of William the Conqueror, so England was doubly subjected to foreign authority. Ultimately, only when all vestiges of Roman Catholicism have been expunged will the simple faith of apostolical days be recovered. Parker’s encouragement of younger scholars such as Joscelyn, Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and John Stow resulted in continuing investigation of Saxon England throughout Elizabeth’s reign. During this time, the Anglo-Saxon language was recovered, and the beginnings of the study of the religious structure and devotional practices of Saxon England were made. The other major area of investigation was the laws and systems of government that prevailed before the Norman Conquest. All this research was carried out from manuscripts that had been preserved within the Parker circle. The desire to clarify the laws and government of Saxon England was moved by the same impulses that had driven the quest to identify a distinctively British Church. It was desirable to demonstrate that the Saxon kingdoms had their own substantial codes of law that were quite independent of Roman law, and that the privileges and boundaries of monarchical authority were well defined. The rise of nationalist sentiment was the cause, released by the Reformation and reinforced by Elizabeth’s policies of proud independence, defiance of Spain, and mercantile expansion.⁵ William Lambarde, a Kentish gentleman with legal training, contributed significantly to this movement to emphasize the nordic character of the people who occupied the land from the fifth century onwards. They were ‘Saxons, Jutes and Angles: three ⁵ For a succinct and comprehensive account of this vast subject, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).

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

sorts of the Germane nation’. Vigorous, hardy, and warlike in contrast to the weak Britons they supplanted, they had a language, laws, and customs that were very different from those of the peoples who had lived for centuries under Roman rule. He published a collection of pre-Conquest laws under the title of Archaionomia in , with the laws in Anglo-Saxon type specially cut by John Day on one page facing a Latin translation opposite. The introduction briefly describes customs and modes of landholding and government peculiar to the Saxons, including their free assemblies to discuss matters of importance that Tacitus had described as a feature of Germanic tribes in his De Germania. In , Lambarde brought out his Perambulation of Kent, a volume of topography, history, and place-name studies that showed how comprehensively Saxon settlement had permeated and shaped his own county.⁶ This early phase of studies of Saxon England reached its apogee in  with Richard Verstegan’s memorable book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Verstegan’s father had migrated to England from the Low Countries in Henry VII’s reign. Richard had attended Oxford in the s, and it was probably at that time that he grew interested in the Anglo-Saxon language, as a result of the publications coming from the Parker circle. It may well be that he began to write his book in that decade or in the early s, when curiosity about Saxon affairs was fresh and exciting. As a fervent Roman Catholic, he found it prudent to live abroad in centres of the Catholic faith, most notably Antwerp, where he wrote and illustrated several books that detailed the cruel persecutions of Catholics by Dutch, French, and English Protestants. His sortie into Saxon studies was as unexpected as it was impressive. The ‘decayed intelligence’ that needed restitution was the knowledge that the English nation was entirely Germanic in its origins. The Ancient Britons were not the ancestors of the English, and old legends that Britain had been settled by Trojan exiles could be dismissed. There was clear historical evidence that the English were the descendants of the tribes from Saxony and Jutland who had occupied the land from the fifth century onwards. The English language was the most convincing proof of the Germanic roots of the nation as Verstegan proceeded to demonstrate in great detail. At the end of the sixteenth century, the prevailing consensus about national origins—among poets, dramatists, and masque writers at least—was still the British History provided by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. He had described the Trojan forebears of the Ancient Britons, and the colourful line of British kings fabled for their heroic lives. When James became king in , he was hailed in his coronation pageants and in a torrent of celebratory verse as the worthy successor of a noble line that included the Trojan Brutus, Lear, Cymbeline, and Arthur. Antiquaries were beginning to discredit this tradition, but it still retained remarkable vigour. Verstegan dedicated his book to King James in , declaring him to be ‘descended of the chiefest blood royall of our Ancient English-Saxon Kings’. Now the Saxons were no longer to be viewed as rough ⁶ A helpful recent study of Lambarde’s achievements is provided by Rebecca Brackmann in The Ellizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Lawrence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ).

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

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interlopers, opportunistic barbarians who had seized the land of the British and had been slowly civilized by their adoption of Christianity. They were vigorous warlike Teutons, sprung from those Germans who had successfully resisted the armies of the Romans, and who had been described with deep admiration by Tacitus. The Restitution was the first book in English devoted entirely to the Saxons as a people. With the help of much recent continental scholarship, Verstegan attempted to reconstruct the religion they followed as pagans, showing a serious humanist curiosity in his enquiry, with no disparaging remarks about heathen folly. Their chief gods were exhibited, with their particular powers and the manner of worshipping them. Striking illustrations of their ‘Idols’ were provided, for Verstegan was a talented engraver. He went on to analyse the structure of Saxon society, with the titles of ranks and officers along with their roles and duties. Of the Saxon Church. however, he has nothing to report, a strange omission. Throughout the book he holds up the Anglo-Saxon language against the modern English language to show how the latter is of offspring of the former, all the time emphasizing ‘the proprietie, woorthinesse and amplytude’ of ‘our ancient English toung’. Personal names, place names, topographical names, occupational terms all declare our Saxon inheritance, and by word lists, etymologies, and lively expositions of Saxon usage he arouses the reader’s curiosity about the language. The Romans and the Danes are scarcely mentioned in Verstegan’s book, for they did little to shape the England his readers lived in. Even the Normans receive scant attention, for although their knights conquered the land, their language was eventually overcome by English. By the end of the book, the reader might feel persuaded that ‘he can lack no honor to be descended from so honorable a race’. The Restitution remained the most influential book on Saxon England for well over a century, being reprinted in , , , and . It was still being quoted with respect by antiquaries in the eighteenth century.⁷ The pride that Verstegan took in his Saxons was an emotion common to the antiquaries who restored the past in Elizabethan times and after. It is evident in the bold title of William Camden’s masterpiece: Britannia. Published in , Britannia became the most widely read and admired book about the various pasts of these islands. It gave every educated gentleman in the country an awareness that he was living in a deeply historical landscape, and aroused an interest in local history that has never since diminished. Camden, a master at Westminster School, had long been fascinated by antiquities. He had been urged by his friend the Flemish geographer Ortelius to present an account of Britain as a province of the Roman Empire for the illumination of European scholars. Roman settlements and military camps would be identified, the path of the great roads traced, and an account furnished of the British tribal areas controlled by the Romans. All this would be set in the framework of the topography of the country. Camden enlarged his scheme ambitiously, deciding to describe each county, recording what every invading race had added or obliterated ⁷ For an extensive account of Verstegan, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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

and the growth of towns and markets. Notable military encounters would be included, and the achievements of famous men. He soon realized that he could not proceed with his plans without an understanding of Anglo-Saxon, for so much history lay locked up in Saxon manuscripts. When it came to topographical description, so many British or Roman place names had been overlaid by Saxon names that one could not pursue a local history without confident linguistic skills. How Camden learnt or taught himself Anglo-Saxon is not known, but it would have been through his friendship with William Lambarde, and others who had orbited around Matthew Parker, those men who loved and acquired manuscripts, and whose activities were encouraged by Parker’s friend and patron, William Cecil. (It was to William Cecil, Lord Burghley that Camden dedicated his Britannia.) Camden’s knowledge of Saxon history, as exhibited throughout Britannia, is detailed and confident, evidently the result of considerable research among surviving manuscripts. In the enlarged  edition of Britannia, Camden added a whole new chapter on the Saxons and their gods, much of it derived from Verstegan. His competence in dealing with medieval history, post-Conquest, is exceptional. He has assimilated the contents of so many chronicles, knows the political currents flowing though the reigns and the personalities associated with them, and always he attaches history to place. Camden had little to say about the history of Christianity in Britannia. It was not part of his agenda, which was spacious enough already. He was a topographer first, and then a historian. As an example, see how he approaches Salisbury. The ruins of Old Sarum on its nearby hill first catch his eye. He describes the remains and the fortifications, and relates the site to the Roman settlement of Sorbiodunum. He then descends to modern Salisbury, briefly remarks the cathedral, which he notes was built in forty years and is ‘augustissimum’ and ‘speciosa’—magnificent and handsome. A short tour of the market town is followed by a long history of the Earls of Salisbury. He mentions the Saxon foundation of a monastery at neighbouring Wilton, but does not stop to investigate. Camden does not wish to engage with monasteries, for they were too hot a topic in the s to be discussed, evoking much hostility or nostalgia. Generally, Camden avoids religious history as too contentious. He will leave religious history to others. By the s the project for a full ecclesiastical history of Britain that had seemed so timely an enterprise to Parker and his associates in the s and s had run into the ground. Parker’s energies had gone into supervising the translation of the Bishop’s Bible, which was published in , and ensuring the acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer in the parishes of England. Church administration sapped his scholarly energies. He died in , and the impetus to explore British and Saxon religious history died with him. But the new reign of a theologian king revived the idea of a grand ecclesiastical narrative that would enable a new generation to understand where the episcopal Church of England stood in the great scheme wherein human designs attempted to interpret God’s will. In  King James convened the Hampton Court Conference to try to settle the direction and the doctrines of his Church. He commissioned a new translation of the Bible that would recover as accurately as possible the

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

 

meaning of the scriptures from their original languages. Once again the time seemed right for a study of the essential principles of a reformed religion that aspired to an integrity close to that of primitive Christianity.⁸ There was no shortage of scholars worthy of the undertaking. William Camden, John Selden, Henry Spelman, Henry Savile, Lancelot Andrewes, James Ussher, and Robert Cotton could all be engaged. The scale of the project was however too great, and no one was willing to take the lead. Sir Robert Cotton, the friend and former pupil of Camden, who had assembled the finest library of manuscripts in the country at his house in Westminster, was tempted by the prospect, for no nobler use could be imagined for his collections, but he was not a man for epic research. Eyes turned to James Ussher, the Irish scholar and controversialist who was prodigiously learned in ecclesiastical history. From his undergraduate years he had devoted himself to this study, and he had formed a minute knowledge of the history, theology, liturgy, and canons of the early Church. Such knowledge was held to be indispensable to judgements about the approximation of contemporary religious practice to that of primitive Christianity. The prospect of surveying the whole progression of the faith over thirteen hundred centuries was the kind of challenge that Ussher relished. He became a master of the grand scheme. Ultimately, his most renowned book would be his universal chronology, The Annals of the World deduced from the Origin of Time (). Ussher committed himself to investigate to the utmost degree the records of the early Church in Britain, and in this enterprise he received the backing of King James, who always supported the ideal of a learned clergy. In  the King wrote to the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland to inform them that he had granted Ussher indefinite leave of absence from his Irish bishopric to pursue his research. The King had chosen ‘to employ him in collecting the Antiquities of the British Church before and since the Christian faith was received by the English nation . . . which being published might tend to the furtherance of religion and good learning’.⁹ Ussher published several impressive volumes, beginning with A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Irish and British (, reprinted ). He was a great delver into church records and was able to bring forward much hitherto unknown material from Irish manuscripts. He declared ‘that the religion of the ancient Irish differed little or nothing from that which was maintained by their neighbours the Britons’. He drew a picture of a church using the holy scriptures in an almost uncontaminated form, adhering to the doctrines concerning predestination, grace, mercy, faith, works, justification, and salvation that were close to the pronouncements of St Augustine of Hippo, the touchstone of orthodox theology. The liturgy used in the early Irish and British churches and the ways of celebrating communion were similar to the practice of the Church of England in the seventeenth century, he reported.

⁸ For this project of a British church history, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton –: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁹ The letter is printed in C. R. Elrington, The Life of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D.D. (), –.

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

Ussher’s supreme achievement as a church historian did not appear until , when he published Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates. It was written in Latin, partly to convey its message to a learned European audience, and partly because so much of its source material was in Latin. This was not only the fulfilment of King James’s desire to have a profoundly researched account of the antiquity and integrity of the British Church, but it was also the answer to Matthew Parker’s desire to produce a coherent history of the early Church in Britain that would show its apostolic origins separate from Rome, and its simplicity and purity in doctrine and worship that were in keeping with the primitive Christianity of the evangelical era. It was a work that could be held up against the Catholic polemicists, who were so busy in Elizabethan and Stuart times, to show that the reformed Church of England was in most important respects the inheritor of the early Church in these islands. Ussher had access to a much greater range of documents and sources than Parker and his circle, and he had a much finer historical sense.¹⁰ He had an unprecedented understanding of the capillary progress of Christianity through Britain, thanks to his intensive study of the Celtic Church. He provides a wealth of documentary detail about the growth of the Church and its organization in mainland Britain. The fables relating to the first contact with the Gospel he carefully sifts, inclining to an acceptance of Joseph of Arimathea’s mission shortly after the death of Christ, and accepting as genuine the story of King Lucius’s conversion in the later second century. This last story recurred in most accounts of early Christianity in Britain as an indication of the eagerness of British rulers to hear of the new faith. Ussher believes that by the time of Constantine the Church was broadly networked across Britain. He applies his scholarship to determine how the episcopal sees were formed in Britain, and, from the record of Church councils, gives the fullest account yet made of the bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries. He devotes several chapters to the spread of the Pelagian heresy in Britain—Pelagius was a fourth-century British Christian based in Rome who argued that man’s free will contributed to salvation separately from the assistance of divine grace—but shows how the British Church successfully freed itself from this heresy.¹¹ This resounding vindication of the British Church was naturally dedicated to King Charles as the Supreme Governor of the Church, but the confident picture presented by this book would soon be smashed by the outbreak of civil war and the dissolution of the Church of England from  onwards. Ussher was much aided in his research by Sir Henry Spelman, a lawyer and member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries who had enquired deeply into the ancient ¹⁰ Ussher was able to use various manuscripts of Gildas and Columbanus from the sixth century, Adamnanus from the seventh and Sedulius Scotus from the ninth century, as well as many early Celtic saints’ lives and the Letters of St Patrick. In  he published an invaluable collection of documents relating to the early Irish Church which he had discovered, under the title of Veterum Epistolarum Hibernicarum Sylloge. ¹¹ For a fuller account of Ussher’s writings on church history, see Parry, Trophies of Time, –. Pelagianism had had certain beliefs in common with the Arminian doctrines that were spreading in England in the s and s and that were opposed by Ussher.

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

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privileges and entitlements of the Church such as tithes and sanctity of church lands. He was concerned to clarify the body of canon law that appertained to the Church of England. Canon law is made in the councils of the Church, so he conceived the plan of documenting all the councils that had been held in Britain since the earliest days of Christianity and all the councils of the Church catholic and universal that British representatives had attended.¹² Drawing on recent continental publications, notably the Annales Ecclesiastici ( vols, –) of the Roman scholar Cesare Baronius, and the Generalia Concilia of Severinus Bini () he detailed how the British and then the Saxon churches had engaged in European councils and absorbed doctrine and discipline from them. The most significant parts of Spelman’s Concilia () are the records and canons of the synods of the Saxon kings from Alfred onwards, Athelstan, Edmund, Edgar, Ethelred, and Edward the Confessor, which he prints in Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Here was the legal and doctrinal underpinning of the Saxon Church which, Spelman argues, was part of the inheritance of the Church of England in the seventeenth century. The contents of the Concilia (which concluded with the acts of Edward the Confessor) helped to root the Church of England more firmly in antiquity, and justified the hierarchy and spiritual discipline of the Church from ancient precedents. The extent to which the modern Church was bound by decrees from the old Church was left open, as a matter for divines and ecclesiastical lawyers to resolve. While high scholarship such as Spelman’s and Ussher’s might fill the Stuart intelligentsia with admiration and delight, and helped to concentrate minds on the religious life of the early centuries, it had no impact on the beliefs of ordinary people. But within the Church of England, beginning around , a movement was developing that would oblige English men and women to think hard about the way they worshipped and about the nature of reformed worship and its relation to pre-Reformation practices. This movement concentrated on enhancing the ceremonies associated with worship, for its leaders believed that the services of the established church were insufficiently reverent, and all too often they took place in churches that were not fit for the worship of God. A loosely allied group of churchmen came to believe that the virtue of the sacrament of the eucharist, or holy communion, was undervalued in the Church of England. In most parish churches it was celebrated only three or four times a year. For these churchmen, partaking of the sacrament was essential to the process of salvation; it was a vital component of worship, more important than the sermon that expounded the text of the scriptures. The celebration of communion should be at the centre of worship, and it should be performed reverently and formally. The Elizabethan communion table that could be brought out into the choir or nave when required was thought to be too casual and informal. It would be better to have a fixed table, at the east end of the church, perhaps railed off and raised up, and if one called the table an altar, perhaps that term bestowed greater dignity and respect on the place where Christ’s sacrifice was commemorated. The site of the altar, within the chancel, should

¹² For a review of Spelman’s work as an ecclesiastical historian, see Parry, Trophies of Time, –.

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

be considered more sacred than the rest of the church, and so the chancel might be more richly decorated to acknowledge this special degree of holiness. The church overall, as the place where God is worshipped, should be made decent and beautiful. So many churches had become dilapidated and decayed in Elizabethan times that a vast amount of renovation needed to be undertaken. The men who drove this movement forward were a group of prominent bishops, Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Neile, John Overall, Bishop of Lichfield, John Buckeridge, William Laud, and Matthew Wren, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and John Cosin, a canon of Durham. All were learned men, and all shared the belief that the Reformation in England had been too severe. There were many features of pre-Reformation worship that were not doctrinally unacceptable, that might have been retained. A more ceremonious conduct of services, for example, a fuller liturgy, richer and more varied vestments—copes for bishops—candles and a cross on the altar, and embroidered cloths to dignify the altar. Musical settings of sacred texts could be allowed. In the furnishing of the church, painted glass windows with biblical scenes could be justified as an aid to devotion, and carving too might be acceptable. The Calvinist rejection of images, in line with the Second Commandment, may have been over-zealous, for the arts could stir up and intensify devotion, and add beauty to reverence. The decoration of the Temple at Jerusalem showed clearly that the arts could be used in the service of religion. So a more sympathetic attitude to late medieval worship prevailed in this movement, which we today would term a High Church movement.¹³ Its development proved extremely divisive, for the majority of Englishmen, who liked their Protestantism plain, saw it as a reintroduction of popery and a betrayal of the principles of the Reformation. A striking example of a return to a late medieval mode of worship was the publication in  of John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions or The Houres of Prayer. Cosin made it clear that he wished to restore the old canonical hours into the pattern of English worship; his book caused outrage amongst Puritan critics, headed by William Prynne, who denounced the work as a reappearance of the Catholic breviary. There were prayers for the dead, prayers of confession, and preparatives to absolution, all excluded from the repertoire of Church of England prayers hitherto. Cosin insisted that he was returning to ‘the practice of the Ancient Church’, but his scheme of prayer was an acknowledgement that the medieval books of hours provided a pattern for private devotion that could be rewardingly employed by Anglicans. In  Protestant spirits were again agitated by the publication of The Female Glory by Anthony Stafford, a gentleman of High Church principles, in praise of ‘our Blessed Lady, the Holy Virgin Mary’, a work which proclaimed the spiritual benefits to be gained by the contemplation of the life and death of Mary. In this book, Stafford also approves the institution of ¹³ For recent accounts of the Laudian movement, see Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) and Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ).

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

 

nunneries for devout women, and recommends the use of prayer-beads as an aid to devotion. The further one got away from the Reformation decades, the more prejudices against the practices and vestiges of Catholicism lessened, at least among the well-educated. Camden had felt unable to write about monasteries, because they aroused resentful feelings and because so many English gentlemen who owned land and buildings that had formerly been monastic property did not wish to be reminded of these origins. It fell to a trio of English Benedictine monks in France and the Low Countries to compile the first great collection of English monastic documents, printed at Douai in  under the title Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia.¹⁴ The s saw the beginnings of monastic history by Protestant scholars, as Roger Dodsworth, the Yorkshire antiquary, started to make collections of monastic records with the immensely ambitious intent of documenting the growth of religious houses in England. His patron was Sir Thomas Fairfax of Nun Appleton near York, who would later become the commander of the Parliamentary armies in the Civil War. The fact that he lived in a house built on the site of a nunnery may have inclined him to support the project, but as an antiquary himself, Fairfax had a dispassionate curiosity about an institution that had been such a prominent feature of medieval England. Dodsworth benefited from the collaboration of William Dugdale, the Warwickshire antiquary, who was able to bring his organizational skills to Dodsworth’s voluminous collections and bring the work to the press after the latter died in . Monasticon Anglicanum (vol. i , vol. ii , vol. iii ) provided the groundwork for all subsequent study of this field. By the printing of charters and donations it enabled scholars to understand the extensive role played by monasteries in medieval society by means of their vast landholdings and economic activities; their devotional function was less examined. Dugdale’s friend the scholar and politician Sir Roger Twysden also began to take an interest in monastic history in the s, though only slender remains of his researches now survive. Twysden also contributed much to the restoration of medieval history by the publication of ten minor chronicles in  under the title of Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem.¹⁵ Although the Monasticon was illustrated with many fine engravings, amongst which those by Wenceslas Hollar were particularly accurate in their depiction of Norman and Gothic architecture, Dugdale never pays any attention to the style or decoration of a building. This indifference to the style, craftsmanship, and beauty of medieval architecture was shared by all antiquaries. The vocabulary for discrimination and appreciation did not yet exist. When positive responses needed to be expressed, words like ¹⁴ These three monks were Augustine Baker, Leander Jones, and Clement Reyner. Reyner is generally regarded as the editor of the volume. See M. D. Knowles’s contribution to Levi Fox (ed.), English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹⁵ Twysden’s fragment The Beginners of a Monastick Life was published by Edmund Gibson at the end of his edition of Sir Henry Spelman’s History and Fate of Sacrilege (). Amongst the historians that Twysden put into print in Scriptores Decem were Ailred of Rievaulx, Simeon of Durham, and Gervase of Canterbury.

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   



‘fair’, ‘fine’, or ‘noble’ were used. The first truly observant remarks about medieval architecture would seem to be those made by William Somner in his Antiquities of Canterbury (). Somner (–) held a number of administrative posts associated with Canterbury Cathedral, where he was patronized by Archbishop Laud, to whom the Antiquities is dedicated. Half of the book is devoted to the city of Canterbury, the rest to the cathedral, which he considers to ‘exceed most of the Realm, if not all, in beauty, stateliness and magnificence of building’. Somner guides the reader reverently round the interior, looking into the many chapels and explaining their function in the medieval times. As a specimen of his observation, he remarks when he ascends the steps to the apse, ‘I hold [this part] to be somewhat less ancient than the quire and its undercroft: the ocular and peaked or pointed form of the arch, the round marble pillars or columns both above and below . . . showing a manifest discrepancy and difference one from the other’.¹⁶ He provides a ‘history of the fabrick’ using the cathedral archives and his own perceptions. Most enterprisingly, he tells his reader ‘I shall desire you would take notice of the Windows, especially in the Church’s upper part, which both for the Glass and Iron-work thereof are well worthy your observation’.¹⁷ He then records the subject of every window and the Latin verses that explain the parallelisms between the Old and New Testament scenes. Somner’s Antiquities offers an unprecedented way of looking at a medieval church: historically knowledgeable, articulate, appreciative, and contextual. Besides his accomplishments as a medievalist, William Somner was also the leading Anglo-Saxonist of his generation. He was appointed to the Readership in Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge that had been founded by Sir Henry Spelman in  after its first holder, Abraham Wheelock, died in . Somner brought to completion the great project that had occupied him for many years, his great Dictionarium Saxonico-Anglicum that was published in folio in , which provided the first comprehensive explanation of the vocabulary, with specimen phrases and Latin and English equivalents. After the lexicon, Somner printed the Anglo-Saxon Grammar by Aelfric the early eleventhcentury grammarian as a way of communicating the structure of the language. This truly monumental work of scholarship finally established Anglo-Saxon studies on a firm foundation, now accessible to any determined aspirant. It might be appropriate to end this chapter, which has sketched the rise of AngloSaxon studies in connection with the early history of the Church and the beginnings of a serious approach to the medieval centuries of triumphant Catholicism, by drawing ¹⁶ William Somner, The Antiquities of Canterbury, nd edn (, repr. ), . Somner’s attempts at assigning medieval architectural styles to reigns precede John Aubrey’s more detailed efforts by some thirty years. Aubrey probably compiled his ‘Chronologia Architectonica’ in the early s, but never published his scheme. ¹⁷ Somner, Antiquities, . A similar enterprise in studying a medieval cathedral in the context of its history and with an eye to its architecture and to the programme of its stained glass was undertaken by Symon Gunton in the late s, but his account was not published until , as The History of the Church of Peterburgh. Both Somner and Gunton, incidentally, show a lively interest in monastic history in their works.

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

 

attention to two books of similar title but of opposing ideologies that appeared just after the mid-century. Both were very large folios. One was Thomas Fuller’s The ChurchHistory of Britain (), the other was Serenus Cressy’s The Church-History of Brittany (). Fuller (who was a good friend of Somner) was a middle-of-the-road clergyman who retained his post as parson at Waltham Abbey in Essex during the Commonwealth. A scholar with a popular touch, he chose to write a full church history from the beginnings of Christianity in Britain until the death of Charles I. He produced a coherent narrative written from the standpoint of a patriotic Protestant. It is overcredulous about origins, well-informed about the Saxon Church, deeply prejudiced against Rome in the Middle Ages, and dense with detail about the Reformation. In composing it, as one can see from his marginal references, he was able to draw on a rich accumulation of historical scholarship published since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The names of Camden, Lambarde, Verstegan, Selden, and Weever recur with some frequency. Spelman’s Concilia is used as an indispensable source of information about Church councils and canons, while Ussher’s book on the Antiquities of the British Church serves as a guide across the early centuries. Bede is sensibly used as the principal interpreter of the Saxon Church, often with the help of Fuller’s friend Abraham Wheelock whose edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Latin, Saxon and English had been published in .¹⁸ Many medieval chronicles were now in print to provide a bridge from Saxon to Norman times, and then through to Tudor times. From the Reformation onwards there is an abundance of material. Fuller keeps to the apostolic origins of the faith via Joseph of Arimathea and praises the purity of belief in the British Church. He ingeniously navigates the difficulty presented by the fact that the revered Bede sided with the Roman strain of Christianity introduced from the south of England by Augustine’s mission. Bede indicated that Saxon England came under papal rule, but Fuller suggests that the native British tradition of faith retained a distinctness from Rome for several centuries after Augustine. In particular, Fuller believed that the eremitic and monastic practices that were such a distinctive feature of the British Church derived primarily from Egyptian and Syrian models.¹⁹ His presentation of the high medieval phase is deeply coloured by anti-papal prejudice, and he asserts that only with Wycliffe does the light of true faith shine again. All in all, it is a creditable history, one that testifies how vast fields of knowledge about Saxon and medieval England have been cultivated by the development of specialized scholarship. Serenus Cressy (–) began life as Hugh Cressy who after his time as a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, became a chaplain to Thomas Wentworth and then to Lord Falkland. With the ruin of the Church of England in the Civil War, he left England, converted to Catholicism in Rome, then became a Benedictine monk at the English College at Douai, changing his name to Serenus Cressy. He joined a mission to England, and became a priest in the household of Queen Catherine of Braganza at ¹⁸ Wheelock had also published the first edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Chronologia AngloSaxonica (Cambridge, ). ¹⁹ Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (), .

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   



Somerset House in London.²⁰ His thousand-page volume advances only to the end of the Saxon era. He used much the same source materials as Fuller, but wrote entirely as a confessed Catholic. Because of this, his book was printed in Rouen, thus avoiding the need for the English censor’s imprimatur, but sold in England. In his opinion, the Celtic Church of the Britons had benefited immeasurably from grafting itself onto the Roman stock introduced by Augustine. This was a case of one apostolic church merging with another, and being strengthened as a result. Cressy praised the pagan Saxons’ willingness to convert to the new faith, and approved and admired their enthusiasm for the monastic life. Especially is he impressed by the number of noblemen and women who sought the devotional life, rejecting the advantages of their high station. As Fuller had leavened his long narrative with many pleasant anecdotes, so Cressy gratifies his readers with many—too many—stories of miracles performed by British and Saxon saints or by their relics. His book is full of saints’ lives, and their miracles testify to the constant workings of divinity among the Saxons. Cressy was able to introduce a good deal of information from continental writings in the library at Douai. Religious history is intertwined with secular history, so The Church-History of Brittany was quite the fullest account of Saxon England when it was published. Fuller was persuaded that a deep current of gospel Christianity runs from the first century to the Conquest, gradually diluting as time passes. That original purity of faith was only restored by a new army of Protestant saints and martyrs in Tudor times. Cressy convinced himself that apostolic Christianity was reinvigorated by a gradual submission to Rome in the seventh century and was gloriously incorporated into the true Church that flourished in ‘Brittany’ until it was subverted by the heresies of the Reformation. Both these church histories were written in an age of bitter polemic when Catholic and Protestant apologists contended to prove their church the receptacle of the true faith. The fact that two large scholarly histories using similar source materials could come to opposing conclusions might suggest to the modern onlooker the vanity of all scholarly endeavour.

S  Brackmann, Rebecca, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Lawrence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ). Fincham, Kenneth, and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Fox, Levi (ed.), English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Graham, Timothy, and Andrew G. Watson (eds), The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

²⁰ A sketch of Cressy’s career is given by Anthony Wood in Athenae Oxonienses, ii (Oxford, ), cols –. Cressy wrote a life of Augustine Baker, one of the compilers of the Apostolatus (see n. ).

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

 

Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). McKisack, May, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Parry, Graham, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ). Sharpe, Kevin, Sir Robert Cotton –: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

     

......................................................................................................................

 . 

E though medievalism was only identified as a style and code of values in the mid-nineteenth century, appeals to an idea of the Middle Ages can be found as soon as writers and thinkers detected a critical distance between themselves and the medieval period. During the religious and political upheavals of the English Civil War period of the middle decades of the seventeenth century, when all orthodox ideas about nation, government, and belief came into question, the Diggers were among the groups finding inspiration in the Middle Ages as they sought for models for restructuring society. A general assumption among these groups is that social degree is a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Rejecting the concept of the Divine Right of Kings, they argue instead for universal human rights. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the biblical story of the Fall, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appeal to English history, suggesting that the Norman Conquest is England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta mark the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights.

T N 

.................................................................................................................................. As Christopher Hill argued in his seminal essay ‘The Norman Yoke’, this idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others.¹ The theory of the Norman yoke influenced social and racial theory in the nineteenth ¹ See Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’ (). Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, , repr. ), –.

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

 . 

century, so that even works suggesting class reconciliation rather than revolution, such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe () and Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, Or, The Two Nations (), construct oppositions between the ruling Normans and their descendants and the descendants of the Saxons who are obliged to work for them. For example, early in Ivanhoe, set long after the Norman Conquest at the end of the twelfth century, Wamba the Jester points out that ‘swine is good Saxon’ but ‘pork’ is ‘good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles’.² Similarly, in Sybil, the novel represents the Saxons under the Norman yoke continuing in Victorian Britain through ‘two nations’ of ‘the RICH and the POOR’, who are ‘formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws’.³ The focus here, though, is on political movements and works of art that attempt to redress these imbalances through the Digger tradition of communal ownership emerging in the era of the English Civil War period. The medievalism of the seventeenth century did not, of course, imply an uncritical acceptance of the style and values of the Middle Ages. For most of these thinkers, the period between the Norman Conquest and the English Reformation was dominated by Roman Catholicism, monarchical law, and oppression of the poor. They were hence highly selective in drawing precedents from medieval history, focusing largely on preNorman rights inscribed—or, according to most interpreters, reinscribed—in Magna Carta. The difficulty in determining what the Diggers knew about history is a result of the practice of their foremost writer Gerrard Winstanley, who only explicitly acknowledges the Bible as a written authority.⁴ Yet the Diggers certainly drew on the interpretive tradition of other radical-reformist groups emerging at a time of new thinking about the nature of government, especially the Levellers; indeed, an alternate title to Winstanley’s tract A Declaration to the Powers of England is The True Levellers Standard Advanced.⁵ While the Diggers made a special contribution to medievalism, their historical thinking makes assumptions either drawn from Leveller writers such as John Lilburne or from a common source. The Levellers’ history of England therefore provides a starting point for understanding the Digger perspective. The Levellers earned their name for arguing for equality under the law. Although they were not a cohesive group like the Diggers, John Lilburne (c.–) had emerged as a leader for the Levellers by . That year John Hare published St Edward’s Ghost: Or, Anti-Normanisme: Being a Patheticall Complaint and Motion in the Behalfe of Our English Nation Against Her Grand (yet Neglected) Grievance, ² Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (; Oxford: World’s Classics, ), . ³ Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; Or, The Two Nations (; London: Penguin, ), . ⁴ In the introduction to their outstanding edition of The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley,  vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein point out that, in early life, Winstanley very likely had access to books other than the Bible (i. ). ⁵ For the bibliographical history see Works of Winstanley, ed. Corns et al., ii. . Subsequent quotations follow this edition.

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     



Normanisme, although he had composed it some years earlier.⁶ Following the antiquarian Richard Verstegan, Hare argues for the Teutonic origins of the English and hence describes Edward the Confessor as ‘the last rightfull English king’ (). If, he argues, the English are an occupied and enslaved people like the Greeks under the Turks, will any reasonable man be so unjust? or any English man be so impious as to define it for unlawfull in us, to endeavour to recover our Right and lost honour and Libertie? would any man be so absurd as to stigmatize and detest it for rebellion, in the Greekes to shake off (if they were able) the Turkish Yoake, and to recover from that enimies usurpation their ancient honour, Lawes, Libertie, and Language that now ly overwhelmed and buried in Turcisme as ours in Normanisme? ()

Hare maintains that the kingly line should be derived from the Saxons; that the heirs of William the Conqueror’s army should surrender their titles and possessions; that law should be in English or Latin (not French); and that the English language itself should be ‘be cleared of the Normane and French invasion upon it, and depravation of it, by purging it of all words and termes of that descent, supplying it from the old Saxon and the learned tongues’ (). Although their argument was not so explicitly racial, the Levellers similarly characterized the monarchy as the heirs of Norman oppression. Lilburne had been imprisoned for helping the anti-episcopal cause in –, and although Oliver Cromwell assisted with his release and he fought for the Parliament party in the Civil War, he later distanced himself from the Presbyterians, advocating instead a complete restructuring of society. Even then, Lilburne supplemented his claims for natural rights by repeatedly appealing to English history. The subtitle of Regall Tyrannie Discovered, composed while Lilburne was again imprisoned in , is ‘A DISCOURSE, shewing that all lawfull (approbational) instituted power by GOD amongst men, is by common agreement, and mutual consent.’⁷ Yet while the title suggests natural right, the sentences that follow suggest historicized rights; his subject is also The Tyrannie of the Kings of England, from the dayes of William the Invader and Robber, and Tyrant, alias the Conqueror, to this present King Charles, Who is plainly proved to be worse, and more tyrannicall then any of his Predecessors, and deserves a more severe punishment from the hands of this present Parliament, then either of the dethroned Kings, Edw. . [or] Rich. . had from former Parliaments (title-page)

Having mentioned the deposed kings Richard II and Edward II, Lilburne reveals even more awareness of medieval history. Of William the Conqueror he says, ⁶ John Hare, Saint Edward’s Ghost, or Anti-Normanisme: being a patheticall complaint and motion in the behalfe of our English nation against her grand (yet neglected) grievance, Normanisme (London, ). ⁷ [John Lilburne], Regall Tyrannie Discovered (London, ). Lilburne’s authorship of some works is conjectural.

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

 .  History makes it clear, that WILLIAM THE CONQVEROVR, OR TYRANT, being a Bastard, subdued this Kingdome by force of Armes. . . . And having gained the Country, he ruled it by his sword, as an absolute Conqueror, professing that he was beholding to none for his Kingdome, but God and his sword, making his power as wide as his will (just Tyrant like) giving away the Lands of their Nobles to his Normans, laying unwonted taxes, and heavie subsidies upon the Commons, insomuch, that many of them; to enjoy a barren liberty, forsook their fruitfull inheritance, and with their wives and children as out-lawes, lived in woods, preferring that naked name of freedome, before a sufficient maintenance possest under the thraldome of a Conquerar . . . For whereas the causes of the Kingdome were before determined in every Shire, And by a Law of King Edward Segier, all matters in question should, upon speciall penalty, without further deferment, be finally decided in the Gemote, or Conventions held monethly in every Hundred: Now he ordained· That four times in the yeare for certain dayes, the same businesse should be determined, in such place as he would appoint, where he constituted Judges, to that purpose, and others from whom as from the bosom of the Prince all litigators should have justice. And to make them as miserable, as slaves could be made, He ordered that the Laws should be practised in French, and Petitions, and businesses of Court in French, that so the poor miserable people might be gulled, and cheated, undone and destroyed; not onely at his will and pleasure, but also at the will and pleasure of his under Tyrants and Officers. ()

This passage, derived from Samuel Daniel’s history of England published in the early s, contains many of the ideas about English law later adopted by the Diggers. First, William conquered the land and distributed it to his followers. The English were driven out from the land, suffered heavy taxation, and in some cases chose to become outlaws rather than slaves. The law had previously been administered by regular gatherings of the people but was now replaced by judges presiding over quarter sessions. The law was also practised in French, so poor people could not understand it and had to rely on lawyers to handle legal matters. All of William’s policies remove agency from the people as a whole and place it in the hands of royal appointees and legal professionals. Lilburne follows this with an overview of medieval history, his main source being Daniel, although he also quotes Sir Edward Coke’s commentaries on English law.⁸ He describes John and his son Henry III as seeming like ‘Monsters rather then men, Roaring Lions, Ravening Wolves, and salvadge Boares (studying how to destroy and ruine the people) rather then Magistrates to govern the people with justice and equity’. John was nevertheless forced to concede to ‘the GREAT CHARTER, made to keep the Beame right betwixt SOVERAIGNTY and SUBJECTION’ (), a phrase directly quoted from Daniel.⁹ Also following Daniel, Lilburne suggests that the English Middle Ages did have a good king, in the person of Edward I, who ratified Magna Carta and agreed to uphold its principles. Even then, Lilburne believes that laws before the Conquest were better. Concluding his ‘true relation, of the begetting, the conception, and birth of Magna Charta, The English-Mans Inheritance’, he states in his most direct reference to the Norman yoke: ⁸ In The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, Coke had pointed out that William the Conqueror was not the originator of English law. ⁹ See Samuel Daniel, The Collection of the Historie of England (London, ), .

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     



yet alas, in my judgment, it falls far short of Edward the Confessors Laws, (for the ease, good, and quiet of the people) which the Conqueror robbed England of, for the Norman practises yet in Westminster-Hall, by reason of their tediousnesse, ambiguities, uncertainties, the entries in Latine, which is not our own Tongue, their forcing men to plead by Lawyers, and not permitting themselves to plead their own causes, their compelling of persons to come from all places of the Kingdom, to seek for Justice at Westminster, is such an Iron Norman yoak with fangs and teeth in it . . . That if we were free in every particular else, that our hearts can think of; yet . . . were we slaves, by this alone, the burthen of which singly will pierce, & gaul our shoulders, & make us bow, & stoop even down to the ground, ready to be made a prey, not only by great men, but even by every cunning sharking knave. ()

In a work also composed in Newgate Prison in February , The Out-crye of the Oppressed Commons, Lilburne asserts that his rights under Magna Carta are being violated; he seems to have had direct access to the text of the charter. The House of Lords has assumed the authority to judge and commit us who are Commoners, which by law they have no authority not in the least to doe, as appeares in the twenty ninth Chapter of Magna Charta, which expresly saith, ‘No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his free-hold, or liberties, or free customes, or be out-lawed, or exiled, or any otherwise distroyed, nor we will not passe upon him, nor condemne him, but by lawfull judgement of his Peers, or by the law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny nor deferre to any man either justice or right.’ ()

Lilburne quotes Sir Edward Coke’s commentaries on English law to prove that law should be administered by commoners, not by lords. Finally, the very title of The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived, Asserted, and Vindicated (June ) emphasizes that historic legal rights need to be ‘revived’, not created. The Diggers were thus able to draw on a tradition that appealed to pre-Conquest English rights and that represented Magna Carta and other later concessions from the Crown as attempts to revive those rights. To the Levellers’ claims for medieval political rights, however, they added an economic theory—again not simply ideal, but grounded in medieval history, which seemed to them to justify a claim to common land.

T D’ 

.................................................................................................................................. The Diggers were more declaredly a movement than the Levellers. Whereas the title ‘Levellers’ was applied by enemies and Lilburne uses the term with caution,¹⁰ ¹⁰ In A Whip for the present House of Lords OR The Levellers Levelled (), Lilburne confirms that he identifies with the ‘desire that all alike may be Levelled to, and bound by the Law’ (p. ). This would imply that he does not see the Levellers as a movement, but hopes that he is one of many like-thinking citizens who desire political equality under the law.

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

 . 

the Diggers were willing to self-identify by the label that described what they did. The Diggers’ main goal was to farm common land, providing food for the community and avoiding the oppression of private ownership. The movement was always small, but William Everard seems to have led the initial digging at George’s-Hill in Surrey. Gerrard Winstanley, however, soon took on the role as voice and leader of the movement. Winstanley’s writings consistently quote the Bible, but unlike Lilburne he does not explain the sources of his historical knowledge. As Thomas Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein have pointed out in their edition of his writings (ii. ), Winstanley had a connection to John Lilburne through the Quaker John Fielder; both of them wrote in his defence in Fielder’s publication The Humble Petition and Appeal of John Fielder of Kingston Miller, to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England (). With no record of his reading we cannot be sure how Winstanley knew about medieval history but his implied understanding of the Norman Conquest closely follows the version that Lilburne describes: namely, that after conquering England William gave the land to his Norman followers, and that laws were written in French to the disadvantage of the English people. Corns, Hughes, and Loewenstein observe that Winstanley’s ideas vary ‘with time and context’; around the time of the execution of Charles I in  and the Diggers’ work to farm common ground at George’s-Hill in Surrey, his thought was evolving rapidly. Winstanley soon realised that Parliament’s victory did not change ideas of private property ownership and that the Diggers would have to continue to struggle for the right to farm common land. In contrast with Lilburne, Winstanley hence focuses more directly on issues of property than on systems of government. According to Winstanley, however, the problem of property ownership began at the Fall. He emphasizes that once ‘Adam’ (humanity) had fallen from Paradise, the desire for ownership and domination replaced the ‘evennesse’ () of God’s original creation, so that The first Adam is the wisdom and power of flesh broke out and sate down in the chair of rule and dominion, in one part of man-kind over another. And this is the beginner of particular interest, buying and selling the earth from one particular hand to another, saying, This is mine, upholding this particular propriety by a law of government of his own making, and thereby restraining other fellow creatures from seeking nourishment from their mother earth. So that though a man was bred up in a Land, yet he must not worke for himself where he would sit down. But from Adam; that is, for such a one that had bought part of the Land, or came to it by inheritance of his deceased parents, and called it his own Land: So that he that had no Land, was to work for those for small wages, that called the () Land theirs; and thereby some are lifted up into the chair of tyranny, and others trod under the foot-stool of misery, as if the earth were made for a few, not for all men. (Works, i. –)

The earth is for Winstanley a ‘common treasury’: for example, in A Declaration to the Powers of England, he explains:

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     



. In the beginning of time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the Lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another.

Yet here as in a number of Winstanley’s writings there seems to be a second ‘fall’, mirroring the first, namely, the property laws put in place by William the Conqueror. His first point marks the beginning of time, but by the fourth he has reached the Norman Conquest: And the last inslaving Conquest which the enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England; and from that time Kings, Lords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and the violent bitter people that are Freeholders, are and have been successively. The Norman Bastard, William himself, his Colonels, Captains, inferior Officers, and common Souldiers, who are still from that time to this day in pursuit of that Victory, imprisoning, robbing and killing the poore inslaved English Israelites. (ii. )

Even his choice of biblical examples frequently serves as a typological expression of the Norman Conquest and domination by conquerors. He often refers to the bondage of the people of Israel in Egypt and under the Babylonians, and makes particular use of the stories of Cain and Abel and of Esau and Jacob and the question of birthright. Following the Bible, Winstanley assumes the right of the younger brother to occupy the land, characterizing Esau as the ‘man of the flesh’ and Jacob as guided by spirit; thus Esau becomes identified with the heirs of the Normans and Jacob with the ‘English’.¹¹ Thus in A Declaration to the Powers of England, he exclaims: ‘O thou A-dam, thou Esau, thou Cain, thou hypocriticall man of flesh, when wilt thou cease to kill thy younger brother?’ (ii. ). This idea of birthright is expanded upon in A Letter to the Lord Fairfax (), where he asks: Whether William the Conqueror became not to be King of England by conquest, turned the English out of their birthrights, burned divers townes, whereof thirty towns were burned by him in Windsore Forrest; by reason whereof all sorts of people suffered, and compelled the conquered English for necessity of livelihood to be servants to him and his Norman souldiers? . Whether King Charles was not successor to the Crown of England from William the Conqueror, and whether all Laws that have been made in every Kings Reign did

¹¹ This may seem counter-intuitive. In the Genesis story, Jacob tricks Esau out of his birthright, so the use of the word ‘birthright’ in the sense of who occupied the land first is an inexact parallel; presumably, Winstanley, like John Hare, sees the English as the equivalent of the chosen people and therefore typed by Jacob rather than Esau.

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

 .  not confirm and strengthen the power of the Norman Conquest, and so did, and does still hold the Commons of England under slavery to the Kingly power, his Gentry and Clergie? (ii. )

This is perhaps the most explicit reference to what Winstanley knew about medieval history. In the most part, references to pre-Norman times are vague; unlike Lilburne and others of the time, he makes no mention of kings such as Edward the Confessor. Yet central to his beliefs is the assumption that, before William distributed it to his Norman army, common and waste land was available for the use of all people and so they were able to be free and independent rather than working for others. He follows Lilburne in blaming the Conquest for hierarchy, French laws, and quarter sessions, and adds that the Normans also introduced tithes: ‘William the Conqueror promised, That if the Clergie would preach him up, so that the people might be bewitched, so as to receive him to be Gods Anointed over them, he would give them the Tenths of the Lands increase yearly’ (ii. ). Beyond frequent references to the Norman Conquest and its legal consequences, the only English historical fact Winstanley explicitly mentions is Magna Carta, and even here his references are far fewer than among other reformist writers of his time. In An Appeal to the House of Commons, making a rare but vague reference to pre-Conquest English history, he draws a parallel with one of his favourite biblical examples, Israel’s captivity in Egypt: England, you know, hath been conquered and enslaved divers times, and the best Laws that England hath, (viz. Magna Charta) were got by our Forefathers importunate petitioning unto the Kings, that stil were their Task-masters; and yet these () best laws are yoaks and manicles, tying one sort of people to be slaves to another; Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people stil are, and have been left servants to work for them, like the Israelites under the Egyptian Task masters. The last enslaving yoak that England groaned under, (and yet is not freed from) was the Norman, as you know; and since William the Conqueror came in, about six hundred years ago, all the Kings that stil succeeded, did confirm the old laws, or else make new ones, to uphold that Norman conquest over us; and the most favouring laws that we have, doth stil binde the hands of the enslaved English from enjoying the freedom of their creation. (–)

He also makes a passing reference to Magna Carta in his most developed vision of a new society, The Law of Freedom (). The work is addressed to Oliver Cromwell, and in the opening address, Winstanley refers to the late King Charles as the ‘Kingly Conqueror’—typologically, Charles and William of Normandy are one so that ‘whatsoever is recovered from the Conqueror, is recovered by a joint consent of the Commoners’ (ii. ). The Law of Freedom sets out a plan for running a community without buying and selling, and thus, according to Winstanley, with no need for lawyers (ii. –). While money might be needed for international trade, everyone

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     



within a community will work according to their capabilities, and families will be able to take what they need: ‘In every Town and City, shall be appointed Store-houses for flax, wool, lether, cloth, and for all such commodities, as come from beyond Seas, and these shall be called general Store-houses, from whence every particular family may fetch such commodities as they want’ (ii. ). Such a community will require ‘overseers’ chosen yearly (ii. ). While the elaborate description of how such a community would govern itself may seem utopian rather than medievalist, Winstanley’s main point is that the land lost to the Normans after the Conquest will be reclaimed by the English. The idea of annually elected officials is a commonplace in the radical reformist tradition and clearly echoes claims for the Saxon witanagemot’s annual gatherings. Winstanley never uses the term Saxon, however; central to his argument is that the ‘English’ people were enslaved by the invading ‘Normans’. There can be little doubt that the Diggers’ empowering version of medieval history helped win them some followers. In addition to Winstanley’s Digger community in Surrey, a number of other groups established colonies; John Gurney lists groups in Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and Nottinghamshire.¹² Yet Winstanley’s repeated appeals to the medieval past failed to win him government support; bullied by local landowners, the Surrey Diggers were unable to maintain their vision of recreating England before the ‘Norman yoak’, and groups elsewhere encountered similar resistance to reclaiming the commons.

T    D

.................................................................................................................................. Although the movement was so brief, the communal experiment ending before the Restoration of the monarchy in , some memory of the reformist principles of the Diggers and similar groups seems to have survived in the radical tradition at least until the turn of the nineteenth century, where the language of the ‘Norman yoke’ remains prominent. E. P. Thompson has gone so far as to argue that a direct influence is possible, since an enthusiastic antinomian such as William Blake could well have found the seventeenth-century texts in private collections or have read reprints of works by John Reeve, Ludowick Muggleton, and others.¹³ Even though we cannot be sure that Blake read the works of Gerrard Winstanley, the two visionaries share some interesting similarities in language and thought. For example, in A Declaration to the Powers of England (), Winstanley asks: what are all those binding and restraining Lawes, that have been made from one Age to another, since that [Norman] Conquest, and are still upheld by furie over the ¹² John Gurney, Gerrard Winstanley, The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London: Pluto Press, ), . ¹³ E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, ), –.

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

 .  people? I say, what are they? But the cords, bands, manacles, and yokes that the inslaved English, like Newgate prisoners, wears upon their hands and legs as they walk the streets; by which those Norman Oppressors, and these their Successors from Age to Age, have inslaved the poore people by, killed their younger Brother, and would not suffer Jacob to arise. (ii. )

Blake’s ‘London’ begins with startlingly similar images of walking city streets under the mental enslavement of the law: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe In every cry of every Man In every Infants cry of fear In every voice, in every ban. The mind-forg’d manacles I hear . . . ¹⁴

This is the only use of the word ‘street’ in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the image of walking the streets is also relatively uncommon in Winstanley’s writings. Among those advocating radical political reform for Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appeals to medieval history are very common. Many of these politicians and authors could, of course, have drawn their own conclusions from a study of history and especially of sources available both to the Levellers and Diggers and to themselves, such as Coke’s commentaries on English law. The repeated returns to the touchstones of the Norman Conquest and Magna Carta, however, suggest that writers in the radical reformist tradition may have had some awareness of seventeenthcentury thought. Tom Paine, for example, represents the Norman Conquest as bringing in a code of oppressive laws that forced the English to try to claim back their rights.¹⁵ Although Paine insists that rights are natural rather than historical, the idea of reclaiming rights shares assumptions with Lilburne and Winstanley. Later in the century, some of the Chartists seem to have known about the writings of John Lilburne, and like the Levellers and Diggers, insisted that they were reclaiming rights rather than simply asserting a natural right to participate in government. The Chartist movement differed from the Diggers’ ideas in arguing that political equality would be the first step to social justice, but as their name suggests, their construction of a five-point ‘Charter’ echoes Magna Carta and, what is more, their insistence on annual Parliaments echoes Winstanley’s belief that official appointments should be made yearly. The image of the ¹⁴ William Blake, Songs of Experience (London, ). ¹⁵ Paine famously wrote in Common Sense, ‘When William the Conqueror subdued England, he gave them law at the point of the sword; and, until we consent that the seat of government in America be legally and authoritatively occupied, we shall be in danger of having it filled by some fortunate ruffian, who may treat us in the same manner, and then, where will be our freedom? Where our property?’

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     



Norman yoke is especially prevalent in the writings of the long-lived democrat Major John Cartwright. Again, we cannot be sure that Cartwright had direct access to Winstanley’s writings, but he agrees with Winstanley that annual elections are a way to ensure that government remains in the hands of the people as a whole since they ‘will always adhere to the true interests of the nation’.¹⁶ Annual parliaments are the central focus of Take your Choice! (). Again in the radical reformist tradition, Cartwright notes that the ‘all-wise creator . . . made men by nature equal, as well as free’ () but insists that ‘making our parliaments annual, and our representation equal, can neither of them, in any sense, nor without a direct falsehood, be stiled innovations. Both of them were the antient practice of the constitution’ (). His goal is therefore ‘restoring’ the constitution rather than creating one (). Although Take your Choice! does not show the almost obsessive admiration for the Saxons seen in Cartwright’s later writings, Cartwright praises ‘the immortal and blessed Alfred’ (p. xxiv) as the ‘best of all our kings except his present majesty’ [George III]. Even though, acknowledging the legal commentaries of his contemporary Sir William Blackstone, Cartwright knows somewhat more about pre-Norman English government than Winstanley did, key points in the preface to Take your Choice! seem very close to Winstanley’s thinking. For example, using Charles I as the embodiment of the post-Saxon monarchy, Cartwright laments that: ‘The prince will invade the people’s property, in order to enrich his minister; the minister will violate their liberties, in order to render his master absolute. For one Alfred there are a thousand Charles’ (p. xxv). Even more explicitly, he asks, ‘Are we not suffering from the distress and idleness of the poor, and from a visible depopulation; and do we not leave millions of acres uncultivated?’ (p. xvi). Cartwright is probably here referring to the practice of enclosing land to create vast grazing pastures that gave the impression that the rural population was declining, but landowners’ ability to claim rights over land depended on government approval, and Cartwright’s point is that if all men had a vote, the poor would not allow such injustices; perhaps they would even find ways to ‘cultivate’ the land in the Digger tradition. Echoes of the Diggers’ commitment to seeing the land as a ‘common treasury’ can also be found in the nineteenth century. In the French Revolutionary era, Thomas Spence advocated the return of property to the people: ‘Landed Property always was originally acquired, either by conquest or encroachment on the common Property of Mankind.’¹⁷ Like Winstanley, Spence frequently quotes the Bible to show how humanity departed from nature: for example, he observes: the earliest records show, that the earth was immediately ‘filled with violence,’ and that God-like reason was as much employed in the destruction and robbery of fellowcreatures, as in subduing the earth and the brute creation for a more comfortable ¹⁶ Major John Cartwright, Take your Choice! (London, ), p. xii. ¹⁷ Thomas Spence, The End of Oppression; Being a Dialogue between an Old Mechanic and a Young One (London, ).

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

 .  subsistence: Thus in proportion as the comforts of life increased by man’s labour and ingenuity, so did the rapacity of men also increase to rob each other, and societies were as much formed for the sake of strength to plunder others, as for mutual defence. Well and truly then might it be said that ‘the wickedness of man was great in the earth,’ and that ‘all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.’¹⁸

Also like Winstanley, he believed that the end of a class collecting rent would ensure prosperity for all who were prepared to work, although Spence seems to have imagined this coming about not through the peaceful reclaiming of land but by a people’s rising similar to the directly contemporary French Revolution. In ‘democratic Parishes’ () there would be no opportunity for government to be oppressive. Spence is often characterized as an independent and original thinker but he himself acknowledged that he was drawing on an old tradition of rethinking government and property. He may not have known Winstanley’s works directly but in Pig’s Meat, a penny publication marketed to the poor in –, he frequently quotes James Harrington’s Oceana (), which in its description of a model commonwealth rejects the idea of hereditary rule brought in by the Norman Conquest, hence drawing on the Civil War era discourse on the Norman yoke. Like Winstanley, Spence envisions communal ownership of the land at a local level. While much of Pig’s Meat is quoted from other writers, Spence included some of his own verses that in characterizing the English workers as ‘once so free’ shows his medievalist influences. ‘The Downfall of Feudal Tyranny, Severely felt by the Moderns, under the System of Landlord and Tenant’, begins: That conquering blade, who did us invade Ev’n William the Norman by name, Among his proud band he divided our land, Nought leaving but slav’ry and shame . . . These plundering bands, thus strengthen’d by lands, For ages have rul’d us with awe, Whilst we once so free, now without property, From conqu’rors received the law . . . (iii. )

The refrain ‘my poor boys’ strengthens Spence’s identification with the victims of Norman tyranny. Indeed, during the wars against France, he went so far as to claim that the current landlords were worse than their Norman forebears: For they have got more completely into the spirit and power of oppression now than ever was known before, and they hold the people in defiance by means of their armed associations. They are now like a warlike enemy quartered upon us for the purpose of raising contributions, and William the Conqueror and his Normans were fools to them in the art of fleecing. ¹⁸ Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (London, ), ed. H. Dickinson http://www.ditext.com/spence/restorer.html, accessed June .

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     



Spence’s solution was hence not a piecemeal reclaiming like Winstanley’s, but the complete end of landed property. A later nineteenth-century vision of an ideal community also has many similarities with Winstanley’s. In News from Nowhere (), composed in the medieval form of a dream vision, William Morris shows his commitment not just to medieval politics and economics but also to style. When ‘William Guest’, a dreamer from the nineteenth century, finds himself in the peaceful, prosperous, and healthy England of the future, he asks how it is governed and receives the answer ‘the whole people is our parliament’.¹⁹ Like the Diggers, the English of the future see most law, and all lawyers, as serving to protect private property ownership. And like the Diggers’ and Spence’s ideal, the people and land are divided into ‘areas of management, a commune, or a ward, or a parish’ (). Potentially contentious issues are dealt with at ‘the next ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it, according to the ancient tongue of the times before bureaucracy’ (). ‘Guest’ has by this time already been given the items he wants in shops, and his informant Hammond now explains further, ‘The wares which we make are made because they are needed; men make for their neighbours’ use as if they were making for themselves, not for a vague market of which they know nothing’ (). This seems very similar to Winstanley’s idea of families taking what they need from storehouses in The Law of Freedom because ‘Commonwealths Government governs the Earth without buying and selling’ (ii. ). Morris’s combination of medievalism and communism clearly partakes of the Digger tradition, although as John Gurney has remarked, he shows no direct evidence of having read Winstanley’s works (Gerrard Winstanley, ). It does raise the question, though, of whether in his London reading Karl Marx himself came across Digger ideas. While Marx sees society as progressive and Winstanley is seeking to reverse the fall both of the nation and of humanity, their models for communal property ownership are startlingly similar. Gurney notes that following the  Revolution the Russian Leninists acknowledged Winstanley as one of their forerunners (Gerrard Winstanley, ). Many later small-scale communes have also drawn inspiration from Digger writings. The Digger movement thus provides a significant bridge between the recreation of a vision of a historical medieval past and the dream of an earthly paradise.

S  Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, ). Corns, Thomas N., Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley,  vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Gurney, John, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London: Pluto Press, ).

¹⁹ William Morris, News from Nowhere and Selected Writings (London: Penguin, ), .

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

 . 

Hill, Christopher, ‘The Norman Yoke’ (). Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, , repr. ), –. Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Thompson, E. P., Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, ).

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P A R T I I .............................................................................................................

ROMANTIC PERIOD MEDIEVALISM .............................................................................................................

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  ......................................................................................................................

                    

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 

E in the reign of Queen Victoria, the prominent printer Richard Taylor published a fresh edition, in three volumes, of Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry. This influential work had originally appeared in – and Taylor’s edition of  was the second to update it, after a version produced by the antiquarian Richard Price in . Price had already included many new notes, and had updated and corrected Warton; Taylor, for his new edition at the dawn of the Victorian age, included many more notes, most of them by the leading antiquarians of the time. The antiquarians and litterateurs of Victoria’s reign were prone to complain about Warton’s History (like many works embarking on a new field, it was full of mistakes and speculations that proved to be unwarranted). But clearly, they could not do without it.  was a good time to go into the market with a fresh look at medieval literature (Warton’s book, despite the implicit claims of its title, was largely a work on medieval poetry). In many ways the s in Europe (and particularly in Britain) would prove to be the crucial decade for what we now know as ‘medievalism’. This was the decade when Gothic Revival architecture established itself as the prime idiom for ecclesiastical and civic building in Britain. It was the time when Augustus Pugin would advance his ideas on such architecture, even as the walls of the new, neo-Gothic Houses of Parliament designed by him and Charles Barry rose at Westminster. At the same time in France, Prosper Mérimée was in charge of the Commission des monuments historiques, which drove the restoration of the cathedral of Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle in Paris by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In the sphere of art, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in , while the medievalist historical novel was reinvented by Edward Bulwer Lytton. This was also a decade of working-class unrest and the mass movement known as Chartism. For diverse figures on right and left, from Benjamin Disraeli to Thomas Carlyle, medieval feudalism and chivalry appealed as offering answers to a

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

 

troubled industrialized modernity. Indeed the word ‘medievalism’ itself came into currency in the s, initially as a derogatory synonym for Anglo-Catholicism, and soon with much wider applications.¹ In a strict sense, ‘medievalism’, with all its varied meanings, was a Victorian invention, originating in the first Victorian decade. The turn to the medieval in the period was, as the example of Taylor’s re-edition of Warton suggests, based firmly on the prior work of the s and s. The major figures considered in this chapter—Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy, and Joseph Ritson—were all dead before the future Queen Victoria was born in  and therefore, so far as Victorian medievalism is concerned, belong firmly to the prehistory. But the survival and continued vitality of their works ensured their ongoing importance in the context of the Victorian reinvention of the medieval. They had fundamentally reoriented thought about the medieval period. After the English Reformation, whenever the term ‘Middle Ages’ was used or the period it denoted invoked, it was in the negative sense established by Reformation and humanist thought. With Warton and Percy, this changed, and the fact that in the nineteenth century (as still today) there was a positive conception of a romantic Middle Ages to counterpose to a barbaric Middle Ages was largely due to their work and that of their immediate followers, pre-eminently Walter Scott. They were not always greatly original, but were deeply influenced by French and German scholars who preceded them (such scholars as Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye in France, and the German Friedrich von Schlegel). Nevertheless, Percy, Warton, Ritson, and Scott established the outlines from which a broader British medievalism, in the Victorian period, could grow.

E :   

.................................................................................................................................. In Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, cultures which had come to view themselves as the pinnacle of civilization began to look away from their own sophistication and towards the primitive in all its forms.² Inevitably, even as Enlightenment civility was celebrated, some lamented a loss of simplicity and their own distance from the state of nature. So they turned to distant worlds: to the Americas, or the Pacific where, in Tahiti in , the aristocratic mariner Louis-Antoine de Bougainville admired what he thought of as an Edenic island and brought a Tahitian native back to Paris as a kind of exhibit of man in his natural state. Cultures also looked to their own wild margins, as did Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in their celebrated tour of ¹ OED s.v. medievalism; see further David Matthews, ‘From Mediaeval to Mediaevalism: A New Semantic History’, RES  / (): –. ² On the British case, see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), and on a rise in national optimism after the Seven Years War, see ch. .

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

the Hebrides and Western Isles, an account of which was published in . People also looked to the past: in mid-eighteenth-century Britain the fabricated Ossian poems from a distant, imagined Celtic past enjoyed their spectacular success. Closer to hand were the ballads of late medieval and early modern Britain, some of them available in early printed pamphlets or manuscripts, others needing to be transcribed from the words of their singers. The turn to the primitive was a broad-ranging movement with many outcomes; a focus on the Middle Ages was just one strand, but perhaps among the most influential. In this context, Thomas Warton is interestingly subtle. Like anyone of his time, he had inherited the image of the Middle Ages as a time of barbarity. In the first sentence of the preface to his History of English Poetry, he noted that it was natural that ‘an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement’ should be curious about ‘the transitions from barbarism to civility’.³ There is no doubt that Warton was attracted to medieval literature, which he began to discover in the manuscripts of the libraries in Oxford where he was professor of poetry. But for him the Middle Ages were in fact poised between two moments, as a long phase of transition between classical civilization and the first glimmerings of modernity. By the time of Chaucer, in Warton’s view, the pageantry associated with chivalry had ‘contributed to introduce ideas of courtesy, and to encourage decorum’. At the same time, ‘the national manners still retained a great degree of ferocity, and the ceremonies of the most refined courts in Europe had often a mixture of barbarism, which rendered them ridiculous’. Warton concluded, ‘This absurdity will always appear at periods when men are so far civilised as to have lost their native simplicity, and yet have not attained just ideas of politeness and propriety’ (HEP i. ). Warton does not outrightly condemn the Middle Ages, but he is far from being an uncomplicated champion of the period. He highlights the problem that curious and interesting as humans in an early state are, they are likely also to be barbarous and alien when taken from their context. Clearly, chivalry helps him negotiate this problem, as it is chivalry, in his view, that helps refine cultures (and allows poetry). Warton had two important predecessors in this regard. One of them, Richard Hurd, had advanced an extensive theory in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance in . For Hurd, chivalry was the natural system of restraint that would emerge in response to feudalism. Romance, in turn, was the literary expression of this system. The other predecessor was Thomas Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry () was a famous anthology of ballads and romances which was probably even more broadly influential than Warton’s history. This work gave large numbers of readers access to early poetry and was immediately successful; a second edition followed in , with two further editions in Percy’s lifetime and a long afterlife throughout the nineteenth century. Much more than a simple collection of poems, it was itself a literary history, which has been described as ‘the seminal, epoch-making work of English Romanticism’.⁴ ³ Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century,  vols (London, –), i, p. i. Hereafter HEP. ⁴ Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), .

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 

There were many collectors of ballads and other old poems in the period immediately succeeding Percy’s and Warton’s publications. John Pinkerton was one who looked in particular to Scotland. Another who did this, under the influence of Percy, was the young Walter Scott, whose own ballad anthology, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–), was a form of homage to Percy. Equally prominent among the immediate successors of Percy and Warton was a major scholar who reacted violently against their work. Joseph Ritson was an impoverished lawyer, originally from the north-east of England, who announced himself to the scholarly world with an astonishing attack on Warton’s History in , in which he aimed to ‘expos[e] to the public eye a tolerable specimen of the numerous errors, falsities, and plagiarisms, of which you have been guilty’.⁵ This kind of intemperate language meant that, although Ritson was often right in his specific criticisms, he was largely rejected by the scholarly establishment, which sided with Percy and Warton. Nevertheless Ritson, before his early death in , produced a series of important collections of medieval poetry, contributing a great deal to the study of Middle English romance and to the then scarcely known field of Robin Hood ballads. What all of these works did was twofold. They provided a corpus of early verse where previously there had not been one. In the space of a few decades, between Percy’s Reliques in  and Scott’s Minstrelsy in  along with Ritson’s Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës in the same year, a very large corpus of ballads, romances, and related literary materials came on to the market, framed as polite letters for consumption by middle-class readers. For many such readers, no doubt, that was enough. But the second thing the anthologists did was to spark the beginnings of English literary history. Warton’s work was avowedly a literary history, but so too were the anthologies by Percy, Scott, and Ritson. In their introductory essays and their scholarly notes these authors were committed to a new literary history, and took medieval literature seriously in a way that had not been done since the Elizabethans. Many medieval works had not been read since the mid sixteenth century, so that medieval literature was itself like an undiscovered territory ready to be enjoyed and colonized. Percy and Warton led the explorers.⁶ This was a novel move at a time when scholars and writers were usually guided by classical literature. In their new literary history of the British Middle Ages, Warton, Percy, and others showed themselves sympathetic to the past they were uncovering.⁷ One of Percy’s scholarly essays in the Reliques, for example, was on alliterative poems (of the kind represented by the fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision, Piers Plowman); this essay is today recognized as the first to identify, name, and with ⁵ [Joseph Ritson], Observations on the Three First Volumes of The History of English Poetry. In a Familiar Letter to Their Author (London, ), . ⁶ On the development of the study of romance in this period see Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, ). ⁷ On the political character of Warton’s and Percy’s work see Philip Connell, ‘British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, / (): –.

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

some accuracy describe the characteristics of alliterative verse, which for a long time previously had barely been comprehended. Whatever the wild speculations, promoted by Percy and Warton (and tirelessly debunked by Ritson), about a world of protected bardic minstrels, these scholars did an enormous amount simply in bringing previously unknown texts to light and showing, for example, how such a work as Spenser’s Faerie Queene was indebted to and self-consciously reliant on a prior tradition. But their sympathy for medieval literature had strict limits. Warton’s work best shows how it was possible to be an admirer, but a very reserved one, of medieval culture. His History of English Poetry was a monument to medieval literature to which generations of readers were indebted. But, as passages cited above show, unlike some of his Victorian successors, he was not finally enamoured of medieval chivalry—a system which existed, after all, to mitigate the undoubted barbarism of the period. There is a deep affective streak running through the History of English Poetry but it does not arise, as it would for some later writers, from an uncomplicated admiration for chivalry and romance. While, as James Simpson puts it, the Middle Ages are positive for Warton because they are dominated by the imagination, which is good for poetry, the period is also marked by ‘the superstitious practice of papish religion’ which is ‘detestable and idolatrous in itself ’, even if it must ‘be suffered for its positive imaginative effects’.⁸ Warton’s objections to the period run even more deeply than his rejection of Catholicism. He felt that ‘We look back on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority; we are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance’ (HEP i, p. i). The Middle Ages are attractive because of their ‘rudeness’, their difference, which lies in their simplicity. But at the same time, in Warton’s view, we would not want to return to that rudeness from our present sophistication. Much as various mariners enjoyed Tahiti, afterwards they sailed away. When looking at a historical period, just as a geographical location, the state of rude simplicity is best contemplated from the comforts of the eighteenthcentury study. Like Warton, Thomas Percy shows abundant enthusiasm for his ballads and romances but at the same time keeps some distance to works he referred to as ‘the barbarous productions of unpolished ages’.⁹ Early in the first volume of the Reliques Percy presented the ballad of ‘Sir Cauline’, which he took from a severely damaged manuscript version. In fleshing out the story with stanzas of his own composition Percy shows a good understanding of medieval romance in a tale of star-crossed lovers, Sir Cauline and Christabell. Like Warton after him, Percy is clearly attracted by the conventions of chivalry as found in medieval romance. In his ballad a princess loves a

⁸ James Simpson, ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – (). ⁹ Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,  vols (London, ), i, p. vi. The words are from the dedication, believed to have been written by Samuel Johnson; the sentiments are probably those of Percy as well as Johnson.

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 

knight who is socially beneath her; the knight performs tasks to make himself worthy; the pair are separated by an angry father until the knight proves himself through defeating a monstrous enemy who threatens the father’s realm. To this point, ‘Sir Cauline’ is an accurate pastiche of a medieval romance. What then happens is unlike any medieval romance, however. After he has defeated his foe the victorious knight Cauline expires in the lists from his wounds and Christabell dies of grief beside him. Percy, like Warton, is attracted to tales of bravery and chivalry but he does not always let them wipe away the streak of violence he sees in medieval culture. It is significant that the ending of ‘Sir Cauline’ was entirely Percy’s own invention; as an editor, he was a notorious tinkerer and improver. In the case of the damaged ‘Sir Cauline’ he had little choice but to improve, and in doing so he created pathos and tragedy arising out of violence, not the ameliorative marriage and happy long life that usually concludes a medieval romance. It was possible indeed to see the ballads and romances as having quite dark shades. J. G. Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and first biographer, lauded the way in which Scott, when presented with a number of variant forms of a ballad, would instinctively put together the ‘correct’ version for his Minstrelsy; he had a ‘knowledge of old manners and phraseology’, Lockhart claimed, together with ‘a manly simplicity of taste, such as had never before been united in the person of a poetical antiquary’. Scott, ‘with instinctive tact’, would recreate ‘the primitive diction and imagery’ of the original and discard corruptions. [He] produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilized ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their wild rude humour, are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror, interrupted by hardly a blot of what deserves to be called vulgarity, and totally free from any admixture of artificial sentimentalism.¹⁰

This passage distils a great deal of what was at stake for literary scholars in the period. It was by then widely known that Thomas Percy had tended to improve his ballads, and a new generation of editors was under greater pressure to be more faithful to the actual record. Hence Lockhart presents Scott here as a natural philologist. At the same time, writing long after Scott had established himself as a successful poet, Lockhart portrays his subject as the inheritor of the medieval bardic tradition (a tradition almost Homeric, in Lockhart’s view). It is the attitude to the premodern past that is of interest here: mixed in with the attraction for ‘stern and deep passions’ is an apprehension bordering on terror in the face of old literature’s ‘cruel tragedies’ and ‘wild rude humour’. Lockhart, writing at the very beginning of the Victorian period, recalls the Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages as attractive but alien, with the potential to terrify. But it is terror in the sense made popular by another key figure of the late ¹⁰ J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott,  vols (Edinburgh and London: Robert Cadell; John Murray and Whittaker & Co., –), i. –.

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

eighteenth century: if ‘the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person’, wrote Edmund Burke in his essay on beauty and the sublime, it is ‘capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’.¹¹ This perceived capacity for terror led in another direction. Horace Walpole had early recognized it in his novel, Castle of Otranto (), which created a taste for the Gothic, that, more than any other genre, took from the Middle Ages the notion of a sublime terror. This strand led also to the Romantic poets who seized selectively on the late eighteenth-century vision of the Middle Ages to produce their own version of the medieval, pioneering the modern sense of the Gothic. The title of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ shows Percy’s influence, which extends to the figure of the bard Bracy, who is not simply the minstrel of Sir Leoline’s castle but is entrusted with an important errand and reveals himself to be a seer of visions: an exalted version of the medieval minstrel owing more to Percy’s vision than any medieval evidence. As a modern ballad, ‘Christabel’ fully brings out aspects of an imagined Middle Ages which result from an investment in ballad and romance to the exclusion of other forms: this is a world in which a sort of delightful horror is not far away, a scene of portents, danger, and, more explicitly than in Percy’s work, a thinly veiled dangerous sexuality. In the medieval romances uncovered by Thomas Warton, knights chastely rescue their intended brides; in ‘Sir Cauline’ as refashioned by Percy, a knight and his lady expire chastely side by side. Coleridge removes the knight in shining armour from the scene altogether in ‘Christabel’, highlighting instead the vulnerable feminine on the one hand through the virginal Christabel herself, and an aggressive, dangerous and overtly sexualized femininity on the other through the mysterious Geraldine, between which men are apparently helpless. These then are aspects of medievalism in the late eighteenth century. In the next section of this essay I return to the ways in which this inheritance was received by the Victorians.

V :   

.................................................................................................................................. Thomas Fosbroke, an impoverished parson in rural England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, published works of antiquarianism from which he hoped to make a little money. In  he produced the second edition of a work on monasticism in the Middle Ages and in it, as if by accident, he coined the adjective ‘medieval’. While there does not appear to have been anything deliberate in this coinage, it reflects a context in ¹¹ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. th edn (London, ), .

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 

which the word ‘Gothic’ was no longer thought appropriate as a general adjective for the Middle Ages.¹² ‘Gothic’ now had many very specific associations, many of them negative. ‘Medieval’, a new word, had none, and this neutral adjective came into increasing use in the early decades of the post-Napoleonic peace, when the Middle Ages took on a new guise. Certainly the Middle Ages could still be thought of as ‘Gothic’ (in Walpole’s or Percy’s or Coleridge’s sense). But scholars now preferred the term ‘medieval’, as a way of describing a historical period without ascribing a particular character to it. One of the defining texts for the period was Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (), a novel in which we find what is in some ways the typical scene of romance as it was filtered through the work of Percy and Warton. Rowena, a pure and virtuous young woman, is oppressed and abjected before being finally rescued by her knight. Rowena is contrasted with the Jew Rebecca, who at one stage cares for and heals the knight Wilfrid of Ivanhoe. But the more directly opposed female figure is arguably the relatively minor character Ulrica, a woman who has been wronged in the past and now lives incarcerated in the castle of Torquilstone where she appears in the middle of the action as part prophetess, part poet, part mad Gothic ghost who perishes in the flames at the siege of the castle. Through Ulrica and the villain Brian de Bois Guilbert, Ivanhoe gestures towards the kind of Gothic Middle Ages seen in The Castle of Otranto and glimpsed (but left open due to incompletion) in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. Ivanhoe, however, is not heavily invested in this vision. With Ulrica’s destruction in the narrative to a great extent the vision of a Gothic Middle Ages also leaves it. With the shift in literary genre represented by Ivanhoe, away from the latter-day ballad seen in ‘Christabel’ to the novel as a major literary form for representing the Middle Ages, there was also a shift towards historical realism. The medievalist novel usually aimed to present a realistic Middle Ages, often with politics at its heart. This is true in Scott’s own revisiting of the Middle Ages in Quentin Durward () and in Victor Hugo’s celebrated Notre-Dame de Paris, published in France in  and soon translated into English. The tendency is even more marked in the work of their English heir, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his novel The Last of the Barons (), the main female character, Sybil Warner, is marked out for tragedy. She is periodically oppressed in the course of the narrative by a group of malign female figures, a travelling troupe of dancers called tymbesteres. But this Gothic subplot remains minor in the novel, and Lytton’s chief interest is in the realistic depiction of a masculine world of political machinations in the Wars of the Roses. His novel seeks to explain the rift between the earl of Warwick and Edward IV, in a very explicitly described context in which Lytton sees the beginnings of a shift from feudalism to middle-class commercialism as taking place in the period. Warwick is the last of the barons of the title, and with him dies the last vestige of chivalry, which Lytton, in his context in the rebellious s, regards as regrettable. When he describes the Battle of Barnet, it is no less than the future of England that is at stake, as

¹² See further Matthews, ‘From Mediaeval’.

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

the forces of a crass commercialism are no longer held back by the softening influence of ethical chivalry. In such a guise, the Middle Ages had become much less alien by the s, much more obviously continuous with the present day and bearing lessons for the present. Not long before the publication of Lytton’s novel, a group of aristocrats had staged the famous Eglinton tournament in Ayrshire, a full-scale re-enactment of medieval pageantry, clearly inspired by the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche in Ivanhoe. Re-enactment obviously suggests a form of continuity with what is being re-enacted; it presupposes an original which can be performed again. This is rather different from the sublime and remote Middle Ages glimpsed in Percy’s work and the poetry of the younger Scott. It suggests that by the s the British Middle Ages were becoming domesticated. This is true in one quite literal sense: Gothic Revival architecture was everywhere in the s. Old medieval churches were being repaired in new medievalist forms, or replaced altogether by neo-Gothic ones, and hence in this respect the image of the Middle Ages was becoming quite commonplace. As we have seen, in the s Warton’s history remained popular as did Percy’s Reliques. But their clear sense of superiority to the period is now compromised by a new attitude: in early Victorian writing, even if the Middle Ages remains in many ways alien, there is often a strong sense of continuity with the period. Significantly, the first glimmerings of modern medieval studies can also be seen in this period. A new generation of scholars was drawn to romance under the influence of Warton, but less because of an attraction to the beautiful and sublime than because of an interest in what they saw as their own past. There was coming to be a national interest in this past and national pride in a sense of continuity. Increasingly in the early Victorian period scholars read romances as if they were realist novels and deduced realistic details from them. What interested Frederic Madden, in his great edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight published in , was not the poem’s intricate plot or dazzling poetry, but its detailed depiction of castles, armour, and clothing and its reference to courtly Christmas games. Madden valued the poem not as a constructed textual artefact but as a clear window on the past. At the same time, another and decidedly non-scholarly approach to the romances was simply to take them and the chivalry they portrayed at face value. Kenelm Henry Digby published an influential work entitled The Broad Stone of Honour in  with the subtitle ‘Rules for the Gentlemen of England’; it appeared in an expanded version (soon after its author’s conversion to Catholicism) in – with the subtitle ‘The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry’. In this work Digby unsubtly and persistently maintained that chivalry, as portrayed in medieval romance, could be regarded as a viable model for modern-day conduct. There is no longer any sense that a line ought to be drawn between the Middle Ages and ourselves, because the author is not concerned about the barbarism of the medieval period. This work might be an extreme example, but it is also an instance of a more general tendency among adherents of the period. Where there is continuity between the Middle Ages and the present, there is no longer much to fear in the Middle Ages.

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

 

Of course it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which the Middle Ages had become popular. The spread of neo-Gothic buildings was not welcomed by all, and in the wake of Catholic Emancipation in  and the Oxford Movement’s tracts in the s (which looked back to the medieval Catholic past of the Church), there was a widespread reaction against a turn to the medieval past. One of the reasons that the term ‘medievalism’ became so widely used in the s was because it was a handy derogatory term to be applied to those in the Oxford Movement and anyone else who appeared to be turning to the barbaric past of the Catholic Middle Ages. It is significant, nevertheless, that by the end of the decade the word ‘medievalism’ could be used in a much less judgemental way (to describe the whimsy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings, for example). There was then a domestication of the medieval at this time, a reclaiming of the period to make it part of the story of British history.

C:    ?

.................................................................................................................................. To this point I have argued that the s was a pivotal period in British understandings of the Middle Ages, and that the context for this can be traced back to the antiquarian efforts of Percy, Warton, Hurd, and after them, Ritson and Scott. To close the chapter, I want to look at an alternative way of thinking about this narrative. I begin by briefly recounting a very well-known story: we owe to Thomas Percy himself an account of how he rescued what became known as the Percy Folio (the inspiration for his Reliques) from a friend’s house where the servants were using it, half a page at a time, to light the fire. Percy wrote this story down himself on the manuscript, now British Library, Add. MSS. . He had particular motivations in telling it: despite the success of the Reliques, readers were increasingly critical of Percy’s considerable editorial liberties. It became important to Percy to point out that the manuscript was incomplete and required the kind of intervention which he made with ‘Sir Cauline’. The manuscript was about a century old when Percy came across it in this fashion. It had been read by different people, who annotated it; it might also have been associated with performance of the material it contained. It was probably once part of a larger library and it seems clear that before it was judged by one provincial middle-class household in the s to be scrap paper, it had been valued. The manuscript today consists of about  pages and it has been calculated that about an eighth of the material originally present is missing, torn out by the culpable maids, which suggests that it had not been lying in the parlour very long. Whatever the history of the manuscript and however much it might once have been valued, when Percy happened on it around , it was clearly a relic of a forgotten culture to which no prestige attached.¹³ In that context, Percy was the right person to ¹³ On the manuscript as a relic see further Groom, Making, –.

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find it. At the time he was a recent Oxford graduate steeped in the classics, but he was also of humble provincial origins, the son of a grocer. He could recognize the appeal of popular ballads, but he was also the man to refashion those ballads to make them fit for the drawing rooms of Georgian England. Much later, Frederick Furnivall perceived this, ironically suggesting that Percy had regarded the manuscript ‘as a young woman from the country with unkempt locks, whom he had to fit for fashionable society’.¹⁴ The Percy Folio, as an object, might be unique, but the culture of popular ballads and romances which it represented was not. Hence, to frame the story of the ballad revival from the s in the way that I have done here does not quite capture the entire story. As Albert Friedman wrote more than fifty years ago, the ballad ‘revival’ was not in fact ‘the “making to live again” of the ballad’, but rather ‘the translation of the ballad from an active life on the popular level to a “museum life” on a higher level’.¹⁵ It certainly makes sense, as I have argued here in the context of histories of the medieval revival, to see the s as crucial. We now tend to think, after Linda Colley, of the eighteenth century as the period in which ‘Great Britain’ was brought into being (with the Act of Union of ) and in which a new national culture espoused classical, ‘Augustan’, Enlightenment, and rationalist values.¹⁶ The Middle Ages, by contrast, were in retreat; in the eighteenth century, there were no new publications of the foremost writers of the late Middle Ages: no editions of the work of John Gower, William Langland, or Thomas Malory and, before , very little Chaucer. What happened from the s was the inevitable reaction. Yet from another point of view, medieval literary culture was quite simply abundant in eighteenth-century Britain. There were hundreds of copies available of the Middle English romances of the heroes Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick, for example, while the late medieval narrative of the wonders of foreign lands, Mandeville’s Travels, was also easily available. Many of these texts were available in cheap productions which had drifted a long way from their Middle English origins, but it was nevertheless possible to buy what was, for the time, a perfectly scholarly edition of Mandeville’s Travels, issued in , just as there were reliable editions of the Middle English chronicles of Robert Mannyng of Brunne and ‘Robert of Gloucester’, produced by Thomas Hearne at the same time (, ). In what sense, then, can we say there was a medieval ‘revival’ in the s? What makes this revival stand out is the influence that such texts as the Reliques had on the Romantic movement, and particularly the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In one direction the medieval revival is privileged because it leads to the story of the canon of

¹⁴ John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall (eds), Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript,  vols (London, –), i, p. xvi. ¹⁵ Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ; see further on this Groom, Making, –. ¹⁶ Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation –. nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).

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 

English literature. Secondly, the work of Warton, Percy, and Ritson in particular is part of the story of English literary history: the beginnings of the university study of English literature are bound up with them. Nevertheless, the notion of a medieval revival has less to tell us about the progress of medievalism as such than has been thought, or at least, it obscures important aspects of that story. Such publications as Percy’s, Warton’s, and Hurd’s represent not the discovery of something forgotten, but rather the translation of something that had been there all along into elite culture. In this context, what Thomas Percy did was not to discover something new, but to take something entirely commonplace—the popular culture of the day—and to confer distinction on it, recasting it for elite literary culture. He himself was quite aware of this. His reference in the preface to the Reliques to the material he had collected as a set of ‘barbarous productions’ might be a modesty topos, but it also points to what could all too easily be said about the verse and its blend of ‘polite culture and street culture’ (Groom, Making, ). The point of the story about the discovered manuscript is perhaps not the providential rescue of a precious source, but that Percy was the man—the son of a small-town grocer but well educated—best placed both to recognize popular culture when he saw it, and also to shift it into an elite form. Indeed, through his education and his own shift from provincial commerce to the established Church of England, this translation was one he was familiar with himself. What is important about the medieval revival of the late eighteenth century, then, and what made it so important to the later Victorian revival, is first the wonder it provoked, the sense of an alien world that both attracted and repelled, which was what Romantic poets and Gothic novelists took up. In this sense, the medieval past was like an exotic and undiscovered territory. But secondly, the opposite tendency was also important; the way in which this revival made popular culture acceptable within elite culture, allowing the understanding of the Middle Ages in terms of continuity with modernity. In the Victorian age, with its rapid and frightening transformation of landscape, cities, and society, that apparently timeless and simple past began to look very appealing: not a distant country at all, but a familiar place in an attractively more primitive guise.

S  Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation –. nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Connell, Philip, ‘British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later EighteenthCentury England’, Historical Journal, / (): –. Friedman, Albert B., The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Johnston, Arthur, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, ).

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

Matthews, David, ‘From Mediaeval to Mediaevalism: A New Semantic History’, RES  / (): –. Simpson, James, ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in James Simpson, Jeremy Dimmick, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Spadafora, David, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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 

N book better embodies the anxiety that gnawed at nineteenth-century antiquarians, historians, and literary critics than J. A. Giles’s Six Old English Chronicles, of Which Two Are Now First Translated from the Monkish Latin Originals, published in .¹ This eminently useful volume provides accessible English versions of a number of influential chronicles. Æthelweard’s tenth-century Latin Chronicon fills in some gaps from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Asser, a tenth-century Welsh monk, wrote a Life of King Alfred that is still regarded as the most detailed early account of that monarch. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae got its very first English translation in the volume, and made possible a new scrutiny of the early modern chronicles. English versions of ‘Gildas Sapiens’ and the Historia Brittonum attributed to the ninthcentury Welsh monk Nennius, too, were now available in the vernacular. Rounding out the volume was a translation of one of the most celebrated works of medieval chorography, the De situ Britanniae of Richard of Cirencester, a fourteenth-century account of travels around Britain that had received the imprimatur of one of the eighteenth century’s greatest antiquarians, William Stukeley. Richard’s book was for the first time widely available in the vernacular, but it had already proven its value. Charles Bertram, who discovered and published the manuscript, himself had declared that Richard ‘is not to be classed with the most inconsiderable historians of the middle age . . . It is considered by Dr Stukeley, and those who have inspected it, as a jewel, and worthy to be rescued from destruction by the press.’² Historians had therefore been using it for decades. Martin Folkes draws on Richard of Cirencester in his Tables of English Silver and Gold Coins (–), noting the

¹ J. A. Giles (ed.), Six Old English Chronicles, of Which Two Are Now First Translated from the Monkish Latin Originals: Ethelwerd’s Chronicle; Asser’s Life of Alfred; Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British History; Gildas; Nennius; and Richard of Cirencester: Edited, with Illustrative Notes (London: H. G. Bohn, ). ² Six Old English Chronicles, p. xx.

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occurrence of ‘near  names of towns, &c. unheard of before’.³ Richard Gough uses Richard’s map in  to date other early works of cartography.⁴ In the same year Thomas Llewellyn draws on Richard for information about the early settlement of Somersetshire.⁵ In  William Enfield learns from Richard that ‘The county about Leverpool . . . formerly constituted a part of the kingdom of the Brigantes.’⁶ Even Edward Gibbon uses it for some of his famous notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Gentleman’s Magazine includes letter after letter from amateur antiquaries, correcting the record by invoking Richard’s work. The pace gains further momentum in the nineteenth century, by which time Richard of Cirencester has become one of the standard sources for the early history of Britain. Richard of Cirencester’s De situ Britanniae had only one significant drawback: it was pure fiction. Bertram concocted the whole thing. But a century had passed between the work’s announcement in  and its debunking in , and it would be another twenty-three years before its status as a forgery was widely accepted. The damage had been done. The phoney Richard was sharing a volume with authentic texts, and countless works of antiquarian research suddenly came under suspicion, and the basis of understanding early British history was in doubt. This episode is a reminder that the prospect of deception hung over every inquiry made by antiquarians, historians, literary historians, and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Traps like these awaited everyone discussing medieval literature in the nineteenth century, when almost any edition of medieval texts might be a hoax—or, even more confusing, a blend of the genuine and the bogus. ‘In practice,’ writes Christopher N. L. Brooke, ‘for most historians, dodging the forger is an occasional exciting hazard, not a normal part of his daily routine.’⁷ That may be true today, when most significant works have been picked over by experts through the course of decades or even centuries. Such was not the case, though, through most of the nineteenth century, when to study the works of the Middle Ages was to venture into uncharted waters. And much of the nineteenth century’s engagement with the works of the Middle Ages can

³ Martin Folkes, Tables of English Silver and Gold Coins: First Published by Martin Folkes, Esq; and Now Re-Printed, with Plates and Explanations, by the Society of Antiquaries (London, –),  n. ⁴ Richard Gough, Anecdotes of British Topography; or, An Historical Account of What Has Been Done for Illustrating the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland (London, ), . ⁵ Thomas Llewellyn, An Historical Account of the British or Welsh Versions and Editions of the Bible: With an Appendix Containing the Dedications Prefixed to the First Impressions (London, ). ⁶ William Enfield, An Essay towards the History of Leverpool, Drawn up from Papers Left by the Late Mr George Perry, and from Other Materials Since Collected, by William Enfield: With Views of the Principal Public Structures, a Chart of the Harbour, and a Map of the Environs. nd edn (London, ), . ⁷ Christopher N. L. Brooke, ‘Approaches to Medieval Forgery’, Journal of the Society of Archivists,  (–) –, at .

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be understood only against a background of the fakes, frauds, forgeries, counterfeits, and hoaxes that had been piling up over the previous century. The medieval canon was growing quickly in the decades leading up to the Victorian era. When Thomas Warton’s milestone History of English Poetry appeared in , with its learned comments on Thomas Hoccleve, John Gower, and John Lydgate, most of the audience had likely never read a word of any of them. The contours of the history Warton recounts are far from our own conception of the high points of medieval literature. With the exception of Chaucer’s works,⁸ very few medieval texts—even those we might expect to find in today’s undergraduate anthologies—were familiar before . Beowulf, for instance, was entirely unknown to all but a few antiquarians until Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin published De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV: Poëma danicum dialecto anglosaxonica in , and even then it was inaccessible to a popular audience before John Mitchell Kemble’s translation of The Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf in . It goes unmentioned in Warton’s History. Layamon’s Brut, likewise, was very little known before Sir Frederic Madden’s edition of . (‘This curious work never was, and probably never will be, printed’, wrote George Ellis in . Isaac Disraeli was there to correct him: ‘but we live in an age of publication, and Layamon is said to be actually in the press’.⁹) Even many medieval works that had been ‘discovered’ earlier were hardly familiar among the educated public. Piers Plowman, for instance, appeared in print in  and —and then not again until .¹⁰ John Gower’s Confessio Amantis appeared in , , and —but not again until .¹¹ The texts were known to exist, but little more than that. The pattern is similar for many major English writers of the Middle Ages. Most medieval literature was terra incognita until, and even into, the Victorian era. This significant expansion of the medieval canon made the era an attractive target for all manner of fakers. A centuries-old provenance can give a modern work a kind of authority, a distinction guaranteed by its supposed antiquity: this makes the fakery more desirable. Apparent antiquity also makes it less likely that a reader will be able to spot the imposition: this makes the fakery more practicable. Forge a poem by someone recently dead, and plenty of people will eagerly point out anomalies. Forge a poem by a third-century Scottish bard, an eighth-century Saxon translator, or a fourteenthcentury Welsh poet, and who can say with authority that it is inauthentic? As

⁸ Chaucer’s works were reasonably well known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the Canterbury Tales appeared in print in , with major editions either of the Middle English text or a modern adaptation in , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , and . ⁹ George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, to Which Is Prefixed an Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the English Poetry and Language. rd edn,  vols (London: G. and W. Nicol, ), i. ; Isaac Disraeli, Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature.  vols (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, ), i.  n. ¹⁰ See Charlotte Brewer, Editing ‘Piers Plowman’: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ¹¹ The Confessio Amantis of John Gower, ed. Reinhold Pauli,  vols (London: Bell & Daldy, ).

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G. Kitson Clark remarks, ‘The probability that official documents may have been forged or tampered with increases the further you go back into the middle ages.’¹² Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forgers learned these lessons. If we adopt the era’s own expansive conception of ‘Dark’ or ‘Middle Ages’—nearly anything in Europe before what we have come to call the Renaissance that was not considered part of classical antiquity, including works in Latin, Old English, Middle English, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old French, and other languages—we see that many of the great literary forgeries had to do with medieval texts. The two most high-profile eighteenth-century attempts to expand the canon of the vernacular literature of Great Britain were the Ossianic poems published by James Macpherson, supposedly dating from around the third century, and the Rowley poems by Thomas Chatterton, dating from the fifteenth. The catalogue of spurious medieval texts does not stop there. Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) ‘discovered’ many medieval Welsh texts, which appeared between  and . William Henry Ireland is most famous for the so-called Shakespeare Papers, and the pseudo-Shakespearean Vortigern is the most notorious document to emerge from the imposture. But Ireland too ventured into the Middle Ages, most notably with an unpublished manuscript poem, The Divill and Rychard. The full title proclaims its origin in the late fifteenth century: ‘The Divill and Rychard: As itt was donn onn Sonday last att the Pallace att Westmynster by the Clarkes and Boyes of Powles fore owre Gracyouse Valarowse most noble renownedd and puyssant Kyng Henry VII. on his Crownatyon afterr the Kylling owre late usurpyng Tyraunte Rychard III att the Courte beying atte thys syghtern. . S. W. H. I. Apr  .’¹³ Fakes were not exclusively textual. Giovanni Bastianini forged many statues, some incorporating genuine fifteenth-century marble, others created from scratch.¹⁴ At the end of the nineteenth century, Luigi Parmiggiani (or Parmeggiani), also known as Louis Marcy, ‘made a number of spectacular sales of forged mediaeval works of art, amongst others the sales to the Victoria & Albert Museum which helped precipitate the  select committee inquiry, as well as to the British Museum’.¹⁵ The ‘Spanish Forger’—whose identity is still unknown—turned out dozens, perhaps hundreds, of miniatures and illuminated manuscripts at the end of the Victorian era.¹⁶ Any museum with a significant collection of medieval art is certain to have many identified forgeries now consigned to storage, and most probably have as-yet-unidentified forgeries hanging on walls. There were also potential fakes, less clear-cut than the Ossianic or Rowleyan poems, but still hovering at the border between authenticity and inauthenticity. Nineteenthcentury ‘repairs’ and ‘restorations’ of medieval paintings and statues, though perhaps ¹² G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: Heinemann, ), . ¹³ BL, Add. MS , fols r–r. ¹⁴ Carol Helstosky, ‘Giovanni Bastianini, Art Forgery, and the Market in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Journal of Modern History, / (): –. ¹⁵ David Phillips, Exhibiting Authenticity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ¹⁶ See William Voelkle with Roger S. Wieck, The Spanish Forger (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, ).

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done with the best of intentions, often introduced modern elements into genuine old works; Macpherson and Iolo Morganwg did their own ‘restorations’ of authentic medieval texts. In the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Thomas Percy insists on a high degree of fidelity to his source material, even to the point of suggesting he was too faithful, leading to pedantry: ‘The desire of being accurate has perhaps seduced him into too minute and trifling an exactness . . . Where any thing was altered that deserved particular notice, the passage is distinguished by two inverted “commas.” And the Editor has endeavoured to be as faithful, as the imperfect state of his materials would admit.’¹⁷ From our point of view, though, Percy was reckless, and his treatment of his sources would not pass muster among editors today. His silent ‘improvements’ to his manuscript sources may amount to a kind of fakery. Even when he was being scrupulous with his sources, he found himself wrestling with fakes. Percy included ‘Hardyknute’, then widely believed genuine, albeit with a headnote that ‘this fine morsel of heroic poetry hath generally past for ancient’, but he put it at the end of his collection ‘that such as doubt of its age may the better compare it with other pieces of genuine antiquity’.¹⁸ Some fakes were never seriously intended to deceive, but still ran the risk of misleading credulous readers. The Book of Jasher is more prank than hoax; Jacob Ilive left many hints in  that this ‘ancient text’ translated by the eighth-century monk Alcuin was not meant to be taken seriously. Still some were taken in. The humourless Thomas Hartwell Horne, for instance, citing the disappointment of friends who took the book for authentic, pulls no punches in his Manual of Biblical Bibliography (): ‘In the hope of preventing future unwary purchasers from being similarly misled, he now subjoins a few specimens of the falsehoods, anachronisms, and contradictions of the Holy Scriptures, which characterise this nocturnal production of the non-sane infidel author, Jacob Ilive.’¹⁹ An edition that took Ilive’s jeu d’esprit seriously appeared in Bristol in , and as late as  the Rosicrucians regarded the comic imitation as a work of divine inspiration. Very old forgeries were still circulating in the nineteenth century. Ingulf ’s Historia Monasterii Croylandensis was widely cited in the period; though it purported to be by an eleventh-century abbot, it was in fact from the thirteenth or fourteenth century— authentically medieval, but a fake nonetheless.²⁰ As Thomas Hoving writes of the visual arts, ‘every day we’re learning that lots of antiquities we thought were faked in the late

¹⁷ Thomas Percy (ed.), Reliques of Ancient Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric Kind): Together with Some Few of Later Date,  vols (London, ), i, p. xii. ¹⁸ Reliques, ii. . See also Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ¹⁹ Thomas Hartwell Horne, A Manual of Biblical Bibliography: Comprising a Catalogue, Methodically Arranged, of the Principal Editions and Versions of the Holy Scriptures (London: T. Cadell, ), . ²⁰ Ingulf is cited as support for the authenticity of Rowley’s poems in Jeremiah Milles’s edition. See Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, in the Fifteenth Century, by Thomas Rowley, Priest, &c.: With a Commentary, in Which the Antiquity of Them Is Considered, and Defended, ed. Jeremiah Milles (London, ),  n.

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nineteenth century are actually forgeries of earlier times’.²¹ And folklorist Charles Martin points out some of the problems with early collections of medieval documents: The first important collection of Anglo-Saxon documents was a six-volume study, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saonici, edited by J. M. Kemble and published between  and . Most of the , documents included are royal charters. . . . All of the documents . . . are not originals, however. A few are extant originals, some are duplicate copies of lost originals . . . others are later copies . . . and still others are outright forgeries.²²

Kitson Clark even refers to ‘what may be called innocent forgery, as when a monastery conceived itself to have received certain rights from a dead king, but could not find the actual document conferring the grant among its muniments, and therefore supplied the loss’.²³ Students of literary falsehood are usually careful to distinguish actual fakes from pseudepigrapha, works bearing false authors’ names, though perhaps arising from error rather than mens rea. From the point of view of the nineteenth century, though, it mattered little when the confusion was introduced. Any text or artefact that was inconsistent with its declared provenance threatened to lead Victorian readers astray. As Thomas B. Shaw put it in , In criticising Chaucer’s works, we are at the outset met by the difficulty of distinguishing among the many mediæval poems ascribed to him those which are genuine . . . we may consider as doubtful the Romaunt of the Rose (of which however some translation was certainly made by Chaucer), The Court of Love, The Complaint of the Black Knight (probably by Lydgate), The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, Chaucer’s Dream, The Flower and the Leaf.²⁴

New fakes of medieval works from this era continue to turn up even now. In  Barbara Palmer revealed John W. Walker’s records of performance of the Towneley Plays were mostly Victorian forgeries.²⁵ And in an important study based on primary archival research, Lawrence Warner has shown the role a faker, William Dupré—a ‘distant disciple of Chatterton’—played in establishing the canon of William Langland in the s.²⁶ Dupré’s forged medieval manuscripts were exposed, after which Dupré

²¹ Thomas P. F. Hoving, ‘The Game of Duplicity’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, / (Feb. ): –, at . ²² Charles B. Martin, ‘Anglo-Saxon Diplomatics: An Introduction to Sources’, South Central Bulletin, / (Winter ): –, at . ²³ Kitson Clark, Critical Historian, . ²⁴ Thomas B. Shaw, A History of English Literature, ed, William Smith (London: John Murray, ), –. ²⁵ Barbara Palmer, ‘ “Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited’, Comparative Drama,  (): –. ²⁶ Lawrence Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

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appealed for assistance to George Chalmers, one of the central combatants in the dispute over William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare Papers. Romantic and Victorian critics were all too aware of how much deception lurked in the ostensibly medieval works they read. ‘The present age,’ wrote Vicesimus Knox in , ‘it must be owned with regret, is an age of literary deception.’²⁷ Many surveys of the history of the English Middle Ages are filled with warnings about the number of hoaxes threatening to waylay innocent explorers. Credulous medieval writers, according to Joseph Berington in , ‘would not hesitate to prefer forged decretals, or the diploma of Constantine, to the sober and really genuine productions of the most enlightened age’.²⁸ Henry Hallam in  bemoaned the absurd religious beliefs of the Middle Ages, noting that ‘In most cases, they were the work of deliberate imposture.’²⁹ Lamenting the difficulties of writing about the medieval Church, Sharon Turner complained in  of ‘So much imposture, so many errors, so much fanaticism, and such fierce passions’, that it is hardly possible to say anything with confidence.³⁰ In , Robert Thomas Hampson advised historians ‘to subjoin the diplomatic doctrine of dates as employed in distinguishing the genuine from the forged charters of former times’.³¹ As James A. Jeremie wrote in  of the time of the Church fathers, ‘forged writings were largely circulated and injudiciously received by the Christians’.³² Even major authors’ canons may have contained fraudulent patches: writing in  about ‘A Praise of Women’, Charles Deshler observed, This Poem is usually printed with Chaucer’s works, and was considered genuine, till the judicious Tyrwhitt invested it with doubts. And although this eminent critic is of the opinion that it ought not to be imputed to him, . . . yet we cannot but observe in it many of the characteristic peculiarities both of style and thought, which distinguish Chaucer. At all events, and if it be a forgery, it will still serve as an illustration of Chaucer, since the copyist was obliged to conform as closely as possible to the sentiments of the author whom he counterfeited.³³

²⁷ Knox, ‘On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English Poets’, in Essays Moral and Literary. New edn,  vols (London, ), i. . ²⁸ Joseph Berington, A Literary History of the Middle Ages: Comprehending an Account of the State of Learning, from the Close of the Reign of Augustus, to Its Revival in the Fifteenth Century (London: J. Mawman, ), . ²⁹ Henry Hallam, View of the State of Society in Europe during the Middle Ages,  vols (London: John Murray, ), ii. . ³⁰ Sharon Turner, The History of England during the Middle Ages,  vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, ), v. . ³¹ Robert Thomas Hampson, Medii Ævi Kalendarium; or, Dates, Charters, and Customs of the Middle Ages, with Kalendars from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century; and an Alphabetical Digest of Obsolete Names of Days: Forming a Glossary of the Dates of the Middle Ages: With Tables and Other Aids for Ascertaining Dates.  vols (London: Henry Kent Causton & Co., ), i. . ³² James A. Jeremie, with J. B. S. Carwithen and A. Lyall, Christianity in the Middle Ages: Being the History of the Church from the Second to the Twelfth Century (London and Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., ), . ³³ Charles Deshler (ed.), Selections from the Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: With a Concise Life of That Poet, and Remarks Illustrative of His Genius (New York and London: Wiley & Putnam, ), .

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(He was apparently taken in by a pseudepigraphal work.) Even so distinguished a critic as Edmund Gosse fretted over the authenticity of The Kingis Quair in , and was able to offer only a half-hearted conclusion that it was ‘probably authentic’.³⁴ This self-consciousness about the risk of encountering forgeries led some editors and scholars to advertise their strict adherence to the truth, as if to anticipate accusations of falsification. We see it as early as Thomas Percy, whose preface to Five Pieces of Runic Poetry () is a not-so-oblique comment on James Macpherson: ‘The Editor was in some doubt whether he should subjoin or suppress the originals. But as they lie within little compass, and as the books whence they are extracted are very scarce, he was tempted to add them as vouchers for the authenticity of his version.’³⁵ The declaration signals his determination to be scrupulous with his sources. James Henry Dixon’s collection of Early English Poetry, Ballads and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages for the Percy Society () includes an even more explicit boast: ‘Nor will there be discovered in our pages a solitary “modern antique,” or literary forgery.’³⁶ It takes no small measure of temerity to make the claim, though Dixon’s confidence seems misplaced when we notice the name ‘J. Payne Collier’ five pages earlier, listed among the ‘Council of the Percy Society’. Does it matter whether a document is a fake? It is possible to defend a wide range of answers to this question, depending on who is reading it and to what end. In the literary culture of the nineteenth century, though, it mattered very much, at least to some people. This era’s vernacular criticism was particularly concerned with historicism: the conviction that a work of art derived its significance, and at least some of its merit, from its place in history. To a historicist critic, two literary texts, one from , the other from , must be interpreted and evaluated differently, even if they are literatim identical. Placing a text in its historical moment, therefore, is a necessary precondition for reading it. Thomas Tyrwhitt, for instance, opens his edition of The Canterbury Tales () with this statement of historicist principles: ‘In order to make the proper use of these Mss., to unravel the confusions of their orthography, and to judge between a great number of various readings, it was necessary to enquire into the state of our language and versification at the time when Chaucer wrote.’³⁷ Establishing the culture that produced a text would provide the appropriate set of criteria by which to analyse and evaluate it. A text that claimed a false provenance for itself therefore was claiming the right to be judged by inappropriate standards. One of the reasons fakers claimed antique provenances for their works, then, is because it invited audiences to read them in a way they otherwise would not. Even the most banal observations could seem profound if they antedated all the other banal observations. Others may have done similar things, but my candidate did them first,

³⁴ Edmund Gosse, A Short History of Modern English Literature (London: Heinemann, ), . ³⁵ Thomas Percy (ed.), Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, tr. from the Islandic Language (London, ), sig. Ar. ³⁶ James Henry Dixon (ed.), Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages: Edited from Original Manuscripts and Scarce Publications, xvii (London: Percy Society, ), p. x. ³⁷ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt,  vols (London, –), i, p. i.

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and therefore deserves to be celebrated. The poet, for centuries imagined as a master of imitation, is newly conceived among the Romantics as an innovator. Priority assumed ever greater importance in literary criticism, perhaps as a result of Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (). The emphasis on originality, on being first, is summed up in Young’s assertion that ‘Originals are, and ought to be, the great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion; Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before.’³⁸ As a result, one of the little-acknowledged keywords of Romantic-era literary history is first. It is difficult to turn more than a few pages of Warton’s History without coming across some claim of priority: ‘The first poet whose name occurs . . . in this annals, is Robert of Glocester’ (i. ); ‘in this Roman d’ Alexandre verses of twelve syllables were first used’ (i. ); ‘their troubadours were the first writers of metrical romances’ (i. ); ‘Cinthio Giraldi supposes, that the art of the troubadours . . . was first communicated from France to the Italians’ (i. ); ‘It is certain, that these  were the first of our dramatic exhibitions’ (i. ); ‘it is not quite certain, that Longland was the first who led the way in this singular species of versification’ (i. ); and so on. He was not alone. Percy collected the ballads in his Reliques, displaying them ‘not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature, shewing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages’.³⁹ Thomas Tyrwhitt is likewise eager ‘to distinguish the parts [of The Canterbury Tales] where the author appears as an inventor, from those where he is merely a translator, or imitator’ (i, p. ii). Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets praises Abraham Cowley as ‘the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode’, John Milton as ‘the first Englishman who, after the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classick elegance’, and John Dryden as ‘the first who joined argument with poetry’.⁴⁰ Of course histories have always had interest in the origins of the institutions they chronicle, but the attempt to understand literary history as a series of firsts is distinctive in the later eighteenth century, and only grew over time. A writer, therefore, who claimed priority without having earned it was determined to hoodwink the critics, and the threat was greater than the improper interpretation or valuation of a single text. Because knowledge builds on knowledge, a fake that managed to elbow its way into a literary history threatened to distort the interpretation and evaluation of every other text. If the canon of texts from which we derive the criteria for historicist judgements of the Middle Ages includes fakes, then all judgements based on those criteria are suspect. The metaphor of counterfeit money, widely understood to taint the entire monetary supply, was often invoked, as when George Chalmers, one of the central figures in the

³⁸ Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ (London, ), . ³⁹ Percy, Reliques, i, p. vi. ⁴⁰ Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson,  vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), xxi. , , .

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disputes over the Ireland Shakespeare Papers, complained in : ‘The principal laws relative to counterfeit Coin having been made above a century ago,’ he writes, ‘the tricks and devices of modern times are not in many instances provided for, and hence it is that the Country is deluged with base Money.’⁴¹ A literary economy deluged with base metals was unsustainable. There can be no question that the fabrications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries damaged scholarly inquiry: they delayed the development of some areas of knowledge and they put inquirers off some subjects for a while. They forced inquirers to second-guess all their source material, and it is possible that a fear of being deceived was enough to discourage someone from announcing new insights. It is tempting to think that, had antiquarians not wasted the s arguing over the authenticity of Chatterton’s Rowley poems, they might have spent time on more serious research into authentic fifteenth-century poetry. But the forgeries also had benefits—they always do. In the words of Anthony Grafton, one of the pioneers in the study of literary fakes, For , years and more, forgery has . . . stimulated vital innovations in the technical methods of scholars . . . forgery has stimulated, both in the forgers who tried to create convincing documents and in the critics who tried to unmask them, the development of a richer sense of what the past was really like. Forger and critic have been entangled through time like Laocoon and his serpents; the changing nature of their continuous struggle forms a central theme in the development of historical and philological scholarship.⁴²

Fake medieval documents, whatever their provenance and whatever variety of fakery they embodied, encouraged critics to examine their evidence with an unprecedented degree of attention. Forgers, in other words, taught the critics how to read Chaucer and Langland. Fakers provided crash courses in certain kinds of textual analysis, and forced detectors to develop new and increasingly sophisticated techniques. The two sides were engaged in a battle of escalating sophistication, as sometimes one pulled into the lead, sometimes another. And so it may well be the case that the investigation of fakes, rather than wasting the time of the inquirers, actually spurred them on to their best work. The most powerful weapon in the detectors’ arsenal was the anachronism.⁴³ According to a historicist conception of cultural development, a work should reflect the age in which it was produced; if it contains things incompatible with the age in which it is said to have been produced, it must be a fake. And so critics scrutinized documents looking

⁴¹ George Chalmers, Facts and Observations Relative to the Coinage and Circulation of Counterfeit or Base Money, with Suggestions for Remedying the Evil (London, ), . ⁴² Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. ⁴³ I discuss the role of anachronisms in eighteenth-century discussions of forgery in Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), ch. .

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for slips in chronology. All the major varieties of anachronism-detection show up in the case of England’s best-known faker of medieval works, Thomas Chatterton, whose poems were published ‘as the supposed productions of  , a priest of Bristol, in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV’.⁴⁴ Thomas Chatterton lived and died in the eighteenth century, and his ‘discovered’ poems prompted little attention during his lifetime. After his death, though—an apparent suicide at the age of —there was a wide-ranging discussion of the authenticity of the works he published.⁴⁵ His pseudomedieval productions hung over the reception of medieval texts well into the nineteenth century. Major editions of and works about Chatterton appeared in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and , along with dozens of reissues and minor editions. No actual fifteenth-century poet had half the influence of this fake fifteenth-century poet, and certainly none did more to advance literary scholarship. From the time of their first collected publication, authenticity was a concern with the Rowleyan poems. In Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century ()—the title itself advertises doubt— editor Thomas Tyrwhitt opens his preface with both a declaration of their putative date and an indication of his concerns about accurate transmission: The Poems, which make the principal part of this Collection, have for some time excited much curiosity, as the supposed productions of  , a priest of Bristol, in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV. They are here faithfully printed from the most authentic MSS that could be procured. . . . Nothing more therefore seems necessary at present, than to inform the Reader shortly of the manner in which these Poems were first brought to light, and of the authority upon which they are ascribed to the persons whose names they bear.⁴⁶

He concludes by offering no definitive verdict—‘It may be expected perhaps, that the Editor should give an opinion upon this important question; but he rather chooses, for many reasons, to leave it to the determination of the unprejudiced and intelligent Reader’⁴⁷—but the seeds of doubt have clearly been planted. The ensuing dispute over the authenticity of the Rowley poems is one of the emblematic scholarly disputes of the Romantic age, occupying dozens of pamphlets and magazine articles beginning in the s and continuing for decades—as late as , an editor could write that ‘The controversy concerning the authenticity of

⁴⁴ Thomas Chatterton, Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (London, ), p. v. ⁴⁵ Current thinking has entertained the possibility, even the probability, that the self-administered arsenic was intended as a treatment for a sexually transmitted disease, not as a suicide attempt. In legend, though, Chatterton was a tragic but glorious suicide. ⁴⁶ Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol (), p. v. ⁴⁷ Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol (), p. xiii.

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the Poems ascribed to , has called for the abilities of the most competent judges . . . but no decision, which can be regarded as final, has hitherto been given.’⁴⁸ The resulting controversy is valuable for showing how Romantic-era readers understood the relationship between literature and history, and established the modes according to which older texts would be read through the nineteenth century. Anachronisms were the most common means of challenging the authenticity of the Rowley poems, though what sorts of anachronism exercised critics varied. The easiest sort of textual anachronism to detect today is probably the lexical. Tools like the Oxford English Dictionary enable us to say with reasonable confidence that the word drawing in the Rowleyan poems—‘a drawynge of Geoffreis Logge’—is unlikely to be fifteenth-century in origin, since there is no other evidence of this sense of the word before . Before June , though, when the fascicle of A New English Dictionary containing the part of the alphabet running from doom to dziggetai appeared, few critics had the temerity to make such claims. A few dedicated antiquarians with prodigious memories might sometimes hazard that sort of negative statement, but they left themselves open to embarrassment if their opponents were able to turn up even a single counterexample. Orthography provided another hunting-ground for anachronisms, though the variability of spelling in authentic documents from the Middle Ages made it easier for fakers to improvise their own eccentric spellings. Chatterton gave his forgeries an air of antiquity by cloaking modern words in pseudo-antique spellings. It is easy to be cynical about their approach to old orthography: take your text; double every consonant that can be doubled; change i’s to y’s and vice versa; sprinkle silent e’s liberally; be a little more sparing with silent h’s. When the forgers went too far, though, critics were ready to argue that orthography could betray deception. This led to discussions about the degree of variability in actual medieval and early modern texts, as when John Wyatt noted that ‘The orthography of that age was . . . little reducible to any fixed standard . . . But that a vast superfluity of letters is generally observable, no man at all conversant with antient writings can doubt.’⁴⁹ For supporters of Chatterton it was an article of faith that no spelling, however outré, was too eccentric to be from the fifteenth century. The sceptics’ case depended on establishing the true limits of medieval orthography and developing the rudiments of an understanding of textual transmission in English manuscripts—genuinely new territory. Because they lacked authoritative tools for dating individual words and spellings, investigators of potential fakes were forced to fall back on modes of expression and poetic form, and those are much more difficult to quantify. Early in his book on

⁴⁸ Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, ed. L[ancelot] S[harpe] (Cambridge, ), p. v. ⁴⁹ John Wyatt, A Comparative Review of the Opinions of Mr James Boaden . . . and of James Boaden, Esq. (London, []), .

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Chatterton, Edmond Malone—one of the great champions of historicist reading— identifies four fronts on which he plans to challenge Chatterton’s supporters: I will confine my observations to these four points. . The versification of the poems attributed to Rowley. . The imitations of modern authours that are found in them. . The anachronisms with which they abound. . The hand-writing of the Mss.—the parchments, &c.⁵⁰

Chatterton’s metre was one of the central concerns, not just for Malone but for many in the disputes of the s and s. The argument advanced by Malone and other sceptics was that the metre of Rowley’s poetry was too mellifluous, too regular, to be a product of the fifteenth century. Even if Chatterton’s poetry is ‘disfigured by old spelling’, Malone argues, the verse flows ‘as smoothly as any of Pope’s’, and that, for Malone, is ‘a matter difficult to be got over’.⁵¹ Another reader believed the excellence of the versification was the first indication of fraud: ‘On our first opening these Poems,’ the writer for the Monthly Review observed, ‘the smooth style of the harmony, the easy march of the verse, the regular station of the cæsura, the structure of the phrase, and the case and complexion of the thoughts, made us presently conclude they were Mock Ruins.’⁵² Another who deployed this mode of argument was Horace Walpole, generally cast as the villain in the Chatterton story, though he does not deserve that role. ‘I told him also,’ Walpole recalled to a friend, ‘that I had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed MSS. I mentioned their reasons, particularly that there were no such metres known to the age of Richard I—and that might be a reason with Chatterton himself to shift the era of his productions.’⁵³ Implicit in these arguments is a conception of the development of English prosody, from the crude and hobbling metres of the Middle Ages to the smooth and flowing numbers of Walpole’s own century. The change had not begun to happen in the fifteenth century; only with figures like the Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, and later Edmund Waller did English versification achieve what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers saw as its proper footing. ‘And here let me remark how incredible it is’, writes Walpole, that Rowley, a monk of a mere commercial town, which was all Bristol then was, should have purified the language and introduced a diversified metre more classic than was known to that polished courtly poet, Lord Surry; and this in the barbarous

⁵⁰ Edmond Malone, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley. nd edn (i.e. st collected edn) (London, ), . ⁵¹ Malone, Cursory Observations, . ⁵² Monthly Review,  (Apr. ): . ⁵³ Walpole to Bewley, in Letter to the Editor, cited in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis,  vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), xvi. .

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 



and turbulent times of Henry VI and that the whole nation should have relapsed into the same barbarism of style and versification, till Lord Surry, I might almost say, till Waller, arose. I leave to better scholars and better antiquaries to settle how Rowley became so well versed in the Greek tragedians. He was as well acquainted with Butler, or Butler with him, for a chaplain of the late Bishop of Exeter has found in Rowley a line of Hudibras.⁵⁴

Walpole read the opening of The Battle of Hastings II—‘Oh Truth! immortal daughter of the skies, | Too lyttle known to wryters of these daies’—and scribbled in the margin of his copy, ‘Is it credible that these shou’d not be modern lines?’⁵⁵ Even Rowley’s defenders, like Jacob Bryant, had to address the too-good-to-be-true prosodic mastery, grudgingly admitting, ‘I have had my scruples upon this head.’ He was left with a not very convincing explanation: although Rowley’s versification was better than anything else yet discovered in the fifteenth century, still, ‘In every age there will be a difference among writers; and whatever number of poets there may be found, it is a great chance, but there will be some one person more eminent than the rest.’⁵⁶ The notion of progressive ‘improvements’ in prosody is consistent with a more general sense that literary taste was improving over time. It was widely assumed, especially in the early eighteenth century, that literature was improving—perhaps not since classical antiquity, although there were diverse opinions on this, but certainly since the Middle Ages. A few isolated geniuses may have transcended their age; this was the usual way to account for Chaucer. But even the geniuses were still marred by the bad taste of their culture. This attitude can be seen in some of the arguments over Chatterton’s authenticity. Walpole was one of many to raise this question: An amazing genius for poetry, which one of them possessed, might flash out in the darkest age—but could Rowley anticipate the phraseology of the eighteenth century? His poetic fire might burst through the obstacles of the times; like Homer or other original bards, he might have formed a poetical style—but would it have been precisely that of an age subsequent of his own by some hundred years? Nobody can admire the poetry of the poems in question more than I do—but except being better than most modern verses, in what do they differ in the construction?⁵⁷

Not everyone, though, was willing to admit that literary taste was progressive, or that modern poetry was superior to that of the Middle Ages. Jacob Bryant, for instance, though he saw the appeal of this sort of argument, was reluctant to embrace it:

⁵⁴ Walpole to William Bewley,  May , in Walpole, Correspondence, xvi. –. ⁵⁵ Walpole’s annotations to Poems Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, ed. Jeremiah Milles (London,  [i.e. ]), British Library, shelfmark C..i., p. . ⁵⁶ Jacob Bryant, Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley, in Which the Authenticity of Those Poems Is Ascertained (London, ), –. ⁵⁷ Walpole to William Bewley,  May , in Walpole, Correspondence, xvi. .

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

 

Many have maintained, that if these poems were of the date supposed, and if poetry had been so much improved, it would never have fallen off afterwards: as there would have been a standard for future composition. . . . But herein, I think, there is much uncertainty: and whoever proceeds upon these principles, may form a very wrong judgment: for this rule of determination is certainly very precarious.⁵⁸

This hesitation is telling, because alongside the belief that literary taste was improving was the contrary belief that it was declining. Hugh Blair made this point in his defence of Macpherson’s Ossianic poems: ‘ancient poems . . . promise some of the highest beauties of poetical writing. Irregular and unpolished we may expect the productions of uncultivated ages to be; but abounding, at the same time, with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fire, which are the soul of poetry. For many circumstances of those times which we call barbarous, are favourable to the poetical spirit.’⁵⁹ The historicist argument presented by Malone, Warton, and Walpole implied that only scholars could read the literature of the past; more important, it implied that only scholars would want to read inferior poetry redeemed only by historical priority. Not everyone was prepared to accept these claims, and this sort of progressive historicist scholarship provoked a powerful reaction. As Beth Lau observes, ‘The Rowley controversy in many respects was a debate over who had the right to construct and interpret the national literary past.’ The ‘progressive view of English literary history, which claimed that poetry steadily evolved from crude primitive origins to a more advanced, sophisticated state’, was under threat, and those who embraced Chatterton’s fantasy version of medieval Bristol ‘wished to prove that Medieval English poetry was vital and accomplished, perhaps even more so than the supposedly more refined literature that replaced it’.⁶⁰ By bringing historicist criticism into play, forgers taught the world to read medieval literature with an antiquary’s attention, but they also may have taught the world not to care about ‘authenticity’. William Blake defiantly declared he did not care about the evidence that medieval texts were not really medieval: ‘I Believe both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient, Is so.’⁶¹ Others followed Blake’s lead in embracing an imaginative recreation of a fantasy version of the past. Chatterton’s imaginary Middle Ages inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, and continued to provide material for Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. They created their pseudo-medieval pastiches for an audience that had perhaps grown weary of worrying about these things.

⁵⁸ Bryant, Observations, . ⁵⁹ Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation, in Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . ⁶⁰ Beth Lau, ‘Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats’, Studies in Romanticism, / (Winter ): –, at . ⁶¹ The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, ), .

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 



S  Bak, János M., Patrick J. Geary, and Gábor Klaniczay (eds), Manufacturing a Past for the Present: Forgery and Authenticity in Medievalist Texts and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Leiden: Brill, ). Brooke, Christopher N. L., ‘Approaches to Medieval Forgery’, Journal of the Society of Archivists,  (–): –. Dutton, Dennis (ed.), The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). Freeman, Arthur, and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century,  vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Gaskill, Howard (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). Grafton, Anthony, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Groom, Nick (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, ). Groom, Nick, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, ). Moore, Dafydd, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson’s ‘The Poems of Ossian’: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Ruthven, K. K., Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Stewart, Susan, Crimes of Writing: Crimes in the Containment of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

  ´            ,          ,                       

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 

F posterity, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (–) is known primarily for being the first scholar to recognize the significance of Beowulf and for introducing the poem to the world, whereas Rasmus Rask (–) stands as a founder of the science of comparative linguistics. But for their own era, the two men probably were most important as principal founders of Anglo-Saxon and Norse philology. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin was born at Bær in Hrútafjörður, Iceland, son of county magistrate (sÿslumaður) Jón Teitsson and Elín Einarsdóttir. His father died when he was  years old, and he was raised by his maternal aunt þórunn Einarsdóttir and her husband Brynjólfur Jónsson at Ljárskógar in Dalasýsla. He later adopted as his patronym a Latinized version of the name of a paternal ancestor, county magistrate þorkell Guðmundsson (d. ) (Jørgensen : ). Upon graduating from the school at Skálholt in , he continued his studies in Denmark, first at the Metropolitan School, from where he graduated in , and later at the University of Copenhagen, where he completed a degree in philosophy in  and a law degree in . It was during this time that he edited the canonical laws of Bishop þorlákr (published ¹) and Bishop Árni (²) and translated Vígslóði, the manslaughter section of Grágás into Latin ().³ ¹ Jus Ecclesiasticum Vetus sive Thorlace-Ketillianum Constitutum An. Chr. MCXXIII—Kristinrettr hinn Gamli edr þorláks oc Ketils Biscupa. Ex Mss Legati Magnæani cum versione latina, lectionibus variantibus, notis, collatione cum jure canonico, juribus ecclesiasticis exoticis, indiceque vocum. ² Jus Ecclesiasticum Novum sive Arnæanum Constitutum Anno Domini MCCLXXV—Kristinrettr inn Nyi edr Arna Biscups. Ex Mss Legati Magnæani cum versione latina, lectionum varietate notis, collatione cum jure canonico, conciliis, juribus ecclesiasticis exoticis, indiceque vocum. ³ Particulam Primam Juris Criminalis Islandici antiqvi latine versi cum qvatuor circa jurisprudentiam domesticam.

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, ,     



In , Thorkelin was appointed secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission, which was set up in  as a governing body for the Arnamagnaean Foundation, the collection of manuscripts and printed books that Árni Magnússon bequeathed, along with his estate, to the University of Copenhagen on his death in . Thorkelin oversaw the publication of an edition in two volumes of documents concerning Denmark and Norway housed in the Arnamagnaean Collection,⁴ contributed a Latin translation to an edition of Eyrbyggja saga,⁵ and prepared indices and genealogies to an edition of Hungrvaka.⁶ Further publications include Konga-Erfda ok Rikis Stjorn sive Successio Regia et Regni Administratio ex Illustriss. Biblioth. Suhmiana cum versione latina, et lectionum varietate (); Statuta Provincialia Statuta Sinodalia Casus Episcopales Casus Papales Excommunicationes contra raptores predones & rerum ecclesiasticarum invasores Interrogationes in confessione faciendæ (); Analecta qvibus Historia, Antiqvitates, Jura, tam publicum qvam privatum Regni Norvegici illustrantur (); Vathrudnismal sive Odarum Eddae Sæmundiane Una–qvam ex Cod. Membr. Biblioth. Regiæ cum versione latina, varietate lectionum, notis philologicocriticis (); a glossary to an edition of Orkneyinga saga;⁷ Samling af Danske KirkeLove (), which he completed on the death of the previous editor; and Dania et Norvegiae in Sigillis Seculli XIII. Redivivæ Ex Leg: Arna Magnæano (). In , Thorkelin was employed as assistant keeper in the Royal Privy Archives. Three years later, he received the title of ‘professor extraordinarius’ at the university, next in line for a chair on the Philosophical Faculty, and in , he was promised the position of keeper of the Royal Privy Archives, when that position became vacant. Modelling, it seems, his trajectory on that of Jacob Langebek (–), keeper of the Royal Privy Archives in –, who had made research trips to Sweden, Finland, Russia, and other Baltic countries, where he made copies of documents pertaining to Danish history, Thorkelin decided to examine what Danish and Norwegian antiquities might be found in Great Britain and Ireland.⁸ He obtained a paid leave of absence from his positions as secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission and assistant keeper of the Royal Privy Archives and was awarded a generous two-year travel grant from King Christian VII (–), which was later extended, from a special fund (Fonden ad usus publicos) with the stipulation that he deposit the documents he had discovered in the National Archives on his return to Copenhagen. Thorkelin set sail from Elsinore in the summer of  and arrived at London. From this home base, he made frequent trips to Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. While it

⁴ Diplomatarium Arna-Magnæanum, exhibens Monumenta Diplomatica, qvæ collegit et Universitati Havniensi testamento reliqvit Arnas Magnæus historiam atqve jura Daniæ, Norvegiæ, et vicinarum regionum Illustranta. Ex Bibliotheca Legati Arna-Magnæani (). ⁵ Eyrbyggia Saga, sive Eyranorum historia (). ⁶ Hungurvaka sive Historia primorum qvinqve Skalholtensium in Islandia episcoporum (). ⁷ Orkneyinga Saga sive Historia Orcadensium (). ⁸ Kevin S. Kiernan, The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, ), –.

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

 

is unclear if Thorkelin had prior knowledge of the Beowulf manuscript (British Library, Cotton, Vitellius A. xv) before his arrival in England, we know through Humfrey Wanley’s catalogue description that it came to his attention while he was working in the British Museum in October . Believing the poem to be an early Danish epic originally composed in Danish, he commissioned in  a copyist, whom Kiernan has identified as James Matthews, accomptant to the Trust of the British Museum, to make a transcript of the poem, known today as Thorkelin A, and later, sometime between  and , he himself made another, Thorkelin B.⁹ The transcripts are listed among the manuscripts of the Royal Library in Copenhagen as NkS  and  to. Thorkelin spent six years in England, Scotland, and Ireland working in the British Museum, the King’s Library of Buckingham House, and other libraries. He had a special gift for friendship and socialized with members of the Royal Society and other influential people, including Whig politician Horace Walpole (–) and George Dempster of Dunnichen (–), a member of Parliament. He may also have socialized with Lord Francis Rawdon, Marquess of Hastings (–), to whom he dedicated Fragments of English and Irish History in the Ninth and the Tenth Century in Two Parts, Translated from the original Icelandic, and Illustrated with Some Notes (), consisting of extracts from Icelandic sagas dealing with transactions between Scandinavians and the British. Members of the social elite were clearly impressed with him, for in , he was made an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, received an honorary doctorate in law from the University of St Andrews, and in , he wrote to his benefactor, Privy Councillor Johan von Bülow (–), that the Archbishop of Canterbury had offered him a keepership of the British Museum—an offer that he declined because of his love for Denmark and the Danish royal house. This devotion is also clear from his encomium about Prince Regent Frederik VI, Sketch of the Character of His Royal Highness the Prince of Denmark (),¹⁰ which two years later was translated into Danish and German. Kristian Eberhard Voss, keeper of the Royal Privy Archives, died in early , and the position was immediately offered to Thorkelin, who accepted and returned to Denmark the same year. He also resumed his position as secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission and held both positions until his death. The year after his return to Copenhagen, Thorkelin married Gunhild Cecilie Hvidsteen (née Dybe), a prosperous widow. Her late husband, Poul Christensen Hvidsteen, had owned a brewery, which Thorkelin took over and operated. The couple had six sons, but three died in infancy, and only one survived Thorkelin.¹¹

⁹ Kiernan, Thorkelin Transcripts, –, . ¹⁰ The complete title of the work is Sketch of the Character of His Royal Highness the Prince of Denmark. To which is added, a Short Review of the Present State of Literature and the Polite Arts in that Country. Interspersed with Anecdotes. In Four Letters, by a Gentleman Long Resident in Copenhagen to a Friend in London. ¹¹ E. H. Harvey Wood, ‘Letters to an Antiquary: The Literary Correspondence of G. J. Thorkelin (–)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, ), .

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, ,     



Thorkelin brought with him to Denmark a respectable number of Danish and Norwegian antiquities, though it is difficult to ascertain just how much material Thorkelin copied and had copied for him during his fieldwork abroad. Some of his copies were recatalogued under new bindings, others were dismembered and rebound with new shelf marks, and yet others were recopied by him in Copenhagen.¹² Most importantly, however, he brought with him the two transcripts of Beowulf and the idea of publishing an edition of the poem based on the two transcripts.¹³ The edition was not published until  under the title De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV. Poēma Danicum Dialecto Anglosaxonica. Ex Bibliotheca Cottoniana Musaei Britannici. The delay was due in part to the British bombardment of Copenhagen in the fall of , which destroyed Thorkelin’s home and all of his work on the edition and forced him to begin anew, and in part to the fact that his position as keeper of the Royal Privy Archives was not conducive for research, though he wrote the short treatise Beviis, at de Irske, ved Ostmannernes Ankomst til Irland i det ottende Aarhundrede, fiortiene en udmærket Rang blandt de meest oplyste Folk i Europa paa de Tider,¹⁴ translated the New Testament into Icelandic,¹⁵ contributed an introduction to an edition of Egils saga,¹⁶ wrote the article ‘Auswahl von Wörtern, welche die Schotten, Isländer und Dänen mit einander gemain haben’,¹⁷ and prepared an edition and Latin and Danish translations of the Gulaþingslög of King Magnús lagabætir!¹⁸ Moreover, Thorkelin held a number of responsible posts (he was appointed justitsråd in , etatsråd in , and konferensråd in ), managed the brewery, and was an avid collector of books and manuscripts, all of which would seem to have made demands on his time. Thorkelin’s wife died in , and only two years later, one of his sons, George Dempster, who since  had worked as a scribe in the Archives, passed away after a long illness. The tragedies took a toll on Thorkelin’s own health, and during his last years, he worked mostly from home.¹⁹ Thorkelin’s contemporary Rasmus Rask was born in Brændekilde on the island of Funen, Denmark, son of the tailor Niels Hansen Christiansen Rasch and Birthe Rasmusdatter. Rask received his early education at Odense cathedral school, where he was revealed to be a linguistic genius. His studies included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Danish, French, and German; to these he added Old Norse, Dutch, Faroese, ¹² Kiernan, Thorkelin Transcripts, . ¹³ J. R. Hall, ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf: Thorkelin’s () and Kemble’s ()’, in D. G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the  Manchester Conference (Cambridge: Brewer, ), . ¹⁴ The treatise was published in Nye Samling af det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter,  (). ¹⁵ Þat Nya Testamente vors drottins og endurlausnara Jesu Christi, eptir þeirri annari útgáfu þes á Islendsku (). ¹⁶ Egils-Saga sive Egilli Skallagrimii Vita (). ¹⁷ The article was published in Idunna und Hermode,  (). ¹⁸ Regis Magni Legum Reformatoris Leges Gula-Thingenses (published ). ¹⁹ Aðalgeir Kristjánsson, Nú heilsar þér á Hafnarslóð: Ævir og örlög í höfuðborg Íslands – (Reykjavík: Nýja bókafélagið, ), .

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

 

Greenlandic, Gothic, Creole, and English, and also did considerable work on Danish dialects. Upon the completion of his examen artium in , Rask enrolled at the University of Copenhagen, where he studied theology, but he soon abandoned that field in order to devote himself fully to language studies. With the help of Rasmus Nyerup (–), professor, librarian, and provost at Regensen, whom Rask had assisted in his translation of Snorri’s Edda,²⁰ Rask was appointed assistant keeper of the University Library in , though without salary, and received a free place at Regensen. From then on, a steady stream of publications by Rask began to flow. His first articles included studies of runic inscriptions, and by  he had completed a grammar of Icelandic (Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske Sprog, ). Although descriptive, the grammar provides some historical explanations, notably an explanation of what Jacob Grimm later named Umlaut. His work on the grammar also led to Den danske Grammatiks Endelser og Former af de islandske Sprog forklarede (completed – and ), in which he explains the simplified inflectional system of Danish by comparing it with the highly inflectional system of Icelandic. Moreover, he made significant contributions to Björn Halldórsson’s Icelandic dictionary (Lexicon Islandico-Latino-Danicum, ). In , Rask entered a competition sponsored by the Danish Scientific Society where each competitor was to submit a study of the origins of Old Norse. His research took him to Sweden (spring ) to study Swedish, Finnish, and Sami, and to Iceland (–) to perfect his Icelandic. While travelling in Iceland, Rask brought together a collection of about  manuscripts, many of them noteworthy items relating to modern Icelandic literature and history. He returned via Scotland to Denmark, where he presented the finished work, Undersögelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (), to the committee and won the prize. While abroad, Rask had been appointed amanuensis at the University Library of Copenhagen and promoted to librarian, but his desire to continue his work on the prize essay took him to Asia. For his prize essay had concluded that Icelandic stems from Greek, a derivative of Thracian, which in his view was the root of Greek and Latin, but led him to believe that there were languages in Eastern Europe and Asia that might be even closer to the root. An invitation from Arvid August Afzelius (–) to teach Icelandic in Stockholm offered the possibility of beginning the journey, for which he had received the promise of financial support from von Bülow, and in  he left Denmark. He stayed in Stockholm until , where he did some preliminary work on Finnish, Russian, Arabic, and Persian but concentrated primarily on Old Norse; he published a Swedish revision of his Icelandic grammar,²¹ an edition of Snorri’s Edda,²² in collaboration with Afzelius an edition of the Poetic Edda,²³ an Old Norse reader,²⁴

²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁴

Edda eller Skandinavernes hedenske Gudelære (). Anvisning till Isländskan eller Nordiska Fornspråket (). Snorra-Edda ásamt Skáldu og þarmeð fylgjandi ritgjörðum (). Edda Sæmundar hinns Fróða (). Sýnishorn af fornum og nýjum norrænum ritum í sundrlausri og samfastri ræðu ().

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, ,     



and finally an Anglo-Saxon grammar and reader,²⁵ which was no doubt inspired by his earlier publication of an edition of a section of King Alfred’s geographical treatise²⁶ and his collaboration with Frederik Grundtvig (–) on the latter’s Danish translation of Beowulf.²⁷ Travel funds obtained for him by Peter Erasmus Müller (–), professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, at the presentation of the prize essay to King Frederik VI, to whom it was dedicated, enabled Rask, who on the same occasion had been named professor, to continue his journey through Finland to St Petersburg, where he completed an essay on Finnish,²⁸ studied Russian, and some Persian, Arabic, and Armenian, and did some preliminary work on Sanskrit. Additional travel funds obtained by Müller made it possible in  for Rask to travel via Moscow to Astrakhan, where he paused to study Persian and Kalmuck, and from there to Tbilisi, where he wrote a draft of a preliminary continuation of the prize essay.²⁹ From Tbilisi he continued via Tehran, Esfahan, Persepolis, Shiraz, and Bushehr to Bombay, where he sojourned to study Avestan and Pehlevi and purchased, with a grant from the Danish government, a collection of manuscripts in these languages, which he later gave to the University Library. From Bombay, he travelled to north India through Gwalior and Varanasi to the Ganges, sailed down the river to the Danish colony Frederiksnagor (Serampore), and arrived in Madras in , where he studied the Dravidian languages of India and completed an essay in English on Avestan (‘Some Remarks on the ZendAvesta and Zend Language’, Udvalgte Afhandlinger, : –). From Madras he travelled via the Danish colony Trankebar by sea to Sri Lanka, where he stayed for almost a year. Here he worked on Pali and Sinhalese: his writings comprise the chapter on pronunciation in Benjamin Clough’s A Compendious Pali Grammar with a Vocabulary in the Same Language () and a draft of a Pali grammar, Singalesisk Skriftlære (); moreover, he assisted Clough with his two-volume Dictionary of the English and Singhalese, and Singhalese and English Languages (–) and acquired a collection of rare palm-leaf manuscripts in the two languages. Upon his return to Denmark in , he gave these manuscripts to the Royal Library in Copenhagen in return for the financial help he had received from the authorities in the two Danish colonies in connection with a ship accident, which caused him to return to Denmark almost a year later than planned. Despite pressure to continue work on the materials he had brought with him from Asia, Rask turned his attention to runology and began work on a Danish orthography and a Danish etymological dictionary, though his first publication after his return was a ²⁵ Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligemed en kort Læsebog (). ²⁶ ‘Ottars og Ulfstens korte Rejseberetninger med dansk Oversættelse, kritiske Anmærkninger og andre Oplysninger’ (). ²⁷ Bjowulfs Drape: Et gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige Aar-Tusinde af Angel-Saxisk paa Danske Riim (). ²⁸ ‘Afhandling om den finniske Sprogklasse’ (Samlede Afhandlinger, : –). ²⁹ ‘Undersøgelse om det gamle nordiske eller islandske Sprogs Slægtskab med de asiatiske Tungemaal’ (Samlede Afhandlinger, : –; Udvalgte Afhandlinger, : –).

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

 

Spanish grammar (Spansk sproglære, ). The reasons for his apparent loss of interest in Asian languages are not clear.³⁰ It appears that he had expected to be appointed professor of Asian languages, but all he managed to secure was a raise. In , Rask was offered a position as librarian at Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, and using the offer as leverage, he again applied for a position at the university and again received only the offer of a raise, though this time with the stipulation that he publish an essay on ancient Asiatic literature. In , the professor of Asian languages died. Rask applied for the position, which was essentially a position in Semitic languages with emphasis on Hebrew, but it was not filled, and instruction in Hebrew was assigned to a lecturer in theology, Matthias Hagen Hohlenberg (–). It seems that Rask then set his sight on a professorship in Semitic, and after having given public lectures on Arabic and written two books on the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew calendars (Den gamle ægyptiske Tidsregning, , and Den ældste hebraiske Tidsregning, ) he once again applied for the professorship, but it seems that his application was not considered. Following Nyerup’s death in , Rask applied for his positions as provost of Regensen and chief librarian, and was offered the latter (Nyerup’s professorship went to Christian Molbech, –). Two years later, in , the professorship of Asian languages again became vacant, for Hohlenberg, who in the meantime had been promoted to professor, was nominated as a member of the board of governors. Rask was offered the position, which he accepted, but being ill from tuberculosis he died less than a year after his appointment. Although Rask’s years in Denmark after his return from Asia were less than ideal in terms of academic appointments, they were productive. The books that he published comprise a Frisian grammar (Frisisk sproglære, ), a work on Danish orthography (Forsøg til en videnskabelig dansk Retskrivningslære, ), an Italian grammar (Italiænsk Formlære, ), a study of Afrikaans (Vejledning til Akra-Sproget på Kysten Ginea, med et Tillæg om Akvambuisk, ), a modern Icelandic reader (Lestrarkver handa heldri manna börnum, ), a Danish grammar (A Grammar of the Danish Language for the Use of Englishmen, ), an Old Norse grammar (Kortfattet Vejledning til det oldnordiske eller gamle islandske Sprog, ), an Old Norse reader (Oldnordisk Læsebog, ), an English grammar (Engelsk Formlære, ), and a Sami grammar (Ræssoneret Lappisk Sproglære, ). He also had a hand in the publication of editions of Icelandic sagas (Fornmanna sögur, – (–),  (),  (), and  ()) through the Royal Nordic Society of Ancient Writings (Det kongelige nordiske Oldskriftselskab), which he had founded in . Works not prepared for publication include grammars of German, Dutch, Portuguese, and French. Some of these were published posthumously in Samlede Afhandlinger (–), edited by his half-brother Hans Kristian Rask (–); others were edited by Louis Hjelmslev in Udvalgte

³⁰ Frederik Rönning, Rasmus Kristian Rask. Et Mindeskrift i Anledning af Hundredårsdagen for hans Fødsel (Copenhagen: Schønberg, ), . Otto Jespersen, Rasmus Rask: I hundredåret efter hans hovedværk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, ), –.

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, ,     



Afhandlinger (–). Still other manuscripts of studies are in the Royal Library and the University Library in Copenhagen.³¹ Although Thorkelin and Rask were contemporaries and both resided in Copenhagen, they did not collaborate, though certainly their paths crossed. Rask’s letters to von Bülow reveal that he had little respect for Thorkelin personally and professionally. In a letter dated  April , a frustrated Rask reported that Guðmundur Pétursson (–) had felt offended that Rask and not he had been selected by the Arnamagnaean Commission to prepare an Icelandic dictionary and had complained to Thorkelin, who accordingly persuaded Christian Cold (–), a member of the Commission, to turn the work over to Guðmundur Pétursson (Breve, : –). In a letter dated  June , Rask accused Thorkelin of deliberately keeping the publisher busy so as to delay the publication of Rask’s scholarly works and made reference to a previous run-in with Thorkelin in the University Library (Breve, : –). In a letter dated  March , Rask expressed his indignation at the annual report of the activities of the Arnamagnaean Commission, which in his view was a reflection of the Commission’s secretary—full of contradictions, lies, and twaddle to cover up for the lack of accomplishments—and argued that Thorkelin had made himself an object of derision and caused Iceland irreparable harm by his translation of the New Testament (Breve, : –). And in a letter dated  December , he claimed that Thorkelin had abandoned all scholarly work in favour of his translation of the New and Old Testaments into Icelandic (Breve, : ). It is possible that these unflattering comments stem from Rask’s bitterness about Thorkelin being awarded the Order of the Dannebrog in , an order of Denmark given to honour faithful citizens for meritorious service. Despite his numerous and ground-breaking scholarly contributions, Rask did not receive such honours in his lifetime. The accolades he did receive were posthumous: on the centenary of his birth a biography was published by Rönning;³² the centenary of the publication of his prize essay was marked by a biography by Jespersen;³³ a Rask-Hjelmslev symposium was held at the University of Copenhagen in  on the occasion of the -year jubilee of the university; on the bicentennial of Rask’s birth an exhibition featuring him was held at the University Library, while a collection of essays on him was published by scholars at the University of Copenhagen. Yet Rask was not alone in his views about Thorkelin, for a number of contemporary scholars, including Erich Christian Werlauff (–) and Niels Matthias Petersen (–), voiced similarly negative sentiments, and most of the reviews of Thorkelin’s scholarly works were also quite negative. One of the sharpest criticisms came from Grundtvig, who interestingly and unwittingly caused Thorkelin’s and Rask’s scholarship to intersect. In his review of Thorkelin’s edition of Beowulf, ³¹ See Breve fra og til Rasmus Rask,  vols, ed. Louis Hjelmslev (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, ). Breve fra og til Rasmus Rask: Brevkommentar og håndskriftkatalog by Marie Bjerrum (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, ), iii. –. ³² Rönning, Rasmus Kristian Rask. ³³ Jespersen, Rasmus Rask.

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

 

Grundtvig sharply attacked Thorkelin for having misunderstood the poem and blamed him for having made almost as many errors as words in the edition and even more in the Latin translation. Thorkelin answered in kind, denied all charges, and challenged Grundtvig to produce a better translation of the poem, offering him all possible help.³⁴ The debate continued, but eventually the two men came to be reconciled, and Grundtvig began his translation of the poem into Danish with the help of Rask, who procured Thorkelin’s two transcripts for Grundtvig’s use. The two evidently intended to prepare a new, critical edition of Beowulf, but only a few months later Rask set out on his long journey, and nothing came of the edition. In a letter to Nyerup dated  January , Rask asked Nyerup to tell Grundtvig not to wait for him, ‘because while the grass grows, the cow dies’ (Breve, : ; my translation). Rask later published his Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligmed en kort Læsebog, in which a section of Beowulf (lines –) was properly edited for the first time: ‘By careful attention to Thorkelin’s transcription and by careful emendation, Rask was able to produce a text immeasurably superior to Thorkelin’s’.³⁵ For his improvements over Thorkelin’s text, Rask gave credit to Thorkelin, who had let him use his transcripts. Still Thorkelin’s claim to fame remains his work on Beowulf. While his editio princeps of the poem has value only in the sense that it invigorated interest in Anglo-Saxon studies, it also had immediate impact on not only the scholarship of Grundtvig and Rask, but also on that of a number of others including John Conybeare (–), who in  made a collation of Thorkelin’s edited text with the manuscript; Frederic Madden (–), who in  made his own collation of Thorkelin’s edited text with the manuscript, finding errors that Conybeare had missed; Benjamin Thorpe (–), who in  travelled to London to collate Thorkelin’s edited text; and finally John M. Kemble (–), who in  transcribed the poem from the manuscript.³⁶ The Thorkelin transcripts, however, have served philologists well until modern times. These transcripts provide more nearly complete texts of the poem than the text as it is now preserved in the Cotton manuscript. The manuscript was damaged in the  fire in Ashburnham House, and the crumbling away of its scorched parts had gone far before museum authorities arranged to have it placed in paper frames in . These frames cover many letters, and the Thorkelin transcripts, which were made before the deterioration had begun, restore or help to restore about , letters.³⁷ As a comparative linguist who managed to define the Into-European family as a whole with a clarity and completeness unequalled in his time, Rask exercised a profound influence on Danish philology as an introduction to West Norse studies for several generations of philologists, through his grammars, readers, and editions. His Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske Sprog formed the basis, directly or

³⁴ T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder (eds), Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, ), , . ³⁵ Franklin Cooley, ‘Early Danish Criticism of Beowulf’, English Literary History,  (): –. ³⁶ Hall, ‘First Two Editions’, . ³⁷ Kiernan, Thorkelin Transcripts, p. ix.

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, ,     



indirectly, for all subsequent Old and Modern Icelandic grammars. His editions of Old Norse texts have been superseded, but their importance for their time is not to be passed over lightly. His Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligemed en kort Læsebog proved very significant for Old English studies, though its full weight was not felt until Thorpe, who from about  to  had studied at the University of Copenhagen under the direction of Rask, translated an enlarged and revised edition of the grammar into English. It was through his translation, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue with a Praxis (), prepared with the cooperation of Rask, that Thorpe came to introduce English scholars to the ‘new philology’ and came to abandon the Anglo-Saxon typeface (retaining only thorn and eth).³⁸ As scholars, Thorkelin and Rask were foils of one another. One was a gentleman scholar, the other an academic scholar. Common to them was that they were representative of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, and in particular, its belief in the glorious ancient past of the Nordic countries. Their scholarly works, which invigorated interest in, and appreciation of the Germanic past of Britain and Scandinavia, were products of this cultural movement.

S  Birrell, T. A., ‘The Society of Antiquaries and the Taste for Old English –’, Neophilologus,  (): –. Bjork, Robert E., ‘Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin’s Preface to the First Edition of Beowulf, ’, Scandinavian Studies,  (): –. Bjork, Robert E., ‘Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (eds), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, ), –. Cooley, Franklin, ‘Early Danish Criticism of Beowulf’, English Literary History,  (): –. Fjalldal, Magnús, ‘To Fall by Ambition: Grímur Thorkelín and his Beowulf Edition’, Neophilologus,  (): –. Hall, J. R., ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf: Thorkelin’s () and Kemble’s ()’, in D. G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the  Manchester Conference (Cambridge: Brewer, ), –. Kiernan, Kevin S., Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. Rev. edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Malone, Kemp, ‘Rasmus Rask’, Word Study,  (Oct. ): –. Repr. in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, –,  vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), i. –.

³⁸ Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Benjamin Thorpe (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York and London: Garland Publishing, ), .

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

 

Shippey, T. A., and Andreas Haarder (eds), Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, ). Wolf, Kirsten, ‘Rasmus Rask (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York and London: Garland Publishing, ), –. Wood, E. H. Harvey, ‘Letters to an Antiquary: The Literary Correspondence of G. J. Thorkelin (–)’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, .

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  ......................................................................................................................

                

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 

G  G 

.................................................................................................................................. T imaginations of all the major British Romantics were haunted by the Middle Ages. Inheritors of the great antiquarian revival of the mid-eighteenth century, they grew up reading Gray and Percy, Warton and Chatterton, Hurd and Home; and having learned from them to appreciate the value of medieval and early modern literature and culture, they took ‘Gothic’ authors such as Chaucer, Spenser, Dante, and Tasso, as well as the anonymous medieval balladeers of England and Scotland, as role models for their own literary ambitions.¹ Looking back on his youth, Wordsworth claimed that as a young man he had feared poetic comparison only with ‘Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton’.² Milton had been viewed as an exemplary English poet ever since his critical reclamation by Addison in –, and Shakespeare had been celebrated almost without reservation since the Shakespeare revival championed by Johnson and Garrick in the s; but the addition of Chaucer and Spenser to Wordsworth’s list bears witness to the change in attitudes which had taken place by his day, and the extent to which the literature of Britain’s ‘Gothic Ages’—a capacious eighteenth-century term which could encompass everything from the fall of Rome to the early seventeenth century—had come to be seen as a valuable cultural resource, rather than merely as so much evidence of what Elizabeth Cooper had referred to, half a century before, as ‘the Gothique Rudeness that was handed down to us by our unpolished Fore-Fathers’.³

¹ On the significance of the figure of the medieval poet for the Romantics, see Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Houndmills: Macmillan, ). ² Cited in Joseph Wittreich (ed.), The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, ), . ³ Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library (London, ), p. xii.

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 

In the literature of the later eighteenth century, this sense of the medieval epoch as an age of considerable cultural achievement had co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with the older assumption that the ‘Gothic ages’ had been a period of ignorance and cultural decline. As James Watt has stressed, the ‘Gothic’ literature of the s and s was as likely to idealise the medieval past as to demonise it; but, by the mid-s, ‘Gothic’ fiction (i.e. fiction set in the ‘Gothic Ages’) had begun to focus increasingly on the violence and superstition of the medieval past, becoming strongly associated with the themes of fear and horror in the process.⁴ The novelist whose work was most central to this transformation was Ann Radcliffe, who first won major commercial success with her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (). Her romances became the reading matter of choice in Britain during the years which followed the French Revolution, inspiring a host of imitators who attempted to copy her formula—famously mocked by Austen in Northanger Abbey—of beautiful heroines being menaced by evil villains in threatening Gothic locales. Pursued by a variety of wicked clerics and aristocrats who embodied all the very worst traits of ‘Gothic’ civilisation, her sensitive, sentimental heroines experienced every variety of terror, horror, and dread; and thus, in the fiction of Radcliffe and her many imitators, the medieval castle or abbey came to symbolise the violence and injustice of the Gothic past. This sense of the Middle Ages as an epoch of horror and darkness was powerfully reinforced by the new interest in German literature which arose in Britain during the s. With a very few exceptions, such as Klopstock’s Messiah and Goethe’s Werter, German literature had been almost unknown in eighteenth-century Britain, and very few German works had been translated into English; but, in the s, British audiences belatedly started to become aware of the extraordinary literary flowering which had taken place in Germany over the previous decades.⁵ Probably the most influential German works to be translated into English during this period were Schiller’s historical tragedy Die Räuber (, tr. ) and Bürger’s ghost-ballad Lenore (, tr. ), both of which had an immediate and wide-ranging impact; and the same appetite for scenes of medieval terror which had made Radcliffe’s romances so successful also created a market for English translations of German fiction and poetry which dealt with similarly Gothic and horrific themes.⁶ British demand for such fiction soon outstripped the available German supply, resulting in the appearance of a wave of German-themed British Gothic fiction—some of it spuriously claiming to have been translated ‘from the German’—which featured much higher levels of violence, horror, ⁴ James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ⁵ On German literature in eighteenth-century Britain, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁶ On the impact of Bürger and Schiller, see Diane Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, – (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ), –; on the influx of German Gothic into Britain, see Watt, Contesting the Gothic, , and Robert Le Tellier, Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (–) (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, ), –.

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

mystery, and supernaturalism than had previously been common in the genre.⁷ The most famous exponent of this German-style Gothic fiction in Britain was Matthew Lewis, himself a translator of German fiction into English; Lewis shot to fame with his gory Gothic novel The Monk (), but he went on to devote most of his literary career to the writing of plays. The first of these was the enormously successful supernatural drama The Castle Spectre (), which—unlike The Monk—had a medieval setting. Not all of these German-influenced works of Gothic fiction were actually set in the Middle Ages; but their plots often centred around ‘Gothic’ buildings and institutions which dated back to the medieval period. Coupled with the thenpopular Gothic ‘romances’ of Radcliffe and her imitators, this German-style Gothic fiction did much to strengthen the contemporary tendency for British authors to write about the ‘Gothic Ages’ as an era primarily characterized by villainy and violence. The impact of this medieval-themed German literature upon the British Romantics was immense. In , after reading a translation of Die Räuber, Coleridge wrote breathlessly to Southey: ‘My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? . . . Why have we ever called Milton sublime?’⁸ He went on to write a poem, ‘To the Author of “The Robbers”’ (), in which he described Schiller as a ‘Bard tremendous in sublimity’, and imagined that actually seeing Schiller would be enough to move him to tears; later, in , he would translate Schiller’s Wallenstein into English.⁹ In , Hazlitt was similarly overwhelmed, recalling later that ‘The Robbers . . . stunned me like a blow’, while in  Lamb was so struck by Lenore that he wrote enthusiastically to Coleridge: ‘Have you read the Balad [sic] called “Leonora” in the d No. of the “Monthly Magazine”?–. If you have—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’¹⁰ Walter Scott’s first published works were translations from the German: Translations and Imitations from German Ballads () and Goetz of Berlichingen (), the latter being the first English translation of Goethe’s medieval drama, Götz von Berlichingen (). Blake drew three illustrations for Lenore in , while Coleridge and Wordsworth both set to work on historical tragedies written in imitation of Die Räuber, which would eventually become Osorio () and The Borderers (). Both Wordsworth and Coleridge attempted to learn German—the latter with rather more success than the former—and in  they travelled together to Germany in order to improve their ⁷ Examples of British Gothic novels set in Germany, some of them spuriously claiming to be based on German originals, include The Castle of Wolfenbach () and The Mysterious Warning () by Eliza Parsons, The Midnight Bell () by Francis Lathom, and Orphan of the Rhine () by Eleanor Sleath, all of which have earned a kind of immortality by being recommended to Catherine by Isabella in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. On the acceptance of the supernatural in German Gothic fiction, at a time when it was still highly contentious in France and Britain, see Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, ), –. ⁸ Letter to Southey,  Nov. ; S. T. Coleridge, Letters, ed. Earl Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), i. . ⁹ On Coleridge’s relationship with German literature, see Ashton, German Idea, –. ¹⁰ William Hazlitt, ‘Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth’, Lecture VIII, in Selected Writings: –, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, ), v. ; Charles Lamb, letter to Coleridge,  July , in Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin Marrs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), i. .

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

 

knowledge of the language; a step which would have seemed bizarre just ten years earlier, when few English writers viewed German as a literary language worth studying.¹¹ This German influence was particularly pronounced in the works both men wrote during the s, and strongly coloured their treatment of medieval material in their subsequent poetry.

R R 

.................................................................................................................................. Of the major British Romantics, only Blake was largely untouched by these literary developments. He had taken an interest in medieval art and architecture at an early age; James Basire, to whom he was apprenticed, worked as an engraver for the Society of Antiquaries, and he set the young Blake to work copying the medieval carvings in Westminster Abbey, which seem to have made a deep impression upon him.¹² His first collection of poems, the Poetical Sketches (), included an ‘Imitation of Spenser’, three pieces with medieval settings (‘Fair Eleanor’, ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, and ‘King Edward the Third’), and ‘Prologues’ for two unwritten historical plays on Edward IV and King John. Near the end of his life, in , he would summarize his views on medieval Gothic art in lines engraved into his anti-Classical polemic, ‘On Virgil’: Grecian is Mathematic Form. Gothic is Living Form¹³

For Blake, the artistic and architectural traditions of medieval Europe represented an ideal of pure Christian art, drawing upon ‘the Sublime of the Bible’, and largely untainted by ‘the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the Sword’ which he saw as disfiguring the neoclassical art of his own day.¹⁴ In  he wrote in praise of ‘the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages’, whom he described as poor but holy men, ‘Wandering about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the World was not worthy’.¹⁵ Against an entrenched cultural narrative which saw the Dark Ages as a period of ignorance and artistic decline, Blake asserted a counter-narrative in which the traditional exemplars of the ‘Dark Ages’, the barbaric Goth and the superstitious medieval monk, were actually far less destructive than the supposedly civilized nations which they had helped to destroy. As he wrote ¹¹ On Wordsworth and Coleridge’s time in Germany, see Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (London: Viking, ), –, and Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), ch. . ¹² G. E. Bentley Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. ¹³ William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman, rev. edn (New York: Anchor Books, ), . ¹⁴ Blake, Poetry and Prose, . ¹⁵ Blake, Poetry and Prose, .

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

in ‘On Homer’, ‘it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’.¹⁶ Blake’s idiosyncratic interpretation of history was rooted in a tradition of radical medievalism which located the glory of medieval Britain in the ‘Gothic liberty’ supposedly enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons, before their conquest and subjugation under the ‘Norman yoke’ of the feudal system.¹⁷ Thus Blake very deliberately located his imagined golden age of Gothic Christianity not in the late medieval period, when the feudal system was at its height, but centuries earlier, in ‘what we call the Dark Ages’. Rather than praising the feudal warrior-aristocrats beloved by the more conservative British medievalists of his day, Blake articulated a critique of such medieval military heroics as early as ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, in which he wrote: O what have Kings to answer for, Before that awful throne! When thousand deaths for vengeance cry, And ghosts accusing groan!¹⁸

Blake’s ideological opposition to such warlike monarchies and aristocracies was only intensified by the events of the French Revolution, of which he was a passionate supporter; and his first epic, The French Revolution (), celebrated the revolutionaries as destroyers of a tyrannical government which derived its repressive powers from the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages. In place of the medieval knights and kings celebrated by the conservative Gothic literature of the period, whom he saw as having founded the very despotic monarchies against which the revolutionaries were now struggling, Blake praised the hermits, monks, artists, and architects of the Dark Ages, whom he viewed as free and holy men who had devoted their lives to art and faith rather than ‘War and Dominion’.¹⁹ Throughout his career, Blake incorporated medieval design elements into his art; and his use of Gothic arches, stylized foliage, and a proliferation of grotesques and gargoyles all help to connect Blake’s engravings back to the productions of ‘the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals’, whose works he had studied as an apprentice. ‘Gothic’, for Blake, was always a positive term, and never one associated with evil or barbarity. In his view, the true barbarians had been the ‘Greek and Latin slaves of the Sword’ and their medieval and modern successors: civilizations which worshipped wealth, authority, and violence, and thus warred continually upon ‘Gothic liberty’ in both politics and art. As young men, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge also supported the French revolutionaries, and their political sympathies—along with their fascination with German literature such as Die Räuber, a work so fiercely radical that the French National Assembly voted in  to make Schiller an honorary citizen of revolutionary ¹⁶ Blake, Poetry and Prose, . ¹⁷ On the ‘Norman yoke’ tradition, see Chapter  of the present volume. ¹⁸ Blake, Poetry and Prose, . ¹⁹ Blake, Poetry and Prose, .

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

 

France—strongly coloured their treatment of the Middle Ages in their early works.²⁰ The outbreak of the French Revolution had triggered a sharp debate in Britain over the value of those ‘Gothic’ institutions which had maintained and defined the French Ancien Régime: Edmund Burke, in his anti-revolutionary Reflections, famously lamented that the Revolution demonstrated that ‘the age of chivalry is gone . . . and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’, while the pro-revolutionary writer Helen Maria Williams, who did not share Burke’s assessment of the value of the medieval ‘age of chivalry’, celebrated the ‘sublime’ Revolution as the culmination of Europe’s centuries-long struggle to free itself from ‘the ignorance, the superstition, [and] the barbarous persecution of Gothic times’.²¹ In the years immediately following the Revolution, there was a strong temptation for pro-revolutionary writers such as the young Romantics to follow the lead of radicals like Williams in taking a very negative view of the Middle Ages; the worse the monarchical medieval institutions of Europe could be shown to have been, the more justified the French revolutionaries were in overthrowing them. Such writers found ample inspiration in the then-popular Gothic fiction of Radcliffe, and in the German-style medieval fiction written in imitation of Naubert, Kahlert, and Schiller, all of which generally depicted the feudal civilizations of the ‘Gothic Ages’ as having been dominated by violence and injustice. Most of the earliest medieval-themed works of the young Romantics fit into this radical Gothic mode, in which the feudal aristocracy is depicted as the opponent of all that is best in medieval culture: its art and literature, its piety, and its traditions of ‘Gothic liberty’. Southey’s drama Wat Tyler () directly stages the clash between the people of England and the unjust authority of the medieval monarchy and aristocracy, depicting the Peasant’s Revolt of  as a justified uprising against the greed and cruelty of the feudal system. Southey and Coleridge’s epic poem Joan of Arc () rejects the conservative medievalist interpretation of the Middle Ages as a golden age of British heroism, depicting the medieval British armies in France as murderous and cruel, and reserving special opprobrium for Henry V; instead they celebrate Joan, the enemy of Britain, who like Wat Tyler is lauded as a champion of the common people. Wordsworth’s early verse drama The Borderers () depicts the Middle Ages as a period of violence and instability, in which ordinary people are left vulnerable to the depredations of a predatory feudal aristocracy; like Joan and Wat, Wordsworth’s outlaw hero Mortimer fights on behalf of the common people, and, like Joan and Wat, he is ultimately unsuccessful, although his career ends in mournful retirement rather than in death. At this stage in their careers, all three poets primarily wrote about the Middle Ages as a dark epoch in which an oppressive military aristocracy gradually crushed the remnants of Britain’s ‘Gothic liberty’ by force of arms, thus implicitly demonstrating why the descendants and successors of that aristocracy needed to be ²⁰ Peter Mortensen, ‘Robbing The Robbers’, Literature and History, rd ser. / (): –. ²¹ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ; Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France (Delmar, NY: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, ), i/. .

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

challenged in the present day. In the context of the s, Southey and Coleridge’s works are fairly straightforward parables about the need for revolutionary action in the face of aristocratic oppression. Wordsworth’s play is much more conflicted about the viability of revolutionary political struggle, reflecting its author’s anguished relationship with the French Revolution; but, like the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Blake, it primarily depicts the feudal aristocratic order as a form of tyranny sustained by violence, undeserving of support in either its medieval or modern forms. Coleridge’s two greatest ‘Gothic’ poems of the period—‘Christabel’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—were much less explicitly ideological. Both were tales of the supernatural, of the sort which had been popularized by Bürger’s Lenore and Scott’s translations from the German; a form which would soon descend to the level of selfparody in Matthew Lewis’s collection of gory, German-style supernatural horror poetry, Tales of Wonder (), but which was still an exciting novelty in . Such poems had introduced the idea, still new and controversial in Britain, of writing poetry featuring explicitly supernatural events, modelled on the supernatural romances of the ‘Gothic Ages’; a trend that was also visible in the novels and drama of the later s, which, under the influence of German models, were starting to flirt with the use of the supernatural, after decades of viewing such material as entirely inappropriate for modern authors. The most appropriate setting for these stories was, of course, understood to be the ‘Gothic Ages’ themselves, when such magical beings had been believed in and written about, and could thus be represented without requiring—to use a phrase invented by Coleridge to describe this very phenomenon—quite as much ‘suspension of disbelief ’.²² Coleridge’s two ‘Gothic’ poems are probably the supreme examples in English of this form of medieval-themed supernatural poetry, growing out of his fascination with both contemporary German literature and with British Gothic fiction.²³ Like Bürger’s Lenore, Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ used both a historical setting and a traditional verse form, namely the ballad; the  version of the ‘Rime’ was even written in an approximation of early modern English, as though to suggest that it was, itself, a survival from the ‘Gothic Ages’, like the forged ‘Rowley’ poems of Thomas Chatterton. The feudal social order of the Middle Ages, harshly criticized in Joan of Arc, is depicted relatively sympathetically in ‘Christabel’, and is simply irrelevant to the ‘Rime’; in these works, Coleridge, like Scott, employs medieval settings not because they provide him with an opportunity for ideological critique, but because the influx of German Gothic literature had made it possible to write tales of the supernatural within such settings which it would otherwise be unacceptable to write at all. As Michael Gamer has shown, some early critics attacked the ‘Rime’ precisely because they saw it as an example of the degenerate taste for showy but ultimately meaningless German-style tales of supernatural terror; and Coleridge’s critiques of ²² S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in Works, vii/ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . ²³ On Coleridge’s reading of Gothic fiction, see Arthur Nethercot, The Road to Tryermain: A Study of the History, Background, and Purposes of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), –.

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

 

Gothic fiction in his reviews for Critical Review, along with Wordsworth’s famous attack on ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies’ in his  preface to Lyrical Ballads, should perhaps be understood as attempts by both writers to differentiate their own supernaturally themed works from the German-influenced Gothic literature of the period, which was rapidly coming to be seen as a low-status genre with highly questionable ideological implications.²⁴ It is certainly true that the ‘Rime’ is a vastly superior poem to anything which appeared in, say, Tales of Wonder; nonetheless, both do share a common origin in the craze for fantastical Gothic tales which followed the translation of Bürger’s Lenore into English, which did so much to foster an interest in scenes of medieval magic and terror amongst the young poets of s Britain.

P 

.................................................................................................................................. As the years of war with France wore on, the youthful radicalism of the early Romantics—the not-so-youthful Blake excepted—increasingly ebbed away. The French Revolution had not brought about the new age of peace and liberty they had hoped for; instead, it had unleashed a seemingly interminable series of wars, which threatened Britain’s very survival as an independent power. In , with French troops massing for an invasion on the far side of the Channel, Wordsworth wrote a series of patriotic sonnets, including this one: It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open Sea Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed, ‘with pomp of waters, unwithstood,’ Road by which all might come and go that would, And bear our freights of worth to foreign lands; That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our Halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.²⁵ ²⁴ Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –; William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. For Coleridge’s reviews of Gothic fiction, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable, ), –. ²⁵ William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems –, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –.

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   



In this poem, the legend of Britain as an ancient land of ‘Gothic liberty’, the home and origin of ‘British freedom’ from ‘dark antiquity’ onwards, is not placed in opposition to the military feudalism of the later Middle Ages, but united with it. Radical interpretations of medieval Britain as an ancient land of liberty oppressed by a Norman aristocracy are grafted onto a conservative account of medieval Britain in which those very aristocrats are celebrated as national heroes: the ‘invincible Knights of old’ are here figured not as the enemies and abolishers of ‘British freedom’, but as its guardians, and it is precisely because ‘we’ are descended from them that ‘we must be free or die’. What Wordsworth attempts here is the evocation of a national past which can unite rather than divide the people of Britain, placing radical enthusiasts for ‘British freedom’ alongside the sort of people who have old suits of armour hanging in their halls, rather than against them; for, in this time of national emergency, such unity is required if the French are to be repelled. The same point is made in another of his  sonnets: Vanguard of Liberty, ye Men of Kent, Ye Children of a Soil that doth advance It’s haughty brow against the coast of France, Now is the time to prove your hardiment! To France be words of invitation sent! They from their Fields can see the countenance Of your fierce war, may ken the glittering lance, And hear you shouting forth your brave intent. Left single, in bold parley, Ye, of yore, Did from the Norman win a gallant wreath; Confirmed the charters that were yours before;— No parleying now! In Britain is one breath; We all are with you now from Shore to Shore:— Ye Men of Kent,’ tis Victory or Death!²⁶

Here, the success of the men of medieval Kent in winning concessions from their Norman overlords is presented not as part of an ongoing struggle for the restoration of ‘Gothic liberty’ within Britain itself, but as an example of their ancestral capacity to resist the power of France—a capacity which is described with the antiquated, medieval word ‘hardiment’, and which is apparently to be enforced with a distinctively medievalsounding ‘glittering lance’. Clearly somewhat anxious that the modern ‘men of Kent’, like those in Wat Tyler’s day, might wonder whether the contemporary equivalents of those Norman aristocrats might be their descendants in the House of Lords rather than the armies of France, Wordsworth moves to cut off any such speculation, insisting that the men of Kent should not even think about negotiating with the French—‘No parleying now!’—and that the whole nation, including them, is united against the French threat: ‘In Britain is one breath; / We all are with you now from shore to shore’. ²⁶ Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, .

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 

In these years the British government was concerned that, if the French did invade, they might not be able to rely upon the loyalty of the people of Britain: elsewhere in Europe, local factions sympathetic to the French revolutionaries had sometimes sided with the invading French armies against their own governments. (Fears such as these led to Blake’s arrest in , after he and his wife were accused of threatening to side with Napoleon when the invasion came.²⁷) In these poems, Wordsworth invokes Britain’s medieval heritage as part of an attempt to persuade his countrymen that Britain was, and always had been, a nation united by its devotion to the heroic defence of liberty. There was a great deal of this sort of patriotic literary medievalism around at the time, most obviously in the form of the many nationalistic historical epics that were then being written: in  alone two epic poems on King Alfred and one on Richard I were published, along with Ogilvie’s epic Britannia, which dealt with Britain’s distant past, and Cowley’s Siege of Acre, which emphasized the continuity between medieval and modern British military heroism by celebrating Britain’s recent victory over the French on the same site where Richard I had triumphed over the Saracens over six hundred years before.²⁸ This new literature of patriotic medievalism largely displaced the fashion for German Gothic, which by  was falling out of favour in Britain, attacked for its supposed extravagance by critics as diverse as Francis Jeffrey and William Wordsworth.²⁹ In the new patriotic poems, the knights and kings of medieval Britain are presented as exemplars of justice and heroism, whose victories demonstrate that there is no enemy that Britain cannot overcome so long as it stays true to its glorious heritage. Coleridge’s poetic fragment, ‘The Knight’s Tomb’ (), communicates a similar faith in the value of Britain’s ancient chivalry, describing the medieval knight ‘Sir Arthur O’Kellyn’ not as an agent of oppression, but as a ‘good man’, the wielder of a ‘good sword’, who deserves his place in heaven ‘with the saints’.³⁰ Faced with the threat of imminent invasion by a French army which they no longer trusted to deliver a better future for anyone except Napoleon, both Wordsworth and Coleridge seem to have decided that an ancient military aristocracy might not be such a bad thing for Britain after all. These heroic knights and kings proliferate in the later poetry of Wordsworth and Southey; and in this they, like many other writers of the period, were doubtless influenced by the colossal popularity of Walter Scott. As already mentioned, Scott began his literary career as a translator of German poetry and drama in the s, before going on to edit a collection of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–), which aimed to preserve the folk-songs of Scotland—many of them of ²⁷ Bentley, Stranger, –. ²⁸ On the patriotic epic tradition, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ch. , and Joseph Crawford, ‘Milton’s Heirs’, Studies in Romanticism, /  (): –. ²⁹ On the waning fortunes of German literature in Britain after , see Ashton, German Idea, –, –. ³⁰ S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Knight’s Tomb’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

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   



medieval origin—just as Percy and Herder had done for those of England and Germany. He first became truly famous for his poetic tales of Scottish chivalry, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (), Marmion (), and The Lady of the Lake (), all of which owed something to the Scottish folk-ballad tradition, and rather more to the medieval-themed poetry of the German Romantics. In the wake of Scott’s success, the English poetry of the s began to fill with heroic medieval knights and warriors, in a continuous patriotic celebration of the nation’s glorious medieval past: in Wordsworth’s later poetry, such chivalric heroes can be seen in his poems ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’ (–), ‘Effusion’ (), and ‘Composed at Cora Linn’ (), while in Southey’s works, they serve as the heroes in his epic poems Madoc () and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (). As I have stressed, it is no coincidence that all of these poems were written during the Napoleonic wars. As young radicals, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey had looked to the medieval epoch for clues regarding the origins of those social fault lines which they saw as disfiguring contemporary British society; but, faced with the looming Napoleonic threat, they turned instead to that same past for a vision of ancestral British heroism with which to comfort and unify a divided and embattled nation.

T    

.................................................................................................................................. By the time the Napoleonic wars finally ended, medievalism—in both its patriotic and ‘Gothic’ forms—had become an entrenched presence within British literature. While Wordsworth was growing up it had still been something of a minority interest; but by  the popularity of Gothic fiction, poetry, and drama, along with the proliferation of medieval-themed epics and the works of Scott, had made such subject matter commonplace. A fascination with knights and ladies, abbeys and castles, no longer required apology or explanation; it had come to be taken for granted that any British author might reasonably take an interest in the famous deeds of his medieval ancestors. Byron, Keats, and Shelley all shared this contemporary fascination with medieval history and culture. The young Byron—the only one of the British Romantics who could credibly claim descent from ‘the invincible Knights of old’—wrote two poems on his ancestral home at Newstead, ‘On Leaving Newstead Abbey’ and ‘Elegy on Newstead Abbey’ (both published in ), which mythologized the glories of his aristocratic medieval forebears. Percy Shelley’s grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, had been so carried away by the medieval enthusiasms of the s that he had a neo-Gothic castle built in Sussex. The younger Shelley’s adolescent fascination with German Gothic literature culminated in a number of poems of medieval supernatural horror—most notably the rather excitably titled horror-poem ‘Ghasta, or, the Avenging Demon!!!’ (, which he described as having been inspired by ‘a few unconnected German Stanzas’, but also clearly owed a great deal to Lewis’s The Monk) as well as two extremely poor Germanstyle Gothic novels, Zastrozzi () and St Irvyne (), which mercifully sank

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

 

without trace.³¹ Radcliffe’s Gothic romances contributed to Keats’s fascination with the culture of the Middle Ages; later, he would refer jokingly to the ‘fine Mother Radcliffe’ names he bestowed upon his own romantic medieval tales.³² With the opening up of Europe following the end of the Napoleonic wars, all three increasingly turned their attentions south, to Italy; and just as the s had witnessed a flood of literary interest in medieval Germany, so the s and s saw a revival of interest in medieval Italy, powerfully stimulated by Henry Cary’s  translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia into English blank verse. Leigh Hunt led the way with his Story of Rimini (), and Shelley, Byron, and Keats all followed him in writing works with medieval and early modern Italian settings, including The Lament of Tasso (), The Cenci (), ‘The Prophecy of Dante’ (), ‘Francesca of Rimini’ (), ‘Isabella’ (), Marino Faliero (), and The Two Foscari (); Shelley also wrote translations and adaptations of Dante, and some fragments of a drama on Tasso. (Scott, once again, had got there long before; he had been reading Ariosto and Tasso since he was a teenager.³³) Even the elderly Blake participated in this enthusiasm, producing his magnificent sequence of illustrations to Dante in –, in the very last years of his life.³⁴ While medieval Germany had tended to be viewed by British writers as a land of open tyranny and violence—an impression powerfully reinforced by the many s British novels and poems set in medieval Germany, which often made heavy use of scenes of horror—medieval and early modern Italy was generally figured as a setting dominated by luxury, corruption, and intrigue.³⁵ This was, to some extent, a matter of each generation finding the version of medievalism which it required: just as the example of medieval Germany had been used by the first generation of British Romantics to critique the repressive Ancien Régime states of Europe, whose symbol in pro-revolutionary writing was always the ‘Gothic’ medieval fortress-prison of the Bastille, so the example of medieval Italy was now used to critique the new European order, which Shelley and Byron saw as being hopelessly corrupt. (It also allowed them to comment indirectly on the wretched state of Italy under Austrian rule; in his Preface to the ‘Prophecy of Dante’, Byron describes the literature of the Italians as ‘all that is left them as a nation’.³⁶) Although their emphasis changed, for the most part they continued to depict the ‘Gothic Ages’ as a period of injustice, however gorgeously adorned; ³¹ Percy Shelley, ‘Ghasta’, in Poetical Works, ed. Neville Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), i. . ³² Letter to George and Georgiana Keats,  Feb. ; John Keats, Letters, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins,  vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ii. . ³³ C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, ), . ³⁴ On Dante’s significance to the British Romantics, see Antonella Braida, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), passim; Brand, Italy, –; and Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, ), ch. . ³⁵ On the fascination of the British Romantics with medieval Italian history, often depicted in a highly Gothicised fashion, see Brand, Italy, , and Cavaliero, Italia Romantica, ch. . ³⁶ Lord Byron, ‘Preface’, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), iv. .

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   



and in this Byron, Keats, and Shelley, all of whom were sympathetic to contemporary radical politics, signalled their dissatisfaction with the idealized visions of patriotic medievalism which were then being offered up by the now firmly conservative Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott. In the longer run, it was Scott’s vision which won out; and compared to the titanic shadow cast by his works, the influence of the other British Romantics on the ways in which the nineteenth century made sense of its medieval past was relatively minimal. But they did help to assimilate into English literature a disparate range of influences— German, Italian, radical, conservative, Gothic—which made it possible for British authors to write about the Middle Ages in new ways; and, in particular, it was through their works that the German-style Gothic literature of the s was translated into a form which would prove acceptable to later generations of British poets. Critics in  might have seen Coleridge and Lewis as largely interchangeable purveyors of debased Germanic supernaturalism, but over the next forty years the fortunes of what we now call Gothic and Romantic literature diverged sharply; the works of the Romantics, Blake excepted, became established parts of the national literary canon, while the Gothic poetry and fiction of their lesser-known contemporaries came to be dismissed as morally degenerate sub-literature. It was thus largely through the poetry of the Romantics that genres such as the medieval tale of the supernatural and the Gothic tale of terror were able to live on into the high literature of mid-nineteenth century. To the Victorian era, they bequeathed a new sense of both the beauty and horror of the medieval past, and a new awareness of the symbolic and imaginative possibilities of ‘Gothic’ supernaturalism; and their legacy can be plainly seen in the works of Tennyson, Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and all those other Victorian authors who partook so heavily, and so frequently, of the riches of the Romantic Gothic imagination.

S  Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Braida, Antonella, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). Cavaliero, Roderick, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, ). Crawford, Joseph, ‘Milton’s Heirs’, Studies in Romanticism, / (): –. Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Fay, Elizabeth, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Houndmills: Macmillan, ). Hall, Daniel, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, ). Hoeveler, Diane, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, – (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ).

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Le Tellier, Robert, Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (–) (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, ). Mortensen, Peter, ‘Robbing The Robbers’, Literature and History, rd ser. / (): –. Watt, James, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Wittreich, Joseph (ed.), The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

              The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past ......................................................................................................................

 

T    -

.................................................................................................................................. S in valediction to his son, the old shepherd in William Wordsworth’s ‘Michael, A Pastoral Poem’ (), bids him retain as an ‘emblem of the life’ of his forefathers, and hence as an ‘anchor and . . . shield’, the plan of a Sheep-fold, the first stone of which the boy now lays.¹ The conspicuously absent and imaginary Sheep-fold (‘A work which is not here’) forms, in Michael’s mind, ‘a covenant / . . . between us’ (ll. –). His self-imposed duty to complete what his son has symbolically begun is the corollary of the duty imposed upon Luke to redeem for his father his own ‘patrimonial fields’ (l. ). But the putatively natural ‘covenant’ is rapidly denatured when transplanted with Luke into the ‘dissolute’ world of the city (l. ). Chosen by Michael as the solution to a financial crisis rather than the sale of any ‘portion’ (l. ) of his subsistence farm, the ‘covenant’ was in fact always as unnatural as what Tom Paine called Edmund Burke’s sacrifice of the substantial good of the present generation to a fetishized patrimony.² Michael sends Luke to one ‘Kinsman’ in order to ‘repair’ the ‘loss’ caused by the old shepherd having been ‘bound / In surety’ for another—his ‘industrious’, now-bankrupt, ‘Brother’s Son’ (ll. –, –). But once removed from anything more than an imaginary connection to his father’s hastily invented

¹ ‘Michael’, in William Wordsworth, The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis,  vols (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, ), –; ll. –. ² Tom Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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 

patrimonial tradition, Luke ‘slacken[s] in his duty’, gives himself over to ‘evil courses’, and ends in a ‘hiding-place beyond the seas’ (ll. –). And Michael, whose ability to endure this catastrophic loss of posterity depends upon evading the kind of social and historical consciousness that first motivated the sacrifice of his son, works compulsively at the non-building of the palliative emblem of ancestry that is not there (ll. –).³ Michael’s ‘unfinished Sheep-fold’ is a fitting emblem of Wordsworth’s sense of history. As a ruin recovered in verse, the Sheep-fold echoes the recuperative endeavours and acts of ‘commemorative piety’ of eighteenth-century antiquarianism—which took castles, churches, and ruined walls as ‘constituent parts of the nation’s past, which in turn was a formative part of the present’.⁴ But as a fragment forestalled in the act of construction, to which ‘appertains’ a ‘history / Homely and rude’ (ll. , –), the unwrought Sheep-fold also registers a crisis within the sense of history more widely. In Reinhart Koselleck’s account, the French Revolution completed the erosion since the Reformation of the ‘static time’ that could be ‘experienced as tradition’.⁵ The Revolution also marks the emergence of a new ‘unknown’ time, ‘within which and out of which’ the nation state ‘weaves’ itself, ‘trapped within’ an incipiently ruinous ‘temporal structure’ of ‘static mobility’.⁶ For the medieval historian, Sharon Turner, this heapingup of the historical horizon made all preceding histories ‘dwindle into insignificance’— requiring historians of the future to be ‘more picturesque’ in order to be ‘more comprehensive’, ‘exhibit[ing] great operations’ by bringing ‘events together more in their connected masses’.⁷ As Nicholas Halmi notes, ‘the temporalization of history and the aestheticization of ruins’ were at once ‘opposed in theory’ and ‘compatible in fact’.⁸ A sense of historical foreshortening and acceleration becomes visible in architectural images such as Joseph Gandy’s ‘Imagined view of the Bank of England in ruins’ () and Charles Cockerell’s architectonic capriccio, ‘The Professor’s Dream’ (; Figure .).⁹ ³ See also the reading of ‘Michael’ in Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. ⁴ Rosemary Sweet, ‘Gothic Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, ), –, . ⁵ Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Kenneth Tribe (Cambridge, MA: Columbia University Press, , tr. ), . ⁶ Koselleck, Futures Past, , . ⁷ Sharon Turner, The History of England During the Middle Ages. nd edition,  vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, ), i, pp. xi–xii. ⁸ Nicholas Halmi, ‘Ruins without a Past’, Essays in Romanticism,  (): –, . ⁹ Gandy’s ‘Imagined view’ is reproduced in Iain McCalman (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. There is a neat summary of Cockerell’s ‘Dream’ in a report on the  Royal Academy Exhibition in The Builder: ‘Mr. Cockerell, R.A., has a very remarkable drawing, called “The Professor’s Dream”, and which is a synopsis of the principal architectural monuments of ancient and modern times, drawn to the same scale, in forms and dimensions ascertained from the best authorities, and arranged on four terraces—Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, and Mediaeval and Modern; the last of these shows more particularly the comparative heights. The Egyptian temples and propylea [sic] form the foreground, including also the sphinx, the Memnon, &c. Then come the Athenian wonders; and the Roman Coliseum, Pantheon, and (once called) Jupiter Sator: the Pisan

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   



Figure .. C. R. Cockerell, RA, ‘The Professor’s Dream’, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Meanwhile, writers from Horace Walpole and Constantin-François de Volney to Anna Barbauld and Charles Lamb associated visions of ruin with the feeling of being or of ‘having been modern’.¹⁰ In his correspondence of late  with the Sinologist Thomas Manning, Lamb (‘of the India-House, London’) spins a series of ‘improbable romantic fictions’, including the imaginary death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, leaving ‘behind him more than forty thousand’ unfinished ‘treatises’.¹¹ Lamb envisions London, England, and ‘the whole western world’ accelerating past its own futurity while Manning remains ‘stationary’ in the east: ‘St Paul’s Church is a heap of ruins; the Monument isn’t half so high as you knew it, divers parts being successively taken down

Tower, the Cathedrals of Cologne, Strasburg, Antwerp; the Brussels Town Hall, &c., represent the mediaeval skill. The Italian domes of the Revival, with St. Paul’s and other of Wren’s works, are crowned by St. Peter’s, and the whole are backed by the dim pyramids, which, as old Fuller says, have outlived their makers’ names. The buildings are brought into combination most artistically, and the result is an extraordinary work.’ The Builder,  ( May ): . ¹⁰ The phrase is Bruno Latour’s, from his resonant remarks on hybridity, purification, modernity, and the ‘Great Divide’ in We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –; my emphasis. See also Halmi, ‘Ruins without a Past’, –. ¹¹ The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas,  vols (London: Methuen & Co., ), vi. –. As David Higgins notes, Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ was first published in Southey’s Annual Anthology under the title ‘THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON, / A POEM, / Addressed to CHARLES LAMB, of the India-House, London’. See David Higgins, Romantic Englishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, – (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .

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which the ravages of time had rendered dangerous . . . all this has taken place while you have been settling whether Ho-hing-tong should be spelt with a — or a –’.¹² The Sheep-fold in ‘Michael’ is one of a series of semi-ruinous structures in which Wordsworth seeks to retransmit tradition and ‘commemorative piety’ beyond the ‘transnatural’ time of the ‘Epoch of Revolutions’—to ‘enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration’, as he puts it in The Prelude.¹³ This architectural series stretches from ‘The towers’ ‘split with ruin deep’ of ‘A Gothic Tale’ (), to the ‘four naked walls / That star’d upon each other’ of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’ (–, ‘The Pedlar’, ll. –), the lost ‘mansion’ in the landscape of ‘Tintern Abbey’ (, l. ), and the half-fragmentary, half-ruined ‘gothic Church’ of The Recluse that was—as Wordsworth put it in the s, modifying the architectural image of The Excursion () with the geological language of ‘Malham Cove’ ()—a ‘wreck of is and was’, ‘sadder’ still ‘Than noblest objects utterly decayed’.¹⁴ As in Cockerell’s ‘Dream’—where a ‘wilderness of building’ (Excursion, II, ) proliferates within bounds set by immemorial antiquity—so in Wordsworth’s poetry, Gothic structures produce an effect of ‘static mobility’—of historical deepening in place. In his poem on the ‘internal spirit’ of ‘feudal times’, The White Doe of Rylstone (), Wordsworth evokes the Gothic remains of Bolton Priory—‘mouldering’ on into ‘Eliza’s golden time’, as ‘young and old’ continue to ‘repair’ to the ‘shattered fabric’s heart’ ‘for praise and prayer’.¹⁵ By thus contrasting desuetude and decay, and by choosing ‘common historic records’ over the ‘curious’ ‘particulars’ favoured by creative antiquarians such as Walter Scott, Wordsworth reasserts the claim of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads () that the Poet is a traditionalist, ‘an upholder and preserver’ rather than a man of historical science.¹⁶ In comments of  that veer between ¹² Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vi. –. So far from being stationary, Manning was in fact travelling between Calcutta, Lhasa, and Canton. ¹³ See The Prelude (), XI, –, in The Prelude: The Four Texts, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin Books, ); and Koselleck, Futures Past, . The phrase ‘Epoch of Revolutions’ is Barthold Niebuhr’s. ¹⁴ For ‘A Gothic Tale’, see Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), –. For the other poems mentioned here, see The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth. For The Recluse and The Excursion, see Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye, assisted by David Garcia (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), ‘Preface’, –; and see also The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, ; Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, ), –. ¹⁵ Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone: or, The Fate of the Nortons, ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), ll. –. See also Fenwick Notes, –. ¹⁶ See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, nd edn, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, –), i. ; James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ), ; and The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser,  vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; Tirril, Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, ), i. . On the withholding of Wordsworth’s White Doe until , following the ‘derision’ of Lamb and Hazlitt, and Coleridge’s reservations in , see The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, –.

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anxiety and pride in a distinctive achievement, Wordsworth pronounces ‘a plague upon’ Scott’s ‘industrious Antiquarianism’ that has threatened to put ‘my fine story to confusion’.¹⁷ Mid-way between James Thomson condemning Gothic builders for their ‘labour’d heavy monuments of shame’, and John Ruskin celebrating the crude work that manifests freedom, Wordsworth offers his Gothic buildings as an imaginative architecture of the past.¹⁸ Wordsworth’s ‘plague upon . . . industrious Antiquarianism’ would also have implicated his Lake District neighbour and friend, Robert Southey. But while Southey was a very different sort of writer—periodical essayist, would-be historiographer royal, and (at least initially) an enthusiastic poet laureate—he was similarly engaged in efforts to transform antiquarianism into new forms of history.¹⁹ Southey affiliated his historical sense to Wordsworth’s in describing his own long-planned Book of the Church () as a ‘running commentary’ to Ecclesiastical Sketches (), and hoped that they would thus, ‘without any concerted purpose . . . go down to posterity in company’.²⁰ In his imaginative history cum dialogue with the dead, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on Society (), Southey made repeated references to ‘our great philosophic poet’, and there was, ‘perhaps, not a page’ of that book that he ‘did not read [Wordsworth] in MS’.²¹ ‘One of Southey’s purposes in the Colloquies was’, as Tim Fulford argues, ‘to advance the cause of Wordsworth’s past poetry as a discourse that could teach Britons how to live in the present’.²² When planning a second series of Colloquies against the Reform Bill in –, it was Wordsworth—and specifically not his earlier collaborator Coleridge—to whom Southey turned for advice.²³ And it was Wordsworth’s sense of the importance of the work and ‘anxi[ety] for . . . speedy publication’ that prompted

¹⁷ The Middle Years, i. . ¹⁸ See Thomson’s Liberty (–), ii. –, in The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); and John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume the Second, The Sea-Stories (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., ), –. ¹⁹ See W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), passim; and Mark Storey, ‘ “Bob Southey!—Poet Laureate”: Public and Private in Southey’s Poems of ’, in Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –. ²⁰ See Stuart Andrews, ‘Wordsworth, Southey, and the English Church’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Winter ): ; and Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey,  vols (London: Longmans, –), v. . Southey had been planning The Book of the Church since at least the start of : see Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, ), . ²¹ See Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society,  vols (London: John Murray, ), i. , ; ii. , , ; and Lionel Madden (ed.), Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, ), . ²² Tim Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ²³ Robert Southey to John Rickman,  May , in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry,  vols (New York: Columbia University Press, ), ii. –. ‘I will . . . show the whole to Wordsworth, the only consultable person within reach here, at present. S.T.C. is not so: he would travel from Dan to Beersheba in the margin’.

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Southey to take the project to his publisher, John Murray.²⁴ Southey was, however, something more than Wordsworth’s social mouthpiece or historical interpreter. He claimed to be ‘a good poet—but a better historian, & the better for having been accustomed to feel & think as a poet’.²⁵ If Wordsworth’s Poet was a global historian of feelings, then Southey was at least an alternative answer to the description.²⁶ He described himself in  as having ‘more in hand than Bonaparte or Marquis Wellesley. digesting Gothic law—gleaning moral history from monkish legends & conquering India, or rather Asia, with Alboquerque—filling up the chinks of the day by hunting in Jesuit-Chronicles, & compiling Collectanea Hispanica & Gothica’.²⁷ ‘Michael’ represents an intriguing intersection of Southey and Wordsworth as poets and historians. As Michael Wiley argues, ‘Michael’ was written in response to Southey having ‘appropriated’—if not plagiarized—the themes and images of Wordsworth’s unpublished ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (–), in a poem of the same title included in Southey’s English Eclogues ().²⁸ As in Southey’s eclogue, and as in early drafts of Wordsworth’s own dialogical ‘Ruined Cottage’, Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ presents a single ‘knowledgeable speaker explaining the historical circumstances of a pile of ruins’; and the later poem compensates the loss of dialogue with an ‘amplification’ of the ruin motif whereby ‘the sheepfold ruins’ are doubled by ‘Michael’s cottage now fully erased from the land’.²⁹ Southey recognized ‘Michael’ as one of Wordsworth’s foremost ‘pieces of . . . beauty’.³⁰ But in his own later appropriation of the dialogue form (following Wordsworth’s publication of his ‘Ruined Cottage’ as book I of The Excursion, ), Southey attempted in the Colloquies both to supplement and to surpass Wordsworth’s history in ruins. In conversation with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, Southey summons up the spirit of ‘Michael’. Sir Thomas quotes Henry VIII on the Reformation and ‘an old stone wall’: Henry had too much sagacity not to perceive the consequences which such a book [as Simon Fish’s The Supplication of Beggars ()] was likely to produce, and he said after perusing it, ‘If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and begin at the ²⁴ Robert Southey to John Rickman,  June , Huntington Library MS RS. The second series of Colloquies was never published, owing to John Murray’s financial difficulties. ²⁵ The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer, Romantic Circles Electronic Editions, University of Maryland; letter . ²⁶ Wordsworth’s Poet ‘binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time’. Poetry is ‘the history or science of feelings’. See Preface to Lyrical Ballads in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, i. ; and the ‘Note to The Thorn’, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²⁷ Collected Letters of Robert Southey, letter . ²⁸ Michael Wiley, ‘Romantic Amplification: The Way of Plagiarism’, ELH / (Spring ): –, –. ²⁹ Wiley, ‘Romantic Amplification’, . On the evolution of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’ from ‘stark story’ to complex dialogue, see James Butler (ed.), ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), p. xii. ³⁰ Robert Southey to Anna Seward,  July , The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, letter .

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bottom, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head’. But he saw also that it tended to serve his immediate purpose.³¹

For Southey’s Sir Thomas, this architectural image bespeaks the king’s consciousness of historical cause and effect—and testifies to the historical ingrowth consequent (as in ‘Michael’) on suppressing or evading such knowledge. Elsewhere in the Colloquies, Southey invokes ‘Michael’ still more directly. Another conversation with Sir Thomas turns on the historical origins of commercial society and the medieval ‘progress of inclosures’. This exchange comes with an assemblage of anecdotes that includes sheep devouring ‘men and fields and houses’ in Thomas More’s Utopia (), Hugh Latimer on ‘inclosers’ turning ‘householders and inhabitants’ into ‘a shepherd and his dog’, and an ‘odd’ early-Stuart text on ‘Churches’ making ‘shepherds cottages’.³² Having thus charged the pastoral figure of the shepherd with historical resonance, as the unwitting cipher of the ‘depopulating system’, Southey then draws a parallel with ‘the extinction of small farms’ ‘in these days’.³³ Southey’s history thus comprehends Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral poem’, articulating the pattern of dispossession and historical blindness that ‘Michael’ realizes only obliquely in the shape of the unfinished Sheep-fold. Southey historicizing Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ is a suggestive instance of HansGeorg Gadamer’s account of historicism taking hold, as ‘romanticism—the revival of the past . . . the cultivation of ancient customs’ motivates ‘the historical research that has slowly, step by step, transformed the intuitive revival into historical knowledge proper’.³⁴ But if Wordsworth’s traditionalism is just, as James Chandler notes, a ‘wrinkle in Gadamer’s story’, it is also clear from the exchange with Scott over The White Doe that Wordsworth was deliberately doing something different.³⁵ In August , Wordsworth told Scott that while his Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field () had gained its end, it was not ‘the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself . . . both as to matter and manner’.³⁶ That ‘end’ was not Scott’s ‘outward & social forms’ of past ‘life’ but ‘its internal spirit’.³⁷ Coleridge suggested something similar in his later

³¹ Southey, Sir Thomas More, i. –. Simon Fish’s Supplication of Beggars () attacked the doctrinal edifice of purgatory, focusing on its lack of scriptural authority and the clerical abuse that had turned it into a system of ‘pardons for money’. See Richard Rex, ‘More and the Heretics: Statesman or Fanatic?’, in George M. Logan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Thomas More’s response was the Supplication of Souls (), defending purgatory by what Stephen Greenblatt calls ‘strained’ exegesis of apocryphal texts, ‘oddly’ presented as the direct communication of the dead, speaking to the reader from within their purgatorial fires. See Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, ), –. The text of Fish’s Supplication, followed by ‘The Story of M. Symon Fish’—Southey’s source here—is included in the staple work of English Protestant identity, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,  vols (London, ), ii. –. ³² Southey, Sir Thomas More, i. –. ³³ Southey, Sir Thomas More, i. –. ³⁴ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, ), . ³⁵ James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, . ³⁶ The Middle Years. i. . ³⁷ The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, .

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comment that the history reader who had not learned to honour the ‘self-evolving’, half-submerged ‘ideal’ character of the English Constitution had ‘missed [the] most valuable result’ of his studies, and ‘might . . . as profitably, and far more delightfully have devoted his [time] to Sir Walter Scott’s Novels’.³⁸ The Romantic historicism of the Lake Poets was, on this view, not an ox-bow lake cut off from ‘historical knowledge proper’, but itself the main stream, carrying a history held not in curiosities but in common. What the comparison with Scott and Southey reveals is that Wordsworth’s ‘Gothic’ poetics involves the gradual ‘cultivation’—as opposed to the ‘civilized’ transcendence—of the forms handed down from tradition.³⁹ In ‘Michael’, Wordsworth develops an oblique historical form, a ‘pastoral poem’ that registers without over-writing or allegorizing the socio-political ‘trouble’ (l. ) of the s. Various cues in the poem and in Wordsworth’s other writings extend the historical frame all the way back to the s, and the gradual (though occasionally violent) consolidation of the ‘statesmen’ system of ‘small estates’.⁴⁰ Wordsworth evokes without expressing the overlapping temporalities and perspectives in play by suspending the story in oral tradition: it is ‘the first, / The earliest of those Tales that spake to me / Of Shepherds’ (ll. –). He redoubles the effect by using a language of ‘plain humanities’, shorn of ‘poetic’ ‘hieroglyphics, and enigmas’, but subtly ‘garnished’ by a pervasive use of the ‘un-’ prefix (‘unhewn’, ‘ungarnish’d’, etc.).⁴¹ Pointing at once to the past and the future, carrying a double sense of reversal and of incomplete accomplishment, the ‘un-’ prefix is the textual ‘remnant’ of Michael’s historical experience of Koselleck’s ‘new unknown time’. As Jane Stabler notes (in a different context), the ‘un-’ prefix embodies Wordsworth’s processes of ‘slow creation’: it allows the poet to revisit a word even as it is ‘wrought in the opposite direction’, with the ‘remnant’ making ‘the process of transformation . . . legible’.⁴² Poised, in Georg Simmel’s phrase on the ruin, ‘[b]etween the not-yet and the no-longer’, the ‘un-’ prefix acts as a textual double for Michael’s Sheep-fold, providing a negative ‘affirmation’ of the peaks ascended by the ‘spirit’ by marking out the persistence of the ‘path’ ‘descend[ing] to its home’.⁴³ For Fiona Stafford, similarly, the ‘privative prefix’ in ‘Michael’ has a slow historicizing effect, gradually specifying ‘the ideal through knowledge of what it is not’.⁴⁴ Wordsworth thus draws out that which lies inchoate and inarticulate in the ³⁸ Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, ), –. ³⁹ Coleridge develops the distinction between civilization and cultivation in his Constitution of the Church and State, –. ⁴⁰ Terry McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, in Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁴¹ See Wordsworth, ‘Appendix to the Preface’, in Prose Works, i. ; and Fiona Stafford, ‘Plain Living and Ungarnish’d Stories: Wordsworth and the Survival of Pastoral’, Review of English Studies,  / (): –, –. ⁴² Jane Stabler, ‘Byron and The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Spring ): –, . ⁴³ See Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in ‘Two Essays’, The Hudson Review, / (Autumn ): –, . ⁴⁴ Stafford, ‘Plain Living’, .

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‘history / Homely and rude’ (ll. –) of the ‘unfinished Sheep-fold’—making the unconscious conscious, the accidental intentional, and the ballad lyrical. The poem recreates the dynamics of the ‘covenant’ between Michael and Luke, as Wordsworth encloses the rustic ‘Tale’ in imagination, ‘for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second Self when I am gone’ (ll. , –). But this virtual reproduction is already an act of imaginative reclamation and historical reading. In a pair of roughly contemporary draft passages for ‘Michael’ and The Prelude, Wordsworth engages in a vitally metaphorical reflection on how steady attention to old forms unlocks their latent historical content. ‘There is’, he writes in the ‘Michael’ passage, a shapeless heap of unhewn stones That lie together, some in heaps and some In lines that seem to keep themselves alive In the last dotage of a dying form At least so seems to a man that stands In such a lonely place.⁴⁵

In the Prelude fragment, Wordsworth writes of the ‘considerate and laborious work’ of ‘slow creation’ that doth impart to speach Outline and substance, even till it has given A function kindred to organic power— The vital spirit of a perfect form.⁴⁶

Wordsworth’s staging of Michael’s steadfast act of unremembrance lifts him out of occlusion in the natural landscape, but without subsuming the family tragedy in a higher-level economic analysis. Dorothy Wordsworth suggested a virtual identity between poet and shepherd in describing her brother working ‘at the sheepfold’, and often ‘in vain’.⁴⁷ The ‘dying form’ of the ‘unfinished’ Sheep-fold returns, half-historicized and half-humanized, in Wordsworth’s slow creation of his lyrical ballad’s ‘perfect form’.

A Gothic plan ‘Michael’ marks one stage in the longer development, across Wordsworth’s career, of a Gothic myth and a Gothic inner architecture; what Coleridge, speaking of ⁴⁵ Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems, –, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), . ⁴⁶ Wordsworth, The Prelude , , , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, ), . ⁴⁷ See David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination (New York and London: Methuen, ), .

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Wordsworth’s ‘feudal’ White Doe, called the evanescent ‘Plan’—to be withheld from too gross a ‘materialization’—of ‘the history in the mind’.⁴⁸ So wide is the span, so high the pinnacle, of this overarching design, that it often recedes from view. It is glimpsed in a poem such as ‘Mutability’, a sonnet in Ecclesiastical Sketches (), in which Wordsworth evokes the persistence of ‘the tower sublime / Of yesterday’ by reclaiming and repurposing material on the ‘touch of time’ from ‘A Gothic Tale’—composed over twenty years before.⁴⁹ But much closer to the surface of Wordsworth’s early poetry is a radical feeling for nature as—in John Thelwall’s phrase—‘what is fit and true, and can endure the test of reason’, and the polar opposite of ‘the gaudy, cumbrous fustian’ of the ‘Gothic custumary’.⁵⁰ In such poems as ‘The Tables Turned’ in Lyrical Ballads (), the impulses of nature teach more ‘Than all the sages can’.⁵¹ But Wordsworth also reads in the landscape a ‘Gothic’ lesson—poised between Edmund Burke’s and John Ruskin’s senses of the term—about habit and human nature. ‘For I have learned’, Wordsworth says in ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘To look on nature . . . hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity’ (ll. –). ‘[L]ook[ing] . . . hearing’, the poet perceives in the ruin-rich landscape ‘Things which you cannot see’ (l. ), looking steadily—like ‘Armytage’, the pedlar of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ before him—into the human dimension of time.⁵² Wordsworth closes his poem ‘on the Wye’ by reimagining Armytage’s ‘strange discipline’ of memory as a plan of inner-architecture.⁵³ Through a continual sublation of ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts’ of unselfconscious being, Wordsworth tells his ‘wild-eyed’ sister, she may refashion her mind as a ‘mansion for all lovely forms’, and live on in his absence, haunted everywhere by hope (ll. , , –). The Prelude, composed between  and , though not published until , reflects this gradual ‘materialization’ of Wordsworth’s Gothic ‘Plan’ throughout. The two-part poem of  depicts the child-poet, placed in the ‘severe’ and sublime stream of nature’s ‘school’, both inhabiting and inhabited by a landscape of ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men’, from ‘naked crags’ and ‘stone walls’ making ‘bleak music’ with the wind, to ruins like Furness Abbey, with its ‘fractured arch’ and ‘nave . . . touched by faint / Internal breezes’ (: I, –, –, , ; II, –). Like Byron in Childe Harold, Wordsworth transforms the quest romance and the feeling of historical rupture in ruins into the present matter of his song, shifting ‘from previous ages to previous states of mind, from culture to individual and from

⁴⁸ Coleridge to Wordsworth,  May , qtd. in The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, . ⁴⁹ See Wordsworth, The Borderers, ; and The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, iii. –. ⁵⁰ John Thelwall, The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), . ⁵¹ The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, i. –. ⁵² Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, ed. James A. Butler (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), . ⁵³ ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, – (RC MS. B v l. ).

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history to psychology’.⁵⁴ The poet is himself a human version of the Gothic ruins that populate the landscape, a ‘building’ with its ‘props . . . removed’, that stands ‘as if sustained / By its own spirit’ (: II, –). In this early version of Wordsworth’s ‘Poem on the Growth of [his] own Support’, as Coleridge called it, the Gothic imagery sublimates the Wordsworth family tragedy—the early loss of both parents and the dereliction of old John Wordsworth’s employer, Lord Lonsdale.⁵⁵ Lonsdale’s refusal to repay outstanding debts of almost £, to the Wordsworth children left them literally ‘destitute, and as we might / Trooping together’ (: II, –).⁵⁶ As Dorothy reflected in February , ‘We in the same moment lost a father, a mother, a home, we have been equally deprived of our patrimony by the cruel Hand of lordly Tyranny’.⁵⁷ But as Wordsworth reworked The Prelude into a five- and then a thirteen-book form, including explicit treatment of the French Revolution, he increasingly read the ruin as a historical palimpsest and a paradigm of ‘strong / Confusion’ (: VI, –). In book V, Wordsworth further internalizes the taste for buildings ‘formed in ruins’ in the culture of sensibility.⁵⁸ The boy of Winander, like the ‘fractured’, ‘shattered’ remains of Furness and Bolton, ‘Has carried far into his heart the voice’ of an inhuman nature (V, ). The boy is the limit-case for Wordsworth’s vision of the ‘real chil[d]’: ‘not too wise, / Too learnèd, or too good, but wanton, fresh’, with a little world woven from ‘books and nature’, and with only such ‘Knowledge’ as quickens from inborn ‘power’ (V, –). But better the boy’s toorapid ruin, Wordsworth suggests, than the ‘hollow . . . life of lies’ (V, ) provided for by Benthamite systems of education. A child raised to programmatic study is, indeed, ‘no child, / But a dwarf man’, who dwindles even as he ‘grow[s] wiser every day’, pounded ‘Within the pinfold of his own conceit’ (V, –, , –). The ‘real child’ is to the ‘dwarf man’ as Ruskin’s clumsy ‘old Venetian’ is to his ‘engine-turned’ modern-day English operative: rough, dull, incapable, failing, but hiding ‘transfiguration behind and within’.⁵⁹ The Wordsworthian child, keeping ‘the mind / Deep in its fountain’ (Byron, Childe Harold, III, ), is Coleridge’s ‘dormant’, ‘insular’, ‘self-evolving’ Constitution in miniature.⁶⁰ But in The Prelude, as in the ‘Intimations’ Ode, Wordsworth transforms

⁵⁴ Ralph Pite, ‘Introduction’, in Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (eds), Romans and Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ⁵⁵ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, –), iv. –. ⁵⁶ See McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, –; and Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁵⁷ The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, –, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . ⁵⁸ See Inger Sigrun Brodey, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York and London: Routledge, ), . ⁵⁹ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . ⁶⁰ Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –.

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the ‘immemorial’ view of English nationhood that Coleridge took on from the ‘Gothic historiography’ going back to Edward Coke in the s, as he locates the ‘soul’s immensity’ in a time before education, and claims for his story of true ‘nature yet remembered’ the status of a ‘history’ that, ‘in the words of reason deeply weighed— / Hath no beginning’ (: II, , –).⁶¹ Reflecting on the Revolution in France, Burke had boasted that his feeling for the ‘Gothic’ ‘ground-work’ of Britain in ‘monkish’ institutions like the universities was ‘so worked into my mind’ that he could not ‘distinguish’ the structures of his own thoughts from those of others who came before him.⁶² But Wordsworth had, as Coleridge put it, absorbed and redirected the shock of the Revolution, rebuilding lost ‘Hope’ at home into a ‘dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self ’, transforming history into prophecy.⁶³ In the language of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ and of his  prose tract, The Convention of Cintra, Burke’s mental ‘buildings’ ‘bind too closely to something inward,—to the present and the past’, ‘[w]hereas the vigour of the human soul is from without and from futurity’, in the mental architecture of ‘worlds not realized’.⁶⁴ What Wordsworth proposes in The Prelude is therefore a far more ‘revolutionary architecture’ of the Gothic, which—to adapt John Ruskin’s terms—sets out from an admission of no ‘executive inferiority . . . at all’.⁶⁵ In The Prelude, Wordsworth presents his own story as little less than a national theodicy: Gothic England is redeemed from history in the growth of a poet’s mind. Coleridge articulated this ‘Gothic’ achievement in ‘To William Wordsworth’, his poetic response to Wordsworth reading the whole  Prelude aloud in the dying days of . Coleridge’s Gothic ideal, as he later described it in relation to the British constitution and the English language, was a ‘structure . . . complete in each part’ that preserves ‘the rights and interests of the individual in conjunction with those of the

⁶¹ See R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest, Medieval Institutions in British Thought, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, ; Sean Silver, ‘The Politics of Gothic Historiography, –’, in Byron and Townshend, The Gothic World, –; and Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –. ⁶² Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. nd edn (London: J. Dodsley, ), . ⁶³ Coleridge, ‘To William Wordsworth’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, ll. –, –. ⁶⁴ See The Convention of Cintra in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, i. . Stephen Gill suggests a reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’ as a poem of political imagination. The poem was first published in  as plain ‘Ode’, and it was only through a gradual process of reframing—with a footnote in The Excursion () and a retitling in Poems ()—that Wordsworth managed subsequently to ‘impose a transcendental interpretation’. Opening with the line, ‘There was a time when’, and linked via ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ to ‘Lines’ on the ‘Power’ and the ‘passing’ of Charles James Fox, the  ‘Ode’ originally ‘beckoned to who knows what exercise of nostalgia’. See Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁶⁵ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . Ruskin divides architectural ornament into three ‘systems’: ‘. Servile ornament, in which the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher;—. Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers;—and . Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all.’

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whole’.⁶⁶ Wordsworth was already the incarnation of this organic ideal: Coleridge had prophesied in January  that a simple song of ‘Wordsworth . . . himself ’, a ‘Faithful transcript’ of his ‘habitual Feelings & Modes of seeing and hearing’, could not help but be the world’s ‘first & finest philosophical Poem’.⁶⁷ The Prelude confirmed the prediction. A ‘prophetic’ ‘lay / More than historic’, of ‘high and passionate thoughts / To their own music chanted’, the poem installs Wordsworth ‘in the choir / Of ever-enduring men’ (ll. –, –, –). More than a ‘Gothic instrument’ defining the ‘choir’ (in Coleridge’s later phrase for the church organ), Wordsworth’s poem resembles an entire Gothic cathedral, an ‘architecture’ of ‘self-annihilation’ that also embodies a selfevolving ‘plan’ in which ‘endless complexity and variety are united into one whole’.⁶⁸ Wordsworth’s ‘lay’ rushes Coleridge out of selfish mourning at the ‘grave’ of his own ‘genius’, and he emerges from the poem rising in profound obeisance, reborn in a ‘Gothic’ form between Burke’s ‘proud submission’ and Ruskin’s aspiring reverence: ‘my being blended in one thought / (Thought was it? Or aspiration? Or resolve?) / . . . And when I rose, I found myself in prayer’ (ll. –, –).⁶⁹ Wordsworth’s Gothic ‘Plan’ materialized still further in The Excursion (). The Preface introduces the poem as only ‘part’ of a larger ‘philosophical poem’, The Recluse. The associations of this overarching title, along with Wordsworth’s references to retirement, an inward ‘review’, and a solitude oriented towards ‘Society’, all suggest a modern-day monasticism. This suggestion becomes explicit as Wordsworth figures The Recluse as a fragmentary Gothic edifice, awaiting a reader able to decode the accretive ‘system’ of its architecture: [The Prelude and The Excursion] have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Anti-chapel has to the body of a gothic Church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor Pieces . . . have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses ordinarily included in those Edifices . . . It is not the Author’s intention formally to announce a system: it was more animating to him to proceed in a different course; and if he shall succeed in conveying to the mind clear thoughts, lively images, and strong feelings, the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself.⁷⁰

The whole poem reinvents the Gothic historiographical pattern of Thomson’s Liberty, whereby Britain rises ‘from Celtic night / To present grandeur’ (IV, –). All four of the principal characters are historically transitive. The Solitary is a priest turned Jacobin, now living like an anchorite in a cell, who cultivates Coleridgean poses of ⁶⁶ Coleridge, Lectures –: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes,  vols (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, ), ii. . ⁶⁷ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ii. . ⁶⁸ Coleridge, Lectures: On Literature, ii. . ⁶⁹ See Burke, Reflections, ; Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . ⁷⁰ Wordsworth, The Excursion, –.

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historical ‘abstraction’, and extols the contemplative ‘life where hope and memory are as one’ (Excursion, II, –, V, –, III, ).⁷¹ The Pastor is less an evangelist than a local historian and functionary of Coleridge’s ‘national Church’. The Poet, instantly distinguished from Wordsworth the mountaineer by his ‘languid feet’ ‘toiling’ across a common (I, –), seems much less a Poet than a poet laureate as he hails ‘the State of England’ and the ‘Crown by Freedom shaped’ (VI, –). And the main character in the early books, the Wanderer (‘Armytage’ from ‘The Ruined Cottage’), is doubly obsolescent as a pedlar and an oral poet who lacks ‘the accomplishment of Verse’ (I, ). The ‘something . . . dramatic form’ of the poem also adumbrates medievalism. The focus of interest shifts from the ‘rounded’ character of the Wanderer (I, ) to the ‘pointed’ figure (‘changeable to infinity’) of the Solitary (VIII, ).⁷² Their ‘argument’ about what the Solitary calls our ‘sad dependance upon time’ (IV, ) moves through various types of historical sensibility towards a ‘medievalist’ structure of feeling. Private myth, ‘antiquarian humour’ (III, ), religious syncretism, and graveyard poetry are progressively superseded from books I to VI. Reflections on an Elizabethan knight left stranded by the long withdrawing roar of chivalry then lead on to a Pugin-esque contrast between a ‘many-windowed’ modern factory and a ‘Conventual Church’ ‘of old’ (VII, –, –; VIII, –, –). The poem concludes with a series of ‘Gothic’ vignettes, in which Britain ‘cast[s] off / Her swarms’; Parliament’s ‘venerable Halls’ realize Edward VI’s vision of the Reformation; and a faculty for imagining ‘The thing that hath been as the thing that is’ produces a vision of ancient British druidism and wicker-men, shockingly superimposed upon a cultivated English landscape (IX, –, –, –). But if The Excursion thus anticipates Ruskin on ‘medievalism’ as social life in ‘Gothic form’, much of its audience, including Coleridge and the younger Romantics, received the poem as a backward step, a work more untimely than ‘prophetic’.⁷³ William Hazlitt suggested that the poem was a ‘gothic Church’ only because it harked back to the wilful obscurantism of the Ancien Régime. It ‘affects a system without having any intelligible clue to one’, and resembles nothing so much as a poetical cathedral of Cologne: ‘like one of those stupendous but half-finished structures which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use

⁷¹ In The Friend, Coleridge represents himself as immersed in the ‘old Faith’ that is ‘modern Heresy’, ‘upholding some Principles both of Taste and Philosophy, adopted by the great Men of Europe from the Middle of the fifteenth till towards the Close of the seventeenth Century’. See The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke,  vols (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, ), ii. . ⁷² Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . See also Richard Gravil, ‘Is The Excursion a “Metrical Novel?” ’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (): –; and my ‘The Dramatic End of The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Spring ): –. ⁷³ See Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh, in November  (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., ), , ; and Linda H. Peterson, ‘Sage Writing’, in Herbert F. Tucker (ed.), A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, ), –.

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or beauty’.⁷⁴ The ‘characters’ in The Excursion were not so much psychologically plausible individuals as versions of Wordsworth, refractions of the ‘intense’ (‘selfannihilating’, ‘Gothic’) character that ‘swallows up every thing’: ‘the dialogues . . . are soliloquies of the same character . . . The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar, are three persons in one poet’.⁷⁵ The potential of those parallel ‘soliloquies of the same character’ for a critical archaeology of the ‘Gothic’ subject had ended, for Hazlitt, in nothing more than a self-indulgent ‘intellectual egotism’. Coleridge similarly ‘censured’ The Excursion, ‘comparatively’ with the (thenunpublished) Prelude, as showing an ‘undue predilection for the dramatic form’.⁷⁶ In effect, The Excursion fulfilled Coleridge’s worst fears about a ‘materialization of the Plan’ subverting the true-Gothic ‘history in the mind’ that he still hoped—despite his estrangement from Wordsworth since —would constitute The Recluse. Wordsworth had reduced the ‘wholly imaginative’ ‘character’ of the pedlar from ‘The Ruined Cottage’ to the status of a mere ‘talker in the dialogue’, more ‘Methodist parson’ than Gothic bard.⁷⁷ In the language of Coleridge’s Constitution of the Church and State (), Wordsworth had thus lost sight of the ‘due proportion of the potential (latent, dormant) to the actual Power’. Exchanging the rough majesty of The Prelude for the ‘little urbanities’ of dialogue in The Excursion was equivalent, for Coleridge, to England sacrificing ‘the insular privilege of a self-evolving Constitution’, progressive in proportion as it ‘remain[ed] in the Idea, unevolved’, for a state as ‘improgressive’ as Venice or China, where ‘power’ was ossified in proportion as it was fully ‘awake and . . . operative’ in ‘rigid’ ‘forms’.⁷⁸ For Coleridge, Wordsworth’s poetry had departed from its ‘historic’ and ‘prophetic’ character at the point when it had ceased to be ‘insular’ and oblique. Writing in Tait’s Magazine in , De Quincey concurred: ‘Not . . . in The Excursion must we look for that reversionary influence which awaits

⁷⁴ See William Hazlitt, Selected Writings, ed. John Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; and The Examiner,  Aug. , . ⁷⁵ The Examiner,  Aug. , . ⁷⁶ See Seamus Perry, ‘Coleridge’s Disappointment in The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Spring ): –; and Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate,  vols (London and Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), ii. . ⁷⁷ Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring,  vols (London and Princeton: Routledge, Princeton University Press, ), i. –. ⁷⁸ See Coleridge, Table Talk, i. ; Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –; and, for Coleridge comparing Wordsworth’s ‘mental bombast’ to ‘the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries’, see Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. . While this looks on the face of it like standard ‘orientalist’ denigration of China, Coleridge’s account of the constitution as a magnet, polarized between the forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’, suggests a more specialized meaning for ‘improgressive’. The term may give a Romantic-historicist twist to Adam Smith’s account of the Qing empire as ‘stationary’—meaning, as Giovanni Arrighi claims, not ‘stagnant’ but ‘optimalized’, fit for its own purposes, already arrived at the end of history. See Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –; Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, ); and Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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Wordsworth with posterity’.⁷⁹ Wordsworth’s ‘whole college of philosophy’ was guilty of ‘childish impatience’, of failing to perceive the ‘long swells setting in from the French Revolution’, which ‘has not, even yet, come into full action’. By contrast, Wordsworth’s early poetry was one of ‘palingenesis’: ‘oblique forms’, ‘ruined lodges’, and ‘forgotten mansions’, giving glimpses of a far future ‘even now on the road’. But as Coleridge half-recognizes in his comment on the ‘imaginative’ decline of the Wanderer, The Excursion retains an ‘insular’ and ‘oblique’ ‘Gothic’ character in another sense—in the (distinctly Coleridgean) shape of the Solitary.⁸⁰ For much of the poem, the Solitary’s true-Gothic identity is obscured as the other characters attempt to ‘correct’ him by ‘heaping up . . . exempla in the medieval manner’.⁸¹ But the Solitary’s telling of his own life-story in book III concludes with a passage of poetry that—like Coleridge’s ‘To William Wordsworth’—takes up and transforms Wordsworth’s own articulations of his Gothic myth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude. In the parallel passage at Prelude, IV, –, Wordsworth figures memory as visual mastery. ‘Incumbent o’er the surface of past time’, he engages in a ‘sweet[ly]’ impeded struggle to ‘part / The shadow from the substance’, the surface from the ‘deeps’ of his memory. The Solitary rehumanizes and universalizes the figure: all of ‘human Life’ is a ‘mountain Brook / In some still passage of its course’ (III, , –). There is real imaginative risk in this image. In book V of The Prelude, still waters signified stagnation, as with the mis-taught ‘dwarf man’ and ‘the dimpling cistern of his heart’ (, V, , ). But in an exemplary act of ‘Gothic’ rereading, the Solitary understands the ‘still passage’ in terms of the ‘inland murmur’ and ‘still . . . music’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’. ‘[S]eeing and hearing’ in the ‘habitual . . . Mode’ that Coleridge identified with Wordsworth’s own true-Gothic identity, the Solitary at the ‘Brook’ hears ‘a roar or murmur’, and sees, Within the depths of its capacious breast, Inverted trees, and rocks, and azure sky; And, on its glassy surface, specks of foam, And conglobated bubbles undissolved, Numerous as stars; that, by their onward lapse, Betray to sight the motion of the stream, . . . and make known Through what perplexing labyrinths, abrupt Precipitations, and untoward straits, The earth-born wanderer has passed . . . (III, –)

⁷⁹ Thomas De Quincey, ‘On Wordsworth’s Poetry’, in David Bromwich (ed.), Romantic Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁸⁰ For the suggestion that Coleridge was Wordsworth’s model for the Solitary, see Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ⁸¹ Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, – (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), .

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

The Solitary here models a more historical mode of memory, a sort of reading against the grain of time, in which superficial traces ‘betray’ unknowable internal complications, and impediments to pure knowledge prompt imaginative insight. Overreaching the poet of The Prelude who ‘would enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration’ (XI, –), Wordsworth’s Coleridgean character of the Solitary articulates the transumptive sense of the Gothic Revival that a better spirit lies in waiting, inchoate and immanent, in the external forms of a reinvented tradition. Wordsworth’s Excursion thus plants, in the winter snows of Romanticism, the snowdrops of the Victorian medievalist self. Wordsworth pioneers an inward Gothic architecture with the diffident suggestion that The Recluse ‘may . . . be found’ to resemble a ‘gothic Church’. But by the s, this ‘advance . . . made by the soul of the poet’ is secure.⁸² For John Ruskin, there is no doubt that ‘[t]here will be found something more than usually interesting in tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us’.⁸³ Nor is there—any longer—any doubt of the reader perceiving the inward ‘fellowship’ of this Gothic ‘image’ with ‘our Northern hearts’.

Insular history From a global perspective, of course, Ruskin’s account of the northern-hearted Gothic subject only begs the question. The ‘insular’ Gothic ideal, as I have traced it in Coleridge and De Quincey on Wordsworth, seems to be at odds with scholarship that finds the fountains of Romanticism and the Gothic in intercultural exchanges with the Continent, and with the still more ‘distant peoples’ (in Southey’s phrase) of Asia.⁸⁴ But in this final section, I’d like to focus on an episode, gathered from the scholarship of Romanticperiod ‘globalism’, that suggests how such ‘insular’ and global concepts of the Gothic may coexist or combine. Jerome McGann notes the enabling paradox of historical study that only a ‘completely . . . localized’ art accrues sufficient ‘difference’ to ‘speak to alien cultures’.⁸⁵ But if this in itself suggests the ‘global’ significance of an ‘insular’ Gothicism, I would suggest that the peculiarly historical character of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in the way its ‘oblique forms’ continually register origins and ends altogether elsewhere, and thus preserve it from any kind of easy historical ‘transcendence’. ⁸² See Wordsworth’s ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (), iii. . ⁸³ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. –. ⁸⁴ See Robert Southey, Letters from England: by Don Manual Alvarez Espriella. nd edn,  vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, ), ii. ; and for a concise introduction to the field of the ‘global’ Romantic and Gothic, see Evan Gottlieb’s ‘Recovering Romantic Globalism’, in his Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, – (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ), –. David Higgins considers at length the sort of ‘local’ presence of the ‘global’ that I am sketching here in his Romantic Englishness (). ⁸⁵ Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. nd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ), –.

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In representing Michael’s compulsive ‘work unfinished’ at the Sheep-fold, Wordsworth gestures towards a new, still almost unthinkable sense of simultaneity with ‘lost’ loved ones—not in the grave but ‘beyond the seas’ (ll. , ). Wordsworth leaves Luke’s overseas ‘hiding place’ unspecified. In the Romantic imagination, however, a foreign bourne from which it was scarcely possible to return generally meant East Asia, and particularly China. From Thomas Percy to Coleridge, China was an important ‘foil’ for the early Gothic Revival. Percy’s antiquarian studies of China were instrumental in defining the literary nationalism, the non-classical aesthetics, and the progressive evaluation of language change in his ‘Gothic’ Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ().⁸⁶ In notes prepared for the  ‘Macartney’ embassy to the Qing court, Joseph Banks articulated the widespread view of China—fostered by Percy and by William ‘Orientalist’ Jones—as a quasi-medieval civilization that had failed to become modern, lacking a (medievalist) feeling for ruins and for ‘Gothic’ hybrids of all kinds.⁸⁷ For Banks, China was the ‘high Pitch[ed]’ ‘Ruin of a state of Civilization’, merely possessed in the present by the Qing, but appealing to the British as superior to anything hitherto achieved in Europe.⁸⁸ Differences over commerce and cultural hybridity fed notions of historical divergence. The idea of a world-historical clash between ‘dynamic and modern Britain’ and ‘stationary’ China found emblematic expression in the  episode of the Qing court showing curiosity about British men-of-war, but neglecting such high-tech ‘works of art’ as the Weltsmachine, a German-made cosmological clock specially covered in chinoiserie.⁸⁹ Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (–) arguably refracts this context, with its ‘Gothic’ poet inwardly transforming into a ‘symphony’ with ‘flashing eyes’, a ‘dread’ type of the British zeitgeist-made-machine, transcending Chinese cultural categories to ‘build . . . in air’ with ‘music loud and long’.⁹⁰ There is a similar sense of divergence in ⁸⁶ See David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –; Eun Kyung Min, ‘Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ()’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, / (): –; and Kitson, Forging Romantic China, –. On Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ as a Chinese poem, see also Peter J. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. ⁸⁷ See George Steinmetz’s summary of this ‘European’ view of China in The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. ⁸⁸ See The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection, –, ed. Neil Chambers (London: Imperial College Press, ), –. ⁸⁹ See Kitson, Forging Romantic China, , –. For intriguingly different images of the Weltsmachine, see the Romantic Circles Gallery, ‘The Chronometer and Planetarium System’ (http://www.rc. umd.edu/gallery/chronometer-and-planetarium-system), and Philipp Matthäus Hahn, ‘Große astronomische Welt-Maschine—Cod.math.qt.’ (c.–) in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart (http://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/purl/bszX). ⁹⁰ I draw here on Nick Groom’s persuasive reading of the ‘symphony’ in ‘Kubla Khan’ as a variant of the hurdy-gurdy, the droning ‘automatic harp’ of the ballad singer. Groom’s papers on the topic include: ‘Kubla Khan’s Automatic Harp: Ambient Noise in Late-th Century and Romantic Poetry’, University of Sheffield,  Feb. , and ‘Strange Music from Beyond the Wall of Sleep: Aeolian Harps, Seashells, and the Pagan Lyre’, at the th Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, Aug. .

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

Charles Lamb’s  letters to Thomas Manning at Canton. Lamb suggests that his ‘improbable romantic fictions’ of London in ruins follow inevitably from being in ‘correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth’.⁹¹ His joke about the ‘spelling’ of ‘Ho-hing-tong’ (discussed earlier) leads on to a vision of Manning returning ‘like a Struldbug [sic] into a world where . . . all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete . . . as wit of the last age’.⁹² The very title of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (), meanwhile, plays on the cognitive ‘shudder’ of connecting England and the (supposed) ‘modes of life’ in China.⁹³ In telling his dreams, De Quincey counterposes ‘Chinese’ visions of being ‘buried, for a thousand years . . . in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids’ with a dream-architecture inspired by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Piranesi’s fantasies of Rome, of ‘endless growth and self-reproduction’ in ‘vast Gothic halls’.⁹⁴ If De Quincey’s dream-architecture recalls the ‘wilderness of building’ in The Excursion (II, ), and if Lamb’s linkage of catachresis and historical consciousness recalls the ‘plain humanities’ replacing ‘hieroglyphics’ in ‘Michael’, there is a still closer correspondence between Wordsworth’s poetry and China in the shape of his brother, John Wordsworth, captain of the Canton trader, the Earl of Abergavenny. The Wordsworths invested heavily—both financially and emotionally—in John’s voyages. And as Peter Kitson has shown, this outbound investment returns with strange force, as China ‘erupts’ into ‘that most canonically Romantic poem about the formation of the Romantic self ’, The Prelude.⁹⁵ The Chinese ‘eruption’ happens twice. In one version of the poem, from /, Wordsworth introduces China into book V as a new context for the miseducated ‘dwarf man’. The child prodigy is now ‘Monstrous as China’s vegetable Dwarfs’, and resembles an English ‘Oak’ in ‘living miniature’, the product of a system ‘Of human care industriously perverse / Here to advance the work and there retard’.⁹⁶ Wordsworth also adds a trace to the  text of book VIII, where the ‘Paradise’ of the English Lakes enters into comparison with ‘Gehol’s famous Gardens’, ‘Beyond that mighty Wall, not fabulous’ of China (VIII, –). Gehol’s interjoining ‘scenes’ of ‘shady dells’ and ‘eastern monasteries’ exemplify a landscape architecture of ‘ever growing change’ (VIII, –). But Wordsworth prefers the ‘Paradise / Where I was rear’d’, as a human landscape: not ‘composed’ by ‘patient’ ‘myriads’ for an imperial ‘dynasty’, but cultivated

⁹¹ See Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vi. . ⁹² See Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vi. . ⁹³ See Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, ), –: ‘De Quincey’s adoption of the adjective “English” was undoubtedly meant in part to preempt the implicit “Oriental” that would otherwise be attached to “Opium-Eater” ’. ⁹⁴ Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁹⁵ Kitson, Forging Romantic China, . ⁹⁶ See The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark Reed,  vols (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), ii. ; book V, ll. –.

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 

with ‘Fellow’ feeling by ‘Man free, man working for himself ’ (VIII, –). Here beauty—like knowledge in book V (l. )—is ‘not purchased with the loss of power’. A ‘roam’ in Gehol’s gardens ‘Would leave behind a dance of images’ that might ‘break in upon . . . sleep for weeks’ (VIII, –). But even in that brief interspace, the ‘common haunts of the green earth’—existing beyond and beneath the artifice of landscape gardening—are ‘fastening on the heart / Insensibly’, ‘So that we love, not knowing that we love, / And feel, not knowing whence our feeling comes’ (VIII, –). Wordsworth’s source for both of these ‘Chinese’ passages appears to be John Barrow’s Travels in China (), a quasi-ethnographic account of the country based on first-hand experience during the ‘failed’ Macartney embassy of . Wordsworth likely read Barrow’s book (possibly in Southey’s review copy) around the time he composed the lines in book VIII, by October .⁹⁷ Extracts then went into the Wordsworths’ commonplace book (DC MS ) for future use.⁹⁸ Wordsworth’s late addition to book V is in keeping with Barrow’s account of a system of ‘dry study’ that replicates knowledge but with ‘no meaning’.⁹⁹ The evocation of Gehol in book VIII similarly comes straight out of the Travels, corresponding closely to the description given on pages – of Barrow’s book.¹⁰⁰ But the common origin of the two passages belies the contrast in their textual status. The passage on Gehol, from , is present with variations in all subsequent versions of The Prelude. The / addition to book V, on the other hand, is expunged from the final text. After the lines on ‘the dimpling cistern of his heart’, only a context-less stump survives: ‘For this unnatural growth the trainer blame, / Pity the tree’ (: V, –). Wordsworth’s reasons for adding and then subtracting China from book V are unknown. But The Prelude was a poem that ‘lived in manuscript’, continually revalidated between  and  through ‘compulsive rewriting’.¹⁰¹ The ‘vegetable’ and ‘industrious’ terms of the / addition suggest Wordsworth removing it in the spirit of Burke’s constant constitutional gardener, taking ‘care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant’.¹⁰² Wordsworth’s poetry of self-evolving

⁹⁷ See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Kitson, Forging Romantic China, –; and John Barrow, Travels in China: Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey Through the Country from Pekin to Canton (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, ), –, –. ⁹⁸ Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, . ⁹⁹ Barrow, Travels in China, –. ¹⁰⁰ See Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, ; and The Thirteen-Book Prelude, i. . ¹⁰¹ See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., ), ; see also Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, . ¹⁰² See Burke, Reflections, . Wordsworth developed Burke’s metaphor in his  pamphlet on The Convention of Cintra, warning the Spanish patriots not to be ‘indiscriminately afraid of new things . . . Young scions of polity must be engrafted on the time-worn trunk: a new fortress must be reared upon the ancient and living rock of justice’. See The Convention of Cintra in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, i. .

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‘internal spirit’ again reasserts itself against ‘industrious antiquarianism’.¹⁰³ But if this only sharpens the contrast with the hardier material on ‘Gehol’s . . . gardens’, Kitson intimates an explanation both global and ‘insular’ in the death, en route to China, of John Wordsworth, in February . Wordsworth conferred finished form on the poem ‘on . . . [his] own Support’ in May , just three months after John’s ship went down, taking to the sea floor some £, of goods and silver, and leaving the Wordsworths exposed to huge potential liabilities.¹⁰⁴ But the ‘feeling . . . loss’, as ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ calls it, runs deeper still. Bound up somewhere in the near-quarter-million loss, and John Wordsworth’s total investment of around £,, was a £, advance on the Lonsdale debt, which the family had invested in John’s unsuccessful voyage to Canton of –.¹⁰⁵ John Wordsworth seems to have understood his Chinese voyages, with their huge potential for profit (through private trading in opium), as a way of repairing the family ruin. As William put it in his correspondence, ventriloquizing his brother’s voice: ‘He [i.e. John] encouraged me to persist in the plan of life which I had adopted; I will work for you, and you shall attempt to do something for the world. Could I but see you with a green field of your own and a Cow and two or three other little comforts, I shall be happy’.¹⁰⁶ The Prelude passage comparing the English Lakes and Gehol’s gardens maps intriguingly onto the difference between John’s vision of a rural English idyll, invisibly sustained by (partially illicit) Chinese commerce, and the account Wordsworth found in Barrow’s Travels of the imperial spectacle at Gehol. Barrow inserts the account of the British ambassador, George, Lord Macartney, who describes finding ‘before me’, ‘at my feet’, ‘everything . . . as on an illuminated map; palaces, pagodas, towns, villages, farmhouses, plains, and vallies . . . and meadows covered with cattle’.¹⁰⁷ The distressing effect of this similarity in dissimilarity is uncannily exact. As Kitson suggests,

¹⁰³ This ‘insular’ turn in the revision of book V may, however, also have a ‘global’ register. Andrew Warren reads the ‘Arab Quixote’ dream at the start of book V in terms of an incipiently global perspective, with the ‘Oriental Manuscript’ no longer representing, as for the Augustans, merely ‘a fortuitous route to allegory’, but rather (quoting Andrew Piper) a ‘complex calculus of the local and the global’. See Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Merging the global presence of China into the already ‘complex calculus’ of book V may have seemed to Wordsworth after  to complicate beyond comprehension what he already feared in  was a ‘scarcely’ ‘obvious’ ‘drift’ (, V, –). The background ‘argument’ of the book on ‘Books’ and education runs, as I read it, from an ‘Arab Quixote’ allegory recalling Southey’s Thalaba on ‘Oriental’ immemorialism, ‘waste’, and ‘ornament’, to a (modern, European) nightmare of machine-education, and on to an implicitly contrasting ‘Gothic’ vision of ‘There was a Boy’—where the Coleridgean Gothic ideal of a ‘structure complete in each part’ materializes briefly, only to perish as premature. Barrow’s account of Chinese ‘industry perverse’ might have seemed in / to make a neat link between the first and second parts of this ‘argument’ about education. But on subsequent reflection, the dwarf tree figure may have seemed to pre-empt or subvert any claim for the completeness-in-each-part of the Gothic child. ¹⁰⁴ Kitson, Forging Romantic China, –. ¹⁰⁵ See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, ; and Peter Kitson, ‘The Wordsworths, Opium, and China’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Winter ): –, . ¹⁰⁶ The Early Years, . ¹⁰⁷ Barrow, Travels in China, –.

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Wordsworth reading Macartney in Barrow would almost certainly have noticed a further comparison between the scene at Gehol and the ‘noble’ and ‘diverse’ grounds of Lowther Hall in Westmorland—a place which, Macartney notes in passing, he ‘knew . . . many years ago’.¹⁰⁸ Macartney’s airy reference to past pleasures summons up the Wordsworth family tragedy. John Wordsworth senior had been law agent and land steward to James Lowther, Lord Lonsdale.¹⁰⁹ The British ambassador to China, meanwhile, ‘knew’ the Lowther estate because Lonsdale was his brother-in-law, and because he (Macartney) was returned as MP for Cockermouth in the  general election—the beneficiary of bribes and other expenses advanced in the Lowther interest by none other than John Wordsworth senior, and never repaid.¹¹⁰ In , long after Lowther’s heir had made restitution to the adult Wordsworth children with an overpayment of £,, they were still ‘fighting against a sense of their dispossession’.¹¹¹ In a letter of  August, Dorothy reflected with a feeling of loss never old on Lonsdale having restored ‘in a whim’ the ruin (‘buried’, ‘choked’, ‘intermingled’) of the ‘home’ by the Derwent that they had ‘lost’ when their father died, ‘one and twenty years ago’.¹¹² And therefore, perhaps, the far-fetched reference to ‘Gehol’s famous Gardens’ remains, unchanged in its substantial lineaments, within Wordsworth’s ‘insular’ English poem. Wordsworth importing Macartney’s vision of China into The Prelude was also making a repayment, with interest, of the lordly ambassador’s global export of the Lakeland stewardship of his father, John Wordsworth senior. The story of William and his brother John sealing their own ‘covenant’ by laying ‘the foundation stone of a little fishing hut’ may (or may not) be a ‘fantasy’ back-projected from Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral poem’.¹¹³ But Wordsworth could hardly have failed to notice, through all his years of toil at the complete but continually unfinished Prelude, that the loss of John Wordsworth junior to the China trade was in effect the tragedy of ‘Michael’—and with it the whole Romantic spirit of a traumatically reinvented tradition—reinscribed within the very fabric of his own family, and written in the ultimately unspellable hieroglyphics of global commerce.

S  Brodey, Inger Sigrun, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York and London: Routledge, ). Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Gill, Stephen, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

¹⁰⁸ Barrow, Travels in China, . ¹⁰⁹ McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, . ¹¹⁰ See Kitson, Forging Romantic China, ; and McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, . ¹¹¹ Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority, –. ¹¹² The Early Years, . ¹¹³ Richard Matlak, Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, – (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, ), –, n.

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Higgins, David, Romantic Englishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, – (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Kitson, Peter, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Porter, David, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Warren, Andrew, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

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A discussion of this topic has to begin with Ivanhoe (), which has been aptly described by Clare A. Simmons as ‘the textbook of nineteenth-century British medievalism’.¹ Ivanhoe was such a richly ‘procreative’ text, as Ann Rigney has argued, because it at once ‘stuck in people’s memory’ and ‘invited . . . readers to re-write it’.² In this chapter I will focus primarily on Ivanhoe and the novels that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period in English history—from just before the Norman invasion of  to just after the Third Crusade of –—in the terms that Scott so vividly established. Writers of medievalist fiction after Ivanhoe generally took for granted what Scott had to say about the eventual resolution of the post-Conquest antagonism between Norman and Saxon, and it is in part at least the adaptability (as well as attractiveness) of this story of national emergence that helped to make Ivanhoe, as Fiona Robertson has claimed, ‘probably the single most important cultural production of the nineteenth century’.³ While Ivanhoe did not encompass all of the possibilities that would be explored by subsequent works set in the Middle Ages (many of which dealt with earlier or later periods), it did in different ways help to shape the development of historical fiction more broadly, and, as I will suggest, the reception of the text and of its numerous reworkings had implications for the status of the historical novel as a genre. In the light of Richard Maxwell’s account of the mid- to latenineteenth-century ‘juvenilization’ of historical fiction, I will conclude by briefly considering Robert Louis Stevenson’s War of the Roses tale The Black Arrow ()

¹ Claire A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), . ² Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ³ Fiona Robertson, ‘Novels’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, .

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as a retrospect on the subject of this chapter that borrows from Ivanhoe, but which also refuses the conjoining of individual and national development that is so characteristic of the medievalist novel in the wake of Scott.⁴ Before discussing reworkings of Ivanhoe it is important first of all to acknowledge that the novel itself is rhetorically less straightforward than some nineteenth-century responses to it appear to indicate. Ivanhoe’s opening chapter provides an outline of the ‘state of things’ in England at the end of the twelfth century, and it describes the effects of the Norman invasion, central among them, at least according to Scott’s enormously influential version of events, the continuing existence of ‘two hostile races’, victor and vanquished.⁵ The work also here introduces the reader to the no less resonant idea of ‘merry England’, by evoking ‘a pleasant district’ of South Yorkshire where ‘there extended in ancient times a large forest’, said to be home to ‘those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song’ (I, ). Scott thus created a composite setting—partaking of romance as much as history—that merged different, if related, mythologies which had already been subject to diversely politicized appropriation. Scott’s reference to ‘English song’, for example, alludes to the ballads about Robin Hood that had been collected by the republican antiquary Joseph Ritson, and Locksley and his men were key constituent elements of the ‘procreativity’ that Ivanhoe set in play. While Locksley is a yeoman—a commoner rather than a nobleman—who speaks for ‘the rights of Englishmen’ (I, ), he additionally regards himself as ‘monarch’ (I, ) of the forest and later kneels before King Richard. Just as Ivanhoe in this way nods to but then undercuts the idea of a ‘greenwood’ commonwealth, so too does it rehearse the popular notion of the ‘Norman yoke’ only thereafter to relativize the Conquest as one among other past invasions of England: the oaks of the forest described at the outset, it is said, may once have ‘witnessed . . . the stately march of the Roman soldiery’ (I, ). In its opening chapter alone, then, Ivanhoe contains multitudes, establishing much of the potentiality that would be explored by subsequent fictions of the Middle Ages. Ivanhoe also looks ahead to its own conclusion during these preliminaries, because after rehearsing the idea of the linguistic gulf dividing Norman and Saxon, it notes that the ‘necessary intercourse’ between the lords and the cultivators of the soil gradually led to the formation of a common dialect, from which arose ‘our present English language’ (I, ). Another index of the breadth of Scott’s canvas, however, is that the novel complicates this evolutionary narrative by telling the story of the ‘noble Saxon maiden’ Ulrica, who became ‘the prey and the scorn’ (I, ) of the elder Front-de-Boeuf and his men, her fate re-establishing the association of conquest and rape. Scott’s representation of the treatment of Isaac of York additionally offers the reader a critically detached perspective on the process of reconciliation that is ostensibly the novel’s subject, since it suggests how common abuse of an abjected other might help onetime enemies ⁴ Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁵ Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Hereafter I.

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eventually to overcome their differences: if ‘Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton [remained] adverse . . . to each other’, the reader is told, they ‘contended which should look with greatest detestation upon a people, whom it was accounted a point of religion to hate, to revile, to despise, to plunder, and to persecute’ (I, ). Aware that people of her faith are scapegoated as sources of infection, and refusing to be converted to Christianity, Isaac’s daughter Rebecca declares at the end of the novel, just after the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena, that she and her father will seek exile in Moorish Grenada. Even as it concludes its narrative of rapprochement with the joint festivities of Saxon and Norman, therefore, the novel acknowledges the limits of this inclusivity, presenting the self-definition of a ‘Christian’ society as a closing of ranks that entails losses as well as gains. That so many readers have wanted Ivanhoe to marry Rebecca rather than Rowena is perhaps indicative of a wider dissatisfaction with the nature of the novel’s resolution. Many of the best-known nineteenth-century responses to Ivanhoe attended not to any such perceived shortcomings in the text, however, but rather to Scott’s successful negotiation of the problem of ‘two hostile races’ announced at the work’s outset. Ivanhoe famously offered a lens on the present for Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil (), because it helped him to define a ‘one nation’ Toryism that recognized the necessary obligations of aristocratic rulers to the people that they governed. The novel similarly spoke to the present for Thomas Carlyle, who saw in Scott’s depiction of the relations between Cedric of Rotherwood and his ‘thrall’ (I, ), the swineherd Gurth, a moral economy that was more humane than the modern capitalist world of wage labour. Scott’s vivid representation of the pageantry of chivalry, notably in the chapters dealing with the Ashby tournament, provided further memorable episodes and tableaus that succeeded for their readers in, as Ann Rigney has put it, ‘bringing the past to life in colour’.⁶ The tournament itself is described by Scott in ironic as well as romantic terms (one of the four men who died there was ‘smothered by the heat of his armour’ (I, ), we are told), but it nonetheless inspired re-enactments not just in Britain, as at the Eglinton tournament of , but also in the United States, where Mark Twain famously lamented the impact of the ‘Sir Walter Scott disease’ on the self-perception of slave-owners in the antebellum South. Twain claimed that Ivanhoe undid the good work of Don Quixote by encouraging self-styled Southern gentlemen to revere the ‘sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless longvanished society’.⁷ For Scott’s contemporary William Hazlitt, by contrast, the ritualized violence of the Ashby tournament demonstrated an enduring truth, because it manifested the ‘determination and spirit’ and indifference to pain that were characteristic of English masculinity—whether evident in a modern boxing ring or on a field of armed combat in ‘merry England’.⁸ ⁶ Rigney, Afterlives, . ⁷ Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (), in John O. Hayden (ed.), Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), . ⁸ William Hazlitt, ‘Merry England’, The New Monthly Magazine,  (Jan. ): –, .

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Such different responses to Scott’s evocation of the culture of chivalry serve to illustrate Rigney’s argument that the various ‘figures of memory’ generated by Scott—of the ‘two hostile races’, Locksley and the greenwood, Gurth’s thraldom, and Rebecca’s resistance, as well as the Ashby tournament—were both extremely compelling and liable to invite ‘correction, re-working, and puzzling through’.⁹ If it is fair to say that Ivanhoe played a very substantial role in inventing the Middle Ages for the nineteenth century, it is necessary to emphasize too, however, that Scott was not himself the originator of the medievalist novel. Thomas Leland’s Longsword () was probably the first work of fiction to employ a medieval setting, and the idea of ‘English’ or ‘Gothic’ historical romance, inaugurated by Longsword and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (), was well established by the end of the eighteenth century. In writing within yet also turning away from this genre, Ann Radcliffe, in Gaston de Blondeville (probably completed in ), anticipated the playful reflexivity of the Waverley novels, most obviously by including a long frame-tale in which two travellers in the present debate the meaning of the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, where the action of the work takes place. Set (like Longsword) during the reign of Henry III, Gaston incorporates a tournament scene of its own that is pivotal to the denouement of the novel, but which also exemplifies Radcliffe’s self-consciousness about the process of attempting to produce the distant past for her audience. When the work refers to ‘a loud blast of trumpets and a great huzza’ as it begins to evoke the ‘splendid field’ on which the title character later meets his end, the narrator records the reaction of a spectator struggling to find a vantage-point: ‘Why this is worse than seeing nothing at all, to be tantalized in this way’.¹⁰ Scott did not acknowledge Radcliffe’s Gaston (which was not published until , after Radcliffe’s death), but he did identify a forerunner of sorts in the figure of the antiquary Joseph Strutt. In the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to Ivanhoe, Scott cited Strutt’s medieval romance Queen-hoo Hall () as a negative example that defined the novelty of his own work, projecting onto Strutt an over-zealous obsession with ‘the repulsive dryness of mere antiquity’ while claiming for himself a much more extensive domain, the ‘manners and sentiments which are common to us and our ancestors’ (I, ). Scott at the same time indulged in the pleasures of ‘antiquarian irony’ here, for example by having his persona Laurence Templeton declare his reliance on ‘the singular Anglo-Norman MS’ (I, ) of Sir Arthur Wardour—actually a character in Scott’s earlier novel The Antiquary ().¹¹ The novel registers its debt to this imaginary manuscript on a number of occasions, and in other ways too it parades its own artifice, displaying what Jerome McGann has described as an almost ‘Brechtian

⁹ Rigney, Afterlives, . ¹⁰ Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, Or The Court of Henry III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance. St Alban’s Abbey, a Metrical Tale; With Some Poetical Pieces,  vols (London: Henry Colburn, ), ii. . ¹¹ I take the phrase ‘antiquarian irony’ from Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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transparency’.¹² One especially rich example of this self-consciousness occurs when the jester Wamba exchanges habits with his master Cedric and instructs him as to how best to effect his escape, in the disguise of a friar, from captivity in Torquilstone Castle: Pax vobiscum will answer all queries. If you go or come, eat or drink, bless or ban, Pax vobiscum carries you through it all. It is as useful to a friar as a broomstick to a witch, or a wand to a conqueror. Speak it but thus, in a deep grave tone,—Pax vobiscum!—it is irresistible—Watch and ward, knight and squire, foot and horse, it acts as a charm upon them all. (I, –)

Scott can be seen here to reflect on his own strategy for producing medievalist fiction, by suggesting that judiciously sparing use of authenticity-effects, such as a familiar Latin phrase, might be enough to create the requisite atmosphere, and to enchant an audience likely to be nonplussed by ‘mere’—in other words, undiluted—antiquity. For all that the influence of Ivanhoe was enormous, then, Scott’s status as an innovator needs to be understood as in part the product of his own self-representation, as he carefully cleared a space for himself and differentiated his work from that of his predecessors, in the process making possible his ‘colonization’ of—for Scott—new English territory.¹³ Situating Ivanhoe in the context of Scott’s own writing career provides another useful way of thinking about the impact of the novel, because as well as being Scott’s first ‘English’ fiction it contained the seeds of later works such as The Talisman () (one of his Tales of the Crusaders) that came to be influential in their own right. Set before Ivanhoe, with King Richard still in Palestine prior to his return to England, The Talisman was seen by many reviewers to immerse its audience in the world of the crusades, where previous historical fictions—for example, Longsword and Richard Warner’s Netley Abbey ()—had only included brief crusading interludes. If there was something thrilling for readers about thus being placed ‘in the very heart of the camp’, however, some also signalled their disappointment that the novel finished ‘without a battle’.¹⁴ As is the case with Ivanhoe, The Talisman is a work that often appears to be as interested in the effects of peaceful contact between erstwhile adversaries as it is in the history of conflict between them. One early demonstration of this occurs after the famous opening depiction of the ‘knight of the red cross’ Sir Kenneth and the Saracen Sheerkohf (Saladin in disguise) in single combat, when the novel presents the latter addressing Sir Kenneth in an established ‘lingua franca’, and then notes the way in which Saracens had ‘gradually caught’ chivalric manners from their Christian foes.¹⁵

¹² Jerome McGann, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, . ¹³ Ian Duncan, introduction to Ivanhoe, p. vii. ¹⁴ Review of Tales of the Crusaders, Monthly Magazine,  (July ): –, . ¹⁵ Scott, The Talisman, ed. J. B. Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ),  and .

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Scott playfully drew attention to such confounding of readerly expectations, stating in his  introduction that during this period ‘the Christian and English monarch’ Richard ‘showed all the cruelty and violence of an Eastern sultan’, while Saladin ‘displayed the deep policy and prudence of an European sovereign’.¹⁶ It has often been observed that Scott’s Saladin is a more chivalric figure than King Richard, and as David Simpson has pointed out, Saladin in the guise of Adonbec El Hakim is additionally credited with a healing agency analogous to that of Rebecca in Ivanhoe. The Talisman (in the words of Simpson) ‘stages a conflation of Jew and Arab in the debate among Richard’s courtiers about whether a heathen should be allowed to offer medical treatment to a Christian king’, but rather than present a European ‘Christendom’ that is unified by its identification of such interchangeable others, it continually emphasizes the depth of the enmity existing between nominal allies.¹⁷ Scott’s disruption of the Crusader/Saracen binary culminates in the scene at the novel’s conclusion, when Saladin summarily executes the Grand Master of the Templars, guilty of having finished off his partner in crime, Conrade of Montserrat. Simpson has emphasized the sophistication of Scott’s treatment of outsiders such as Rebecca and Saladin, who are both possessed of a—largely unrecognized—‘curative power’.¹⁸ The nature of Scott’s attention to the figure of the charismatic stranger demonstrates the idiosyncrasy of his crusading fictions, and their divergence from contemporary efforts to recover the idealism of the crusades: Kenelm Digby in The Broad Stone of Honour (), for example, described the crusades as an endeavour in which ‘all Europe was united in a band of brothers to worship the Saviour of mankind’.¹⁹ Just as nineteenth-century audiences were able to appreciate Ivanhoe as a work of romantic pageantry, however, so too did many readers praise in particular the picturesque grandeur of The Talisman, a novel which, for G. P. R. James, ‘fully, perfectly, and feelingly, displayed’ the ‘spirit’ of the Third Crusade.²⁰ Scott characterized himself in his Journal in  as ‘something like Captain Bobadil who traind up a hundred gentlemen to fight very nearly if not altogether as well as myself ’, adding later that the method of his followers was akin to ‘dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute descriptions of events which do not affect its purpose’.²¹ These remarks predate the publication of James’s first novel (Richelieu: a Tale of France of ), but, uncharitable as they are, they help

¹⁶ Scott, Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous, ed. J. H. Alexander (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), p. xx. ¹⁷ David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . ¹⁸ Simpson, Stranger, . ¹⁹ Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour: or, Rules for the Gentlemen of England (London: C. and J. Rivington, ), . ²⁰ G. P. R. James, The History of Chivalry (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, ), . ²¹ The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),  and –.

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us now to think about the ways in which some subsequent writers of historical fiction read—and perhaps misread—Scott. James’s fifth novel Philip Augustus, or The Brothers in Arms () is set in France in the late twelfth century, and it clearly takes from Ivanhoe its point of departure, the return home of knights from the crusades, as well as its larger interest in the dynamics of national unification. One obvious difference of James’s novel from Ivanhoe is also apparent at the outset, however, when it refers to the feudal system as a ‘brilliant institution’, which had risen at this time ‘to its highest pitch of splendour’.²² In Ivanhoe, ‘brilliant’ is a far more ambivalent designation than this, as is evident in Scott’s description of King Richard as a ‘brilliant, but useless’ figure: if ‘the lion-hearted king’ may be regarded as ‘a knight of romance’, the reader is told, his reign was ‘like the course of a . . . meteor’, which shed light but was then ‘instantly swallowed by universal darkness, his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause, and hold up as an example to posterity’ (I, –). James stated that the crusading enterprise popularly associated with King Richard was ‘in itself magnificent and heroic’ (PA, i. ), and he further evoked a ‘splendid’ past at the level of his work’s historical costume. The opening chapter of Philip Augustus offers an itemization of the armour worn by the Count d’Auvergne and his companion Guy de Coucy, the latter said to be ‘covered with a bright haubert, or shirt of steel rings, which, polished like glass, and lying flat upon each other, glittered and flashed in the sunshine as if they were formed of diamonds’, though the ‘puckered silk’ of his ‘gambeson’—a padded defensive jacket—‘rose above the edge of the shirt of mail, and prevented the rings from chafing upon his neck’ (PA, i. ). Scott’s claim that the authors he ‘trained up’ provided an overload of ‘minute descriptions’ indicates that he was well aware of the precarious status of historical fiction in the hierarchy of literary genres, as a kind of writing that was liable to be pulled down by the weight of the detail that it dragged in; in the journal entry cited above, he admitted that ‘Perhaps I have sin’d in this way myself ’.²³ As is well known, Scott was widely accused of anachronism and error in his own evocation of the past (for example, in Ivanhoe’s account of a conflict between Norman and Saxon that was still ongoing at the end of the twelfth century), and the German historian Ranke, committed to an idea of history ‘as it really was’, cited Scott as a negative influence, pledging to avoid ‘all imagination’ after reading Quentin Durward ().²⁴ Even as historical fiction increasingly came under scrutiny as the practice of history-writing was professionalized, however, the historical novel became the genre of choice for prolific authors writing for the mass market, not least because—as the titles of the diverse works of

²² G. P. R. James, Philip Augustus; or, The Brothers in Arms,  vols (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley), i. . Hereafter PA. ²³ Scott, Journal, . ²⁴ Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

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      



James or Edward Bulwer-Lytton demonstrate—its potential seemed to be all but inexhaustible. Ivanhoe helped to generate not only other crusading novels but also other fictions of the Norman Conquest, the best-known and most influential of them probably Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (). Bulwer-Lytton wrote in a review of Scott’s Tales of My Landlord () that historical fiction afforded ‘[o]pportunity to instruct as well as to amuse’, and in Harold he both sought to set a new scholarly standard and to construct a grand narrative free from the self-reflexive irony of Scott: ‘I have devoted to this work’, he declared, ‘a degree of research which, if unusual to romance, I cannot consider superfluous when illustrating an age so remote, and events unparalleled in their influence over the destinies of England’.²⁵ Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold refers in a footnote to Duke William of Normandy’s ‘bandit argument’ (H, ) proposing the division of conquered English lands (and thereby alludes to Tom Paine’s memorable portrait of the ‘French bastard’ in Common Sense ()), but it is nonetheless sceptical about any notion that ‘Saxon’ liberties were curtailed by the Norman invasion.²⁶ While King Harold is clearly heroic and his men are impressively brave, Saxon warriors in the novel are defined against a generally ‘inert’ population, and the ‘Witana-gemot’ is described less as a proto-democratic popular assembly (as it was in the writing of some eighteenth-century radicals) than a body ‘representing . . . the things the people most prized’, including ‘wealth’ as well as ‘valour’ (H, ). Depicting ‘the old Saxon manhood’ as having been subdued by ‘that timorous spirit of calculation, which the over-regard for wealth had fostered’ (H, ), Bulwer-Lytton is thus able here to portray the Norman Conquest as in the long run an act of renewal, by which the nation was strengthened rather than subdued: significantly, both the legendary King Alfred and Duke William are at different times credited with a far-sighted vision of ‘the Civilisation that was to come’ (H, ). Clare A. Simmons has observed that Harold presents the reader with the paradox of a ‘Whig tragedy’.²⁷ The titular hero is nominally ‘the last’ of his line and meets his death during a conflict that is rendered in epic proportions, but in the novel’s terms the idea of a Saxon ‘spirit’—more martial than democratic—nonetheless lives on into the present, as ‘the tombless shade of the kingly freeman still guards the coasts, and rests upon the seas’. The novel’s final paragraph declares that ‘Eight centuries have rolled away’, and then asks ‘where is the Norman now? or where is not the Saxon?’, ultimately rejecting the argument that the Norman invasion was a decisive rupture in the history of the nation, and celebrating the emergence of a greater Englishness, aligned with qualities of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Justice’ (H, ).

²⁵ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Fraser’s Magazine (), in Hayden, Scott: The Critical Heritage, ; Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, rd edn (London: George Routledge, ), p. xvii. Hereafter H. ²⁶ The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), . ²⁷ Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), .

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The language of national destiny invoked by Bulwer-Lytton here helps to substantiate Billie Melman’s claim about the mid-century shift in understandings of the post-invasion period, now seen in terms not of ‘darkness’ but ‘apotheosis’.²⁸ A comparable rhetoric is evident in Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, ‘Last of the English’ (), published (as Melman points out) on the th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and, like Harold, focused on a figure popularly associated with resistance to the Norman invasion. The ‘last of ’ formulation clearly echoes that of Bulwer-Lytton, and Kingsley’s novel, again following the example of Harold, situates its hero in the context of a much longer and broader narrative that, partly by virtue of its scope, manages to transform defeat into victory. Hereward begins by declaring that while ‘heroic deeds of highlanders . . . have been told in verse and prose’, ‘we must remember . . . there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and the fen’.²⁹ Kingsley thus distances himself from Scott (identified as a ‘Scottish’ writer rather than as the author of Ivanhoe), and at the same time introduces the reader to a practical heroism integral to the making of modern Britain, specifically referring to the acts of ‘clearing, delving, dyking, [and] building’ (HW, i. ) by which the Fens of East Anglia were drained. The novel presents such improvement of ‘nature’ as supporting a civilization, antithetical to romance, that is liable to degenerate into ‘slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed’ (HW, i. ), but the figure of the ‘lowlander’ nonetheless retains his manly virtue, Kingsley suggests, in part because he is possessed of a ‘mongrel’ (HW, i. ) strength, the product of a history of amalgamation between Germanic peoples predating the Norman invasion. This idea of intermixture as a progressive force is again appealed to in relation to the sturdily independent ‘Zeelanders’ who would go on to constitute the Dutch Republic, and Kingsley’s attention to the determining effects of race is similarly evident in his reference to the apparently unchanging history of ‘Celtic Ireland’, ‘one dull and aimless catalogue of murder and devastation, followed by famine and disease’ (HW, i. ). Hereward at one point aligns the savage Irish of the eleventh century with the Maoris of contemporary New Zealand, and Kingsley’s earlier novel Westward Ho! () offers a more overtly imperial frame of reference than this in its concluding account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada: it describes this conflict in world-historical terms as the decisive triumph of ‘Protestantism and freedom’ over ‘Popery and despotism’, and ‘the prophetic birth-paean’ of enlightened colonization across the globe.³⁰ If the language of race provided a way of explaining the course of history in fictions from Harold onwards, however, novels with broadly medieval settings were generally not as direct as Kingsley’s Elizabethan tale in looking ahead to the future ‘expansion of

²⁸ Billie Melman, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (): –, . ²⁹ Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, ‘Last of the English’,  vols (London: Macmillan & Co., ), i. . Hereafter HW. ³⁰ Kingsley, Westward Ho! Or, the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight (London: Macmillan & Co., ),  and .

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

England’.³¹ In the case of a work such as Charlotte Yonge’s The Little Duke, or Richard the Fearless (), for example, this can partly be explained by the fact that its action takes place across the Channel, and in the distant past (‘as long ago as the year ’).³² The lack of overt reflection on manifest destiny here can also be attributed to the way in which, in a text written for child readers, Yonge maps historical development onto her protagonist’s coming of age. Yonge’s hero Richard is introduced as the ward of ‘Northmen’ in Bayeux (his father Duke William having fallen victim to Flemish treachery), and he undergoes a kind of captivity at the hands of the French King Louis (who also poses as his guardian), before escaping to rejoin his own people, among whom he implements the lessons he has learned: above all he comes to understand what his father knew, that the passions have to be governed and that the only proper use of force is in defence of right. Richard Maxwell has referred to Yonge’s work as ‘the story of a child who must grow up before his time’, a parable about the ‘half-hidden moral abysses’ of childhood, where play is never entirely divorced from the responsibilities of adult life.³³ The historical scaffolding of this tale is itself significant, though, not least because—scrambling the binary logic of the ‘Norman yoke’—Yonge presents her Normans as if they were Saxons, as a ‘free-born’ (LP, ) people resisting an overbearing and expansionist neighbour. More clearly than in Harold and Hereward, the bearers of virtue in the novel are rooted in the vigour of their ethnic heritage (‘let not our Danish cousins say we learn Frank graces instead of Northern blows’ (LP, ), one character exclaims), but are progressive at the same time, because they have rejected Norse codes of vengeance for Christian ideals of forgiveness. Yonge’s work therefore pays tribute to the endurance of the racial myth that Ivanhoe did so much to circulate, and by demonstrating the ‘flexibility’ of that myth, as Simmons has argued, further depoliticizes it.³⁴ Rather than appealing to the distant past as the locus of hereditary democratic rights, the High Church Yonge instead associated her Normans with familiar forms of faith and manners, thereby negotiating Kingsley’s opposition between English Protestantism and continental Popery. G. A. Henty’s Winning His Spurs (), another tale for children, set at the time of the Third Crusade, distinguishes at the outset between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Normans, as its hero Cuthbert, son of Sir William de Lance, enlists the ‘foresters’ of Worcestershire (inhabitants of an Ivanhoe-style ‘greenwood’) to help him rescue the Earl of Evesham’s daughter, who had been abducted by the tyrannical Sir John of Wortham (significantly labelled as a ‘baron’). In the style of Yonge, Winning His Spurs brings together historical fiction and coming of age narrative, its title making plain that the protagonist is an irrepressibly active figure, in contrast to Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who, as when he ³¹ J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co., ). ³² Charlotte Yonge, The Little Duke, or, Richard the Fearless (London: John W, Parker, ), . Hereafter LP. ³³ Maxwell, Historical Novel, . ³⁴ Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, .

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 

follows the siege of Torquilstone Castle from his sick-bed inside, is sometimes presented at a remove from the heroic activity taking place elsewhere. Taken together, Henty’s—over one hundred—adventure tales are at once wide-ranging in their subject matter and repetitively formulaic in their structure. They both draw on and revise the example of Scott, because while they invariably introduce, as Maxwell has argued, ‘a fictional boy protagonist, just on the edge of manhood, [who] becomes attached to a world-historical figure’, they present heroes who, more clearly than Scott’s prototype Edward Waverley, learn ‘honourable, effective conduct’ when they become caught up in conflict.³⁵ In Winning His Spurs, Henty’s hero joins the Third Crusade as a follower of the Earl of Evesham, and he goes on to receive a knighthood after helping to extricate King Richard from the throng of Saracens who surrounded him at the height of one of the numerous battles and skirmishes that the tale describes. In a work by a writer who has so often been seen as a recruitment agent for British imperial service, it is striking that, while a captive in Palestine, Cuthbert should encounter a veiled woman who asks what ‘stirs up the heart of the Christian world that they should launch their armies against us, who wish but to be left alone, and who have no grudge against them?’³⁶ The novel addresses this disarming question not so much by seeking to justify the crusades in themselves (it acknowledges King Richard’s massacre of the defenders of Acre, for example), as by portraying the crusading enterprise as a kind of service to the nation. In by now familiar terms, Henty here accepts Scott’s account of the ‘two hostile races’ in late twelfth-century England, and presents the crusades as creating a new English identity out of the ethnic divisions of the past. Even as it bears the imprint of Ivanhoe, however, Winning His Spurs offers a manifestly reductive rewriting of Scott’s novel. In addition to downplaying Scott’s scepticism about popular investment in the crusades (and imagining an undivided Christendom), Henty’s tale marries its hero to the woman he initially helped to rescue (without any Scott-style introduction of a rival heroine), and it describes the return of King Richard from captivity in Europe as restorative for the nation as a whole. Leslie Stephen in  famously declared that Ivanhoe marked the beginning of Scott’s ‘descent from the library to the school-room’, and it seems fair to say that works by Yonge, Henty, and others that were derivative of Ivanhoe helped to accelerate this decline in Scott’s status, by reshaping perceptions of the text with which they directly and indirectly engaged.³⁷ As a variety of historical fiction, then, the medievalist novel after Scott, at least in Britain, came to be regarded as a form of writing that, if it could provide a ‘healthy’ reading experience for boys, had little claim to literary value. With this reputational shift in mind, I will conclude by looking at another—and rather different—reworking of Ivanhoe, Robert Louis Stevenson’s fifteenth-century tale The Black Arrow. Stevenson’s work was initially published (in ) in a magazine titled Young Folks, but it ³⁵ Maxwell, Historical Novel, . ³⁶ G. A. Henty, Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades (London: W. Foulsham & Co., n.d.), . ³⁷ Leslie Stephen, Cornhill Magazine (), in Hayden, Scott: The Critical Heritage, .

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      



can nonetheless be seen to disrupt the ‘juvenilization’ of medievalist fiction that in many respects—for example, its elaborate stylistic pastiche—it helped to perpetuate. Although Stevenson’s protagonist Dick Shelton ‘starts the novel as a page and ends it a knight’ (in the words of John Sutherland), the story of his coming of age significantly departs from the Yonge and Henty tradition of adventure-fiction, by detaching adolescence from any idea of an analogous national emergence and presenting it instead as a state of psychological confusion.³⁸ This confusion is above all the product of Dick’s complex relationships with others, most notably his surrogate father, Sir Daniel Brackley (who murdered his actual father), and his fellow ward, John Matcham/Joanna Sedley, whom he first encounters as another ‘lad’ but who is in fact a ‘maid’ in disguise, with whom he falls in love. The Black Arrow borrows from Scott as well as from the tradition of Yonge and Henty, but while it alludes to the ‘greenwood’ locale of Ivanhoe in its description of the home of the outlaw fellowship referred to in the title, it makes no concession to any idealizing mythology of ‘merry England’. Where Scott offered to his successors a schematic understanding of ‘two hostile races’, there are no such clear dividing lines in the world of The Black Arrow, and there is consequently no comparable basis for a forward-looking story of reconciliation. Although the absence of any narrative of national ‘apotheosis’ here is partly a function of Stevenson’s Wars of the Roses setting, The Black Arrow also draws attention to the shifting allegiances of calculating figures such as Sir Daniel Brackley, and its denouement introduces a renowned historical villain in the form of ‘Richard Crookback’, the future King Richard III. If The Black Arrow can thus be seen to define itself against Ivanhoe (Stevenson struggled with his powerful Scottish precursor, as is well known), in other respects it might be regarded as truer to Ivanhoe than some of the earlier Scott-inspired fictions previously discussed in this chapter. Towards the close Dick Shelton is yoked to one that he recognizes as ‘a great personage’ () (in line with the Henty formula that itself derived from Waverley), yet this figure, ‘the bold, black-hearted, and ambitious hunchback’, is associated only with a ‘brief kingdom and . . . lasting infamy’ (), and Dick’s brief entanglement with his namesake leaves him wanting to escape from the ‘dust and blood of that unruly epoch’ (), and to return to the greenwood with his new wife. As I have tried to show in this chapter, one important manifestation of the ‘procreativity’ of Ivanhoe is the work of writers from Bulwer-Lytton onwards who claimed that historically remote events such as the Norman invasion were enduringly formative for modern imperial Britain. From these readers of Ivanhoe, The Black Arrow might be seen to recover something of the playfully reflexive scepticism of a novel that—after it reconciles Norman and Saxon—concludes by recording the exile of its most attractive character, Rebecca, and by following its reference to the death of the ‘rash and romantic’ (I, ) King Richard with a (mis-) quotation from ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’.

³⁶ Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, ed. John Sutherland (Harmondsworth, ), p. viii.

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SUGGESTED

READING

Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in NineteenthCentury Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Hayden, John O. (ed.), Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). Leask, Nigel, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Maxwell, Richard, The Historical Novel in Europe, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). McGann, Jerome, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Melman, Billie, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (): –. Rigney, Ann, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Robertson, Fiona, ‘Novels’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Simmons, Clare A., Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Simpson, David, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).

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  .............................................................................................................

 .............................................................................................................

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        ......................................................................................................................

        -     

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. . 

I a lecture delivered at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin on  February , shortly before his unexpected and untimely death, John Mitchell Kemble stated that ‘No man values higher than myself that noble spirit which makes us look with love upon the records of our ancestors, and of our own hand; nor can any man feel prouder than myself in the conviction of the high state of culture to which the earliest denizens of this island had attained’.¹ This passionate appeal to the past is not straightforward nostalgia for a glorious past but an active desire to praise and acknowledge earlier cultural accomplishments. This sense of national pride—even extreme pride—at the cultural accomplishments of one’s ancestors: this is the hallmark of Victorian approaches to Anglo-Saxon poetry. And John Mitchell Kemble, brother of the famous actress Fanny Kemble, son of the two Irish players who established a theatrical dynasty in the centre of London, and first English editor of the vernacular epic Beowulf, clearly did believe what he said. The discovery of ‘the records of our ancestors’ had taken place in earlier generations, indeed in earlier centuries, but the first serious academic study of those records was the work of the Victorians. They produced the first critical editions of the poetry in English, and for some texts the first editions in any language. With assistance in the previous generation from John Josias Conybeare, John Mitchell Kemble and

¹ John Mitchell Kemble, The Utility of Antiquarian Collections, as throwing Light on the Pre-historic Annals of the European Nations. An Address delivered to the President and Members of the Royal Irish Academy at their meeting February ,  (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, & Co., ), .

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Benjamin Thorpe in particular led the way with respect to Anglo-Saxon poetry. Their work was codified and organized in the next generation under the aegis of Frederick J. Furnivall, surrounded by a growing professional or more than semi-professional cadre of scholars and thinkers.² These three men (Thorpe, Kemble, Furnivall) established the field in the British Isles; more importantly, both Furnivall and Kemble were indefatigable proselytizers on behalf of all things early medieval. In Furnivall’s case his enthusiasm led him to found societies for the study of Chaucer, Wyclif, Shakespeare, and to become the leading light of the Early English Text Society, despite a tendency to quarrel with those from whom he needed support and effort. Kemble also never achieved the academic post which must have been his dearest desire, largely owing to a protracted quarrel early in his career. Thorpe, on the other hand, lived a quieter life altogether, organizing and publishing edition after edition of Old English poetry and of the laws, and other texts too. Other scholars engaged in editing and studying Old English poetry, and in proselytizing on its behalf, but Thorpe, Kemble, and Furnivall represent the core of the endeavour in this period. Moreover, the Victorian period, until recently little acknowledged for its role in the historiography of the study of Old English language and literature, reminds us of just how closely scholars and students of the early medieval period could be connected with the poets and prince-pleasers, the movers and shakers, of the time. The societies they founded attracted politicians, thinkers, writers, socialites, landed gentry: the elite of Victorian society and a good portion of the middle class as well. Work on Anglo-Saxon poetry was very much in the public eye, and contributed to a conception of the nation in very profound ways.

T    A-S E

.................................................................................................................................. Anglo-Saxon poetry might best be described as a proximate source of Victorian medievalism. All five of the major manuscripts containing vernacular poetry written down before  in England were discovered, studied, and edited before or during the nineteenth century for the first time. Poems found in other manuscripts were published in more sporadic ways; John Josias Conybeare located and published some, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems were published as part of the chronicle materials by various editors, and some of these scattered poetic texts were not edited until the ² The best study of these individuals is Julie Ellen Towell, ‘The “Rise and Progress” of AngloSaxonism and English National Identity: Old English Literature in the Nineteenth Century’ (Wayne State University, doctoral dissertation, ).

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   - 



mid-twentieth century. But the major five manuscripts were all addressed very thoroughly in the Victorian period, including the least of these. Benjamin Thorpe, the first English editor, trained in Denmark with Rasmus Rask; his second publication, in , addressed what to modern scholars might be the least of the Old English poetic texts, but the metrical translation of the translation of the psalms known as the Paris Psalter is also the longest surviving Old English poem at over , lines. Thorpe honed his trade as an editor with this text, printing the poetry with a facing Latin version of the psalms. Thorpe next edited the Exeter Book in , an edition followed later in the century by Israel Gollancz for the Early English Text Society in . The Exeter Book remains in some ways the most famous of the Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts, since it includes most of the elegies and all of the extant riddles, along with a rich collection of other religious and secular poems. The third manuscript of Old English poetry is perhaps the one of least interest to the Victorians, and also the one already available in a considerably earlier period: named for Caedmon or Junius, the manuscript in the Bodleian Library in the Victorian period was first edited by Franciscus Junius in ; its impact on nineteenth-century medievalism is somewhat indirect, although it does have to be mentioned that one of its texts, Genesis B, might have informed John Milton’s construction of Satan in Paradise Lost. This was Thorpe’s first edition, in  (probably very early in ), the first production of the Society of Antiquaries as a publishing entity and also including a prospectus of the Society’s publishing plans for what it called Anglo-Saxon and Early English literature. Kemble produced the editio princeps of the Vercelli Book in  for the Ælfric Society; the manuscript contains a mix of homilies and religious poems, including the famous Dream of the Rood. Its existence was only discovered in the early nineteenth century, so it was very much a ‘new’ Old English collection that the Victorians could really engage with. Most significantly, the last of the five principal manuscripts of Old English poetry is that containing Beowulf, and the editing history of this poem of , lines in the nineteenth century is by far the most complex of these stories. GrímurJónsson Thorkelin published the first edition in Denmark in ; the first English edition was that by John Mitchell Kemble in , with a second and more accurate edition in –, and the second major edition was that of Benjamin Thorpe in . For the next fifty years, scholarship on Beowulf was dominated by Danish and German textual editors, including C. W. M. Grein’s conservative edition in , N. F. S. Grundtvig’s conservative edition in , and many more. The text of the poem appears to have become extremely well-known in nineteenth-century Britain, with excerpts and translations and stories adapted for both adults and children published by a broad range of individuals (most famously, William Morris). Its representation of an ideal nobility, its theme of selfless sacrifice, its generous and manly hero: these were stirring elements for the nostalgic medievalism of the nineteenth century. Where scholarly focus became continental and conservative, it could be argued that the earliest editions of Anglo-Saxon poetry in England gave rise to strongly patriotic and nationalistic responses. These early editions were all preceded, however, by perhaps the most

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influential of the early poetic engagements with these materials, the work of John Josias Conybeare.

J J C:     E

.................................................................................................................................. The first collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry to arrive in the salons of Victorian England was an extremely popular and much-reprinted volume titled Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.³ The volume contains a number of pieces read by Conybeare (–) to the Society of Antiquaries and published in Archaeologia, pieces which may have introduced the British literati to Anglo-Saxon literature and its ideas. The Society of Antiquaries was already a venerable institution, very broadly based across upper-class English society, having been founded in the early eighteenth century. Illustrations, completed after the death of John Josias in  by his widow Mary and his brother, the geologist William Daniel Conybeare,⁴ seems to have effected a turn from deep interest in the history and antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon period to concern with its texts, especially the poetic ones. Conybeare had been an early holder of the Rawlinson professorship of Anglo-Saxon, from  (when nominated in  he was ) until  when he resigned to become professor of Poetry. He was the first to edit and translate some of the knottier Old English poems, and also perhaps the first to attempt to offer a detailed survey of the field, with descriptions of each manuscript, elucidation of its contents, comparisons of the poems and other texts with other Germanic materials, and analyses of what each text offers to the present-day reader. Language interested Conybeare deeply, so in the Illustrations he prepared examples of what we would today call Old High German and Old Norse texts, translated or transliterated them into Anglo-Saxon, and then offered what he called an English version. The book begins with detailed discussion of Anglo-Saxon metre, focusing for example on the Riming Poem, and draws comparisons both to Celtic poetry and to later medieval alliterative poetry before offering a catalogue of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry, and editions and translations (into Latin and English) of several poems including Battle of Maldon, Widsith, The Wanderer, sections from Christ and Satan, and very extensive materials from Beowulf. The texts appear under other titles, so that what today we call ³ John Josias Conybeare, as edited by William Daniel Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Harding & Lepard, ). ⁴ Conybeare has received less scholarly attention, and probably less credit, than he merits, but now see Robin Bray, ‘ “A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Christian”: John Josias Conybeare (–) and his “Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” ()’ (Glasgow University, doctoral dissertation, ). Bray uses an array of previously unpublished materials, including family documents and correspondence, to get a much clearer picture of Conybeare’s contribution to the field. She also identifies the involvement of his widow in the preparation for publication of the Illustrations.

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   - 



The Wanderer is for Conybeare The Exile’s Complaint, and The Battle of Maldon is well titled The Death of Byrhtnoth. Conybeare even includes the twelfth-century alliterative poem now called The Grave, under the title ‘Norman-Saxon Fragment on Death’, and he includes a passage from what he calls ‘King Alfred’s Boethius’, picking up from William of Malmesbury and publicizing for his nineteenth-century audience the involvement of Alfred in translation practices in the ninth century. To some extent, Conybeare was following up the work of Sharon Turner, whose widely known History of the Anglo-Saxons had included substantial discussion of Anglo-Saxon poetry and literature.⁵ In the seventh edition, in , Turner introduces Beowulf and offers a romanticized account of the text. (The eighth edition of the History, produced by Turner’s son, came out in ; that the text ran to eight editions, each involving corrections and additions, suggests considerable interest in the period.) Underlying Conybeare’s more focused and scholarly approach (if in many details mistaken, as is often pointed out), then, is Turner’s nationalistic and passionate narrative. Conybeare’s work, however, established poetry as a subject of study, a discipline, in the nineteenth century and also as a valued enterprise in the AngloSaxon period.⁶ To trace but one small example of his influence, within a few years of publication of the Illustrations, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was recommending Beowulf in print, and privately translating the ‘Norman-Saxon Fragment on Death’, giving the poem its generally accepted title of ‘The Grave’.⁷ Conybeare’s work on Beowulf offers another window into a broader world of thinking about these texts, since in the last years of his life he worked with his new friend Frederic Madden (later, in , to be named as the long-time Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum) on a collation of the Thorkelin edition of Beowulf with the manuscript. Although the history of this work is complex, Conybeare’s plans for improving on Thorkelin’s work are clear.⁸ Had he lived longer, and not been obliged by his clerical duties to move away from Oxford, and not undergone such a sustained attack on his scholarship and

⁵ Sharon Turner, The History of the Manners, Landed Property, Government, Laws, Poetry, Literature, Religion and Language, of the Anglo-Saxons,  vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, ). ⁶ See Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon & London, ), –; Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; and Richard C. Payne, ‘The Rediscovery of Old English Poetry in the English Literary Tradition’, in Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (eds), Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –. ⁷ See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . For Longfellow’s version, see The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Horace Elisha Scudder (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., ); Longfellow also translated ‘Beowulf ’s Expedition to Heort’ and ‘The Soul”s Address to the Body’, both also from Conybeare’s Illustrations. His translations were the principal influence on the translation programme a century later of Jorge Luis Borges, who rendered ‘The Grave’, in particular, into Castilian Spanish. ⁸ See Kevin S. Kiernan, ‘The Conybeare-Madden Collation of Thorkelin’s Beowulf ’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M. Treharne (eds), Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –.

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abilities by Kemble, Conybeare might well be more fully acknowledged today for the extent to which he made Old English poetry readily available. One of the first reviews of the volume regarded it as perhaps ‘too recherchée for the general reader’ but also a ‘rich treat’ with many intriguing texts, ‘gems’ of ‘intrinsic merit and beauty’: in short, ‘the work is one of great and lively interest’.⁹

B T

.................................................................................................................................. First among the early English editors of Anglo-Saxon poetry is Benjamin Thorpe (c.–), partly because he edited Beowulf, the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Paris Psalter, four of the five major codices. He also edited the law-codes of Anglo-Saxon England, the homilies of Ælfric, the romance Apollonius of Tyre, several historical texts and chronicles, and the other poem in the Beowulf manuscript, Judith. More importantly, however, he seems to have accomplished his work without drawing a lot of attention to himself. In his obituary in the Otago Witness he is ‘the well-known Anglo-Saxon scholar and archaeologist’ and ‘one of the best Teutonic scholars of the age’, a quiet encomium and an accurate one. In addition to his work editing texts and attracting students and colleagues to the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, he was also a constant contributor to Archaeologia, and a highly engaged member of the Society of Antiquaries for much of his working life as an Anglo-Saxonist.¹⁰ Thorpe and Kemble together mark a shift in the English approach to Anglo-Saxon poetry, having both been trained on the Continent. Thorpe took the lead in their initial relationship, writing to Kemble in  as a senior and already-published figure encouraging his younger colleague in the edition of Beowulf that Kemble was just finishing, and asking his advice on an issue with respect to his own edition of the Junius manuscript poems. Their correspondence continued for about a decade, reflecting also the extent to which the antiquarian world of Victorian England was a small one.¹¹ Together, they brought a new rigour, a new interest in comparative philology, to thinking about Anglo-Saxon studies. Thorpe had been a student with Rasmus Rask in Copenhagen, and he began his career as an Anglo-Saxonist by translating Rask’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar into English in  (and again in ); in the postscript that he appends to the extended preface, Thorpe explains his desire to give ‘an English garb

⁹ The review appeared in La Belle Assemblée, or Court and Fashionable Magazine (Sept. ); it is quoted here from Bray, ‘A Scholar, A Gentleman’, as appendix :, pp. –. ¹⁰ Anonymous obituary, ‘Benjamin Thorpe’, Otago Witness,  Oct. . The paper was a fortnightly publication in Dunedin, capital of Otago, in New Zealand; Thorpe clearly merited mention far from home. ¹¹ See Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

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   - 



to a work so excellent in itself, and so important to English Scholars’.¹² His first volume for the Society of Antiquaries was Caedmon’s Metrical Paraphrase, the term used in the Victorian period for the poems in the Junius manuscript, which appeared in early ; his edition of the Paris Psalter manuscript, including both the poetry and the prose and a facing version of the Latin psalter came out in ; and his work on the Vercelli Book was published in a meagre and unhappy form in , the full version available in sheets circulated amongst scholars. He edited many prose works, mostly of Old English, for the next two decades, and returned to poetry with his edition of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburh, with very literal translation, in . Thorpe was a careful editor, providing accurate transcriptions of the manuscripts, and as much information as he deemed necessary for comprehension. In the early s he pushed hard for an English plan to edit and publish these materials, as against a plan developed in Denmark by Grundtvig; partly he seems to have wanted to do the work himself for a group of subscribers, and partly he seems to have wanted the work done in England. Before the s, when he appears in Copenhagen as a student in his mid-forties, and meets his future wife, there is little information about Thorpe. He seems to have been paid, at least by some of the commissioners of his work, and to have needed the payment, as late in life he was granted a small civil pension, and his widow received a similar stipend for his services to editing Anglo-Saxon. The ODNB even describes his works as ‘self-effacing’, listing nearly two dozen major editions including the first anthology of Old English texts (Analecta Anglo-Saxonica in , which remained in print until Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader first appeared in ).¹³ Thorpe also produced, for a general audience, several works popularizing the mythology of the North, and offering tales and traditions of Scandinavia and Germany, and a translation of the Edda from Old Norse. In other words, Thorpe wanted both to prepare scholarly editions and to popularize the material he knew, to make available a whole range of Germanic legends and stories for an English audience. Over the years, Thorpe has been much maligned for his errors of comprehension and presentation, but he worked for a wage, quietly and with little or no access to the grand circles of Victorian England. He was treated as the journeyman editor of this material so that others could build their free-wheeling and spectacular castles upon his base. Getting the text available and comprehensible for the historians and the literary figures of the time seems to have been the main goal of the Society of Antiquaries, the Master of the Rolls, and the others who employed Thorpe in these endeavours. He seems to have done as instructed, and to have proceeded with the labours requested of him with as little fuss as he could manage. Hudson Gurney once remarked in his ¹² Erasmus Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, with a Praxis, tr. from the Danish by B. Thorpe (Copenhagen: S. L. Møller, ), p. lx. I am grateful to David Carlton for lending me his copy of this work. ¹³ See ODNB. Except for Towell, ‘Rise and Progress’, Thorpe gets little attention, less of it positive; see Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Benjamin Thorpe (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York: Garland Publishing, ), –.

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journals (Gurney was the long-time vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries, –, and part of his remit, as he interpreted it, was underwriting and organizing the publication of many early antiquities including the literary ones) that Thorpe had come to him in some distress. He had submitted an edition and had been ordered to curtail it, to eliminate much of the scholarly matter and keep it more entertaining. Gurney advised careful attention to the letter of the changed remit, but with an eye to preserving as much scholarship as possible. Thorpe did not have the level of control of his scholarly work that he might have wanted, and it seems likely that some of the opprobrium heaped on his head is undeserved.¹⁴

J M K

.................................................................................................................................. Kemble, (–) sometimes called the Anglo-Saxon Meteor, is the figure most discussed and researched from this period.¹⁵ Tennyson in a sonnet admires him as ‘spurred at heart with fieriest energy’ and lauds him in – for a plan to enter the priesthood (later abandoned).¹⁶ Kemble was one of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’, an elite society of twelve gregarious, creative, and liberal thinkers who are also undergraduates at Cambridge; the group also included his friends Arthur Henry Hallam, William Thackeray, Richard Chenevix Trench, and Alfred Tennyson. Kemble as a young man was at the heart of this society, engaged and enthusiastic, though not about the law despite his entrance into the Inner Temple in , or about mathematics, the subject of his degree. He cast about as a young man, thinking of holy orders, joining an ill-fated uprising in Spain, and after a study trip to Germany during the long vacation in , studying the work of Jakob Grimm. Here he settled. His correspondence with Grimm began with a fan letter in  and the last surviving letter is ; Kemble also spent time in Germany with Grimm. Theirs is a highly scholarly correspondence, but also a warm one; Kemble’s salutations start with ‘Honored Sir’ and shift gradually to ‘My dear friend’ and finish with ‘My dear Jakob’, while Grimm has ‘Dear Friend’ and ‘Dear, good ¹⁴ Hudson Gurney’s notebooks are a fascinating study worth further consideration. This reference comes from Norfolk Record Office, Norfolk, catalogue ref RQG , volume N in the alphabetical series of Gurney’s notebooks, the volume dated August th –August th . On the other hand, see Levine, Amateur and Professional, , for a complaint about Thorpe, who protested that he had suffered ‘an inflammation of the eyes and head’. ¹⁵ The best starting point is the website curated by Simon Keynes at http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk/. In addition to comprehensive work on Anglo-Saxon charters, the site includes a great deal of information and material concerning Kemble. See also the very full study by Raymond A. Wiley, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kemble. The Life and Works of John Mitchell Kemble –, Philologist, Historian, Archaeologist’, in Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, David Brown, and James Campbell, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History I (): –. Wiley also collected, edited, and translated John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm: A Correspondence – (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ). ¹⁶ Alfred Tennyson, The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate (New York: Harper & Brothers, ), ; originally published in Poems (), Tennyson’s first collection of poetry.

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   - 



Kemble’, and the like. Kemble’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon grammar was very strong, and like his soon-to-be friend Thorpe he was very good at transcription, but his first edition of Beowulf, produced in haste in  when he was , rushed to publication. J. R. Hall refers kindly to his ‘pioneering intelligence’ which brought the editing of Old English texts into the modern era,¹⁷ but Kemble’s construction of the poem was full of ‘gloomy ideas’ and shifted from an Anglo-Saxon approach to a German Saxon one.¹⁸ The  edition presented the poem in half-lines (hudibrastically), and had few notes, a very cursory glossary, and no translation. It argued strongly that the poem was a copy of something that had come over to England with the Germanic ancestors prior to , and offered therefore a highly Germanicized account of the mythology and history mentioned in the poem. At the same time, this was the first scholarly edition of the poem in English, and a tremendous advance on Thorkelin’s. Kemble revised and republished his edition in –, with a second volume, a corrected text, and a full and surprisingly modern translation. Kemble had given up his desire to date the poem and its events, and offered here a professional and authoritative text and commentary. He did continue to work on the poem, declaring in a letter to Grimm in  that he wanted to ‘publish a new edition of Beówulf’, continuing with the statement that ‘Beówulf, Beówulf himself, both God & Hero, I cannot give him up!’¹⁹ Kemble’s translation stands alone as the first complete translation of the poem, and his belief in its purpose and meaning for English history and English nationalism points to the mythic import of the poem. Kemble published his edition of the poems in the Vercelli Book in two volumes, in  and again in . Perhaps one detail will indicate his brilliance as a scholar and creative thinker; it was Kemble who connected the Dream of the Rood, a poem he called ‘Poem of the Dream of the Holy Rood’ as being a version of the text in the runes inscribed on the Ruthwell Cross. He published a long article on Anglo-Saxon runes, a precursor to his shift towards the study of archaeology in his forties (he died just before turning fifty). A synthetic thinker, Kemble was always searching for connections in Germanic philology, in place names and idioms, in artefacts and historical references. Although he did inherit his father’s job of Examiner of Plays in , Kemble’s financial situation was never entirely secure. Sadly, he never obtained the university post at Oxford or Cambridge that he dearly wanted, or the position of chief librarian at the British Museum, or any of the other posts for which he was eminently qualified and for which he applied. The reason seems likely to be his combative and polemic attitude, ¹⁷ See J. R. Hall, ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf: Thorkelin’s () and Kemble’s ()’, in D.G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the  Manchester Conference (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, at . ¹⁸ Thomas Wright makes these complaints in ‘Anglo-Saxon Scholars and Literature’, Gentleman’s Magazine, ,   (Sept. ): , as quoted in Gretchen P. Ackerman, ‘J. M. Kemble and Sir Frederic Madden: “Conceit and Too Much Germanism”?’, in Berkhout and Gatch, Anglo-Saxon Scholarship, –, at . Ackerman’s is the most entertaining account of the controversy in the magazines that Kemble caused, and Madden became thoroughly embroiled in. ¹⁹ Wiley, Kemble and Grimm: A Correspondence, letter July , p. .

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most notably exemplified when he started a public argument about Anglo-Saxon scholarship, with a review of Thorpe’s Analecta Anglo-Saxonica in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April . Kemble argued that, were it not for German and Danish scholars, there would be little useful work done on early English materials, and especially not at Oxford. The responses came thick and fast, and Kemble kept his side of the controversy alive for some time all by himself. The putative occasion for the whole kerfuffle, Thorpe’s anthology and grammar, disappeared under the wave and counterwave. Perhaps the most outspoken writer in response to Kemble was the anonymous author of a pamphlet written as a sequence of letters between R. and I. J. (Kemble thought it was Joseph Bosworth), and titled The Anglo-Saxon Meteor; or, Letters in Defence of Oxford treating of the wonderful Gothic attainments of John M. Kemble, of Trinity College, Cambridge.²⁰ The pamphlet does not seem to have circulated widely, however, so the larger part of the controversy was in the London periodicals. Kemble fought his corner well; the university post he so wanted never came his way.

F J F

.................................................................................................................................. Furnivall (–) trained as a lawyer and practised in a desultory way, joining the Philological Society in  and using that as a springboard with which to found a whole set of societies and start a multiplicity of projects. He was secretary of the Philological Society from  until the end of his life. All of his societies were founded fundamentally in support of Furnivall’s greatest dream or plan, which was the notion of a new dictionary of the English language, based on historical principles, later called the New English Dictionary at Oxford. From  until  he served as editor for that dictionary, and until his death he was a massive and engaged contributor. In order to continue that work, he knew that the documents and texts available in the language needed to be available in good editions that were wholly trustworthy. Furnivall as a result founded the Early English Text Society in  (still functioning today to provide new and better editions), and a whole sequence of other societies including Browning, Shelley, Wyclif, Chaucer, Ballad, and even one for Shakespeare. Like Kemble, however, Furnivall was quick to judgement and to make loud and untrammelled complaints, so that all of his ventures were marked by acrimony and division. At the same time, in many respects also like Kemble, Furnivall was a surprisingly scholarly editor, hardworking and accurate, anxious to improve his own work but also perfectly willing to publish carelessly prepared materials. That is, he was a contradictory soul, genial and

²⁰ The pamphlet is dated  March . See the detailed bibliographic and historical analysis at Simon Keynes’s website: http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk/node/.

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   - 



pugnacious, occasionally quite foolish and quarrelsome, but passionate and engaged. He was an enthusiast, and brought consideration of the English language and English texts into every literate place in England, with a constant flow of articles and notices in all the papers and journals, with events and his tea-time literary salons on New Oxford Street, with stories and bombast. Furnivall made the connection from medieval texts to lexicography; by the time of his death, as Derek Pearsall points out, over  volumes had been published in the Early English Text Society.²¹ Like Thorpe and Kemble, he venerated the Germanic comparative philological approach, but unlike them he was a highly engaged and public figure. Both with the societies he founded, and with his public connections including altercations with figures such as Algernon Swinburne and friendships with John Ruskin, Richard Chenevix Trench (philologist and Archbishop of Dublin), and Robert Browning, Furnivall was in the Victorian public eye. He completed, metaphorically and in some ways physically, the link between medieval texts and the study of language. Thus, when universities began tentatively to engage in the study of English language and literature, it was Furnivall’s Early English Text Society which offered them the riches needed for effective advanced teaching and learning. However, the trajectory here has been one of increasing professionalization, and a turn to the scholarly engagement with Old English poetry. And while that is a genuine development, and perhaps the most important one for scholarship in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, it may not well reflect the background which gave rise to thinking about Old English as a populist issue in Victorian England. That is, the early study of Old English poetry and especially the process by which it came to be edited in England and then made more broadly available as a public endeavour indeed offers us one source of material for the matter of Victorian medievalism. J. J. Conybeare, John Mitchell Kemble, Benjamin Thorpe, and in the next generation Frederick J. Furnivall: these four are perhaps the most significant, though by no means the only, serious scholars of Old English poetry in England in the Victorian period. Among them they produced the texts that Victorian poets and early Anglo-Saxon scholars read and reworked, believed and relived; in some cases, they taught or read these texts to those poets, filled with enthusiasm and excitement at their rediscovery of the Old English past. Kemble remains perhaps the most famous of these, as the most well-connected, though his connections did not garner him the permanent appointment he dearly wanted. Thorpe perhaps did the hardest job of work, for the least amount of current acknowledgement and posthumous praise. Conybeare’s work was well-recognized and well-received, and his was scholarship for the sheer joy of doing the work; he did not depend on this work for making a living, as Thorpe certainly did and Kemble probably did without wanting to admit it. Conybeare also deserves credit as the first to think about the poetic metre of Old English, and its Germanic and Celtic ²¹ See Derek Pearsall, ‘Frederick James Furnivall (–)’, in Helen Damico Medieval Scholarship, ii. – at p. . See also the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Furnivall by William S. Peterson at ODNB; and William Benzie, Dr F.J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, ).

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. . 

parallels. And Furnivall represents the next generation of the businesslike Victorian scholar with no apology offered; the work needed to get done if it were paid for and not otherwise. That said, it may well be that the work that they and others did that may well prove to be the most important feature of Victorian medievalism was their articles for Victorian periodicals. For example, volume  of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, published in , includes in its July issue a long article ‘On Anglo-Saxon Poetry’.²² Kemble published frequently in Fraser’s Magazine, but this piece is anonymous: it opens with a statement that it is worth having a paper on the ‘poetry of our Saxon forefathers, and the more so, as it is a subject which is at present attracting much attention’, reviews the scholarly field and publications in process, quotes extensively from Beowulf with a facing translation, refers to many other poems, and finishes with the statement that ‘[i]n studying it [the Anglo-Saxon tongue], we study also the groundwork of the latter [our language]; and, in a greater degree than we are accustomed to suppose, the ground-work of its literature’ (p.  and p. ). These articles, read by the poets and novelists who were publishing their work in these magazines, and by the general public, offer a sense of what the ordinary Victorian individual came to think of as the Anglo-Saxon past, and its poetry.

S  Benzie, William, Dr. F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, ). Bray, Robin, ‘ “A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Christian”: John Josias Conybeare (–) and his “Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” ()’, Glasgow University, doctoral dissertation, . Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Momma, Haruko, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Pulsiano, Phillip, and Elaine M. Treharne (eds), Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Sweet, Rosemary, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon, ). Turner, James, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).

²² Anonymous, ‘On Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, Fraser’s Magazine,  (July ): –. The piece follows a short story and precedes a very chatty analysis of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and a selection of Hugo’s poetry, after which comes an analysis of the stock exchange and its vicissitudes. Fraser’s Magazine was but one of the popular periodicals of the Victorian era, sometimes called the age of the periodical; see also The Athenaeum and the Gentleman’s Magazine.

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        ......................................................................................................................

              

......................................................................................................................

 

I , the year in which Queen Victoria passed away, Rudyard Kipling published Kim, the culmination of his interest in Geoffrey Chaucer, whom he cherished as his favourite poet of all times. Kipling procrastinated over the completion of his novel for eight years because he desired to accomplish for his own contemporaries what he and many in the Victorian era believed Chaucer had accomplished for fourteenth-century England: a national epic that would help his contemporaries to unify, to develop a common patriotic identity. Kipling recognized the excellent possibilities the medieval frame tale offers to a writer who intends to depict and praise the diversity of real-life people in any given society. Through the frame tale, he felt in a position to inform his isolated island audience about the lives of people in the most populous part of the British Empire. He felt akin to Chaucer’s choice of characters, which excluded the highest ranks of authority and zoomed in on those who, in Kipling’s own opinion, kept the Empire going strong: the duty-bound experts in administration, army, secret service, and the common people. Moreover, he shared, and sometimes consciously imitated, his medieval predecessor’s love for detailed description and tongue-in-cheek perspective on human behaviour. To reread Chaucer’s Christian frame of the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett in fourteenth-century Canterbury, Kipling substitutes a multi-ethnic and multi-religious pilgrimage on India’s trains and the Grand Trunk Road and celebrates Kim’s educational progress from the ‘little friend of all the world’ childishly playing ‘The Great Game’ to a conscious defender of the idea of the Empire in the British Secret Service. Where many of Chaucer’s stories (for example, ‘The Knight’s Tale’) abound with references to Christianity and Boethius’s early-medieval Wheel of Fortune, Kipling introduces an alternative in the Lama’s Buddhist avoidance of the Wheel of Life. Correspondences culminate in the one figure that fascinates Kipling the most among the character studies of the Canterbury Tales: the talkative and overbearing Sahiba in Kim is Kipling’s own misogynist misprision of the Wife of Bath. In his late

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short story, ‘The Wish House’ (), Kipling would recreate her character once again, this time into the lively portrait of Mrs Ashcroft, a retired cook who, like Chaucer’s Cook in the ‘Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’, has an ulcer on her shin and, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, negotiates issues of consuming possessive desire for and ‘maistrie’ over her lover. In ‘The Wish House’, Kim, ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ (; a story featuring a forged Chaucer fragment), and several poems (‘The Consolations of Memory’, ‘The Justice’s Tale’), Kipling scavenges Chaucer’s texts for ideas, plots, and characters to create a broad claim for an unbroken continuity between medieval England and contemporary Britain. At a time of increased political, social, and racial tensions within the far-flung boundaries of the British Empire, he uses Chaucer and medieval literature and history in general as powerful educational tools to forge a strong sense of national identity for his target audience of adolescent boys. He is convinced that they will carry the torch of the Empire’s civilizatory mission forward into and through the twentieth century. As numerous other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century examples demonstrate, Kipling’s preference for Chaucer as an inspiration for his own literary production was hardly exceptional. In fact, the engagement with Chaucer also shown by the likes of G. K. Chesterton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Masefield, William Morris, Henry David Thoreau, and Virginia Woolf was the direct outcome of more than seventy years of gradually growing fascination with a poet whose medieval persona and works Victorians as well as their contemporaries in other Englishspeaking countries imagined as a predecessor to their own preferred aesthetics, ideologies, and mentalities.¹

T   C

.................................................................................................................................. In , the most distinguished English poet of his day, John Dryden, made a selffashioning effort to link his own poetry with the works of a number of famous predecessors in his Fables Ancient and Modern. While his translations contributed to disseminating the tales of the Knight, Nun’s Priest, and Wife of Bath from the Canterbury Tales, few of Dryden’s contemporaries would have thought of Chaucer as a canonical poet. By , Chaucer’s late medieval English had become increasingly difficult to understand, and most of the select few with access to his texts were unimpressed by his inclusion of lower class characters and bawdy scenarios. It is only at the end of the eighteenth century that Chaucer’s texts were being rediscovered due to a growing interest in historicizing the national past on the one hand and the romantic idealization of everything premodern and pre-industrial on the other. ¹ On such connections, see the chapter, ‘Writers’ Chaucer’ (pp. –) in Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, ).

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   



Thomas Warton’s highly influential History of English Poetry (–) confirmed Dryden’s earlier judgement by situating Chaucer historically as the father of England’s national poetic tradition; Thomas Tyrwhitt, through his five-volume (–) edition of the Canterbury Tales, not only made Chaucer more widely available, but also reduced his texts’ forbidding alterity by distinguishing between the grammatical and scribal origins of Chaucer’s perplexing final –e and providing a first fully fledged glossary; William Godwin wrote a sensationally successful Life of Geoffrey Chaucer in  which, while partly confabulated, created great public interest in Chaucer, the author and the person; and the Romantic poets enthusiastically read the medieval poet as a pre-Shakespearean ally against Enlightenment rationalism and neoclassicist poetic forms and ideals.² This moderate revival of interest in Chaucer increased exponentially during Queen Victoria’s reign.

F     C

.................................................................................................................................. During the first half of nineteenth century, the Middle Ages began to be identified as a distinguishable historical period, and the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalism’ first entered the English vocabulary.³ Until the s, those interested in the medieval period, variously referred to as amateurs, antiquarians, bibliomaniacs, enthusiasts, glossographists, and dilettantes, were devoted and self-taught middle and upper middle class individuals who enjoyed reading and discussing historical documents. Dedicated students and lovers of these documents, they did much to preserve medieval manuscripts and assisted later generations in locating, cataloging, and editing them. However, access to their print editions of medieval texts was limited to themselves, their immediate circles of friends, and the members of the exclusive literary and printing clubs to which they belonged.⁴ These early readers and editors are fascinated as much by the similarity/modernity as by the otherness/alterity of their medieval sources. On ² Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry,  vols (London, –); Thomas Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer,  vols (London, –); William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet,  vols (London: Printed by T. Davison for Richard Phillips, ); on Warton and Tyrwhitt’s publications, see Derek Brewer (ed.), Chaucer: The Critical Heritage,  vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). On the popular success of Godwin’s biography, see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –; on the popularity of medieval poetry (and Chaucer) among the Romantic poets, see Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). ³ David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, establishes the first uses of ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalism’ in English texts for  and , respectively. ⁴ On the work of these individuals see Monica Santini, The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship: Discussing and Editing Medieval Romances in Late-Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bern: Lang, ), esp. –.

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the one hand, Chaucer’s long and structurally and linguistic complex poem, Troilus and Criseyde, with its close focus on the emotions and thoughts of its protagonists, invited modern readers to transcend the centuries which separated them from fourteenth-century England and to imagine Chaucer as a congenial soul akin to their own aesthetic preferences and those of the canonical authors of their own present. On the other hand, Chaucer’s fabliaux (The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale), which tell an extended (usually bawdy) joke or trick, were deemed entertaining precisely because of their premodern ‘primitive’ features. They enabled readers either to succumb to nostalgia about an allegedly less restrictive ‘old’ and ‘merry’ England or feel good about their temporal distance and perceived superiority to a more barbarous past. Two Victorian gentleman scholars, who found Chaucer’s works fascinating in their historical otherness as well as in their relevance to the present, played a central role in the poet’s rise to modern national and international fame: Frederick James Furnivall and Walter W. Skeat. Frederick James Furnivall (–), although lacking formal training in linguistics and textual editing, advanced the study of early English literature and language more than any other nineteenth-century scholar. If his educational background was in mathematics and the law, his real passion was more in social reform than in his daytime job as a conveyancer. He joined the Christian Socialist movement, participated actively in labour agitation as speaker and strike organizer, and even sold his book collection to support striking workers.⁵ Furnivall helped found and strongly supported London’s Working Men’s College (), teaching English grammar and literature five nights a week over a period of ten years. Impressed by the application of new scientific methods to the humanities, he joined the Philological Society in , became its Secretary in , and remained in this position until the end of his life. In , he persuaded the members of the Philological Society to create and publish a ‘New English Dictionary’ based on historical principles, an effort that would usher in the great tradition of English lexicography and its crown jewel, the Oxford English Dictionary.⁶ To take comprehensive stock of an entire nation’s linguistic heritage the dictionary needed reliable entries from historical sources, a challenge Furnivall overcame by founding the Early English Text Society (), the Ballad Society and the Chaucer Society (both ), the New Shakspere Society (), the Wyclif Society (), and the Shelley Society (). For his encyclopedic editorial plans, he enlisted the help not only of an impressive number of English and international scholars, but edited himself thirty-nine of the first Early English Text Society’s volumes, with the assistance of numerous students from the Working Men’s College and other volunteers. Twentiethcentury users of the Oxford English Dictionary had no idea that the unimpeachable authority of their reference book was based on the foundational work of collating and ⁵ For a biography, see William Benzie, Dr F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, ). ⁶ On Furnivall’s founding role for the OED, see Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of Language: The Living OED (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).

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   



comparing textual variants done by ordinary people like ‘Lizzy’ (Eleanor Nickel) Dalziel, a ‘lady’s maid’ and later Furnivall’s wife, W. A. Dalziel, Lizzy’s brother and a student teacher at the Working Men’s College, or other young women such as Teena Rochfort-Smith and Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx). Furthermore, it is questionable that Caroline Spurgeon (–) and Edith Rickert (–) would have become internationally known Chaucerians in an almost completely maledominated field had it not been for Furnivall’s steadfast support and encouragement.⁷ These examples reveal that Furnivall’s political activism cannot be separated from his scholarly enthusiasm about providing scientifically reliable texts. Because English universities lagged behind in the study of medieval English texts, he provided access to Old and Middle English manuscripts to numerous German scholars who, already organized in state-funded departments of English, travelled to Britain to transcribe, edit, and analyse texts they considered part of a common Germanic heritage. These German scholars had developed ‘philology’ as a methodology that would emulate the successes of their counterparts in the sciences, medicine, and technology. As exemplified by the work of Jacob Grimm (–), philology was originally broadly defined as an inclusive and even potentially emancipatory study of culture based on history, theology, jurisprudence, linguistics, and literature. After its institutionalization at the modern university, however, it quickly developed into a mostly decontextualized study of manuscripts, linguistic and prosodic aspects of texts, and the writing of literary history, often amounting to little more than the sedulous collecting of minute details to build an imposing tower of socially irrelevant knowledge. Furnivall, who held that the reading of original medieval texts could be a powerful tool to bring about social and political change by proposing alternative ways of living and thinking, despised the ‘doctored editions’ and most of the science-like paratextual features (footnotes, textual notes, indexes, glossaries, commentary) produced by his German academic collaborators. However, he needed their authority as university professors and their access to a host of well-trained Ph.D. students to speed up the publication of medieval texts. What German and British Chaucerians needed at this specific point in time to produce authoritative versions of Chaucer’s poetry was access to the extant manuscript tradition. Using his vast network of personal and professional connections, Furnivall managed to gain access to the most important known manuscript versions of the Canterbury Tales. Embracing the same nineteenth-century epistemological paradigms that led physician Peter Mark Roget to classify the vast English lexicon into orderly lists ⁷ Beatrice White (‘Frederick James Furnivall’, Essays and Studies,   (), –) calls Furnivall a ‘feminist’ who rightly criticized Cambridge University as ‘preposterously antiquated in withholding degrees’ from women ‘when they could beat men at their own game’ (). Spurgeon wrote a -vol. history of Chaucer reception, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Rickert (together with John M. Manly) compiled the bulk of materials on Chaucer’s biography and historical contexts published in  (Oxford: Clarendon Press) as the Chaucer Life Records. Rickert and Manly also published the first authoritative text of the Canterbury Tales based on all available manuscripts, the -vol. The Text of the Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).

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of related words in his  Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Furnivall ordered and systematized the unwieldy variance of Canterbury manuscripts by collating and printing them in neat parallel columns in the eight-volume Six-Text Print of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which he published through the Chaucer Society between  and . With this feat, he enabled dozens of scholars and editors to produce the widely disseminated printed editions of the Canterbury Tales he hoped all other British readers, especially students, would enjoy as much as he did: ‘Anyone who reads the Canterbury Tales, and gets to know the man Chaucer, must delight in and love him, and must feel sorry that so little has been done for the works of the genial bright soul, whose humour and wit, whose grace and tenderness, whose power and beauty, are the chief glory of our Early Literature.’⁸ If Frederick Furnivall’s role was that of the tireless Victorian gentleman agitator, promoter, manager, and publisher, who transformed the landscape of medieval studies in Britain with his abounding energy for social change, Walter William Skeat’s engagement with Chaucer and medieval literature represents the increasing sublimation of enthusiastic interest in the Middle Ages into a fully fledged subject of academic study. Like Furnivall, Skeat did not set out to become a medievalist, but read mathematics and theology at Cambridge. After his church career was cut short because of illness and he had tired of teaching mathematics at Cambridge, he began to pursue a career in English studies, a path that would lead him to be elected the first holder of the Elrington and Bosworth professorship at Cambridge University in . He was involved in several of Furnivall’s projects and organizations, especially the Philological Society, became himself the founder and president of the English Dialect Society, produced (following Furnivall’s encouragement) several ground-breaking critical editions of Old and Middle English texts (Lancelot of the Laik, ; Piers Plowman, –; John Barbour’s The Bruce, –; and Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, –) for the Early English Text Society, and authored the widely received Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (–; revised and enlarged, ).⁹ In addition to hundreds of articles and notes on medieval literature and language, Skeat made lasting contributions to Chaucer studies. Following the modern obsession with clarifying questions of authorship and authority regarding the numerous anonymous medieval texts, he set out to distinguish between authentic Chaucerian creations and ⁸ The quotation is from Furnivall’s introductory section (which he downplays as ‘May be skipt as gossip’) to vol. i () of the Six-Text Edition,  and . H. L. Spencer, ‘F.J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best: The Six-Text Canterbury Tales and the Chaucer Society’, Review of English Studies, / (): –, calls the Six-Text Edition ‘a radically important publication’ with ‘far-reaching consequences for the later editing of Chaucer’ that ‘are still with us’ (). For a recent assessment of Furnivall’s role for the study of Chaucer, see Ruth Evans, ‘The Chaucer Society, Victorian Medievalism, and the Nation State: Englishness and Empire’, The New Chaucer Society Blog,  Mar.  (http://newchaucersociety. org/blog/entry/the-chaucer-society-victorian-medievalism-and-the-nation-state-englishness), accessed Dec. . ⁹ For a full bibliographic assessment, see Charlotte Brewer, ‘Walter William Skeat (-)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York: Routledge, ), –.

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spurious works attributed to the poet since the fifteenth century. Like Furnivall, Skeat established a science-like methodology to extricate Chaucer scholarship from the druidical mist of more impressionistic pre-academic judgements. Diagnosing typical patterns in rhyme, grammar, and etymology from texts securely attributable to Chaucer, he applied formal tests about these internal features to texts of doubtful attribution. As a consequence, he rejected a number of texts that had been considered Chaucer’s and had contributed to the poet’s reputation as a prodigious nature-poet between the s and the s (for example, The Court of Love, Flower and the Leaf, Complaint of the Black Knight, The Testament of Love, and The Cuckoo and the Nightingale).¹⁰ Almost all of Skeat’s adjudications on what constitutes the Chaucer canon have remained unchallenged even more than  years after he produced them.¹¹ Skeat made an even bigger contribution to providing reliable Chaucerian texts to scholars and the general public alike. He edited The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (–), the first comprehensive seven-volume critical edition of the poet’s works, with extensive notes and a full glossary, and the firm foundation for all future scholarly editions and numerous translations; in his Student’s Chaucer () he condensed introductory matters and textual notes to a minimum and provided secondary school and college teachers all over the Anglophone world with the first affordable one-volume edition of the poet’s works; and he published several editions of individual Canterbury tales, translated some tales into rhyming verse, and even composed his own ‘The Dyers Prologue’ and the ‘Dyers Tale’ in Middle English for The Universal Review ().¹²

C   V 

.................................................................................................................................. Frederick J. Furnivall’s and William W. Skeat’s efforts reveal a strong tendency among Victorian Chaucer experts to disseminate the poet’s texts as widely as possible. Various didactic goals are also at work in some of the translations and other modernizing renderings of Chaucerian narratives for the general public in the nineteenth century. The writer and illustrator Mary Eliza Haweis (–), for example, chose to translate and adapt several of Chaucer’s Canterbury stories and shorter poems for children as well as adult non-scholarly readers, a conflation of audiences that speaks to how many among the educated social classes viewed the intellectual abilities of working-class citizens. Haweis, who also wrote a suffragistic novel and several successful manuals on ¹⁰ The Chaucer Canon: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon, ). ¹¹ See Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, ), esp. ch. , ‘Disattribution and Authenticity’ (pp. –). ¹² For these creative contributions, see James D. Johnson, ‘Walter W. Skeat’s Canterbury Tale’, Chaucer Review, / (): –.

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domestic décor and home management, was convinced that Chaucer’s Middle English, if only accompanied by an ‘occasional reference to a glossary’, could be understood and enjoyed by ‘anybody with moderate intelligence and an ear for musical rhythm’. Bringing together numerous commonly held views about Chaucer and his age, she stated that the ‘stiff ’, ‘obscure’, ‘simple’, and ‘crude’ features of early English were easily accessible to those still developing their language skills, that Chaucer ‘wrote for the people’, and that he was ‘a thoroughly religious poet’. Defending him against common accusations of bawdiness and poor taste, she maintained that even ‘his merriest stories’ had ‘a fair moral’ and ‘those that are too coarse for modern taste are rather naïve than injurious’.¹³ Despite her protestations, however, she heavily bowdlerized any potentially offensive stories, passages, and words and illustrated her anthologies (Chaucer for Children, ; Chaucer for Schools, ; Tales from Chaucer, ) with mostly idyllic and picturesque scenes. Haweis was well educated—her father was Thomas Musgrave Joy (–), the genre and portrait painter who was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint the prince of Wales—and made ample use of the scholarship published by Frederick Furnivall and others. She may well be among the first editors and translators of Chaucer’s texts to whom the poet’s increasing fame as the father of English poetry provided a much-needed source of income. Her  publication of Chaucer’s Beads: A Birthday Book, Diary and Concordance of Chaucer’s Proverbs or Soothsaws, which contained a large number of Chaucerian aphoristic and proverbial sayings in Middle English with contemporary translations, was ‘a pleasing combination of the functional and the decorative, would suit childish hands, but might also appeal to older purchasers who had both the leisure to read and sufficient social obligations to require the organisational properties of a diary’.¹⁴ The publication was clearly marketed toward middle or upper-middle class women, wives and mothers with access to a certain level of disposable income. The expurgation of potentially objectionable tales, sections, and individual words and the free adaptation of Chaucer’s original texts were also prominent features of earlier translations and adaptations. Charles Cowden Clarke’s two-volume  The Riches of Chaucer is a radical example of such tendencies. His anthology, which dominated the popular market of modernized Chaucerian texts through the end of the century, omits the problematic fabliaux from his version of the Canterbury Tales, offering instead selections from the relatively ‘safe’ Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde. In addition, as the subtitle explains, the medieval poet’s ‘impurities’ were ‘expunged’, ‘his spelling modernized; his rhythm accentuated; and his obsolete terms explained’. Cowden Clarke’s focus on modernizing spelling, reducing syntactical alterity, indicating word stress, and adding a glossary at the

¹³ Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key (London: Chatto & Windus, ), pp. ix–x. ¹⁴ Margaret Connolly, ‘ “Dr Furnival and Mother Like the Same Old Books”: Mary Haweis and the Experience of Reading Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century’, Philologie im Netz, Supplement / (http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft/bt.htm), accessed Nov. .

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bottom of each page may well have been influenced by his experience of lecturing on Chaucer and Shakespeare at the Mechanics’ Institute of Royston, one of the numerous nineteenth-century educational establishments meant to create a better educated adult workforce. Just like Mary Haweis, Cowden Clarke, too, was convinced that stories featuring chivalry (‘Knight’s Tale’), female patience and obedience (‘Clerk’s Tale’), magic and wonderment (‘Squire’s Tale’), beast fable (‘Nun’s Priest’), and saintly children (‘Prioress’s Tale’) would help instil the behavioural virtues prized by Victorian educators in children as well as (allegedly childlike) working-class adults. Two years before The Riches of Chaucer, he compiled Tales from Chaucer in Prose: Designed Chiefly for the Use of Young Persons, a volume based on similar principles and modelled after Charles and Mary Lamb’s widely disseminated prose retellings of Shakespeare plays for children (Tales from Shakespear, ).¹⁵ John Saunders’s two-volume  Canterbury Tales, from Chaucer, while perhaps not as influential as Haweis’s and Cowan Clarke’s publications, offers another variation among the Victorian attempts to bring Chaucer’s poetry to large segments of the British public. In his introduction, Saunders considers three ‘modes adopted by lovers of Chaucer to popularize his works’, and concludes that all three of these modes have only been partly successful. He has been ‘re-written, as poetry’, but since even another great poet, John Dryden, had already failed at modernizing the medieval poet appropriately, others should not even try; secondly, ‘the poetical has been transformed into a prose narration’, which has eliminated the ‘hindrances caused by antiquated words or pronunciations’, but also destroyed the subtlety of the poetic original and blocked readers from ‘the perusal of the original text’; and finally, ‘Chaucer’s poetry has been presented in its own proper form, with a modernized spelling, and an accented pronunciation’, but versions based on this method ‘attract neither the student nor the general reader: too lax for the one they still remain . . . too irksome for the other’.¹⁶ Saunders decides on a hybrid approach that combines the latter two ‘modes’, making ‘the whole course of the story clear by resolving inconvenient or difficult passages in the poetry into prose’, and allowing ‘the reader to be constantly refreshing himself from “the well of English undefiled,” by leaving all the remainder, including the finest portions of the poetry, in its own nervous and beautiful language’. He sees his specific method of presenting Chaucer’s poetry by a mélange of prose rendering, original verse, critical commentary, and aesthetic criticism as a transitional one until scholarly editions will provide medieval texts in fully appropriate form, until ‘Chaucer shall be, through all his works, his own sole interpreter.’¹⁷ The same new printing technologies (faster perfecting cylinders and rotary presses) and increases in general literacy that accelerated and improved the reception of the

¹⁵ See Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), –. ¹⁶ ‘Introduction’, Canterbury Tales, from Chaucer (London: Charles Knight, ), i. –. ¹⁷ Canterbury Tales, from Chaucer, –. On Saunders’s method and goals, see Charlotte C. Morse, ‘Popularizing Chaucer in the Nineteenth-Century’, Chaucer Review, / (): –.

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Chaucerian modernizations by Haweis, Cowen Clarke, and Saunders also facilitated the distribution of some Chaucerian texts in one of the widely sold ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ or ‘Bloods’, serials which published sensationalized crime and horror fiction printed on cheap wood pulp paper and geared towards working-class (male) audiences. While the cheap paper quality and scant preservation of these serials render a reliable history of their reception impossible, it is clear that William Thomas Stead (–), a radical idealist, pacifist, and journalist and the leading publisher of paperbacks during the Victorian era, made versions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales accessible to more readers than ever before. Stead’s Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, which appeared in his Masterpiece Library, ‘Penny Poets’, Series , Vol. IV, no.  (August ) and probably circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies, was meant to provide to its readers ‘a literature not of to-day, but of all the yesterdays, so as to render available for the poorest English-speaking man the best thoughts which the greatest thinkers expressed in the purest style since our language first was fashioned’.¹⁸ He decided to achieve his goals by retaining the poetic form, modernizing the spelling, and altering the verse where necessary to make it scan. Stead, too, would later extend his attention from adult working-class men and women to their children. In , he started another ‘Penny’ series, Books for the Bairns, which was meant to ‘fill the imagination of the English-speaking child with visions of beauty and romance’ and quickly attracted monthly sales of , via an attractive mélange of simplified narrative (mostly fairy tales) and outline pen-and-ink sketches.¹⁹ As an enthusiastic Christian, he excised all potentially offensive content, including in his  issue on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.²⁰ For example, he changed the knight’s offence in the Wife of Bath’s Tale from a rape to a stolen kiss, and his version of the Franklin’s Tale made the Victorian implication that divorce is preferable to adultery.²¹

T ’ 

.................................................................................................................................. Whatever the specific genre or target audience Victorian critics, writers, translators, and illustrators chose to imagine Geoffrey Chaucer and his texts, they all shared in the ¹⁸ William Thomas Stead, ‘After Seven Years’, Review of Reviews,  (): –, here . Christina von Nolcken, ‘ “Penny Poet” Chaucer, or Chaucer and the “Penny Dreadfuls” ’, Chaucer Review, / (): –, was able to identify only eight remaining copies world-wide of the issue containing the Canterbury Tales. ¹⁹ William Thomas Stead, ‘How to Get the Millions to Read: Books for the Bairns’, Review of Reviews,  (): –, here . ²⁰ Stories from Chaucer, Being The Canterbury Tales. In Simple Language for Children. Illustrated by Edith Ewen (London: Office of ‘Books for the Bairns’, Mowbray House, Norfolk Street, Strand, W.C. [, reissued multiple times]). ²¹ Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature, –, offers an analysis of Stead’s Chaucerian ‘Penny’ publications.

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desire of a nineteenth-century nation that tried to articulate and bolster its specific and undeniable national character. In , two years after the Great Exhibition of  had made a powerful display of Great Britain’s global superiority in technological and scientific progress, Henry Hart Milman, in his learned History of Latin Christianity, was ready to embrace the medieval poet as ‘resolutely, determinately, almost boastfully English’ and claim that his ‘deliberate goal’ had been the creation of a ‘native poetry’.²² Matthew Browne, in his  study of Chaucer’s England, declared jubilantly that Chaucer was connected with persons and events ‘prominent in one of the most splendid eras of English history’ and that the Canterbury Tales contained ‘more Englishness than any other poem in the language’.²³ And in  John Richard Greene, in his widely distributed Short History of the English People, glorified Chaucer’s ‘genius’ as ‘neither French nor Italian’, but ‘English to the core’.²⁴ British Chaucer scholars joined this general national effort, often similarly minimizing the importance of Italian and French poetry to the poet’s allegedly original ‘English’ creations. They were even more scandalized by German scholars’ similarly nationalistic attempts to subsume all of English literature and language study, including Chaucer, as rightfully belonging to the realm of German(ic) studies.²⁵ Thus, English philologist and phonetician Henry Sweet (–) keenly recognized that the historical study of English was being rapidly annexed by the Germans, and the English editors would have to abandon all hopes of working up their materials themselves, and resign themselves to the humble role of purveyors to the swarms of young program mongers turned out every year by the German universities, so thoroughly trained in all the mechanical details of what might be called ‘parasite philology’ that no English dilettante can hope to compete with them—except by Germanizing himself and losing all hope of his nationality.²⁶

Similarly, Walter W. Skeat voiced a bitter nativist complaint that ‘the inevitable German’ kept colonizing and monopolizing academic work on Chaucer that should really be done by English scholars like himself, ‘[t]hough I am perhaps to some extent disqualified, as being merely a native of London, in which city Chaucer himself was born’.²⁷ As common educational standards, newspapers, railways, and the telegraph assisted in building a sense of national unity and belonging for the modern British nation state, Chaucer, as the first and only medieval English poet comparable to Shakespeare and

²² Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity: Including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V (; New York: Sheldon & Co., ), viii. . ²³ Matthew Browne, Chaucer’s England (London: Hurst & Blackett, ), i. –. ²⁴ John Richard Greene, Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, ), . ²⁵ On the German(ic) ‘annexation’ of medieval English subject matter, see Richard Utz, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology. A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, – (Turnhout: Brepols, ), esp. –. ²⁶ Henry Sweet, The Oldest English Texts (London: Early English Text Society, ), pp. v–vi. ²⁷ Walter W. Skeat, ed. Chaucer: The Minor Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. vii.

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modern English poets laureate, was even elevated to the role of founding father not only of English poetry, but of the entire nation: He made a national language; he came very near to making a nation. At least without him it would probably never have been either so fine a language or so great a nation. Shakespeare and Milton were the greatest sons of their country; but Chaucer was the Father of his Country, rather in the style of George Washington. And apart from that, he made something that has altered all Europe more than the Newspaper: the Novel. He was a novelist when there were no novels. I mean by the novel the narrative that is not primarily an anecdote or an allegory, but is valued because of the almost accidental variety of actual human characters. The Prologue of The Canterbury Tales is the Prologue of Modern Fiction. . . . The astonishing thing is not so much that an Englishman did this as that Englishmen hardly ever brag about it.²⁸

G. K. Chesterton’s post-First World War summary of nationalist sentiment reveals the degree to which Victorian and early twentieth-century readers had projected their deep desire for their own linguistic and cultural origins onto the Middle Ages and, specifically, Geoffrey Chaucer. As ‘Father of his Country’, Chesterton makes him the equal not only of George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and first President of the United States, but of all ‘Father of the Nation’ figures in history. It is as such a powerful Pater Patriae figure that Ford Madox Brown (–), like his friends and colleagues of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists an avid devotee of medieval art, depicted the poet in his oil-oncanvas painting Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (begun ; finished ). There, Chaucer stands as a towering figure, on equal footing (representing equal national historical importance) with King Edward III, the Black Prince, and Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt, declaiming lines from ‘The Legend of Custance’ (‘The Man of Law’s Tale’). The painting also shows, in Brown’s own words, ‘a troubadour from the South of France, half jealous, half in heart-struck admiration’ of the father of English poetry, and in the spandrels of a large arch, ‘the overthrow, through Chaucer, of the Saxon Bard and the Norman Troubadour’.²⁹ Brown, who agreed with his contemporaries that Chaucer’s poetry, apart from ‘spelling’ and ‘a few minor proprieties’, ‘comes home to us as naturally as the last volume we hail with delight from the press’, saw him not only as ‘a perfect English poet’, but even ‘a modern English poet’.³⁰ It is in this role, as an almost timeless representative of Englishness and the unique continuity between the

²⁸ G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (; New York: Sheed & Ward, ), . ²⁹ Brown’s commentary was published in the Catalogue for the  Piccadilly Exhibition of his work (The Exhibition of Work, and Other Paintings, by Ford Madox Brown), cited here according to Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, ), –. ³⁰ Brown, The Exhibition of Work, cited according to Bendiner, .

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medieval and the modern nation, that Rudyard Kipling would encounter Chaucer and extend his significance to the modern British Empire.

S  Benzie, William, Dr F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, ). Brewer, Derek (ed.), Chaucer: The Critical Heritage,  vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). Brewer, Charlotte, ‘Walter William Skeat (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York: Routledge, ), –. Bury, Laurent, ‘Which Medievalism? The Case of Ford Madox Brown’, Cahiers victoriens et éduardiens,  (): –. Connolly, Margaret, ‘ “Dr Furnival and Mother Like the Same Old Books”: Mary Haweis and the Experience of Reading Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century’, Philologie im Netz, Supplement / (http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft/bt.htm), accessed Nov. . Ellis, Steve, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, ). Fay, Elizabeth, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Johnson, James D., ‘Walter W. Skeat’s Canterbury Tale’, Chaucer Review, / (): –. Matthews, David, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Morse, Charlotte C., ‘Popularizing Chaucer in the Nineteenth-Century’, Chaucer Review, / (): –. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ). Santini, Monica, The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship: Discussing and Editing Medieval Romances in Late-Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bern: Lang, ). Spencer, H. L., ‘F. J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best: The Six-Text Canterbury Tales and the Chaucer Society’, Review of English Studies, / (): –. Spurgeon, Caroline, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, –,  vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Utz, Richard, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology. A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, – (Turnhout: Brepols, ). Von Nolcken, Christina, ‘ “Penny Poet” Chaucer, or Chaucer and the “Penny Dreadfuls” ’, Chaucer Review, / (): –. White, Beatrice, ‘Frederick James Furnivall’, Essays and Studies,   (): –.

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  ......................................................................................................................

         -       George Forrest Browne, Proctor, Professor, Bishop, and Anglo-Saxonist ......................................................................................................................

 

I

.................................................................................................................................. I is generally accepted that the modern study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture begins at the turn of the twentieth century with work of William Gersham Collingwood following the death of John Ruskin in , for whom he had effectively acted as secretary from  when he moved to Cumbria. In  Collingwood had completed and brought to publication a volume on the Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures of the Diocese of Carlisle which had been left unfinished by the Revd W. S. Calverley when he died in , and with Ruskin’s death Collingwood began to publish systematically on the early medieval stone sculptures of Yorkshire (his first such publication appearing in ), and then the North of England, a volume published in . This, however, presents a far from complete impression of the origins of the modern ‘academic’ study of the material, which arguably has firmer roots in the later nineteenth century—in the lectures, illustrations, and publications of George Forrest Browne that seem to have commenced some thirty years earlier, in , following his publication on The Venerable Bede in . His indefatigable activities devoted to the promotion of the material, in both academic and public spheres, ensured not only continued interest in the subject, but may arguably have laid the foundations of the study and understanding of the need to

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conserve the sculptures in the twentieth century, leading to the county-by-county multi-volume British Academy publication of the corpus of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture.

G F B (–)

.................................................................................................................................. Born in York in  George Forrest Browne went up to Cambridge in the mid-nineteenth century, in , where he read mathematics and classics, and graduated in  as ‘thirtieth wrangler’ (with first-class honours in maths); a year later he obtained a second in the theological examination (at the time not yet a tripos), and in  was ordained at Cuddesdon (Oxfordshire), by the Bishop of Oxford. Following his graduation from Cambridge he was employed as master of mathematics and classics at Trinity College, Glenalmond (known as ‘The Scottish Eton’), which had been founded in  by Gladstone to train clergy and educate the children of the gentry. He remained here, becoming Bell Lecturer and Theological Tutor, until  when he took up a Fellowship at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and proceeded to MA. His marriage in  forced him to relinquish the Fellowship but in  he was appointed Chaplain of St Catherine’s and Junior Proctor of the University (serving subsequently as Senior Proctor between  and ). Two years later, in , he was elected to the benefice of Ashley-cum-Silverley (in eastern Cambridgeshire). Following his appointment as first editor of the Cambridge University Reporter (), and first Secretary of the Local Examinations Syndicate (, becoming Secretary to the Local Lectures Syndicate in ), and his election as a member of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in , Browne began exhibiting objects and presenting papers at the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in , becoming a Council member with Henry Bradshaw in . It was an activity that he continued on a regular basis till  and, from  his papers focused almost exclusively on the sculptural remains of Anglo-Saxon England and those of early medieval Ireland and Scotland. His first presentation ( November ), apparently inspired by the fact that a number of sculptures had been recovered in that year, was delivered with the aim of bringing home ‘to the minds of Cambridge antiquaries more than had been done hitherto, the considerable number and very great importance of this group of sculptured stones’.¹ Browne’s use here of understatement, a rhetorical device common in his correspondence and publications, is clear: from the minutes of the meetings of the Society it seems no attempt had ever been made to ‘bring home to the minds of the Cambridge antiquaries’ anything on the subject of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. From this point on he was giving at least two lectures a year on the subject in Cambridge, and others elsewhere (in Newcastle, for instance, in ), while ¹ ‘Sculptured Stones and Crosses of the Saxon Period in the North of England’ ( Nov. ), Report Presented to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, at its Forty-Third Annual General Meeting, May ,  (Cambridge, ), p. lxxiii.

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 

publishing as many as four pieces a year in various antiquarian and archaeological journals and volumes of collected essays. His research into the subject is also apparent in his many publications on history of the early Church in England: on Bede (); on Monkwearmouth church (); on early English Church history (), Christianity in England before the arrival of Augustine in Kent () and Augustine himself (); on the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy (); and on Theodore and Wilfrid (), Aldhelm (), Alcuin (), and Boniface of Crediton (). Most notably, having been elected fourth Disney Chair in Art and Archaeology at Cambridge in , he devoted his Disney Lecture series to the subject of the sculptured stones of pre-Norman type in the British Isles. This marked a complete break with the (till then) accepted remit of the Chair: that the annual lecture series would be on classical art and archaeology, the interest of John Disney (–) who had endowed the Chair in  and donated most of his extensive collection of Greek and Roman antiquities to the Fitzwilliam Museum in . The requirement was however, for the Chair to deliver lectures on ‘the subject of classical, medieval and other antiquities, the Fine Art and all matters and things connected therewith’;² it was under the broadest frame of reference of this remit that Browne chose his subject— particularly as the appointment seems to have followed his researches in Italy (Florence, Ravenna, and Rome) into the cross-cultural influences of early Christian art on that of the early medieval sculptures of Britain and Ireland in . On stepping down as President of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society at the AGM in May that year, Browne had presented a relatively excoriating address on the ‘position of Archaeology in the University’, deploring the absence of a ‘Special Board’ that ‘has charge of the whole subject, medieval, classical, ancient, prehistoric; whose business it is to combine and compare’ (emphasis added).³ Being as much a classicist as a medievalist by this time it can perhaps be assumed that his Disney Lectures were intended to foreground the non-classical elements of archaeology at the University; only classical archaeology were ‘in charge of the Special Board for Classics’, an arrangement Browne deemed ‘natural and proper’.⁴ Leaving such academic concerns, he was appointed Canon of St Paul’s in London in , elected Bishop Suffragan of Stepney in , and Bishop of Bristol in —a post from which he retired in . During his time in London and Bristol he continued promoting the early history of the Church in England and its arts, with lecture series on the subject, held for both Chapter and the wider congregation. In keeping with the remit of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) these were generally published by the Society and frequently reprinted.

² J. R. Tanner, The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, Being a Supplement to the Calendar with a Record of University Offices and Distinctions to the Year  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ³ Cambridge Antiquarian Society List of Members – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, –), . ⁴ Cambridge Antiquarian Society List of Members, p. .

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

In addition, his contributions to the Conference of Bishops tended also to be on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon Church and its arts, such as his address at Glastonbury in August  which was held to mark the arrival of Augustine and the baptism of Ethelbert in Kent in  by celebrating the presence of an active Christian Church in England long before the arrival of the Gregorian mission; some , people attended this event, over , of them members of the clergy. His lectures and their subsequent publication built his reputation as an expert in the field of Anglo-Saxon sculpture; as early as  he had been consulted on the discovery of an early medieval inscribed stone at Brough (now in Cumbria), the preservation of which he campaigned for, acquiring the stone and presenting it to the Fitzwilliam Museum on  May that year to ensure its safe-keeping and, ideally, public display. From this it is clear that Browne’s interest in Anglo-Saxon sculpture emerged from his understanding (indeed fervent belief), that the Church in England, historically, did not depend on the papacy. In one of his more strident publications, On What are Modern Papal Claims Founded (), following criticism in The Tablet ( May) of a lecture inspired by the doctrine of papal infallibility on  May, Browne delivered a lengthy excursus on the debt owed by the English Church ‘to the see whose occupant Gregory sent Augustine,  years ago, to call into being the Church of the English, Ecclesia Anglorum, as Gregory called it’.⁵ This is followed by an extended (thirty-page) criticism of the papacy, based on what Browne termed ‘historical evidence’, before he summarizes how modern papal claims rest: on a forced interpretation of Scripture not known to the great early commentators [such as Agatho]; . . . on a doubtful statement of a much controverted point of history [whether Peter was Bishop of Rome]; . . . on deductions dawn from some of the most barefaced forgeries of which history has to tell [such as the Donation of Constantine]; . . . on an asserted safety of sacraments which is shattered by the straightforward application of their own principles [the denial by various Popes of previous ordinations]; . . . and on the misplaced presumption that the English people have forgotten the centuries of scandals that led to the Reformation.⁶

It is clear that his publications on Anglo-Saxon Church history were, to a considerable extent, inspired by research into the historical relationship of the Church in England with that of Rome, but his correspondence reveals that antipathy towards papal claims did not hinder his campaigns locally, even after he had stopped serving as Proctor, to seek full censorship of University students who interrupted and otherwise hindered the celebration of Mass in the Roman Catholic churches of Cambridge. However, it was not just research into the historical relationship of the Church of England with the papacy that provided Browne with the opportunity to study and promote Anglo-Saxon sculpture. As an apparent devotee of the SPCK, and Secretary to

⁵ G. F. Browne, On What are Modern Papal Claims Founded (London, SPCK: ), . ⁶ Browne, Papal Claims, –.

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 

the London Diocesan Home Mission (from ), he was also fully aware of the relationship between Britain’s current imperial activities and the missionary role of the Church of England. The opening to his book on Bede notes that ‘in these present times of active missionary enterprise it is difficult to imagine anything more encouraging, and more full of hopeful prophecy, than the final conversion of Northumbria, with its speedy outcome’.⁷ His later publication on the history of the early English Church (), reflects the same theme with a lengthy examination of the nature of being Anglo-Saxon—which in his view enabled Britain to be an imperial power. In keeping with a long-standing view of the Anglo-Saxons vis-à-vis the Romans, Browne concluded that the ‘Roman Britons’ were ‘a very poor creature, a very bad blend’,⁸ and that: we are Anglo-Saxons, that first and that last, whatever else we may be: grateful to the Celt, the Dane, the Norman, for their attentions to our forefathers and our foremothers; grateful for the dash, the solidity, the firmness of grasp we may by these blendings have had strengthened in us; but Anglo-Saxons, after all complements are paid.⁹

This ‘nation race’ was, according to Browne ‘a stirring, independent, intelligent race; sprung up into dominance among the ruins of an earlier civilisation, ruins that they themselves made; absorbing what was attractive and worthy of imitation in the old world; striking out for themselves fresh lines in the new’, and it was among these people that the Gregorian mission shed ‘a flood of light’.¹⁰ The remainder of the book is spent detailing the characteristics of the early Church in England: its ‘liberal’ attitude to women and their education (an attitude reflected in his support of the foundation of the ladies’ colleges at Cambridge); the paintings displayed at Jarrow and Wearmouth; the scholarship flourishing in the early monasteries; the literature and manuscripts produced in the early scriptoria of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria; the nature of the art used to decorate the manuscripts; the architecture of the early stone churches at Jarrow, Wearmouth, Ripon, and Hexham; and the sculptures produced, such as the grave-slabs at Kirkdale in Yorkshire, and the stone crosses at Bewcastle (Cumbria), Ruthwell (Dumfriesshire), and Ilam in Staffordshire. After  pages devoted to outlining such ‘fresh lines’ drawn by the Anglo-Saxons, Browne concluded that ‘those who guide the fortunes of the English Church will do well to bear in mind that we have a history such as no other nation has, and that such as we were in early times such we are in the whole now’.¹¹ Clearly the relationship between Church and State was as important to Browne as that between the Church in England and the papacy, and it was through engaging with these wider issues, historically, that Browne came to research and present the sculpture of early medieval England (claiming that these studies taught him also to

⁷ G. F. Browne, The Venerable Bede (London: SPCK, ), . ⁸ G. F. Browne, Lessons from Early English Church History: Three Lectures Delivered in the Cathedral Church of St Paul’s London (London: SPCK, ), . ⁹ Browne, Lessons, . ¹⁰ Browne, Lessons, –. ¹¹ Browne, Lessons, .

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review his understanding of that Church), and in doing so he can perhaps be considered to have provided the earliest systematic study of the material on which future scholarship has been based, albeit unacknowledged.

P A-S 

.................................................................................................................................. When Browne presented his first paper on Anglo-Saxon sculpture in  he had clearly been researching the subject for some time. The lecture included discussion of carvings at Ruthwell (Dumfriesshire), Bewcastle and Gosforth (Cumbria), Hexham and Alnmouth (Northumberland), Chester-le-Street (Co. Durham), Ilkley, Otley, Collingham, Burnsall, Thornhill near Dewsbury, Lastingham, Kirkdale, Sinnington, Leeds, and Healaugh near Tadcaster (all in Yorkshire), and Whalley in Lancashire. In what was to become a characteristic feature of his lectures this was illustrated by ‘a number of drawings and tracings’; in fact, it seems each monument was illustrated by some form of ‘facsimile’.¹² These generally took the form of a full-sized rubbing ‘outlined with pencil or ink, the latter giving the clearer effect’.¹³ In some cases the rubbings were exceedingly large, that of the panel of the Leeds cross displayed to the Society being a full  feet long. In such circumstances, as with his later rubbings of the crosses at Sandbach in Cheshire now held at Bristol University Library, it seems that Browne produced the more extensive rubbings on a number of consecutive sheets of paper that were subsequently joined together by a cloth strip on the back, the outlines of the carvings being picked out first in pencil and then ink, and errors deleted by the application of white paint. It was a lengthy process, and Browne was not above involving others in it. When conducting his research in Rome  with John Middleton, then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, he records how ‘the ladies [of the party] outlined my rubbings as an evening occupation’.¹⁴ It was a method of publicly illustrating his lectures that he chose deliberately, considering that even ‘the most careful draughtsman must in some cases interpret what he sees, and thus the result of his skill is a picture of what he thinks he sees. The accuracy of the proportion in my method is another advantage’, although he does note with considerable disingenuousness that as ‘I cannot draw at all, and can put in these outlines, it is a question between this method and none’.¹⁵ When preparing the illustrations for publication the rubbings were photographed and reproduced to scale on printers blocks through photolithography, a process Browne often had to finance at considerable expense; his ¹² Report Presented to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society at its Forty-Third Annual General Meeting, May , , with Appendix (Cambridge, ), p. xxiii. ¹³ G. F. Browne, ‘On the Pre-Norman Sculptured Stones of Derbyshire’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society,  (): . ¹⁴ G. F Browne, The Recollections of a Bishop (London: Smith, Elder & Co., ), . ¹⁵ Browne, ‘Derbyshire’, .

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 

Disney Lectures were accompanied by over  such illustrations, costing him his entire professorial allowance. Whether through necessity or a concern for accurate reproduction Browne’s method of illustration was markedly different from that selected by Collingwood, or indeed Margaret Stokes, his contemporary, whose preparatory drawings for her book on the early Christian art of Ireland () are held in Dublin at the Royal Academy of Ireland (with Collingwood’s being held at the Sackler Library in Oxford). Like Collingwood she was a trained artist, and initial work in the field was recorded by measurements, notes, and sketches. These were subsequently worked up into neat versions, which were then sent away, with instructions, to be etched and published. Later, Browne’s lectures were ‘illustrated’ with full-scale casts being brought to the lecture hall—both squeeze paper casts and those moulded with plaster-of-Paris. These were presented by Browne to Bristol University but as with so many nineteenth-century cast collections they have failed to survive. While his lectures (and subsequent publications) were so generously illustrated, the carved ornament, figural subject, and inscriptions carved on the monuments under consideration were also systematically described, their measurements given, and were then discussed in terms of their relationship with other examples of what Browne deemed to be similar work, before being considered in terms of their potential meanings. As he put it in his first lecture: ‘from a comparative study of the subject there was no group of stones that were so decidedly living stones . . . , none which spoke in the way in which . . . these English stones speak’.¹⁶ In terms of modern art historical approaches Browne was employing two distinct methodologies: one that has been identified as involving a formalist ‘stylistic’ analysis, and the other, iconographic or iconological—that considers the symbolic frames of reference of the carvings. The first was familiar in archaeological circles since the pioneering work of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (in ), the first director of the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, which was popularized in England, first by Thomsen’s successor, Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, in his work on Scandinavian archaeology (in  and ), and subsequently by John Evans in his numismatic studies of the s. Today, this methodology is strongly associated with post-Darwinian constructs of imperial synthesis through works such John Lubbock’s enormously influential Pre-Historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, published in . It was clearly the approaches popularized in publications such as these that Browne was applying, although similar approaches had been popularized in emerging art historical circles by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (often described as the father of both art history and archaeology), whose Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works (published in German in ) was translated into English by Henry Fuseli in , a second edition appearing in . It was a publication that would have been familiar in the archaeological circles in Cambridge, with its collection of classical art inherited from John Disney and catalogued by him in

¹⁶ Report, p. lxxiii.

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three volumes in keeping with such eighteenth-century publications. It was, however, only with Giovanni Morelli’s work on Italian painters in  (translated into English in ) that the approach is deemed to have become firmly established in art historical circles, and it is the approach to the study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture that has most often been identified with that established by Collingwood. The other approach, identified in art historical circles following Erwin Panofsky’s discussion of it as ‘iconological’ in the s, has its roots in nineteenth-century perceptions of art having a moral imperative as (in Hegelian terms) it was understood to reflect the spiritual advancement of a people. For Margaret Stokes and Romilly Allen writing on the art of early medieval Ireland and Scotland (respectively) it was the means by which the spirit of the early Celtic peoples could be expressed. Following the ‘symbolical’ methodology that had been established by André Didron through his Iconographie chrétienne (of ) and his  translation of the twelfth-century Byzantine treatise on Christian art that set out the formulae by which the symbolism of Christian events was to be depicted (adopted by Anna Jameson in her Sacred and Legendary Art of  and translated into English by Margaret Stokes in ), Allen demonstrated how carvings in Scotland and Ireland corresponded to, but progressed from, early Byzantine images, on the understanding that ‘each period of history of Christian art has its special set of subjects’ so that ‘the varying conditions of ecclesiastical life . . . produced corresponding changes in the monuments and object upon which the symbolism manifests itself ’.¹⁷ For Stokes the approach was vital and required ‘something more than archaeology’: as she saw it, a mind of ‘wider grasp’ is required ‘to perceive the qualities which form the essential elements of the individuality of Irish Art [the] true merit [of which] lies in its use and in that indefinable quality which, for want of a better word, we term feeling’.¹⁸ Such perceptions informing this approach to early medieval Christian art clearly indicate why Browne might have incorporated it in his account of the sculpture of the Christian art of the Anglo-Saxons and the propensity of the ‘English stones to speak’. It was certainly a sentiment he agreed with; railing against what he termed the ‘dull school’ of archaeology at Cambridge, he identified its members as those who not only lacked imagination but ‘regarded the use of imagination by those who happened to have it as an offence against archaeology’.¹⁹ To find meanings in patterns and devices, references to real persons of the period in surface sculpture of the Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian style and times, was to their mind foolish. Not being either scholars or historians, or not being able to give life and actuality to scholarship or history, they had no sympathy with . . . those who were more adequately equipped.²⁰

¹⁷ J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland Before the Thirteenth Century: the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology for  (London: Whiting & Co., ), . ¹⁸ M. Stokes, The Early Christian Art of Ireland (London: George Bell, ), , . ¹⁹ Browne, Recollections, . ²⁰ Browne, Recollections, .

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The combined approach employed by Browne enabled him to reassess the impressions of other commentators in the interests of establishing the nature of the carvings through accurate observation. The results could be remarkably beneficial in their insight: as at Wilne in Derbyshire where he demonstrated that the font had been cut down from a larger carved column, and turned upside-down to serve a baptismal function. Perhaps led to investigate the sculpture by the earlier claim of Charles Cox, the historian of the early Church in Derbyshire, that it displayed an inscription combining runic and Palmyrene scripts, Browne was able to demonstrate, through turning his rubbing upside-down, that the register in question depicted the lower portions of six human figures. He was also concerned to cast the net for comparanda beyond both the sculptural and the arts generally of Britain and Ireland. His close friendship with Henry Bradshaw who had identified the early medieval, Insular, nature of the tenth-century Book of Deer (Cambridge: University Library, MS. Ii..) and who had acted as Browne’s best man (apparently spending the wedding service under the church organ examining church brasses), no doubt facilitated his investigations into the art of early manuscripts; investigations that involved him travelling to Florence in  to examine the Codex Amiatinus (Florence: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatinus ), identified in  by De Rossi as a product of the Jarrow-Wearmouth scriptorium. This discovery was brought to the attention of an English readership in a letter to The Guardian (Church of England newspaper) by Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury in February , noting that De Rossi had identified the manuscript as that brought to Italy by Ceolfrith ‘Britonum’. Apparently unaware that Berger had suggested ‘Anglorum’ would be a more appropriate reading in , Browne responded to the news with his own letter identifying Ceolfrith as ‘Anglorum’ and with Hort’s support and receiving a letter from De Rossi agreeing he could decipher the ‘l’ of Anglorum in the preface to the manuscript, Browne travelled to Florence to view the manuscript for himself. After being refused entry to the Laurentian Library for days on end, he obtained an order from the government in Rome that gave him two days to examine the manuscript in person. His confusion concerning the requisite presence of the under-librarian and a workman was resolved when he saw that the weight of the manuscript required it to be brought up to him on a stretcher carried by two men. His examination convinced him that (regardless of palaeographic and codicological considerations) the decoration of the manuscript—almost completely limited to the first quartonium which he noted had been pasted into the manuscript after it had been originally bound—was not English in character. Nevertheless, the presence of a portrait of Ezra (fol. r) and an illustration of the Temple (fols v–r), taken together with Bede’s account of the Ceolfrith pandects, convinced Browne that the illustrations came from one of the (early sixth-century) Cassiodoran manuscripts recorded by Bede as having been at Jarrow-Wearmouth. Here, Browne’s concern with identifying the English nature of the early Church in the region was clearly primary in his deliberations. But in order to establish the presumed early Christian nature of the illustrations, he travelled on immediately to Ravenna to view the reputed bookcase featured in the mosaic programme of the fifth-century

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mosaics in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, and demonstrated its similarity with that in the Ezra miniature while also arguing that the figure of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels (London: British Library, Cotton MS Nero D .IV, fol. v) could be related to that of Ezra in the Codex Amiatinus. He seems to have been the first to note these connections which have been debated ever since. Soon afterwards Browne travelled to Rome, meeting up with Middleton, an acknowledged expert in the antiquities of Rome that he had published in ; there he made rubbings of the relief carvings he found in the Forum and in early churches that featured geometric designs and plant scrolls in their ‘surface decoration’, against which he was able to assess the British and Irish examples and demonstrate, like Allen and Stokes, the local nature of the Anglo-Saxon carvings and their place in the progress of the Christian spirit in the region. Here, it was the nature of interlace patterns, perhaps the most prolific pattern type featured on the Anglo-Saxon sculptures, that was of greatest concern. In fact, it was the difference between the interlinking circles of the Codex Amiatinus decorated pages (fol. VIIv) and the types of related patterns in AngloSaxon sculpture and manuscripts that led him to conclude that the painted miniatures could not have been produced in England. In Italy he found only one continuous interlace pattern (on a piece of sculpture in Brescia) that in his opinion came anywhere close to those produced in Anglo-Saxon art, while the closest parallels for the plant scrolls on the earliest Anglo-Saxon sculptures could only be found in Ravenna. His wide-ranging research had indicated no real comparisons with sculpture in either Rome or the French and German areas of the sub-Roman world, and this led him in turn to conclude that the early workers in stone who were, according to Bede, brought to England from ‘Gaul’ in the seventh century, must have come from Gaul south of the Alps—from what might today be termed ‘Lombardy’. His life-long concern with promoting and presenting Anglo-Saxon sculpture also involved Browne in the production of contemporary art projects based on AngloSaxon art. Middleton, like Browne born in York (in ), was also a long-standing friend of William Morris with whom he had travelled to Iceland in the  and, following his appointment as Slade Professor Art in Cambridge, became Director of the Fitzwilliam in , and then Art Director of the South Kensington Museum in . As part of this circle Browne had early been brought into contact with the later PreRaphaelites, the sisters of John Millais being visitors to the family home in Cambridge in the s. Although apparently unable to draw, Browne designed the stained-glass windows of St Ignatius Martyr in Sunderland (in ) for another long-standing friend, Bishop Lightfoot of Durham, who had commissioned and funded the entire church. On his move to St Paul’s he was instrumental (in ) in designing part of the mosaic programme for the Cathedral—indeed in his autobiography of  it is suggested that he sketched the overall design. And, a decade before Collingwood began designing grave-markers in the form of Anglo-Saxon crosses (for Calverley in  and Ruskin in ), Browne had consulted over the design of the grave cover for Bishop Lightfoot’s tomb in the chapel at Bishop Auckland in , suggesting one of the grave slabs uncovered at Kirkdale in Yorkshire in . At the time of their

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recovery they were examined by Haigh and one was identified as bearing an inscription; they were then built into the outer wall of the church but erosion through damp destroyed most of the carved decoration and the inscription, so that when Browne visited the church to make a rubbing, prior to his  lecture, he could only make out two letters of the inscription; during restoration work in – the slabs were moved back inside the church. Haigh’s account of the cross-decorated/inscribed grave slab, however, led to conversations between Lightfoot and Browne, and it was on this basis that the stone was used as the source of inspiration for the design of the Bishop’s gravestone. He also designed a copy of the pectoral cross of St Cuthbert (from a mould cut in boxwood as the original was too delicate), for Lightfoot’s successor, Bishop Westcott, which was worn at his consecration. Cast in iron at one of the laboratories in Cambridge, this copy was subsequently cast in gold for Browne’s successor as Bishop of Bristol, Dr Nickson, who had been a Canon of Durham; Browne himself commissioned one in silver for his own use. In  he was also subsequently involved in designing large-scale crosses for ‘our age’ inspired by those at Ruthwell and Bewcastle:²¹ namely, the so-called Cædmon Cross at Whitby (inaugurated by Alfred Austin the poet laureate, in ), and the Bede memorial cross at Roker Point in Sunderland in  (inaugurated by the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Durham). Under the initiative of Hardwicke Rawnsley, Canon of Carlisle (–), who would no doubt have been aware of the replica of the Gosforth Cross in Cumbria that was part-carved by Calverley and set up in Aspatria near his grave (something Browne does not mention), these monuments were, according to him, set up in imitation of the carved stone cross erected to commemorate the arrival of Augustine which had been commissioned in  by Earl Granville (d. ), then Warden of the Cinque Ports. Inspired by the ninth-century south cross in the market place of Sandbach in Cheshire, the Latin inscription accompanying St Augustine’s Cross was composed by his tutor, Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford (–), the father of Alice Liddell who was apparently commemorated by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (). As an intimate of this group Browne had stayed in Oxford with Dodgson (who had spent much of his childhood at Richmond near York) when being ordained in . While Collingwood’s contribution to the early academic study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture cannot be denied, it is clear that a systematic study was made by George Forrest Browne during his time at Cambridge and afterwards; a study that was moreover, more wide-ranging both in its consideration of the various sculptures discussed and in terms of the comparanda invoked: Collingwood focused on the sculpture of the North of England in an attempt to identify those produced under Anglo-Scandinavian influence, while Calverley before him focused entirely on those preserved in Cumbria. Furthermore, Browne’s was what would today be termed an ‘inter-disciplinary’ study that situated the material within the disciplines of history,

²¹ Browne, Recollections, .

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   - 

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theology, archaeology, and art history as they existed in the academy in the later nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He thus considered their relief carvings in considerable detail, recording measurements, taking rubbings, and making casts (today deemed to be invasive processes), which have nevertheless provided subsequent scholars with an invaluable record of the condition of the stones at that time. His engagement with the sculptures within the nexus of the emerging disciplines of archaeology and art history clearly situated his responses in terms that would today be considered neither fully archaeological nor art historical, but they nevertheless drew much that was rewarding from both avenues of enquiry, and perhaps led to his involvement with the promotion of large and small-scale art objects inspired by Anglo-Saxon art. He also considered their ‘meanings’ in terms of their Christian frames of reference, as well as their historical context. His opinions on these latter subjects were strongly held in terms of contemporary relations between Church and State, between England and Rome, and have no doubt contributed to his work being neglected by later generations. Yet, it remains the case that his motives led him to record, study, and present many monuments that had not yet been considered in the antiquarian or archaeological literature, and his deeply felt belief that the earliest vernacular sculptures of England needed to be saved from neglect, intellectually, artistically, and physically, has had a lasting impact on our understanding of this unique body of material, and for this he can perhaps be credited with rescuing the monuments from the comparative oblivion into which they had sunk since the sixteenth century.

A The research into this subject was funded initially by a British Academy Research Development Award to initiate an extended study by the author into the historiography of Anglo-Saxon sculpture between the mid-sixteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Without this grant, much would not have been possible.

S  In addition to the publications referred to in this chapter relating to George Forrest Browne’s interest in Anglo-Saxon sculpture, see his contributions to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and their subsequent publication in the Reports Presented to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society at their Annual General Meetings (, , , ). For the British Academy Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (CASSS), see vols – which list complete bibliographies for Anglo-Saxon sculptures, including publications by Browne, Calverley, and Collingwood.

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Hawkes, Jane, ‘W. G. Collingwood and Anglo-Saxon Sculpture: Art History or Archaeology’, in Rachel Moss (ed.), Making and Meaning in Insular Art (Dublin: Four Courts Press, ), –. Hawkes, Jane, ‘Studying Early Christian Sculpture in England and Ireland: The Object of Art History or Archaeology’, in James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan (eds), AngloSaxon/Irish Relations Before the Vikings (London: British Academy, ), –. Hawkes, Jane, ‘W. G. Collingwood: Artist, Art Historian, Critic, Archaeologist, and AngloSaxonist’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, / (Summer ): http://www.thcartworldwide.org/accessed July . Hawkes, Jane, ‘An Early Encounter with the Codex Amiatinus: George Forrest Browne and the Art of the Manuscript’, in Jane Hawkes and Meg Boulton (eds), All Roads Lead to Rome: The Creation, Context and Transmission of the Codex Amiatinus (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –. Moreland, John, ‘The World(s) of the Cross’, World Archaeology, / (): –. Moreland, John, ‘George Forrest Browne, Early Medieval Sculpture and Nineteenth-Century Reformation Historiography’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association,  (): –. Townend, Matthew, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ).

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M Ireland and Wales broadly resembled each other in two important respects: the production of extensive and varied literatures in Celtic vernaculars, and the experience of English conquest that had major long-term consequences. These similarities help to explain why the reception of medieval Irish and Welsh culture and history in the Victorian period shared some common characteristics. However, there were also significant contrasts, resulting partly from differences in the Middle Ages, but owing more to the different directions taken by Ireland and Wales in the post-medieval centuries. An assessment of the recovery and revival of medieval Irish and Welsh culture and history in the Victorian period thus needs to be attentive to the particular contexts in which those efforts occurred. Such an assessment also faces the challenge that, by and large, approaches to the Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in Victorian Ireland and Wales have not been viewed from the perspective of medievalism. It has been justly noted that ‘Welsh medievalism is a relatively underexplored field’, and the same is true of its Irish counterpart.¹ Admittedly, some scholars have made (usually brief) attempts to situate the reception of medieval Irish and Welsh culture and history in a wider context of medievalism.² ¹ Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘ “Impertinent Structures”: A Breton’s Adventures in Neo-Gothic Wales’, Studies in Travel Writing,  ():  n. . For a survey of Welsh developments, see Pryce, ‘Culture, Identity, and the Medieval Revival in Victorian Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, / (): –; and, for history writing, see Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies,  (): –. ² Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival – (London: Thames & Hudson, ), ; Peter Denman, Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, ), –; T. J. Edelstein, Richard A. Born, and Sue Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival – (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art,

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Nevertheless, this engagement with the Middle Ages has mainly been viewed through the lens of national or Celtic revival or the history of Celtic scholarship rather than approached as a subject in its own right.³ For example, Jeanne Sheehy wrote of a twostage Celtic revival in Ireland, beginning in the second quarter of the nineteenth century with the antiquarian study of medieval manuscripts, buildings, and other material evidence, followed by a reimagining of this medieval heritage in what is generally known as the Irish (Literary) Revival (c.–c.) associated with Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats.⁴ Two main phases of cultural endeavour have also been identified in Wales, both of which included a significant engagement with the Middle Ages. The early Victorian period witnessed the continuation by patriotic Anglicans of efforts, begun in the second decade of the nineteenth century, to revive Welsh culture through Cambrian societies and provincial eisteddfodau as well as the formation of the Welsh Manuscript Society () and Cambrian Archaeological Association ().⁵ However, in the second half of the century, as part of a wider shift in Welsh society, Nonconformists became more prominent in the eisteddfod movement and other cultural spheres; moreover, a self-conscious sense of national revival, focused above all on education, became increasingly palpable from the s and further stimulated interest in the nation’s early and medieval origins.⁶ This is not to say that nineteenthcentury movements of cultural revival designed to foster national identity in Ireland and Wales were essentially or even predominantly medievalist in their inspiration: particularly in Ireland, pride in aspects of the medieval past vied with primitivist idealizations both of a pre-Christian golden age and of a living peasantry seen as embodying authentic culture and traditions.⁷ University of Chicago, ), pp. xiii–xiv; Michael Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon: The Rediscovery, Reproduction, and Re-Invention of Early Irish Metalwork’, in Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past, ; Damien Murray, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, – (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, ), –, , , , ; E. G. Millward, ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion”: Y Rhamant Hanesyddol yn Oes Victoria’, in Millward, Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion: Agweddau ar Lenyddiaeth Oes Victoria (Llandysul: Gomer, ), –. ³ The same is true, with respect to the Victorian period, of Veronica Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, ), ch.  (‘The Celtic Bandwagon’), which focuses mainly on late twentieth-century developments such as druidism, after outlining aspects of Celticism in Ireland and Wales down to the nineteenth century. ⁴ Sheehy, Rediscovery, . Cf. Michael McAteer, Standish O’Grady, Æ and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, ), –. See also Vera Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, ). ⁵ R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and of the Gwyneddigion and Cymreigyddion Societies (–) (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, ), –; Prys Morgan, ‘Lady Llanover (–), “Gwenynen Gwent” ’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion ,   (): –. ⁶ Huw Pryce, J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), , –. ⁷ Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, ), –, –; Murray, Romanticism, –, , –, –.

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     

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A full consideration of the subject would need to encompass Irish and Welsh interactions with medievalism in other parts of Europe, especially England, as exemplified, say, by the influence of the Gothic Revival on Irish or Welsh Victorian architecture, or, conversely, by Tennyson’s use of Welsh Arthurian material, notably Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, in Idylls of the King.⁸ However, such wide-ranging comparison and contextualization lie beyond the scope of the present chapter. Instead, through selective comparisons between the two countries, the following discussion assesses the significance of the reception of the Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in Victorian Ireland and Wales.

C

.................................................................................................................................. The contexts in which those efforts took place differed widely between the two countries.⁹ In Ireland, the Great Famine of – led to a significant fall in population that continued apace for the rest of the century.¹⁰ By the census of , the first to include questions about language, ‘English had become the everyday language of the vast majority of the people of Ireland’, with the number of Irish-speakers estimated at just over . million (. per cent of the population); by  the number had fallen to just over , (. per cent of the population).¹¹ The period also witnessed increasing calls for political self-determination, some of whose advocates turned to violence with the Young Ireland revolt of  and the Fenian rising of .¹² (The Fenians, a revolutionary republican movement, evoked medieval Irish legend in being named after the fianna, the ancient warrior band that followed Fionn Mac Cumhaill whose feats also inspired literary endeavours, as we shall see.¹³) Developments in Wales were both less catastrophic and less politically challenging. Rapid industrialization sustained substantial demographic growth, especially in the south-east, with the ⁸ Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail, , ; Jeanne Sheehy, ‘Irish Church-Building: Popery, Puginism and the Protestant Ascendancy’, in Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint (eds), The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –; The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ii. –, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; Tom Peete Cross, ‘Tennyson as a Celticist’, Modern Philology, / (): –; K. Tillotson, ‘Tennyson’s Serial Poem’, in Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies (London: Athlone Press, ), , . ⁹ Cf. Paul O’Leary, ‘Accommodation and Resistance: A Comparison of Cultural Identities in Ireland and Wales, c.–’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since : Integration and Diversity (Dublin: Four Courts, ), –. ¹⁰ L. P. Curtis, Jr, ‘Ireland in ’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vi. Ireland under the Union, . – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹¹ Brian Ó Cuiv, ‘Irish Language and Literature, –’, in W. E. Vaughan, New History of Ireland, vi/. –, . ¹² D. George Boyce, Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for Stability. Rev. edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ), chs –. ¹³ F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), –.

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population of Wales doubling to two million during Victoria’s reign. This was accompanied by a constant increase in the numbers of Welsh-speakers to a total of about , by  (about  per cent of the population), who, in a further contrast to their Irish counterparts, were mostly literate, being served by an extensive print culture in Welsh.¹⁴ True, as in Ireland, the late s marked a turning point, but in Wales this took the form of a ‘crisis of identity’ rather than starvation, eviction, and emigration.¹⁵ Damning verdicts on the Welsh language and Nonconformist religion in reports on education in Wales, popularly known as the ‘Blue Books’ (), helped to mobilize a politically committed Nonconformity, aimed at ending Anglican dominance through the disestablishment in Wales of the Church of England: moves for greater political self-determination were limited to calls towards the end of the century for Welsh home rule by the ultimately abortive Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement within the Liberal Party.¹⁶ It is striking that, despite the great changes just outlined, attempts to deploy their medieval past as a critique—whether radical or conservative—of the perceived failings of the present appear to have been few in Victorian Ireland and Wales. True, Thomas Davis (–), prolific advocate of the nationalism of Young Ireland, turned to early Irish land law—interpreted in the light of medieval Norwegian landholding (udalism)—as a remedy for landlordism, which he and later writers in both Ireland and Wales condemned as the toxic legacy of feudalism.¹⁷ In addition, half a century later, the notion of decline from the civilization of early Christian Ireland was central to the argument of Douglas Hyde’s famous lecture On the Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland ().¹⁸ On the whole, though, the Middle Ages were not used as a stick to beat Irish or Welsh Victorian society in the manner of, say, Pugin’s Contrasts or Ruskin’s idealization of the medieval craftworker. For example, while the young Yeats knew William Morris and admired his rejection of ‘the mass-produced values of Victorian capitalism’, he placed his hopes for artistic renewal in Irish patriotism rather than the socialism for which Morris found medieval inspiration.¹⁹

¹⁴ John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics,  vols (Cardiff: HMSO, ), i. . ¹⁵ Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales and its Crisis of Identity’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.–c. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ¹⁶ Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ‘ and : “Brad y Llyfrau Gleision” and Welsh Politics’, in Jones, Mid-Victorian Wales: The Observers and the Observed (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), ch. ; Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, – (paperback edn, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), chs –. ¹⁷ Thomas Duddy, A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, ), –; Pryce, J. E. Lloyd,  n. . ¹⁸ Douglas Hyde, ‘On the Necessity of De-anglicising Ireland’, in Charles Gavan Duffy, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature (London: T. Fisher Unwin, ), –, esp. , , . ¹⁹ R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, i. The Apprentice Mage – (Oxford, ), –, , –.

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In terms of institutional support for an engagement with their medieval pasts, Ireland and Wales shared some general characteristics also found elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The publication of medieval sources by the British government’s Record Commission and Rolls Series as well as by London-based bodies (notably the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, revived – and again in , and the Irish Texts Society from ), and the presence of antiquarian societies that helped to promote an interest in the Middle Ages are cases in point.²⁰ But there were differences too. In Ireland, Dublin was an important metropolis, the seat of British administration, including the Ordnance Survey, whose research on history and topography (–), accompanying its mapping of Ireland to revise the basis for taxation, brought together leading Irish antiquaries—led by George Petrie (–), and including the Irish scholars John O’Donovan (–) and Eugene O’Curry (–)—and made a major contribution to the understanding of the Irish past.²¹ Dublin was also home to other institutions that fostered antiquarian and scholarly study of medieval Ireland, notably two universities (Trinity College, founded in , and, from , the Catholic University), the Royal Irish Academy (), Public Record Office (), and National Museum and National Library (both established in  and opened in ).²² Antiquarian societies, such as the Irish Archaeological Society (), were likewise established in the city, and the same was true of provincial Irish cities, especially Belfast and Cork.²³ The closest Wales came to the latter cities in the early and mid-Victorian period was Swansea, with its Royal Institution of South Wales,²⁴ but there was no metropolitan centre comparable to Dublin—a reflection of the greater administrative integration with England achieved following Henry VIII’s Acts of Union. True, university colleges were established in Aberystwyth (), Cardiff (), and Bangor (), capped by a federal University of Wales (), while Cardiff ’s increasing prominence as a major coal-exporting port in the late Victorian period led to city status in  and its choice

²⁰ Raymond Gillespie, ‘Printing History: Editing and Publishing Historical Documents in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland –: Essays in Honour of Michael Adams (Dublin: Woodfield Press, ), –; Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, in D. Huw Owen (ed.), Settlement and Society in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. Cf. Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ²¹ Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts, ). ²² Marie Bourke, The Story of Irish Museums, –: Culture, Identity and Education (Cork: Cork University Press, ), pp. xxvii, –, –; Gillespie, ‘Printing History’, –. ²³ Murray, Romanticism; Joan Rockley, Antiquarians and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Cork (Oxford: Archaeopress, ). ²⁴ Louise Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’: An Urban History of Swansea, – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –.

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as the site of the new National Museum of Wales two years later.²⁵ Nevertheless, antiquarian and cultural activity probably relied more than in Ireland on the voluntary efforts of societies and individuals, including the Wales-wide fostering of cultural and scholarly endeavour in both the Welsh and English languages by local, regional, and, from , national eisteddfodau. These in turn provided a model for the Oireachtas, an annual cultural gathering held by the Gaelic League from  to foster the Irish language.²⁶

T    M A   I  W 

.................................................................................................................................. In both Ireland and Wales the significance attached to the Middle Ages was contingent on understandings of those countries’ pasts as a whole that had developed since the early modern period. Although aspects of the medieval period were idealized as golden ages in both nations, those aspects differed as did views of the period’s importance compared with what came before and after. On the one hand, traditions, largely going back to the Middle Ages, which traced the origins of both the Irish and the Welsh to a distant pre-Christian era evoked differing responses to the challenge of disentangling legend and history posed by medieval (and later) sources. Those responses in turn reflected contrasting attitudes to patriotism: for some, belief in glorious ancient origins was an essential component of national identity; for others, a source of national embarrassment. The continuing influence of earlier interpretations of the past was also reflected in notions of periodization that conceived of the Middle Ages in terms other than ‘medieval’. On the other hand, interpretations of the modern histories of Ireland and Wales coloured perspectives on the Middle Ages in the arc of national history. Broadly speaking, the histories of both countries were seen as falling into two main phases. In Ireland, the dividing line had been drawn in the late twelfth century, with the end of what Sophie Bryant termed in  ‘the Irish period of free development’, as an ancient Gaelic civilization fell prey to Anglo-Norman and English conquest and settlement that opened a new phase of Irish history dominated by a narrative of oppression, dispossession, and resistance that extended into the nineteenth century

²⁵ J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), ch. ; Neil Evans, ‘The Welsh Victorian City: The Middle Class and Civic and National Consciousness in Cardiff, –’, Welsh History Review,  (–): –. ²⁶ Hywel Teifi Edwards, The Eisteddfod (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –; Caoimhín De Barra, ‘A Gallant Little “Tírín”: The Welsh Influence on Irish Cultural Nationalism’, Irish Historical Studies, / (): –.

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via Tudor conquest, Cromwellian wars, and the rising of .²⁷ In Wales, by contrast, conquest and eventual political assimilation with England were viewed with equanimity. True, the medieval Welsh kings and princes down to Edward I’s conquest of – were celebrated, as were the literary achievements of their age. Yet the ensuing subjection to England was made palatable, first, by the accession of the partly Welsh Henry VII to the English throne in  and, second, by Henry VIII’s Acts of Union (–), which not only gave the Welsh the same legal rights as the English but providentially opened the way for the Protestant Reformation.²⁸ In contrast to Ireland, then, where a Catholic majority suffered discrimination under a Protestant state, and nationalist movements were formed from the late eighteenth century onwards, the history of modern Wales was widely interpreted as the making of a Protestant—and by the mid-Victorian period, predominantly Nonconformist—nation loyal to the British Crown. Understandings of the medieval histories and cultures of both Ireland and Wales were complicated by powerful tendencies to romanticize a pre-Christian past. This is most apparent in the idealization of ‘ancient’ Ireland, whose chronological limits were variously defined, but extended at their widest from the beginning of the third millennium  to about  .²⁹ This chronological depth was given precision by the medieval chronicle tradition as transmitted by the early seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters, first published in full by O’Donovan in , which commenced with Noah’s Flood, dated to ‘The Age of the World’ (AM) . And it was peopled by the medieval scholars’ conception of early Irish history as consisting of a series of invasions from the east, beginning with Cesair, grand-daughter of Noah and ending with the Milesians, the direct ancestors of the Irish, in AM .³⁰ (O’Donovan criticized the precise dates as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘apocryphal’.³¹) For many of their interpreters in the Victorian period, then, medieval Irish sources mattered most as witnesses to a remote and glorious pre-Christian era rather than as windows on the Middle Ages.

²⁷ Sophie Bryant, Celtic Ireland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., ), p. x; Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict – (London: Allen & Unwin, ), –; James M. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), –. ²⁸ Prys Morgan, ‘Iolo Morganwg and Welsh Historical Traditions’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. ²⁹ E.g. Henry O’Neill, The Fine Arts and Civilization of Ancient Ireland (London: Smith, Elder, & Co.; Dublin: George Herbert, ), , , –, . See also Matthew Campbell, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ³⁰ Annala Rioghachta Eireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, by the Four Masters, ed. and tr. John O’Donovan. nd edn,  vols (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., ), i. [–], –; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘ “An Honour to the Nation”: Publishing John O’Donovan’s Edition of the Annals of the Four Masters, –’, in Fanning and Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland, –; Bernadette Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, ), –. ³¹ Annala Rioghachta Eireann, i, pp. xlii–xlvi.

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However, such views also faced important challenges. One prominent area of debate among nineteenth-century Irish antiquarians, who fell into opposing camps of ‘Paganists’ and ‘Christians’, concerned the extent to which the legendary accounts of pre-Christian origins could be accepted.³² Though critical in many respects, the great Irish scholar Eugene O’Curry accepted the Milesian origins of the Irish, and Mary Ferguson had no hesitation in devoting the opening chapters of her popular history of Ireland to the ‘Mythical’, ‘Heroic’, ‘Atacottic’, and ‘Ossianic’ periods.³³ Such ideas went on to influence the Irish Literary Revival from the s, notably in Standish James O’Grady’s works on Cú Chulainn, a hero presented as a historical figure whose exploits had been preserved by bardic tradition.³⁴ By contrast, George Stokes sought to elevate Brian Boru (d. ) as a national hero on the grounds that he was ‘a truly historical personage’, comparable to King Alfred, rather than a mythical figure, and John T. Gilbert urged the publication of documents in order to hasten the demise of ‘those romances, styled “Irish Histories,” by which Ireland has been . . . historically mistaught and deluded’.³⁵ A critical approach likewise informed studies and editions of medieval Irish texts by Celtic scholars such as Whitley Stokes (–) and Kuno Meyer (–).³⁶ Controversy also turned on the origins and purpose of monuments in the Irish landscape, notably round towers and stones with inscriptions in the ogam alphabet: Petrie’s detailed attempt to establish the Christian character of the former in a prize essay of , eventually published as The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland (), met with considerable opposition from those reluctant to abandon romantic ideas of the round towers as evidence of Phoenician or other early eastern settlers.³⁷ Comparable debates occurred in Wales. Welsh historians still cited, albeit with varying degrees of approval, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain as evidence for the Trojan origins of the Welsh through Brutus, descendant of Aeneas.³⁸ In addition, claims for biblical origins were popular thanks to Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Mirror of the Primitive Ages), first published in  and frequently reprinted in the Victorian period, which, adapting Pezron’s work on the

³² Murray, Romanticism, ch. . ³³ Eugene O’Curry, On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish,  vols (London: Williams & Norgate, ), ii. –, , ; M. C. Ferguson, The Story of the Irish Before the Conquest: From the Mythical Period to the Invasion under Strongbow (London: Bell & Daldy, ). ³⁴ Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, i (London: Sampson Lowe, Searle, Marston, & Rivington, ), pp. iii–xix; McAteer, Standish O’Grady, –, –. ³⁵ George Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church. A History of Ireland from St. Patrick to the English Conquest in  (London: Hodder & Stoughton, ), ; [J. T. Gilbert], On the History, Position and Treatment of the Public Records of Ireland. By an Irish Archivist. nd edn (London: J. R. Smith, ), –. ³⁶ Ó Cuív, ‘Irish Language’, –; Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (–) (Dublin: Four Courts, ); Seán Ó Lúing, Kuno Meyer, –: A Biography (Dublin: Geography Publications, ). ³⁷ Leerssen, Remembrance, –. ³⁸ Brut y Brenhinedd: Llanstephan MS.  Version, ed. Brynley F. Roberts (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ), –.

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     

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Celts, presented the Welsh as the descendants of Gomer son of Japhet.³⁹ Furthermore, Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg; –) had promoted primitivist ideas by arguing that the Welsh bards were direct descendants of the druids, a view elaborated by some of his Victorian successors, including R. W. Morgan, whose The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria () combined it with earlier legendary interpretations by opening with chapters successively on the ‘Gomerian Era’, the ‘Trojan Era’, and ‘The Druidic Religion of Britain’.⁴⁰ Changing attitudes are reflected in the two longest histories of Wales published in the nineteenth century, Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru (History of Wales, –) and R. J. Pryse’s Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (History of the Britons and Welsh, –). One striking feature of the former is its effective revival of a framework that was fundamental to medieval Welsh historical writing, whereby Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth were followed by the chronicles known as Brut y Tywysogyon (The Chronicle of the Princes) in order to trace the history of the Welsh from their Trojan ancestors to the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in .⁴¹ Thus Price opened with sections on the coming to Britain of, respectively, the Welsh, the Romans, the Gospel, and the English, followed by a discussion of the early Church in Wales. This part of his book followed Geoffrey in taking his readers to the late seventh century, before moving on to the subsequent period in a lengthy section headed ‘Y Tywysogion’ (The Princes), furnished with its own introduction that announced a narrowing of focus from a wider Brittonic world to Wales. Here, attention was devoted mainly to the centuries down to the Edwardian conquest with only brief coverage of events thereafter.⁴² True, Price expressed reservations about Geoffrey’s account and at times distinguished sharply between ‘(true) history’ and ‘legend’.⁴³ But he also declared that if all legends were ignored, there would be no early history left.⁴⁴ That R. J. Pryse followed Price’s twostage periodization three decades later and indeed made it more explicit in his title reflects the durability of the medieval historiographical framework on which it was based. However, Pryse was far more critical than his predecessor, declaring that his aim had been to write a history, not a romance like Geoffrey, or a novel like Theophilus Evans.⁴⁵ This approach to sources was strongly influenced by the chemist and literary scholar Thomas Stephens (–), who declared in  that ‘one of the imperative duties of Cambrian writers, is to institute a rigid examination of the sources of our

³⁹ Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c. – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. ⁴⁰ Catherine A. Charnell-White, Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ); R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria (Ruthin: I. Clarke []), , , . ⁴¹ Historical Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. Patricia Williams (London: MRHA, ), pp. xxiv–xxv. ⁴² Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru (Crickhowell: Thomas Williams, ), pp. v–vii, –. ⁴³ Price, Hanes Cymru, , –, , , , . ⁴⁴ Price, Hanes Cymru, ; cf. , . ⁴⁵ R. J. Pryse, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry,  vols (London: Mackenzie, –), ii. [p. iii].

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

 

national history’.⁴⁶ From the s the challenge of distinguishing between legend and history was likewise central to the work of the historian John Edward Lloyd (–).⁴⁷

M  

.................................................................................................................................. The aspects of the medieval period that were celebrated in Victorian Ireland and Wales bore some similarities. One common element, which built on ideas elaborated in the early modern period (with medieval antecedents, especially in the Irish case), was the portrayal of the two countries’ early ecclesiastical history as an age of saints.⁴⁸ As Rice Rees declared in : ‘So numerous are the Welsh saints, that their history is in a manner the ecclesiastical history of their time’.⁴⁹ This perception was reflected in editions and studies of medieval Irish and Welsh saints’ Lives: for example, William Rees’s Lives of the Cambro-British Saints (), William Reeves’s Life of St Columba (), and J. H. Todd’s St Patrick, Apostle of Ireland ().⁵⁰ Such works were linked to confessional agendas. In both countries the Anglican Church invoked this early Christian history in order to establish its native credentials and thereby rebut charges that it was merely an English implant. One key concept was the ‘Celtic Church’ allegedly independent of Rome.⁵¹ In Wales, a version of this had been developed by sixteenth-century Protestant churchmen, who argued that the Reformation had restored the early British or Welsh Church, an idea that continued to be promoted by Anglicans in the Victorian period.⁵² From the s the Anglican Church in Ireland, developing a view articulated by Archbishop Ussher in the early seventeenth century, adopted a similar strategy in claiming to be the true successor of the church established by St Patrick, which, so it was alleged, had been corrupted by Rome after the ⁴⁶ Thomas Stephens, ‘The Book of Aberpergwm, Improperly Called the Chronicle of Caradoc’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, rd ser.  (), . ⁴⁷ Pryce, J. E. Lloyd, –; Marion Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers and Abandoned Sources: Edward Williams, Thomas Stephens and the Young J. E. Lloyd’, in Neil Evans and Huw Pryce (eds), Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, – (Farnham: Ashgate, ), –, esp. –. ⁴⁸ Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁴⁹ Rice Rees, An Essay on the Welsh Saints or the Primitive Christians Usually Considered to Have Been the Founders of Churches in Wales (London: Longman, ), p. xiii. ⁵⁰ W. J. Rees, Lives of the Cambro-British Saints (Llandovery: W. Rees, ); William Reeves, The Life of St Columba, Founder of Hy, Written by Adamnan (Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, ); James Henthorn Todd, St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland: A Memoir of His Life and Mission (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, & Co., ). See also Murray, Romanticism, . ⁵¹ Donald E. Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, ), –. ⁵² Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, in his, Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –; Rees, Essay, –; Price, Hanes Cymru, –. Criticism of idea in Pryse, Hanes, i. .

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     



Anglo-Norman invasion.⁵³ This view was rejected by the Irish Catholic Church, which held that it was descended directly from St Patrick and generally sought to appropriate Ireland’s early Christian heritage as its own, a claim that gained greater prominence as Irish nationalism became increasingly identified with Roman Catholicism in the later decades of the nineteenth century.⁵⁴ Likewise, albeit on a much smaller scale, attempts to revive Roman Catholicism in Wales claimed early Welsh saints and other aspects of the medieval Welsh Christian heritage.⁵⁵ However, in Ireland the early Christian period was regarded not only as holy but also as a cultural and intellectual golden age remarkable for its illuminated manuscripts, carved stone crosses, and intricate metalwork as well as for its scholars, including a number who distinguished themselves on the Continent.⁵⁶ This was much less true of Wales. There, the emphasis remained on the establishment and spread of Christianity, and cultural revival was seen as coming later, as part of a wider ‘awakening’ of nations, namely a flowering of vernacular literature, patronized by Welsh princes, extending from c. to the Edwardian conquest of . Moreover, the prose tales were transferred via Brittany to the Continent, where they played a crucial role in the development of European romance—an interpretation that influenced Charlotte Guest’s decision to translate the Mabinogion.⁵⁷ Attitudes to medieval secular rulers also differed. True, both Irish and Welsh writers condemned the internecine struggles of the Middle Ages and tended to assess rulers according to the extent to which they fostered national unity.⁵⁸ Thus Diarmait Mac Murchada (d. ) was singled out for his treachery in inviting Anglo-Norman invaders to Ireland,⁵⁹ whereas Brian Boru, killed at the battle of Clontarf in , was accorded a heroic role as a high-king who not only united Ireland but defended its ⁵³ Meek, Quest, –; Murray, Romanticism, ; Niamh NicGhabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings in Ireland, –: Building on the Past (Dublin: Four Courts, ), , . ⁵⁴ E.g. James Gaffney, The Ancient Irish Church: Was it Catholic or Protestant? (Dublin: James Duffy, ). See further Kevin Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland – (Dublin: Four Courts, ), –, –; Sheehy, ‘Irish Church-Building’, –; NicGhabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings, ch. ; Philip O’Leary, Prose Literature of the Irish Revival, –: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), – and n. . ⁵⁵ Louis Nedelec, Cambria Sacra; or, The History of the Early Cambro-British Christians (London: Burns & Oates, ), esp. pp. xv–xxix; Pryce, ‘Culture’, –, , and n. . ⁵⁶ O’Neill, Fine Arts; Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, esp. Lectures VII, XI; Margaret Stokes, Early Christian Art in Ireland (London: Chapman and Hall, ). ⁵⁷ Price, ‘An Essay’, esp. –, –, –; Price, Hanes Cymru, –; Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry (Llandovery: William Rees, ), –, –; The Mabinogion, tr. Charlotte Guest,  vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans; Llandovery: W. Rees, ), i. pp. [xi]–xvi. ⁵⁸ M. F. C[usack], An Illustrated History of Ireland: From the Earliest Period (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., ), ; Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, , –, ; Price, Hanes Cymru, , ; Jane Williams, A History of Wales, Derived from Authentic Sources (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., ), , . ⁵⁹ C[usack], Illustrated History, . Cf. F. X. Martin, No Hero in the House: Diarmait Mac Murchada and the Coming of the Normans to Ireland (Dublin: National University of Ireland, ), –.

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 

early Christian civilization through his defeat of the pagan Danes and restoration of churches.⁶⁰ However, Brian Boru was exceptional among Irish rulers in receiving such praise. By contrast, Victorian historians of Wales—following the lead of David Powel in his Historie of Cambria (), a version of which had been published as late as ⁶¹—were readier to celebrate their nation’s medieval kings and princes. Yet generalization is difficult, as some authors found the rulers’ martial qualities distasteful and preferred to highlight the peace and codification of Welsh law allegedly achieved by Hywel Dda (the Good) (d. ) or Llywelyn the Great’s supposed contribution to British liberties through his role in securing Magna Carta ().⁶² The Catholicism of medieval Wales could also cause discomfort among both Anglican and Nonconformist writers.⁶³ Overall, though, Victorian assessments of medieval Wales were more positive than those of medieval Ireland. In particular, a distinctively Welsh national history continued to be seen as having taken place above all in the Middle Ages, especially in the period down to . Moreover, its achievements could be lauded without having to lament, as some did in Ireland, that the following centuries had marked a decline that could be arrested only by fundamental change in relations with Great Britain. In contrast to Ireland and other European nations in multinational states, then, celebration of the medieval Welsh past served, not as a justification for political selfdetermination, but rather as a vindication of Wales’s honourable place in a union with England or Great Britain (even if that might involve a measure of home rule).

A  

.................................................................................................................................. The contrasts between Ireland and Wales regarding the periods and aspects of the Middle Ages that mattered most are reflected in the art and architecture of the Victorian period. In Ireland, artists followed antiquarians and scholars in focusing on the achievements of the centuries down to the Anglo-Norman invasion (though throughout the period there were also those ready to identify with later medieval Gothic architecture as intrinsic to the island’s cultural and religious inheritance).⁶⁴ Carved stone crosses and Hiberno-Romanesque churches were recorded and analysed, ⁶⁰ C[usack], Illustrated History, –; Ferguson, Story of the Irish, –; Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, –; Seán Duffy, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ), –. ⁶¹ R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne and the History of Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies,  (–): –. ⁶² Pryce, ‘Culture’, –; Pryce, J. E. Lloyd, –. ⁶³ Williams, History, , , ; Pryse, Hanes, i. –; ii. . Cf. Paul O’Leary, ‘When was AntiCatholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,  (): –. ⁶⁴ NicGhabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings, passim.

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     



and the resulting publications, with numerous plates, as well as plaster casts of crosses displayed at the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin () and then at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham (–), made the monuments more widely known and thus helped to inspire imitations and adaptations.⁶⁵ The same was true of illuminated manuscripts, housed in Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy, and other repositories. For example, Petrie devised a type based on lettering in the Book of Kells and other early medieval Irish manuscripts for printing Irish texts.⁶⁶ Early Christian metalwork, increasing quantities of which came into the public domain through discoveries on archaeological sites and sales, was turned to commercial use through the manufacture of replicas as jewellery. A notable example was the ‘Tara’ brooch (datable to c.), acquired in  by the enterprising Waterhouse company in Dublin, which thus named it as part of an advertising campaign that included its display together with the replica brooches produced by the company at the Great Exhibition in London; Queen Victoria’s subsequent purchase of two replicas further promoted their popularity.⁶⁷ From the s several architects built churches in the Hiberno-Romanesque style found in twelfth-century churches such as Cormac’s Chapel, Cashel.⁶⁸ The early medieval artistic tradition also provided a visual language to commemorate modern political leaders, most strikingly in the case of the memorial to Daniel O’Connell in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, with its Hiberno-Romanesque church and round tower (although this departed from the original design by Petrie, much to his chagrin), and more widely through the erection of ‘Celtic’ stone crosses decorated with interlace.⁶⁹ To the (admittedly limited) extent that they turned to the medieval past, Irish painters also focused on early Christian Ireland, depicting St Patrick or Brian Boru.⁷⁰ Likewise Daniel Maclise’s famous painting The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (), depicting the groom standing on a fallen stone cross before a ruined chapel on a blood-soaked field outside Waterford, may be seen as an elegy to the Christian civilization destroyed by the Anglo-Norman invaders.⁷¹ ⁶⁵ Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture: A History (Dublin: Four Courts, ), ; Elizabeth L. McCormick, ‘ “The Highly Interesting Series of Irish High Crosses”: Reproductions of Early Medieval Irish Sculpture in Dublin and Sydenham’, in Jane Hawkes (ed.), Making Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Insular Art (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ), –. ⁶⁶ Dermot McGuinne, Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, ), –. ⁶⁷ Niamh Whitfield, ‘The Finding of the Tara Brooch’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland,  (): –, –; Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon’, –; Elizabeth McCrum, ‘Commerce and the Celtic Revival: Irish Jewelry of the Nineteenth Century’, Éire—Ireland, / (): –. ⁶⁸ Cyril Barrett, ‘Visual Arts and Society, –’, in Vaughan, New History of Ireland, vi/. –, –. Isolated instances of Hiberno-Romanesque elements earlier in the nineteenth century: Hill, Irish Public Sculpture,  n. . ⁶⁹ Sheehy, Rediscovery, –; Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, –, , . ⁷⁰ Cyril Barrett, ‘Irish Nationalism and Art –’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, / (): . ⁷¹ Brian P. Kennedy, Irish Painting (Dublin: Town House, ), , . See also Raghnall Ó Floinn, ‘Antiquarian Influences in The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife’, in Jane Hawkes (ed.), Making

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

 

Wales witnessed similar developments, but on a much more smaller scale and only from the s.⁷² This was largely because much less early medieval art and architecture survived than in Ireland, the main body of material comprising stone sculpture of the seventh to twelfth centuries, which T. H. Thomas (–) not only helped to preserve but celebrated as a source of artistic inspiration for the present.⁷³ By contrast, there was a dearth of illuminated manuscripts and metalwork.⁷⁴ However, the Welsh were readier to commemorate medieval secular figures than the Irish: for example, eisteddfod competitions elicited a sculpture of the fifth-century King Tewdrig of Gwent in  and a painting of ‘Hywel Dda Codifying the Welsh Law’ in , while a statue of Llywelyn the Great (d. ) of Gwynedd was made for a fountain in Conwy in .⁷⁵ There were also several abortive campaigns from the s onwards to raise a memorial to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the ‘last prince’ of Wales killed in , an ambition only finally realized in .⁷⁶ Small wonder that in  T. E. Ellis thought that more needed to be done to commemorate the medieval Welsh rulers Hywel Dda, the two Llywelyns, and Owain Glyndŵr.⁷⁷ A telling illustration of differing chronological priorities in Ireland was the widespread movement to mark the centenary of the  rising by erecting commemorative statues, including one in Dublin of its leader Wolf Tone, which encountered similar delays to the plans for a monument to Llywelyn, being eventually unveiled only in .⁷⁸

I  W 

.................................................................................................................................. Irish and Welsh literature also responded to the medieval past by creating new works derived in varying degrees from medieval sources or the medieval histories of Ireland and Wales. In Ireland, manuscript copies and adaptations of medieval texts in Irish as Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Insular Art (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ), –. ⁷² For an excellent overview, see Martin Crampin, ‘Artistic Engagements with Medieval Decorative Arts in Wales: Recording, Interpretation and Invention’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, ), –. ⁷³ Pryce, ‘Culture’, –. ⁷⁴ Huw Pryce, ‘Ecclesiastical Wealth in Early Medieval Wales’, in Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane (eds), The Early Church in Wales and the West (Oxford: Oxbow, ), , –; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Aberystwyth and Cardiff: National Library of Wales, ), –. ⁷⁵ Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –, –; Richard Haslam, Julian Orbach, and Adam Voelcker, The Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ⁷⁶ Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and the Welsh Historical Consciousness’, Welsh History Review,  (–): –, –. ⁷⁷ Thomas E. Ellis, ‘The Memory of the Kymric Dead’ [], in Ellis, Speeches and Addresses (Wrexham: Hughes & Son, ), –. ⁷⁸ Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, –; Geraldine Higgins, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .

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well as early modern texts on medieval themes—for example, the poems of the Fenian cycle and the prose tale Cath Cluan Tarbh (The Battle of Clontarf)—continued to be made in the nineteenth century.⁷⁹ From  the Gaelic League, reacting to aspersions cast on early Irish literature by Professor Robert Atkinson of Trinity College, Dublin, encouraged the publication of Modern Irish versions of medieval tales; and ballads and songs on Fionn Mac Cumhaill were also collected and printed.⁸⁰ Similar attempts were made to translate medieval Irish prose texts into English, and became a central hallmark of the Irish Revival from the s, beginning with Standish James O’Grady’s various renderings of the tales of Cú Chulainn. True, O’Grady, strongly influenced by Thomas Carlyle, presented his History of Ireland (–) as a new kind of history that would make vivid a distant, pre-Christian past and provide heroic inspiration for the present. But this was no less literary than his professedly literary works on Cú Chulainn.⁸¹ Later attempts to translate and adapt medieval Irish tales into modern English varied from the scholarly work of Eleanor Hull to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (), written in a Hiberno-English dialect modelled on that spoken by the villagers of Kiltartan adjacent to her Coole Park estate, Co. Galway.⁸² New prose writing in Victorian Ireland turned to medieval themes only to a limited extent.⁸³ Historical novels in English largely focused on events from the late sixteenth century onwards, with the exception of Gerald Griffin’s The Invasion (), set in the age of the Viking invasions, and republished c. with extensive notes by Eugene O’Curry.⁸⁴ Likewise Irish prose writing of the Gaelic revival from the late nineteenth century, though occasionally placing its narratives in the time of St Patrick, Brian Boru, or an unspecified ancient Gaelic past, tended to focus on the English conquests of the late sixteenth century and subsequent crises such as the  rising and the Great Famine.⁸⁵ On the other hand, Irish-language poetry, ‘the public voice of Gaelic Ireland during the nineteenth century’,⁸⁶ retained a consciousness of its medieval origins in its ⁷⁹ E.g. Gearóid Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , , –, –, –; Duanaire Finn: The Book of the Lays of Fionn, Part I, ed. Eoin MacNeill (London: Irish Texts Soc., , ), pp. [xvii], xxvi; Cath Cluana Tarbh: The Battle of Clontarf, ed. Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail (London: Irish Texts Soc., , ), , , – (a reference I owe to the late Richard Sharpe). ⁸⁰ O’Leary, Prose Literature, –, –, –. ⁸¹ McAteer, Standish O’Grady, chs –; Geraldine Higgins, Heroic Revivals, ch. ; Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. ⁸² Eleanor Hull (ed.), The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature. Being a Collection of Stories Relating to the Hero Cuchullin. Translated from the Irish by Various Scholars (London: David Nutt, ); Gregory, Cuchulain; Leerssen, Remembrance, –. ⁸³ Cf. Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English, –: From Catholic Emancipation to the Fall of Parnell’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ⁸⁴ Cahalan, Great Hatred, , and chs – passim; Leerssen, Remembrance, –. ⁸⁵ O’Leary, Prose Literature, –. ⁸⁶ Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish’, .

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treatment of modern subjects. Thus Daniel O’Connell (–) was ‘praised in the traditional manner of Irish chieftains in the earlier bardic poetry’, with one Clare poet combining medieval and modern allusions in envisaging him as ‘High King of the country like Bonaparte’.⁸⁷ Irish poets in English also looked back to the Middle Ages. First, several penned verse versions of medieval legends. Thus Denis Florence McCarthy’s ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’ () provided a rendition of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani,⁸⁸ and Samuel Ferguson’s poems Congal () and Conary () were based respectively on the historical tale The Battle of Dun na nGedh and the Battle of Magh Rath (edited and translated by John O’Donovan) and on The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, one of the tales in the Ulster Cycle (available in a manuscript translation by William Hennessy).⁸⁹ In addition, Yeats gave voice to his political sympathies after the defeat of the Irish Home Rule Bill in  in The Wanderings of Oisin (), which presented Ossian’s mourning of the Fenians in a dialogue with St Patrick.⁹⁰ Second, the first part of Aubrey de Vere’s poem, Inisfail: A Lyrical History of Ireland () was devoted to the Middle Ages, beginning with the Anglo-Norman invasion but including flashbacks to the early Christian period. De Vere both sought to lend authority to his verse by citing antiquarian scholarship and articulated a medievalist sensibility, notably in the poem ‘Patrick and the Knight; or, The Inauguration of Irish Chivalry’, supported by a reference to O’Donovan.⁹¹ Third, patriotic poetry— including that of Thomas Davis and other authors included in the hugely popular anthology The Spirit of the Nation ()—sought to inspire its readers and listeners by invoking figures and events from the medieval past, although their historical reference points ranged into the nineteenth century too.⁹² A notable instance was Thomas Clarence Mangan’s ‘Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’ (), which implicitly contrasted the flourishing state of the province under its medieval king ‘Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand’ (Cathal Crobderg; d. ) with its parlous condition during the famine.⁹³ The foundation for new uses of medieval Welsh literature had been laid by the threevolume anthology The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (–), a compendium of prose and poetry—transcribed, without English translations, from medieval and later

⁸⁷ Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish’, –. ⁸⁸ Matthew Campbell, ‘Poetry in English, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁸⁹ Denman, Samuel Ferguson, –, –; Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, –. ⁹⁰ Campbell, ‘Poetry’, –; Campbell, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, –. ⁹¹ Aubrey de Vere, Inisfail: A Lyrical History of Ireland (Dublin: James Duffy, ), ; Campbell, ‘Poetry’, –. ⁹² Campbell, ‘Poetry’, –. Popularity of Spirit of the Nation: Margaret Kelleher, ‘Irish Literary Culture’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁹³ Seamus Deane (gen. ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,  vols (Derry: Field Day, ), ii. –; Campbell, ‘Poetry’, .

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manuscripts—that remained sufficiently in demand for the publisher Thomas Gee to issue a second edition in .⁹⁴ English translations of various works appeared in both periodicals and books. Most notable of the latter was Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the eleven medieval tales she dubbed The Mabinogion (–), an enterprise inspired by her passion for medieval European romance and facilitated by cooperation with Welsh scholars.⁹⁵ Medieval Wales also inspired new Welsh writing in English, such as Lady Marshall’s long poem A Prince of Wales of Long Ago: A Bardic Legend of the Twelfth Century ().⁹⁶ The same was truer still of writing in Welsh. This was due in part to the encouragement given by competitions at eisteddfodau and literary societies, which offered prizes for poems and prose works on medieval heroes and events such as Llywelyn the Last (d. ) or Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth, both subjects at the Llangollen eisteddfod of .⁹⁷ Another factor was the growing sense of national revival in the later nineteenth century. Thus Owain Glyndŵr (d. c.), the last Welsh leader to lead armed resistance against English rule, was celebrated in poetry, prose, and drama in both Welsh and English, especially from the s, and proved popular among writers aligned with the Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement within the Liberal Party that advocated Welsh home rule.⁹⁸ Moreover, numerous historical novels in Welsh were set in the Middle Ages, both during and before the age of Glyndŵr; often published in newspapers, these responded to popular interest in Welsh heroes of the past.⁹⁹ It appears, then, that Victorian writing in Welsh was more strongly imbued with medieval themes than its counterpart in Irish. The contrast with Ireland was probably due to the centrality accorded to the medieval centuries, especially down to  or at latest , in perceptions of the Welsh past, and the corresponding lack of modern nationalist struggles that inspired Irish writers. Moreover, in both Wales and Ireland there were those who questioned the value of basing modern literature on medieval sources. Throughout the nineteenth century the use in modern Welsh poetry of the twenty-four strict metres defined in the fifteenth century by Dafydd ab Edmwnd, together with the sound-patterning conventions of cynghanedd, provoked strong condemnation, being described by one observer as a

⁹⁴ Constantine, ‘Welsh Literary History’. ⁹⁵ Revel Guest and Angela V. John, Lady Charlotte Guest: An Extraordinary Life (Stroud: Tempus, ), ch. . ⁹⁶ Jane Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. ⁹⁷ Edwards Hywel Teifi, Gŵyl Gwalia: Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol yn Oes Aur Victoria (Llandysul: Gomer, ), . ⁹⁸ E. Wyn James, Glyndŵr a Gobaith y Genedl: Agweddau ar y Portread o Owain Glyndŵr yn Llenyddiaeth y Cyfnod Modern (Aberystwyth: Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigion, ), –, –; Jane Aaron, ‘The Gregynog Papers #: “A Nation Once Again”: Owain Glyndŵr and the “Cymraec Dream” of Anglophone Welsh Victorian Poets’ [], Wales Arts Review: https://www.walesartsreview. org/the-gregynog-papers--a-nation-once-again-owain-glyndwr-and-the-cymraec-dream-of-anglophonewelsh-victorian-poets/ (accessed Dec. ). ⁹⁹ Millward, ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion” ’.

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regrettable symptom of ‘our worship of the past, our literary mediaevalism’.¹⁰⁰ For some writers in Irish, the need largely to rely on English translations, owing to the linguistic difficulties of Old and Middle Irish, was a cause of regret, as was the sheer difficulty of recreating the distant age in which the medieval Irish tales were set.¹⁰¹ Likewise William Magee (‘John Eglinton’) argued in  that the remoteness of medieval Irish tales from modern lived experience disqualified them from being a sound basis for a new Irish literature in English that aspired to universality, a charge rebutted by Yeats, who insisted that those tales had the potential to be as universally popular and significant as the Arthurian Romances, or the Norse sagas and Germanic legends staged respectively by Ibsen and Wagner.¹⁰²

C

.................................................................................................................................. In conclusion, the medieval cultures and histories of Ireland and Wales received substantial and wide-ranging attention in the Victorian period. Much of this engagement with the Middle Ages was motivated, as in many other nineteenth-century European countries, by a desire to legitimize and promote national identity. Yet the uses made in Ireland and Wales of their medieval legacies differed in significant respects. This was partly because of contrasts between those legacies but resulted more from the fundamentally different directions taken by the histories of both countries after the Middle Ages.¹⁰³

S  Bourke, Marie, The Story of Irish Museums –: Culture, Identity and Education (Cork: Cork University Press, ). Boyce, D. George, Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for Stability. Rev. edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ). Camille, Michael, ‘Domesticating the Dragon: The Rediscovery, Reproduction, and Re-Invention of Early Irish Metalwork’, in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival – (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, ), –. ¹⁰⁰ Cf. Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘The Eisteddfod Poet: An Embattled Figure’, in Edwards (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c. – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –; Thomas Nicholas, Middle and High Schools and a University for Wales (London: Jackson, Walford & Hodder []), . ¹⁰¹ O’Leary, Prose Literature, –, –. ¹⁰² John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, AE, and W. Larminie, Literary Ideals in Ireland (London: T. Fisher Unwin; Dublin: Daily Express Office, []). ¹⁰³ I am very grateful to Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha for valuable bibliographical guidance and to Nancy Edwards and Paul O’Leary for their comments on a draft text.

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Campbell, Matthew, ‘Poetry in English, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Campbell, Matthew, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Charnell-White, Catherine A., Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ). Collins, Kevin, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland – (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Crampin, Martin, ‘Artistic Engagements with Medieval Decorative Arts in Wales: Recording, Interpretation and Invention’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, . Cunningham, Bernadette, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘ “An Honour to the Nation”: Publishing John O’Donovan’s Edition of the Annals of the Four Masters, –’, in Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland –: Essays in Honour of Michael Adams (Dublin: Woodfield Press, ), –. De Barra, Caoimhín, ‘A Gallant Little “Tírín”: The Welsh Influence on Irish Cultural Nationalism’, Irish Historical Studies, / (): –. Denvir, Gearóid, ‘Literature in Irish, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Doherty, Gillian M., The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Duddy, Thomas, A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, ). Duffy, Seán, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ). Edelstein, T. J. (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival – (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, ). Evans, Neil, and Huw Pryce (eds), Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, – (Farnham: Ashgate, ). Higgins, Geraldine, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Kelleher, Margaret, ‘Irish Literary Culture’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Kelleher, Margaret, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English, –: From Catholic Emancipation to the Fall of Parnell’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . Kreilkamp, Vera (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, ). Leerssen, Joep, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, ). Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Lord, Peter, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ).

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Morgan, Prys, ‘Early Victorian Wales and its Crisis of Identity’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.–c. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. Morgan, Prys, ‘Iolo Morganwg and Welsh Historical Traditions’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. Murray, Damien, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, – (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, ). NicGhabhann, Niamh, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings in Ireland, –: Building on the Past (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Ó Cuiv, Brian, ‘Irish Language and Literature, –’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vi. Ireland Under the Union, . – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. O’Leary, Philip, Prose Literature of the Irish Revival, –: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ). Ortenberg, Veronica, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, ). Pryce, Huw, ‘Culture, Identity, and the Medieval Revival in Victorian Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, / (): –. Pryce, Huw, J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ). Pryce, Huw, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies,  (): –. Sheehy, Jeanne, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival – (London: Thames and Hudson, ). Williams, Mark, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).

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    

N- in Victorian Scotland is a diverse phenomenon, finding expression in Gothic architecture; paintings and murals; book illustration; fiction, poetry, revivals of ballad and romance; the founding of scholarly and antiquarian societies; Arts and Crafts-related educational practices—all throughout the reign of a British monarch, of course, who had famously loved Scotland since her first visit in . Given such diversity across medium, expression, and purpose, Scottish neo-medievalism lacks the sustained coherence or unity of a ‘movement’ in this period. Still, its purpose and ethos can best be understood by the artistic and cultural phenomena which ‘bookend’ it: its Romantic precedents and its modernist culmination. Neo-medievalist impulses and interests are seeded in the earlier eighteenth-century period, becoming a powerful facet of the imagination in the Scottish Romantic period and developing during Victoria’s reign into sustained scholarly practices and endeavours. Literary historians and editors construct and collect a distinct national cultural and literary narrative; and, as a variety of writers and artists harness the aesthetic and socio-political implications of neo-medieval style and subject, they re-energise the creative possibilities of Scottish art and culture. Into the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘Renaissance’ movements—both ‘Celtic’ and Hugh MacDiarmid’s own—differently perceive medieval literary culture as a key means of imaginative and political redefinition. Recurrent ideological, cultural, and political associations emerge in these various neo-medieval preoccupations: for example, Catholicism; Anglo-Scottish relationships and Wars of Independence; Jacobitism and political rebellion. In that respect, Scottish Victorian neo-medievalism in its diversity is unified by being a rereading or reimagining of salient and highly charged ‘moments’ in Scotland’s past; and, like most neomedievalism, it is highly partisan, motivated by different types of nostalgia and desire. In this chapter, we chart some of the main literary and artistic practices of Victorian Scotland; and we have chosen to ‘delimit’ the potentially vast scope by focusing on

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those which can be termed ‘vernacular’ in subject—in other words, Scottish or ‘Celtic’ in subject matter. Prior to the Victorian period, Scottish literary culture had experienced other kinds of medieval revivals. Although Scotland’s Calvinist reformation had been keen to deride the ‘superstition’ and ‘bawdry’ inherent in the world of the old faith, the medieval had endured in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature in the persistence of particular poetic modes and styles (e.g. dream vision—even in the Protestant Elizabeth Melville’s text; the resurgence of flyting; romance models; allegory, stressing at least aesthetic continuities between later medieval Scots tradition and early modern). However, the first stirrings of a medieval revival had been felt in the earlier part of the eighteenth century in the antiquarian work of the poet, Allan Ramsay (-).¹ In homage to the author of the first vernacular Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid—with its transposition of classical ideas of political imperium, its defence of Scots’ eloquence, and its critique of the limited linguistic, imaginative, and moral horizons of other vernacular versions (specifically William Caxton’s)—Ramsay changed his literary nickname from Isaac Bickerstaff to Gavin Douglas (c.–), one of the famous trinity of medieval Scots poet makars which included William Dunbar and Robert Henryson. As the principal reviver and collector of vernacular Scots literature, Ramsay’s medieval nom de plume is significant, ‘indicating his intimacy with a literary circle in post-Union Edinburgh that attempted to preserve . . . the Scottish humanist tradition’.² ‘Medievalism’ in eighteenth-century Scottish literary circles, then, meant engagement with perceived ‘lost’ ideals and traditions—‘nationalism’, humanism, vernacular language, and the recovery and preservation of song culture, as exemplified in James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Song () and Ramsay’s own The Tea-Table Miscellany ().³ Between  and , Ramsay produced his edition of the poem, Christ’s Kirk on the Grene, a vernacular carnivalesque celebration of public disorder which in its opening stanza alludes to an anonymous fifteenth-century Scots poem. The cultural shape and pattern of the late Middle Ages which early eighteenth-century Scottish ‘custodians’ such as Ramsay promulgate for a new readership encompasses a demotic ‘folk’ vision of anti-authoritarianism sanctioned by that ultimate embodiment of authority, a king himself. In the variable attribution of Christ’s Kirk to two Stuart kings, James I and James V, Ramsay’s edition signalled Jacobite allegiance, and had followed in the wake of another Jacobite medievalist production, the edition of Douglas’s Eneados in , produced by Thomas Ruddiman. The latter also printed Ramsay’s collection, The Evergreen (), which included poems by William Dunbar (The Golden Targe, The Dregy, The Flyting, albeit in slightly modernized Scots orthography, for Ramsay was not strictly an antiquarian;

¹ See Thomas Crawford, ‘The Medievalism of Allan Ramsay’, Scottish Studies,  (): –. ² Steve Newman, ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly, / (Fall ): –. ³ Cf. Leith Davis, ‘Imagining the Miscellaneous Nation: James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems’, Eighteenth-Century Life, / (): –.

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rather, the medieval ‘past’ was a sign of literary continuity with the present, and of renewed vernacular, and political, energy).⁴ Ramsay’s friend, and a contributor to his Tea-Table Miscellany, William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (?–), published a translation in  of the fifteenth-century Scots poetic epic, The Wallace, ascribed to ‘Blind Hary’. For much of the eighteenth century, this Jacobite-medievalist conjunction persisted,⁵ being found in the use of Scots generally and in specifics such as the use of the Christ’s Kirk stanza for ‘modern’ poetry by Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Elsewhere the medieval world was put to slight use, for instance, by James Thomson in his Seasons (–), where both Columba and William Wallace make understated appearances, though largely pressed into service against, respectively, the despotism of Rome and the supposed creeping despotism of early Georgian England. By Burns’s time, however, something slightly different is occurring. In , when provided patronage by the Dumfriesshire Riddell family in their home at Friar’s Carse, Burns begins imaginatively to deploy medievalism. We see this in his constructing of a poetic persona, ‘the Beadsman’, in his ‘Written In Friar’s Carse hermitage on the bank of the Nith—June—’, a remarkable turn in the work of a presbyterian poet. Likewise inspired by a newly expansive Enlightenment historiography were Walter Scott’s long narrative poems such as Marmion (), about the Battle of Flodden in , and The Lady of the Lake (), set in the time of James V and providing inter alia an important moment in nineteenth-century Mariology in its lyric of ‘Ave Maria’, so famously set to music by Schubert in . Scott’s predilection for medievalist fantasy is well-known, his baronial pile at Abbotsford often seen as his enactment of that fantasy, stoked by his archival, bibliophilic, and material fascination for the Middle Ages (including the world of the border ballads). But Scott’s role as editor of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–) was highly significant in bringing together medieval and folk material in a way that anticipates the later careers of Gregor and Lang, and his particular obsession with Scotland’s thirteenth-century fairy communicant and poet, Thomas the Rhymer, produced an important symbolic conflation between medieval and Romantic literary identities, epitomized by his edition of the medieval romance of Sir Tristrem.⁶ In his novels of the Middle Ages too (Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Talisman, The Betrothed, Count Robert), Scott demonstrates his affinity for European neo-medieval romanticism but also begins to allow sympathy to a greater or lesser degree for an indigenous or vernacular medieval world; for example, in his portrait of the early modern but significantly Catholic monarch, Mary, Queen of Scots, in The Abbot (). Scott’s early Gothicism too, nurtured by his immersion in German ⁴ Cf. Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Dunbar and his Readers: From Allan Ramsay to Richard Burton’, Studies in Scottish Literature, – (): –. Cf. also Newman, ‘Scots Songs’. Interestingly, Ramsay’s work was republished in the latter half of the nineteenth century. ⁵ Cf. Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ⁶ Cf. Sarah Dunnigan, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of Scott, Scotland, and the Grimms’, in Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew (eds), Scotland and the Nineteenth Century World (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, ).

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

    

culture, might be read as symbiotic with the turn against French culture, with its iconoclastic revolution, during the s. Scott’s advancement of an old, lost world of medieval chivalry takes place against the background of the French Revolution’s shattering of the Ancien Régime. And Scott himself belonged to an extensive network of other antiquaries, historians, and collectors — Henry William Weber (–), Henry Ellis (–), for example, who each had a distinctive but interrelated set of interests in the recovery and restoration of ‘ancient’ texts—pointing to a collective preoccupation with the medieval past and, in particular, with the reception and editing of medieval romances. Scottish writers and historians such as Robert Jamieson (–) and John Leyden (–) were also fascinated by the German and Scandinavian medieval literary heritage, those romance and ballad texts which shared some commonality with Scottish tradition, such as Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (). Scott’s supposedly backward-looking medievalism was cited for being party to the rise of the Oxford Movement, an idea that gained stature after John Henry Newman celebrated Mass at Abbotsford in  and again in . Newman was a friend of James Robert Hope Scott who, on his marriage to Scott’s grand-daughter, Charlotte, had inherited Abbotsford. However, it was John Crichton-Stuart, rd Marquis of Bute (–), received into the Catholic Church in  whose powerful wealth drove the restoration of institutional Catholicism in much grander style than might otherwise have been the case in the late Victorian period, as well as the trend towards Gothic architecture and the medieval imagination more generally. The eponymous character of Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair (), the fabulously wealthy aristocrat with a Frankish name, is a reimagined Bute, who despite the powerfully romantic attractions of the medieval world in the s and the medieval/renaissance glories of Rome which he visits, steps back from the brink of conversion. At the same time, Lothair also turns away from his dour, Calvinist-tinged Scottish background, finding a happy medium in the Church of England. Disraeli’s novel is at once a slightly despairing plea that Reformation Britain might not be undone and a large admission that the old medieval, Catholic world had returned not simply as fictional romance but at the heart of the life of the British establishment. Bute’s own antiquarian endeavours played their part alongside the likes of the editions of the Scottish Text Society (see below) in opening up a lost medieval world, such as the body of Celtic Latin monastic hymns and the rich history of Scotland’s ancient ecclesiastical capital, St Andrews, work which he published in the s and s.⁷ No nineteenth-century Scottish novelist after Scott, however, showed a similar appetite for imaginative depictions of medieval Scotland, England, or Europe. Rare exceptions include Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow () dealing with the Wars of the Roses, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company (), portraying

⁷ See John, rd Marquess of Bute, Essays on Home Subjects (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, ). Cf. his edition, Altus of St Columba (); he also delivered a lecture on William Wallace at Paisley in .

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 -

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the years – during the Hundred Years War. These novels showed that for the nineteenth century, unlike the one that followed, ancient English as much as Scottish history was attractive to the Scottish literary eye. Likewise, Thomas Carlyle’s hymning of Samson of Tottington, the twelfth century Abbot of Bury, St Edmunds, as an exemplary leader in Past and Present () shows a positive interest in the preReformation period in England that he nowhere demonstrates towards the land of his birth. Nineteenth-century Scottish historical fiction writers seemingly prefer to engage with the subjects of the Reformation, the Covenanting period, and the Jacobite and Hanoverian conflicts. Douglas Gifford suggests that this turning away from medievalism in nineteenth-century Scottish historical fiction illustrates a marked divergence from its English counterpart, and that this may be attributed to the effect of the  Disruption which arguably resurrects a more immediate or recent history of Scotland’s religious and civil divisions (in other words, mid–late seventeenthcentury conflict and eighteenth-century rebellion). In similar respects, too, Scottish poetry in the Victorian period largely dispensed with the medievalism so prominent in both thematic and formal terms in Scott and James Hogg. Arguably, the most formidable work demonstrating medieval influence by a Scottish Victorian poet is James (B. V.) Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (–), steeped in its author’s reading of Dante’s Purgatory. The work of Robert Buchanan (–) is infused with a Gothic, neo-Catholic eroticism which recalls the earlier Romantic neo-medieval ballad imitations of Hogg and Leyden. As well as imitations of medieval chivalric and Scandinavian epic, his work also transmutes aspects of Scots ballad tradition, seen especially in the thematic recurrence of the motif of the changeling, second sight, and child morbidity. Elsewhere, however, those emblems of Scottish medieval resistance, freedom, and nationalism—William Wallace and Robert the Bruce—imaginatively return. In a sense, they had never entirely disappeared from poetic incarnation, appearing in Wordsworth and Southey as well as Burns, Joanna Baillie, and Alexander Pennecuik. This is arguably a consequence of the fact that two epic poems, John Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace, were among the most frequent medieval Scottish reprintings of the eighteenth century (often published alongside each other).⁸ It is not difficult to see why these martial, heroic epics appealed both to a burgeoning antiquarian and popular readership in the period. To post-Union cultural sensibilities, they embody the poetic vision of an independent sovereign nation whose individual heroes (albeit in very different ways, which is why the repeated conflation of both texts is interesting) marshal their warrior strengths, redoubtable armies, and political nous against English oppressors. Ostensibly, both texts are romances but of a peculiar kind: their teleology works towards the liberation of the nation, its own transformed identity, rather than that of an individual knightly protagonist; if political ‘fredome’ is their primary goal, then other facets of high

⁸ It was Pinkerton’s edition of which Scott was rather disdainful in a letter (the only extant one) to Jacob Grimm.

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

    

medieval romance are jettisoned in its pursuit—for example, amour courtois and the veneration of women.⁹ This has an effect on their Victorian poetic incarnations. In ‘A Song of Scottish Heroes’ (), John Stuart Blackie (–) invokes them amongst those ‘heroes who bled for the old Scottish cause’, though the poem’s nostalgic romance of nationalistic masculinity is an historically eclectic mix, blending John Knox, the Covenanters, and Burns in heroic resistance to ‘the Southron’.¹⁰ Blackie’s Scottish medieval martyrology is echoed by other British poets. Menella Bute Smedley (–) imagines an oddly serene ‘sacrifice’ for her hero in ‘The Lay of Sir William Wallace’ (), and in her poem on Bruce seems to pay homage to Barbour’s epic in portraying at length James Douglas’s ill-fated journey to the Holy Land with the reliquary of Bruce’s heart. Smedley commends the chivalric ethos embodied in Douglas’s act of heroic fidelity by blending a tender homosociality with celebration of Scottish martial masculinity.¹¹ In some respects, this ‘resurrection’ of Bruce and Wallace is predictable, and continues a tradition of Romantic eulogy (Smedley’s ‘lay’ of Wallace ends in Melrose, sanctified as the final location of Bruce’s heart and of Scott’s memory too). Perhaps more surprising is the imaginative return or rehabilitation of James I, the first Stuart king. In her ‘Lay of King James I in his Captivity’ (), Smedley ventriloquizes the erotic and philosophical dilemma of the love poem famously ascribed to him, The Kingis Quair, itself full of echoes and allusions to European and English traditions of allegorical love poetry: Known but dimly from afar, Seen but through a dungeon-grate, Still thine eye hath been my star,— Still thy smile shall be my fate, Throned upon that brow serene, Strength, hope, purity, are seen. (ll. –)

Smedley’s interest in James and his poem may have been stimulated by the poem’s considerable reprintings in the early nineteenth century. The Quair also provided inspiration for the murals created by the painter and poet, William Bell Scott (–), for Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, who also turned to Border history and tradition for the paintings he produced for Wallington Hall in Northumberland. The Quair has its own Pre-Raphaelite associations, not just in the artistic style and signature of Scott’s work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had apparently watched Scott working on the Penkill murals,¹² also wrote a Jamesian-inspired poem, ‘The King’s Tragedy’, completed in , which narrates the king’s plight through the narrative voice of

⁹ Cf. Sergi Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition c.-c. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ). ¹⁰ From Lyrical Poems (), ll. , . ¹¹ From Lays and Ballads of Ancient History (). ¹² Dwight and Helen Culler, ‘The Sources of “The King’s Tragedy” ’, Studies in Philology,  (): –, .

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Catherine Douglas, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As in Smedley’s homage, the Quair—which Rossetti called a ‘lovely poem’¹³—is deliberately echoed: And he kissed her hand and took his harp, And the music sweetly rang; And when the song burst forth, it seemed ’Twas the nightingale that sang. ‘Worship, ye lovers, on this May: Of bliss your kalends are begun: Sing with us, Away, Winter, away! Come, Summer, the sweet season and sun! Awake for shame,—your heaven is won,— And amorously your heads lift all: Thank Love, that you to his grace doth call!’ (ll. –)

One of Rossetti’s sources appears to have been The Life and Death of King James the First of Scotland, printed in  by the Maitland Club, a copy of which he owned; whilst the legend of Catherine was itself based on Hector Boece’s The History and Chronicles of Scotland (), reprinted in . The Rossetti-Quair association offers a small but significant example of a creative response to a larger phenomenon which is the reprinting and editing of medieval Scottish texts. The scholarly recovery of medieval Scottish literature is a vital aspect of Victorian medievalism in Scotland, establishing detailed philological and editorial standards to which modern medieval and early modern Scottish scholarship is still indebted. This can be seen in a series of publications throughout the century, culminating in the work of the Scottish Text Society.¹⁴ Walter Scott’s antiquarianism not only had consequences for Romantic aesthetics but also resulted in the founding of scholarly societies such as the Bannatyne Club (modelled on the Roxburghe Club) which he founded in  and which ran until . This was named after the Bannatyne manuscript, the most important collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scots poetry, so-called on account of its chief compiler and transcriber, George Bannatyne, an Edinburgh merchant whose extraordinary manuscript points to the creative and intellectual networks of the courtly, civic, and mercantile classes in early modern Scotland.¹⁵ The Bannatyne manuscript was a resource which had been used by Ramsay for his anthology The Evergreen but was fully published by the Bannatyne Club

¹³ Culler and Culler, ‘Sources’, . ¹⁴ Cf. Padmini Ray Murray, ‘Antiquarianism’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The History of the Book in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –. ¹⁵ Cf. Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Interaction between Literature and History in Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical Context’, in A. A. Macdonald et al., (eds), The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan (Leiden: Brill, ), –.

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

    

between  and , which produced  volumes.¹⁶ Also involved in the founding of the club was David Laing (–), librarian of the Signet Library from  and one of the most eminent collators and collectors of medieval and Renaissance Scottish culture and literature. Laing’s manuscript collections were bequeathed to the University of Edinburgh in . His two volumes of William Dunbar’s poetry (), his edition of Henryson (), and of Andrew Wyntoun’s Cronykil of Scotland (–) comprise some of the major work of the Bannatyne Club which also included a reprinting of the Charteris edition of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. A third major player from the Bannatyne Club was Cosmo Innes (–), a voracious inquirer into burgh and ecclesiastical records of the Scottish medieval period and who exerted a formative influence in making inquiry into pre- Scottish history an academic discipline.¹⁷ These Victorian clubs, driven by the obsessive collecting endeavours of writers and historians such as Scott and Laing, were therefore the chief means by which the literary culture of medieval Scotland found material and textual re-embodiment. Alongside the Edinburgh-based Bannatyne Club, Glasgow had the Maitland Club founded in  and which ran until , named in allusion to the Lothians poet and lawyer, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (–) and again dedicated to the publishing of early Scottish texts which were eclectic and diverse (including one of the few early Scottish romance texts, Clariodus; Pitcairne’s Ancient Criminal Trials; Marian history as well as seventeenth-century interest too, as in Napier’s  book on Montrose and printings of Drummond and Urquhart). In , the Scottish Text Society (STS) was founded, and in its first series, in –, produced sixty-five volumes of medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation texts.¹⁸ Here for the first time for modern Scotland were proper editions of Barbour’s Bruce, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, saints’ lives, fifteenth-century alliterative verse, and a wide panoply of other Middle Scots writing became newly available. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there had arguably been a sea-change in Scotland’s attitude to its medieval (Catholic) heritage. In a larger perspective, two converging influences might be seen as leading to the founding of the STS: first of all a new emphasis abroad in Europe on ‘folklore’, and secondly the long nineteenthcentury movement from the Gothic to medievalism going back at least as far as the taste-changing interventions by Walter Scott and Blackwood’s Magazine. In the case of the former impetuses, one of the founding figures of the society was Walter Gregor (–), whose interests were powerfully formed by his involvement in the Folklore Society established in London in , as well as his interest in the Early English Text Society which had been established in . To some extent, one might argue that the previous ideological, cultural nationalist, and confessional associations of medieval

¹⁶ Cf. Elizabeth Elliott, ‘Ransacking Old Banny: The Bannatyne Manuscript, the Bannatyne Club, and the Making of Edinburgh Communities’, Edinburgh Review,  (): –. ¹⁷ Richard A. Marsden, Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland’s Past c.– (Farnham: Ashgate, ). ¹⁸ See Alexander Law, The Scottish Text Society – (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, ).

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 -

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Scottish literature had been largely shed by the s so that collecting old Scots texts was a ‘harmless’, antiquarian pastime that could shed light on what from the perspective of the late Victorian mindset might appear to be the rich, ‘regional’ past of Scotland. The career of Andrew Lang (–) also shows something of this new lens through which the long Scottish past might be viewed in his pioneering status as a scholar. This reconfiguration, then, perhaps paves the way for the striking early twentiethcentury creative and critical receptivity towards medieval Scotland. Particularly vocal literary advocacy for medievalism can be seen in the poetic manifesto of Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid, –), ‘Back to Dunbar’, as well as in the work of Edwin Muir (–) who idealized the cultural and literary ‘golden age’ of the reign of James IV. MacDiarmid also appropriated the idea of the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, or being the site of a meeting of extremes, from G. Gregory Smith (–), a literary critic and historian, who derived this concept from his view of the medieval ‘outlook’, espoused in the most influential of all books of generalist, Scottish literary criticism, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (). This influential work was the culmination of Smith’s work in the Victorian and Edwardian period which capitalized on the solid foundations of the Scottish Text Society established in . Smith’s The Days of James IV – (London: David Nutt, ), part of a series of ‘Scottish History by Contemporary Writers’, was essentially a gathering of historical documents from the period, but he was clearly absorbed by the relationship which he drew between this (relatively short-lived) reign of political stability and what he describes as ‘the golden days of Scottish literature’. Ten years later, The Transition Period () would explore the broader literary culture of fifteenthcentury European literature but the ‘special excellence’ of Scottish as opposed to English literature in this period was signalled, and presents a different, more nuanced version of the ‘Scottish Chaucerian’ label or category by which late medieval Scots literature was usually defined as ‘palely imitative’. The emphasis on technique and form is emphasized again; he sees Dunbar rather than Douglas as the locus of an emergent sensibility (which he describes as a proto-Renaissance individuality and humanity); and he returns to identifying the continuities between the medieval and eighteenthcentury periods in Scottish literature as part of his important shaping of a critical and cultural vernacular narrative. Smith’s Specimens of Middle Scots (), in particular, brought the voice of a powerful critic as well as editor to bear on those Scottish writers in the early twentieth century who would become the most nationalist. This is a work which capitalized on the long, late Victorian immersion by scholars in medieval texts as its editor sought both to draw comparison and mark differences with Middle English. Among other judgements, Smith established the high cultural and artistic import of medieval Scottish literature: ‘Middle Scots was, more exclusively than any companion phase in the languages of north-west Europe, the special affair of literary habit, as distinguished from spoken dialect’.¹⁹ Whilst Smith was exact in his tracings of the

¹⁹ Smith, Specimens of Middle Scots (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, ), p. xi.

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

    

etymological and linguistic roots and origins of Lowland Scots, and its partial derivation from northern English, he was fascinated by its status as a ‘national literary language’,²⁰ and the sense, evoked in the previous quotation, of its rhetorical capacities and sheer artfulness. This also involved a slight renegotiation or different awareness of the relationship between Scots and ‘Celtic’, in other words, Irish and Scots-Gaelic literary and linguistic cultures which he sees as having little influence on and exchange with Lowland culture. (Indeed, in the Transition Period, Smith draws attention to Dunbar’s parody of Highland cultures and so internal schisms and divisions between different medieval cultures in Scotland, thereby complicating the problem of ‘national unity’ or cohesiveness.) The idea of an historically traceable and distinct Scottish literary culture significantly emerges out of Victorian intellectual and antiquarian enterprises. It can be seen also in a variety of other publications from this period such as T. F. Henderson’s Scottish Vernacular Literature () and J. H. Millar’s A Literary History of Scotland (), and earlier D. Irving’s History of Scotish [sic] Poetry (); but the particular critical narrative shape which Smith gave to this body of recent medieval scholarship gave Scottish modernist writers a new touchstone of aesthetic and historical value. In the decades of the s and s, neo-medievalism flourished in other ways. The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland which, as elsewhere, embodied a variety of artistic mediums and material cultures, melded a renewed fascination for the aesthetic power of medieval arts with the contemporary and fashionable inspirations of European Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Like the English Arts and Crafts movement driven by a political vision of the empowering inclusivity of the arts across society and culture, fin-de-siècle Scottish neo-medievalism has a social purpose. Shaped by a number of different artistic and political influences, one movement or phenomenon in which neo-medievalism plays a significant role is the Celtic Revival, or ‘The Celtic Renascence’. This threads back to Romantic and early nineteenth-century neomedievalism in its identification between cultural, ideological, and national identities and the renewing sources of medieval literature and art. One of the most concrete expressions of the movement is the journal called The Evergreen. Relatively short-lived, its four issues printed in – ably fulfilled its remit as ‘a northern seasonal’. Echoing the politically and socially informed artistic practice of William Morris and others, it was also underpinned by the aims of social and practical renewal associated with one of its founders, Patrick Geddes (–). An ecologist, polymath, and social visionary, Geddes helped to ensure that the journal’s contents consistently reflected the holistic interrelationship between the arts and sciences which he saw as inseparable from broader processes of civic and political renewal. The first spring issue, for example, contains essays by William MacDonald, J. Arthur Thomson, and Geddes which articulate their utopian vision of an allencompassing regeneration which begins with the restoration and transformation

²⁰ Smith, Specimens, .

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 -



of material environments: ‘[W]ith this . . . there arises a corresponding renewal of economic and moral function which shall yet be Industry, the renewal and development of Life as well—what shall yet be Education. And then even painter and poet find, through what seemed to them an irrelevant science, new space for beauty and new stimulus of song’.²¹ For Geddes, the emblem of civic, and therefore cultural, renewal had specific embodiment in the ‘current resuscitation of old Edinburgh’,²² and the precedent of Ramsay’s Evergreen. The debt was not only titular; Geddes wanted ‘our new Evergreen’ to reincarnate what he perceived as a radical early eighteenth-century fusion of ‘local tradition and living nature’, and so add ‘a fresh page to that widely reviving Literature of Locality’,²³ resulting in a process of ‘radical decentralization, shifting focus away from London and toward the Celtic fringe’.²⁴ And in more literal, architectural terms, the building and extension of Ramsay Gardens in Edinburgh— accommodation for students, artists, and Geddes’s own family as well as the University School of Art—took shape around the home which once belonged to Allan Ramsay. The neo-medieval vein which runs through the reborn Evergreen and its ethically and socially regenerative framework is culturally eclectic. Its diverse medieval ‘Celticity’ is seen in the inclusion of ‘retellings’ of ‘Breton’ tradition by Edith Wingate Rinder (who was also William Sharp’s lover). Her prose fantasies, including ‘Amel and Penhor’ and ‘Telen Rumengol’, mark a larger and distinctive contribution by women artists to the journal, which included work by the Irish writers, Rosa Mulholland (–), Katherine Tynan (–), and Nora Hopper (–). It is early medieval English lyric tradition which appears in modernized versions (‘Old English Spring’; ‘Blow Northern Wind’ in the first issue) rather than Scots,²⁵ though one of the early visual illustrations, ‘Robene and Makyne’, by the Scottish-trained artist Charles Hodge Mackie is an unacknowledged reference to a pastoral lyric by Robert Henryson. Geddes’s spring issue manifesto only partly imagines a nascent Scottish ‘Renascence’ in the mythic terms of medieval Lowland Scotland—‘[t]he prophetic Rhymer listens from Elfland, Arthur sits in the Eildon Hills, Merlin but sleeps in his thorn’—yet the ‘Celticity’ of this vision draws most strongly from the Gaelic medieval culture of the western highlands and islands. For Geddes, the ‘revival of ancient Celtic design’, the ‘expression of youngest Scottish art’,²⁶ was core to his vision of an organic aesthetic and social renewal based in vernacular art. In the Evergreen’s interplay of word and image, interlacing knots and

²¹ The Evergreen. A Northern Seasonal (Spring ): . ²² The Evergreen, . ²³ The Evergreen, , . ²⁴ Julian Hanna, ‘Manifestos at Dawn: Nation, City and Self in Patrick Geddes and William Sharp’s Evergreen’, International Journal of Scottish Literature,  (), http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue/hanna. htm, accessed Nov. . ²⁵ One exception is the poem ‘Ane Playnt of Luve’ by the sculptor and poet, James Pittendrigh Macgillivray (–) (he also contributes to the second issue), which strongly recalls the love lyrics of the mid-sixteenth-century Scottish Bannatyne manuscript (issued in a facsimile edition in  by the Hunterian Club). ²⁶ Evergreen, .

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

    

spirals ‘after the manner of Celtic ornament’, principally by female artists (one of whom, Helen Hay, taught at Geddes’s Edinburgh Arts and Crafts School, founded in ), are significant embellishments and central figures of decoration and ornamentation. For Geddes and others, Celtic design combined beauty and the practicability of traditional and new crafts, and so became central to the revival of fin-de-siècle Scottish art, design, and education; interestingly, Charles Rennie Macintosh’s first professional commission ‘was the design of a Celtic cross to commemorate Alexander McCall, Chief Constable of the City of Glasgow Police. With a bronze inset portrait by Pittendrigh Macgillivray, it was inspired by medieval west Highland work.’²⁷ What Geddes described as ‘the vastest and most elaborate Celtic illumination in the modern world’²⁸ were painted in - the Common Room of the University Hall at Ramsay Garden by Helen Hay, Helen Baxter, and John Duncan. Duncan, a key visual artist of late nineteenth-century Scottish neo-medievalism and close collaborator with Geddes, paints episodes from Celtic and British Arthurian myth (e.g. ‘The Taking of Excalibur’, c.). (Indeed, Scottish Arthurianism in this period is largely visual rather than literary.²⁹) Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, European Symbolism, and Italian Renaissance art, Duncan also painted Joan of Arc—‘Jehanne d’Arc et sa Garde Ecossaise’, c.—at the suggestion of Geddes and Andrew Lang, a member of the FrancoScottish Society, founded in Edinburgh in ,³⁰ and who would later write a study of la pucelle. Interestingly, this points to the broader feminized neo-medieval Catholic strain which runs through the Evergreen (and through the poetry of Robert Buchanan). Allusions to the Cúchulainn and Fenian cycles in the Evergreen bind early Irish tradition to Scottish, reflecting the coalescence of revivalist energies in Ireland and Scotland in the s. William Sharp (–), another of the journal’s contributors, keenly attributed the burgeoning ‘Scoto-Celtic’ movement of the early s to the Ossianic heritage and ‘immediately’ to ‘the rising of the sap in the Irish nation’.³¹ A co-collaborator with Geddes on the Evergreen project (informing him in  that he sought ‘to centralise in Edinburgh all the Celtic work now being done by Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers’),³² and correspondent of Yeats in the s, Sharp controversially

²⁷ Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, ), . ²⁸ Qtd Cumming, Hand, . ²⁹ The Scottish painter, William Dyce (–), was commissioned to decorate the Queen’s Robing Room in  (and therefore at an early stage in the nineteenth-century rehabilitation of Arthurian legend) with illustrations from Malory’s legends, but their apparent eroticism was problematic; as a compromise, Dyce opted for emblematic illustrations of chivalric virtues but died before completion of all seven. See Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), ch. . ³⁰ John Kemplay, The Paintings of John Duncan: A Scottish Symbolist (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, ), . ³¹ Elizabeth Sharp, William Sharp/Fiona MacLeod: A Memoir (London: William Heinemann, ), . ³² Qtd in Hanna, ‘Manifestos’.

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 -



and prolifically wrote under the pseudonym ‘Fiona MacLeod’. The alterity of this writerly alter ego—feminine, Gaelic, Catholic—is mirrored in the division between the Sharp/‘MacLeod’ inclusions in the Evergreen itself: a ‘legendary romance’ concerning Brigid, ‘Mary of the Gael’, is MacLeod’s, echoing the feminized, mystical discourse, a blend of paganism and neo-Catholicism, which characterizes his other published work as MacLeod (e.g. his prose fantasy, Pharais, published in , the year in which he met Geddes). Sharp is naturally a controversial figure, and his is a particularly egregious kind of ‘Celticity’, a ‘racial revival’, in Geddes’s words,³³ conjured out of mythic essentialism (Hugh MacDiarmid erased Sharp/MacLeod from his otherwise fulsome praise for Geddes’s and the movement’s cultural cosmopolitanism). But Sharp’s work should be seen as a significant creative and imaginative counterpart to the renewed collection and gathering of medieval Highland culture by Alexander Carmichael for the Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations Collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the last Century (), an idealized, aestheticized pan-Celtic vision which provokes interesting questions about sexual and cultural identities in fin-de siècle Scotland. Another pivotal exponent of the s Scottish neo-medieval aesthetic is the Irishborn artist Phoebe Anna Traquair.³⁴ A prolific painter and practitioner (working with a variety of different materials, including embroidery, enamelling, and other material crafts such as mural decoration), her work in this decade, like Geddes’s, gathers together different influences, past and present, most notably with William Morris (who came to Edinburgh in  for a meeting of the National Association of the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry),³⁵ John Ruskin, and the PreRaphaelite circle. She illustrates Morris’s ‘Defence of Guinevere’ and ‘The Song of Solomon’ (), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (–). Like Duncan’s, Traquair’s work absorbs the influence of Italian medieval art and manuscript illumination: this can be seen in the illustrations she produced for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’; and for an edition of Dante’s La Vita Nuova (–). Traquair’s art also presents an embodied visual legacy and heritage which, redolent of Geddes’s vision, has civic value and import, as seen in the murals which she created in Edinburgh between  and  for the chapels of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children; the Song School of St Mary’s Cathedral; the Catholic Apostolic Church in East London Street; the glowing angelic figures which serenely evoke medieval Italian illuminations have the poignant purpose of ‘comforting bereaved families’³⁶ whilst fulfilling Traquair’s belief in the spiritual potential of the arts. Traquair is the first professional woman artist in Scotland and her vision is singular but she is also representative of a community of female artists who, in the s in Edinburgh and Glasgow, carved out a new creative and social space, enabling them to combine literary and visual arts through the crafts of book binding, design, and ³³ Cumming, Hand, . ³⁴ Cf. Elizabeth Cumming, Phoebe Anna Traquair (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, ). ³⁵ Cumming, Hand, . ³⁶ Cumming, Hand, –.

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

    

illustration, many of which were medievalist in subject and form, as in the work of Annie S. MacDonald (–). Morris’s poetry was also illustrated by other artists as well as Traquair, such as Jessie M. King (–) (who also illustrated BurneJones and whose work is frequently fantastical, medievalist, and fairytale-esque), and by Margaret and Frances MacDonald (‘The Defence of Guenevere and other poems’, ). The work of the MacDonald sisters in particular exemplifies how the Celtic art revival permeated beyond Geddes and the Edinburgh circle, reflected in Frances’s early work where her ‘angular, humorous, and attenuated’ female figures resemble ‘details on the pages of illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells’.³⁷

S  Burkhauer, Jude, Glasgow Girls. Women in Art and Design – (Edinburgh: Canongate, ). Bawcutt, Priscilla, ‘Dunbar and his Readers: From Allan Ramsay to Richard Burton’, Studies in Scottish Literature, – (): –. Cumming, Elizabeth, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, ). Davis, Leith, ‘Imagining the Miscellaneous Nation: James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems’, Eighteenth-Century Life, / (): –. Dunnigan, Sarah, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of Scott, Scotland, and the Grimms’, in Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew (eds), Scotland and the Nineteenth-Century World (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, ), –. Hanna, Julian, ‘Manifestos at Dawn: Nation, City and Self in Patrick Geddes and William Sharp’s Evergreen’, International Journal of Scottish Literature,  () [web]. Kemplay, John, The Paintings of John Duncan: A Scottish Symbolist (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, ). Mainer, Sergi, The Scottish Romance Tradition c.–c. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ). Marsden, Richard A., Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland’s Past c.– (Farnham: Ashgate, ). Newman, Steve, ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly, / (Fall ): –. Pittock, Murray G. H., Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Poulson, Christine, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ).

³⁷ Jude Burkhauer, Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design – (Edinburgh: Canongate, ), .

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        ......................................................................................................................

       ’    . .         ,        ,   

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 

A defined as ‘the most curious book in the world’,¹ Boccaccio’s Decameron first appeared in Victorian England in the Italian edition of  published by William Pickering with an introduction by the famous Italian poet Ugo Foscolo.² Despite its ‘gross and disgusting licentiousness’,³ the Decameron appears to be a treasure of good tales written by a ‘most divine writer’⁴ who was able to arouse the desire to write in the Victorian reader, the pleasure of production reserved only for eminent readers and potential writers. It is not by chance that many eminent Victorians such as Thomas Moore, John Cam Hobhouse, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne were deeply affected by the stylistic and conceptual innovations of the Decameron, in which there is no Aristotelian distinction between honest love, love for delight, and love for utility. Far from considering the Decameron as family reading, to be read aloud in the family circle in the presence of wives and daughters and for the instruction of children in their

¹ D. G. Rossetti, qtd in H. G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, ), . ² The poet Ugo Foscolo (–) was an exile in England from  onwards. ³ Wright, Boccaccio in England, . ⁴ Wright, Boccaccio in England, .

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

 

moral duties, eminent Victorian authors took pleasure in rewriting Boccaccio’s medieval tales of love. A ‘fusion of horizons’,⁵ medieval and Victorian, is activated in particular by Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne experiencing an elitist pleasure derived from reading the Decameron which appears to be a ‘writerly text’⁶ or ‘text of bliss’, i.e. a text of sublimity which not only stimulates the reader’s creativity but imposes the desire to rewrite, imitate, and emulate the original text. From this perspective, the Decameron is a text of pleasure in the Barthesian sense, not only because it deals with the sensualistic and epicurean vision of the ars amandi but also because it stimulates the reader’s creativity, imposing a state of desire on the reader, discomforting and unsettling the consistency of his tastes, values, and memories. Boccaccio’s medievalism as envisioned in the Decameron establishes this kind of relationship with its cultured readers who are infused with boundless pleasure and with the impelling desire to write and rewrite this epic collection of medieval tales. It is my objective here to investigate Rossetti’s, Morris’s, and Swinburne’s indebtedness to Boccaccio through George Lakoff ’s notion of conceptual metaphors as expressed in the Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought,⁷ as well as through the logic of ‘remediation’⁸ as theorized by Bolter and Grusin, which provide an illuminating framework for discussing how Rossetti’s, Morris’s, and Swinburne’s mind styles were deeply affected by Boccaccio’s creatural medievalism. Combining high and low social classes, knights at arms and ‘knights of the florin’,⁹ Boccaccio’s Decameron represents a new kind of medievalism, what Auerbach would call ‘creatural’¹⁰ medievalism based on materiality and carnality, on ‘the vitalisticdynamic triumph of the physical body and its functions’.¹¹ This kind of innovation, along with Boccaccio’s conceptual ambiguity and stylistic experimentalism, ravished the minds of such medievalist writers as Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Five centuries after its publication, the Decameron appealed to the Victorian readership and in particular those eminent readers dreaming of what Umberto Eco calls ‘the Middle Ages of Decadentism’,¹² for its fleshly pleasures taken to the extremes of human experience.

⁵ Hans Robert Jauss, Wege des Verstehens (Munich: Fink, ), . ⁶ Roland Barthes coined the term ‘writerly text’ as opposed to the ‘readerly text’, the classic text which can be read but not written. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, ), . ⁷ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (eds), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, ). ⁸ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ). ⁹ Viktoria Kirkham, ‘The Tale of Guglielmo Borsiere’, in Elissa B. Weaver (ed.), The Decameron First Day in Perspective: Volume One of the Lecturae Boccaccii (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . ¹⁰ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . ¹¹ Auerbach, Mimesis, . ¹² Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), .

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   ’ 



In line with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and John William Waterhouse who painted pictures illustrating the tales of the Decameron, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne operated their own remediations of Boccaccio’s questions of love. In their cross-cultural translations of the Decameron, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne seem to appropriate and refashion Boccaccio’s medievalism in unique works of art.

B’ F  R’    

.................................................................................................................................. Like his father Gabriele, author of Sullo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma (), his brother William Michael who translated Boccaccio’s Filostrato, and his sister Christina, author of ‘Dante, An English Classic’ (), an essay investigating Boccaccio’s poetry, Rossetti translated Boccaccio’s rhymes in The Early Italian Poets (), and created such double works of art as Bocca Baciata (), and A Vision of Fiammetta (). Defined by Ford Madox Ford as ‘purely pagan who satisfied his desires as they came’,¹³ Rossetti fell under the spell of Boccaccio’s medievalism in . After visiting the Louvre in , , and later in , he changed his philosophy, leaving ‘Stoicism for Epicureanism’.¹⁴ What stirred Rossetti’s interest was the Italian sensual hedonism as embodied by Fiammetta, Boccaccio’s beloved and muse, who took up multiple roles appearing as the queen of the court of love in the Filocolo (–), as a femme fatale in La Teseide (–), and as one of the seven nymphs of the Ameto (–). Rossetti seems to be haunted by the figure of Fiammetta, endowing his mistress Fanny Cornforth with the same shape-shifting ability as Boccaccio’s muse, since she is depicted as a fallen woman in Found (), as a femme fatale in The Blue Bower (), and as a seducing goddess in Venus Verticordia (–). In Sentences and Notes (), Rossetti offers an ante-litteram definition of remediation, whose blending mode is described in beautiful and sensual terms: ‘Picture and poem bare the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection.’¹⁵ Behind these words, there lies Rossetti’s vision of artistic remediation, according to which perfection may only be achieved in mediating between opposite poles, between picture and poem, between man and woman who are incorporated and represented in another medium,

¹³ Ford Madox Ford, Rossetti: A Critical Essay on his Art (London and New York: Duckworth & Co., ), . ¹⁴ W. H. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (New York: AMS Press, ), . ¹⁵ D. G. Rossetti, ‘Sentences and Notes’ (), in The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis & White, ), .

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

 

in what Maryan Wynn Ainsworth calls the ‘double work of art’.¹⁶ Found (), Golden Water (), Bocca Baciata (), Proserpine (), Astarte Syriaca (–), and Fiammetta (), are only a few examples of remediation, i.e. a combination of poetry and painting in a unique work, a kind of inter-semiotic translation able to promote the conceptual aspects of the image and the iconographical powers of the text. The leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aimed at recovering the primitive art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—illustrating, borrowing, repurposing the stories from medieval literary and historical sources (including the dolce stil novo of the early Italian poets, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Boccaccio’s Decameron). By taking property from one medium and reusing it in another remediation, Rossetti, author of about thirty Sonnets for Picture,¹⁷ started a conscious interplay between media which can be appreciated only if the reader or viewer happens to know both versions and can compare them. If the implicit and sometimes explicit goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media, then Rossetti’s triple works of art and the immaterialized Perlascura project¹⁸ of publishing a dozen autotypes of Jane Morris in a book (Twelve Coins for One Queen) appear as innovative forms of remediation. Rossetti, ‘the most innovative artist of the period, the inventor of a style’,¹⁹ reformed his double works of art into a new medium: the triple work of art, ‘fulfilling the unkept promise of the older medium’.²⁰ Following the rhetoric of remediation which claims that a new medium makes a good thing in terms of immediacy and hypermediacy even better than its predecessor, the female subjects of Bocca Baciata (), and A Vision of Fiammetta () oscillate between inter-textual media, and their subjectivities are determined by those oscillations. In Bocca Baciata, the female subject is assured of existence by the fact that she can enter into immediate relationships with the various media that surround her: the inscription (from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Day , Story ) which is written on the back of the picture (‘bocca baciata non perde ventura’) and Rossetti’s ekphrastic poem, ‘The Song of the Bower’,  (‘Large lovely arms and a neck like a tower’,

¹⁶ Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (Hartford, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, ), . ¹⁷ In the fourth issue of The Germ, Rossetti published Sonnets for Picture, a collection of seven sonnets on famous paintings in the Louvre and other museums on the Continent. In this collection, Rossetti includes paraphrases and comments on his own paintings as well as his highly subjective reinterpretations of paintings by such artists as Hans Mammeling, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, and Ingres. ¹⁸ In August  Rossetti decided to publish some dozen autotypes of Jane Morris in a book. The idea emerged from Rossetti’s involvement with Frederick Shields, a partner in the English Picture Publishing Company, which set about to publish photographic reproductions of the work of contemporary and earlier British artists. It is not possible to ascertain which images of Mrs Morris Rossetti may have thought to include in the Perlascura series, but the first to be published was the drawing of Mrs Morris figured as La Donna Della Finestra. ¹⁹ Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ²⁰ Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, .

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   ’ 



ll. –).²¹ The different titles chosen for the picture (Bocca Baciata) and the poem (‘The Song of the Bower’ recalling the Bible’s Song of Songs) operate a blending between the profane and the sacred that becomes such a crucial part of Rossetti’s works from  forward. For the sensuous use of colour, and the Venetian aspect of the female figure, the painting, which applies Rossetti’s principle of ‘the mere gratification of the eye’,²² appears to be a most innovative triple work of art. In the process of transmutation of media and cultural contamination, Rossetti’s Fiammetta is also reminiscent of Alatiel, the daughter of the Sultan of Babylon featuring in tale II., who is kissed a thousand times by her lovers. This cross-cultural reference may be seen as an allusion to Fanny Cornforth, a prostitute by profession, who used to meet Rossetti and George Boyce in the notorious Argyll Rooms in Piccadilly. The obscenity of the proverb ‘A mouth that is kissed loses no flavor, but, like the moon, is renewed’ is echoed in the poem ‘The Song of the Bower’ (‘My mouth to thy mouth as the world melts away’, l. )²³ and visually rendered in the red lips, flowing red hair, ruddy cheeks, and exposed neck. All the decorative details appearing in the painting—the coral necklace, the white rose, the marigold, and the ripe apple—are, according to Ruskin, ‘wonderful in their realism; . . . awful in their coarseness’.²⁴ Those signs of female sexuality, conveying what Hunt calls ‘animal passion . . . a gross sensuality of a revolting kind’,²⁵ are exquisitely Rossettian in their symbolic ambivalence and contradictory message. For example, the marigold is a visual reminder of Aphrodite and her pains of love but at the same time, as D. M. R. Bentley underlines, is also ‘a flower whose name is a compound of (the Virgin) Mary and gold’.²⁶ Likewise, the ripe apple on the shelf may well be associated with both the biblical story of the Fall and the mythological judgment of Paris. This logic of distortion calls for representations of the real that in fact multiply the signs of mediation and in this way try to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. Rossetti’s female subject is defined as a succession of relationships with various media (verbal and visual) and cultures as envisioned in Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Arabian Nights, whose reference is evident in the Oriental exoticism of Alatiel’s story. Thus, Rossetti’s female figure oscillates between media (moves from the visual to the verbal and vice versa), between models of sexualized women (Fanny, Fiammetta,

²¹ D. G. Rossetti, ‘The Song of the Bower’, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh (London: Dent, ), . ²² William Holman Hunt, letter to Thomas Combe,  Feb. , cited in Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (–): A Catalogue Raisonné,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), i. . ²³ D. G. Rossetti, ‘The Song of the Bower’, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Marsh, . ²⁴ John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Sir Edward Tyas Cook, and Alexander Dundas Ogilvy Wedderburn (London: G. Allen ), xxxvi. . ²⁵ W. H. Hunt, letter to Thomas Combe,  Feb. , cited in Surtees, Paintings and Drawings, . ²⁶ D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Love for Love: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata and “The Song of the Bower” ’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies,  (Fall ): .

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

 

and Alatiel), and her subjectivity is determined by those oscillations. As J. B. Bullen remarks, ‘the figure in Rossetti’s Bocca baciata is not Alatiel, and none of the incidents in her life is illustrated in the painting, yet between them Boccaccio’s text and Rossetti’s image both speak of the infinitely self-regenerative aspects of human desire’.²⁷ From this perspective, Rossetti’s sexualized woman is endowed with the ability to occupy points of view and by the fact that she can enter into immediate relationships with the various media or media forms that surround her. Another peculiar form of remediation is represented by A Vision of Fiammetta () whose frame is inscribed with three texts: () the sonnet by Boccaccio ‘Sovra li fior vermigli e’ capei d’oro’, imbued with Petrarchan sensuality (‘Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi’²⁸) and the dolce stil novo lexicon (‘nugoletta’, and ‘angioletta’) that inspired Rossetti’s painting; () Rossetti’s translation of that sonnet ‘On His Last Sight of Fiammetta’, unable to maintain Boccaccio’s epiphora of the word ‘oro’ (‘Lucida più che mai argento o oro / E qual candida perla in anel d’oro’, ll. –; ‘D’oriental zafir vestita e d’oro’, l. );²⁹ () Rossetti’s own original (ekphrastic) sonnet composition that explicitly doubles the picture. Almost a quadruple work of art, A Vision of Fiammetta may be seen as the reforming of the triple work of art, the triple work of art as the reforming of the double work of art, and the double work of art as the reforming of the work of art. In each case that inadequacy is represented as a lack of immediacy, thus, A Vision of Fiammetta, the quintessential representation of media reform is more immediate than common painting, offering new opportunities for hypermediacy. Inspired by Boccaccio’s sonnet, A Vision of Fiammetta appears to be a heterogeneous mixture of signs, albeit unable to render the semantic fullness of Boccaccio’s text. Only the first quatrains are visually transposed in the symbolic chromatism of Fiammetta’s portrait, which lacks the eroticism of previous representations. It is highly significant that the model for this painting is Marie Spartali Stillman, one of Rossetti’s favourite muses for her Greek beauty and subtle charms which were, according to Rossetti, difficult to recreate: ‘I find her head about the most difficult I ever drew. It depends not nearly so much on real form as on subtle charm of life which one cannot re-create.’³⁰ Far from the overt sexuality of Fanny Cornforth, Marie Spartali Stillman was characterized by elegant features and the mystery of shadowed eyes that gave life to a new and spiritual version of Boccaccio’s muse. For his last sight of Fiammetta, Rossetti prefers to reproduce the intellectual and ethereal figure of Marie Spartali Stillman in order to acquire the truthfulness of life in death and maintain the continuity between depicted and real space.

²⁷ J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²⁸ Francesco Petrarca, Le rime (Florence: Leonardo Ciardetti, ), . ²⁹ Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime (Livorno: Tommaso Masi, ), . ³⁰ Andrea Rose, Pre-Raphaelite Portraits (Yeovil: Oxford Illustrated Press, ), .

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   ’ 



Almost like a Dantesque vision, the figure is split between the chromatic dualism holy gold/deadly red as clearly expressed in the very first line of the sonnet: ‘Sovra li fior vermigli e’ i capei d’oro’ (‘Round her red garland and her golden hair’). As Julian Treuhers aptly summarizes ‘Fiammetta wears a flame-colored dress in allusion to her name . . . . [she] stands entwined in the branches of an apple tree surrounded by emblems of the departing soul a shower of falling red and white blossom, a blood-red bird (the messenger of death), butterflies (symbols of soul), and an angel in the aureole around her head.’³¹ Despite such a profusion of glowing colours symbolizing the brief moment between life and death, the painting under-translates the verbal message of the source text, overlooking the suffering of the poet who ‘with these strings of sorrows and with life’s most weary load / [He] dwell[s]’ (ll. –).³² Rossetti’s incapacity to translate Boccaccio’s turmoil in the pictorial medium confirms what Dinda Gorlée calls ‘informational loss which is highest in intersemiotic translation, since the semiosis shows maximum degeneracy’.³³ The mysterious message of the painting may be explained by the enigmatic personality of the poet-painter whose aesthetic credo is defined by Jerome McGann as ‘an art of pastiche and ritual form’.³⁴ This eclectic procedure is also employed by Boccaccio who experimented with the tension between lyric and narrative components, facilitating what N. J. Perella calls ‘the confluence of various literary currents: the aulic, stil novo tradition, the popular poetry of the time, the burlesque trend . . . and his own tendency toward realism’.³⁵ From this view, Boccaccio and Rossetti were nearly kindred spirits for their innovative artistic veins, and the overall dominance of sensual pleasures in their works. As a mediator of cultures, Rossetti accomplishes the task of remediating older media into new ones, into double, triple, and quadruple works of art, thereby establishing his own space of cultural meaning.

B, M,       

.................................................................................................................................. Writing to Georgiana Burne-Jones from Verona in , Morris reveals his fascination with Italy characterized by ‘magnificent and wonderful towns’³⁶ that capture his ³¹ J. Treuherz, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in R. Dorment, and T. Barringer (eds), Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, ), . ³² D. G. Rossetti, ‘Of his Last Sight of Fiammetta’, in The Early Italian Poets (London: Smith: Elder & Co., ), . ³³ D. I. Gorlée, Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, ), p. . ³⁴ McGann, Rossetti and the Game, . ³⁵ N. J. Perella, ‘Boccaccio’s Lyric Poetry’, Italica, / (Mar. ): . ³⁶ William Morris, letter to Mrs Burne-Jones, May , in The Collected Letters of William Morris: –, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), i. .

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

 

imagination and draw him into a dream in which he feels a strange exaltation of spirit: ‘I am really much excited at all I have seen and am seeing, though sometimes it all tumbles into a dream and I do not know where I am.’³⁷ What stirred Morris’s interest was not the noble Italian art of the earlier Renaissance with which he had but little sympathy, but the natural beauty of Italy with its sublime Alps and Apennines and wonderful lakes like Lake Garda, that gave him such a shock of delight that he ‘really thought [he] had fallen asleep and was dreaming of some strange sea where everything had grown together in perfect accord with wild stories’.³⁸ For the Victorian dreamer of dreams whose ‘work was the embodiment of dreams’,³⁹ those ‘bits of the great world’,⁴⁰ as Morris calls them, gave him the impression that Italy was a ‘country like a garden’,⁴¹ an earthly paradise whose dream-like landscapes are fictionally reproduced in The House of the Wolfings (), The Roots of the Mountains (), and The Wood Beyond the World (). But even before visiting Northern Italy (Florence, Oneglia, Genoa, Venice, Padua, and Verona) first with Burne-Jones in , and later on with his wife in , Morris was deeply affected by the Italian medievalism of Dante and Boccaccio and in particular by the mixture of the sublime with the low. This interest in Italian medievalism is expressed in Morris’s review of Rossetti’s The Early Italian Poets (), in which he reveals his appreciation of the figural realism of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the fleshly medievalism of Boccaccio’s lyrics: ‘The book is complete and satisfactory from end to end . . . it gives to the very symbols the personal life and variety of mankind . . . . It deals wonderfully with all real things that can have poetic life given by passion.’⁴² Also very relevant in this sense is the copy of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, purchased by Morris in , containing the biographies of more than  notable women, and full of woodcut illustrations printed at Ulm in . That was a very fine clean crisp copy bound in sixteenth-century vellum stained yellow which was highly recommended by Burne-Jones: ‘Buy the book by all means’,⁴³ was Burne-Jones’s advice, ‘how much better worth it is than any number of books of less value’.⁴⁴ For Morris, the Middle Ages were a conceptual metaphor, a correspondence between medieval concepts across conceptual domains, which projects an alternative world of beauty wherein the material and the spiritual are successfully integrated. A paramount example of this cognitive process is expressed in The Earthly Paradise,⁴⁵ ³⁷ Morris, letter to Mrs Burne-Jones. ³⁸ J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (New York: Longmans, ), i. . ³⁹ William Morris, letter to Cornell Price, , in The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends, ed. Philip Henderson (London: Longmans, ), . ⁴⁰ Mackail, Life of Morris, . ⁴¹ William Morris, letter to Jane Morris,  Apr. , in Collected Letters: –, . ⁴² William Morris, ‘Review of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems’, in Art and Architecture: Essays – (Holicong: Wildside Press, ), . ⁴³ Mackail, Life of Morris, . ⁴⁴ Mackail, Life of Morris, . ⁴⁵ Unless otherwise stated, Morris’s poems are taken from The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence Boos (New York: Routledge, ).

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   ’ 



Morris’s collection of twenty-four narrative poems into four volumes and more than , lines which are held together by a framework, after the fashion of Boccaccio’s Decameron and which employs occasionally the rhyme scheme of Dante’s Divine Comedy, later fully adopted in The Defence of Guenevere. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, which according to Florence Boos ‘aligns itself with a secular tradition of narrative and romance, . . , reworking earlier disclaimers, such as Boccaccio’s in the Proem to the Decameron’,⁴⁶ projects the medieval metaphors ‘life is a quest’ for an earthly paradise and ‘love is a garden’ of endless bliss which needs cultivation to produce its richest fruits. These conceptual metaphors included in such Morrisian lines as ‘we [wanderers] had reached the gates of Paradise / And endless bliss, at what unmeasured price / Man sets his life’ (‘Prologue. The Wanderers’, ll. –) and ‘nearby on the grass did stand / Seven white-skinned damsels, wrought so fair / . . . That his heart sickened, and quickfire, / Within his parched throat seemed to burn.’ (‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, ll. –, –) are mapped on the target domain of medieval abstractions (such as quest, romance, and dream) which could be easily ascribed to both Dante and Boccaccio. If the former set of verses recalls Dante’s metaphorical projection of heavenly visions, the latter lines reflect Boccaccio’s cognitive structures of pleasure in the medieval garden of love as envisioned in Filocolo (), Teseida (), Ameto (), Amorosa visione (–), Ninfale fiesolano (), and in the Decameron⁴⁷ () whose gardens are used as framing devices. Apart from the titular similarity between The Divine Comedy⁴⁸ and The Earthly Paradise, activated by Dante’s use of indirect antonyms ‘disdegnoso gusto’, Inferno XIII, ; ‘levate dal viso i duri veli’, Inferno XXXIII, ; ‘arsura fresca’, Inferno, XIV, ; ‘vergine madre’, Paradiso, XXXIII, , and Morris’s predilection for direct oxymorons,⁴⁹ there is no shadow of Dante in the largest and most important of all Morris’s poetical works as clearly expressed by the poet himself: ‘Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, / I cannot ease the burden of your fears’ (‘Prologue. The Wanderers’, ll. –). From this perspective, the process by which we cognitively reconstruct the meanings of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise by making conceptual projections from the formal shape of the text’s linguistic characteristics seems to be mapped out in close proximity

⁴⁶ Florence Boos, The Design of William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, ), . ⁴⁷ According to Naomi Miller, ‘the gardens of the Decameron . . . are expressions of goodness, hope and joy—the earthly paradise’: ‘Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains’, in Elisabeth B. MacDougall (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, ), . ⁴⁸ For a masterly reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy see Robert Hollander, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). ⁴⁹ See Jerome McGann, ‘ “A Thing to Mind”: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris’, HLQ (): –.

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

 

to Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione,⁵⁰ an allegorical poem in which, as John Dixon Hunt maintains, ‘the garden of love topos is interwoven with the equally topical and complex theme of the journey/pilgrimage to narrate the palyngenesis and restoration provoked by love’.⁵¹ Both The Earthly Paradise and the Amorosa visione represent the quest for immortal love through allegorical figures, a popular medieval convention which reveals the balance between actions in the world and cultural patterns loaded with expectations in our minds. The subject of Morris’s twenty-four tales and Boccaccio’s fifty cantos is erotic love⁵² achieved or failed, triumphant over or destroyed by fate, and woman is the pure anima, the preserver of man’s morality whose cathartic arena is a medieval garden of love. Boccaccio’s Fiammetta,⁵³ ‘donna gentile e valorosa, / di biltà fonte, com di luce sole’ (Amorosa visione, L, –), is the virtuous woman prototype on whom we would map numerous examples of Morris’s women (Atalanta, the swan-maiden, Psyche, Morgan Le Fay, and so forth). Onto the Boccaccian source domain of individual member or prototypical member we can map classes of persons in the Morrisian target domain. However, when we map from a category’s prototype (Fiammetta) to other members of the class (Morris’s women), two more domains are introduced. That is, mapping from a person to a virtue, and from a prototype to a class member, suggests that four domains are involved. This is when blending theory⁵⁴ can be useful, as an integration in the mental network within whose structure a separate, blended mental space is projected from input mental spaces. If the Amorosa visione is the source story, then the twenty-four tales comprising The Earthly Paradise represent the target stories whose female allegories bring to life the metaphorical source domain through parabolic mappings. In Boccaccio’s parable of love, the poet after entering ‘un nobile castello . . . e alquanto tenebroso’ (Amorosa visione, I, , –) whose allegorical murals depict the triumph of Love (as exemplified by the figures of Jason and Medea, Hercules and Dianira, Paris and Helen, Aeneas and Dido, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Iseult, and so forth), is led into a beautiful garden ‘fiorito e bello com di primavera’ (Amorosa visione, XXXVII, ) where he encounters his beloved Fiammetta. In this medieval hortus conclusus, Boccaccio ⁵⁰ For a bilingual edition see Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, tr. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, ). ⁵¹ John Dixon Hunt, The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁵² See Tobias Foster Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). ⁵³ For an article on the influence of Fiammetta on D. G. Rossetti’s literary imagination see Eleonora Sasso, ‘ “Bocca baciata non perde ventura”: D. G. Rossetti e la traduzione intersemiotica delle Rime di Boccaccio’, in Gianni Oliva (ed.), I Rossetti e l’Italia (Lanciano: Carabba, ), –. ⁵⁴ See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, ‘Conceptual Integration Networks’, Cognitive Science, /  (): –, as well as Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper (eds), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, ).

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   ’ 



projects his prototypical love story in which love is closely associated with other concepts, such as desire, respect, and devotion. Though moved by intense desire on seeing Fiammetta’s ‘bocca bella e piccoletta / vermiglietta rosa e fresca’ (Amorosa visione, XV, –), the poet is urged to postpone erotic fulfilment by a reflective Fiammetta, whose virtuous attitude is reminiscent of Morris’s virginal Atalanta, innocent Psyche, benevolent Morgan Le Fay, and the reluctant and apprehensive swanmaiden of ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’. Fiammetta and Morris’s seductive women share the same conceptual structure of love which consists of a series of tests (ordeals) aimed at proving their lovers’ ardour and commitment. In terms of love tests postponing pleasure, ‘Atalanta’s Race’ is undoubtedly the Morrisian tale which best exemplifies the ritualistically codified practices of fin amour. Atalanta, daughter of King Schoeneus, not willing to lose her virgin’s state, made it a law to all suitors that they should run a race with her in the public place, and if they failed to overcome her they should die unrevenged. The Arcadian hunter Melanion, struck by Atalanta’s beauty (‘Too fair for one to look on’, ‘Atalanta’s Race’, l. ) as exemplified by her Fiammetta-like ‘shining head’ (l. ) and shining eyes (‘shine eyes glisten’, l. ), prepares himself spiritually for the race for sixty-two days. At last he is able to outrun Atalanta in the foot-race with the help of Venus, thereby gaining the virgin who is now wrapped in a sweet embrace, ‘in new unbroken bliss’ (l. ). More similar to Fiammetta’s main stages of amorous relationship is the tale ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, in which the most beautiful swan-maiden of a magical realm appears to John, a shepherd tortured by ‘longings sweet / Piercing his heart’ (ll. –). In constant fluctuation between denial and affection, the maiden, who recalls Fiammetta for the ‘rosy flame of inner love / glowing through her’ (ll. –), tells John that he must make a painful choice to gain her love: he must renounce the mortal world to enter her own fairy land. Likewise, albeit from a different perspective, Psyche, ‘the soul of innocent desire’ (‘Cupid and Psyche’, l. ), the embodiment of Victorian passive virtues, earns the love of Cupid, a male of divine station, after accomplishing the tasks given her by Venus, as a prerequisite to recovering Eros. In the fair gardens of the palace in Cyprus, ‘Hedged roundabout with woodbine and red rose’ (l. ), Cupid finds Psyche sleeping within a white-thorn shade; he is so ravished by the maiden’s beauty that he wonders if his heart ‘would e’er forget / The perfect arm that o’er her body lay’ (l. ). The last tale worth mentioning is ‘Ogier the Dane’, featuring the sensuous witch Morgan Le Fay who gives the knight Ogier the ring of perpetual youth in order to let him enjoy the bliss of immortal love, but only at the cost of great personal sacrifices, of what Boos calls ‘great fragmentation of the heroic identity’.⁵⁵ In the garden scenario of Avalon, Ogier is mesmerized by Morgan’s golden tresses tumbled luxuriously down her shoulders (‘did he behold / The wandering tresses of her locks of gold / Upon her shoulders’, ll. –). Though driven by a Boccacesque impetus, a desire for physical

⁵⁵ Boos, Design of Morris’ Paradise, .

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

 

contact, ‘For in his heart still burned unquenched the fire’ (l. ), Ogier is able to restrain his ardour and is gently led hand-in-hand by the fairy Morgan through a dreamy green place. With Boccaccio and Fiammetta in the source domain, and Atalanta and Melanion, John and the swan-maiden, Cupid and Psyche, Ogier and Morgan Le Fay in the target domains of courtly love, frames such as devotion, fidelity, and respect provide a generic structure for this conceptual mapping. This generic background informs the construction of both Boccaccio’s story and Morris’s stories, and it is also vital for conceptualizing the allegory of love. Indeed, we can see the blend of the general with the specific coming into action when we see Atalanta, the swan-maiden, Psyche, and Morgan Le Fay as members of the virtuous women category within which Fiammetta would be a prototype. This is a recurring theme in the Amorosa visione but this particular sequence can be listed as follows: . Boccaccio is seduced by Fiammetta in a garden.⁵⁶ . Boccaccio’s desire is calmed down by Fiammetta’s rationale.⁵⁷ . Boccaccio has become an accomplished practitioner of courtly love.⁵⁸ The three narrative strands listed offer enough data for a reader to see how the Boccacian tale relates to the Morrisian narrative poems: . Women seduce men in medieval gardens. . Women are erotic dominants (dominatrixes). . Women are custodians of virtues. In terms of cognitive linguistics and notion of motion events, Boccaccio, like Melanion, John, Cupid, and Ogier is a figure whose path is contrasted with the ground (i.e. garden), which functions as a reference point or landmark for sexual orientation. Analysing the motion events of Boccaccian and Morrisian lovers in relation to gardens, we can determine their mapping scopes whose source concept or goal-oriented movement is metonymically related to a wider target concept or intended action. To put it into more simplified terms, the motion event that involves the motion towards a garden is related to the sole purpose of erotic love. The following occurrences of the

⁵⁶ ‘Dintorno a sé tutto il prato allegrava, / come se stata fosse primavera, . . . ] A rimirar contento questa onesta / donna mi stava, che in atti dicesse / parea parole assai piene di festa’ (Amorosa visione, XV, –, –). ⁵⁷ ‘mille fiate credo la basciai / pria si svegliasse la bella angioletta. / Ma subito stordita a dir:—Che fai?—/ cominciò isvegliata,—deh, non fare! / se quella donna vien, come farai?—’ (Amorosa visione, XLIX, –). ⁵⁸ ‘Dunque, donna gentile e valorosa, / di biltà fonte, com di luce sole, / rimirate alla fiamma che nascosa / dimora nel mio petto, ed ispegnete / quella con l’esser verso me piatosa’ (Amorosa visione, L, –).

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   ’ 



word ‘garden’ well exemplify the similarities between Boccaccio’s gardens of love, and Morris’s paradisal gardens: Entered a garden fit for utmost bliss (‘Ogier the Dane’, l. ) Upon the garden where he walked of yore, / Holding the hands that he should see no more (ll. –) Went through the gardens with one dame alone (‘Ogier the Dane’, l. .) she swept o’er me when I was laid / upon the grass beside her feet (‘Ogier the Dane’, ll. .–) About the garden to and fro, / Plucking the flowers from bough and stalk (‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, ll. –) A meadow meet to make him glad / Full oft because of its sweet grass, (ll. –) Where Psyche dwelt, and through the gardens fair / Passed seeking her (‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, ll. –) Then in the gardens heard the new birds sing (l. ) Amidst the sweetest garden was she laid (‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, l. .) Ere midst the gardens they once more were met (‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, l. .)

The verbs of motion reach, enter, go through, pass through, meet midst in relation to gardens as exemplified by such Boccaccian lines as ‘presi il sentiero per lo bel giardino’ (Amorosa visione, XXXIX, ), ‘com’io mirando andava quel giardino’ (Amorosa visione, XXVI, ), ‘Entriam,—diss’io—in questo orto vicino’ (Amorosa visione, XXXVII, ) are always related to goal oriented movements which project the conceptual metaphor ‘love is a garden’. In Morris’s ‘Ogier the Dane’, ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, the courtly garden becomes laden with allegorical symbolism both sacred and profane and is the locus of the lady’s domain and the epitome of courtly love. The large collection of directional satellites (‘upon’, ‘through’, ‘’Twixt’, ‘to and fro’, ‘Amidst’, ‘o’er’, and so forth) encode a target path which leads always to the centre of the garden, a temenos-centre dimension in terms of spiritual renewal, a taboo area where the dreamer is able to meet his beloved and thereby activate what Morris calls ‘the romance of the garden’.⁵⁹ In the lecture titled ‘Making the Best of it’, Morris underlines the importance of gardens defined as ‘positive necessities if the citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind’.⁶⁰ From this perspective, gardens are to Morris cross-cultural spaces in which he can blend the medieval romance of the garden with its ecological and harmonizing function.

⁵⁹ William Morris, ‘Making the Best of it’, in Christine Poulson (ed.), William Morris on Art and Design (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, ), . ⁶⁰ Morris, ‘Making the Best’, .

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

 

Deeply obsessed with the quest for earthly paradises, for locational conceptual metaphors reflecting the totality of human experience, Morris seems to operate a conceptual blending, a conceptual integration between Dante’s figural realism and Boccaccio’s creatural medievalism. The joint influence of those input domains may clarify the complex and multi-faceted representations of the Middle Ages in Morris’s writings in which the dream of Italy is now embodied by a Fiammetta prototype to whose loyal and everlasting service Boccaccio religiously dedicates his heart and now by an angelic Beatrice ‘la dolce vista / de la mia vita, e d’ogni ben radice’ (Canzone, XVIII, –) who guides Dante to heavenly salvation.

S’    B’ D

.................................................................................................................................. Commonly known as a ‘master of literary imitation’,⁶¹ Swinburne appears to be a writer of pleasure in the Barthesian sense, whose texts disrupt the stereotype according to a logic of distorting repetition, a principle of absolute instability which respects nothing. This mode of rewriting leads Swinburne to produce an erotic repetition of the Decameron, which is also aimed at increasing the fantastic and melancholy tones of Boccaccio’s tales. Author of Poems and Ballads (), a revolutionary collection of poems in both form and content, inaugurating a new aesthetic sensibility in poetry, Swinburne shares with Boccaccio a propensity for the fleshly and erotic representation of love. Deeply inspired by Rossetti’s and Morris’s configurations of medievalism, as exemplified by such Arthurian writings as Rosamund (), Queen Yseult (), Tristam of Lyonesse (), and The Tale of Balen (), Swinburne, like Boccaccio, tends to dramatize the sensuous voices of women who, according to Antony H. Harrison, ‘appear as the object of a man’s consuming passion [and] dominate Swinburne’s work’.⁶² According to Herbert G. Wright, many eminent Victorians experienced the pleasure of rewriting Boccaccio’s medieval tales. See, for example, Thomas Moore who, in his Spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron (), rewrites the story of Lydia and Pyrrhus (Day , Tale ) about deception and abuse of men. Likewise, John Cam Hobhouse took pleasure in reproducing in the poem ‘The Miracle’⁶³ the satirical tone of the tale of Masetto (Day , Tale ), a mockery of the religious quest for Eden, in which all of the convent nuns have sexual relations with Masetto. It is also worth mentioning Tennyson’s dramatic adaptation of Boccaccio’s ninth story for the fifth day, The Falcon, a love story between Federigo degli Alberighi and Monna Giovanna, widely recognized ⁶¹ D. G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ), . ⁶² A. H. Harrison, Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, ), . ⁶³ A poem published in Imitations and Translations from the Ancient and Modern Classics.

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   ’ 



as one of his most successful ventures in the theatre. And last but not least, George Eliot and Swinburne offer their own personal versions of the seventh tale of the tenth day of the Decameron, in which Lisa, an apothecary’s daughter, having seen king Peter of Aragon at a tournament, becomes deeply enamoured of him. Dedicated to all unhappy ladies, who ‘keep the flames of love hidden within their delicate breasts’⁶⁴ (‘Esse dentro a’ dilicati petti . . . tengono l’amorose fiamme nascose’⁶⁵), the Decameron is seen as a love manual in disguise, a playful text to be read for pleasure, as a literary text should be. For this reason, Swinburne, disciple of de Sade, who considered pleasure and pain as intrinsic to sexual and poetic experience, decides to translate those tales particularly appealing to his aesthetic sensibility, that is to say the sixth story for the fourth day about the miseries of unfortunate love, as well as the seventh tale of the tenth day, staging an impossible and destructive love between Lisa Puccini, a beautiful maiden of lowly birth, and king Peter of Aragon. As early as  Swinburne starts writing a cycle of twenty prose tales, to be called the Triameron, a series of interlocked tales modelled on Boccaccio’s Decameron. But unfortunately, only ‘Dead Love’ (), the tale of the series in the Italian style, was published in the popular magazine Once a Week, while such other prose stories as ‘The Marriage of Monna Lisa’ and ‘The Portrait’ were privately printed in . The genesis of Swinburne’s Triameron is clearly reported by Edmund Gosse who underlines Swinburne’s rivalrous rewriting of Boccaccio’s Decameron: Swinburne . . . was occupied with a scheme which had begun to take shape at Oxford and which was not finally abandoned till much later. This was the composition of a cycle of nineteen or twenty prose stories to be issued as the Triameron, in rivalry with Boccaccio . . . The only one of these tales which Swinburne printed was Dead Love, which he sent to Once a Week in , and published in book form in . But several others were written . . . and three still exist.⁶⁶

All written in , the short stories ‘Dead Love’, ‘The Marriage of Monna Lisa’ (of which only seven copies were printed), and ‘The Portrait’ are connected in the Triameron in the manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron. As Watts-Dunton explains, ‘The Portrait’ appears to be the most ‘powerful and striking . . . the cleverest in prose that we hitherto know Swinburne to have written. It exemplifies his marvellous gift for catching the note of a remote and exotic literature.’⁶⁷ Unlike ‘Dead Love’, a horrific and uncanny tale imbued with Gothic nuances recalling the necro-fetishism of Lisabetta da Messina (‘she wrapped [Lorenzo’s head]

⁶⁴ Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, tr. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: Norton & Compton, ), . ⁶⁵ Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, ), i. . ⁶⁶ Sir Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. xix of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne,  vols, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (London: Heinemann, –), . ⁶⁷ T. J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Heinemann, ), .

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

 

in a lovely piece of cloth and put it inside a beautiful large pot of the sort people use for growing marjoram and basil’⁶⁸) and of Andreuola da Ponte Carraro (‘a piece of silk cloth . . . that she spread . . . out on the ground and laid Gabriotto’s body on it’⁶⁹), ‘The Portrait’ is criticized by Watts-Dunton for its stylistic resemblance to Agnolo Firenzuola’s novels: but I think that Swinburne’s model was of later date, and more refined. I think that he was consciously imitating the ‘little novels’ of Agnolo Firenzuola, which were excessively popular in the sixteenth century. There is a considerable resemblance in style. The teller of The Portrait is evidently a priest, a dissolute abbot, who shows his calling by an ironical attack on art and beauty and nakedness, an attack so obviously ironical that it makes the soldiers and the ladies’ laugh more exceedingly than before.—[From the Prefatory Note.]⁷⁰

As suggested by Watts-Dunton in The Writings in Prose and Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne, the first prose tales of the Triameron⁷¹ were inspired by the Novellino, the most successful and original example of vernacular prose literature of the Duecento, while such a tale as ‘Dead Love’ employs an extra-diegetic narrator in the manner of Matteo Bandello (c.–), a Dominican story-teller who was immensely admired during the Renaissance. Despite the widespread popularity among the Pre-Raphaelites of the ill-fated story featuring Lorenzo and Isabella in Boccaccio’s Decameron (IV, ), rendered visually in the paintings by John Everett Millais (Lorenzo and Isabella, ), William Holman Hunt (Isabella with the Pot of Basil, ), and John William Waterhouse (Isabella and the Pot of Basil, ), Swinburne is interested in the lesser known novella of Andreuola (IV, ), who secretly falls in love with Gabriotto, a man of low estate. Swinburne is drawn to the figure of Andreuola, young and beautiful and unmarried, a tragic lover in the city of Brescia whose harrowing story recalls the fatal destiny of Tristan and Iseult, Paolo and Francesca, Romeo and Juliet. Originally titled ‘The White Hind’, in order to render Boccaccio’s chromatic symbolism as embodied by a she-goat whiter than snow (‘una cavriuola . . . più che la neve bianca’⁷²) that Gabriotto dreams of meeting in a fair and pleasant wood, Swinburne’s poem was later revised as ‘The Two Dreams’⁷³ (). This latter is a poetical remediation of Boccaccio’s tale, repurposing the medieval tale and taking property from one medium (narrative) and reusing ⁶⁸ Boccaccio, The Decameron, . ⁶⁹ Boccaccio, The Decameron, . ⁷⁰ Wise, Bibliography of Swinburne, . ⁷¹ Here is the list of the tales in the order of appearance for the first and the second days of the Triameron: ‘The Two Kisses’, ‘Lescombat’, ‘The Portrait’, ‘Mistress Sanders’, ‘Dead Love’, ‘Accoranibuoni’, ‘Dream of a Murder’, ‘Sans Merci’, ‘A Man Loved by a Witch’, ‘A Chateaubrun of Rococo Period’, ‘A Story of Queen Fredegond’, ‘A Friend of Madame Dubarry’s’, ‘The Feast of Ladies’, ‘Bogey’, ‘A Lover of Brinvilliers’, ‘Romance’, ‘Case of René Aubryat’, and ‘Bianca Capello’. ⁷² Boccaccio, Decameron, i. . ⁷³ A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Two Dreams’, in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, i (London: Chatto & Windus, ). All quotations are taken from this edition.

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   ’ 



it in another remediation (poetical). Swinburne’s desire for Boccaccio’s medievalism leads to a process of appropriation by which his poetical medium appears to reshape, pervert, and distort Boccaccio’s narrative medium by accentuating the morbid aspects of Andreuola’s story. According to Swinburne’s perverted logic of remediation, the dream-frame narrative facilitates the distortion of images, which are eroticized through a sensuous use of chromatism (‘Their red mouths open till the rose-heart ached’, l. ), metonymic references (‘Thereat he kissed her hands and yellow head / And clipped her fair long body many times’, ll. –) and musical language (‘and sound of veins that beat / As a lute should play of its own heart’, ll. –). In Andreuola’s and Gabriotto’s dreams, Swinburne finds a place of Eros and Thanatos, of condensation and displacement, the ideal dimension for freeing the power of his imagination as well as his drive energies. Largely employed by Boccaccio as a premonitory and revealing means in the tales of Lorenzo and Isabella, Talano d’Imolese (IV, ) and Nastagio degli Onesti (V, ), the dream mode of ‘The Two Dreams’ allows Swinburne to eroticize and aggrandize the Gothic nuances of the original tale. A case in point is the garden where Andreuola and Gabriotto secretly meet, a locus amoenus which in Boccaccio’s description appears to be ‘one of the most accomplished forms of medieval gardens’.⁷⁴ In Swinburne’s remediating process, Boccaccio’s beautiful garden in the city of Brescia becomes a rose-garden in Florence ‘More fair than many’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ), as if to allude to a Dantesque hortus conclusus, where there is a blending of visual and audible codes (‘the green waxed audible’, l. ). The garden, aptly defined as an ‘imaginative container’⁷⁵ by Lakoff, is the location of Andreuola’s and Gabriotto’s prophetic dreams into which the sinful protagonists project their sense of guilt through animal figures. Having consummated their secret marriage, Andreuola and Gabriotto are haunted by such terrifying zoomorphic images as a dark and terrible thing issuing from Gabriotto’s body (‘una cosa . . . la forma della quale essa [Andreuola] non poteva conoscere’⁷⁶) and a coal-black greyhound, hungry and terrifying to look at (‘una veltra nera come carbone, affamata e spaventevole’⁷⁷). Almost as an exercise of replacement, Swinburne radically changes Boccaccio’s dark and terrible thing into ‘a live thing flaked with black / Specks of brute slime and lepercoloured scale, / A devil’s hide with foul flame-writhen grail’ (‘The Two Dreams’, ll. –). Likewise, the coal-black greyhound dreamt by Gabriotto is turned into a femme bestiale whose vampiresque wilderness (‘And her mouth caught like a snake’s mouth’, ‘The Two Dreams’, l. ) increases the uncanny atmospheres of Boccaccio’s death-in-the-garden story. From this perspective, the Gothic imagery envisioned by Swinburne appears to be more horrific and sensuous than Boccaccio’s dream symbols.

⁷⁴ T. Matteini, ‘Giardini scomparsi: Note per un itinerario toscano’, in Guido Ferrara, Giulio G. Rizzo, and Mariella Zoppi (eds), Paesaggio: Didattica, ricerche e progetti (–) (Florence: Florence University Press, ), . ⁷⁵ Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, . ⁷⁶ Boccaccio, Decameron, i. . ⁷⁷ Boccaccio, Decameron, i. .

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

 

More similar to a ‘horror, breathing between life and death’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ), Swinburne’s remediation reshapes Boccaccio’s cavriuola, the animalesque double of Andreuola, into what Rebecca Stott calls ‘melodramatic shapes’,⁷⁸ i.e. ‘monsters, snakes, bats, vampires, dwarfs, hybrid beasts, devils, reflections, femmes fatales’.⁷⁹ Many others are the acts of replacement performed by Swinburne who consciously decides not to translate Boccaccio’s prefatory note about the truthfulness of dreams and to reduce the number and roles of characters (the figure of the Podestà is lacking and the narrative function of the ‘fante’ figure is minimized). All evidence suggests that Boccaccio’s text of pleasure is remediated into a text of bliss which perverts the stereotype. As Barthes maintains, the text of bliss is ‘absolutely intransitive, defined by extreme perversion, unpredictable, mobile, extreme, void’.⁸⁰ It is not by chance that Boccaccio’s simplicity of style is replaced by Swinburne’s abundant figurative language characterized, as Yisrael Levin suggests, by ‘the interplay between sensation, language and cognition in the act of seeing’.⁸¹ This is what happens in ‘The Two Dreams’ and in particular in Andreuola’s visual event according to which she envisions a black crawling thing with specks of ‘leper-coloured scale’ (l. ). Swinburne aggrandizes this horrific description through a crescendo of adjectives and uncanny colours creating the image of a devil bursting into flames producing unbearable and disgusting heat: ‘A devil’s hide with foul flame-writhen grail / Fashioned where hell’s heat festers loathsomest’ (‘The Two Dreams’, ll. –). Behind such a fantastic-marvellous remediation of Boccaccio’s medievalism, there lies what Todorov calls ‘the themes of the other’⁸² comprising all variations on the theme of sexuality, that is to say, the relation of man with his desire and his unconscious. This is clearly exemplified by Gabriotto’s dream, in Swinburne’s erotic version, projecting the theme of sexuality as embodied by the motif of the female vampire, a femme fatale who is connoted metonymically by her deadly kiss, as deadly as the kiss of a snake biting his prey and leaving on his flesh a ‘red mark’ (l. ) as a tangible sign of evil. Like Lucrezia Borgia whose mouth ‘makes beat . . . blood in feverish rhymes’ (‘A Ballad of Life’, l. ),⁸³ Anactoria who according to Swinburne ‘no mouth but some serpent’s found [her] sweet’ (‘Anactoria’, l. ),⁸⁴ and Fragoletta who has a serpent in her hair and whose mouth is ‘made of fire and wine’ (‘Fragoletta’, l. ),⁸⁵ Andreuola appears as a vampire seductress, the epitome of deadly beauty, combining Eros and Tanathos.

⁷⁸ Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), . ⁷⁹ Stott, Fabrication, . ⁸⁰ Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, ), . ⁸¹ Yisrael Levin (ed.), A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . ⁸² Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (New York: Cornell University Press, ), . ⁸³ A. C. Swinburne, ‘A Ballad of Life’, in Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁸⁴ Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁸⁵ Poems and Ballads, i. .

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   ’ 



From this perspective, Swinburne’s translation strategy is all the more evident. As a translator of Catullus, Sappho, and Villon, who is able to write in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, Swinburne applies the Italian proverb traduttore-traditore in ‘The Two Dreams’ remediating Boccaccio’s uncanny tale into a fantastic-marvellous poem. A paramount example of Swinburne’s betrayal of Boccaccio’s medieval text can be found in the decision of not to render the Boccaccian opposition white goat/black greyhound (cavriuola bianca/veltra nera), a symbolic chromatism which is lacking in Swinburne’s poem. As explained by Vittore Branca, author of Boccaccio medievale, black and white colours in Boccaccio’s Decameron ‘indicate women’s traits and sentimental status’,⁸⁶ but Swinburne prefers to celebrate the female nakedness of the maids bathing in ‘sweet fierce water’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ) reflecting the green and gold profusion of the surroundings. Commonly known as a sea worshipper (‘the sea my nursing-mother’, ‘A Ballad at Parting’, l. ;⁸⁷ ‘Mother and lover of men, the sea’, ‘The Triumph of Time’, l. ⁸⁸), to the point that Gaston Bachelard in his seminal study Water and Dreams⁸⁹ will name a complex after him ‘The Swinburne Complex’, i.e. the pleasure and pain deriving from the physical struggle against the aquatic element, Swinburne eroticizes the female body through the visual qualities of water. Like Venus who, on walking out to sea, turns the foam into fire in the sensual union of archetypal contraries (‘making the foam as fire whereon she trod, / And as the inner flower of fire was she’, ‘Laus Veneris’, ll. –),⁹⁰ and Queen Bersabe whose long and wet hair takes the form of a drawing net, decorating her body with a sensual tattoo (‘And her long hair withouten let / Spread sideways like a drawing net’, ll. –),⁹¹ the maids bathing themselves in Gabriotto’s erotic dream metamorphose into aquatic flowers floating on water. The flower motif also characterizes the burial of the dead Gabriotto whose body, resting on Andreuola’s cloth, was covered with roses: ‘She then closed the eyes and mouth, shedding the while many a tear, wove for him a wreath of roses, and strewed upon him all the roses that he and she had gathered.’⁹² The deadly romanticism of such a burial scene is preserved and accentuated in Swinburne’s translation which not only replaces the Boccaccian roses with the majestic red hues of leaves from ‘some withered red’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ) to ‘some / Fair and fresh-blooded’ (l. ), but it also emphasizes the melancholy tones of Bocaccio’s text through such symbolic flowers as the marigold and the sunflower. In Swinburne’s empire of signs, a spoiled marigold and a spent sunflower, originally lacking in Boccaccio’s medieval tale, increase the sense of beauty and sadness in death. ⁸⁶ Vittore Branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni Editore, ), . ⁸⁷ A. C. Swinburne, ‘A Ballad at Parting’, in The Poems of Swinburne, vi. . ⁸⁸ A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Triumph of Time’, in Poems and Ballads, i (London: Chatto & Windus, ), . ⁸⁹ Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundations, ). ⁹⁰ A. C. Swinburne, ‘Laus Veneris’, in Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁹¹ A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Masque of Queen Bersabe’, in Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁹² Boccaccio, The Decameron, .

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

 

According to the secret language of flowers,⁹³ the marigold sprang from the tears of Venus moaning her lover’s death, and the sunflower, despite its nutritive qualities and solar symbolism, may epitomize unfortunate love as in the case of Clytie, the nymph who was turned into a sunflower by her unhappy love for Apollo. Those fleurs du mal, flowers producing pain of love, are particularly appealing to Swinburne’s decadent aesthetics for their symbolic dualism. This is clearly expressed in a letter to William Bell Scott ( December ) in which he describes the marigold of Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata as ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’.⁹⁴ Likewise, the sunflower acquires a dual dimension in ‘The Complaint of Lisa’ (), Swinburne’s rewriting of Boccaccio’s tale (Decameron, Day , Tale ), in which Lisa Puccini projects the conceptual metaphor ‘unhappy love is a sunflower’. Fatally fallen in love with king Peter, Lisa called Mico da Siena, ‘in those days quite a good rhymester’,⁹⁵ to compose a poem for the king. This melancholy canzonet about Lisa’s pain of love is supposed to be sung by Mico da Siena in Boccaccio’s tale, but Swinburne, whose strategy is always aimed at pushing feelings to the extreme, makes Lisa sing the poem. Boccaccio’s principle of tertium non datur does not hold in Swinburne’s system, and Lisa’s complaint focusing on the leitmotif of the sunflower appears to be even more heart wrenching. Once more Swinburne is confirmed as a master of literary misinterpretation since Mico da Siena’s poem is artfully perverted and distorted with the help of the image of the heliotropic flower, standing for both royal nobility and painful love. Like George Eliot, who radically changed Boccaccio’s tale into a long poem entitled ‘How Lisa Loved the King’ (), Swinburne sometimes under-translates sometimes over-translates the Decameron with the intent of reforming Boccaccio’s simplicity of expression with semantic ambivalence, overabundance of style, artificiality of images, and obscure melody. Under close analysis, Swinburne’s translation of Mico da Siena’s canzone does not respect the metrical rhythm of the source text whose alternate rhymes are replaced with double sestinas which Dante mentions in the De Vulgari as a new poetic experiment. By applying the retrogradatio cruciata organization to twelve line end-words (i.e. breath, her, way, death, sunflower, sun, day, bed, thee, dead, done, and me) in order to obtain a double sestina pattern, Swinburne aims at focusing attention on the metaphor of the sunflower. The end-words chosen by Swinburne create the semantic opposition life/death throughout the poem as exemplified by the following six rhyming pairs of end-words: breath/death, thee/me, sunflower/her, day/way, sun/ done, and bed/dead. Another act of betrayal which is worthwhile mentioning is Swinburne’s omission of the final meeting between Lisa and the king, a pivotal scene in order to understand the king’s generous nobility revealed in his intention to lavish precious gifts and domains ⁹³ See Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ). ⁹⁴ Cecil Y. Lang (ed.), The Swinburne Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), i. . ⁹⁵ Boccaccio, The Decameron, .

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   ’ 



upon Lisa’s poor husband. But such a diegetic loss is compensated with the obsessive repetition of the word ‘sunflower’ by Lisa who defines herself as ‘the least flower in [the king’s] flowery way’ (‘The Complaint of Lisa’, l. ), as well as ‘a worm in [her] lord’s kingly way’ (‘The Complaint of Lisa’, l. ). Lisa’s self-destructive monologue is based on the dynamics of the female gaze (‘since I beheld my sunflower’, l. ; ‘I may look up and see my sunflower’, l. ) since she is constantly looking at king Peter, a ‘lordly sunflower’, whose face is always turning towards the sun. Almost blindsighted by the ‘black sun’ of depression (‘while in the sun’s sight I make moan all day’, l. ), Lisa comes to the heliocentric truth about the kingly sunflower shining like a fire of unhappy love that ‘lights [her] pyre of death’ (l. ). This luminous imagery was probably inspired by the Arthurian solar myth as envisioned by authors such as Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, and Matthew Arnold, whose influence is attested to in the fifth stanza of ‘The Complaint of Lisa’ in which there is a reference to Launcelot and Guinevere, the damned lovers ‘lost in the underworld’ (l. ). Sharing with Boccaccio the awareness that the Middle Ages were a predominantly materialistic rather than spiritual period, Swinburne reproduces the danse macabre of the Middle Ages, the creatural realism emphasizing our bodily functions, our mortality, the inevitable disintegration of the human body and all those physical agonies of unhappy love. Swinburne, the poet advocating freedom in Songs before Sunrise (), a volume of poems dedicated to the cause of freedom and democracy and championing the Italian struggle for independence, appears to be the most original re-mediator of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the medieval human comedy which shocked middle-class Victorian readers, thereby activating a pleasure of reading, a desire to find one’s identity in absolute freedom. To conclude, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne are confirmed as exponents of what Robert Buchanan termed ‘the fleshly school of poetry’ for emphasizing the subversively erotic elements in their medieval recreations of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The lure of Boccaccio’s romance is anchored to the medieval notion of courtly love as embodied by Fiammetta, Andreuola, and Lisa, female representatives of the objectified women of the lyric tradition, differing from Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura for their corporeal, sexually charged, and uncanny traits. But more than this, Boccaccio’s Decameron, widely recognized as a true encyclopedia of early modern life and a summa of late medieval culture, appealed to Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne for its living dialogue between past and present.

S  Boos, Florence, The Design of William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, ). Boos, Florence (ed.), The Earthly Paradise (New York: Routledge, ). Bullen, J. B., The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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

 

Eco, Umberto, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ). Foster Gittes, Tobias, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). Harrison, A. H., Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, ). Hollander, Robert, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). McGann, Jerome, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Poulson, Christine (ed.), William Morris On Art and Design (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, ). Seaton, Beverly, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ). Treuherz, J., ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in R. Dorment and T. Barringer (eds), Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, ), –. Weaver, Elissa B., The Decameron First Day in Perspective: Volume One of the Lecturae Boccaccii (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

    ,      ,    

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 

I the introductory lines to ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’, his verse retelling of the thirteenthcentury Icelandic Laxdæla saga, William Morris describes Iceland as a strange and awful land Where folk, as in the hollow of God’s hand, Beset with fearful things, yet fearing nought, Have lived their lives and wondrous deeds have wrought.¹

Medieval Iceland, its fearless people, and the literature recording their wondrous deeds attracted an unprecedented level of interest in Victorian Britain. Of foreign literatures, only those of France and Italy proved equally fruitful sources for Victorian medievalism. In Iceland itself there was a continuous popular reception of the island’s medieval literature into the modern period, but the British general reading public discovered the island’s rich corpus of medieval verse and prose for the first time during the ‘long nineteenth century’ (c.–). Building on foundations laid by scholars and enthusiasts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Victorian Icelandophiles introduced British readers to the full range of Old Norse-Icelandic texts through translations into English and for the first time provided editions of texts in the original language with English-language apparatus for those who wished to pursue the subject further. Enthusiasm for medieval Icelandic literature inspired some to undertake the arduous trip to Iceland to see saga-sites for themselves; others stayed at home but availed themselves of guides to Icelandic that became available in the second half of the century and learned to read the literature in its original language. Through the combined industry and enthusiasm of scholars, writers, and travellers, medieval ¹ William Morris, ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris,  vols (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., –), v. .

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

 

Icelandic literature came as near as it has ever done to a central position in British culture during the Victorian period.

P-V 

.................................................................................................................................. Iceland was discovered by Scandinavian seafarers during the Viking Age and was settled from around  onwards, mainly by families of Norwegian origin, though many spent time en route in Orkney, the Hebrides, or Ireland and there acquired Celtic wives, concubines, or slaves. Medieval Icelanders, like mainland Scandinavian Vikings, spoke and wrote a Germanic language that modern scholars call either Old Norse or Old Icelandic (they themselves referred to it as dönsk tunga, the ‘Danish tongue’, or sometimes as norrœnt mál, ‘Nordic speech’). This language is the parent of modern Danish and Swedish (descending from Old East Norse) and Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese (from Old West Norse). The vast majority of surviving medieval texts—and very nearly all those of literary interest—were preserved in Iceland, however, so for many purposes Old Norse and Old Icelandic may be regarded as synonymous, though a lingering suspicion, especially on the part of some modern Icelanders, that ‘Norse’ really means ‘Norwegian’ has led to increasing use of the ungainly but precise term ‘Old Norse-Icelandic’ in recent scholarship. Icelandic has changed very little in its passage from Old to Modern, unlike other modern Scandinavian languages which have diverged much further from Old Norse. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries Iceland produced as rich and extensive a vernacular medieval literature as anywhere in Europe; the north Atlantic island was the main repository of legendary and mythological material once shared by speakers of Germanic languages across northern Europe and in addition preserved a corpus of uniquely intricate verse and a wealth of historical and historical-fictional prose for which there is no parallel elsewhere in the period. Pre-Christian mythological and legendary material was preserved in a collection of anonymous poems known as the Poetic Edda (often referred to as Sæmundar Edda in the nineteenth century, owing to a mistaken attribution to the twelfth-century scholar Sæmundr inn fróði). Norwegian court poetry from the ninth century onwards (much of it by Icelandic poets and almost all of it preserved in Icelandic manuscripts) and other poetry employing the same extraordinarily complex verse forms is known as skaldic (or scaldic) poetry, from the Icelandic skáld, ‘poet’. Both kinds of verse provided source material for Snorri Sturluson’s (Prose) Edda (c.). In the course of this handbook for poets Snorri provides the most comprehensive surviving account of pre-Christian Norse mythology, though it is filtered through his thirteenth-century Christian perspective. Skaldic verse also provided some of the source material for the great prose (or, more strictly, prosimetric) narratives known throughout the world by their originally Icelandic name, the sagas. Different saga genres are distinguished on the basis of their subject matter: all are concerned with the more or less distant past, but they vary in

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, ,  



historicity; as one Victorian translator remarked, ‘There are many kinds of Sagas, of all degrees of truth’.² All these different kinds of writing attracted British readers in the Victorian period, but, as we shall see, tastes sometimes differed from those of earlier and later periods. Norse-speaking Vikings settled in parts of England from the ninth century onwards alongside speakers of Old English, a related and probably more or less mutually intelligible Germanic language. Though Norse eventually died out, many words were borrowed into English and the genetic, cultural, and linguistic inheritance that Britain owed to Scandinavia was a major stimulus to scholarly and other interest in Viking and medieval Scandinavia and Iceland in the Victorian period.³ Scholarly interest in Old Norse language and literature in Britain began in the seventeenth century and reached an early high point in the work of George Hickes (–), whose Thesaurus Linguarum Septentrionalium of – included, among much else, an account of the language and a version of what became one of the most frequently translated poems, ‘The Waking of Angatýr’, the first complete translation of an Old Icelandic poem into English. Bishop Thomas Percy (–) published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (), which included both Icelandic texts and English translations (drawing on previously published versions in Latin and Swedish), and Northern Antiquities (), an edited translation of Paul-Henri Mallet’s Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc.⁴ Mallet’s writings provided late eighteenth-century Europe with much of what it knew of Viking and medieval Scandinavia and continued, in revised versions of Percy’s Northern Antiquities ( and ), to provide scholarly orientation well into the Victorian period.⁵ The  revision and expansion of Percy’s translation edited by I. A. Blackwell replaced Percy’s translation of Mallet’s partial rendering of Snorri’s Edda with a version of the mythological sections of that work (Gylfaginning and part of Skáldskaparmál) directly from Old Icelandic: this became the primary source for Victorian knowledge of Norse mythology. Blackwell’s edition also reprinted an abstract of Eyrbyggja saga made by Sir Walter Scott (from a

² George Webbe Dasent (tr.), The Story of Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ) p. v. ³ See Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),  on the impact of J. J. A. Worsaae’s An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: Murray, ) on British attitudes towards their Norse inheritance. ⁴ See Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, ); Thomas Percy, Northern Antiquities: or, A Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern nations; Including those of our own Saxon Ancestors (London, ); new edn revised by I. A. Blackwell (London: Bohn, ); and for further context, Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, – (Trieste: Edizione Parnaso, ). ⁵ Either the  or  printing of Percy’s Northern Antiquities was the source for Matthew Arnold’s Balder Dead (), for example.

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Latin version) that had first been published in , one of the earliest more or less complete English retellings of a saga of Icelanders or Family Saga.⁶ The earliest British scholars and enthusiasts of the Icelandic and Scandinavian Middle Ages were heavily dependent on foreign scholarship, including the pioneering printed editions of medieval texts produced in Sweden and Denmark in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often still the standard editions in the Victorian period.⁷ Access to this material was facilitated by the provision of translations and editorial material in Latin, the international scholarly language of the time. Early English translators of Norse-Icelandic texts often depended on Latin, Danish, or Swedish intermediary versions, but William Herbert (–) produced competent English translations directly from the originals in his Select Icelandic Poetry of –. The earliest translations of saga prose into English consisted of extracts concerning events in Britain. Passages of this kind translated from Snorri Sturluson’s voluminous history of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla, were among those translated by James Johnstone (d. ), who set a pattern that was to be widely followed in the Victorian period (and, indeed, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) by collaborating with an Icelander, in his case Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (–), best known to Anglophone readers for his ground-breaking but error-laden editio princeps of the Old English poem, Beowulf.⁸

V 

.................................................................................................................................. Whereas much eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British interest in Icelandic literature had been in the mythological and legendary poetry so congenial to readers of Ossianic epic or Gothic fiction, in the Victorian period interest shifted towards the prose (or prosimetric) sagas, which engaged ‘a reading public for whom the realistic novel had become the dominant literary genre’.⁹ The first complete Icelandic saga to be published in English translation appeared two years after Victoria’s accession: an ⁶ Sir Walter Scott, ‘An Abstract of the Eyrbyggja-Saga’, in Robert Jamieson and Henry Weber (eds), Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, ), –; reprinted in Percy, Northern Antiquities (), –. See further Julian D’Arcy and Kirsten Wolf, ‘Sir Walter Scott and Eyrbyggja saga’, Studies in Scottish Literature,  (): –. ⁷ For an overview of pre-Victorian scholarship on Old Icelandic literature see Andrew Wawn, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, and – for brief discussion of Norse scholarship and reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe. ⁸ On Johnstone see Clunies Ross, Norse Muse, –; John Kennedy, Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –. ⁹ Wawn, ‘Post-Medieval Reception’, . Wawn’s The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), a work of extraordinary scholarship and engaging humour, is the essential starting point for anyone interested in the Victorian

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

eccentric, Scandinavia-based English scholar, George Stephens (–), was the first of several Victorian translators to publish an English version of Friðþiófs saga hins frækna, a romantic saga of the legendary past that was extraordinarily popular throughout the nineteenth century (often in the form of a verse paraphrase by the Swedish bishop Esaias Tegnér, also several times translated into English).¹⁰ It is now very marginal to the study of Old Norse literature, but it was a central text in the canon of medieval Icelandic literature as received in Victorian Britain. It appealed no doubt to a sentimental streak in Victorian sensibility, but the saga is partly set in Orkney, so that, like other sagas popular in the nineteenth century, it has an obvious British connection. In the course of the rest of Victoria’s reign a very large proportion of the surviving literature of medieval Iceland found its way into English. Landmark translations from the period helped establish a canon for Anglophone readers and in many cases continued to be read widely well into the twentieth century; there is space here to consider just a few prominent examples: Samuel Laing’s version of Heimskringla, George Webbe Dasent’s The Saga of Burnt Njal, Muriel Press’s Laxdæla Saga, and the numerous saga translations produced by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon. The Orcadian Samuel Laing (–) published a translation of Snorri Sturluson’s monumental history of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla, in , prefixing to it a long ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ which played an important role in shaping mid-century perceptions of the Viking and medieval north.¹¹ His translation had a long shelf life, being reprinted in  and again (with updated editorial material) in the Everyman’s Library series as late as .¹² Laing had spent three years in Norway (–) and shared with George Stephens an animosity towards Germany which manifested itself in an appreciation of the closeness of the ties between Scandinavia and the British Isles. Laing had a limited knowledge of Icelandic and, unlike many other translators of the period, did not avail himself of the help of a native speaker; instead he relied on versions in Latin, Swedish, Danish, and especially Dano-Norwegian. He set out to produce a translation for ‘the ordinary reader of history,—for the common man’,

reception of ‘the old North’. A survey of saga translations in the period including helpful chronological lists of translations is split across chapters  and  of Kennedy, Translating. ¹⁰ On the popularity of this saga (and Tegnér’s poem) in Victorian Britain, see Andrew Wawn, ‘The Cult of “Stalwart Frith-thjof ” in Victorian Britain’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, ), –, and Vikings and Victorians, ch. . On Stephens’s enthusiasms and numerous publications, see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, ch. . ¹¹ Samuel Laing (tr.), The Heimskringla or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway,  vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, ), i. –. For a fuller discussion of Laing than is possible here, see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, ch. . ¹² Wawn has demonstrated the depth and longevity of Laing’s influence on creative writers (Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, R. M. Ballantyne, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson) and, via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on the composer Edward Elgar: see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, –.

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 

though he also recognized that the text was a ‘work of great literary merit’;¹³ his version has been called a ‘plain faithful translation’ for a ‘plain English reader’.¹⁴ As an example of Laing’s readability, one may quote a passage from the saga of King Óláfr Haraldsson: Thorstein Knararsmed struck at King Olaf with his axe, and the blow hit his left leg above the knee. Finn Arneson instantly killed Thorstein. The king after the wound staggered towards a stone, threw down his sword, and prayed God to help him. Then Thorer Hund struck at him with his spear, and the stroke went in under his mail-coat and into his belly. The Kalf struck at him on the left side of the neck. But all are not agreed upon Kalf having been the man who gave him the wound in the neck. These three wounds were King Olaf ’s death.¹⁵

The frequent skaldic verses incorporated in the narrative often, however, depart quite a distance from the original in both content and, even more, tone. This verse appears shortly after the above prose passage: The marshal Biorn, too, I find, A great example leaves behind, How steady courage should stand proof, Though other servants stand aloof. To Russia first his steps he bent, To serve his master still intent; And now besides his king he fell,— A noble death for scalds to tell.¹⁶

Though the sense is clear enough, this does read like second-rate Victorian poetry. George Webbe Dasent (–) produced the first, and for long the only, complete English translation of the greatest of all Icelandic sagas, Brennu-Njáls saga. His avoidance of archaism (busk, bourn, and redes excepted) wore well and, as Heather O’Donoghue writes, ‘he may be said to have formed the modern taste for saga literature’.¹⁷ Dasent’s Burnt Njal was largely drafted when the author was a diplomat in Sweden in  but not published until  when he had become professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College, London. Wawn notes that it

¹³ Laing, Heimskringla, i, pp. v, iv. ¹⁴ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ¹⁵ Laing, Heimskringla, ii. . Compare the forms of personal names influenced by mainland Scandinavian spellings with the forms in Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon’s version quoted below. ¹⁶ Laing, Heimskringla, ii. . ¹⁷ Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Old Norse/Icelandic’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Cf. George Webbe Dasent (tr.), The Story of Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ), preface, pp. xv–xvi, on his limited use of archaic vocabulary. He also employs the archaic second person singular pronoun and verb forms in conversations.

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

achieved pre-publication sales of a thousand copies.¹⁸ Like Laing’s Heimskringla, it had wide circulation well into the twentieth century thanks to reprints in the Everyman Classics series in  and ; indeed, it had the field to itself until a second English translation of Njáls saga was published in . Whereas Dasent’s  translation of Snorri’s Edda was, in Wawn’s words, a literal version ‘bordering at times on transliteration’, Burnt Njal achieved a more idiomatic English style without sacrificing accuracy (except where Victorian sensibilities called for greater reticence than had been displayed by the Icelandic saga-author, as in the description of Hrútr Herjólfsson’s marital problems).¹⁹ The virtues of Dasent’s style are evident in this passage from the first main climax of the saga, the attack on Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi: Gunnar made a stout and bold defence, and now wounds other eight men with such sore wounds that many lay at death’s door. Gunnar keeps them all off until he fell worn out with toil. Then they wounded him with many and great wounds, but still he got away out of their hands, and held his own against them a while longer, but at last it came about that they slew him.²⁰

The original, two-volume, publication of Burnt Njal included a vast battery of editorial material (a wide-ranging introduction of more than two hundred pages, notes, maps, a nearly seventy-page appendix and an exceptionally detailed index), but almost all of this was omitted in later reprintings. Dasent went on to produce a version of Gísla saga () and also contributed translations to the Rolls Series (see below), but it was Burnt Njal that fired the imagination of Victorian readers. William Morris (–) has justly been called ‘late Victorian Britain’s most celebrated Icelandophile’.²¹ The many saga translations he produced with his Icelandic collaborator exerted a seminal influence on Victorian and later enthusiasm for Old Icelandic literature: a recent commentator claims that ‘probably no serious saga translator since  has been totally uninfluenced’ by their work, though such influence has often taken the form of a reaction against their stylistic approach.²² Morris’s earliest published writings already evince knowledge of Norse material but this became a dominant interest when he began to learn to read Icelandic with the English-resident Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon (–), whom Morris met in .²³

¹⁸ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ¹⁹ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, –, . Wawn notes, however, that Dasent took considerable liberties in changing the order of some chapters. ²⁰ Dasent, Burnt Njal, . ²¹ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ²² Kennedy, Translating, . ²³ Eiríkr describes their meeting and collaboration in William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, The Saga Library,  vols (London: Quaritch, –), vi, pp. vii–xvi. See also Andrew Wawn, ‘Fast er drukkið og fátt lært’: Eiríkur Magnússon, Old Northern Philology, and Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge:

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 

In just a few years the two men made a remarkable number of translations of Icelandic sagas: most were produced between  and the early s, though some were published only twenty years later as part of a six-volume collection, The Saga Library. Their version of Grettis saga appeared in the middle year of Victoria’s reign and was followed the year after by their Völsunga saga (including a selection of relevant eddic poetry); Three Northern Love Stories of  combined translations previously published in periodicals with new translations and included both sagas of Icelanders (Gunnlaugs saga and Víglundar saga) and legendary fornaldarsögur (the second English version of Friðþjófs saga and ‘The Tale of Hogni and Hedinn’). The six volumes of The Saga Library, completed after Morris’s death, included more sagas of Icelanders (Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, Bandamanna saga, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, Eyrbyggja saga, Heiðarvíga saga) and the great kings’ saga compilation, Snorri’s Heimskringla.²⁴ The prominence of sagas of Icelanders (or Family Sagas) is a noteworthy shift in emphasis in the context of Victorian saga translation: only four examples of the genre had previously appeared complete in English, though it has gone on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to be the most widely read and admired Icelandic saga genre. The translation of Völsunga saga—described by Morris as ‘the best tale pity ever wrought’—was of particular significance. Towards the end of their introduction the translators write: We must again say how strange it seems to us, that this Volsung Tale, which is in fact an unversified poem, should never before have been translated into English. For this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks—to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been—a story too—then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been for us.²⁵

Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, ). Eiríkr spelled his name thus in his publications, though the normal modern Icelandic spelling is Eiríkur. ²⁴ Later posthumously published translations include forty chapters of Egils saga in William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Story of Egil the Son of Scaldgrim, in May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), –, and William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Story of Kormak the Son of Ogmund (London: William Morris Society, ). Further unpublished translations and fragments remain in manuscript: see the list provided by the Morris Online Edition at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/listtranslations.html, accessed Jan. . ²⁵ William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (trs), Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (London: Ellis, ), p. xi. This first English translation of Völsunga saga coincided closely with the first performances of the opening two instalments of Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, based in part on the saga and other Icelandic sources: Das Rheingold premiered on  Sept. , and Die Walküre on  June  (the complete cycle was first performed in  and premiered in England in ). On Wagner’s use of Old Icelandic material see Árni Björnsson, Wagner and the Volsungs: Sources of der Ring des Nibelungen (London: Viking Society, ). Morris took a dim view of Wagner’s work: ‘I look upon it as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera . . . the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedle-deeing over the unspeakable woes of

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

As Matthew Townend has recently pointed out, this passage is characteristic of Victorian interest in early Iceland and its literature in two ways: ‘it declares the availability of a northern Germanic alternative to a southern, Mediterranean culture, and a medieval alternative to a classical one’.²⁶ For other Victorians besides William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon the medieval literature of Iceland was not a foreign treasury, but a rightful inheritance. The highly distinctive style that Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon adopt for their translations from Old Icelandic has evoked strongly critical reactions from many readers ever since the earliest reviews, though there have also been a few more positive responses. A famous attack came in the introduction to Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale (discussed below): There is one grave error into which too many English translations of old Northern and Icelandic writings have fallen, to wit, the affectation of archaism and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English words. This abominable fault makes a Saga . . . sound unreal, unfamiliar, false.²⁷

In  Dorothy Hoare argued that ‘in the ingenious search for the words which come nearest to the actual form of the Icelandic, the life and nearness, the directness [of the original] has vanished’.²⁸ The effect is, she claims, ‘entirely different’ from that obtained by reading the Icelandic for oneself. While their approach certainly emphasizes the alterity of the medieval text by using archaic vocabulary and morphological forms, their preference for linguistic forms that English shares (or shared) with Icelandic focuses attention on historical connections between the English and Icelandic languages.²⁹ As J. N. Swannell suggests, the result is, ironically, that the saga translations of Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon can best be enjoyed by those readers whose own knowledge of Old Icelandic (and, one might add, of the history of English) enables them to appreciate the linguistic connections to which the translators draw attention by their stylistic choices: readers with little need for a translation in the first place.³⁰ There is, nevertheless, a vigour to the translations of Morris and his collaborator which Sigurd . . .’ Letter of  Nov.r  in Philip Henderson (ed.), The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), –. ²⁶ Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, . Townend goes on to provide a sensitive explication of the use of ‘race’ in this passage (–). ²⁷ Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell (eds and trs), Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), i, p. cxv. Eiríkr Magnússon defended the approach he and his late collaborator took in Saga Library, vi, pp. vii–viii. ²⁸ Dorothy M. Hoare, The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ²⁹ John Kennedy draws an apposite distinction between archaism and ‘Icelandicized’ translation, arguing that the translations of Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon exemplify the latter: Kennedy, Translating, –. ³⁰ J. N. Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter of Old Norse’, Saga-Book,  (): .

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

 

even readers innocent of Icelandic may savour. The virtues and defects of their approach may be gauged by comparing the following passage with the version by Laing quoted above, though this is a relatively restrained example of their style: Thorstein Shipwright smote at King Olaf with an axe, and the blow struck the left leg anigh the knee and above it. Finn Arnison smote Thorstein down forthwith. But at this wound the king leaned him up against a stone and threw away his sword, and bade God help him. Then Thorir Hound thrust a spear at him. The thrust came on him below the byrny, and ran up into the belly. Then Kalf hewed at him, and the blow took him on the left side of the neck. But men are sundered on the matter, where Kalf gave the king the wound. These three wounds the king got towards the loss of his life.³¹

Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon are particularly successful in the almost impossible task of translating skaldic verse: their idiosyncratic and ingenious diction is peculiarly suited to rendering skaldic artifice. Here is their version of the verse quoted from Laing’s version above: Eke heard I that erst Biorn Learned marshals thoroughly whatwise ’Twas due to hold liege-fealty: He, too, was in the onset. He fell in the host of battle At the head of the king fame-wealthy; That death is all be-praisèd ’Mongst the faithful men king-warding.³²

To the extent that this resists interpretation some might claim that it replicates the experience of reading skaldic verse in the original. Two long poems by Morris which Dorothy Hoare describes as ‘free renderings of the Norse matter’ reached a wider readership than his translations proper and probably did more to inspire interest in Iceland’s medieval literature. ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is a constituent tale in the collection that secured Morris’s poetic reputation, The Earthly Paradise; it retells the story of Laxdæla saga and its popularity prepared an audience for the publication of Muriel Press’s translation of the saga in . Sigurd the Volsung, said by Morris’s daughter to be the central work of his life and the one for which he most wished to be remembered, is a long poem of around , lines that reworks material from both Völsunga saga and the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda. These two major poems have been called ‘by far the best Victorian poems on eddic and saga subjects’.³³ ³¹ Morris and Magnússon, Saga Library, iv. . ³² Morris and Magnússon, Saga Library, iv. . ³³ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . For further discussion of these poems, see Hoare, Works, –, Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, –; on Sigurd see also Amanda Hodgson, The Romances

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, ,  



Victorian saga scholarship was far from a purely masculine endeavour and, appropriately enough given the text’s particular interest in female characters (and, according to some modern scholars, its possible female authorship), the first translation of Laxdæla saga was by a woman, Muriel Press.³⁴ Her version appeared with minimal apparatus: chapter headings with dates, a brief editorial note acknowledging the contribution of ‘a competent Icelander’, one map, and a note on some verses. Besides pioneering translations of texts that have continued to seem central to Old Icelandic literature, Victorian translators were also attracted to texts, like Friðþjófs saga, that now seem more marginal to the corpus. Several sagas translated in the Victorian period have never yet been retranslated. These include two major kings’ sagas, the Great Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason and Sverris Saga, both translated by John Sephton in the s.³⁵ There was also an interest in religious literature on the part of Anglo- and Roman Catholic saga enthusiasts who translated some of the bishops’ sagas, a genre in which there has been little further interest on the part of translators until very recently. Mrs Disney Leith wrote that ‘the ecclesiastical Sagas have been left hitherto almost entirely unregarded. Yet they are no less remarkable, and no less interesting—to Churchmen possibly more—than the secular branch’.³⁶ Her straightforward and accurate versions did not, however, win many converts and bishops’ sagas were largely ignored by translators for most of the twentieth century.³⁷ Mythological texts, on the other hand, seem not to have attracted Victorian translators as much as they have in other periods. The main source for nineteenth-century discussions of Norse mythology remained Blackwell’s revision of Percy’s Northern Antiquities and otherwise only Dasent produced a (partial) translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda (). Eddic poetry had attracted considerable interest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but there was no complete translation of the Poetic Edda until Benjamin Thorpe’s  version, followed eventually by the version in Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale ().³⁸ of William Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. , David Ashurst, ‘William Morris and the Volsungs’, in David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (eds), Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ), –, and Richard Frith, ‘ “The Worship of Courage”: William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and Victorian Medievalism’, in Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. ³⁴ Muriel A. C. Press, Laxdæla Saga (London: Dent, ). Like other Victorian translations, this was given a new lease of life when republished with new editorial material by Everyman Classics in . ³⁵ As Reader in Icelandic Studies at University College, Liverpool (–), Sephton was the first Englishman to hold a major university position in Icelandic. ³⁶ Mrs Disney Leith, The Stories of the Bishops of Iceland (London: Masters, ), . ³⁷ The translation of Lárentius saga biskups by another Anglo-Catholic, Oliver Elton, is also a notable example of Victorian bishops’ saga translation; it remains the only published English version of that text. ³⁸ On the history of translations of eddic poetry see Carolyne Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda into English’, in David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (eds), Old Norse Made New: Essays on the PostMedieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ), –.

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

 

Much of the impetus for saga translation in Victorian Britain came from a sense of national or local affinity with Iceland and Scandinavia. Just as the pioneering saga editions produced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Denmark and Sweden expressed national pride, so many who turned to Icelandic literature in Victorian Britain did so in celebration of the contribution that the Vikings were perceived to have made to British (or English or Scottish) national identity and character. But as recent research has emphasized, Victorian interest in Scandinavian and Icelandic antiquity was often motivated by a sense of its relevance to local, rather than national, identity.³⁹ The interest in Icelandic sources relating to the former Norse earldom of Orkney exemplifies this tendency: even more telling than the partly Orcadian setting of Friðþjófs saga and Samuel Laing’s Orcadian origins, is the fact that the Victorian period saw the publication of two translations of the Icelandic history of Orkney, Orkneyinga saga.⁴⁰

V   O I 

.................................................................................................................................. As with translations, religious, national, or local allegiances often influenced the choice of texts for editing in the original language with English editorial material. Morris’s Icelandic collaborator, Eiríkr Magnússon, produced solo editions of Icelandic texts with English translations and editorial material. Both were religious works, of the kind that attracted more attention from British scholars in the Victorian period than they have tended to do since: an edition of the fourteenth-century Marian devotional poem, Lilja (with facing verse translation, extensive introduction, and full glossary), and an edition and translation of the Icelandic saga of St Thomas Becket for the Rolls Series.⁴¹ The edition of Lilja was the first Icelandic text in an English edition made directly from the manuscript sources; it became ‘a favourite of Anglo- and Roman Catholics’.⁴² The Cambridge-based Eiríkr Magnússon had an Oxford-based rival in the other leading Icelandic scholar working in Victorian Britain, Guðbrandur Vigfússon, whose British publications gave his name in Anglicized form as Gudbrand Vigfusson.⁴³

³⁹ See e.g. Matthew Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ), and ‘Victorian Medievalisms’. ⁴⁰ Jón A. Hjaltalín and Gilbert Goudie (trs), The Orkneyinga Saga, ed. Joseph Anderson (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ); Dasent’s tr. in Gudbrand Vigfusson and G. W. Dasent, Icelandic Sagas and other Historical Documents (London: HMSO, –), vol. iii. ⁴¹ Eiríkr Magnússon (ed. and tr.), Thómas saga Erkibyskups,  vols (London: HMSO, –), and The Lily: An Icelandic Poem of the Fourteenth Century (London: Williams & Norgate, ). ⁴² Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ⁴³ On his life see B. S. Benedikz, ‘Guðbrandur Vigfússon: A Biographical Sketch’, in Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn (eds), Úr Dölum til Dala: Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays (Leeds: Leeds Texts

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, ,  



Gudbrand came to England at Dasent’s request to complete the Icelandic dictionary begun by Richard Cleasby, eventually completed in . He collaborated with F. York Powell, also of Christ Church, in a series of monumental editions and translations of Icelandic literature. Gudbrand’s edition of Sturlunga saga appeared under his name alone, but in the preface he acknowledges that the English of the editorial material is York Powell’s.⁴⁴ Their collaborative Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale is a massive collection of over  pages, entirely deserving of the title ‘corpus’. It made a vast range of Icelandic poetry up to the thirteenth century accessible to English readers for the first time, but unfortunately, as even contemporary reviewers realized, the quality of the scholarship did not match the audacity of the ambition, earning the work Ursula Dronke’s memorable verdict: ‘So vast, so full of delights, and so unbelievably unreliable’.⁴⁵ The two volumes include many hundreds of pages of introduction and commentary and the Icelandic texts were supplied with modern English translations ‘primarily intended as a help to the scholar’.⁴⁶ Gudbrand and York Powell’s posthumously published Origines Islandicae resembled the Corpvs in weight, ambition, and scholarly deficiencies (contemporary reviewers and later scholars have lamented Gudbrand’s poor choice of collaborator). It offered Icelandic editions and English translations of all the important texts relating to the settlement and early history of Iceland, making most of its contents available in English for the first time.

T

.................................................................................................................................. The discovery and dissemination of Icelandic sources was often linked with the discovery of Iceland as a travel destination or involved collaboration with Icelandic scholars who had travelled to and were resident in Britain. Travel between Britain and Iceland was arduous, but increasingly possible and popular. In the second half of the nineteenth century a surge of travel writing about the island became increasingly focused on the relationship between Iceland’s medieval literature and its landscape.⁴⁷ Frederick Metcalfe led this literary turn in travel writing about Iceland with his The Oxonian in Iceland (). Subsequent travelogues sometimes included original and Monographs, ), –. Gudbrand and Eiríkr became bitter opponents over a new Icelandic translation of the Bible and also argued about the severity of the – Icelandic famine. ⁴⁴ Gudbrand Vigfusson (ed.), Sturlunga Saga Including the Islendinga Saga of Lawman Sturla Thordsson,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), i, preface, p. vii. ⁴⁵ Ursula Dronke, ‘The Scope of the Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale’, in McTurk and Wawn, Úr Dölum til Dala, . ⁴⁶ Vigfusson and York Powell, Corpvs, cxiv. ⁴⁷ On Victorian travellers to Iceland and their travel books see further Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, ch. . See also the Travels in th Century Iceland, http://www.northernlite.ca/thcenturyiceland/ index.htm, accessed Jan. ; this website includes a list of ‘more than one hundred accounts of travels in Iceland between  and ’.

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

 

translations from the sagas. In  the polymathic and astonishingly prolific Sabine Baring-Gould published a book about his trip to Iceland the previous year. His interests are primarily literary and the book includes passages translated and paraphrased from several sagas by the author.⁴⁸ These selections have been revealed recently to be merely the published tip of Baring-Gould’s translational iceberg: manuscripts discovered by Andrew Wawn in Devon Record Office reveal that Baring-Gould was in fact the most prolific of all Victorian saga translators, though the vast bulk of his work in this field remains unpublished. Thirty-six notebooks containing an estimated half a million words contain translations of seventeen sagas and short stories, ‘work of remarkable linguistic scrupulousness and intellectual ambition’.⁴⁹ Motivated in part by ludicrously fanciful ideas about his own Nordic ancestry, Baring-Gould taught himself to read Old Icelandic and between the s and s produced what Wawn calls ‘by far the most substantial body of saga translation undertaken by any old northernist in Victorian Britain’.⁵⁰ One can only wonder how differently the old North might have been received in the second half of the nineteenth century had this material been published. Another visitor to Iceland, John Coles, included first English translations (probably by Eiríkr Magnússon) of three sagas in his  account of Summer Travelling in Iceland.⁵¹

T

.................................................................................................................................. Whether travelling to modern Iceland in pursuit of saga-steads, or merely visiting the past in the pages of books, the dedicated Victorian Icelandophile sought tools with which to master the Icelandic language. It was not until Dasent’s translation of Rask’s grammar was published in  that Anglophone readers had easy access to this standard guide to the language.⁵² Obstacles remained formidable, even for the dedicated and gifted. In  Baring-Gould lamented that ⁴⁸ For those whose appetites have been whetted, Baring-Gould supplies a list of printed saga editions in appendix D. ⁴⁹ Andrew Wawn, ‘The Grimms, the Kirk-grims, and Sabine Baring-Gould’, in Andrew Wawn with Graham Johnson and John Walter (eds), Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T. A. Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –, . See also Andrew Wawn, ‘Vatnsdæla saga: Visions and Versions’, in Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop, and Tarrin Wills (eds), Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –. ⁵⁰ Wawn, ‘Grimms’, . ⁵¹ Bandamanna saga, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, and Þórðar saga hreðu. On Eiríkr Magnússon’s involvement see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, , Kennedy, Translating, . At the very end of the century W. G. Collingwood (–) emerged as a major figure in British medieval Icelandic studies, travelling to Iceland in  and publishing a translation of Kormáks saga with Jón Stefansson in : see Townend’s magisterial Vikings and Lakeland. ⁵² George Webbe Dasent (tr.), A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue translated from the Swedish of Erasmus Rask (London: William Pickering; Frankfurt: Jaeger’s Library, ). The Icelandic scholar Þorleifur Repp, based in Edinburgh in the years preceding Victoria’s accession, produced a

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, ,  



I am by no means proficient in the Icelandic tongue. I have worked at it for three or four years, and have arrived at the conclusion that both language and literature require the devotion of a lifetime for their proper mastery. The language is full of obscure idioms, and to these there is no tolerable dictionary.⁵³

He would have to wait until Gudbrand Vigfusson’s completion of the first IcelandicEnglish Dictionary in .⁵⁴ By the last quarter of the nineteenth century would-be readers of Icelandic were also becoming better provided with introductory texts. A selection of extracts was provided by Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell’s Icelandic Prose Reader and a basic introductory grammar and brief selection of texts by Henry Sweet’s Icelandic Primer. Gudbrand Vigfusson provided an extensive and scholarly English-language history of Icelandic literature in the ‘Prolegomena’ to his edition of Sturlunga saga mentioned above.

C’ :    V I

.................................................................................................................................. During the nineteenth century the number of medieval Icelandic sources accessible by an English-speaking reader increased enormously. By the end of the century the more linguistically adventurous had access to Old Icelandic grammars, text selections, and a dictionary. The depth of knowledge which an exceptional Briton might gain by the final years of Victoria’s reign can be illustrated by the first book published, at the age of , by one of Gudbrand Vigfusson’s students, W. P. Ker. It has justly been said that Ker’s Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature has ‘strong claims to be the most enduring critical work on medieval literature produced in Victorian Britain’.⁵⁵ The book, published in , surveys all the early Germanic literatures and the Old French epics, as well as selected romances in French and English. Its long third chapter (pp. –) is dedicated to the Icelandic sagas, providing readers of English with an eloquent and strikingly perceptive essay on the literature which, for all its inevitably dated aspects, retains some value even to the present day. Ker was influential in the institutional development of Icelandic studies in the twentieth century and his book

translation into English of Rask’s grammar, but this remained in manuscript: see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, –. ⁵³ Sabine Baring-Gould, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (London: Smith, Elder, ), p. xvi. ⁵⁴ On Gudbrand’s work on the Dictionary see Svavar Sigmundsson, ‘Guðbrandur Vigfússon as Lexicographer’, in McTurk and Wawn, Úr Dölum til Dala, –. The Dictionary was reprinted with a supplement by W. A. Craigie in . ⁵⁵ Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, .

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

 

distilled many of the achievements of nineteenth-century scholars for the benefit of post-Victorian readers. The writings surveyed in this chapter exerted a profound influence on the course of Victorian medievalism, opening up the riches of Old Icelandic literature for a wide readership. But as we have seen, many of the translations, editions, and linguistic tools produced by Victorian Old Icelandicists continued to be read, referred to, and reprinted well into the twentieth century. With their copyright now long expired, the world-wide web has given many of these texts a renewed life in the twenty-first century.

S  Baring-Gould, Sabine, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (London: Smith, Elder, ). Cleasby, Richard, and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collection of the Late R. Cleasby, Enlarged and Completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Clunies Ross, Margaret, The Norse Muse in Britain, – (Trieste: Edizione Parnaso, ). Clunies Ross, Margaret (ed.), The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, ). Coles, John, Summer Travelling in Iceland (London: Murray, ). Dasent, George Webbe (tr.), A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue Translated from the Swedish of Erasmus Rask (London: William Pickering; Frankfurt: Jaeger’s Library, ). Dasent, George Webbe (tr.), The Story of Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ). Dronke, Ursula, ‘The Scope of the Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale’, in Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn (eds), Úr Dölum til Dala: Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays (Leeds: Leeds Texts and Monographs, ), –. Elton, Oliver (tr.), The Life of Laurence Bishop of Hólar in Iceland (Laurentius Saga) by Einar Haflidarson (London: Rivingtons, ). Henderson, Philip (ed.), The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ). Herbert, William (tr.), Select Icelandic Poetry, Translated from the Originals,  vols (i. London: T. Reynolds, ; ii. London: Longman, ). Hickes, George, Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-criticus Et Archæo Logicus.  vols (Oxford, –). Hjaltalín, Jón A., and Gilbert Goudie (tr.), The Orkneyinga Saga, ed. Joseph Anderson (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ). Laing, Samuel, (tr.), The Heimskringla or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway.  vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, ). Leith, Mrs Disney (tr.), The Stories of Thorwald the Far-farer and of Bishop Isleif (London: Masters, ). Leith, Mrs Disney (tr.), The Stories of the Bishops of Iceland (London: Masters, ). Magnússon, Eiríkr (ed. and tr.), The Lily: An Icelandic Poem of the Fourteenth Century (London: Williams & Norgate, ).

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, ,  



Magnússon, Eiríkr (ed. and tr.), Thómas saga Erkibyskups,  vols (London: HMSO, –). Metcalfe, Frederick, The Oxonian in Iceland; or, Notes of Travel in that Island in the Summer of , with Glances at Icelandic Folk-lore and Sagas (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, ). Morris, William, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris,  vols (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., –). Morris, William, and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong (London: Ellis, ). Morris, William, and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (London: Ellis, ). Morris, William, and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), Three Northern Love Stories and Other Tales (London: Ellis & White, ). Morris, William, and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Saga Library,  vols (London: Quaritch, –). Morris, William, and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Story of Egil the Son of Scaldgrim, in May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), –. Morris, William, and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Story of Kormak the Son of Ogmund (London: William Morris Society, ). O’Donoghue, Heather, ‘Old Norse/Icelandic’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Percy, Thomas (tr.), Northern Antiquities: or, A Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern nations; Including those of our own Saxon Ancestors (London, ); new edn revised by I. A. Blackwell (London: Bohn, ). Press, Muriel A. C. (tr.), Laxdæla Saga (London: Dent, ). Scott, Walter, ‘Abstract of the Eyrbyggja-Saga’, in Robert Jamieson and Henry Weber (eds), Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, ), –; reprinted in Percy, Northern Antiquities (), –. Sephton, John (tr.), The Saga of King Olaf Tryggwason who reigned over Norway   to  (London: Nutt, ). Sephton, John (tr.), The Saga of King Sverri of Norway (London: Nutt, ). Stephens, George (tr.), Frithiof ’s Saga: A Legend of Norway (Stockholm: Bonnier; London: Black & Armstrong, ). Sweet, Henry, An Icelandic Primer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Townend, Matthew, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ). Townend, Matthew, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Vigfusson, Gudbrand [Guðbrandur Vigfússon] (ed.), Sturlunga Saga Including the Islendinga Saga of Lawman Sturla Thordsson,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Vigfusson, Gudbrand, and G. W. Dasent (eds and trs), Icelandic Sagas and other Historical Documents relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen on the British Isles,  vols (London: HMSO, –). Vigfusson, Gudbrand, and F. York Powell (eds), An Icelandic Prose Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ).

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

 

Vigfusson, Gudbrand, and F. York Powell (eds and trs), Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Vigfusson, Gudbrand, and F. York Powell (eds and trs), Origines Islandicae,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Wawn, Andrew, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.

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        ......................................................................................................................

                            -        

......................................................................................................................

 . 

W viewed as the ‘Dark Ages’ or the time of Camelot, the Western European medieval period has continued to be an object of fascination well into the modern era.¹ It is not difficult to understand why. After all, it is an era that spans a millennium (roughly –), at the beginning of which was the collapse of the Roman Empire and the concomitant ascendancy of the barbarian tribes; everything was in flux. New administrative and social structures had to be developed, and the barbarians had to learn how to rule. In addition, the barbarian kings, whether Christian (e.g. Goths, although professing the Arian ‘heresy’) or not (e.g. Franks, until Clovis’s baptism to orthodox Christianity in ) had to deal with a potent social force in the form of the Roman Christian church. At the end of the period, their progeny sat on the longestablished thrones of power supported by substantial systems and impressive bureaucracies. But Europe was again on the brink of a new age of turmoil and social change, which would rival the disturbance of a millennium earlier, for the Reformation and the

¹ While the influence of the medieval period on nineteenth-century German literature (principally the Romantics) and on drama and opera (principally Friedrich Hebbel and Richard Wagner) has been often and extensively treated in scholarly literature, the ultimately more meaningful and longer lasting effect of the Middle Ages is to be found in the more ‘mundane’ sphere of political affairs and was instrumental in the long preparations for the founding of the Second Reich in . Thus I will concentrate almost exclusively on this aspect of medievalism in the present chapter.

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

 . 

discord and conflicts which it would bring about were not far off, events that would forever change Europe and shut the door, at least temporarily, on the Middle Ages. While this may not appear to be a precisely heartening representation, we should, perhaps, pause and consider what actually happened during that period: the gradual development of a civilized society; the replacement of anarchy with law; and the substitution of reflective intelligence and reasoned purpose for instinct and passion. During this time a society was established that brought forth processes creative of political and ecclesiastical institutions, law, language, and social customs. In addition to being the age of the terror of the Inquisition, the massacres of those elements of society that were perceived to be ‘other’, especially Jews and so-called heretics, the blood feuds of the nobility, and the cruelty and hardship of everyday life especially for the underclasses, it was also the time that produced the feudal system (one of the most rational and, to an extent, humane systems of rule devised—in theory, at least), monasticism, without which one would have precious little knowledge of classical antiquity, the development and growth of the cities, and the guilds. It was the era that brought forth such sublime efforts as the illuminated manuscript, the Gothic cathedral, the university, and the Summa of St Thomas. It was the time of the rise and victorious march of Islam and of the productive intellectual symbiosis of Muslims and Jews in Spain who transmitted the greater part of that which we now possess of Aristotle. It was the era of the Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth century, of the Ottonian Renaissance in the tenth, and of the twelfth-century Renaissance, all of which produced stunning achievements in art, literature, and philosophical subtlety. That was the beginning of Europe; the laying of the cultural, social, religious, and, to a certain extent, political foundations upon which later ages would build. While Germany is not the only European country in the nineteenth century to seek a type of self-affirmation in the medieval era, a past that could positively influence the present in some way, its circumstances are different from Great Britain, for example, in that it was not an established, unified nation. And although there were voices raised in the eighteenth century lamenting this fact, it was not until the nineteenth century, especially after the wars of liberation and the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig (), that the struggle to form something resembling a national and political entity began in earnest. For the next several decades Germany increasingly looked back to the Middle Ages, seeking a national and cultural identity upon which a new and united Germany could be erected. The crowning of the Prussian King Wilhelm I in  as the Emperor (Kaiser) of the German Empire marked the successful culmination of that search. It would, as indicated above, take some time before a renewed, focused interest in the medieval period would come to pass. But already some intellectuals were rediscovering the ‘German(ic)’ literary past in the late sixteenth century, with Bonaventura Vulcanius (–: the Gothic Bible and a fragment of the late eleventh-century Annolied, ) and in the seventeenth century with Martin Opitz (–: the only complete edition of the Annolied, ). It was not, however, until the eighteenth century that the seeds of the literary German medievalism of the nineteenth century were sown. Non-critical editions of medieval German literature were published, including

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   



Minnesang (, edited by Johann Jacob Bodmer (–) and Johann Jacob Breitinger (–)), the Arme Heinrich and Iwein by Hartmann von Aue (–, edited by Christoph Heinrich Myller (c.–)), and the soon-to-become ‘national epic of the Germans’, the Nibelungenlied (Johann Jakob Bodmer in , Christoph Heinrich Myller in ). Response to these editions was mixed, but, on the whole, reasonably positive. For some, like Goethe (–), who did not even cut open Myller’s edition of the Nibelungenlied in his younger years, enthusiasm gradually grew, especially after the Napoleonic Wars and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Others, like Frederick the Great (–), King of Prussia, rejected the great epic with his well-known judgement: ‘In my opinion, such “poems” are not worth a rap and do not deserve to be lifted from the dust of obscurity. In my library at any rate, I would not tolerate such miserable stuff but would toss it out!’² Patriotic, as opposed to nationalistic, medievalism also has its beginnings in the eighteenth century. The most important personality in this regard and, indeed, in almost any other endeavour to which he turned his talents, is Johann Gottfried Herder (–). Specifically, he put forth the concept of Volk (the people) as the basis of a national entity as well as that of Sprache (language), i.e. that element through which a people defines and understands itself, a concept that looks forward to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s thesis and the twentieth-century Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. According to Herder (Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, ), language is the means by which a nation is formed. A native language encompasses the traditions and the ‘genius’ of a people, even so-called uncultivated peoples. There is nothing more precious, for in the native language is everything that signifies a particular people. And although he refrains, for the most part, from presenting Germans as a sort of ‘Chosen People’, he does urge them to speak their language with pride. Thus he exhorts Germans in his poem ‘An die Deutschen’: ‘O spei aus, vor der Hausthür spei der Seine häßlichen Schleim aus! Rede Deutsch, o du Deutscher!’³ These anti-French sentiments, which will become quite pronounced in German nationalistic circles in the nineteenth century, probably refer here more to the custom in eighteenth-century German-speaking lands of using French as the language of the cultivated and not as a denigration of France in particular. In this regard, mention should be made of Frederick the Great whose dislike of the German language was well-known (‘German authors pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence’⁴). Nonetheless, the spark was struck and attention was focused on the German language as the glue that holds the German Volk together, thus Herder’s activity in editing and publishing his collection of Volkslieder

² Francis G. Gentry, ‘German Studies’, in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms—Methods—Trends (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, ), –. ³ Johann Gottfried Herder, Terpsichore: Zweiter Theil (Lübeck: Bey Bohn und Compagnie, ), – (‘Oh spew out, spew out the Seine’s foul slime! Speak German, o you German!’). ⁴ Giles MacDonogh, Frederick the Great: A Life in Deeds and Letters (New York: St Martin’s Press, ), .

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

 . 

(‘Songs of the People’—which later helped inspire the Grimms to make their collection of ‘tales’). The title of the second, posthumous edition () Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (‘Voices of the Peoples in Songs’) more aptly describes the content of the collection, namely that it is not restricted to German songs only, but rather is international in scope.⁵ Johann Gottlieb Fichte (–) agreed with Herder that a common language is important for a people to define itself, but in his Reden an die deutsche Nation () he adds another element: the boundaries within which the common language is spoken: Zuvörderst und vor allen Dingen: Die ersten, ursprünglichen und wahrhaft natürlichen Grenzen der Staaten sind ohne Zweifel ihre innern Grenzen. Was dieselbe Sprache redet, das ist schon vor aller menschlichen Kunst vorher durch die blosse Natur mit einer Menge von unsichtbaren Banden an einandergeknüpft; es versteht sich unter einander und ist fähig, sich immerfort klarer zu verständigen, es gehört zusammen und ist natürlich eins und ein unzertrennliches Ganzes. The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.⁶

But Fichte moves beyond Herder toward the concept of ‘chosen people’ when he states: Ein solches kann kein Volk anderer Abkunft und Sprache in sich aufnehmen und mit sich vermischen wollen, ohne wenigstens fürs erste sich zu verwirren und den gleichmäßigen Fortgang seiner Bildung mächtig zu stören.

⁵ In this regard, mention should be made of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Herder included translations of twenty-seven ballads from the Reliques, including ‘Chevy Chase’, ‘Fair Rosamund’, and ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’. For some reason, this aspect of Herder research has not received the attention it should merit. This situation has been changing in the past several years, however. See: Eva Axer, ‘ “Effusions of Nature”—“Samenkörner der Nation”: The Politics of Memory in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Herder’s Volkslieder’, German Life and Letters, / (): –; Jayne Winter, ‘International Traditions: Ballad Translations by Johann Gottfried Herder And Matthew Lewis’, German Life and Letters, / (): –. For much earlier scholarship, but still relevant and well worth consulting, see E. I. M. Boyd, ‘The Influence of Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” on German Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly, / (): –. For the influence of Percy’s Reliques in Germany, in general see Haucke Friedrich Wagener, Das Eindringen von Percy’s Reliques in Deutschland (Diss. Heidelberg: Carl Pfeffer, )—also old but informative. ⁶ Fichte, Reden, . English tr. from: Internet History Sourcebook .

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   



Such a whole, if it wishes to absorb and mingle with itself any other people of different descent and language, cannot do so without itself becoming confused, in the beginning at any rate, and violently disturbing the even progress of its culture.⁷

The nationalistic element in the above quotations cannot be overlooked, especially since they were made in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. And it is this aspect which will continue to be emphasized until , even if neither Herder nor Fichte would have viewed the Second Reich as the proper culmination of their visions. But not only philosophers were fascinated with the prospect of a German nation. German writers, poets, and, as mentioned earlier, scholars were also discovering the medieval world and its literature. Focusing on the German Imperial period, the early Romantic poet Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, more commonly known as Novalis (–), saw a period of greatness and, above all, unity under the Holy Roman (German) Emperor and the Roman Catholic Church. In his Die Christenheit oder Europa (written ; first published ), he writes: ‘Es waren schöne glänzende Zeiten, wo Europa ein christliches Land war, wo Eine Christenheit diesen menschlich gestalteten Welttheil bewohnte.’ (‘Those were splendid and radiant times when Europe was a Christian land, and when One Christendom dwelled in this humanly formed continent.’⁸) Although it seems difficult to imagine, Novalis’s emotional vision of an ideal time of harmony and confessional unity would ultimately be melded with the much more secular and nationalistic views of theorists like Fichte or Herder—to be sure in substantially altered form. Literary medievalism would, of course, be continued by the Romantic authors in lyric and prose, especially Ludwig Tieck (–), Heinrich Wackenroder (–), and Clemens Brentano (–), whose fascination with the Middle Ages would often be evidenced in the setting of their works, as well as in forms of reproductive medievalism, i.e. Clemens Brentano’s  poem ‘Wie sich auch die Zeit will wenden, enden’,⁹ a thematic and lyrical imitation of the thirteenth-century Minnesinger Walther von Klingen’s ‘Swie diu zit will verkeren seren’.¹⁰ In this context, mention must also be made of Romantic visual artists like the Nazarenes, whose influence spread far beyond German-language borders, and Caspar David Friedrich’s (–) evocative allegorical landscapes and, often, the medieval echoes found in them, e.g. Abbey in the Oak Forest (–) or The Monk by the Sea (–).¹¹ ⁷ Fichte, Reden, . English tr. from Internet History Sourcebook: . ⁸ Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (eds), Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich Von Hardenbergs, iii (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ), . ⁹ John Fetzer, Romantic Orpheus: Profiles of Clemens Brentano (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ), : ‘However time may wend, end’. ¹⁰ Hans Jaeger, Clemens Brentanos Frühlyrik: Chronologie und Entwicklung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ), . ¹¹ For more information on Friedrich and his contemporaries/rivals, especially Adrian Ludwig Richter, see William Vaughn, German Romantic Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), chs  and .

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

 . 

While the Romantics kept the memory of the Middle Ages alive—sometimes quite generously understood to include what would later be termed the German Renaissance and Baroque as in Clemens Brentano’s and Achim von Arnim’s three-volume Des Knaben Wunderhorn (–), a collection of supposed ‘original’ songs which represented the true German spirit—the direct and continuing impact of medievalism would be felt in the political sphere. For in addition to the Early Romantics’ aesthetic and philosophical enthusiasm for the medieval period, their attraction had a deeper political foundation that put them at odds with their eighteenth-century forebears. Especially prominent among these writers and thinkers is Friedrich Schlegel (–). In this regard, Frederick Beiser points out: ‘the young romantics admired the Middle Ages not because they were the antithesis of the ideals of the [French] Revolution but because they were an illustration of them. As Schlegel put the point in his Philosophische Lehrjahre [Philosophical Apprenticeship]: “there was never more liberty, equality and fraternity than in the Middle Ages”.’¹² Beiser adds that Early Romantic medievalism was not a ‘cult of the Restauration, but a protest against absolutism and centralization’, as well as ‘an expression of much deeper political ideals, ideals that are all too contemporary: the demand for community, the need for social belonging, the insufficiency of civil society and “market forces”’.¹³ This idealistic view would be ‘popular’ but a short time. For the coming years were to bring new stresses, Napoleon’s dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in  and the establishment of new kingdoms (Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg in ) as well as the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund, –) truly alarmed German patriots of every stripe, and resistance to him and French rule in Europe grew until the defeat of his forces at the Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig (– October ). Opposition to Napoleon was comprised both of conservatives and liberals, and after the defeat of his forces the hopes for the unification of the German-language area were kindled. Patriots, seeing in this united military effort the first step toward a new era of unity, began laying the ideological foundations of the future state. However, while the European powers participating in the Congress of Vienna (–) were unified in their opposition to Napoleon and in their desire to prevent any similar imbalance of power on the European continent in the future, they had, clearly, little interest in a unified Germany. Indeed, Napoleon’s German kingdoms continued their independent existence (only Saxony was diminished in size with Prussia annexing about  per cent of its territory). Prussia was, by far, the most prominent of the German monarchies, and although its ultimate ascendancy was still many years in the future, it became, as will later be shown, inevitable after the failed  Revolution. For now, however, hopes were high and the first step towards ‘unification’ involved looking back to a period when the ‘people’ were thought to be the masters of their own fates—not the medieval period, but even earlier, the era of the Germanic tribes in the early centuries of the Common Era, a sort of Golden Age of Teutonism. The ancient ¹² Frederick Beiser, Early Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), p. xxviii. ¹³ Beiser, Early Political Writings, p. xxix.

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   



Germanic age was seen to be truly ‘German’ because of the reputed bravery and fidelity of the Germanic warrior. This connection between ‘Germans’ and fidelity had already been made by Herder who claimed that the virtues of fidelity and trustworthiness have become synonymous with the name ‘German’.¹⁴ And the incorporation of this synthesis can be found in no less a personage than Arminius (‘Hermann’) and his warriors in the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald ( ), which put a stop to further Roman incursions across the Rhine. The battle demonstrated clearly that the innate integrity of the ‘noble Germanic warrior’ proved to be superior to the cunning of the ‘Wälschen’— an essentially derogatory term which gained in popularity through the course of the century and came to signify any Romance people. For these early patriots the Germanic period was also attractive because of the positive interpretation of the role of the people in the governing process, in other words they were thought to have been free. Combined with this Germanic idealization was the strong tendency to portray the Germans as a sort of ‘mystical body’, and eventually as the only true Christians. Since all foreign influences, especially from Romance language-speaking areas (in this case Rome), were considered inimical to the German character, the Reformation was, in the course of the nineteenth century, increasingly considered to be the start of ‘German’ religion and Martin Luther was honoured as a direct ideological descendant of Arminius in that he defended the Fatherland against the ‘Wälschen’ on a theological level. An early example of this mystical connection can be found in Ernst Moritz Arndt’s proposal for a memorial commemorating the Leipziger Schlacht of , in which he suggests that the monument consist of an earthen mound two hundred feet high topped by a gigantic cross and surrounded by an oak grove. According to Arndt: ‘Dieser Hügel. dieses Kreuz, und diese Bäume wären zugleich ein ächt germanisches und ein ächt christliches Denkmal, wohin unsere Urenkel noch wallfahrten gehen würden.’ (‘This mound, this cross, and these trees would be simultaneously a true Germanic and a true Christian monument to which even our great-grandchildren would make pilgrimages.’¹⁵) Universities played a significant role in the establishment of a German identity. German university students, for example, comprised one very important group in the struggles against Napoleon, not so much in terms of absolute numbers, but rather the percentage of students taking part in the wars. In this regard, Rainer Pöppinghege notes that well over  per cent of all university students volunteered for military service during the period of the Napoleonic Wars.¹⁶ And out of their fervent, patriotic spirit was born in Jena () the ‘Urburschenschaft’, an ‘assembly’ of university students. ¹⁴ Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, ), . ¹⁵ Ernst Moritz Arndt, Ein Wort über die Feier der Leipziger Schlacht (Frankfurt am Main: P. W. Eichenberg, ), . ¹⁶ Rainer Pöppinghege,‘Zwischen Radikalität und Anpassung.  Jahre studentische Geschichte’, in Jan Carstensen and Gefion Apel (eds), Schlagfertig! Studentenverbindungen im Kaiserreich. Reader und Ausstellungskatalog im Auftrage des Landschaftsverbandes Westfalen-Lippe zur Ausstellung im Westfälischen Freilichtmuseum Detmold vom . August bis . Oktober  [exhibition catalogue], –.

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

 . 

The charter states quite clearly the founders’ intentions, which were to also become those of all the Burschenschaften to follow. Among other things, the charter states that it is the duty of all Germans to strive to reawaken the true German character and, especially, to protect the Volk from all despots, both foreign and domestic.¹⁷ In this spirit, the Burschenschaften organized the Wartburgfest in , with intention of honouring Luther and his importance in German history and culture. Primary among his accomplishments were the liberation of Germany from foreign, i.e. Roman influence and his service in the development of the German language. On this occasion, too, the national element predominated and those in attendance viewed the assembly of the ancient Teutons as the prototype of the hoped-for new state. To emphasize the unity of past and present the participants at the Wartburg dressed in what they considered to be Germanic costumes, and thus the festival came to symbolize the political, cultural, and religious purity of the Germans. Since the major goal of the Burschenschaften was to do away with particularism and replace it with a unified country as a constitutional monarchy, their radical ideas raised concern with many princes and rulers of the various German states, With the assassination of the writer August von Kotzebue (–) by Karl Ludwig Sand (–), a theology student and member of the Burschenschaft, Metternich (–), Foreign Minister of Austria, guided the representatives of the newly constituted German Confederation to the passage of the controversial and repressive Carlsbad Decrees () which disbanded all potentially radical or revolutionary student associations, i.e. the Burschenschaften, removed liberal professors, and expelled liberal students. The terminated professors and students were banned from teaching or studying at any university in all thirty-nine member states of the Confederation. The Decrees also sharply curtailed freedom of the press and instituted so-called ‘investigating committees’ to scrutinize all persons and organizations suspected of disloyalty. The Decrees effectively ended any liberal patriotic impulses within the universities and were not rescinded until . The universities were not without other types of influence, however. The establishment of a new academic discipline, Altgermanistik (Medieval German Studies), and its gradual spread to all universities in the German Confederation also contributed to the search for a national and unified identity by providing cultural and literary insights into the German Middle Ages and their literature, particularly the Nibelungenlied.¹⁸ As Annina Periam states: No other story has so widely attracted and enlisted the creative efforts of German poets as that of the Nibelungs, no other poem has aroused so greatly the interest of scholars, writers, and public, as the Nibelungenlied. . . . The reawakened national

¹⁷ Herman Haupt (ed.), Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte der Burschenschaft und der deutschen Einheitsbewegung, i (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, ), . ¹⁸ Gentry, ‘German Studies’, –; Gentry, ‘Major Trends in Nibelungenlied Scholarship’, in Francis G. Gentry et al., (eds), The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Routledge, ), –.

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   



consciousness sought national material; the Nibelungenlied is a poem with but few positive historical features, yet absolutely belonging to the race, with setting and characters truly German; a poem which invited the research of students and which aroused the creative interest of poets with the desire to remould the old saga into a form that should appeal to a modern audience. And since most of the adapters recognized the dramatic spirit of the old epic, and, indeed, of the old saga as a whole, and since the stage offers the most direct form of appeal to the public, nearly all the attempts to recast and arrange the material have been in dramatic form.¹⁹

There is, of course, no dearth of lyric poems written by some of the most well-known poets of the nineteenth century on the topic of the Nibelungen. What predominates in them, however, is less the lyric than the nationalistic moment. The same can also be maintained of the many theatrical versions of the material in the nineteenth century; two, however, stand out: Christian Friedrich Hebbel’s (–) drama Die Nibelungen: Ein Deutsches Trauerspiel in Drei Abteilungen () and Richard Wagner’s (–) opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) cycle (c.–). Both the drama and the opera are based on a mixture of older Nordic legends of the Nibelungs as well as the Middle High German epic. They both reflect the powerful role that the myth of the Nibelungs played in the general German nationalistic consciousness of the nineteenth century.²⁰ The first good translation of the Nibelungenlied by Karl Simrock () as well as the first truly scholarly edition by Karl Lachmann²¹ () served to spread the enthusiasm for the epic and make the ‘German Iliad’ part and parcel of German cultural heritage in the nineteenth century, and, of course, well into the twentieth.²² As Jan-Dirk Müller has written, the Nibelungenlied became, essentially, a looking-glass for those Germans seeking a unifying identity; something around which they could rally and see reflected

¹⁹ Annina Periam, Hebbel’s Nibelungen: Its Sources, Method, and Style (New York and London: Columbia University Press, ; repr. New York: AMS Press, ), . ²⁰ The full title of Hebbel’s drama, ‘The Nibelungen: A German Tragedy’, clearly illustrates this association. ²¹ While Lachmann is recognized as the founder of medieval German philology and as the editor of medieval German texts still used today, his influence on classical scholarship, especially in nineteenthcentury Britain, was quite pronounced. See Richard J. Schoeck, ‘From Lachmann to P. S. Allen: A Chapter in the History of Classical Scholarship’, in Eckhard Kessler and Heinrich C. Kuhn (eds), Germania latina, Latinitas teutonica: Politik, Wissenschaft, humanistische Kultur vom späten Mittelalter bis in unsere Zeit,  vols (Munich: Fink Verlag, ), –; also . ²² The Nibelungenlied enjoyed great popularity outside of German-speaking lands as well. William Morris, for example, begins his The Hollow Land () with the first strophe of the Nibelungenlied using Carlyle’s  translation. See William Morris, The Hollow Land (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., ); Thomas Carlyle, The Nibelungen Lied: An Essay (New York and London: G. P. Putnam, ; orig: Westminster Review, ). Also see Francis E. Sandbach, The Nibelungenlied and Gudrun in England and America (London: David Nutt, ) for a discussion of the various nineteenth-century English-language translations.

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

 . 

their own idealized values and their flawless national character.²³ Nonetheless, while the return to the fantasy of a ‘democratic’ Germanic era or the literature of the Middle Ages may have provided cultural legitimization in an historical perspective, it did not provide political legitimization and it would turn out that, without the latter, no unified Germany would be possible. Something ‘real’ had to be found, something which could serve as a tangible symbol of the German past as well as a representation of a unified German future. And indeed there was something which would fulfill these conditions—or so it was hoped: the unfinished cathedral at Cologne. At the time Arndt was making his proposal for a monument to commemorate the Leipziger Schlacht, a hybrid of ancient Germanic and Christian symbols, Joseph Görres put forth the suggestion which ignited the imagination of his contemporaries, namely to finish construction of the cathedral in Cologne. At the time of Görres’s call for completion of the cathedral, it had been in its incomplete state since the sixteenth century. In addition, during the French occupation it had served alternately as a storehouse, a place of internment for Austrian prisoners, and as a stable. In  Görres compared the sad state of the cathedral with that of Germany: In seiner trümmerhaften Unvollendung, in seiner Verlassenheit ist es ein Bild gewesen von Teutschland, seit der Sprach- und Gedankenverwirrung: so werde es denn auch ein Symbol des neuen Reiches, das wir bauen wollen! This incomplete heap of rubble is, in its desolation, an image of Germany since the era of the confusion of language as well as belief [i.e. the growing usage of French and the ‘confusion’ brought about by the Reformation]. May it now become a symbol of the new Reich that we intend to build.²⁴

That which made the cathedral so attractive to Görres and others was its obvious reminiscence of the Middle Ages and the glory of a powerful and unified empire. As important as the stress on political continuity was also the assertion that the Gothic architectural style of the cathedral was uniquely ‘German’. The discovery in  that the cathedral of Amiens was not only Gothic but probably had served as a model for Cologne caused, as can be imagined, severe consternation among the supporters of the Gothic in Germany, and the discovery was ‘hushed up’ until  when it was determined that instead of Gothic being ‘die deutsche Kunst’, it was now designated as ‘die christlichgermanische Baukunst’ (Christian-Germanic architecture). For, according to the prominent jurist and polymath, August Reichensperger, Gothic is a ‘Germanic’ art form, since around  northern France was under the dominion of the Germanic race.²⁵

²³ Jan-Dirk Müller, Spielregeln für den Untergang. Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes (Tübingen: Niemeyer, ), . ²⁴ Joseph von Görres, ‘Der Dom in Köln’, Rheinischer Merkur ( Nov. ). ²⁵ August Reichensperger, Die christlich-germanische Baukunst und ihr Verhältnis zur Gegenwart (Trier: F. Lintz, ; orig. ), .

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   



In spite of the architectural elusiveness, Cologne Cathedral did enjoy a period as the pre-eminent German symbol, as envisioned by Görres, in that it would become the National Church, a place of confessional reconciliation where both Protestants and Catholics would hold divine services and thus provide tangible evidence of the inherent unity of the German people. The ensuing harmony between the confessions would then be the valid starting point for the restoration of the former imperial glory. And the completion of the cathedral in  can be designated a true undertaking of the entire German nation, in that all classes of society were invited to participate and did so, mainly through financial support. Dombauvereine (associations organized to raise money for and otherwise support the cathedral construction) were formed in all areas of Germany and in many foreign countries, and for a time it appeared as if the ideal of religious unity might become a reality. Protestants, especially, seemed willing to put the nationalistic cause ahead of any religious hesitations that they may have had. Indeed, one of the most bizarre donations to the construction fund involved that of the supposed wedding ring of Martin Luther to the Berlin Dombauverein in , the proceeds from the sale of which was added to the coffers. In addition, the Prussian government, eager to appeal to Catholic subjects in their newly acquired territories, generously supported the project, beginning with King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who oversaw the beginning phase of construction in  and ending with Kaiser Wilhelm I, who presided over the completed cathedral’s dedication in . However, the years between  and  are filled with events which make the dedication ceremony of  a hollow echo of that of . In the intervening time the revolution of  had happened and failed. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the king from whom so much had been expected, was unable to break loose from the traditional concept of empire and the legitimate (sensed by him at least) claim of the Habsburg dynasty to the imperial honour. Thus, when offered the crown by the Assembly in the Paulskirche, he rejected it with a statement to the effect that he would not accept a crown offered by a mob. In addition, the uneasy truce between Catholics and Protestants, really an illusion from the start, broke down completely soon after the dedication of . Catholics were never completely at ease with the prospect of the cathedral becoming a non-sectarian ‘national church’ and their position is made quite clear in a speech by the prominent Catholic theologian and historian, Ignaz von Döllinger (–) to an assembly of German bishops in Wurzburg in . In his talk Döllinger rails against those who would establish a national church for both confessions. According to Döllinger the only true ‘national church’ is the Catholic and the Catholic part of Germany is the true representative of German nationality since only it stands in a continuous, uninterrupted line with the magnificent past of the German people. The Protestant church is, according to him, an apostasy, an aberration. Only by the return to the one fold would the designation ‘national church’ be appropriate.²⁶ These differences were further exacerbated by the growing split between those who sought a restoration of the empire ²⁶ Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Kleinere Schriften. Gedruckte und Ungedruckte, ed. F. H. Reusch (Stuttgart: Cotta, ), –.

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

 . 

with close ties to Rome, in other words another Holy Roman Empire, and those who wished to restrict the activities of any future empire to Germany. It must be emphasized that this consideration was by no means a minor vexation. For at the mention of the word empire the two modifiers ‘holy’ and ‘Roman’ are brought to mind, and with them the religious and international nature of the empire. A Protestant Kaiser who restricts his rule within the boundaries of Germany is unacceptable. The importance of this feeling of continuity was underscored at the  festival celebrating the th anniversary of the founding of Munich. Although there are scattered references to the German Fatherland, the festival remains purely local in character and becomes instead an occasion of praise of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Stressed are the age of the House, its historic connection with Barbarossa, and, through these ties with the old empire, the dynasty’s continuity and legitimacy. And while the festival and the sentiments which informed it can be viewed as evidence of the phenomenon of Bavarian chauvinism, it highlights the above-mentioned problem with which Bismarck and the political founders of the Second Empire became increasingly concerned and with which they would ultimately have to deal. That is, that any royal government which is going to describe itself as an empire cannot avoid the inherent historical implications of such a designation. By , after the successful conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, the stage was set for the founding of the new empire and the emergence of Wilhelm I as the new German Kaiser. The victory over the French assumed a symbolic significance which greatly overshadowed the political. In the propaganda which had been in circulation both before and after the war, the French were put forth as the traditional enemies (Erbfeind) of Germany from the medieval period on. The German triumph was viewed as the settling of an old score, and, because of this, the Germans again had the right to establish a united nation. It was viewed as a holy victory in which the innate German virtues of strength and loyalty held the day against the arrogance and decadence of the ‘Wälschen’. This sense of completeness dominates the descriptions of the many festivals celebrating the victory. Barbarossa, rehabilitated as an early opponent of the Church in Germany, makes his appearance at every turn, awakened refreshed and youthful, marvelling at the wonder that is the new Germany. In the Dresden celebration he even addresses the masses with a Middle High German poem, while in Berlin he is awakened by a dwarf—likewise with a poem, but this time mercifully in modern German—and proceeds to lavish praise on the Hohenzollern which culminates with ‘Hoch, Deutschlands Kaiser, hoch aus voller Brust’ (‘Long live Germany’s Kaiser’) thereby establishing, of course, a link between the old empire and the new. Although the political moment was right and although the people had been nurtured for decades by the hope of a united Germany, the problem of legitimization still existed and Bismarck insisted that the impetus to take the imperial title come not from the people but rather from the German nobility.²⁷ To this end, he persuaded King Ludwig ²⁷ Elisabeth Fehrenbach, Wandlungen des deutschen Kaisergedankens – (Munich/Vienna: Oldenbourg, ), .

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   



II of Bavaria to offer Wilhelm I the crown in the name of the German princes.²⁸ This act, with its historical association of imperial election, provided the major legitimate political cornerstone of the Hohenzollern Empire. The other great problem facing the legitimization apologists of the time was to justify the nature of the new empire, namely a German empire not international in character. In order to deal with this issue, the extreme nationalism of the period and the attendant xenophobia were focused away from France and directed against Catholicism in general and Rome in particular, and the disproportionate (in the view of the Hohenzollern supporters) historical relationship between emperor and pope, empire and papacy, was seen as the ultimate cause for Germany’s problems in history. Thus the new empire should learn from history and view with distrust those in the country who advocated a relationship with the papacy, an alliance which would, as history has shown, only weaken the new nation. The distrust of the Protestant Hohenzollern towards the Catholic Church and the papacy was magnified by the proclamation by Pope Pius IX of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in /. This startlingly conservative doctrinal statement fanned the flames of the later attempt (–) by Bismarck to establish true separation of Church and State and, especially, to limit the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia, a political conflict known as the Kulturkampf (‘culture struggle’),²⁹ a clash which was ultimately resolved with the election of a new pope (Leo XIII) and direct negotiations with the Vatican.  and the era of good feeling surrounding the construction of the Cologne Cathedral was long gone. In sum, the phenomenon of medievalism in nineteenth-century Germany cannot be truly understood, if one does not keep in mind that Germany was not a cohesive political structure until . And although the Middle Ages signified for many a supposed time of national and confessional unity and was certainly inspirational to many creative artists in nineteenth-century Germany as elsewhere, their main ‘purpose’ was to help create a viable, political, and social entity out of a myriad of disparate kingdoms, duchies, and cities united not only by language but also by common purpose. Thus it is not an unimaginable leap from Novalis’s  grand vision of ‘splendid and radiant times when Europe was a Christian land’ to Macte Imperator, Felix Dahn’s  narrowly focused paean to the new German Kaiser Wilhelm I, in which he presents the image of ‘Barbablanca’ and praises the aging monarch for conquering France and, thereby, restoring the luster to the ‘crown of the Germanic

²⁸ Letter from Bismarck to Ludwig: . This was a very clever move on the part of Bismarck to convince Ludwig, His Most Catholic Majesty, to offer the imperial crown to the Protestant Prussian king. Bismarck was well aware, of course, of Ludwig’s obsession with Richard Wagner and the latter’s interpretation of the Germanic past, as well as of Ludwig’s architectural extravagance. In the latter regard, Bismarck offered financial assistance from the Prussian treasury. See Fehrenbach, Wandlungen, . ²⁹ Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, – (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ).

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

 . 

people’.³⁰ The German Empire is clearly the realization of the yearning of the German nation for the better part of a century, the end-product of the developing historical consciousness of the Germans, and can be viewed as the synthesis of the various nationalistic trends in the nineteenth century. It is a monarchy supported by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in an emerging industrial society. It claims its political roots in the age of the Hohenstaufen emperors and its cultish roots in the dim Germanic past.

S  Breazeale, Daniel, and Tom Rockmore (eds), Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ). Frank, Manfred, and Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, ). Gentry, Francis G., ‘Major Trends in Nibelungenlied Scholarship’, in Francis G. Gentry et al., (eds), The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Routledge, ), –. Gentry, Francis G., ‘German Studies’, in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms—Methods—Trends (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, ), –. Müller, Ulrich, and Peter Wapnewski (eds), John Deathridge (tr. and ed.), Wagner Handbook (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, ; orig. Wagner Handbuch, Stuttgart: Kröner, ). Murray, Christopher John (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era: – (New York: Taylor & Francis, ). Ross, Ronald J., The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, – (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ). Saul, Nicholas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Vaughn, William, German Romantic Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

³⁰

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        ......................................................................................................................

                 

......................................................................................................................

    . 

I August , Alexandre Lenoir, an art collector and official commissioned by the French Minister of the Interior, visited the former Abbey of Cluny, one of the most powerful institutions in the medieval world, and was horrified to find the Romanesque church in fragments after an auction of the abbey property to local businessmen. He begged the new government (Le Consultat) to conserve its remains or at least to send artists to make detailed drawings before any further deterioration could take place. The Ministry declined to intervene, although he was authorized to transport to Paris the tomb of Pierre Abelard, which he would combine with fragments of the tomb of Héloïse d’Argenteuil to make the legendary lovers the centrepiece of his idiosyncratic Musée des monuments français (–).¹ Lenoir was one of the first to demonstrate institutional appreciation for the physical remains of medieval France; his museum, initially begun as a warehouse to preserve royal and ecclesiastical structures as they became state property, was later curated into an atmospheric museum displaying remarkable pieces of French sculpture.²

¹ Janet T. Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ), –. Mary A. Shepard, ‘A Tomb for Abelard and Heloise’, Romance Studies, / (Jan. ): –. ² Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ); Dominique Poulot, ‘Alexandre Lenoir et les musées des monuments français’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire,  vols. (Paris: Gallimard, ), ii. –; Alexandra Stara, Alexandre Lenoir et les musées des monuments français: Killing Art to Make History (Aldershot: Ashgate, ).

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

    . 

The reflection on the past encouraged by this museum profoundly influenced visitors from all over Europe; they took the picturesque arrangements of salvaged medieval monuments they saw there as an invitation to imagine life in the Middle Ages.³ Perhaps most famous among them was historian Jules Michelet (–), who confessed, in his Histoire de la Révolution Française, that he owed his passion for history to this museum: So many souls sparked their historical flame here, developing an interest in great remembrances, the vague desire to go back in time! I still remember the sharp and unchanging emotion that unfailingly quickened my heart as I entered those sombre vaults as a boy to contemplate those pale visages. Ardent, curious, fearful, I went and sought, from room to room from age to age. I sought what? I know not; most probably the life of that time and the genius of the past.⁴

This quotation is characteristic of Michelet’s representation of medieval French history, heavily influenced by the Romantic movement’s emphasis on genius and the picturesque possibilities of the past, and tinged by a nostalgic longing to travel back to an era that was no more. Many of his contemporaries similarly looked back to the Middle Ages with a mixture of reverence and curiosity: they, too, were struck by the ‘otherness’ this period represented with regard to their own time, an otherness that ‘sparked’ them to create new texts and art forms based on their imagination of the medieval past.⁵ This sense of the Middle Ages as foreign and unrecoverable was particularly acute in France because of the Revolution (c.-). In England, the ‘revolution’ embodied by the signing of the Magna Carta had made the constitutional monarchy seem a natural extension of the medieval past.⁶ This was not the case in France, where the dramatic social changes brought about by the French Revolution were understood as constituting a radical break with an Ancien Régime seen to have originated in the

³ Sir John Soane was among them, as were most English visitors to Paris. See Gillian Darley, Sir John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), and Patrick Noon, Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism (London: Tate, ). ⁴ ‘Que d’âmes y avaient pris l’étincelle historique, l’intérêt des grands souvenirs, le vague désir de remonter les âges! Je me rappelle encore l’émotion toujours la même et toujours vive qui me faisait battre le cur, quand, tout petit, j’entrais sous ces voûtes sombres et contemplais ces visages pâles, quand j’allais et cherchais, ardent, curieux, craintif, de salle en salle et d’âge en âge. Je cherchais. Quoi? Je ne le sais; la vie d’alors sans doute et le génie des temps.’ Œuvres complètes, vi (Paris: Calmann Lévy,  [–]), . ⁵ An excellent example is Fleury François Richard’s Valentine de Milan pleurant la mort de son époux, specifically inspired by Lenoir’s museum and exhibited at the  Salon. For more about this painting and the ‘style troubadour’, see François Pupil, Le style troubadour ou la nostalgie du bon vieux temps (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, ). ⁶ See e.g. Clare A. Simmons, ‘Absent Presence: The Romantic-Era Magna Charta and the English Constitution’, in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (eds), Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –; and ‘Diggers and the Norman Yoke’ in this volume.

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    



Middle Ages. Victorian-era medievalism in France mapped the tremendous upheaval caused by the Revolution and its continued repercussions throughout the nineteenth century.⁷ The Middle Ages—interpreted by Enlightenment historians as the origin of modern France—became a touchstone for debates among the many political and religious factions jockeying for power and legitimacy after the Revolution.⁸ France’s social turmoil differed markedly from the relative political calm of Victorian England and served as a counter-example for the British, who, as Clare Simmons has argued, used the French situation to emphasize the stability of their own social traditions inherited from the Middle Ages.⁹ Because medievalism in France often reflected politics and because the French political landscape was so different from the British one, we have structured this chapter in sections that allow us to discuss the French overlap with Victorian medievalism in the areas of architecture, antiquarianism, nationalism, classism, spectacle, and mysticism. Although French medievalism is sometimes referred to as a ‘source’ for Victorian medievalism, our chapter will reveal the artificiality of such distinctions. In reality, the medievalism of France and England went hand in hand. Scholars and collectors such as Augustus W. N. Pugin, Francisque Michel, and Joseph Bédier, exiled monarchs and their families, artists, writers, and tourists travelled across the Channel, working together, reading and competing with one another; they often drew diametrically different conclusions from the same medieval texts and artefacts. The most obvious and long-running example is, of course, the nineteenth-century dispute over the Norman Conquest, which led French historians such as Augustin Thierry (in his Histoire de la Conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, published in  and running to four French editions by ), and Francisque Michel (in his Les Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, –) to claim that French influence dominated during the Anglo-Norman period, while English historians such as Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present, ) argued that this was not true since Normans were Teutonic; he and others promoted the pre-Catholic Anglo-Saxon past as Victorian Britain’s true origin.¹⁰

⁷ The Revolution itself was followed by many other revolutions and regime changes: the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo and the subsequent restoration of the French monarchy with King Louis XVIII; the  revolution that ousted his successor, King Charles X, in favour of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans; the  revolution that put an end to the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and inaugurated the Second Republic; the failure of the Second Republic (–) after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état (), which led to his Second Empire (–); the humiliating war loss and German Occupation of the Franco-Prussian War (), which ushered in the Third Republic (–). ⁸ See Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-desiècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). ⁹ Clare A. Simmons has argued that much of the English discussion of France in the nineteenth century came as an attempt to define its own shared history (particularly the Norman Conquest) as different from this revolutionary, Catholic culture. See Eyes Across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History and British Writing, – (London: Taylor & Francis, ). ¹⁰ Clare A. Simmons. Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), –.

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

    . 

T  : , ,  

.................................................................................................................................. The post-Revolutionary social order in France created challenges and opportunities for conserving and classifying documents, objects, and monuments formerly preserved by private or ecclesiastical entities. The demolition of the Abbey of Cluny begun during the French Revolution was halted, for example, only during the s. The lack of government intervention was as much a result of the administrative and political turmoil as it was of a popular taste for the aesthetic contemplation of ruins, popularized by French writers such as Chateaubriand and Charles Nodier (Le Génie du Christianisme () and the twenty-four volumes of the Voyages pittoresques dans l’ancienne France (–), respectively) whose rapturous descriptions and artistically rendered engravings of these tragic ruins (Fig. .) were themselves inspired by the writings of the Count of Volney (Les Ruines, ) and William Wordsworth. The aesthetic poignancy of ruins, celebrated as the ‘stain of time’ in John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (), worked against arguments for restoration to such an extent that the surviving fragment of the Abbey of Cluny would not be classed as an historic monument until . Françoise Choay has pointed out that by this time the French had finally developed what can be called a ‘conservation mentality’, an understanding that national patrimony is valuable and worthy of being preserved.¹¹ The development of a French conservation mentality came about in great part through the work of the Commission des monuments historiques, formalized in  by King Louis-Philippe, though initiated in  by then Minister of the Interior, François Guizot. The need for a body to identify and allocate resources to conserve important French monuments had been recognized as early as  when a line item was created in the budget to do this, but it took popular outrage against the demolition of religious monuments such as that witnessed at Cluny—Victor Hugo’s  poem ‘La Bande noire’ (The Black Crew) and  essay, Guerre aux démolisseurs! (War against the Wrecking Men!) were influential—to turn public opinion firmly against vandals and to promote religious architecture as belonging to all Frenchmen rather than just to Ancien Régime nobles and priests. The state created the position of Inspector General of French Monuments and appointed two men, Ludovic Vitet and Prosper Mérimée (in  and , respectively), to travel to the provinces to evaluate prospects for restoration programmes. Hugo would work closely with them from  as part of the Comité des arts et des monuments. Despite the government imprimatur, these were

¹¹ Françoise Choay, L’allégorie du patrimoine (Paris: Seuil, ), –, and The Invention of the Historic Monument (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ).

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    



Figure .. Émile Sagot’s view of the ruined abbey church of Cluny in Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, vii (–). By permission of Northwestern University.

largely antiquarian enterprises, led by intelligent and inspired amateurs with little to no architectural training. Françoise Choay and Jean Mallion have shown that because interest in medieval architecture was so new in France (most architects were trained in neoclassical forms), the French lacked a vocabulary to differentiate one medieval style from another, thus

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

    . 

leading to heavy reliance on the work of British colleagues.¹² Lenoir, for example, had initially described the abbey church of Cluny as a stylistic mélange between Greek art and Arab taste. Later in the century, this building would come to be seen as one of the pre-eminent examples of ‘Romanesque’ art (taking extant Roman imperial examples as models). It was initially considered only preliminary to ‘Gothic’, the style that would become the nineteenth-century favourite. Hugo, for example, described Romanesque style as ‘stagnant’ and ‘oppressive’ in his  novel Notre-Dame de Paris, thus associating it with ecclesiastical oppression and injustice; he saw its demise as a positive evolution toward the Gothic style’s ‘freedom of expression’. Many of the terms and attitudes that would develop to describe and classify medieval architecture in France thus came about through pan-European collaboration and notably through publications such as the French Annales Archéologiques, begun by Adolphe Didron (secretary of the Comité des Monuments historiques) in , which featured the work of international colleagues such as Pugin and August Reichensperger.¹³ Gothic architecture became immensely popular in France at the beginning of the Victorian era, largely as a result of the aesthetic tastes of these first leaders of the Monuments historiques: Vitet and Mérimée had written historical and Gothic fiction, respectively; Hugo’s tremendously popular Notre-Dame de Paris had glorified the Gothic style; and Didron (encouraged by Hugo) had published an  book on Christian iconography that focused heavily on Gothic edifices. All of them were influenced by the historical works of Thierry and Guizot (especially his  Histoire de la civilisation en Europe and  Histoire de la civilisation en France), which identified the late Middle Ages as the birthplace of modern France, marked by the community participation inherent in the building of Gothic cathedrals.¹⁴ Guizot’s writings were seminal for Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s advocacy of the Gothic as a national style and influential in his prolific (and controversial)

¹² Françoise Choay, L’allégorie du patrimoine, –, and Jean Mallion, Victor Hugo et l’art architectural (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), –. See also Tina Waldeier Bizzaro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Jean Nayrolles, L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ); and Mary Shepard, ‘L’Œuf Sacré: Alexandre Lenoir’s Cour Arabe and the Pointed Arch’, in Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce A. Jordan (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture After the Middle Ages (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ), –. ¹³ For more about the Annales and its role in the Gothic revival in Europe see Georg Germann, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences, and Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . The introduction to the inaugural issue of the journal presents such goals as a ‘declaration of faith’. Les Annales Archéologiques,  (): –. ¹⁴ Guizot was recognized throughout Europe for his writings, notably his -volume. Mémoires de l’histoire d’Angleterre and -volume Mémoires sur l’histoire de France (published –). He spent a year of exile in London writing more work about the English revolution and translating Shakespeare. See Laurent Theis, Guizot (Paris: Fayard, ). His writings would also inform Walter Pater’s influential  Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which identifies medieval France as the origin of the Italian Renaissance.

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    



restoration work on churches (at Vézelay, Paris, Saint-Denis), castles (Carcassonne, Vincennes, Pierrefonds), and town halls.¹⁵ There were many French architects involved in French restorations during this period, but Viollet-le-Duc would become the most internationally visible figure not only because of his tremendous dynamism as a restorer and organizer of exhibits for World’s Fairs, but especially because of the debates surrounding his published theories on restoration, which culminated in the highly influential ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Bance et Morel, –), the six-volume Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français de l’époque carolingienne à la Renaissance (Paris: Gründ et Maguet, –), and the Entretiens sur l’architecture (). Viollet, who wrote that restoration implied recreating a building in an ideal state that may never have existed,¹⁶ became a particular target for British artists and art historians such as John Ruskin, whose Seven Lamps of Architecture vilified Viollet and the ‘destruction’ he had wrought. The international prominence of medieval French architecture in the first half of the nineteenth century—through poignant ruins, restoration campaigns, illustrated publications, and public debate—made it a source of fascination for English writers and artists eager to see these structures for themselves (John Murray’s first travel guide to France was published in  and would be regularly updated afterward; it highlighted the Gothic architecture of Rouen and the Normandy region). William Morris, for example, recalled, in Signs of Change, his first visit to Rouen () as ‘the greatest pleasure I have ever had’ because the city was, at that time ‘still in its outward aspect a piece of the Middle Ages’.¹⁷ He embarked upon a walking tour of nine French cathedrals and twenty-four churches, along with trips to Mont Saint-Michel and a trip to the Bayeux Tapestry with Edward Burne-Jones the following year; the beauty of high mass at Beauvais Cathedral would haunt Burne-Jones for the rest of his life. Both friends were disgusted by Viollet-le-Duc’s work at Notre-Dame de Paris (begun a decade earlier and not yet complete) and left France convinced that medieval buildings should be left alone. Despite this negative note, the trip would prove foundational for Burne-Jones, who was ‘transported with delight’ at his first glimpse of medieval

¹⁵ For the influence of Guizot and Thierry on developing the Gothic as a ‘national style’ see Kevin Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (College Park, PA: Penn State Press, ), –. There is an enormous body of work on Viollet-le-Duc’s restorations. In addition to Murphy’s book, other useful works for understanding Viollet’s thinking and influence are Barry Bergdoll’s introduction to The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné of Viollet-le-Duc (New York: Braziller, ); Laurent Baridon, L’imaginaire scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: L’Harmattan, ); and Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, – (Farnham: Ashgate Press, ). ¹⁶ ‘Restaurer un édifice, ce n’est pas l’entretenir, le réparer ou le refaire, c’est le rétablir dans un état complet qui peut n’avoir jamais existé à un moment donné.’ Article ‘Restauration’ in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, viii. ¹⁷ William Morris: Poet, Artist, Socialist: A Selection from his Writings Together with a Sketch of the Man, ed. Francis Watts Lee (New York: Twentieth Century Press, ), –.

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

    . 

painting, Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin at the Louvre.¹⁸ Morris and Ruskin, like Walter Pater after them, would write beautifully about the wonders of French Gothic architecture and liturgy, thus inspiring subsequent generations of English visitors.¹⁹

I     : , ,  

.................................................................................................................................. The experience of Morris and Burne-Jones illustrates the remarkable advances made with regard to the public accessibility of medieval art and architecture by the s. Post-Revolutionary French architects lagged behind their English colleagues in developing vocabulary to describe their heritage, yet by the s French venues for the contemplation of medieval artefacts were among the best in Europe (Burne-Jones had not been able to see any medieval paintings in England).²⁰ The Louvre and the Musée de Cluny (now called the Musée national du Moyen Âge) both sought to educate the public, an attitude that marked a shift from the private antiquarianism (and classism) of earlier periods to more egalitarian scientific and pedagogical-based methods that would dominate in the second half of the nineteenth century.²¹ The vandalism of the French Revolution was tragic, yet it also created opportunities for individuals like Lenoir to acquire valuable objects and artworks formerly belonging to nobles and clergy.²² This led to new private collections, like that of Alexandre du Sommerard, an archaeologist who, in , opened his collection of medieval artefacts as a museum in the Paris hôtel de ville formerly used by the abbots of Cluny.²³ At his death in  his collections would be fused with the remnants of Lenoir’s and ¹⁸ Fiona McCarthy describes these impressions of France in The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward BurneJones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, ), –. ¹⁹ Notably Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, Morris’s ‘The Churches of Northern France, No. ’, and Pater’s ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’. ²⁰ See McCarthy, Last Pre-Raphaelite, . The British Museum, also founded on the Enlightenment premise of shared knowledge, would not actively begin collecting medieval artefacts until after its expansion in . See Eric Gidal, Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ). ²¹ Daniel Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in NineteenthCentury France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). ²² Tomas Stammers traces the importance of post-Revolutionary collecting in The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in ). ²³ The guidebook published to accompany the museum provides a good sense of the importance of the museum for promoting medieval art and architecture at this time. See Notice sur l’Hôtel de Cluny (Paris: Firmin Didot, ).

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    



transformed into a public museum, the Musée de Cluny that so enthused Morris and Burne-Jones in  and .²⁴ Many French collectors would emulate du Sommerard, bequeathing their personal acquisitions to the state. This was the case with Henri, Duc d’Aumale (son of King Louis-Philippe), who spent his life trying to reassemble the dispersed collections of his ancestors, the Condé princes, and to restore their castle at Chantilly. His bequest to the French state (, made public in ) of the castle and its inestimable collection of books, paintings, and especially medieval manuscripts, surprised the world by breaking with the aristocratic tradition of passing such treasures from one generation to the next. Like the English bequest of Sir John Soane, who willed his house and its collections to the state in  as a museum open to ‘amateurs and students’, d’Aumale, who spent many years (–) in exile in London, and whose collection was once considered among the finest in Britain,²⁵ had similar educational intent, leaving this ‘complete and varied monument of French art in all its branches, and of the history of my father-land at glorious epochs’ for others to study.²⁶ This trajectory from the private enjoyment of treasures to state-run and curated museums or libraries motivated by national history and public education was a product of the Revolution and a hallmark of nineteenth-century French medievalism. Yet it was the pre-Revolutionary work that had made these later institutions possible. Lionel Gossman has identified humanist members of the Académie des Inscriptions working with Camille Falconet as critical for medievalism in England and France. Like the Romantics after them, they focused on the importance of studying local rather than Classical history and identified, in , a number of projects necessary for understanding medieval culture: a glossary of Old French, a history of weights, measures, and currencies, descriptions of monuments, and histories of French literature to name a few. La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, du Cange, and Montfaucon began this work, which proved influential despite being stymied by the Revolution: Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (), for example, was translated into English in , as was his Literary History of the Troubadours (, with a second edition in ).²⁷ Sainte-Palaye’s writings were then read, copied, translated, or annotated by the English thinkers now most affiliated with early British medievalism—Edward Gibbon, William

²⁴ A great deal has been written about the development of the Musée de Cluny and du Sommerard’s guidebook is quite interesting in this regard. Stephen Bann describes the fusion of the two collections in The Clothing of Clio: A Study in the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ²⁵ Gustave Waagen, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, a supplement to Treasures of Art in Great Britain () (London: John Murray, ). ²⁶ Theodore Childs, ‘Le Château de Chantilly’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,  (June/Nov. ): –. On the collection of dispersed family heirlooms as an act of medievalism see Michael Camille, ‘The “Très Riches Heures”: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Critical Inquiry, / (Autumn ): –. ²⁷ Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, ), –, .

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

    . 

Robertson, Richard Hurd, William Mason, Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy, and Walter Scott—and his vision of chivalry was accepted as standard in Britain until .²⁸ The Revolution would usher in a new era of institutional and pedagogical changes driven by interest in French history. The École Normale Supérieure was founded in  and reformed by Napoleon along with the École des Chartes (envisaged by Napoleon as a return to Benedictine archival work) in , but would not come into its own until . It would be emulated by many European and American governments (the University of Liverpool was the first in Britain to adopt this model, in ).²⁹ Charles Ridoux has traced the development of other post-Revolutionary French institutions related to medieval studies, such as the creation of teaching positions at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, the establishment of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, based on German scientific methods (), and new publications like the journal Romania (). While antiquarian scientific societies and academies like those prevalent in Victorian Britain would endure in France, the French also developed a parallel state-sponsored system informed by scientific methodologies with the intent of professionalizing scholarly disciplines.³⁰ The Franco-Prussian War of  would lend even greater impetus to the study of medieval France. Although German thinking had been a model for the French since Germaine de Staël’s  De l’Allemagne, after the war, scholarship became a source of competition. Rereading medieval French history led, for example, to French publications claiming that the Gauls (the tribes living in France before the   Germanic invasions) were the true ancestors of the French people, who had long been oppressed by the Germanic nobility (the same nobility overthrown during the French Revolution).³¹ Such discourse mirrored the Franco-British debates of earlier in the century concerning the impact of the Norman Conquest.³² The result in Britain, as it would be in s France, was the development of new myths about national origins, followed by pedagogical materials and especially children’s literature extolling those historical figures who fought off invaders. King Alfred the Great and Hereward (the ‘last of the English’ in the title of Charles Kingsley’s  novel) became models for Anglo-Saxon

²⁸ Gossman, Medievalism, –, discusses the importance of Sainte-Palaye in Britain and Germany. ²⁹ See Charles Ridoux, Evolution des études médiévales en France de  à  (Paris: Honoré Champion, ), –, –, ; Lara Jennifer Moore, Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, – (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, ). Matthew Arnold’s  study of the French educational system, The Popular Education of France, reveals the interest such changes attracted in Britain. ³⁰ Ridoux, Evolution, –. See Isabel DiVanna, Reconstructing the Middle Ages: Gaston Paris and the Development of Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ) for an overview of the increasingly method-based techniques employed in French scholarship throughout the century. ³¹ See Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, –. ³² See Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, –.

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    



and Victorian England just as Roland and Joan of Arc would become the heroes of Third Republic France.³³ Although the period – has often been acknowledged as critical for the birth of scientific and nationally driven medieval studies in France, many of the attitudes towards medieval studies, published editions of medieval texts, and infrastructure to support such publications had been formalized earlier, many during the reign of King Louis-Philippe (–). The monarch’s focus on medieval French history was not simply a result of the pressures placed upon him by ministers specialized in the Middle Ages, such as Guizot and Hippolyte Fourtoul, but also because of his desire to understand recent events and to study the people’s role in that history.³⁴ When the July  Revolution forced his ultra-conservative cousin, Charles X, to seek exile in England, Louis-Philippe established a constitutional monarchy, undertaking a number of initiatives popular with the bourgeoisie. With the encouragement of Guizot, he would support research, restoration, and publishing campaigns related to the Middle Ages. Francisque Michel’s research into the Norman Conquest, undertaken in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and other English towns, was, for example, part of a governmentsponsored expedition to copy medieval manuscripts deemed of ‘national importance’ (Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis and Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie).³⁵ It was during this research trip that Michel would discover and transcribe the Bodleian Library’s version of the Chanson de Roland (Digby ), later championed as the national French epic. Such state-sponsored research, travel, and publication, while not yet constituting a professionalization of the discipline as would be seen after , resulted, as Michael Glencross has noted, in a new and less antiquarian phase of French research that led to important discoveries and editions of medieval texts by scholars such as Michel, Amaury Duval, Claude Fauriel, François Génin, and Paulin Paris, and later Léon Gautier, Gaston Paris, and Paul Meyer.³⁶ These new editions of medieval manuscripts—read in both England and France—made information accessible to many more poets, novelists, and historians, who used them as a springboard for their own work. The interaction among British and French scholars would continue unabated throughout the century and Les Annales Archéologiques and Romania (a post- French enterprise undertaken with philological methods to transmit to the public of information related to medieval scholarship) ³³ See R. Howard Bloch, ‘The First Document and the Birth of Medieval Studies’, in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. Christian Amalvi, De l’art de la manière d’accommoder les héros de l’histoire de France (Paris: Albin Michel, ). ³⁴ Michael Glencross, Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ) describes the profound sense of a break with the known past and a need to understand it as well as the influence exerted by a number of education ministers who were themselves medievalists (–, –). ³⁵ See Glencross, Reconstructing Camelot, –; Mark Burde, ‘Francisque Michel, Joseph Bédier, and the Epic History of the First Edition of the Song of Roland ()’, Exemplaria, / (Spring ): –. ³⁶ Glencross, Reconstructing Camelot, . Janine Dakyns provides an overview of some of the editorial work performed during the Second Empire in The Middle Ages in French Literature, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), as does DiVanna, Reconstructing the Middle Ages.

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

    . 

Figure .. Le Vieux Paris, Paris  exhibition, in the public domain. Photograph by Elizabeth Emery. By permission of Northwestern University

published British scholars (such as Frederick Furnivall) and acknowledged at length the kindness of the British conservators and librarians who shared manuscripts, copied catalogues, and provided advice.³⁷ By the end of the Victorian era, various French regimes had made so much information about the Middle Ages available to the public that amateurs of all social classes and from all over Europe could consult manuscripts and historical documents in person or in published form in order to further their own interests. This was the case of caricaturist Albert Robida, whose formal education ended at the age of . He was able to recreate through his research one of the greatest successes of the  World’s Fair: Le Vieux Paris (Fig. .). This miniature city consisted entirely of Parisian monuments that had been destroyed through the years and featured a medieval village with costumed shopkeepers, tavern owners, and roving entertainers along with concerts of plainchant in a rebuilt ³⁷ Ridoux discusses a number of British collaborators, Evolution, –.

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    



thirteenth-century chapel. It was the third highest-grossing attraction of the  World’s Fair and allowed some  million visitors (among them several million British nationals) to ‘relive’ a ‘charming’ and ‘picturesque’ Parisian medieval past painstakingly recreated by Robida using the maps, illustrations, and chronicles available in public libraries and archives.³⁸

T  M A

.................................................................................................................................. The century-long focus on discovering, preserving, and sharing the material culture of the Middle Ages is not surprising given the ‘spectacularity’ of nineteenth-century Europe, awash in new visual media such as photographs, panoramas, museums, and World’s Fairs, all of which allowed the display of authentic medieval artefacts and modern creations inspired by them. The medieval period’s ability to ‘spark’ imaginations, as Michelet put it, may have culminated in World’s Fair displays, but it had developed in the Romantic period. Victor Hugo is a critical figure for the reception of the Middle Ages in France and Britain: he wrote poems, essays, and novels in defence of medieval architecture and participated on the Comité des arts et des monuments, but perhaps even more importantly he was one of the first and most vocal French supporters of medievalism, of the creative possibilities the Middle Ages could offer contemporaries.³⁹ Medieval literature continued to be read and appreciated in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but in France the neoclassical aesthetics of the courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV had relegated medieval literature (and medieval illuminated manuscripts) to the dustbin.⁴⁰ Interest in medieval epic and romance had persisted,⁴¹ but it was the French Romantics, fascinated by the intricate plots, historical background, and local colour celebrated by Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott (the young Balzac

³⁸ See Elizabeth Emery, ‘Protecting the Past: Albert Robida and the Vieux Paris Exhibit at the  World’s Fair’, Journal of European Studies, / (Mar. ): –. ³⁹ He was politically important (and dangerous to the British) as a voice of resistance to the Second Empire, exiled first in Jersey then in Guernsey from  to . He was also a major influence on English writers such as Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne, who corresponded with him. ⁴⁰ The Getty Museum’s  exhibit, ‘Untold Stories: Collecting and Transforming Medieval Manuscripts’, provided many examples of the repurposing of illuminated manuscripts, from use as rags and gun wadding to jam jars and children’s art projects. accessed June . ⁴¹ Although it is often said that nineteenth-century France ‘discovered’ the Middle Ages, this is not strictly true since medieval history and literature had never been forgotten. Peter Damian-Grint and Alicia Montoya have revealed just how viable medieval art and literature remained to debates between neoclassical ‘ancients’ and more innovative ‘moderns’: Medievalism and ‘manière gothique’ in Enlightenment France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ); Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ).

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

    . 

proclaimed that he would be ‘Walter Scott or nothing’), who popularized medieval European subject matter as the best way to dislodge the establishment’s neoclassical aesthetic. Essays such as Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare ( and ) and the preface to Hugo’s  play, Cromwell, called for a renewal of French theatre based on national rather than classical histories, a theatre involving psychological or amorous intrigue rather than politics, and dynamic wide-ranging staged settings rather than contrived rules restricting action and time. Frédéric Gaillardet and Alexandre Dumas’s La Tour de Nesle (), a popular play inspired by the real fourteenth-century Affaire de la Tour de Nesle, is a good example: perverted royal princesses kidnap commoners and have their way with them before dumping them into the Seine. In Meyerbeer’s spectacular opera, Robert le Diable (), based loosely on the thirteenth-century legend of Robert the Devil, sumptuous scenic representations of knights, pacts with the devil, and dancing nuns arisen from the tomb dazzled Paris audiences and would be reenacted on thousands of European stages in the decade following its creation. Robert le Diable would also inspire many artworks in different media.⁴² Hugo’s Hernani (), with its elaborate costumes, love story, and a scene set in Charlemagne’s tomb, had made such representations possible by sparking a ‘battle’ between partisans of Classical and Romantic aesthetics. The Romantics would win out in France and elaborate stage settings such as these would persist throughout the century in the hundreds of Frenchproduced operas and plays set in medieval or pseudo-medieval times: Rossini’s Tancrède () and Le Comte Ory (), Donizetti’s La Favorite (), Wagner’s Paris version of Tannhäuser (), Massenet’s Esclarmonde (), and Edmond Rostand’s La Princesse lointaine (), to name just a few. Many of these went on tour throughout Europe.⁴³ The best-selling translations of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, introduced into France shortly after their publication in England, made medieval history, and particularly the Crusades, a subject of renewed popularity. Historical novels written by women and set in the medieval past had flourished in France from the Revolutionary period. Examples include Sophie Cottin’s  Mathilde, about Richard-the-Lionheart’s sister and her experiences following him on crusade, and Marie-Adèle Barthélemy-Hadot’s  Les Brigands anglais ou la bataille de Hastings. Maurice Samuels has argued, however, that the arrival of Scott in France shifted emphasis from female-penned love stories set in vaguely sketched faraway places to more detailed (and male-authored) descriptions of places, costumes, and bodies. Such ‘local colour’ was intended to allow the reader to ‘see’ the past through the creation of

⁴² See Philippe Lalitte, ‘Robert le Diable au XIXe siècle’, Médiévales,  (Printemps ): –. Many writers and artists would take inspiration from this opera, including, as Molly Engelhardt proposes, Charlotte Brontë, who incorporates it into Villette. Engelhardt, Dancing Out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, ), . ⁴³ George Jellinek, History through the Opera Glass (White Plains, NY: Hal Leonard Corporation, ).

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    



Figure .. Les Salles des Croisades, Château de Versailles, . Licence by CC BY-SA .

realistic historical effects.⁴⁴ Emphasis on visual representations of the Middle Ages followed logically from the taste for troubadour paintings and elaborate stage sets, and would be reinforced by Les Salles des Croisades, the five rooms of the Palace of Versailles that Louis-Philippe adorned with some  paintings of the Crusades, commissioned in  for this purpose (Fig. .). These rooms were inaugurated in  and opened to the public in .⁴⁵ Romantic poetry, too, fixated on the figure of the knight errant (le paladin), voyages to the medieval Orient, Arthurian legend, and courtly love, as evident in such works as Hugo’s Les Orientales and La Légende des siècles, Alfred de Musset’s Rolla, Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit, Gérard de Nerval’s ‘El Deschicado’, and Edgar Quinet’s Merlin l’enchanteur. French historical novels such as Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris,

⁴⁴ See ‘Scott Comes to France’, in Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), – for an excellent discussion of Scott’s impact—particularly his use of local colour—on the development of the historical novel in France. ⁴⁵ Claire Constans and Philippe Lamarque, Les Salles des Croisades: Château de Versailles (Paris: Éditions du Gui, ). Other rooms were dedicated to many other eras of French history.

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

    . 

Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars, and Frédéric Soulié’s Le comte de Toulouse also flourished in the early years of the Victorian period and were read in England.⁴⁶ Much late nineteenth-century literary and artistic medievalism thus descends directly from the Romantic movement’s fascination with the spectacular aspects of the Middle Ages: exotic historical settings, brave knights, colourful costumes, and love stories, but towards the end of the century curiosity about the Middle Ages was increasingly based on historical documents. This is the case of Algernon Swinburne in England, who remarked in  that he was studying every scrap of available medieval material (including Michel’s collected volume of all the extant Tristan poems) to ‘build’ his own poem, Tristram of Lyonesse. Swinburne, whose grandfather was French, was probably the Victorian poet most influenced by French sources—not just medieval French literature (Arthurian romance, troubadour poetry, the works of François Villon), but also Romantic-era French poetry by writers such as Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and the later generation of Parnassians and Symbolists. The inspiration he took from French material is evident in works such as Poems and Ballads, Rosamand, and Chastelard.⁴⁷ In France, a fascination with medieval fixed forms used by poets Charles d’Orléans and François Villon (newly edited) led modern poets to experiment with ballads, rondeaux, and vilanelles in the pages of journals including La Plume and Le Mercure de France. Late nineteenth-century writers and artists took inspiration from these new editions of medieval literature, but also from new work on the history of the Middle Ages. A prime example is the medieval feast writer Pierre Loti held in the ‘Gothic dining room’ of his home in Rochefort in , an event widely reported in the press. While he could have decorated his home according to an imagined theatrical notion of the medieval, as did Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, Loti constructed the room out of salvaged fragments from medieval churches and spent at least six months studying cultural practices of the year . He examined fifteenth-century models of tableware at the Musée de Cluny, consulted with experts from the École des Chartes over menus, and coached his guests in the pronunciation of old French.⁴⁸ The evening was described by all as a true resurrection of the year . Like Alexandre Lenoir, Loti sought colourful theatrical aspects that would impress visitors and move them to reflect upon French history, yet he was also obsessed with accuracy, as were many of his generation; they were curious about the ‘real’ Middle Ages. ⁴⁶ Louis Maigron, Roman historique à l’époque romantique: Essai sur l’influence de Walter Scott (Paris: Honoré Champion, ) devotes lengthy discussion to the historical novels of this period and Glencross discusses Arthurian legend. ⁴⁷ Antony H. Harrison, Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, ) and Charlotte Ribeyrol, ‘A Channel Passage: Swinburne and France’, in Yisrael Levin (ed.), A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –. ⁴⁸ See Elizabeth Emery, ‘Pierre Loti’s “Memories” of the Middle Ages: Feasting on the Gothic in ’, in Elma Brenner, Mary Franklin-Brown, and Meredith Cohen (eds), Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –.

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    



Figure .. Basilique de Fourvière, Lyons, –. Licence by CC BY-SA .

Not all home decorators of this period were as scrupulous as Loti. Vestiges of destroyed medieval churches and abbeys appeared as a frequent decorating motif, from ‘Abelard’s table’, moved from the Abbey of Cluny to poet Alphonse de Lamartine’s garden in Saint-Point, to the manuscript pages and antiquities acquired by European collectors, to the Gothic choir stalls that poet Robert de Montesquiou (a friend of Whistler) installed in his antechamber (his home decorating would inspire several of the scenes depicted in J.-K. Huysmans’s  À rebours).⁴⁹ Even the Montmartre taverns and cabarets frequented by the Prince of Wales in the s incorporated medieval furnishings.⁵⁰ By the end of the century, many artists complained about the pervasiveness of medieval ecclesiastical furniture, stained glass, and tapestries in bourgeois domestic settings (though like William Morris, they were even more critical of modern knock-offs). Despite a passion for private medieval home decorating in late nineteenth-century France, there was less public building of neo-Gothic architecture in France than in nineteenth-century Britain (See Part V of this volume.) In France, it was primarily churches—like Sainte-Clotilde in Paris (–)—that adopted neo-medieval

⁴⁹ Frank Herrmann, The English as Collectors (New York: Norton, ) and Sandra Hindman, Michael Camille, Nina Rowe, and Rowan Watson, Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age (Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, ). For more on Montesquiou and others see Claire I. R. O’Mahony (ed.), Symbolist Objects (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, ). ⁵⁰ See Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, –.

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

    . 

forms.⁵¹ An even more popular choice for neo-medieval French buildings was a hybrid ‘Romano-Byzantine’ style like that achieved in the Sacré Coeur basilica atop Montmartre in Paris (–). This style was popularized outside of Paris by Pierre Bossan in buildings such as the Basilica of Fourvière in Lyon (Fig. .).⁵² For parishes requiring more economical choices among neo-medieval styles, a purer Romanesque form could incorporate common neoclassical structural elements and eliminate much decorative detail, even if many church interiors retained the Gothic as the form that had, since Chateaubriand’s  Le génie du Christianisme, been considered best-suited for Catholic worship in France.⁵³

M  S 

.................................................................................................................................. In France, ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’, medieval religious architecture played a particularly fraught role in a post-Revolutionary culture in which the Civil Constitution of the Clergy () had made the Catholic Church subservient to the French State. Partisans of Catholicism militated throughout the century for a return to prominence, using politics, education, and pilgrimages to achieve their goals.⁵⁴ The turmoil consuming the Catholic Church in France—like that surrounding the political upheaval in general—was much discussed in England. This can be seen in the work of John Henry Newman, a leader in the Oxford Movement, who corresponded with French priests and reflected upon the French situation in the years leading to his very public conversion to Catholicism, and in the French-influenced writing of Gerard Manley Hopkins.⁵⁵ ⁵¹ Jean-Michel Leniaud, La Révolution des signes: L’art à l’église (–) (Paris: Cerf, ), –. See also chapters  and  of this book. ⁵² Philippe Dufieux, Le mythe de la primatie des Gaules: Pierre Bossan (–) et l’architecture religieuse en Lyonnais au XIXe siècle (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, ), –. Gretchen McKay, ‘An Eastern Medieval Revival: Byzantine Art and Nineteenth-Century French Painting’, Studies in Medievalism,  (): –. ⁵³ Janet T. Marquardt, ‘The Politics of Burgundian Romanesque: Destruction and Construction in Cluny and Mâcon during the Nineteenth Century’, in Keith Bresnahan and Joanne Mancini (eds), Architecture and Armed Conflict: The Politics of Destruction (London: Routledge, ), –. ⁵⁴ This is a complicated issue that goes beyond the bounds of medievalism, though Catholicism was an important source for English thinking. Inspired by Carlyle, the British defined their Protestant heritage in counter-distinction to the seemingly irrational Catholic actions of the Revolutionary French. On Catholicism in nineteenth-century French society see Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (eds), Religion, Society and Politics in France since  (London: Continuum, ), Joseph Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (College Park, PA: Penn State Press, ), and Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ⁵⁵ See e.g. Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England: Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory in the Summer of  (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., ). Jill Muller provides a succinct account of the French influence in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism (London: Routledge, ).

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    



In France, other nineteenth-century Catholics embraced prayer rather than politics, looking to the medieval past as an ideal time when fasting, communion, and meditation were an integral part of daily life. Charles de Montalembert’s Histoire de sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie () and his seven-volume history of monasticism published in  (Les moines d’Occident) paints a picture of the Middle Ages as the epitome of a lost order of purity and wholesomeness, as did the many new editions of saints’ lives and other Catholic literature published throughout the nineteenth century and intended for adults and children alike.⁵⁶ The return of monastic orders after the Revolution and particularly the creation of the Abbey of Solesmes by Dom Guéranger, beginning in , brought further attention to the medieval Benedictine tradition of work and prayer (emulated at Solesmes through scholarship and plainchant), while publicly promoting monastic life as an island of religious and aesthetic excellence in a turbulent modern world.⁵⁷ The revival of French interest in Les Primitifs, preRaphaelite painters such as Fra Angelico and Rogier Van der Weyden, gave further credence to the idea of monk-artists as pure, as selflessly devoting their artistic or scholarly talents to God.⁵⁸ Such ideals appealed to religious and non-religious alike and contributed to the formation of many nineteenth-century ‘artistic brotherhoods’ (like the Pre-Raphaelites in England, the Rose+Croix and the Nabis in France), which promoted idealized variations of medieval monastic traditions as an antidote to the corrupt modern world.⁵⁹ Writer J.-K. Huysmans did much to further such aestheticization of Catholic traditions inherited from the Middle Ages. Although largely secular in his youth, he began gravitating toward the spiritual and aesthetic intensity of monastic life (at Solesmes and other abbeys) in the s, and became a Benedictine oblate in . He was one of France’s most-influential proselytizers for Catholicism, largely through his semi-autobiographical late novels featuring the character Durtal, who flirts with Satanism in the  Là-bas, before finding faith.⁶⁰ In the book’s sequel, En route

⁵⁶ Loïc Artiaga, Des torrents de papier: Catholicisme et lectures populaires au XIXe siècle (Limoges: PULIM, ), Catherine Rosenbaum-Dondaine, L’image de piété en France, – (Paris: MuséeGalerie de la SEITA, ), and C. J. T. Talar, ‘Discourse on Method: Hippolyte Delehaye’s Légendes hagiographiques’, in Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate (eds), Medieval Saints in Late NineteenthCentury French Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., ), –; Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, –. ⁵⁷ Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ). Martin Clarke notes that ideas from Solesmes influenced the English Downside Movement in the s and s and would become even more influential during the Solesmes congregation’s exile on the Isle of Wight in –. Martin V. Clarke (ed.), Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ). ⁵⁸ Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, –. ⁵⁹ See Laura Morowitz and Will Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ). ⁶⁰ Satanism is a recurring motif in nineteenth-century French medievalism, often echoing the macabre plots of the Gothic novel. See Dakyns, Middle Ages, –, –, –, –.

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

    . 

(), Durtal seeks solace from the perverse modern world in medieval churches such as Paris’s Saint-Séverin, whose fifteenth-century pillars still ‘ooze faith’ from the prayers that permeated them in the Middle Ages, a faith enhanced by the multisensorial liturgical practices that take place there (music, incense, darkness, sculpture, stained glass, processional, taking of the host).⁶¹ In La cathédrale (), Durtal has converted to Catholicism and revels in the medieval symbolism of Chartres Cathedral, as he does in the traditions of monastic life in L’oblat (). Huysmans’s aestheticized representation of the medieval Catholic liturgy was influential not only in France, but also in Britain. His passionate descriptions of medieval and modern practices (the symbolism of Gothic sculpture and stained glass, the plainchant at Solesmes) and the attention he lavished on medieval saints and modern mystics (St Teresa of Avila, Ruysbroeck, Catherine Emmerich, and Ernest Hello, among others), promoted an aesthetic vision of medieval Catholicism that tempted many young writers and artists of this time, from Paul Claudel to Oscar Wilde.⁶² In fact, Husymans’ glorified medieval Catholic liturgy and art as he had the art of poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and painter Gustave Moreau in his  À rebours. This unique book, admired by Arthur Symons as the ‘breviary of the Decadence’, was one of the models for Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and was widely believed to have been the poisonous ‘yellow book’ that mesmerizes the novel’s protagonist.⁶³ All of Huysmans’s late works focus on artefacts from the Middle Ages (manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass, painting, music) that serve as springboards for reveries that transport the miserable modern thinker to a different time. Such spiritual transport would become a defining feature of the literary and artistic Franco-Belgian Symbolist movement (formalized in ), thus leading to the medieval-inspired (and Rossetti and Tennyson-inspired) poetry of Max Elskamp, Stuart Merrill, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Georges Rodenbach, and Emile Verhaeren, and paintings of Odilon Redon, Carlos Schwabe, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Fernand Khnopff.⁶⁴ The references to the Middle Ages in such poems and paintings were not as historically based as Loti’s medieval feast or Swinburne’s homage to medieval French poetry; instead they had more in common with the imaginative Romantic engagement with the Middle Ages, concerned predominately with feelings, ideas, and dreams. While French architecture, history, literature, museums, and spectacles served as important sources for much early Victorian medievalism, the tables had turned by the late s. The Franco-Belgian Symbolist movement was indebted to Rossetti, ⁶¹ Huysmans, En route, Œuvres complètes, xiii/. –. ⁶² Frédéric Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France – (Paris: CNRS Editions, ). ⁶³ See e.g. the discussion of sources in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray: The  and  Texts, ed. Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). ⁶⁴ For European Symbolist painting at this time see Paradis perdus: L’Europe symboliste (Montréal: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, ).

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    



Tennyson, Swinburne, Pater, and Ruskin, discovered by a new generation that read or translated English and travelled back and forth across the Channel. Burne-Jones became all the rage in France after the  World’s Fair at which King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid won a gold medal, and his work inspired much imitation, leading to visual representations of the Middle Ages in France as a vague or dreamy faraway time peopled by knights, swooning ladies, and lilies.⁶⁵ This last decade of the nineteenth century clearly marked a new period of crossChannel collaboration. So many Britons spent time in Paris (Swinburne, Whistler, Wilde, Symons) and French in London (Mallarmé, Vielé-Griffin, Merrill, Montesquiou) that it becomes difficult to say whether the fin-de-siècle Parisian fad for poet François Villon originated from French interest in Swinburne and his translations of Le Testament (themselves inspired by Théophile Gautier’s Grotesques), from Robert Louis Stevenson’s  essay about Villon (which Mallarmé had read), or simply from new French editions of Villon’s poetry, an interest in secular French history, and a Parisian vogue for medieval taverns.⁶⁶ European writers and scholars collaborated on intellectual projects, from journals like Romania and early text societies to poetry journals and book translations. The cosmopolitanism and intellectual collaboration of the s thus make the identification of specific ‘French sources’ for Victorian medievalism more complex than it might initially seem. In fact, À rebours is quite probably the last clearly acknowledged French source for Victorian medievalism, though also marking its demise. This final wave of Victorian medievalism eschewed the dreamy purity of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King for the Sadean-inflected medievalism of Swinburne (criticized by English contemporaries for his dangerous ‘Frenchness’) and Huysmans’s decadent aestheticism.⁶⁷ The Yellow Book (–), the quarterly published by John Lane and associated with the medievalist drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (its first art director) and with Oscar Wilde (though he had no part in its production),⁶⁸ further marks Britain’s turn towards France as an alternative to Victorian morality. It is seen as one of the first periodicals to break markedly with Victorian aesthetics because of Beardsley’s decision to separate text and images. While these choices are not specifically French, Beardsley did seek to shock the ⁶⁵ See Patrick Bade, Burne-Jones: Perfect Square (New York: Parkstone International, ). For the French influence on Pater see John J. Conlon, Walter Pater and the French Tradition (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ) and for Pater’s influence at end of century see Stephen Bann, The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (London: Continuum, ). ⁶⁶ On Swinburne and Villon see Ribeyrol, ‘A Channel Passage’, –, and Nick Freeman, ‘The Gallows Nightingale: Swinburne’s Translations of Villon’, in Jennifer A. Palmgren and Loretta M. Holloway (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. On the French Villon revival in s Paris see Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, –. Claire Pascolini-Campbell’s François Villon in English Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ) analyses the numerous Villon translations circulating in Britain. ⁶⁷ Stanley Weintraub, ‘Introduction’, The Yellow Book: Quintessence of the Nineties (New York: Doubleday, ), . ⁶⁸ See Weintraub on the misidentification of the yellow book Wilde carried to his trial with The Yellow Book. The popular backlash against the periodical after Wilde’s trial would destroy the journal.

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

    . 

Victorian public and did so by associating the periodical’s title with Frenchness: the name of this avant-garde British periodical, which published the leading English poets and artists of its day, refers to the yellow-wrapped French books—like À rebours— which arrived in Britain as titillating alternatives to accepted Victorian fare.

S  Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio: A Study in the Representation of History in NineteenthCentury Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Bressani, Martin, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc, - (Farnham: Ashgate Press, ). Conlon, John J., Walter Pater and the French Tradition (Lewiston, PA: Bucknell University Press, ). Dakyns, Janine, The Middle Ages in French Literature, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Emery, Elizabeth, and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-desiècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Germann, Georg, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences, and Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ). Glencross, Michael, Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Harrison, Antony H., Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, ). Hindman, Sandra, Michael Camille, Nina Rowe, and Rowan Watson, Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age (Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, ). Kaiser, Wolfram, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Morowitz, Laura, and Will Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ). Noon, Patrick, Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism (London: Tate, ). Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Simmons, Clare A., Eyes across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History and British Writing, – (London: Taylor & Francis, ).

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  .............................................................................................................

     , ,                .............................................................................................................

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        ......................................................................................................................

,     -         ,                  

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 

I , the scholar Joseph Bosworth published a dictionary of Anglo-Saxon words, claiming that all English patriots should acquaint themselves with this ancient, medieval language. Bosworth imagined the language of Anglo-Saxons speaking to the raceinstincts of their modern descendants, demanding: Where is the Englishman that does not feel his heart beat with conscious pride and independence when he considers his Freedom? . . . How tame is the Romanised Liberty, in comparison . . . This is the true, heartfelt Freedom and we derived it from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Every Englishman who glories in the vigour of his Father land—who would clearly understand, and feel the full force of his Mother tongue, ought to study Anglo-Saxon.¹

For Bosworth, languages were not arbitrary, interchangeable systems for merely conveying information: they expressed their speakers’ ancestral predispositions, seeming almost woven into the sinews of their bodies. Each language, Bosworth wrote, was shaped by its speakers’ ‘physical constitution’, so that ‘A robust conformation of the bodily frame, and great energy of mind, would, therefore, naturally express itself in words of corresponding strength and tone.’ In this way, Anglo-Saxon rang with ‘the strength of iron, with the gleam and sparkling of burnished steel’.² Bosworth’s comments reflect the popular idea in Victorian medievalism that England’s national identity lay in the history of its language. The Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf could be

¹ Joseph Bosworth, A Compendius Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary (London: J. R. Smith, ), pp. iii–iv. ² Bosworth, Dictionary, p. iii.

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

 

imagined as the pure essence of Englishness, which later infusion of Norman French had corrupted. Conversely, some scholars presented the post-Conquest intermixture of tongues as not a corruption but a realization of England’s national destiny and character. Medieval language might serve as a model of hybridity, matching the verbal diversity of nineteenth-century Britain and its growing empire. I will illustrate these opposing perspectives through the contrasting arguments of the historian E. A. Freeman and the theologian and lexicographer R. C. Trench. Previous generations had hailed a mythic Anglo-Saxon ancestry for their supposed values of liberty and independence, used to justify religious Protestantism and parliamentary power.³ However, the idea that these Anglo-Saxon values were somehow embedded in and perpetuated by their language was more recent. In the late eighteenth century, comparative philology had emerged in tandem with philosophies of nationalism, leading scholars to equate nation and language as parallel developments.⁴ Before the last decades of the nineteenth century, when linguists began to reconceptualize meaning as a matter of synchronic social conventions, scholars often assumed that words derived their meanings from their ancient ancestral uses.⁵ Thus Johann Gottfried Herder had argued that words resonated with the collective memories of the language community in their native environment. Word-meanings, he wrote, ‘are so specifically national, so much in conformity with the manner of thinking and seeing of the people, of the inventor’ that foreigners were never quite able to ‘strike them right’.⁶ The discovery of prehistoric links between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit at the end of the eighteenth century inspired later scholars such as Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp to theorize laws of linguistic change, comparable to the development of embryos or rock formations. Languages seemed strangely alive, evolving over millennia independently of their speakers’ intentions. Philologists often compensated for this disturbing loss of individual control over discourse by positing a larger national ‘mind’, which seemed to maintain a coherent identity down the centuries.⁷ In Britain, particularly, philology was often understood as a tool for discovering national identity, rather than revealing the common origins of nations.⁸ Trench called language ‘the embodiment, the incarnation . . . of the feelings, thoughts and experiences of a nation’; ‘the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and ³ Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, / (): . ⁴ Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since : Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁵ See Brigitte Nerlich, Semantic Theories in Europe, –: From Etymology to Contextuality (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, ), –. ⁶ Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Origin of Language, tr. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: Frederick Ungar, ), . ⁷ Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Fin-de-Siècle (Princeton, NJ, and Guildford: Princeton University Press, ), pp. xi–xii; Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Harvard University Press, ), –. ⁸ Tony Crowley, The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates (London: Macmillan, ), .

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, -,  



preserved’.⁹ Yet visions of medieval English as pure and indigenous masked the inconvenient fact that languages did not remain fixed to the tribes that made them, growing in splendid isolation. They spread and intermingled with the vicissitudes of war, trade, and migration. Nationalist celebration of native speech prompted the question of how to define its boundaries and differentiate it from the foreign. One way of avoiding this problem was to emphasize race over language, imagining the former as enduring through the ages irrespective of linguistic changes. Thus the historian Thomas Arnold told Oxford undergraduates in : ‘Our English race is the German race; for though our Norman forefathers had learnt to speak a stranger’s language, yet in blood, as we know, they were the Saxons’ brethren: both alike belong to the Teutonic or German stock.’¹⁰ Yet such racialism was built upon the data of philology, inferring discrete racial groups from different speech varieties.¹¹ Since the late eighteenth-century, historians such as Thomas Percy, Sharon Turner, and John Mitchell Kemble had extrapolated from the history of languages the existence of behaviourally distinct Teutonic and Celtic peoples. Even the Danish and Norman invasions could be imagined as consolidations of this Teutonic heritage, purifying England’s racial stock against the Celts.¹² Modern English, with its mixed heritage, might be imagined as a mere garb which the race had put on, while Anglo-Saxon language revealed its primordial essence and spirit. Such arguments were problematic, however, suggesting that speakers had become alienated from the speech (and, by extension, character and feelings) of their ancestors. Walter Scott’s medieval-era romance Ivanhoe () revered Anglo-Saxon speech as ‘far more manly and expressive’ than the French of the Norman conquerors.¹³ This feeling that the English language had been debased by foreign influences is discernible in the later comment of the philologist George Webbe Dasent: ‘we have mutilated, and in some respects wellneigh forgotten, the speech of our ancestors, and have got instead a monstrous mosaic, a patchwork of various tongues which we have picked up and pieced together as we went along’.¹⁴ The popular assumption of linguistic determinism ⁹ Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words, ed. Roy Harris (London: Routledge, ), . ¹⁰ Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History. th edn (London: B. Fellowes, ), . ¹¹ See Stephanie Hackert, The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in NineteenthCentury Linguistic Thought (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, ), ; Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race, and the Science of Language (Florence, KY: Routledge, ), . ¹² See Paul-Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities, tr. and ed. Thomas Percy,  vols (London, ); Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest,  vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, –); John Mitchell Kemble, The Saxons in England: A History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest.  vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, ). See also Horsman, ‘Racial Anglo-Saxonism’, ; Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition (London: Rutgers University Press, ), . ¹³ Walter Scott, Ivanhoe; A Romance,  vols (Edinburgh, ), i. . ¹⁴ George Webbe Dasent, A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue, tr. from the Swedish of Erasmus Rask (London: W. Pickering, ), p. iv.

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

 

in nineteenth-century philology enabled scholars to equate an apparent debasement of the nation’s language with the debasement of its morals and spirit. In , the American scholar G. P. Marsh commented in a lecture series on the English language: So truly as language is what man has made it, just so truly man is what language has made him. The depravation of a language is not merely a token or an effect of the corruption of a people, but corruption is accelerated by the perversion and degradation of its consecrated vocabulary.¹⁵

Marsh traced one cause of this corruption to the flooding of English with foreign elements, writing: in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural to the Anglican people, and its grammar has suffered the introduction of many syntactical combinations, which are not merely irregular but repugnant. It has lost its original organic law of progress, and its present growth is by accretion, not by development.¹⁶

Languages seemed almost fitted to the physical brains of their speakers. Indeed, this was the claim of the German philologist August Schleicher who declared that the syntactic structures of different languages ‘are the result of such minimal differences in the character of the brain and speech organs’.¹⁷ This racialist logic was reinforced by comparative philology’s emphasis on speech rather than literature. Scholars such as Grimm proposed constant laws of phonological change, binding the history of languages to their speakers’ bodies. Although one race might imitate the language of another, they could never be fully at home in it. Such was the feeling of alienation which Bosworth evoked of the modern Englishman, compelled to express himself in a language disfigured by foreign forms. The influx of Latinate vocabulary had obscured the etymologies of England’s native words, which linked speakers to specific environments and experiences. Bosworth observed that the Saxons had ‘readily imposed their own names on every district or place where they came; these Saxon names generally denoted the nature, situation or some striking feature of the places to which they were given’.¹⁸ Words uncontaminated by foreign influence could be broken down into their constituent parts, connecting speakers with their ancestors’ patterns of thought. The Saxons ‘had a language’, Bosworth wrote, ‘which by composition would, in the name, often express the nature of the thing’. Thus Ac (oak) and Coɲn (corn) combined to

¹⁵ George Perkins Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (London: Sampson Low, ), . ¹⁶ Marsh, Lectures, . ¹⁷ August Schleicher, ‘Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language’, tr. Alex V. W. Bikkers, in Linguistics and Evolutionary Theory: Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bleek, ed. Konrad Koerner (Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Co., ), . ¹⁸ Bosworth, The Elements of Anglo-Saxon (London: Harding, Mayor, & Lepard, ), p. vii.

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, -,  



denote a corn of the oak or acorn.¹⁹ In contrast to the artifice of modern English, Anglo-Saxon could be imagined as transparent and natural, bound to England’s ancient soil. This sense that the English had become linguistically estranged from their heritage fuelled widespread interest in studying Anglo-Saxon and restoring elements of it in modern English. Marsh suggested that ‘the revival of obsolete English and AngloSaxon words’ would ‘bring with it, not only new expressiveness of diction, but something of the vigour and freshness of thought and wealth of poetic imagery which usually accompanies the revival of a national spirit in literature’. He happily observed that this tendency ‘is very visible in the style of the best prose, and more especially, poetic compositions of the present day’.²⁰ Marsh might have been thinking particularly of William Barnes, who studded his verse with dialect and AngloSaxonisms, some authentic and some fabricated. The influence between philology and poetry in such Anglo-Saxon revivalism was two-way, with Barnes equally praising ‘that increasing class [of philologists] who wish to purify our tongue, and enrich it from its own resources’.²¹ From  onwards, the efforts of F. J. Furnivall’s Early English Texts Society to publish Anglo-Saxon literature also spurred interest in Anglo-Saxon syntax and stylistics. Victorian authors from Alfred Tennyson to Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Morris mined the pre-Norman corpus for vocabulary and formal inspiration.²² Yet there was no disguising the vast gulf between Anglo-Saxon and its modern, much-mixed descendant. Unlike modern Icelanders, who could often still comprehend Snorri Sturluson’s medieval sagas, English readers had to learn AngloSaxon as a strange, alien tongue.²³ Perhaps the alienation of the English race from its linguistic heritage was irrevocable. This feeling was expressed most lamentingly by the historian Edward Augustus Freeman. As an Oxford undergraduate in the s, he absorbed the Anglo-Saxonism of Arnold and Kemble and would reflect it in his later historical writings, notably his five-volume History of the Norman Conquest (–). The link between race and ¹⁹ Bosworth, Elements, p. xv. ²⁰ Marsh, The Origin and History of the English Language, and of the Early Literature it Embodies (London: Sampson Low, ), . Such racialized linguistics also influenced poetic criticism, notably in Lord Saintsbury’s later claim that the English ‘inner ear’ naturally preferred the medieval ballad quatrain over Latinate hexameters; George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day,  vols (London: Macmillan & Co., ), iii. . See Yopie Prins, ‘Victorian Meters’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ²¹ William Barnes, ‘A Dissertation on the Dorsetshire Dialect’, in Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, ), . ²² See Patrick Greig Scott, ‘ “Flowering in A Lonely Word”: Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language’, Victorian Poetry, / (), –; Cary Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, ); Will Abberley, English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ²³ On Victorian interest in Norse history, see Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ).

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

 

language was not straightforward in Freeman’s thinking, and he increasingly nuanced it through his career. Yet, however much he qualified this relationship, he remained nostalgic for a pre-Norman golden age when England’s language had truly expressed its speakers’ ancestral heritage. Even if racial purity was ultimately a fiction, as Freeman sometimes came close to admitting, it seemed to him a necessary one for the political unity of the modern state. His friend and fellow Oxford scholar Friedrich Max Müller expressed such an idea in his popular Lectures on the Science of Language (). Although Müller denied that languages mapped consistently onto specific physical races, he nevertheless declared that, in the modern age, ‘“Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties” . . . [have] remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe.’²⁴ The assumption of originally pure racial types was further undermined by another of Freeman’s Oxford colleagues, the legal historian Henry Maine. Observing that the earliest, nomadic societies were based on kinship, Maine argued that all subsequent social development depended on fictions of kinship. As societies grew and absorbed other tribes, Maine claimed, submission to common authorities came to substitute for the old blood-ties.²⁵ Acknowledging this point, Freeman still stressed the value of race as an idea that united communities and was consolidated by language: ‘kindred, real or artificial, is the one basis on which all society and all government has grown up’.²⁶ Further, he contended that although ‘all races have assimilated a greater or lesser amount of foreign elements’, ‘yet there is in each nation, in each race, a dominant element, or rather something more than an element, something which is the true essence of the race or nation, something which sets its standards and determines its character’ (RL –). In this sense, Freeman concluded that language remained ‘a rough and ready test’ of race, which generally reflected the mysterious ‘essence’ of a people, however much they might blend with other groups at their peripheries (RL ). An active liberal, Freeman presented free trade and an expanded franchise as developments of the nation’s innate, Anglo-Saxon character.²⁷ Viewing the nation as a kind of organism, his philosophy required a racial essence that endured down the ages, expressed and perpetuated by language. Nations ‘are real and living things’, Freeman wrote, by virtue of their language, which extended their original spirit even to adopted late-comers (RL ). Growing up as English-speakers, the descendants of Huguenot émigrés might embody the Anglo-Saxon spirit of liberty

²⁴ Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language. th edn,  vols (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), i. . ²⁵ Henry James Sumner Maine, ‘Kinship as the Basis of Society’, in Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (New York, ), –. ²⁶ Edward Augustus Freeman, ‘Race and Language’, Contemporary Review,  (Mar. ):  (hereafter RL). See C. J. W. Parker, ‘The Failure of Liberal Racialism: The Racial Ideas of E. A. Freeman’, Historical Journal, / (): ; Christopher Hutton, ‘Race and Language: Ties of “Blood and Speech”, Fictive Identity and Empire in the Writings of Henry Maine and Edward Freeman’, Interventions, / (), –. ²⁷ J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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, -,  



and independence as well as direct descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. Hence, Freeman concluded: ‘We assume language as the test of a nation, without going into any minute question as to the physical purity of blood in that nation. A continuous territory, living under the same government and speaking the same tongue, forms a nation for all practical purposes’ (RL ). Ancestry and inheritance were as much social as biological. Although Freeman’s model of nationality was somewhat inclusive in a racial sense, it remained exclusive and purist in a cultural sense.²⁸ Outsiders might only be absorbed into the nation as linguistic empty vessels to be filled with the native language and its history. Bringing their foreign speech with them would dilute the national-linguistic essence, as Freeman believed had occurred since the Norman Conquest. Downplaying the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Danish (and, indeed, the different dialects of Anglo-Saxon), he portrayed pre-Conquest English as a uniform speech community. He wrote: For our purpose we may look on the tongue of England, as it stood at the coming of William, as forming one tongue, one variety of Teutonic speech, now brought face to face with the Romance enemy. We may look on the tongue of Harold and Stigand as essentially the same as the tongue of Hengest and Ælle. We may look on the tongue of the Jute, the Angle, even of the Dane of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, as essentially the same as the tongue of the Saxon.²⁹

Further, Freeman argued, pre-Norman English was mature and complete, framing the subsequent foreign infusions as violations of the language. He wrote: The English tongue has made some advances since the eleventh century, but they are small compared with the advances which it had made between the fifth century and the eleventh. The main divisions of the country, the local names of the vast mass of its towns and villages, were fixed when the Norman came, and they have survived, with but little change, to our own day. (HNC i. )

Freeman believed that the intermixture of different tongues produced only degenerate, sterile monstrosities. The Norman Conquest, he wrote, ‘did not abolish the English language; but it brought in a new language by its side, which . . . did not yield to the reviving elder speech till it had affected it by the largest infusion that the vocabulary of ²⁸ I use the term ‘culture’ tentatively; Victorians were much interested in the power of social custom, but its mechanisms, and distinction from nature, were uncertain and disputed. See George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. nd edn (London: University of Chicago Press, ), –; Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, ). ²⁹ Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England,  vols (Oxford, –), v.  (hereafter HNC). Not all Victorians conflated Saxon and Norse identity so easily, however: see Joanne Parker, ‘Saxons, Danes and the Problem of Defining National Character in Victorian England’, European Journal of English Studies, / (): –.

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

 

one European tongue ever received from another’ (HNC i. ). Freeman presented the migration of French words into English in terms of violent trauma, a ‘shock’ that threw its internal laws and etymologies into disarray. He describes the lexical admixture as an invasion that followed the military one. French terms ‘intruded themselves into our language’, the foreign word ‘turn[ed] a native word out of its place’, in later chronicles ‘French words creep in’, English finally enjoys ‘victory’ over French, ‘but it was only a modified victory’ (HNC v. , , ). Invading elements continue to hide within the population like spies: ‘There are words which came to us from Normandy, just as there are men who came to us from Normandy, which have put on a shape so thoroughly English that it needs philological tact to see that they are really strangers’ (HNC v. ). Freeman does not deny the inevitability of words travelling across languages through history. Yet the post-Conquest infusion stands out for him as an unusually severe disruption of a language’s internal evolution by forces from without. This disruption, in Freeman’s view, dulled and enfeebled the mysterious life-force which he imagined animating the language and its speakers, directing their evolution. He writes of ‘the weakening and deadening of our tongue’, although the exact processes of such degeneration remain hazy (HNC v. ). He argues that the ‘shock’ of being displaced by French ‘heightened and hastened’ English’s grammatical decay, as it rapidly lost its inflective system. As French became the written language of England for several centuries, English continued only in demotic speech, unregulated by literary authorities and thus prone to rapid ‘corruption’ (HNC v. , ). Philologists did not necessarily view such change as degenerative, but it ran contrary to the apparent general law of development from isolated words towards complex relations of inflection.³⁰ ‘Another evil’ caused by the Latinization of English was that ‘our tongue gradually lost the power, a power inherent in any really living language, of making new words at pleasure out of the stock of the language itself ’. Instead, ‘once the French fashion had set in, it was found easier to bring in a French or Latin word, or to coin an English word after a French or Latin fashion, than it was to frame a compound or derivative word out of the ancient stock of the language’. English seemed to Freeman a language (and, by implication, a people), once ingenious and self-reliant, that now parroted others slavishly and mechanically. This tendency had resulted in a ‘daily increasing stock of meaningless words’, ‘the frightful jargon of modern science’ (HNC v. ). To borrow the vocabulary of others was also to borrow the thoughts and personalities of others. Romantic philology depicted speech as the ultimate link between ancestors and descendants, passed down through the breath of successive generations. Through the flood of foreign words into English, this link had been weakened, if not entirely cut.

³⁰ Schleicher claimed that all languages began as ‘monosyllabic’ vocabularies with few grammatical rules before combining words into agglutinations and, finally, inflecting them; see ‘Darwinism Tested’, –. Freeman’s Oxford colleague A. H. Sayce would argue, conversely, that the loss of inflections in English represented a higher stage of development; see An Introduction to the Science of Language, th edn,  vols (London: Kegan Paul, ), i. –.

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, -,  



Ironically, Freeman often seems to convey this sense of estrangement from the Anglo-Saxon past by drawing on the themes and imagery of its poetry, which had only recently been introduced to Victorian general readers.³¹ His statements on the desolation of England’s linguistic heritage are weirdly reminiscent of such poems as ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Ruin’, with their themes of lost kin and kingdoms. ‘Crowds of true, ancient, and vigorous Teutonic words’, he wrote, ‘have perished from our classical speech, and now come among us as strangers.’ The rousing poetry of ‘our ancient battle-songs . . . now seem to us like the words of another tongue’ (HNC v. –). Like the lone speaker of ‘The Ruin’ who sadly surveys the rubble of an extinct kingdom, Freeman mourns over the ruins of the English language, overlaid with foreign constructions. ‘In nothing do we seem so utterly cut off from our earliest forefathers’, he continues, ‘as when we turn to the oldest words of English speech, to the songs of days when England was yet beyond the sea.’ Like the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’, with its images of lonely exile, Freeman imagines native words ‘displaced’ from England’s shores along with many of its men (HNC v. , ). Yet the Anglo-Saxon speakers at least knew who and where their lost kin and lands were. Freeman’s modern English folk cannot be so certain. At a time when meaning was often imagined to derive from etymology, English names seem to lead nowhere. ‘A man who bears a surname formed from an English name’, Freeman writes, ‘may be set down without doubt as being of Old-English descent. But when a man bears a surname formed from a Norman name, the name itself proves nothing’ (HNC v. ). The descendants of the Ealdreds and Æthelwulfs had become Richards and Gilberts, etymological fabrications which erased their true lineage. ‘There are moments’, Freeman confesses, ‘in which we are tempted to say that it would have been better for the English tongue to have died out utterly than for it to be used, as it has been used, as an instrument for making Englishmen forget that they are Englishmen’ (HNC v. ). The Anglo-Saxon poets could also raise their lament in their own tongue, unlike the borrowed one of their descendants. Freeman tried to extirpate Latinate vocabulary from his writing, claiming in one preface to ‘often put a good English word where I had at first allowed a stranger to creep in’.³² Yet such gestures were ultimately futile, as Freeman despaired: It is owing to the coming of William that we cannot trace the history of our native speech, that we cannot raise our wail for its corruption, without borrowing largely from that store of foreign words which, but for his coming, would have never crossed the sea. So strong a hold have the intruders taken on our soil that we cannot even tell the tale of their coming without their help. (HNC v. )

³¹ Benjamin Thorpe published the first translation of the poems of the Exeter Book, alongside the original verses, in , which included ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Ruin’, and ‘The Seafarer’. See Robert D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, ), . ³² Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England. rd edn,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), i, p. v. See Burrow, Liberal Descent, –.

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

 

Philology had begun in efforts to trace language back to the biblical Fall, and the lapsarian logic of decay from pure origins cast a long shadow over nineteenth-century language studies.³³ Freeman’s vain mourning for pure linguistic origins in AngloSaxon England secularized this tendency, framing the Norman Conquest as a national fall that would leave race and language forever out of joint. Freeman’s dour rhetoric was opposed by the alternative view that the medieval mixing of tongues was not the breaking but the making of England’s national spirit. In a lecture series on the history of the English language in , Richard Chenevix Trench described the same transition as Freeman but reached very different conclusions. For Trench, English without Norman French would have remained a barbaric, narrow-minded dialect, cut off from civilization’s cosmopolitan flow of ideas. ‘Philosophy and science and the arts of a high civilization’, Trench claimed, ‘find their utterance in the Latin words of our language, or . . . in the Greek . . . How should they have found it in the other branch of our language, among a people who had never cultivated any of these?’³⁴ The influx of Norman French had been no desecration but an ‘augmentation’, opening new channels of thought and imaginative possibility (EPP ). Nineteenth-century anthropologists often defined savagery and barbarism by isolation. Primitive peoples remained stubbornly outside of global exchanges of commerce and culture, valuing neither the money nor the concepts of civilization. Thus James Cowles Prichard had written that while the dictionaries of ‘civilized nations’ were copious and diverse, the savages’ ‘solitary mode of existence’ gave them ‘few ideas’ and ‘but a short vocabulary . . . Where there is so little intercourse, we find that there are few conventional terms, and these vary at short distances.’³⁵ Barbarians of ancient Europe were usually imagined as a stage above non-European ‘savages’, but the spectrum from primitive isolation to civilized cosmopolitanism still applied. In line with this model, Trench emphasized the lack of home-grown equivalents for many of the Latinate terms that had entered English. ‘How much was there of high culture’, he asked sceptically, ‘how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures, which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the French’ (EPP –). For Trench, Anglo-Saxon was not ‘English’, as Freeman would insist on calling it, but only ‘the aboriginal element’ of English; ‘the basis’, while French, Latin and Greek formed its ‘superstructure’. Saxon vocabulary expressed ‘natural’, immediate needs and feelings while Latinate words enabled more intellectual abstractions (EPP –). Trench’s architectural metaphor implied that national speech might be imagined in terms of hybridity instead of pure roots. Norman French, he suggests, formed a bridge

³³ See Olender, Languages of Paradise, –; Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, tr. James Fentress (London: Fontana, ), –. ³⁴ Trench, English, Past and Present (New York: Redfield, ),  (hereafter EPP). ³⁵ James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (London: John and Arthur Arch, ), –.

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, -,  



over the mental ‘gulf ’ between raw, uncultivated Anglo-Saxon and the classical languages. As a result, English was later capable of ‘direct importation from’ Latin, accessing its deep stores of knowledge and philosophy without the mediation of French (EPP ). Further, Trench frames English’s mixed heritage as consonant with the nation’s outward-looking character, positioning itself at the centre of a global network. With an eye to Britain’s growing empire and role on the world stage (such as in the current Crimean War), Trench declared: It would be difficult not to believe . . . that great things are in store for the one language of Europe which thus serves as connecting link between the North and the South, between the languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of the North and by the Romance nations of the South; which holds on to and partakes of both; which is as a middle term between them. (EPP )

Despite his rhetoric of hybridity, though, Trench still posits a national essence that preceded this intermixture and continues to define the language, descended from medieval antiquity. Marcus Waithe has highlighted how many nineteenth-century writers idealized medieval England for its supposed hospitality. Scott’s Ivanhoe, for instance, depicts Anglo-Saxons warmly welcoming outsiders into their homes, even the enemy Normans.³⁶ Similarly, Trench interprets the great absorption of foreign vocabulary into English as evidence of the nation’s inherent hospitality: It is the very character of our institutions to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, from whatever quarter they come . . . Exactly so has it been with the English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its arms wider, with a fuller confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom. (EPP )

Contradictorily, Trench argues for an innate cultural openness in English nationality when he previously characterized the Anglo-Saxons as parochial barbarians who only absorbed the language of outsiders after being conquered. For Trench, the inner ‘genius’ of the nation’s language remains unaffected by the vocabulary that it imports, as though the latter were a kind of external dress which it adopts. ‘A living language’, he states, ‘is one which . . . is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless and cumbersome forms’ (EPP ). Trench avoids examining too closely the fuzzy line between the language’s inner essence and the external material that it manipulates. As with Freeman, the continuity of a nationallinguistic spirit through history remains a matter of faith.

³⁶ Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –; Scott, Ivanhoe, i. .

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

 

Trench and Freeman’s examples show that Victorian philologists valued AngloSaxon language for divergent reasons. While, for Freeman, it represented pure origins to be revered, Trench viewed it as a point of orientation to develop away from. Against Freeman’s lapsarian model, Trench depicts the Norman admixture as one stage in a steady trajectory of progress. Marsh proffered a similar view, commenting, in spite of his enthusiasm for the restoration of Anglo-Saxon words: ‘That the revival of words of the Gothic stock will supplant or expel much of the Romance portion of our modern English is neither to be expected nor desired.’ Such linguistic purism was at odds with the complex heterogeneity of modern, Western communities, particularly from Marsh’s perspective as an American. He wrote: ‘Social life in our time has become too many-sided, it appropriates too much of the new and foreign, and resuscitates too much of the departed and the dormant, to be content with anything short of the utmost largeness of expression.’³⁷ Freeman’s Oxford colleague A. H. Sayce viewed AngloSaxon as the lowest point of the English language because it was the earliest recorded, woefully lacking in words when compared with modern English. ‘The further back we can trace a language’, he wrote, ‘the poorer it is seen to be . . . The dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon, of the Ormulum, or even of Chaucer, is scant and meagre compared with that at the disposal of a modern English writer.’³⁸ Such views of language evolution as a progressive development instead of a biblical Fall undermined the concept of a timeless national essence behind the language. Languages might be imagined as constantly changing varieties, with no more of a fixed identity than Charles Darwin’s species. Marsh suggested such a comparison three years after the publication of The Origin of Species (). English was, he stated, primarily and radically a Gothic speech, invested with a new aspect, and inspired with a new life by Romance influences just as animals are so modified, in habits, instincts, size and specific characteristics, by changes of nutriment, climate, and other outward circumstances, that the unscientific observer hesitates to recognise them as still belonging to the primitive stock.³⁹

At the heart of the debate over Anglo-Saxon, then, lay different attitudes to language change. Freeman represented an older view of it as necessarily degenerative, departing from original purity. Conversely, Trench and Marsh tended more towards the view of change as a constant law of philology which occurred irrespective of the moral state of its speakers. Such ideas would gradually discredit the organicist model of languages, framing meaning as a product of convention, not etymology.⁴⁰ There were perhaps no pure, static origins for any language, and all partook of the same endless processes of change. Victorian visions of Anglo-Saxon language as a pure national origin were ³⁷ Marsh, Origin and History, –. ³⁸ Sayce, Introduction, i. –. ³⁹ Marsh, Origin and History, . ⁴⁰ See Nerlich, Semantic Theories, –; Stephen G. Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, ), .

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, -,  



haunted by the philological reality that it was only an arbitrary point in a continuous chain of mutation and intermixture.

S  Abberley, Will, English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Crowley, Tony, The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates (London: Macmillan, ). Dowling, Linda, Language and Decadence in the Fin-de-Siècle (Princeton, NJ and Guildford: Princeton University Press, ). Eco, Umberto, The Search for the Perfect Language, tr. James Fentress (London: Fontana, ). Fulk, Robert D., and Christopher M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, ). Frantzen, Allen J., Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition (London: Rutgers University Press, ). Hackert, Stephanie, The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, ). Herbert, Christopher, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, ). Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since : Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Olender, Maurice, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Harvard University Press, ). Parker, Joanne, ‘Saxons, Danes and the Problem of Defining National Character in Victorian England’, European Journal of English Studies, / (): –. Plotkin, Cary, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, ). Waithe, Marcus, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

     

......................................................................................................................

 . 

M was at the heart of Young England, a group of high-minded political friends and their acolytes who acted as a focus of discontent within the Conservative Party in the period – during the government of Sir Robert Peel (–). Contemporary critics dismissed Young England’s medievalism as a social affectation born of the group’s aristocratic origins and ethos and condemned their desire to restore the values of feudalism and the pre-Reformation Church as regressive and impractical, grounded in a misty-eyed misunderstanding of the traditional customs and pastimes associated with ‘Merrie England’.¹ These criticisms were made most humorously by William Makepeace Thackeray. Having honed his satirical talents against Young England in the pages of Punch magazine, Thackeray paid sarcastic homage to the archetypal Young England MP in The Book of Snobs: His son has taken his father’s seat in Parliament, and has of course joined Young England. He is the only man in the country who believes in the De Mogynses, and sighs for the days when a De Mogyns led the van of battle. He has written a little volume of spoony puny poems. He wears a lock of the hair of Laud, the Confessor and Martyr, and fainted when he kissed the Pope’s toe at Rome. He sleeps in white kid-gloves, and commits dangerous excesses upon green tea.²

Thackeray’s target was not Benjamin Disraeli, the man most frequently associated with the Young England movement, but the two men who originated the group and best

¹ For commentary see e.g. Laman Blanchard, ‘Young England’, New Monthly Magazine,  (Feb. ): –. ² William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (London: The Punch Office, ), ch. .

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     



exemplified its beliefs and values: Lord John Manners (–), second son of the th Duke of Rutland, and George Sydney Smythe (–), heir to the th Viscount Strangford. Manners and Smythe shared more than their aristocratic pedigree. Both men lost their mothers at an early age (Manners at , Smythe at ) and both received the standard educational training of their class, Eton College and Cambridge; Manners went to Trinity College, Smythe to St John’s. The two men’s acquaintance, originating at Eton, developed at Cambridge into a friendship which was underpinned by their active participation in the Cambridge Union, where they debated matters of contemporary and historical significance. The positions they adumbrated there—in favour of the monarchy, nostalgic for the displaced Stuarts, critical of the Glorious Revolution and its consequences, desirous for the regeneration and leadership of society by the Anglican Church—were, to some extents, the foundation upon which the future tone and philosophy of Young England was built, though the two men had different attitudes towards the Union itself: I am quite sure [Manners wrote at the time, that] Smythe and I look upon the Union in a very different point of view. I love and reverence it, and would no more think of treating it slightly than my best friend; he, unless I mistake greatly, despises it, and it is but natural he should do so.³

It was a perceptive judgement on Manners’s part and not the least of the temperamental differences between the two men. Smythe had increasingly set out to shock the Cambridge Union, both in the positions he took and his manner of arguing them: ‘I spoke to astonish—not to convince men’, he later observed.⁴ Consequently, whilst Manners and Smythe were equally gifted young men, it was the more charismatic and extrovert Smythe who established himself as the brightest ornament of the ‘Rising’ or ‘New Generation’ (the sub-title which Disraeli adopted for his Young England novel Coningsby in ).⁵ Smythe combined all the self-assurance and self-regard of high birth and future favour with a passionate, mercurial temperament which sometimes made him act as his own worst enemy. It was not coincidental that Smythe admired George Canning so ardently, nor that he was involved in the last recorded duel in England. In , Smythe reflected that he had always been full of ‘hot thoughts and ardent speculations’;⁶ he enjoyed a reputation as something of a rake who pursued and discarded women at will, but also inspired an equally strong devotion in the Reverend Frederick William Faber (–) who provided the crucial religious stimulus in ³ Richard Faber, Young England (London: Faber, ), . ⁴ Mary S. Millar, Disraeli’s Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . ⁵ See the (admittedly interested) description of Manners and Smythe by the Duke of Rutland in Edward Barrington De Fonblanque, Lives of the Lords Strangford (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, ), . ⁶ E. Strangford, ‘George Sydney Smythe: A Sketch’, in George Sydney Smythe, Angela Pisani: A Novel (London: Richard Bentley & Son, ), i, pp. xxv–xxvi.

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

 . 

the formation of Young England. In , Faber confessed to Manners that he loved Smythe ‘with intense affection’ and, since meeting him the summer before, had ‘never known quietness’.⁷ Smythe’s passionate temper and ability to inspire devotion in a wide range of contemporaries was vital in Young England’s foundation as a parliamentary group in . Without it, Disraeli may have proved a more elusive catch. Manners, for one, appears to have sacrificed any ambitions to lead the group to his more extrovert colleague, though his credentials were in many respects more appealing.⁸ Smythe epitomized the youth and friendship which characterized Young England, and exulted in its veneration of the medieval and the old.⁹ Disraeli immortalized Smythe as Coningsby in his eponymous novel of May  whilst, three years later, an admiring reviewer thought that Smythe represented Young England ‘more faithfully than did the club or clique of young politicians to whom the caprice of party gave that name’.¹⁰ The third member of the Young England triumvirate was Alexander Baillie Cochrane (–). Cochrane came from a distinguished naval family and shared much in common with his older compatriots; like them, he had lost his mother in early life (at the age of ) and, like them, was a graduate of Eton and Cambridge (Trinity College; he was also President of the Union). Late in life, Cochrane described Young England as a ‘body of young men who had grown up together from Eton days’;¹¹ given this, he was, perhaps understandably, reluctant to include within its orbit talented mavericks like Disraeli. Smythe told Manners that Cochrane was for an exclusive party of the three men—‘But that will always be, and being together from personal attachment’.¹² At root, Young England was—as Manners rightly observed—an ‘esoteric party’,¹³ a cadre of young aristocrats, augmented by dissidents opposed to the thrust of Peel’s financial and commercially inspired reforms,¹⁴ who sought nothing less than the social and moral regeneration of national political life and culture by invoking (and to an extent transplanting) the values which they detected in an earlier, kindlier, more settled, medieval, age, into their own.¹⁵ It thus found itself closely aligned, in a political ⁷ Raleigh Addington (ed.), Faber: Poet and Priest (Cardiff: D. Brown & Sons Ltd, ), –, –. ⁸ Faber was attracted to Manners’s ‘delicate holiness’ and thought him ‘safer, sounder and wiser than all the rest put together’; Addington, Faber, , . ⁹ Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ed. J. A. W. Gunn et al.,  vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, –), iv, p. xvi. Strangford, ‘Smythe’, xiii; Faber, Young England, ; Addington, Faber, . ¹⁰ G. H. Francis, ‘Literary Legislators (No. V)’, Fraser’s Magazine,  (May ): . ¹¹ Lord Lamington, In The Days of the Dandies (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, ), . Cochrane was raised to the peerage by Disraeli in . ¹² Charles Whibley, Lord John Manners and his Friends,  vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, ), i. . ¹³ Whibley, Manners, i. . ¹⁴ Key adherents included R. Hodgson, Quintin Dick, Henry Hope, John Walter, Augustus Stafford O’Brien, Henry Baillie, Richard Monckton Milnes, William Busfield Ferrand, T. Bateson, A. J. Beresford Hope, and Peter Borthwick, editor of The Morning Post; see the list of Young Englanders identified by Disraeli in Disraeli Letters, iv. . ¹⁵ On which see John Morrow, Young England: The New Generation (London: Leicester University Press, ).

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     



sense, with the attempt to reform the Church of England from within through the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. The evocation of the fallen Stuarts and love of preReformation cathedral architecture had much in common with A. W. N. Pugin’s views, as espoused in Contrasts (), and Manners argued that only the provision of monastic institutions could help to fill the spiritual void which he detected in the industrial towns of Lancashire.¹⁶ Whilst this provided valuable ammunition for Thackeray, who castigated Smythe and Manners as crypto-Catholics, neither Manners nor Smythe ever seriously contemplated converting to the Catholic faith; for them, such a step represented the final abnegation of the Young England project, which was concerned with restoring the place of the Anglican Church in national life, not abandoning it.¹⁷ The religious inspiration for Young England originated in a reading trip to the Lake District, undertaken by Manners and Smythe in the summer of . At St Anne’s Chapel, Ambleside, the two men first encountered Faber. Faber, who had been educated at Shrewsbury, Harrow, and Balliol College, Oxford, had recently become a Fellow of University College, Oxford; he had heard Newman preach and later sent copies of the ‘Tracts for the Times’ to his Young England friends. On Rush-bearing Sunday ( July ), Manners and Smythe heard Faber preach a sermon on the text of ‘The Dignity of Little Children’, the ‘electrical’ effect of which upon them Manners attested to later in life and Smythe memorialized in verse at the time.¹⁸ On  August , Manners recorded: ‘We have now virtually pledged ourselves to attempt to restore what? I hardly know but still it is a glorious attempt . . . the enthusiasm of the young spirits of Britain is with us’.¹⁹ It is not coincidental that the tone and demeanour of Young England’s origins call to mind earlier Romantic movements, conceived amongst the Quantock Hills and in the Lake District, combining political ambition with youthful imagination. Wordsworth at Rydal Mount and Southey at Keswick were, by this time, regarded as the seers of a Romantic Toryism which influenced the philosophy and arguments of Young England; during their summer sojourn in the Lakes, Manners and Smythe were introduced to Wordsworth.²⁰ Relatively little of this early enthusiasm translated into political activism until Manners and Smythe entered parliament in —Smythe as MP for the Anglican heartland of Canterbury, Manners as W. E. Gladstone’s colleague in the representation

¹⁶ Lord John Manners, ‘The Monastic and Manufacturing Systems’, originally published in The Morning Post, , ,  Mar. . ¹⁷ After Faber’s conversion to Rome, in , Manners and Smythe discontinued all relations with him; Addington, Faber, . ¹⁸ [Lord John Manners], ‘F W Faber’s Life and Letters’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,  (Dec. ): ; George Smythe, Historic Fancies (London: Henry Colburn Publishers, ), –. ¹⁹ Faber, Young England, . ²⁰ Manners’s debt to Southey’s Sir Thomas More (), The Book of the Church (), and Letters from England () is evident in his Monastic and Manufacturing Systems () and A Plea for National Holy-days (); W. A. Speck, ‘Robert Southey, Benjamin Disraeli and Young England’, History,  (): –.

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of Newark in Nottinghamshire. In the intervening period (–), Manners entrenched his growing reputation as an uncompromising supporter of clerical and monarchical values by travelling to the camp of Don Carlos, the clericalist claimant to the Spanish throne. The issue raised romantic notions of Cid-like proportions in Manners, who published his experiences in Fraser’s Magazine; later, during Young England’s heyday in parliament, he argued Don Carlos’s case before the House of Commons as avidly as he defended the historical reputation of the Stuarts at the Cambridge Union or in verse.²¹ Smythe too had his legitimist idiosyncrasies—in Historic Fancies, the book of poetry and meditations he published in , he extolled the ancient practice of ‘Touching for the King’s Evil’. The poem was instilled with exaggerated significance by Young England’s critics, being fastened on as the ne plus ultra of the book’s celebration of feudalism, the Church, and aristocracy. However, the book contained more than this; Richard Faber has extolled Smythe’s ‘brilliant’ portraits of French Revolutionary leaders, alongside the ‘rollicking invocation of “The Merchants of Old England”, with which the collection ends’.²² It is hardly surprising to find that a group which was committed to the restoration of imagination and feeling in national political life utilized the medium of poetry to advance its views just as much as using speeches in parliament and addresses at setpiece occasions in the northern industrial towns of England.²³ Smythe, Manners, Cochrane, and Faber each published volumes of verse, which were dutifully inscribed in dedication to one another.²⁴ However, the critical reception of these books was increasingly affected by the growing public profile of their authors as exponents of a medieval ‘golden age’. For example, Manners’s England’s Trust () was somewhat archly characterized as: small effusions of poetry, some of them very beautiful as works of imagination, others too strongly tinged with . . . political and religious opinions to be quite consistent with the good taste which art demands.²⁵

²¹ [Lord John Manners], ‘A Trip Across the Spanish Frontier. Part I’, Fraser’s Magazine,  (May ): –; ‘A Trip Across the Spanish Frontier in July, . Part II’, Fraser’s Magazine,  (July ): –; Lord John Manners, England’s Trust and Other Poems (London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, ), –, , –. ²² Smythe, Historic Fancies, –; Faber, Young England, –; cf. the anonymous reviews in The Times,  July ; ‘Historic Fancies’, New Monthly Magazine,  (Aug. ): –; and ‘Historic Fancies, by the Hon Sydney Smythe’, Fraser’s Magazine,  (Sept. ): –. ²³ The Importance of Literature to Men of Business: A Series of Addresses Delivered at Various Popular Institutions (London: John J. Griffin & Co., ), esp. –. ²⁴ Smythe dedicated Historic Fancies to Manners and addressed him in the poem ‘Cambridge’, ; Manners dedicated England’s Trust and two poems to Smythe (, –) and four poems to Faber (, –, ); Faber addressed twelve of his poems in The Cherwell Water-Lily () to Smythe; Cochrane’s The Morea (), was addressed to Smythe and Manners. ²⁵ G. H. Francis, ‘Literary Legislators (No. III)’, Fraser’s Magazine,  (Mar. ): .

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The book contained one couplet which immortalized Manners’ reputation forever more, however much he attempted to contextualize it: Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old Nobility!²⁶

It is clear from the rest of the poem (and from the volume which took the poem’s title), that Manners did not have in mind a narrowly conceived defence of the nobility as a social caste or group; rather, Manners extolled ‘Nobility’ as a cherished characteristic of feeling and action, enshrined in a series of values, attitudes, and practical applications. The sentiment clearly arose from Manners’s earlier immersion in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (), which delineated the qualities of chivalry in the pre-Revolution French aristocracy. It also drew inspiration from Kenelm Henry Digby’s five-volume treatise, The Broad Stone of Honor: or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry (), which argued for a natural alliance between the aristocracy and the people and prescribed a revived sense of religiosity as the antidote to contemporary ills. Manners subsequently gave practical substance to these sentiments in campaigning for the provision of monasteries in industrial towns and the restoration of national ‘Holy-Days’.²⁷ A fuller sense of Manners’ political philosophy, and its debt to medievalism, can be gained from some of his private correspondence in the period in which England’s Trust was written. In April , Manners wrote that ‘the England one loves is composed of churches and monuments, and songs, and bits of history, and names; not merely the country as it is and its present inhabitants’. More significantly, he told his elder brother, the Marquis of Granby, just prior to the formation of Young England as a parliamentary group: Let us show the people, i.e. the lower orders, by adding to their comforts and pleasures in the only legitimate way a legislature can do so,—viz., by voting money to build public baths, to keep up, or rather to restore, public games, to form public walks, that we are their real friends. Let us give them back the Church holy-days, open the Churches and Cathedrals to them, and let our men of power in their individual capacities assume a more personal and consequently a more kind intercourse with those below them. In a word let society take a more feudal appearance than it presents now.²⁸

At Cambridge, Manners had been a member of the Camden Society, which was generating interest in the medieval period through the publication of original texts.

²⁶ Manners, England’s Trust, . ²⁷ See the anonymous review, ‘England’s Trust’, The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review,  (Oct. ): –. ²⁸ Whibley, Manners, i. , .

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 . 

When Manners spoke, alongside Smythe and Disraeli, at the Manchester Athenaeum in October , he chose as his theme the importance of history and the inculcation of a love of literature and art in the masses, citing the work of the Camden Society as his exemplar.²⁹ A year before, Manners had consulted Sir Francis Palgrave (a key participant in the Camden Society) on the subject of reforming the Mortmain Act. Palgrave’s The Merchant and the Friar () extolled apprentices, guilds, religion, and chivalry in a way that influenced Manners’s own thinking and his belief that contemporary ills could be solved by a resort to the age of monasteries, feudalism, and government by aristocrats and priests. These were important themes in Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (), which drew upon the work of the Camden Society, whilst Coleridge’s idea of the ‘clerisy’ had been outlined in On the Constitution of Church and State (). As a teenager, Manners had read Henry Hallam’s View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (). However, Hallam was no friend to monasteries. As such, whilst Manners has rightly been described as ‘the most medieval’ member of Young England, his medievalism was no less selective for all that.³⁰ Richard Faber has argued that ‘there is a good case for regarding Manners both as the chief begetter of Young England’s most typical ideas and as their steadiest and (after Disraeli) most effective exponent to the public’.³¹ In part, Manners’s centrality to the movement was a function of his character, which was ‘earnest and engaging’, but it also reflected his indispensability and his assiduousness once the political dimensions of Young England were settled in the autumn of .³² In July of that year, Manners noted that Disraeli ‘wishes us to form a party with certain general principles’, observing that ‘there never was a House of Commons in which there was so much young talent frittered away’. Manners and Smythe had already discussed the particulars at Geneva in June but it was not until October, when Smythe and Cochrane encountered Disraeli at Paris (where he was on a charm offensive with Louis Philippe, King of the French), that the issue was settled. In communicating the outcome to Manners, back in England, Smythe was at pains to defer to his friend’s judgement: We have settled, subject to your approval, to sit together, and to vote together, the majority deciding. Beyond this we have settled nothing, because I have no authority from you, in relation to individual details or to political principles. As to the bond of self-denial and refusal of office, Cochrane and Disraeli were violent for it, but I saw objections, which I will give you viva voce.³³

²⁹ The Importance of Literature to Men of Business. ³⁰ Faber, Young England, . As First Commissioner for Public Works in the s, Manners favoured the Gothic in public buildings. For Cochrane’s scepticism about the virtues of medievalism, see Faber, Young England, . ³¹ Faber, Young England, , also see , , ; cf. Charles H. Kegel, ‘Lord John Manners and the Young England Movement: Romanticism in Politics’, Western Political Quarterly,  (): . ³² Morrow, Young England, –. ³³ Whibley, Manners, i. –.

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Smythe, for all his aristocratic pedigree, was under constant parental pressure to secure an appropriate marriage and political advancement, in order to restore his family’s somewhat perilous financial situation. It was this, more than anything else, which explained the eventual decision to let each member of Young England decide independently whether to accept any ministerial offer of preferment. It is at this point, properly speaking, that Disraeli begins to assume importance in the movement. Although neither young nor aristocratic, he became the most prominent of Young England’s members. He burnished his image as the leader of the group by retrospectively creating a genealogy which led from the ideals he espoused in this period through to his later policies as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.³⁴ In historiographical terms, this has had the unfortunate consequence of making Young England appear little more than one of the ‘props’ which enabled Disraeli ‘to mount the greasy pole of politics’ and Smythe the equivalent of a ‘disciple’.³⁵ This has done neither Young England nor Disraeli many favours; indeed, one recent biography revives the view of him as an opportunist, committed to nothing but his own self-advancement.³⁶ However, it is clear that Young England not only provided Disraeli with a mechanism for attracting publicity but associated him with a number of highly capable and widely admired young colleagues whose views, in a number of areas, were consonant with his own. At Shrewsbury, on  May , Disraeli told his constituents that the tenure of property was the performance of its duties and regretted the loss of the feudal system; Manners would have said no less. Two years later, in Sybil or The Two Nations (), Disraeli evoked the role of the Church in dispensing charity during the Middle Ages and represented monks as kind and generous landlords. The book appeared only nine months after Manners had introduced a ‘Pious Uses and Charities Bill’ into the House of Commons, in an attempt to reform the Mortmain Act of , by allowing landowners to bequeath land to the Church, the better to enable it to provide spiritual guidance and comfort to the lower orders.³⁷ Disraeli shared equally strong political views with Smythe. The two men venerated the eighteenth-century Tory statesman Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. In the s and s, Disraeli recovered Bolingbroke’s concept of the ‘Patriot King’ and echoed his hostility to the Whig ascendancy and the system of Dutch finance introduced after the Glorious Revolution of  by referring to the Whig governments of the s as a ‘Venetian Oligarchy’ and charging Peel with having betrayed the historic foundations of Toryism. Disraeli’s fashioning of a respectable Tory tradition out of the policies of Shelburne and Pitt the Younger (who would never, in the context of

³⁴ Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), introduction. ³⁵ Speck, ‘Young England’, ; Millar, Smythe, passim. ³⁶ Douglas Hurd and Edward Young, Disraeli, Or The Two Lives (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ). For an alternative view of Disraeli’s motives, see Robert O’Kell, ‘On Young England’, Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, accessed Feb. . ³⁷ The law on Mortmain was not reformed until –; The Times,  May,  Oct. .

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 . 

their times, have described themselves as ‘Tories’) encompassed reciprocal free trade agreements, the conciliation of Ireland, and alliance with France. Such a fashioning had strong foundations in contemporary historical treatments of eighteenth century Toryism.³⁸ It was exactly this programme which Disraeli presented to Louis Philippe in November  and which dominated his Young England trilogy, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred ().³⁹ The trilogy was the Young England movement as fiction born of flesh—in addition to Smythe as Coningsby, Manners appeared as Henry Sydney, Cochrane in the guise of Charles Buckhurst, and Faber (whom Disraeli never appears to have encountered, other than through Manners’s good reports) as Aubrey St Lys. Coningsby quickly replaced Manners’s England’s Trust as the manifesto of the group and overshadowed the almost simultaneous publication of Smythe’s Historic Fancies.⁴⁰ It is true that, even before Disraeli’s formal agreement with Young England at Paris, he described himself as ‘without effort the leader of a party, chiefly of the youth and new members’ and, in November , presented himself before Louis Philippe on exactly that basis.⁴¹ However, if Disraeli was increasingly the most prominent, then Manners and Cochrane were the most consistent and assiduous members of Young England in terms of intervention in debate and parliamentary attendance. Manners spoke sixteen times in  and twenty-five times in , and Cochrane fifteen times in  and thirty times in , whilst Smythe only spoke four times in .⁴² Manners’ authority was increased by the fact that he undertook first-hand research— his expedition to the camp of Don Carlos in  was succeeded by a visit to Lancashire (with Smythe) in the autumn of  and to Ireland, as the famine began to take hold, five years later.⁴³ Like Disraeli, Manners was also committed to taking Young England’s appeal outside parliament by addressing large public meetings in the north of England—he spoke at the Birmingham Athenic Institution in August  and at Bingley (alongside W. B. Ferrand) two months later.⁴⁴ Nor did Manners ignore the need to secure a good press for Young England. In addition to the good favour of The Times and The Morning Post (where some of Manners’s publications began life), the group’s ideas were aired in The Oxford and Cambridge Review. An early attempt (by Manners and Cochrane) to secure The Courier newspaper, two years before the ³⁸ Peter Jupp, ‘Disraeli’s Interpretation of English History’, in Charles Richmond and Paul Smith (eds), The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli – (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, ), –; Richard Faber, Bolingbroke and Beaconsfield (London: Faber & Faber, ). ³⁹ Richard Gaunt, ‘From Country Party to Conservative Party: The Ultra-Tories and Foreign Policy’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, – (Farnham: Ashgate, ), –; Smythe, Historic Fancies, –. ⁴⁰ Sheila Smith, Mr Disraeli’s Readers (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, ). ⁴¹ Faber, Young England, . ⁴² Disraeli Letters, vol. iv., pp. xix, xxii–xxiii, xxviii n. . ⁴³ Lord John Manners, Notes of an Irish Tour in . nd edn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, ). ⁴⁴ J. T. Ward, ‘ “Young England” at Bingley’, Journal of the Bradford Textile Society (Bradford: The Bradford Textile Society, –), –.

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formal political birth of Young England, demonstrates their appreciation of the factors contributing to the success or failure of such an enterprise.⁴⁵ By contrast, the formation of a short-lived Young England newspaper, in , was only tangentially connected with the group. It addressed itself to a much wider social agenda and must count amongst the countless imitators and emulators who fastened onto the ‘Young England’ name for their own purposes. Young England’s existence as a parliamentary group was always uncertain and, by , it was in retreat, pulled apart by internal differences of emphasis on individual policies and external forces which contributed to widen those differences still further. Faber had originally counselled Manners against constituting Young England as a political force, believing that ‘more social justice could be achieved by religious and moral revival than directly through politics’ and regarding an Anglican Church under Tractarian influence as better able ‘to achieve national unity and class harmony’. But Faber’s influence was waning and his conversion to Roman Catholicism (in the wake of Newman’s own translation in October ) was a contributory factor in Young England’s collapse.⁴⁶ The political divisions within the group were made evident on  April , when Manners, Smythe, and Milnes supported Peel’s enhanced grant to the Catholic training seminary at Maynooth in Ireland, whilst Disraeli, Ferrand, O’Brien, Bateson, and Dick opposed it. Ireland had always been a unifying issue for the group within parliament, providing it with some of its most spectacular hits against the Prime Minister. Faithful to their vision of a revived Toryism, Young England had supported a policy designed to encourage sympathy and identity with Ireland, which would serve to unify rather than marginalize the majority Catholic population. This, Young England maintained, was the policy of Charles I, Strafford, and James II, Pitt and Canning, not of Cromwell, William III, and the Whigs. It foundered over Maynooth because of the traditional anti-Catholic sentiment of many individuals within the wider Young England group but, more especially, in revulsion at Peel’s ‘betrayal’ of the ‘Church and King’ platform upon which the Conservative Party had been returned to power in the  General Election.⁴⁷ However, whilst Maynooth was the most obvious manifestation of the split within the group, a degree of independence had always characterized Young England’s stance (and votes) in parliament. For example, whilst Disraeli, Manners, and Cochrane supported Lord Ashley’s campaign to institute a Ten Hour working day for children employed in factories, Smythe voted against the measure three times in one

⁴⁵ This has been overlooked by Robert Stewart, ‘The Conservative Party and the “Courier” Newspaper, ’, English Historical Review,  (): –; cf. Whibley, Manners, i. –. ⁴⁶ Addington, Faber, ; Faber, Young England, . ⁴⁷ For the context within which Peel proposed the enhanced grant to Maynooth, and the opposition it raised, see Donal A. Kerr, Peel, Priests and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ).

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

 . 

parliamentary session (), convinced that it would infringe the productive capacity of manufacturers. By contrast, the group was unified in opposing the Whig Poor Law, the Poor Law Amendment Act or ‘New’ Poor Law of , with its ‘workhouse test’ and its principle of ‘less eligibility’ to relief. Manners, Cochrane, and Ferrand consistently spoke against the Poor Law Commission, which administered the new Poor Law Unions, as an unwarranted measure of government centralization which interfered with locally accountable control of poor relief by parishes and the Church. However, on related ‘Condition of England’ questions, the group displayed a high degree of individualism. Manners and Ferrand were the most conspicuous advocates of the provision of allotments for agricultural labourers whilst, in a speech to his constituents at Bridport, in November , Cochrane argued in favour of extensive sanitary reform. This level of individualism was borne out by Young England’s voting patterns. According to David Roberts’s calculations, six out of eleven of the leading members of the group supported the Ten Hours bill, whilst a similar number advocated the abolition of the Poor Law Commission.⁴⁸ The impact of such differences within small political groups is always magnified more clearly than in larger associations; it was a situation which could hardly endure. Moreover, as Charles Whibley observed, by , ‘the three leaders were travelling at different paces to different goals’.⁴⁹ By the time that Peel introduced his bill to Repeal the Corn Laws, in January , Smythe had accepted a government position as Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, whilst Richard Monckton Milnes and Cochrane also sided with Peel. Of the original Young England triumvirate, only Manners subsequently opposed Repeal.⁵⁰ Though Young England had fractured by the end of the  parliamentary session, the quick succession of the Repeal crisis made the group appear merely a prelude to the re-emergence of the ‘Country’ opposition to Sir Robert Peel. This impression quickly took hold amongst contemporaries. In , Manners was invited to write the history of the Country Party ‘from its formation in ’—a task which Disraeli dissuaded him from with a characteristic mixture of flattery and guile: Such a task could not be undertaken by a person in your position except for the sake of enduring reputation . . . The subject itself is good, but, if treated, must be kept in manuscript for the next twenty years, when probably you yourself may be Prime Minister.⁵¹

In fact, by , Disraeli had himself completed two periods as Prime Minister and, through his later novels and speeches, done much to fashion the historiographical ⁴⁸ David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), –. ⁴⁹ Whibley, Manners, i. . ⁵⁰ [Lord John Manners], ‘The Corn Laws and the Aristocracy, I’, The Oxford and Cambridge Review,  (Jan. ): –; ‘The Corn Laws and the Aristocracy, II’, The Oxford and Cambridge Review,  (Feb. ): –. ⁵¹ Whibley, Manners, ii. –.

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     



trajectory from Young England (by way of Country Party protectionism) to Disraelian Conservatism.⁵² Nevertheless, though Smythe and Cochrane travelled different political paths from Young England, after , they remained true to the vision which it had championed. At the  General Election, Smythe justified his support for the Maynooth Grant by outlining a vision of historical Toryism as the friend and protector of Ireland, adding to it his support for secular education of the masses (a measure against which he and Manners had spoken in the Cambridge Union), extension of the franchise, and the abolition of religious disabilities.⁵³ Manners also remained loyal to his fellow ‘young apostles’.⁵⁴ In , in his second volume of collected poems—which he dedicated to Cochrane—Manners renewed attention to the campaign for the restoration of national holy-days (which he saw as the natural corollary to the achievement of a shorter working day for factory workers) in a reflection on ‘May Day’. Nevertheless, the tone of the volume was necessarily more wistful, with a closing meditation on changed political circumstances called ‘Disappointment’.⁵⁵ Smythe never achieved the promise of his youth and, after some vigorous journalism during the later s, died from consumption in . Cochrane also passed from heady promise to the position of an amusing memorialist of the ‘days of dandies’. Even Manners, in spite of serving in every Conservative government until the end of the nineteenth century, failed to achieve the high public offices for which contemporaries thought him well-equipped. His seemingly idiosyncratic commitment to the revival of medievalism in English public life—whether in the re-establishment of monasteries or the restoration of traditional communal pastimes (such as field sports, games, and walks) centred around the village green and parish church—came to look redolent of the sort of fashionable, quixotic medievalism promoted by the upper classes in the late s and early s, most famously, in the Eglinton Tournament of . After attending the royal ‘Fancy Ball’, at which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert appeared as Edward III and Queen Philippa, in , Manners himself was moved to wonder at the possible contradictions raised by the event: Now am I altogether wrong, in thinking that good may come from all that enormous waste [of money]? Many hundreds of the higher orders have been left to look into the domestic histories of their forefathers, to adopt the picturesque dresses, to learn something of their manners.⁵⁶

⁵² Not least by writing the biography of the Country/Protectionist party leader, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (London: Colburn & Co., ). ⁵³ George Sydney Smythe, Speech at Canterbury, July   (London: n.p., ). ⁵⁴ Fonblanque, Strangford, . ⁵⁵ The final poem in the volume was a reflection on the death of Bentinck; Lord John Manners, English Ballads and Other Poems (London: Francis and John Rivington, ), –, –. ⁵⁶ Whibley, Manners, i. –; Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament  (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, ), –.

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

 . 

Looked at in retrospect, Young England appears like nothing more than the last hurrah of romantic Toryism, before it submitted to the inevitable onward march of bourgeois individualism and commercialism. By comparison with the assertive nationalism associated with other ‘Young’ groups—notably Young Ireland and Young Italy— Young England appears introspective, retrospective, and elitist in its composition and values. However, as recent scholarship has begun to argue, both these judgements do an injustice to the motivations and personalities from which the group emerged. Some contemporaries were more perceptive. As G. H. Francis argued in , Young England ‘aimed at moral regeneration, not at working out intellectual problems’ and its leading spirit, Manners, wished to Re-build the structure of society on the original great design, using as much of existing materials, whether partially organised, or disorganised, as can be adopted, without interfering with the general plan.⁵⁷

Like most Tories, Young England looked to history for the solution of contemporary discontents. In locating those solutions in a return to medievalism, they discovered how easily derided such historicism can be.

S  Addington, Raleigh (ed.), Faber: Poet and Priest (Cardiff: D. Brown & Sons Ltd, ). Faber, Richard, Young England (London: Faber, ). Gaunt, Richard, Sir Robert Peel: The Life and the Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, ). Millar, Mary S., Disraeli’s Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). Morrow, John, Young England: The New Generation (London: Leicester University Press, ). Whibley, Charles, Lord John Manners and his Friends,  vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, ).

⁵⁷ Francis, ‘Legislators (No. III)’, , .

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        ......................................................................................................................

               ,          ,      ......................................................................................................................

 

T moral value of asceticism as expressed through monasticism and sainthood was a matter for intense cultural contestation in the nineteenth century. The opponents of the Victorian revival of aspects of medieval Catholicism in both its Roman and Anglican forms had the habit of denouncing Catholic ascetic self-denial as being at best ridiculous and at worst a dangerous, even personally fatal, preoccupation with mental and physical decay.¹ Because contemporary critics denied the ability of Church authorities to identify who was or was not a legitimate saint and which community was or was not following a legitimate monastic order, they tended to focus on the notion that vulnerable individuals were being coerced into lives of privation, or else had come to embrace it as a result of personal sinfulness or eccentricity. Particular concern was raised over the effect of celibacy on the mental and physical health of those who had renounced what most Protestants saw as the natural state of matrimony. Thus, the persons and bodies of those participating in the Victorian revival of monasticism were also favourable sites for the development of sexualized conceptions of perversion because their ascetic practices were read, not as spiritual heroism, but as the result of tastes that were perverted in fascinatingly dubious ways.² Nevertheless, the successes of

¹ On asceticism see Geoffrey Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); K. Ishwaran (ed.), Ascetic Culture: Renunciation and Worldly Engagement, (Leiden: Brill, ) and Mayeul de Dreuille, The Rule of St. Benedict and the Ascetic Traditions from Asia to the West (Leominster: Gracewing, ). ² On Victorian monasticism see Peter F. Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion (London: SPCK, ) and Building up the Waste Places: The Revival of Monastic Life on Medieval Lines in the Post-Reformation Church of England (Leighton Buzzard: Faith Press, ), Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ) and Susan Mumm, Stolen

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

 

the Roman Catholic revival in the nineteenth century in the wake of legal emancipation and of the Oxford Movement of the s that aimed to reassert catholicity within the Church of England, were facilitated by a distinct, if uneven, decline in anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Britain. This meant that the wider, secular culture of the age increasingly came to engage with forms of sainthood and monasticism to the extent that they even began to influence notions of British imperial manliness and heroism. The chapter is not intended to provide a detailed history of the denominational evolution of monasticism and sainthood within Victorian Catholicism. Rather, it explores, by means of a series of key examples, the battle between the proponents and opponents of medieval and contemporary monasticism and sainthood. My aim is to explain the range of views towards religious asceticism within Victorian society and their relationship to contemporary constructions of gender and forms of sexual desire. Whilst monasticism had been disposed of by Henry VIII, sainthood had never quite left the world of Protestant England. Parish churches remained dedicated to saints even after the rigorous dispersal of relics. Moreover, the evidence of the Acts of the Apostles could not be dismissed in the same way as could undated medieval hagiographies. Furthermore, the considerable importance of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (commonly known as the ‘Book of Martyrs’, first edition ) ensured that religious self-sacrifice played an important role in Protestant devotion. The events of the French Revolution had a powerful effect on public opinion by raising awareness of the sufferings of contemporary Catholics, including monks and nuns.³ These events were watched with horror by many Protestants in Britain despite that country’s record of strident anti-Catholicism since the Reformation.⁴ The reason for this was that the Revolutionary attack on the Catholic Church was widely conflated in Britain with an atheistic drive to extirpate Christianity.⁵ Many Roman Catholic priests and monks fled to England and were given a surprisingly warm welcome. Indeed, King George III

Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London: Leicester University Press, ). ³ On the impact of the French Revolution see Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ); Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (London: Harper Collins, ); Olwen Hufton, ‘The Reconstruction of a Church, –’, in Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas (eds), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, and Dominic Janes, ‘John Foxe and British Attitudes to Martyrdom After the French Revolution’, in Alex Houen and Dominic Janes (eds), Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁴ David Rice, ‘Combine Against the Devil: The Anglican Church and the French Refugee Clergy in the French Revolution’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, / (): –. ⁵ Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. –: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), , and Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), .

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 , ,  



visited French Trappists at Lulworth in Dorset.⁶ Influential voices, such as that of Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (), began to make themselves heard in defence of monasticism.⁷ Despite the setbacks of the French Revolution, the subsequent reappearance of Roman Catholic orders in Britain can be seen as part of a wider denominational revival in continental Europe which facilitated monastic repopulation.⁸ For instance, in  land was purchased at Mount St Bernard in Charwood Forest for the Cistercians; however, such examples notwithstanding, a substantial part of the nineteenth-century monastic revival took place within the Church of England.⁹ This development followed from the impetus towards greater catholicity within Anglicanism which arose during the s in the form of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement led by John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Bouverie Pusey. The theological agenda of these men and their followers focused on the recovery of patristic, medieval, and Caroline texts and the rejection of many doctrinal aspects of the Reformation. However, the social critique of the Tractarians, which took aim at what they saw as the soullessness of utilitarian mercantilism, had much in common with the romantic medievalism espoused at this time by the architect and Roman Catholic convert, A. W. N. Pugin. He promoted an idealized vision of pre-industrial England in which social harmony was ensured through the patronal benevolence of both secular lords and of the Church.¹⁰ Such wishful thinking was aided by the deficiencies in the contemporary understandings of medieval Christianity. Pugin could, thus, assert the Romanness of the English Church before the Reformation, relying on the influential arguments of John Lingard’s Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (), but Anglicans could, at the same time, cling to the notion that the medieval Church in England had been, at least in some senses, proto-Protestant prior to an acknowledged period of corruption in the fifteenth century.¹¹ A key development was the establishment of various associations for the study of medieval antiquities, of which the most influential was the Cambridge Camden (Ecclesiological) Society founded in . Ecclesiologists mainly came from within the Church of England and were hugely influential in disseminating Pugin’s Gothic revivalism within the national Church. The result was a rising incidence of ‘ritualist’ ⁶ Peter F. Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion. nd edn, ed A. W. Campbell (London: SPCK, ), –. ⁷ Derek Beales, ‘Edmund Burke and the Monasteries of France’, Historical Journal, / (): –, at . ⁸ Susan O’Brien, ‘Terra Incognita: The Nun in Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present,  (): –, at . ⁹ Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . ¹⁰ S. A. Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹¹ John Lingard, Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (Newcastle: Edward Walker, ) and Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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

 

devotion inspired by the example of the Middle Ages and this formed the basis from which, in due course, Anglo-Catholicism was to emerge. These developments were not separate from the work of the Tractarians but have their roots in its practices. For instance, Newman employed the Gothic style for his new church at Littlemore (built –) and, though he was never a member of the Camden Society, he was one of the founders of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture in .¹² Moreover, Newman established a quasi-monastic community at Littlemore a short time before his conversion to Rome in . By the end of the nineteenth century around twenty men’s communities had been established, although many quickly became extinct. By contrast there were around ninety women’s orders, many of which referred to their members as ‘Sisters of Mercy’ rather than as nuns.¹³ Because the Church of England was integral to the political establishment of the nation, as Roman Catholicism pointedly was not, public controversy over monasticism most frequently focused upon Anglican institutions. An important feature of the time was that the Church of England had become bitterly divided between what were referred to as ‘Church parties’, with Tractarians being most fiercely opposed by evangelical defenders of the values of the Reformation.¹⁴ Anglican monasticism was firmly located within the ‘High Church’ party and took particular inspiration from Tractarian interest in medieval monks, a number of whom were celebrated in Newman’s fourteen-volume series of Lives of the English Saints (–).¹⁵ These texts represented, amongst other things, an attempt by Newman to hold together notions of Englishness and of Catholicity. However, the miraculous occurrences and ascetic privations that featured in these texts were regarded by many Anglicans as peculiar evidences of Tractarian credulity rather than as admirable models for lives of devotion.¹⁶ Evangelicals and Nonconformists denounced these texts as an exercise in the servile imitation of Roman imbecility. However, it is important to stress that if Anglican ritualists admired and attempted to imitate certain forms of medieval asceticism, such as extensive fasting, they did not revive—albeit perhaps partly because canon law did not allow them to do so—the cultus of the saints extolled by prominent contemporary works of Catholic apologetic.¹⁷

¹² James Patrick, ‘Newman, Pugin and Gothic’, Victorian Studies, / (): –, at ; and see also Peter Howell, ‘Newman’s Church at Littlemore’, Oxford Art Journal, / (): –. ¹³ Mumm, Stolen Daughters, . ¹⁴ W. J. Conybeare, ‘Church Parties’, in Arthur Burns and Stephen Taylor (eds), From Cranmer to Davidson: A Miscellany (Woodbridge: Boydell, ), – (first publ. ) and William van Reyk, ‘Christian Ideals of Manliness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Historical Journal, /  (): –, at . ¹⁵ Devon Fisher, Roman Catholic Saints and Early Victorian Literature: Conservatism, Liberalism and the Emergence of Secular Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . ¹⁶ J. Derek Holmes, ‘Newman’s Reputation and The Lives of the English Saints’, Catholic History Review, / (): –, at , and Fisher, Roman Catholic Saints, –. ¹⁷ As for instance in Daniel Rock, ‘Hierurgia’, or Transubstantiation, Invocation of Saints, Relics and Purgatory, nd edn (London: C. Dolman, ).

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 , ,  



As far as the majority of the general public was concerned, however, monks and Catholic saints remained peculiar, exotic, and threatening figures on the British cultural landscape. I will illustrate this point by developing a short case-study of the way in which the leading British satirical magazine, Punch, responded to the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’ of . This phrase was used by outraged opponents of Pope Pius IX’s unilateral declaration of the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England which had been in abeyance since the Reformation. Punch had been established in  and swiftly made a reputation for incisive political satire, some of which, such as the contributions of the radical journalist Douglas Jerrold, was distinctly anti-clerical.¹⁸ It was not, however, initially partisan, in so far as the evangelical opponents of the Tractarians were also treated to mockery as hypocritical and canting puritans. Punch saw itself as the voice of sensible and sophisticated middle-class opinion and was prone to make fun of what it saw as prejudice, superficiality, and ignorance among both the lower and upper classes.¹⁹ With a circulation estimated at around , in  it had become a highly influential indicator and conduit of (an important segment) of public opinion.²⁰ Whilst Punch hammered away at Pius IX and the newly appointed Cardinal of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, it also expended considerable energy on satirizing contemporary developments within the Church of England. The primary focus was the parish of St Paul in the rich suburb of Belgravia, where the Reverend W. J. E. Bennett had just constructed what had been hailed by the medievalist architectural journal, the Ecclesiologist, as being the most ‘complete, and with completeness, the most sumptuous church which has been dedicated to the use of the Anglican Communion since the revival’ of the Gothic style favoured by Anglican ritualists. This new building was constructed at the heart of a complex in the early English Gothic style which included a school known as ‘St Barnabas’ College’ where Bennett, even though he was married, moved to live communally for a time with his curates in a ‘residentiary house’. This was not a Catholic monastery, but to outsiders it might have looked rather like one. At the same time Priscilla Lydia Sellon, a pioneering Anglican nun, helped Bennett to establish a small community of ‘Sisters of Mercy’ in the area whose mission was to work with the local poor.²¹ On  October  Punch announced the establishment of a ‘Convent of the Belgravians’ in which it spoofed the establishment of an Anglican nunnery as the play-acting of a few silly, rich women.

¹⁸ Richard Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, – (Columbus: Ohio University Press, ) and Bruce A. White, ‘Douglas Jerrold’s “Q” Papers in Punch’, Victorian Periodicals Review, / (): –. Between Sept.  and Mar.  Jerrold signed sixty-seven articles (as ‘Q’), but his contributions waned from  and Punch drifted toward the middle ground of politics. ¹⁹ A point that emerges clearly from Jamie W. Johnson, ‘The Changing Representation of the Art Public in Punch, –’, Victorian Periodicals Review, / (): –. ²⁰ Altick, Punch, . ²¹ Dominic Janes, Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, and Editorial, Ecclesiologist,  (): .

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

 

Everybody who has a proper veneration for the reredos, and who, without holding extreme opinions on the subject of the dalmatic, feels correctly on that of the alb, who has a soul that can appreciate mediaeval art, particularly the beautiful foreshortening of our ancestors, and who would revive their ecclesiastical practices and institutions to an extent just tastefully Romanesque, will be ‘ryghte gladde’ that there is a proposal to found a Convent, under Anglican principles.

The reader is informed that the abbess will be ‘a real Countess at the least’ and that inmates must pay £ a month for pleasant lodgings. Moreover, ‘it will be incumbent on the Nuns to appear in society, in order to display the beauty of sanctity . . . they will thoroughly renounce the world, in the Belgravian sense’.²² Shortly afterward, on  November, a slightly more alarming take on male asceticism appeared under the headline ‘A Dream of Whitefriars’. In this, a London tradesman dreams that a dirty and disreputable friar has appeared at his house: ‘my daughter, Fanny Peach, who has just come home from a finished school in Belgravia, fell down on her knees at the sight of this ragged old hermit and begged his blessing’.²³ What was lurking here was the fear that unscrupulous men would make sexual claims on the wives and daughters of respectable heads of households under the cover of spurious claims to celibacy. On  March  the fear of the supposedly rampant financial and physical appetites of that archetypical anti-Catholic bogeyman, the rotund friar (or monk), was made blatantly obvious (see Fig. .). Here the reader was confronted by the stereotyped images of youthful innocence and mature evil. It was inspired by a recent incident in which a rich heiress had been placed in a Roman Catholic convent, in order, so it was alleged, to deprive her of her money. However, this cartoon also references the contemporary practice of kidnapping well-dressed little girls for their clothing, as happened to Florence Dombey in Charles Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son (–). James Kincaid has argued in Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (), concerning innocent children in the literature of this period, that this purity, this harmlessness is presented as a complete vacancy; the absence of harmfulness amounts, in fact, to nothing at all, a blank image waiting to be formed. As emptiness, the child David [Copperfield] can be variously eroticised by those around him: his kissing mother, his hugging nurse, his beating stepfather and schoolmaster, the adult narrator, and, arguably, the reader. Purity, it turns out, provides just the opening a sexualising tendency requires.²⁴

When Kincaid’s insights are applied to ‘The Kidnapper’ it appears that that image of an innocent child is ripe with the potential for sexual molestation; something that is

²² Percival Leigh, ‘Convent of the Belgravians’, Punch,  Oct. : . Attributions of Punch articles are derived from the Punch contributors’ ledgers, BL, Add MS, //–. ²³ William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘A Dream of Whitefriars’, Punch,  Nov. : . ²⁴ James N. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, ), . See also Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ).

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 , ,  



Figure .. John Leech, ‘The Kidnapper.—A Case for the Police’, Punch ( March ): .

emphasized not only by the depiction of a rapacious monk, but also by the leering gargoyles on each side of the darkened archway.²⁵ ²⁵ John Leech, ‘The Kidnapper.—A Case for the Police’, Punch,  Mar. : . For the attribution to Leech see Susan P. Casteras, ‘Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and

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

 

The presence of such lurid images can be interpreted in a number of ways. On one level it evidences the survival of crude anti-Catholic stereotypes which had been popularized during the Reformation. On a second level it can be understood in relation to the very similarity between Protestant and Catholic admiration for aspects of ascetic self-denial. In his article, ‘Tradition and Modernity in Protestant Christianity’, Alan Davies comments that, although ‘few, if any [Protestants] would regard themselves as ascetics . . . elements of the puritan ethic—the sense of stewardship, the preciosity of time, the organisation of talent, the abhorrence of laziness, the tempered soul, the moderate and ordered life—remain as perennial characteristics of Protestant spirituality’.²⁶ Catholic practices, through their ostentatious visibility, can be understood as threatening to eclipse Protestant norms of personal spiritual heroism and, thus, there was a powerful incentive to represent the former as flamboyantly corrupt. At a third level, Catholic asceticism was a particular threat to Victorian men because they tended to associate reasoned self-control with their own sex. This meant that there was a related tendency to regard women and children as vulnerable precisely because their emotions, and supposed delight in superficial appearances, made them vulnerable to trickery and seduction. Moreover, since they had been brought up to admire masculine self-control, it followed that they might be easily fooled by ostentatious displays of fake asceticism. It was this fear of Catholic performance as unhealthy and false that inspired the appearance in Punch of a supposed advert for ‘Puseyite Cosmetics’: PATENT ECCLESIASTIAL ACHROMATICON, or PALLIFACIENT FLUID, for blanching the COMPLEXION, and imparting to the FACE that delicate PALLOR which is the recognised indication of severe Thought and Study. Also his MACERATIVE ELIXIR, or ASCETIC SOLUTION, for the ATTENUATION of the FRAME, warranted to reduce the stoutest proportions to the most interesting slenderness, and produce, in the space of a few days, a personal appearance not to be distinguished from the results of years of Abstinence.²⁷

This piece also flags up the fact that there were two apparently conflicting anti-Catholic stereotypes in play here. The first is the aforementioned hypocritical friar whose greed cannot be concealed because of the size of this belly, and the second is of the peculiarly enervated and wasted runt, who can only seduce women by pretending to be sympathetic, pale, and interesting. Herbert Sussman has argued that ‘the intensity with which male writers and artists fixed on the monk and monasticism . . . the disproportionate energy expended on an

Novices’, Victorian Studies, / (): –, at . See also Altick, Punch, , and Andrew McDonald, ‘The Preservation of Innocence in Dombey and Son: Florence’s Identity and the Role of Walter Gay’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, / (): –, at . ²⁶ Alan Davies, ‘Tradition and Modernity in Protestant Christianity’, in K. Ishwaran (ed.), Ascetic Culture: Renunciation and Worldly Engagement (Leiden: Brill, ), –, at . ²⁷ Percival Leigh, ‘Puseyite Cosmetics’, Punch,  Nov. : .

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 , ,  

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anachronistic or, in its contemporary manifestation, a socially marginal topic provides insight into the male anxieties of the time’.²⁸ Indeed, as the title of his study, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity indicates, James Eli Adams has contended that both the performance and the display of self-discipline were important elements in constructions of Victorian manliness. Supposedly ostentatious asceticism of the Catholic variety could be differentiated as unmanly, indeed, effeminate, because to cultivate privation to excess could be represented as idolization of a state of bodily weakness that was for men, if not to the same degree for women, abject.²⁹ The gendered aspect of the Protestant reception of the cult of the saints can be seen from the writings of the Reverend Charles Kingsley who objected strongly, and repeatedly, to many aspects of Catholicism in both its Roman and Anglican forms. In particular, he took part in an acrimonious dispute with Newman in which he cast aspersions on what he projected as his ascetic weakness and effeminacy. The jibes of Kingsley, who was the apostle, so to speak, of muscular Christianity, can be contextualized by reference to contemporary lampoons in Punch of ritualist priests as camp transvestites, such as ‘The Height of Fashion’ which appeared in . This shows various priests being measured for new vestments, posed as if they were women trying on new frocks. The caption reads, ‘Oh Athenasius it’s charmingly becoming’.³⁰ The precise sexual ‘truth’ of Newman’s life is unlikely ever to be known. He had a long and enduring friendship, one so intense that it has been referred to as a love affair, with Ambrose St John. This began with their first meeting in  and the two were buried together, but there is no evidence that this relationship was sexually consummated (in so far as that is regarded as necessary proof of same-sex desire).³¹ Oliver Buckton has suggested that if Newman’s celibacy, friendships, and emotional behaviour in the s were not obviously ‘full of dubious sexual import and suggestive of a variety of “perversions”—it is clear that they were so, or were becoming so, by the s’.³² In other words, during the s, as it became increasingly clear that ritualist clergy were not intent on molesting women, a new and alarming possibility was ²⁸ Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ²⁹ James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ) and Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ³⁰ Anon., ‘Height of Fashion’, Punch  (): . ³¹ On Anglican celibacy as, in certain circumstances, normative, see B. W. Young, ‘The Anglican Origins of Newman’s Celibacy’, Church History,  (): –, Donna Vitanza, ‘ “The Cloister and the Hearth”: A Popular Response to the Oxford Movement’, Religion and Literature, / (): – at  and Gillian Walker, ‘Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Constructing the Celibate Priest’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, / (): –. Such relationships have been seen as ‘wholly spiritual’ and yet such ‘love was not the less for being spiritual’ as discussed by Alan Bray, ‘A Traditional Rite for Blessing Friendship’, in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, – (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –, at . ³² Oliver S. Buckton, ‘ “An Unnatural State”: Gender, “Perversion” and Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua’, Victorian Studies, / (): –, at . See also Susann Dorman, ‘Hypatia and Callista: The Initial Skirmish between Kingsley and Newman’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, / (): –, and

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 

becoming apparent; that the fact that they were not doing so implied that they were perhaps a little too like women. The limited success of male monasticism in Victorian England implies that it may have been facing particularly intense cultural head-winds, whereas the public embrace of personal suffering appears to have been more acceptable for women and this may have facilitated the spread and survival of orders of Sisters of Mercy. It is notable, for instance, that when Charles Kingsley decided to write a play, The Saint’s Tragedy () on the theme of the sufferings of St Elizabeth of Hungary (–), he engaged with her self-degradation with what looks suspiciously like enthusiasm. She entered a convent after the death on crusade of her husband, Lewis, Landgrave of Thuringia. But before she became a nun she embarked on physical mortifications to prepare herself to walk in the footsteps of Christ. She was canonized in . In the play Elizabeth says that It pleases me to bear what you call pain, Therefore to me ’tis pleasure: joy and grief Are the will’s creatures; martyrs kiss the stake . . . Eve’s curse lays suffering, as their natural lot, On woman-kind, till custom makes it light.³³

In other words, it is natural for women to suffer, and they become so inured to it as even to begin to like it. In  Philip Hermogenes Calderon, an English painter of Spanish and French descent, revealed, to considerable controversy, St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation (reproduced in Fig. .).³⁴ There was a concerted campaign on the part of Roman Catholics against this work on the grounds of its supposedly anti-Catholic erotic prurience. Indeed, the painting was inspired by scenes in Kingsley’s play in which a domineering monk secretly lusts after a woman and convinces her to separate from her husband.³⁵ The campaign to impugn the picture’s moral respectability and get it removed from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition did not succeed. It would appear that the display of female self-abasement was less culturally problematic than its male counterpart. John Kucich has put forward a theory which accounts for this distinction. He places a theory of (disguised) male masochism at the heart of the British Protestant imperial project.³⁶ Men were supposed to embrace suffering as an act of duty, but not to seek it for reasons of personal enjoyment. This meant that labouring either at home or in the Vincent A. Lankewish, ‘Love among the Ruins: The Catacombs, the Closet and the Victorian “Early Christian” Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture, / (): –. ³³ Charles Kingsley, The Saint’s Tragedy; or, The True Story of Elizabeth of Hungary (London: John W. Parker, ), . ³⁴ Philip McEvansoneya, ‘ “A Libel in Paint”: Religious and Artistic Controversy around P. H. Calderon’s The Renunciation of St Elizabeth of Hungary’, Journal of Victorian Culture, / (): –. ³⁵ Clive Barker, ‘Erotic Martyrdom: Kingsley’s Sexuality beyond Sex’, Victorian Studies, / (): –, at . ³⁶ John Kucich, ‘Melancholy Magic: Masochism, Stevenson, Anti-Imperialism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, / (): –, at .

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 , ,  



Figure .. Philip Hermogenes Calderon, St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation, , © Tate, London .

colonies for Queen and country could be projected as a laudable burden rather than an act of despotic self-indulgence.³⁷ By contrast the duty of women could be understood as involving obedience to the sexual lusts of men which were often understood to be abhorrent to feminine delicacy. All this was to be borne with grace and charm. In order to understand the willingness of Protestants to sacrifice their comfort, and often their lives, for the Empire, Kucich develops a theory of masochism which is centred on ‘the production of omnipotent fantasy by means of pain-seeking behaviour’. In this process, the imperial conquerors mentally configured themselves as suffering, Christ-like figures who, under God, took the burdens of the world on their shoulders. The noble sufferings of the Protestant Briton, in an ironic echo of Catholic sainthood, provided scripts of heroism which disempowered the moral critiques of opponents.³⁸ All this notwithstanding, the cult of medieval saints and relics was widely treated with a mixture of disgust and morbid fascination by Protestant society as a whole.³⁹ This was

³⁷ John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . ³⁸ John Kucich, ‘Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling’s Middle Class Imperialism’, Victorian Studies, / (): –. ³⁹ Dominic Janes, ‘Vile Bodies: Victorian Protestants in the Roman Catacombs’, in Mark Bradley (ed.), Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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 

very much the response of Dickens—a liberal (‘broad Church’) Anglican—when he visited the shrine of Carlo Borromeo (–) in Milan: The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo Borromeo is preserved, presents as striking and as ghastly a contrast, perhaps, as any place can show . . . A windlass slowly removes the front of the altar; and, within it, in a gorgeous shrine of gold and silver, is seen, through alabaster, the shrivelled mummy of a man: the pontifical robes with which it is adorned, radiant with diamonds, emeralds, rubies: every costly and magnificent gem. The shrunken heap of poor earth in the midst of this great glitter, is more pitiful than if it lay upon a dunghill. There is not a ray of imprisoned light in all the flash and fire of jewels, but seems to mock the dusty holes where eyes were, once. Every thread of silk in the rich vestments seems only a provision for the worms that spin, for the behoof of worms that propagate in sepulchres.⁴⁰

Three years before Dickens published his Pictures from Italy, from which this extract is taken, Thomas Carlyle, who had a strictly Calvinist upbringing, published a startlingly positive and optimistic vision of a medieval monastery in the form of his Past and Present (). This shows that, at least for a while, he bought into the Catholic revivalist vision of monasteries as viable institutions for the regeneration of Britain. Crucially, he aligned them with the imperatives of British manliness, by projecting them as institutions dedicated to hard physical labour. However, Richard Schoch has argued for what he refers to as the ‘theatricality’ of Carlyle’s vision. According to Schoch, such scenes as that in which Abbot Samson exhibits the body of St Edmund were perhaps most palatable to Carlyle’s readership as theatrical representations similar to those employed by Charles Dickens in his description of the shrine of Carlo Borromeo.⁴¹ Therefore, what is concealed by the Protestant reception of Catholic practice is in fact the location of pleasure in the self as spectator, as is argued by John Davis in his article ‘Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire’ () in which he highlights the importance of ‘detached, touristic viewing (focussing both on the aesthetic, ritual environment and the worshippers who perform within it) which was the preferred Protestant means of witnessing the theatrical components of the [Catholic] rite’.⁴² This implies that the predominant role of Catholic asceticism for many Protestants was as a space of fantasy. This conclusion should not be taken to imply that sincere doctrinal differences were not at the root of many of the distorted visions held by various Protestants concerning ⁴⁰ Dickens in his Pictures from Italy (), , discussed in Dominic Janes, ‘Dickens and the Catholic Corpse’, in Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano (eds), Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, ), –, at . ⁴¹ Richard Schoch, ‘ “We do Nothing but Enact History”: Thomas Carlyle Stages the Past’, Nineteenth-Century Literature,  (): –, at . ⁴² John Davis, ‘Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire’, in David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (eds), The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ), –, at –.

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 , ,  



Roman Catholic spiritual ideals. But equally Catholic religious practice should not be seen as an immaculate space insulated from wider societal constructions of sainthood and monasticism. In particular, although fears of the ravishment of nuns by rapacious monks were seemingly without foundation, there is evidence that some of those involved in the revival of monastic life in Victorian Britain were attracted to it, at least in part, because of their interest in aspects of same-sex desire. As has been pointed out by Frederick Roden, the Tractarian fascination with medieval monasticism showed some awareness of the potential for peculiarly intense friendships within such communities, as when John Dobree Dalgairns spent part of his time when he was at Newman’s quasi-monastic community at Littlemore researching the life of the twelfth-century abbot Aelred of Rievaulx.⁴³ Parallel instances appeared in later decades, notably in the case of Benjamin Carlyle, who was one of the most important figures in the monastic revival at the end of the nineteenth century. He presided as Father Aelred at Caldey Abbey in south Wales, where he appears to have been inspired by his predecessor’s passion for emotional relationships with fellow monks. He required, we are told, frequent embraces and kisses on the mouth.⁴⁴ Carlyle’s community took over Llantony Abbey, also in south Wales, which had been established by another prominent pioneer of revived Benedictine monasticism within the Church of England, Joseph Leycester Lyne.⁴⁵ Having received encouragement, and his first habit, from the aforementioned Lydia Sellon who was the founder of an Anglican woman’s order, he established a community in Norwich. This, however, was soon to be shut down in the wake of a scandal concerning a love letter sent by one of the monks to a local boy. In order to help fund his next establishment at Llantony Lyne wrote a series of novels. In this first of these, Brother Placidius and why He Became a Monk: A Tale for the Young Men of the Times (), a man is recruited, one might even say seduced, by a monk whose ‘calm, black eyes met those of Charles [i.e. The future Placidius], who crimsoned deeply, and his eyes fell beneath a look, such as he had never met before’.⁴⁶ The monks and oblates were sometimes photographed together, as shown in Fig. .. Lyne’s particular interest in boys (he adopted and lived with two of them) appears in his second novel, Leonard Morris (), which was ‘not written for old ladies, but for young men’.⁴⁷ In this effusion, the brothers are overheard

⁴³ Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –, and John Dobree Dalgairns, Life of St. Aelred (London: James Toovery, ). ⁴⁴ He also had his favourites and went into mourning if they left the community, see Peter F. Anson Abbot Extraordinary: A Memoir of Aelred Carlyle, Monk and Missionary, – (London: Faith Press, ), . ⁴⁵ The discussion here is derived from the more expansive treatment given in Dominic Janes, Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. ⁴⁶ Joseph Leycester Lyne, Brother Placidius and Why He Became a Monk: A Tale for the Young Men of the Times (Abergavenny: J. L. Lyne, ), . ⁴⁷ Joseph Leycester Lyne, Leonard Morris; or, the Benedictine Novice (London: Richard Bentley, ), xii.

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 

Figure .. Joseph Lyne as part of a ‘characteristic group’ at Llanthony Abbey, undated photograph in Beatrice de Bertouch, The Life of Father Ignatius, O.S.B., the Monk of Llanthony (London: Methuen, ), opposite p. .

chit-chatting about the request of a small boy to be beaten in association with a performance of the Mass: ‘Didn’t the child squall?’ ‘Not a sound, but received the sacrament with almost a rapture. His fair, bright face and sweet blue eyes were upturned to the Host with such delight, but his face was suffused with crimson from the pain.’ ‘And knowing that he was to receive another caning when he left the altar?’ ‘Yes; and he took the second still more bravely.’ ‘Well, upon my word, I never could have believed such a thing possible. It is a wonderful life this monastery life.’⁴⁸

The queerness, therefore, which hung about Catholic asceticism seems to have attracted both criticism and enthusiasm, a fact that recent studies such as Julia Saville, A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins () have ⁴⁸ Lyne, Leonard Morris, –.

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 , ,  



begun to explore in detail. There was certainly no clear dividing line between the Church and the aesthetic circles associated with men such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater.⁴⁹ Medievalist asceticism was an element in the fin-de-siècle cult of decadence, as seen, for instance, in the passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray () in which we learn that Dorian had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain.⁵⁰

However, the influences of Classical and Christian antiquity and the Renaissance were as important as the Middle Ages in subsequent understandings of Victorian Church queerness.⁵¹ Thus Lytton Strachey, the leading homosexual member of the Bloomsbury Set, looking back on the life of John Henry Newman in Eminent Victorians (), wrote that: in other times, under other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in [Thomas] Gray’s footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica. At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of the Middle Age.⁵²

The desire for such ascetic enchantment lay, ultimately, in a wish not to conform to the social imperatives of the Victorian age and to escape from its worldly and marital obsessions and the cult of domesticity. But Strachey seems to have thought that the Cardinal’s medievalism had, ultimately, prevented the personal expression of his ⁴⁹ Dominic Janes, ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist’, Journal of Victorian Culture, / (): –. ⁵⁰ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Camille Cauti (New York: Barnes & Noble, ), . ⁵¹ Richard A. Kaye, ‘ “Determined Raptures”: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence’, Victorian Literature and Culture, / (): –. ⁵² Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, ), . The Lyra Apostolica was a corpus of devotional poems some of which were authored by Newman. For the queer lure of the Greek palaestra (wrestling school) and of Renaissance art see, respectively, Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ) and Will Fisher, ‘The Sexual Politics of Victorian Historiographical Writing about the Renaissance’, GLQ / (): –, at ; and for Gray’s homoerotic longings see Raymond Bentman, ‘Thomas Gray and the Poetry of “Hopeless Love” ’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, / (): –.

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 

queerness. In other words, the conservative moral agenda of medievalist asceticism limited its scope for actual, as opposed to perceived, sexual transgression. It would seem that Pope Benedict XVI agreed, since it was at his hands that Newman was beatified in . Yet two years earlier, during the translation of his relics from Rednal to the chapel of St Carlo Borromeo at the Birmingham Oratory it was found to be impossible to distinguish his remains from those of his friend Ambrose. They had decayed, physically, if not morally, together.⁵³

S  Adams, James Eli, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). Anson, Peter F., The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion, nd edn, ed. A. W. Campbell (London: SPCK, ). Barker, Clive, ‘Erotic Martyrdom: Kingsley’s Sexuality beyond Sex’, Victorian Studies, / (): –. Burleigh, Michael, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (London: Harper Collins, ). Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). Fisher, Devon, Roman Catholic Saints and Early Victorian Literature: Conservatism, Liberalism and the Emergence of Secular Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, ). Janes, Dominic, Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Janes, Dominic, Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Kucich, John, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Ohi, Kevin, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ). Purves, Maria, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ). Roden, Frederick S., Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Skinner, S. A., Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

⁵³ Newman was finally canonized in  by Pope Francis. Peter Jennings, ‘Birmingham: Translation of the Remains of Cardinal Newman’, Independent Catholic News,  Nov. : , accessed Sept.  and Mark D. Jordan, ‘Straightening up Cardinal Newman’, Religion Despatches,  July : , accessed Sept. .

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Sussman, Herbert, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Vance, Norman, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Yates Nigel, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

  Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era ......................................................................................................................

 

W the intrepid hero of the Chartist fable The Political Pilgrim’s Progress () finally reaches the City of Reform, he is rewarded with a utopian vision of an emancipated community: Here every man breathed the air of freedom . . . here every man possessing common industry was able to earn an ample livelihood, and bring up his own family in ease and comfort . . . here every man could, if he pleased, shoot a hare or a pheasant, unfound fault with, if he took care not to damage fences or growing crops; here was no such thing as a stock exchange, or a saving bank . . . here every man ate beef, mutton, veal, pork, or bacon every day, and every man brewed his own strong beer, from the labourer to the lord; here the linen was spun at home, for the most part, and was so strong that it would out-last one hundred times the quantity of flimsy cotton; here the furniture of every man was made of solid oak, mahogany or rosewood, and not of mere fir deal-boards veneered over with the appearance of mahogany as thin as wafer; here, in short, all men spent a life of honest but happy industry, and lived generally to good old age.¹

Made more powerful by its appearance in a Chartist newspaper at the height of the ‘disturbances’ of ,² this fantasy of artisanal independence highlights the enduring appeal of political nostalgia in the nineteenth-century radical imagination. ¹ Ian Haywood (ed.), Chartist Fiction: Thomas Doubleday, The Political Pilgrim’s Progress; Thomas Wheeler, Sunshine and Shadow (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –. ² The story first appeared in the Newcastle-based Northern Liberator, a physical force Chartist newspaper. For further details, see Haywood, ‘Introduction’, Chartist Fiction, –.

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 

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The cherished notion of the ‘free-born’ Englishmen did not expire with the Reform Bill of ; on the contrary, Chartism adopted a title that echoed the legendary Magna Carta (often spelt ‘Charta’ at this time), the most famous of all emblems of English liberty. Previous generations of radicals had made clear that ‘we want nothing new’³ and had campaigned powerfully for the restoration and recovery of ‘lost’ social, economic, and (less sure-footedly) political rights.⁴ For many eighteenth-century reformers the blame for the destruction of ‘merrie England’ lay squarely with the infamous Norman yoke, that invasion of foreign aristocracy which suppressed an indigenous Saxon democracy,⁵ but by the time of the Chartists there were several other pseudo-historical models available.⁶ The most impressive and influential of these medievalist myths was the idea that the dissolution of the monasteries in the fifteenth century had obliterated a central institution of ‘boundless charity’.⁷ The chief architect of this ‘authentic fantasy’⁸ was William Cobbett, the leading radical journalist whose A History of the Protestant Reformation (–) was an important intervention in the Catholic emancipation debates of the late s. Cobbett’s importance for Victorian medievalism was his socio-economic analysis rather than his religious polemics. In his account, the Reformation initiated the hegemony of an oligarchical, centralized State that served the interests of propertied elites: the ‘remote consequences’ of the ‘beastly lust’ of the Tudor ruling class ‘are, some of them, now before us in that misery, that beggary, that nakedness, that hunger, that everlasting wrangling and spite’ that has replaced ‘the ease and happiness and harmony and Christian charity, enjoyed so abundantly, and for so many ages, by our Catholic forefathers’.⁹ In his role as the self-proclaimed champion of the rural poor of Georgian England, Cobbett was emphatic that during ‘Catholic times’ there were ‘no paupers’.¹⁰ Cobbett’s popular political mobilization of anti-Reformation medievalism was a key innovation. His use

³ The phrase is William Cobbett’s; see the Political Register,  Mar. . ⁴ See James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , ; Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, ), ch. . ⁵ As E. P. Thompson noted with wry frustration in The Making of the English Working Class (; London: Penguin, ), eighteenth-century reformers from John Wilkes onwards indulged in ‘almost any constitutional innovation for which a Saxon precedent could be vamped up’ (). ⁶ As Florence Boos points out, the Victorians understood the medieval period to encompass a huge span of time, from the fall of Rome to the seventeenth century; this ‘medieval millennium’ provided commentators with a ‘very wide scope’ for alternate views of history and society. Florence S. Boos, History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, ), . See also Kevin Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, ), ; Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), ch. . ⁷ A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts (Printed for the author, ), . ⁸ Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), ‘Introduction’, . ⁹ William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland,  vols (London: Published by the author; ), i, letter , para. . ¹⁰ Political Register,  Feb. .

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 

of the telling juxtaposition between the benign past and the tawdry present was taken up by both Pugin and Carlyle, who in turn would exert a major influence over the Victorian literary imagination.¹¹ Cobbett’s brand of medievalism also merged with his more personal nostalgia for ‘Old England’, that rural culture of independent artisans and yeomanry into which he had been born, and which he saw being swept away by Enclosure Acts, machinery, gentrification, and commercialization.¹² The area of discursive overlap between these various myths is the ideal rural society, an organic, ‘knowable’ community of ‘honest but happy industry’, a place where a free, healthy and happy English people were once to be found.¹³ Like all myths, radical nostalgia was a highly selective view of the past, conveniently erasing the inequalities and brutalities of feudal society, yet serving as a powerful rhetorical tool to attack present-day injustices.¹⁴ As Raymond Williams explains in Culture and Society –, radical and working-class investment in this organicist mythology was part of a wider, decisive shift in sensibility that became a hallmark of Victorian literary culture. In its postRomantic guises, medievalism became a core element in a new notion of culture as the antithesis of industrial capitalism and a bulwark against dehumanization. In Williams’s words, the ‘idealization of the Middle Ages’ was ‘characteristic of nineteenth-century social criticism’.¹⁵ This idealization was ideologically flexible (incorporating Cobbett, Pugin, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) and it conveniently effaced the more authoritarian—as opposed to charitable—aspects of Catholic hegemony, but in its most radical and spectacular form it became a utopian vision of Victorian industrial capitalism capitulating to a ‘superior economic, social and spiritual life for the common people’.¹⁶ The conventional view is that we owe this achievement ¹¹ Alice Chandler rates Pugin’s Contrasts as ‘one of the clearest statements ever made of the medieval ideal’: A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), . For Raymond Williams, Carlyle’s Past and Present is the ‘most substantial’ and ‘most literal’ of Victorian ‘visions of medieval order’: Culture and Society – (; Penguin, ), . Disraeli’s novel Sybil () is an example of an immediate novelistic response to Carlyle. ¹² See The Autobiography of William Cobbett, ed. William Reitzel (London: Faber & Faber, ), ch. . ¹³ The term ‘knowable’ community comes from Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ch. . ¹⁴ It is interesting to note the durability of radical medievalism despite its weak historical foundations. John Ruskin, for example, voiced a typically realist critique: ‘We don’t want either the life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again . . . All that gorgeousness of the Middle Ages, beautiful as it sounds in description, noble as in many respects it was in reality, had, nevertheless, for foundation and for end, nothing but the pride of life—the pride of the so-called superior classes; a pride which supported itself with violence and robbery, and led in the end to the destruction both of the arts themselves and the States in which they flourished’ (cited in Williams, Culture and Society, ). For Walter Crane, however, ‘England was indeed merry, in spite of family feuds and tyrannous lords and kings, before her industrial transformation and the dispossession of her people’: Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (; London: George Bell & Sons, ), –. ¹⁵ Williams, Culture and Society, . ¹⁶ See the entry for ‘Medievalism’ in Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, ).

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 

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to William Morris: it is after all in the pages of News from Nowhere () that we see Hammersmith Bridge transformed into an English Ponte Vecchio and the great metropolis of London revert to a string of Arts and Crafts, commerce-free hamlets in which the cash nexus is a distant memory. For Terry Eagleton, Morris stands headand-shoulders above his precursors: ‘The vision of a just society was often enough inverted into an impotent nostalgia for the old “organic” England which had passed away. It was not until the time of William Morris, who in the late nineteenth century harnessed this Romantic humanism to the cause of the working-class movement, that the gap between poetic vision and political practice was significantly narrowed.’¹⁷ While there is no denying that Morris’s socialist remaking of medievalism was a major triumph, what is overlooked in this narrative is the debt that Morris’s vision owed to Chartist literary culture. In this chapter I want to offer a new genealogy of radical medievalism in the Victorian period by bringing to light a neglected masterpiece of ‘poetic vision and political practice’, W. J. Linton’s Bob Thin; Or The Poorhouse Fugitive.

I 

.................................................................................................................................. If William James Linton (–) remains an under-researched figure in both Chartist and Victorian studies, his remarkable anti-Poor Law poem Bob Thin () has been all but forgotten.¹⁸ Although Brian Maidment implicitly promoted the poem when he borrowed its subtitle for the title of his pioneering anthology of Victorian labouring-class verse, The Poorhouse Fugitives (), the text has received almost no critical attention, even among scholars of Chartist poetry, and its innovative illustrations (which Linton composed with the help of a number of collaborators) have been completely overlooked.¹⁹ Yet it is the visual design of the poem (Fig. .) that clearly displays one of the text’s most original and arresting features: its imitation of the ¹⁷ Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . See also E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (; New York: Pantheon Books, ), –, –. ¹⁸ All quotations and images are from the author’s copy of the privately printed  text which reproduced the version in the Illuminated Magazine. ¹⁹ In her comprehensive study Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, ), Isobel Armstrong refers in passing to Bob Thin, calling it a ‘weaver poem’ (). Similarly, Herbert F. Tucker gives the poem only the briefest of mentions in his discussion of Punch’s use of parodic illuminated capital letters—curiously, he states that the poem is unfinished: ‘Literal Illustration in Victorian Print’, in Richard Maxwell (ed.), The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, ),  n. . Tucker is slightly fairer to the poem in his later book Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) where he praises its ‘interart vision’, the similarities with Blake, and the ‘wry grotesquerie’ of Part One (–). See also Alastair Lovett, ‘Creative Aspiration and Public Discourse: The Prose, Verse and Graphic Images of William James Linton (–)’, Ph.D. thesis (Durham, ), –.

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

 

Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, a page from Part One, .

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

medieval illuminated manuscript. The first part of the poem, in which the weaver-hero Bob Thin is consigned to a workhouse, contains over eighty exquisite and witty parodies of illuminated capital letters; the second part, in which Bob dies and is fantastically reborn into a medievalized, egalitarian rural community, is adorned with floricultural imagery. It is significant that the poem first appeared in the appositely titled Illuminated Magazine, a periodical with a high-minded mission to bring the civilizing and enlightening beauties of the fine arts to the common reader. As this chapter will show, Linton was uniquely placed to channel the radical tradition of medievalist utopianism into the new cultural power of the illustrated press; paradoxically, he exploited the new age of mechanical reproduction to showcase the aesthetic virtues of artisanal literary craft and its concomitant anti-capitalist political ethos. It was this ‘illuminated’ vision of social and political transformation that Linton bequeathed to the socialist revival of the later nineteenth century. In order to locate Bob Thin more securely within the radical print culture of the period, a very brief review of Linton’s career is in order. Linton was formidably well qualified for the task of giving artistic expression to radical medievalism. In addition to being a Chartist intellectual, poet, and editor, he was one of the Victorian period’s leading woodcut engravers, excelling in a craft that had its roots in the Reformation.²⁰ Unlike William Blake, an obvious precursor (and whose career Linton was instrumental in reviving),²¹ Linton was fully engaged in the radical public sphere as an activist, writer, and artist: as Anne Janowitz notes, he was ‘one of the most prolific poets and editors working in the radical print tradition from about  through to the s’.²² Nurtured by the tradition of radical print culture that associated the hand-operated printing press with political liberty and freedom of expression, Linton produced a unique collection of illustrated periodicals, notably The National (), Odd Fellow (–), and The English Republic (–). The fact that the latter was published from Brantwood, a house on Lake Coniston in the Lake District which Linton later sold to John Ruskin, shows in a quite literal way how Linton acted as a bridge between earlier and later generations of radical intellectuals and social critics. Linton also trained Walter Crane, who became the leading socialist artist of the late Victorian period. Crane was in no doubt about Linton’s legacy, describing him as ‘a notable historic link, carrying on the lamp of the older traditions of wood-engraving to these

²⁰ Henry Vizetelly called Linton the ‘first wood engraver of his epoch’: Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, ), . ²¹ Linton was responsible for most of the engravings in Alexander Gilchrist’s pioneering  biography of Blake. See Joseph Viscomi, ‘Blake After Blake: A Nation Discovers Genius’, in Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds), Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), –. ²² Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . F. B. Smith’s biography of Linton, Radical Artisan: William James Linton – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ) is still unrivalled. Though Smith is unimpressed by the poem, he states that it became ‘part of the repertoire of radical reciters’ and established Linton’s reputation as ‘a people’s poet’ ().

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degenerate days’.²³ Before he died Linton hand-bound twenty volumes of his works and donated them to the British Library, an apt tribute to his artisanal radicalism and creative independence. The stylistic roots of Bob Thin can be seen in his two early journals The National and Odd Fellow. The National: A Library for the People was published in two-penny weekly instalments between January and June .²⁴ The journal coincided with the first and most inflammatory Chartist Convention and its editorial methodology reflected the highly volatile, even pre-revolutionary political mood of those months. The basic format echoed the Jacobin ‘pig’s meat’ anthology of the s, incorporating excerpts of important radical texts interspersed with essays, diatribes, and poetry, but the main difference between Linton and his precursors was the inclusion of a wood engraving on the front cover, a conscious echo of the burgeoning market in cheap illustrated journalism and fiction and a significant departure from the mainstream Chartist press. For Linton, the popular visual image was a major new site for ideological intervention. Unlike Charles Knight and other popular educators of the s who celebrated the apolitical benefits of the woodcut revolution,²⁵ Linton dedicated his periodical to the ‘struggles of the Unmonied in their pursuit of knowledge’ (). Linton associated visual education with radical self-improvement: ‘to accustom the eye to the study of beauty is one way, and no inconsiderable way, of ennobling and beautifying the mind . . . every illustration shall bear the impress of Beauty and convey some moral lesson’ (). The apparent overlap between these high-minded sentiments and those of his cultural rivals is deceptive, as Linton refused to separate beauty and morality from politics. He used the resources of the periodical format to textually subvert the type of antiquarian and picturesque images that littered the pages of ‘useful knowledge’ publications,²⁶ providing his Chartist readers with an instructive lesson in radical aesthetics. For Linton, medieval buildings and antiquities still carry a significant political charge. The tone of his analysis is established in the first issue of the National: the front page contains an engraving of Tintern Abbey, a ruin associated with both restorative Romantic sensibility and the legendary monastic charity and humanity so lauded by Cobbett, Pugin, and Carlyle. However, any reader who expected to find such sentiments in the pages of the journal was in for a surprise, as the scene is

²³ Crane, Decorative Illustration, . ²⁴ In  the periodical was published in one volume with continuous pagination. Page references are from this edition. ²⁵ See Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –, for a discussion of Knght’s picturesque illustrations. In , the year Bob Thin appeared, Knight published his own contribution to the medieval revival: Old England: A Pictorial Museum of Regal, Ecclesiastical, Baronial, Municipal, and Popular Antiquities,  vols (London: Charles Knight & Co., ). ²⁶ See Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), ch. .

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actually an illustration of a historical short story in which a rebellious Tintern monk heroically opposes the Norman yoke and declares ‘I have taught the equality of man’ ().²⁷ Audaciously and wittily, Linton converts a prime symbol of the medieval revival into a home for a John Ball lookalike. Similarly, a later issue ( April) debunks a picturesque view of Lowther castle in Westmorland by interjecting: ‘All very beautiful! But—what price is paid by the People to secure these superfluities to the noble proprietor?’ (). One final example is worth citing: the commentary on an engraving of Winchester Cathedral ( May) states that this was a church ‘of great note in the time of the Saxons’ which has since suffered a double fall, first into ‘Romish superstition’ and then into the modern system of ‘reformed clergy’ who are the ‘robbers of the aged and the destitute’. Linton concludes that churches have become ‘raree shows and places of exhibition’ for ‘bishops and murderers’, monuments and ‘royal wax-work’ (). These interventions are an early indication that Linton would make the myth of a fairer and more humane medieval society pay the ‘price’ of radical analysis. Unlike Cobbett, Linton’s medievalism had no place for institutional religion of any kind, and in the second part of Bob Thin religious buildings—though not quasi-religious sentiments— are significantly absent from his utopian vision of merry England. In another way, however, Linton elevated radical medievalism to new heights by projecting it into the idealized future, a key shift that anticipated Morris and other utopian writers later in the century.²⁸ Linton’s other periodical Odd Fellow established his literary and visual credentials as a political satirist, an experience that he would pour into the first part of Bob Thin. Co-edited with the veteran radical pressman Henry Hetherington (whose newspaper the Poor Man’s Guardian was the leading light of the ‘unstamped’ wars of the early s), Odd Fellow anticipated the more famous Punch (launched in ) in its use of large and small political cartoons combined with skits, sketches, waggish humour, and a variety of lighter periodical genres. In his memoirs, written towards the end of his life, Linton claimed to have known all the ‘galaxy’ of Punch artists,²⁹ and there are some strong iconographic affinities between the satirical capital letters used frequently in Punch and the dozens of grotesque, surreal, and comic figures that dance down the margins of Bob Thin.³⁰ Linton was able to fuse this satirical vocabulary with a deep knowledge of the much older craft of the woodcut, a tradition he celebrated in a

²⁷ See also an article in the  March issue which debunks parliamentary democracy by reviewing the progress of political rule in Britain from the Saxons to the present. ²⁸ In addition to Morris, it is also worth mentioning two lesser known utopian novels: Richard Jefferies, After London () and W. H. Hudson, A Crystal Age (), both of which feature medieval futures. ²⁹ W. J. Linton, Memories (London: Lawrence & Bullen, ), . ³⁰ Linton also seems to have drawn on a tradition of radical-satirical alphabet books: see e.g. Charles Jameson Grant, A Political Alphabet (London: Tho. Maclean, ). One of the first texts in which Linton recycled the vignettes from Bob Thin was Twenty Six Cuts at the Times Furnished by Bob Thin: Forming An Illustrated Alphabet for all those Little Politicians who have not yet Learned their Letters (London: James Watson, ).

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substantial study of the history of wood engraving.³¹ Hence the two parts of Bob Thin draw on different aspects of the illuminated medieval text that were widely admired at the time; heightened beauty and (particularly in relation to genres such as the bestiary) a vivid, even grotesque imagination.³² For Linton, the format and dynamic of these two aspects of the illuminated page emblematized the transformative powers of the radical imagination: in Part One of Bob Thin, the parade of theatricalized capital letters perform a fantasia of social and political evils, the Victorian equivalent of a medieval catalogue of sinful practices; in Part Two, the beautifying pastoral scenes and motifs deliver idealized promises of a better life, the rebirth of the lost knowable community, and political salvation. Linton was uniquely qualified to deliver this redemptive vision to an expanding, visually literate readership.³³ In  the engraving business he ran with his partner Orrin Smith secured a lucrative contract with the newly launched Illustrated London News, placing Linton at the forefront of the revolution in visual media. In its first issue, the new paper boasted that it had ‘converted blocks into wisdom, and given wings and spirit to ponderous and senseless wood’ ( May ). Behind the self-flattery and hyperbole, this manifesto contains an intriguing cluster of tropes: the alchemical, necromantic, and evangelical metaphors imply that illustration had the quasimiraculous power to animate both the printed word and the desensitized, ‘blockhead’ public. By enabling the reader to ‘see’ reality for the first time on a regular basis, the paper claimed to be advancing both democracy and modernity, but its mission statement also drew on an older, pre-Enlightenment reverence for the magical power of the image. The rage for illustration would soon be denounced by critics like Ruskin as a hallmark of debased popular literature and commodity fetishism, while in radical print culture a lingering iconoclastic distaste for visual pleasure meant that most Chartist periodicals remained unillustrated. But Linton saw things differently and it was during the time he was fully immersed in producing this new visual reality that he first hatched the idea for an illuminated poem that would give ‘wings and spirit to ponderous and senseless wood’. Linton’s ambition was to recreate the aura of a medieval mode of literary production inside the matrix of the Victorian illustrated periodical: this would achieve the goal of redistributing a radicalized version of high culture to a wide readership.³⁴ His opportunity came when he took over the editorship of the ailing Illuminated Magazine from Douglas Jerrold.

³¹ The Masters of Wood Engraving (New Haven: Printed for the Author, ). See part I in particular. ³² See H. Noel Humphreys, The Art of Illumination and Missal Painting (London: H. G. Bohn, ), –. ³³ As Patricia Anderson notes, the ‘hallmark of a transformed and expanded popular culture’ in the early Victorian period ‘was its increasingly pictorial character’: Printed Image, . See also Brian Maidment, Reading Popular Prints, –, nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ³⁴ Walter Crane also understood that a compromise had to be reached between imitating monastic literary composition and reaching an audience through the medium of print: ‘if beauty were the sole

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Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, title-page of the privately printed version, .

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Linton first conceived the idea of a long illustrated poem in  while he was supplying engraved images to the Illustrated London News. The scale of the project led him to recruit the talents of his friends Thomas Sibson (–), William Bell Scott (–), and Edward Duncan (–) as assistant illustrators.³⁵ This collaborative aspect of the venture, as announced on the title-page (Fig. .) creates an impression of a small-scale workshop of artistic production that reinforces the poem’s artisanal ethos and politics. Like other Chartist, radical and ‘social problem’ narratives from this period, the central tragedy of the story is the destruction of productive labour (personified by the male breadwinner) in the face of the inhumane forces of capitalism and unreformed politics. The decline into pauperdom was the ne plus ultra of workingclass experience, and by the mid-s the oxymoronically named workhouse had become the antithesis of civilized values in the popular imagination. In Past and Present (), for example, Carlyle laments that, though ‘England blooms’, there are two million paupers in workhouses: ‘There they sit, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantment . . . their hope of deliverance yet small . . . O, what a waste is there, of noble and thrice-noble national virtues’.³⁶ Linton’s unique contribution to the antiPoor Law campaign was that his poem would quite literally ‘illuminate’ the debate; its aesthetic qualities would showcase the artistic skills, creative energies, and visionary politics that were under threat from the modern state—indeed, the visual qualities of the poem are more original, impressive and significant than its textual component. The ideal platform for disseminating this unique intervention into the ‘condition of England’ question came when he took over the editorship of Douglas Jerrold’s aptly titled Illuminated Magazine in . This periodical was launched in  and took its mission of bringing art and enlightenment to the masses very seriously: It has been the wish of the proprietors of this work to speak to the MASSES of the people; and whilst sympathising with their deeper and sterner wants, to offer them those graces of art and literature which have too long been held the exclusive right of those of happier fortunes. (Preface to the first edition, May )³⁷

As its title indicates, the Illuminated Magazine placed visual imagery at the heart of its educative mission: object, we could not do better than follow the methods of the scribe, illuminator, and miniaturist of the Middle Ages. But the world clamours for many copies (at least in some cases), and the artist must make terms with the printing press if he desires to live’: Decorative Illustration, . Shortly after its appearance in the Illuminated Magazine, Bob Thin was published in two versions, a self-published format with full illustrations and a cheaper edition with fewer illustrations published by James Watson. ³⁵ There are no signatures for the vignettes in Part One, so I am inclined to attribute these to Linton. Bell Scott and Duncan signed a number of designs in Part Two though there is no trace of Sibson. ³⁶ Thomas Carlyle, Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), . ³⁷ Douglas Jerrold, the original editor of the Illuminated Magazine, believed that ‘The natural office of the Fine Arts is not merely to add to the pleasures of the opulent, but to diffuse enjoyment amidst the workers’: Douglas Jerrolds’s Shilling Magazine,  (): . See also Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold – (London: Duckworth, ), ch. .

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These ‘Illuminations’—for we use the word in its original, and not in its conventional sense—though colourless, will be so placed and scattered, that Literature may, it is hoped, reveal new graces by the pure light of Art. (Prospectus, April )³⁸

The emphasis on ‘the word in its original, and not in its conventional sense’ shows just how deeply the medieval revival had permeated popular print culture. Though sales of the magazine were falling, Linton leaped at the chance to reach a readership that extended beyond loyal Chartist readers. According to Brian Maidment, the Illuminated Magazine belonged to a new type of ‘journal of popular progress’. Occupying the liberal middle ground between full-blown Chartism and the reactionary press, and more staunchly critical of laissez-faire than their Whig ‘useful knowledge’ precursors of the s, these journals promoted educational and cultural ‘illumination’ as the most secure basis for a peaceful and successful transition to political reform. Though Linton’s ardent republicanism placed him on the left of the Chartist movement, in other respects he was a more pragmatic reformer and like many Chartist intellectuals he held a strong, post-Romantic belief that the creative imagination was a route to personal and collective emancipation.³⁹ He responded very positively to the Illuminated Magazine’s mission of democratizing art. His position can be summed up by a comment from his first co-editor, Henry Hetherington, ‘Which then, will ye choose? Knowledge, calculated to make you free, embellished with wood engravings; or nambypamby stuff published expressly to stultify the minds of the working people’.⁴⁰ Although Linton only managed to produce one volume of the periodical before it closed, he exploited its reputation for ‘startling vignettes’ and seized upon ‘a moment when wood engraving represented both a high level of achievement and an almost unlimited potential for further development’.⁴¹ The Life and Adventure of Bob Thin; or the Poorhouse Fugitive appeared in two instalments in the fifth and final volume of the Illuminated Magazine.⁴² As already noted, Part One, The Life and Adventure of Bob Thin is a tour de force of what George Jacob Holyoake called ‘Minstrelsy and Art’.⁴³ There are over eighty illuminated letters, usually seven to a page, and nearly all are distorted figures signifying a rich range of themes and satirical targets. The astonishingly ‘high level of achievement’ of the wood engraving spills from the page: considering the fact that each vignette was engraved on a woodblock only about one inch square, the intricacy and complexity of the designs is quite remarkable; as Walter Crane noted, Linton revived the spirit of the ‘Medieval ³⁸ Cited in Slater, Douglas Jerrold, . ³⁹ See Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ⁴⁰ The Poor Man’s Guardian,  Apr. . ⁴¹ Brian Maidment, ‘The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), –, . ⁴² Illuminated Magazine,   (): –, –. ⁴³ G. J. Holyoake, People’s Review (); cited in Smith, Radical Artisan,  n. .

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miniaturist’.⁴⁴ It is perhaps unsurprising that Linton preserved the blocks and reused them throughout the rest of his career.⁴⁵ The pictographic idiom is completely original, blending elements of older and newer visual sources: traditional allegorical and emblematic symbolism, the ‘minstrelsy’ of the bestiary, the muscular wit of caricature and radical satire, and the more genial humour of Punch. Like the vignettes, the text’s opening account of the origins of the Poor Laws wears its medievalism lightly, as if Linton had one eye on the pious pronouncements and polemics of Pugin and Carlyle (Past and Present appeared only two years before Bob Thin, and though Linton may have admired the quality of Pugin’s illustrations to Contrasts he would certainly not have agreed with Pugin’s zealous conclusions). Like both these writers, Linton uses the juxtapositional technique of contrasting the inhumane workhouse system with the communal virtues of the monasteries that were destroyed by the Reformation, but both the text and the images maintain a satirical distance from this core medievalist myth: Of late the Solons of the nation Out of their bag of legislation (The bag o’ the spider, not o’ the bee) Have spun a web, a twist of three, Of such a monstrous complication— Good meanings it is said pave hell: There’s not a doubt but they meant well— It threats the poor with worse starvation Than when bluff Harry kick’d the monks out.

The capital ‘T’ of ‘Than when’ is a an intriguing triple-bodied monster representing the three Poor Law commissioners (‘a twist of three’) in a wide-legged stance that clearly evokes famous portraits of Henry VIII (Fig. .); in other words, the new Poor Laws complete a historical loop in which modern state tyranny has succeeded its authoritarian Tudor precursor. To this extent the poem conforms to the medievalist critique of modern barbarity, but this is the limit of the convergence. In an earlier passage there is another reference to the ‘Sundry friars, out of whose thrift— / Rogues as they might be, ne’ertheless— / The poor had succour in distress’. This alludes to the medieval Church’s charitable role, but the brief concession is as far as the text’s sympathy for ‘Catholic times’ stretches: the illuminated ‘S’ of ‘Sundry’ is a snake-like letter formed out of a serpent gnawing at a strangely ethereal friar (Fig. .). Such imagery has a long pedigree stretching back to Reformation satire, though that does not mean that the poem is anti-Catholic. Indeed, Linton campaigned for Young Ireland, wrote regularly for its periodical the Nation, and published a collection of poems under the title Ireland for the Irish. It would be more accurate to describe the poem’s vision as

⁴⁴ Crane, Decorative Illustration, –. ⁴⁵ The sixty-three woodblocks are held in Yale University’s Arts Library.

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Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Henry VIII as the Poor Law commissioners, .

secular, anti-clerical, and against the political power of institutional religion, while still retaining a spiritualized humanism.⁴⁶ The popular appeal of radical medievalism is evident in the fact that Linton follows the burlesque of ‘bluff Harry’ with a skit on the Norman yoke: We’ve had our scions of misrule, Of the illegitimate Norman school, Who’ve laid our husbandman in bond— Like eels pent in shallow pond— Curfewing us, and then with ‘charters’ Just lighting some to adorn their garters.

The capital ‘L’ of ‘Like eels’ is one of the many wiry, elongated figures that litter the poem, in this instance in a kneeling and begging position to signify the calamity of vassalage, another antecedent for Victorian industrial slavery and pauperism. The reference to ‘charters’ alludes to both Paine and Blake, though by the s the word ⁴⁶ Linton was an active member of the  Chartist Convention that recommended the separation of Church and State.

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Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, ‘Sundry friars . . . ’, .

had been appropriated by Chartism, as any reader of the poem would know. The full significance of this radical vocabulary does not emerge until Part Two where we see a vision of the land reclaimed for the people. In Part One the tone only darkens gradually; initially, the poem plays with both the Saxonist and Tudor versions of England’s fall from grace, partly (we can surmise) to debunk the conservative politics of Carlyle and Pugin, and partly to maintain a healthy irreverence towards all regimes of power: Woe to the poor! Till glorious Bess (Who wink’d not, save at manliness) Swore by odd’s teeth, her father’s oath, (A practice to which she was not loath) That every man had a right to live, Even though his labour might not thrive.

The account of ‘royal Betty’s summer glory’ is told in a ‘laudatory paren / Thesis’, and just as the line break accentuates the deflation of royalist hagiography (‘Trusting to be excused our rudeness’), so the page design literally draws a line around this section of the text (Fig. .). The line also connects an elongated, acrobatic imp (whose horizontally outstretched legs form a base for the uppermost vignette of a pompous, nosein-air ‘Bess’) with a hybrid mermaid-Britannia figure flaunting an absurdly long tail (an echo of the Queen’s ridiculously elevated train in the upper illustration). Moreover, the lower end of this line is attached to another imp who is diving into the water over the mermaid’s tail. Allegorically, this could represent the expulsion of the evils of

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Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Queen Bess and the Poor Laws, .

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destitution, but this interpretation is undermined by two tiny details: the line looks as if it about to ensnare the trident-bearing Britannia; and the imp appears to be grasping ominously at the huge tray of food balanced on the head of the figure below it, a figure who represents the original ‘abundance’ of the state of nature (this theme finds its apotheosis in Part Two, but it is typical of the satirical logic of Part One that abundance takes the form of a subaltern). These interactions and collisions between the illuminated letters turn each page into a dynamic and complex performance of text and image, giving ‘wings and spirit to ponderous and senseless wood’. The subtlety, wit, and sophistication of the vignettes give the impression that each page was carefully designed in a manner reminiscent of a medieval manuscript. Linton and his collaborators used their considerable artistic talents to invoke what the Illuminated Magazine referred to as the ‘original’ spirit of illumination. This was a bold aspiration as the Victorian revival of interest in illumination was predominantly a backlash against the explosion of popular illustration. Pugin regarded ‘dry and mechanical’ modern engraving as ‘devoid of soul, sentiment and feeling’ and warned artists that it was only by ‘studying the zeal, talents, and feelings’ of the ‘wonderful’ fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that ‘art can be restored, or excellence regained’ (, ). According to J. W. Bradley in A Manual of Illumination on Paper and Vellum (), ‘The Art of Illumination is being steadily revived, and is much practised’; its virtues are ‘patience, thoughtfulness and delicacy’.⁴⁷ The implicit contrast here is with the immediacy, sensationalism, and ephemeral nature of popular print, a contrast drawn out much more pugnaciously by Ruskin. In his essay ‘Notes on the Present State of Engraving in England’ (), he declaimed that the ‘illustrative art industry of the modern press’ was ‘enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob’.⁴⁸ Linton could rise above such attacks as he also had very high artistic standards and was the first to disdain shoddy workmanship.⁴⁹ But like Morris and Crane, he saw the production of high-quality art as an emancipatory cultural and political force, the recovery of a lost creativity that was simultaneously nostalgic and utopian. There is, however, a contrast between the free play of the imagination in the vignettes and the increasing strictures imposed on the hapless hero in the textual narrative. Bob is indeed ‘thin’: his increasingly emaciated body signifies the inhumane Malthusian logic of the workhouse, a decline reflected in the preponderance of other

⁴⁷ J. W. Bradley, A Manual of Illumination on Paper and Vellum (London: Winsor & Newton, ), preface. See also Gerald Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –. ⁴⁸ John Ruskin, ‘Notes on the Present State of Engraving in England’ (); cited in Andrew King and John Plunkett (eds), Victorian Print Media: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, –. Coincidentally, Ruskin’s chosen example of this debasement was an illuminated letter T from a ‘vignette of Venice’ in the Cornhill Magazine for July . See also Peter W. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), . ⁴⁹ As Linton puts it in his book Wood-Engraving: A Manual of Instruction (London: George Bell & Sons, ), ‘Every line of an engraving ought to have meaning’ (; original emphasis).

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stick-like figures performing in the margins. But more disconcertingly for the reader, Bob’s narrative role is also quite sketchy and belated, as if his right to be considered as a fit subject for literature and art is also under duress. Unlike most literary representations of the working class at this time, Linton downplays realist, sentimental, and melodramatic discourses in favour of satirical banter and a faux-facetious tone, almost as if he is lulling the reader into a false sense of security by mimicking the antics of his closest rival, Punch (the poem’s comic subtitle, for example—‘A Political— Philosophical—Historical—Biographical—Anecdotal—Allegorical—Parenthetical— Pathetical—Prophetical—Poetical—Logical—Metrical—and Moral New Poor-Law Tale’—gives a misleading impression of the poem’s radical engagement). One vignette of Bob peering out from his cell shows clearly that the option of reportage was available to Linton (Fig. .), but he preferred to displace the imagery of the deformed and exploited class body onto his medievalized fantasia of satirically grotesque characters. Compare the previous realistic vignette to the bizarre design for Bob’s introduction into the poem: ‘Bob Thin, a weaver was by trade; An honest lad and most industrious’. The vignette shows a triple-faced demon using another, upside-down imp (evident from the forked tail) as a giant cotton bobbin—the latter is shaped to make the letter B (Fig. .). The reader’s expectation that this illuminated letter would show an image of Bob is completely shattered. Instead we are given a defamiliarized, witty travesty of the dignity of labour that puns on the hero’s first name rather than the more obviously symbolic surname: honesty and industry have little value in this inverted moral universe of exploitation. Linton is not yet ready to allow a glimpse of the lost world of creative labour and community values: the function of Part One is to transform a familiar critique of laissez-faire and the new Poor Laws into compelling and ‘illuminating’ new images. The ornamental capitals, entertaining and resourceful though they undoubtedly are, produce ugliness and distortion, not beauty—for the latter, the reader has to wait until Part Two. Yet the preponderance of ‘thin’ stick-figures is more than just a Malthusian foil to Bob’s full-bodied rebirth in Part Two. These scrawny, elasticated creatures perform like the poem’s mascots or genies, displaying the malleability and versatility of the illuminated letter, particularly in its satirical guise. The poem’s ‘wisdom’ derives from the dynamic interplay between the vignettes. As a final example of this, we can return to one page which centres on a skeletal pauper figure breaking stones while being beaten with a cat o’ nine tails from the anonymous hand of Power, a motif derived from emblem books and used frequently in caricatures (Fig. .). Above and below this symbol of injustice (who actually represents a capital E) are a rich variety of figures whose postures and antics perform a range of echoes, pairings, inversions, and contrasts: two tumblers doing headstands to make a W; an angel with outspread wings making a Y; a stick figure with grotesquely elongated legs (in this case shackled) making an M; an S made of a Samaritan apparently giving help (but possibly pointing to a workhouse); a B made up of another pairing of a pauper (who could be Bob) and a merchant who is cocooned in a bale spun by the starving worker; and finally a tiny group of displaced paupers on a journey to their native parish or ‘settlement’, surrounded by a garland-like

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

 

Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Bob in his workhouse cell, .

Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, the impish cotton bobbin, .

circular border of toadstools. The overall effect of the page is to provide an emblematic language for the hypocrisies and exploitative processes of Victorian capitalism, meshing victims and perpetrators into a web of socio-economic forces that ultimately determine whether the human body has substance and representation.

M E

.................................................................................................................................. Part Two of the poem, originally titled The Poorhouse Fugitive, is another totally unique document in Victorian literary history. Published almost fifty years before A Dream of John Ball () and News from Nowhere (), Part Two of Bob Thin

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

conspicuously anticipates the socialist medievalism of the fin de siècle, though we should not celebrate the poem only for being ahead of its time. Indeed, the real achievement of the text is its transformation of the determining cultural and political context of the s. Linton and his collaborators used their artistic skills to make the medieval critique of Victorian capitalism both politically attuned to Chartist concerns and a convincing aesthetic experience (‘true eye knowledge’ in Charles Knight’s phrase).⁵⁰ Having died in the workhouse, Bob Thin is reborn into a medievalized, socialist Paradise in which poverty and the class system no longer exist. The barefooted, smock-wearing community live in forested hamlets, indulge in traditional (bloodless) sports and pastimes such as wrestling and fencing and take leisurely communal picnics. The appeal of this pastoral fantasy is enhanced by the apparent absence of work, though it is clear from the beauty of the people and the luscious environment that the dignity of labour has been restored. The capitalist evils of ‘sordid Trade’ have been eradicated and a ‘mystery Of loveliness’ pervades the social fabric: beauty is now truth and truth beauty. The abundance of illumination is the ocular evidence that a reformed society is a thing of beauty, a fusion of ‘poetic vision and political practice’.⁵¹ The impish figures of Part One are replaced by luxuriant pastoral scenes that eventually burst out from the margins and flow through the pages, caressing and swirling around the text: in Carlyle’s terms, we see the ‘gigantic Life’ of the medieval community (–). The switch to naturalistic representation is less original than the visual antics of Part One, but the more relaxed visual mode is appropriate for a vision of a struggle-free, organic society. For H. Buxton Forman, this section of the poem was ‘set in a high key and full of freshness’.⁵² Some of the illustrations of the idealized medieval community are unlike anything in Pugin, Morris, or Crane. Edward Duncan’s depiction of the wooded ‘Place of Games’, for example, resembles a traditional picturesque landscape (Fig. .), and the effect of this verisimilitude is to make the utopian fantasy of these ‘Glorious creatures’ seem familiar and achievable. Another compelling example is William Bell Scott’s village scene which uses a diagonal orientation to integrate the community and the natural setting (Fig. .): Beautiful the village show’d, In the forest heart embower’d; Every cottage over-flower’d, Every cottage link’d by flowers To its neighbour; every dwelling— With its garden plot, for use . . .

⁵⁰ Cited in Anderson, Printed Image, . ⁵¹ In an  article on ‘Illustrative Art’, Linton rhapsodized about the virtuous power of the artist: ‘we believe that artists—as the priests of the Beautiful (which alone is the Humanizing, the Divine and the Enduring)—hold in their gift a redeeming and regenerating power greater than any other in the present condition of society’: Westminster Review,  (): –, –. ⁵² Cited in Lovett, ‘Creative Aspiration’, .

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

 

Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Edward Duncan, the ‘Place of Games’, .

Flowers are both the content and form of this vision, as to ‘link’ with ‘flowers’ is a primary technique of illumination.⁵³ This ‘over-flower’d’ scene, bursting with human and natural life, is the utopian answer to the Enclosure Acts and all the abandoned, depopulated hamlets and ruined ‘cots’ of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Cobbett, and Clare. Perhaps Bell Scott made an error when he inserted a fortress-like structure on a hill in the top right corner. This hint of an aristocracy is specifically ruled out by the text: the homes of the villagers are like ‘Palace-nests amid the trees’. So perhaps the castle is abandoned; kingcraft and priestcraft have withered away as the people repopulate the social and political landscape. This imagining of contented medieval swains may seem very remote from the pragmatic concerns of Chartists in the ‘hungry forties’, but the reference to each cottage having a ‘garden plot, for use’ signals that the poem is permeated by the radical discourse of land reform. It was precisely in the ‘doldrums’ period of the mid-s that the Chartist movement developed its Land Plan, a scheme to resettle slumdwelling urban workers in purpose-built rural communities.⁵⁴ Operating like a ⁵³ As Crane notes, almost any medieval illuminated psalter ‘will furnish not only lovely examples of floral decoration in borders and initials of endless fertility of invention, but also give us pictures of the life and manners of the times’: Decorative Illustration, . ⁵⁴ The word ‘doldrums’ is used by Malcolm Chase to describe the lull in revolutionary Chartist activity in the mid-s: see Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), ch. .

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 

Figure .. William James Linton, Bob Thin, William Bell Scott, a village scene, .



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

 

lottery, thousands of Chartists subscribed to a fund which paid for the building of bungalow-style cottages (most of which survive to the present day), each of which had a large garden for growing produce. Though the scheme floundered in the early s for legal reasons, it was idealized in Chartist publicity as a utopian return to the land. The Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor described the new ‘paradise’ in terms very similar to the scenes of rebirth in Bob Thin: ‘My pale face is turned into a good, sound, sun-burnt complexion . . . when I look out of my window at the prospect, I feel myself a giant’.⁵⁵ As Malcolm Chase has shown, the Land Plan derived from a longer radical tradition of the ‘People’s Farm’, a vision of land repossession based on the biblical jubilee.⁵⁶ Agrarian radicalism flourished during revolutionary periods, notably the English Civil War (the Diggers) and the Romantic period (Paine’s Agrarian Justice and Thomas Spence’s vision of a republic of autonomous parish democracies). By the time of the Chartist Land Plan, therefore, floriculture had become radicalized. The benefits of reconnecting the people with nature were eulogized by Cobbett: ‘it is the gardens of the labourers that are the great ornament of the country . . . a thing so beautiful, so interesting, of such incalculable good in the way of moral influence, as well as in that of promoting health’.⁵⁷ Bob Thin’s garden plot (pun intended) is the apotheosis of these agrarian aspirations, a morale-boosting vision of pastoral regeneration. The villagers in Bell Scott’s scene are shown departing for a festival, . . . to commemorate A great deliverance,—from all The ancient tyrannies of Wrong.

The trope of salvation is both quasi-religious and revolutionary, a distillation of the discourses of dissenting radicalism that nourished working-class politics in the period of its ‘making’. The agency behind the ‘deliverance’ is not identified—it would be several decades before Morris replotted the socialist garden with class struggle and civil war—but the vagueness enhances the utopian flavour of the fantasy: the word ‘ancient’

⁵⁵ Cited in Chase, Chartism, ; see also –. See Alice Mary Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, ) for a detailed account of the scheme. For literary propaganda see the short story ‘The Charter and the Land’ (), first published in the Chartist periodical The Labourer. When a deprived Manchester family arrive at O’Connorville, the first Chartist settlement to open, they are greeted by ‘many new comrades upon the same mission to the Holy Land’: Ian Haywood (ed.), The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), . ⁵⁶ Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). See also Jeremy Burchardt, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change since  (London: I. B. Tauris, ), ch. . ⁵⁷ William Cobbett, ‘Advice to the Learners of Grammar’, in A Spelling Book (n.p., ), . See also John Saunders, ‘Some “Points” for a New “People’s Charter” ’, Illuminated Magazine,  (): –. Saunders states ‘There is, perhaps, no other taste or pursuit that could be tended with so much advantage among the poor of England, as that of floriculture’ (–).

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

refers equally to customary abuses (including the Norman yoke) and to the conflicts of the s viewed from the imaginary, medievalized future. Just as Bob Thin is restored to grace at the end of the poem, it is to be hoped that Linton’s neglected masterpiece can now assume its rightful place in both the Chartist literary pantheon and in the annals of Victorian medievalism.

S  Anderson, Patricia, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Bonnett, Alastair, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, ). Boos, Florence S., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, ). Burchardt, Jeremy, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change since  (London: I. B. Tauris, ). Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). Chase, Malcolm, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Chase, Malcolm, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Curtis, Gerald, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Haywood, Ian (ed.), The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Haywood, Ian (ed.), Chartist Fiction: Thomas Doubleday, The Political Pilgrim’s Progress Thomas Martin Wheeler, Sunshine and Shadow (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Holloway, Lorretta M., and Jennifer Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ). Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Lovett, Alastair, ‘Creative Aspiration and Public Discourse: The Prose, Verse and Graphic Images of William James Linton (–)’, Ph.D. thesis (Durham, ). Maidment, Brian, Reading Popular Prints, –, nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Morris, Kevin, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, ). Sanders, Mike, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Simmons, Clare A., Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ). Sinnema, Peter W., Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Smith, F. B., Radical Artisan: William James Linton – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

   Materialist Medievalism ......................................................................................................................

 

O past and present have identified what the architectural historian J. Mourdant Crook terms a ‘geological fissure’ running through Victorian society, dividing medievalists from their rationalizing, modernizing, materialist adversaries.¹ In some senses this depiction is right, for in terms of aesthetics, medievalists pitted themselves against neoclassicists, and on political and social questions, they were often set against a diverse but allied group of political economists, liberals, medical materialists, and utilitarians. We certainly see this in many chapters in this Handbook, but other chapters, including those by Ian Haywood and Dominic Janes, have singled out exceptions to the standard view of the perceived fissure in the Victorian cultural landscape. In addition, this fissure has seemed widest on issues about the body, which have been commonly understood as concerns for medical materialists and utilitarians, but rarely medievalists. This perception is reflected in the fact that the body only features occasionally in scholarship on Victorian medievalism. One such notable exception (others will be addressed later) is John Ulrich’s work on labour and the body in the medievalist writing of William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and Isaac Disraeli.² I aim to expand this argument, to make the claim that medievalists were deeply invested in issues of health and death, as well as anatomy and other branches of medicine. Moreover, medievalists often evoked the past in support of views about the ethics and care of the body that were surprisingly comparable to those held by materialists and utilitarians. ¹ This is an echo of the famous  quote by Lord Acton, that the Classical and the Gothic were the ‘two great principles that divide the world’ and that all ‘political as well as religious questions’ could be reduced to that ‘great dualism’. Acton’s comment is from an unpublished draft, quoted in Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . J. Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (London: Francis Lincoln, ), . Also, see ‘Introduction’ to this volume, p. . ² John Ulrich, Signs of their Times: History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, ), .

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

In fact, there is a strain of thought, and an architectural aesthetics that runs through Victorian culture, which could be called ‘materialist medievalism’. I argue that the rather impressionistic view of a bifurcated Victorian society has obscured how often opinions between seemingly incompatible thinkers overlapped on aesthetic, philosophical, and ‘condition of England’ questions that focused on the body. It is my hope that this reconsideration will help us better understand the Victorian foundations of our modern concerns with surveillance, medical research on human subjects, health and well-being in urban environments, and memorialization and care of the dead.

D, ,  

.................................................................................................................................. Scholars often identify Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian design, the panopticon, as the architectural embodiment of the irreconcilable differences between medievalists and utilitarians (Fig. .). The clean, precise symmetry of Bentham’s blueprint for workhouses, jails, and other modern institutions seems clearly anathema to the medievalist mindset and worlds away from the soaring spaces and ornate details of ‘barbarous’ cathedrals that were born of faith, feudalism, and deep feeling.³ Just as often, scholars refer to A. W. N. Pugin’s influential design treatise Contrasts () or Thomas Carlyle’s juxtaposition of medieval and modern life in Past and Present () as unambiguous statements of anti-utilitarianism. Indeed, Carlyle describes modern life as the experience of being ‘encased’ in a single transparent ‘ice-palace’, from which one could only communicate via ‘signals and gesticulations’ to ‘visible, but forever unattainable’ neighbours.⁴ Scholars have read this representation of modern alienation along with Carlyle’s invocation of chivalry as a direct reaction against Bentham’s utilitarianism, so that Carlyle’s ‘opposition to Bentham’s social theory is as pervasive as it is legendary’.⁵ Michel Foucault’s famous dissection of Bentham’s architectural model in Discipline and Punish (trans. ) incidentally reinforced the opposition between medievalist Carlyle and utilitarian Bentham. As we know, Foucault characterized the panopticon as a paradigm of modern power: it is a mechanism that uses surveillance to encourage self-discipline and self-regulation, thereby rendering power subtle, diffuse, and multidirectional.⁶ Utilitarianism is portrayed as something of a dangerous political philosophy, which seeks to discipline, normalize, and make bodies productive and docile. ³ Including Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –; Tristram Hunt, ‘Pugin versus the Panopticon’, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), –. ⁴ Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (), ed. Chris Vanden Bossche (Berkeley, CA: University of California ), . ⁵ Ulrich, Signs, . Catherine Gallagher, for instance, describes Carlyle as ‘one of the most consistent and effective anti-Benthamites of the early Victorian period’ in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), . ⁶ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,  []).

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

 

Figure .. Willey Reveley, Elevation, Section and Plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary, , in The Works of Jeremy Bentham,  vols, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: W. Tait, ), iv, postscript ii.

Post-Foucault, the panopticon has come to epitomize disciplinary society, while it has become commonplace to characterize Bentham as a Dickensian villain or as a nefarious ‘forerunner of Big Brother’.⁷ Kathleen Blake makes the case that because ‘Foucault’s Panopticon is better known than Bentham’s, the intellectual affinities between ⁷ Anne Brunon-Ernst, ‘Introduction’, in Brunon-Ernst (ed.), Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon (Farnham: Ashgate, ), –, . For these types of characterizations, see for instance Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber, ); Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham’, in Victorian Minds (New York: Knopf, ); Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company: Jeremy Bentham’s Silent Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ).

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  

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Bentham and his ostensible opponents have been obscured.⁸ There is a tradition in literary criticism, from F. R. Leavis forward, of setting Bentham, with his ‘crude’ ideas and his ‘nightmare of a penal institution’, as the arch-enemy of Dickens, Carlyle, and Ruskin.⁹ ‘So hard and carceral has panopticism come to seem via Foucault’ and ‘so dogmatic has panopticism come to seem’, Blake argues, that we have forgotten its foundational aims and obscured ‘its tie to critical thinking and freedom of thought’.¹⁰ Other critics have, in different ways, urged more careful reading of the shared socioeconomic principles between Bentham and Victorian novelists. Regenia Gagnier and Catherine Gallagher have excavated the nuances of Bentham’s theories (although Gallagher reads Thomas Carlyle as a consistent critic of Benthamite political economy), while Lauren Goodlad has challenged our fixation with the panopticon, as it has blinkered our understanding of history.¹¹ In addition, members of the Bentham Project at University College London and the Centre Bentham at Paris Ouest-Nanterre University have combined forces to redress misconceptions about Benthamite utilitarianism and the history of its reception. My intention is to build on these reassessments, and specifically, to challenge the view that the supposedly ultra-rational, disciplinary panopticon has nothing in common with the paternal, cooperative vision of medievalists (whether or not they self-identified as anti-Benthamite). In fact, there are surprising connections between Carlyle and Bentham, as well as, more surprisingly, Carlyle and Foucault. Carlyle’s description of modern life in Victorian England, in which the self-disciplining individual finds him or herself ‘alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’, anticipates Foucault’s description of modernity. As Foucault will, Carlyle uses an architectural image—a transparent ice-palace—to capture the way solitary citizens see each other but never connect. The ice-palace is as much about heralding an age of transparency as is Foucault’s conceptualization of the panopticon’s high central tower and surrounding fan of peripheral cells.¹² Yet, it could be argued that the condition of society, as described by Carlyle and Foucault, is precisely that which Bentham sought to counter. His notes on everyday life

⁸ Kathleen Blake, Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; See also David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); James G. Nelson, ‘The Victorian Social Problem Novel’, in W. Baker and K. Womack (eds), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Westport, CT: Greenwood, ), –. ⁹ Blake, Pleasures, . ¹⁰ Blake, Pleasures, . Some time ago, Raymond Williams also contended that scholars have a confused idea of utilitarianism and pointed out that Dickens and Bentham shared similar views on the sources of happiness and pleasure; ‘Dickens and Social Ideas’, in M. Slater (ed.), Dickens  (London: Chapman & Hall, ). ¹¹ Gallagher, The Body Economic; Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ); Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). ¹² Foucault, Birth, .

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in the panopticon, which covered gardening, town-planning, recipes, the use of excreta for compost, and even the design of buildings in the Gothic style, are a mix of fantasy and practicality, spectacularity and cloistered security, utopian vision and rational science. As such, Janet Semple argues, Bentham’s Panopticon has roots ‘in the English utopian tradition and in the Arcadian romance of the pastoral idyll’ (). This sounds very much like the medievalist project of William Cobbett, as well as the utopian model cities of Robert Owen and J. S. Buckingham. It throws into question, then, H. L. A. Hart’s characterization of Bentham as a ‘humdrum rationalist’ who ‘envisaged no millennium and no utopia’.¹³ Further, medievalist architectural projects that were built, or designed to be built in the Gothic style, could also be described as disciplinary. As Semple reminds us, ‘regimentation, conformity and compulsion are the very essence of ideal communities’, and this is the case, too, with modern plans for neo-feudalist communities that enshrined the principles of the Middle Ages (). With respect to managing bodies in communities, Victorian medievalists who have so often been characterized as nostalgic and anti-rationalist had more in common with Benthamite utilitarianists than has been typically assumed. In addition, John Ulrich argues convincingly that Bentham and Carlyle are both motivated by ‘ideologically “humanist” intentions’. Their respective social proposals may seem highly oppositional, as does their understanding of human motivations, but they promote similarly disciplinary systems.¹⁴ In Past and Present, for instance, Carlyle envisions traditional forms of power in a modern guise, particularly in his outline of the way bodies should be kept at their labours under the watchful eye of new industrial leaders. Modelled on the feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the modern captain of industry metes out rewards and punishments in traditional ways, but also encourages productivity through modern forms of internalized discipline. Indeed, this is one reason why chivalry is so very appealing for Carlyle. As a medieval cultural institution, chivalry had begun life as an externally administered set of laws that demanded ‘subjection to rule’, but over time, chivalric values had become ‘universally inculcated’ and adapted as ‘a habit and a social duty’.¹⁵ Chivalry was fashioned into a distinctly modern convention, with markedly modern ends: to have individual behaviour modified through persistent, subtle forms of self-discipline. Carlyle’s hope, as he describes it in Past and Present, was that chivalric customs would be replicated in the modern industrial world to become ‘chivalry of work’: duty and obligation would become implanted in the soul of each worker. Ulrich reads this aim as a reproduction of ‘the very machinations of internalized surveillance’ that were enshrined in the panopticon.¹⁶ ¹³ H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; also qtd in Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ¹⁴ Ulrich, Signs, . ¹⁵ Thomas Carlyle, Carlyle’s Unfinished History of German Literature, ed. H. Shine (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, ), . Carlyle wrote this over a decade before the publication of Past and Present. ¹⁶ Ulrich, Signs, .

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Chivalry and panopticism produce the healthy, dedicated, productive minds and bodies necessary for a well-functioning labour force. Carlyle adopts corporeal metaphors to capture the ways that customs affect body, mind, and soul. Customs and habits, which Carlyle terms ‘formulas’, become part of ‘the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man’s life’; like the physical body, customs could ‘have vitality’ as they had in feudal communities, or they could have a deadening effect, as they had come to do in industrialized society.¹⁷ Negative or ‘dead’ formulas, which restrict free thought, dampen the fires of invention, and constrict the body, have the effect of calcifying flesh. Like ‘foam’ they harden ‘into oyster-shell’, Carlyle writes, and like skin that is all ‘leather and callosity’, they grow ‘thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; till no heart any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous, calcified’.¹⁸ A glance along any industrialized city street on any given day would prove that this was indeed the case, for modern bodies had become ‘fixed and hardened . . . irretrievably shaped and kneaded’ and ‘baked’ into a ‘social form’.¹⁹ The businessman’s menacing eyes were a result of commercial competition, while the uncertain eyes, hanging lips, and ‘marred visage’ of the fatigued factory worker spoke volumes about his brutalization at the hands of mechanized industry.²⁰ The emphasis on the body is worth noting here, for it indicates how insidiously immaterial formulas shape the subject, even penetrating the skin. Despite his utilitarian principles, William Godwin would seem as unlikely a bedfellow of Bentham as Carlyle. Godwin may share with Bentham an unflinching commitment to impartiality, rationality, and utility, but he deplored what he termed ‘fabulous and imaginary restraints’ as a means of controlling populations, whether that was by religious laws, customs, or formulas.²¹ In an early nineteenth-century unpublished essay ‘On Religion’, Godwin identified the greatest enemy to happiness and progress as ‘a tyrant acquainted with all our most secret motions, and sits like Jeremy Bentham, perched on top of his Panopticon, to spy into our weaknesses’.²² It is more than suggestive that Bentham and the panopticon appear in an argument against the use of an all-seeing, fear-inspiring God to control populations. Religious rituals and laws brought an authoritative God into the very souls of people, compelling them to curb their deeds and thoughts. Bentham had replaced God with a light that shone from a tower onto the bodies and into the minds of each inhabitant. As God was invisible but still powerful, so was the invisible or absent warden; as the faithful constantly felt the eyes of God upon them, so citizens were under the multi-directional gaze of a subtle authority. They governed themselves accordingly. Godwin’s view of panopticism is comparable to Carlyle’s idea of negative formulas: both produced calcified bodies, hearts, and minds.

¹⁷ Carlyle, Past and Present, , . ¹⁸ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ¹⁹ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ²⁰ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ²¹ William Godwin, ‘On Religion’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin,  vols, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, ), vii. –, . ²² Godwin, ‘On Religion’, .

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Still, the philosophical relationship between Godwin and Bentham was much more complicated, as was that between the utilitarian Godwin and the medievalist Carlyle. This is evident, for instance, in Godwin’s  novel Caleb Williams. In his dissection of a moment of transition from traditional forms of power to diffuse forms of coercion, Godwin anticipates Carlyle (and in some respects, Foucault). The novel’s aristocratwith-a-secret, Falkland, has an eye that ‘penetrate[s] every concealment’ and surveys ‘every article’ of his servant Caleb’s ‘conduct’ and even his ‘gestures’.²³ This makes him ‘a copy of what monarchs are’; in other words, he is a traditional tyrant. Yet, modern disciplinary power also operates through Falkland, so that along with his nemesis Caleb, he discovers ‘how many links’ (or customs) bind body and mind.²⁴ Like Carlyle, Godwin uses a purposeful metaphor that places the body at the centre of a ‘monstrous’ struggle between independence and the customary demands of social membership. The individual, Godwin writes, is more like one of ‘those twin-births, that have two heads indeed, and four hands; but if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to miserable and lingering destruction’.²⁵ Social belonging requires a docile body and a malleable mind; for we might say, following Carlyle, that the individual who refuses to subscribe to certain formulas is banished to a transparent cell in an ice-palace. Although the supremely confident and autonomous figure for much of the novel, in the end Falkland’s own body ultimately proves docile, so that: His visage was haggard, emaciated, and fleshless. His complexion was a dun and tarnished red . . . and suggested the idea of its being burnt and parched by eternal fire that burned within him. His eyes were red, quick, wandering, full of suspicion and rage . . . His whole figure was thin to a degree that suggested the idea rather of a skeleton than a person actually alive.²⁶

As formulas inscribe themselves upon Falkland’s body, the usual markers of individual identity become obliterated, so that he appears ‘ghost-like’. At the same time, he is a ‘machine’ that is ‘irresistibly compelled’ by ‘circumstances’ to become calcified and fleshless.²⁷ But we seem a way off from medievalism here. How does medievalism figure in Godwin’s portrayal of discipline and punishment? As in Carlyle’s writing, the codes of chivalry are first a means of external and then internal discipline in Caleb Williams, and the body attests to this. Falkland is an antiquarian who imbibes ‘the love of chivalry and romance’ from Italian poetry, from Charlemagne and Arthur, but he then becomes ‘too deeply pervaded’ with the codes of ‘chivalry’ to let a cool, rational head prevail.²⁸

²³ William Godwin, Caleb Williams (), ed. David McCracken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²⁴ Godwin, Caleb, , . ²⁵ Godwin, Caleb, . ²⁶ Godwin, Caleb, –. ²⁷ Godwin, Caleb, . ²⁸ Godwin, Caleb, .

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In the end, he grows into a tyrant who thinks nothing of getting medieval on those he perceives to have slighted him. Godwin’s yoking of medievalism with tyranny may seem to conflict with Carlyle’s promotion of internalized chivalric values as a positive customary form of social discipline. Moreover, Godwin’s negative portrayal of feudal tyranny seems in keeping with the ultra-rationalist, anti-feudal, utilitarian views he espoused in the s, (before his  Life of Geoffrey Chaucer—which celebrates the ‘modes and prejudices of chivalry’—seemed to indicate an about-face).²⁹ Yet we should not miss the consistency of Godwin’s views, nor misunderstand his representation of medievalism in Caleb Williams. For it is not that he targets ‘the laws of knight errantry’ per se in the novel, but rather that he takes aim at the disciplinary power of long-standing codes and beliefs in general. It is Falkland’s ‘invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance’— not the romances themselves—that takes ‘possession’ of his ‘soul’ and damages his ‘external appearance’ and ‘health’.³⁰ That the danger lies in Falkland’s attachment to, and his possession by, a set of customs recalls Carlyle’s condemnation of formulas that calcify body and mind. I hope to have demonstrated in this section, on the discipline of bodies and the customs of chivalry, that the relationships between Victorian medievalists and utilitarians were much more tensile than is typically assumed. In the following sections, I examine how the same is true of medievalists and medical materialists. As we will see, medieval revivalism was implicated in a cluster of related issues, including the medical uses of bodies, burial practices, and memorialization.

T    : ,  ,  

.................................................................................................................................. Bentham, Carlyle, Godwin, and Pugin all subscribed to the now-conventional idea that environment profoundly affects people’s behaviours and states of mind, as well as their bodies. It is true that they disagreed over some of the finer points of this environmentalism (according to Carlyle, Bentham overemphasized the power of ‘external circumstances’ to shape human happiness).³¹ Generally though, on this tenet, utilitarians, materialists, and medievalists shared common ground, from which grew shared social, cultural, and medical ideas about the body, its roles, and uses. This foundational principle about how buildings shape individuals underpins Pugin’s influential architectural treatise Contrasts (), and it is one of the things ²⁹ William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, nd ed,  vols (London: R. Phillips, ); i.; after its publication, nineteenth-century observers moved Godwin from the radical materialist camp to the conservative one, aligning him with his old political enemy, the champion of modern chivalry, Edmund Burke. ³⁰ Godwin, Caleb, ; emphasis mine. ³¹ Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review  (): –, .

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that motivates his great ambition to revive Gothic architecture and design. We don’t often associate Pugin with concerns of the body, but he makes important links between design and health and well-being.³² In his correspondence, for example, he proposed that architecture could cure illness, nervous complaints, and digestive ailments. A fever or high pulse could be alleviated with a walk in the cloisters at Salisbury, Norwich, or Winchester Cathedrals; if a stomach was ‘overcharged with bile’, a look at the destructive architectural alterations of the so-called architectural improver James Wyatt would incite the patient to ‘discharge’ his stomach.³³ Playfully ironic these comments may be, but the principle is not. There is no doubt that Pugin deplored the panopticon, viewing it as a design that devalued the human body and the individual. Scholars have thoroughly mined his illustration of contrasting medieval and modern poorhouses from Contrasts, so I will focus only on the specific issue of medical materialism, which is raised in two of the thumbnail images (Fig. .).³⁴ In the ‘Modern Poor House’, utilitarian design is linked to medical science, which devalued and commodified the bodies of the poor. One thumbnail image portrays bodies as ‘material for dissection’, traded between anatomists and ‘resurrectionists’ (body snatchers) or ‘burkers’ (those who murdered and then sold pauper bodies to anatomists). This image implicitly targets the Anatomy Act (), which was intended to curb the illegal trade in bodies by providing anatomists with the unclaimed corpses of those who died in workhouses, hospitals, or jails. In the contrasting thumbnail beneath the ‘Antient Poor House’, Pugin portrays noble, ritualistic burial, as performed in the monastic Middle Ages. Here, human dignity is extended across class divisions and beyond life, so there were no ‘unclaimable’ bodies. It is understandable that, on the issue of dissection, scholars would identify a rather gaping chasm between a paternalist medievalist view like Pugin’s and the medical materialism of Benthamite liberals who framed the Anatomy Act and lobbied for its passage into law in the s. Indeed, Pugin’s illustrations clearly show how medievalism was deployed against medical materialism. Some scholars have also taken sides on the issue, by praising paternalist medievalists for ensuring medical ambitions be tempered by ethics, and for honourably protecting human dignity against the pitiless rationality of liberals and utilitarians. Tim Marshall pronounces rather dramatically that, with the ratifying of the Anatomy Act, ‘the monstrous face of the Utilitarian ³² A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts (Printed for the author, ); a critical exception is Martin Bressani and Cameron Macdonell, ‘Remedies External and Visible: Pugin’s Health and Pugin’s Gothic’, True Principles, / (Winter –): –. ³³ A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Letter to Edward Willson’,  Feb. , The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, –,  vols, ed. Margaret Belcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), i, . See Bressani and Macdonell for more on this passage and how themes around the body, illness, and recovery shaped Pugin’s work. ³⁴ See, for instance, Corinna Wagner, ‘ “Standing Proof of the Degeneracy of Modern Times”: Architecture, Society and the Medievalist Designs of A. W. N. Pugin’, in L. Holloway and J. Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances and Gothic Thrillers: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), –; Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, ) and John M. Ganim, ‘Medievalism and Architecture’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World (London: Routledge, ), –.

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Figure .. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, Contrasts,  (nd ed).

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culture of mid-Victorian England was born’, and taking a personal tone, characterizes Bentham as a hypocritical and egotistical ‘old man’.³⁵ Similarly, in her classic study, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (), Ruth Richardson applauds the ‘old paternalists’, including the medievalist anti-Poor Law, anti-Malthusian MP William Cobbett, for their stand against cold-hearted utilitarian parliamentarians and medical materialists. Richardson identifies troubling ‘affinities’ between those on the dark side of the divide: Malthusian political economists and their ultra-rational approach to the problems of poverty and population; the medical materialists and their Anatomy Act; the Whig-Benthamites and their Poor Laws (which brought the issue of poverty under a centralized system of welfare); and early twentieth-century extreme right-wing politicians with ‘eugenicist ideas’. She argues that English workhouses, built under the aegis of poor relief, ‘prefigure some of the functions ascribed to the Nazi camps’.³⁶ Victorian overseers of workhouses who had released paupers’ corpses for dissection shared ‘an attitude of mind’ with ‘those who built gas ovens for Jews’: both groups, she writes, ‘smugly and routinely’ defined other human beings ‘as non- or sub-human’.³⁷ To be sure, this line of argumentation is only one part of Richardson’s invaluable study of the history of the Anatomy Act. I focus, though, on how these characterizations speak to a wider and often unchallenged tendency to see an unbridgeable geological fissure in Victorian political thought. In this case, medievalists and paternalists are rightly portrayed as anything but nostalgic and escapist (as they have so often been, wrongly, characterized). Yet, this is at the expense of utilitarians who are caricatured as Dickensian villains, or worse, as inhumane exterminators of the vulnerable. Debates about dissection overlap with questions about the care of the dead and burial practices. In fact, Richardson ascribes the rise or resurrection of working-class death culture, with its showy and expensive burials, to the Anatomy Act debates.³⁸ According to Richardson, middle-class utilitarian social reformers like Edwin Chadwick failed to recognize that showy funerals were a symbolic means of redressing the indignities done to the bodies of poorer citizens in dissecting rooms and in pauper’s burial grounds. The argument that, in contrast to paternal medievalists, utilitarian reformers did not understand the meanings or import behind working-class customs surrounding death has been corroborated by other critics and historians. David Collings contends that the ‘secularizing project’ of figures like Bentham and Chadwick, as he describes it, ‘encountered the somewhat alien logic of symbolic exchange’ that occurred ‘between the living and the dead’ in working-class culture.³⁹ In some ways, ³⁵ Tim Marshall, ‘Frankenstein and the  Anatomy Act’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, ), –; Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), . ³⁶ Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), . ³⁷ Richardson, Death, –. ³⁸ Richardson, Death, –. ³⁹ David Collings, ‘Bentham’s Auto-Icon: Utilitarianism and the Evisceration of the Common Body’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, / (): –, .

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scholarly commentary reflects Carlyle’s own critique of Bentham. In an  letter to the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Carlyle wrote that Bentham’s ‘fault is that he can affirm nothing, except that money is pleasant in the purse and food in the stomach, and that by this simplest of all Beliefs he can reorganize Society’.⁴⁰ In other words, Bentham did not understand the motivational power of intangible emotions—even though biologically based—such as shame and impotence, pride and self-respect. Still, these types of characterizations obscure how reasonable and compassionate were utilitarian criticisms of burial customs; moreover, as we will see, utilitarian plans for new, ethical commemorative practices accorded in many ways with those promoted by medievalists. In particular, social reformers criticized the often fraudulent business practices of burial clubs: to ensure that they would receive a funeral with some pomp, even very poor families paid funds into burial societies, with the idea that, upon their deaths, those ‘friendly’ societies would pay out for as elaborate a funeral as possible. In The Practice of Internment in Towns (), Edwin Chadwick estimated that £–m was held in burial clubs, the proprietors of which exploited the most vulnerable. This sum constituted a substantial portion of working-class income that was used neither for ‘relief in sickness, nor for . . . education’.⁴¹ Chadwick observed that working-class families were willing to pay often exorbitant fees to mercenary funeral directors because they feared social recriminations if they did not demonstrate ‘proper respect to the deceased’.⁴² It could be said that burial societies were the institutional manifestation of calcifying customs or formulas. Working-class death culture prevented families from improving themselves and barred them from reaping the fruits of their labours. Bentham described this in utilitarian terms as an eternal deferral of pleasure. Those who paid in, week after week and year after year, only suffered pain for a pleasure they would never experience.⁴³ There were points of agreement on this issue between the utilitarian Chadwick and the medievalist Carlyle. They both contended that burial societies destroyed the good customs that held society together, thereby creating a social atmosphere where neighbour violated neighbour, or worse, where a parent committed a crime against a child that seemed, in the Victorian mindset, to defy nature. This issue, brought before the public eye by a particularly notorious case, was significant enough for Carlyle to raise in the first pages of Past and Present. The Stockport child murder case captured all that was wrong with a system that encouraged greed, preyed on fear, excused irrationality, and turned desperate individuals into criminals. In , an Irish couple living in Stockport, Robert and Anne Sandys, were found guilty of the murder of two of their ⁴⁰ Thomas Carlyle to Macvey Napier,  Jan. , Letters, v; The Carlyle Letters Online https:// carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume//lt--TC-MN-?term=Denyer. ⁴¹ Edwin Chadwick, A Special Report on the Practice of Internment in Towns (Philadelphia: C. Sherman,  []), . ⁴² Edwin Chadwick, A Supplementary Report on the . . . Practice of Interment in Towns (London, ), . ⁴³ Jeremy Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon: Or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’ (), in Bentham’s Auto-Icon and Related Writings, ed. James Crimmins (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, ), .

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daughters and the attempted murder of another in an attempt to cash in on burial money (£ s to be exact). Carlyle and Chadwick may have disagreed on the finer points of how to address this type of crime,⁴⁴ but they did agree that social and economic conditions had given rise to customs that had profoundly harmed communities and individuals. It was all the more troubling that a brother and sister-in-law (George and Honora Sandys) had been charged with committing the same crime in the house next door, for it demonstrated that despair and transgression were contagious. Both Chadwick and Carlyle envisioned an epidemic of criminal degeneration that began in one home and spread to the next—a vision that was supported by first-hand accounts. Chadwick recounted how one Manchester minister who worked with the poor was ‘shocked by a common phrase amongst women of the lowest class—“Aye, aye, that child will not live; it is in the burial club.”’⁴⁵ Carlyle imagined how the spectre of murder for profit rose in the minds of desperate men and women: ‘It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done, “And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?”’⁴⁶ This crime, which would have been supposedly unimaginable in the medieval communities portrayed by Pugin or described by Carlyle, revealed that ‘the working body of this rich English Nation’ now suffered from ‘chronic gangrene’.⁴⁷ But utilitarian reformers also took inspiration from the Middle Ages in their attempts to halt that gangrene. In his report on internment practices, Chadwick turned to medieval craftsmen to devise alternative ways of dealing with the dead. As the stonemasons of old had given ‘voice’ to ‘the language of the senseless stone’, so could moderns create an architecturally meaningful national cemetery where all bodies received the same respectful burial.⁴⁸ Taking his cue from ancient funeral rites associated with medieval guilds, Chadwick suggested that individuals be buried amongst their vocational brethren. The ‘humblest class of artisans would feel consolation and honour’ to be buried alongside, for example, the canal engineer James Brindley, or the inventor of the spinning mule, Samuel Crompton, ‘or with others who “have risen from the wheelbarrow” and done honour to the country, and individually gained public attention’ for their accomplishments.⁴⁹ Importantly, the living would derive ‘great moral force’ and ‘incentive to public spirit’ from the memory of deceased individuals who, from humble beginnings had distinguished themselves in civil service, arts, or science.⁵⁰ ⁴⁴ For Chadwick, the cases of fraud and violence—including infanticide and suicide for spousal profit—were all good reasons for central administration of health and welfare; in contrast, Carlyle blamed the type of externally administered reforms that Chadwick proposed and that were enshrined in the New Poor Law and workhouse system. Carlyle instead proposed that society could be guided by the new ‘captains of industry’ established as ‘a real Industrial Baronhood’ modelled on the monastic Abbotts of the Middle Ages (Letters, xiii. ; Past and Present, ). ⁴⁵ Chadwick, Supplementary, . ⁴⁶ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ⁴⁷ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ⁴⁸ Chadwick, Supplementary, . ⁴⁹ Chadwick, Supplementary, . ⁵⁰ Chadwick, Supplementary, .

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Yet, Chadwick’s medievalism as vehicle for social reform has gone largely unnoticed; scholars have instead emphasized the differences between him and figures like Pugin and Dickens. Chris Brooks viewed Chadwick’s rational, utilitarian garden-cemeteries as ‘anti-pathetic to the whole complex of sensibility that had developed from the sentimental and the picturesque, and could even be construed as un-Christian, almost irreligious’.⁵¹ That Chadwick and other social reformers used the term nuisance to refer to the stench and the repellent sight of decomposing bodies that clogged urban churchyards in poorer neighbourhoods is, the argument goes, indicative of their unfeelingness.⁵² But ‘nuisance’ was also a long-standing legal term, enshrined in English tort law, with a much wider application. A public nuisance was created, for instance, by the long-deferred (by some two months!) state funeral for the Duke of Wellington on  November . Dickens decried this as a ‘system of barbarous show and expense’ and an example of how ‘no class escaped’ from the ‘unmeaning mummeries’ associated with a ‘respectable’ funeral.⁵³ And in a statement that echoed utilitarians on the subject of nuisance, Dickens insists that individuals should not ‘be made the instruments of infecting, either the minds or the bodies of their fellow-creatures’.⁵⁴ If this isn’t enough to challenge the so-called fissure between medievalists and utilitarians over the issue of public nuisance, the fact that Bentham himself criticized the uses of that term must be. He thought it wrong—as did contemporary medievalists and modern observers—that ‘dead bodies had tended to be regarded as something of a nuisance’ in nineteenth-century society.⁵⁵ In fact, as he explains, it was precisely this that motivated his own memorialization scheme. In ‘Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’, Bentham suggests that the more ‘incorruptible’ parts of bodies could be made into ‘auto-icons’ to be preserved as public monuments.⁵⁶ Auto-iconization was a rational and dignified way of dealing with material realities (which became a ‘nuisance’) while commemorating the dead, as well as of freeing up funds for the living, which could then ‘be applied to the purpose of bodily comfort and

⁵¹ Chris Brooks, Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victorian and Edwardian Cemetery (Exeter: Wheaton, ), . Haewon Hwang also addresses Brooks’s statement in ‘Exhuming the City: The Politics and Poetics of Graveyard Clearance’, in Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith (eds), Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, ), –. ⁵² See, for instance, Richardson, Death, , . ⁵³ Charles Dickens, ‘Trading in Death’, Household Words,  ( Nov. ): –, . ⁵⁴ Dickens, ‘Trading’, . As Catherine Waters observes, ‘the decomposition of the Duke’s body and contemporary fears about the proximity of decaying flesh’ provided a ‘subtext’ for anxieties about barbarism and social degeneration; in Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . ⁵⁵ Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Note that Bentham’s title echoes the utilitarian anatomist Thomas Southwood Smith’s ‘Use of the Dead to the Living: An Appeal to the Public and Legislature on the Necessity of affording Dead Bodies to the Schools of Anatomy by Legislative Enactment’ (), which was, as the title indicates, a plea for adoption of the Anatomy Act. ⁵⁶ Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon’, .

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enjoyment’ to ‘the exclusion of the pain of hunger’.⁵⁷ Bentham’s auto-icon scheme, illustrated by the preservation of his own body for posterity, is a more fanciful form of commemoration than Chadwick’s, yet it should be taken at face value as part of a wider project to improve the health, pleasure, and moral education of the living.⁵⁸ Bentham’s memorialization may seem to have little to do with medievalism, but as with his philosophical and jurisprudential writing, medieval models of governance were a touchstone for his proposals.⁵⁹ He imagined that auto-icons (kept together with a small library of the deceased’s works) would be the object of a modern form of medieval pilgrimage. Instead of the traditional tombstone as destination, there would be a monument that in some way embodied the dead individual’s character and thoughts. In fact, Bentham, Chadwick, and Godwin all looked to medieval precedents for guidance on how architectural design could express and elicit emotion, and encourage the best out of the living. In his Essay on Sepulchres (), Godwin describes how he ‘never understood the annals of chivalry’ until he ‘walked among the ruins of Kenilworth Castle’—there he saw, heard, and felt history.⁶⁰ The site of sieges and royal receptions, and the past lives of Normans and Tudors, Kenilworth teaches Godwin how emotionally affective architecture and landscape could be. Since our feelings are dependent ‘upon the operations of sense’, Godwin writes, then being in the actual place where historical greats once lived and died—seeing and touching the stones and buildings, for instance, or hearing the sounds of bell-towers—operates more fully on our minds.⁶¹ The Essay on Sepulchres prompted Godwin’s contemporaries, and especially his opponents, to trumpet his political change of heart (as they had done following publication of his medievalist  Life of Chaucer). A comment in the Monthly Review, that the Essay was ‘more in the style of antient piety than of modern philosophy’, is indicative of the perception that the old radical had become a paternal, conservative, feudalism-loving medievalist.⁶² This is to miss the fact that, in his system of monumentalization, Godwin combines ancient piety with modern philosophy: his medievalism dovetails with his utilitarianism, and as such, is conjoined with his

⁵⁷ Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon’, . ⁵⁸ This pamphlet was not published in Bentham’s lifetime and there has been debate about its provenance and Bentham’s intentions. It is from a manuscript dated mostly , printed , but not published. See C. F. Marmoy, ‘The “Auto-Icon” of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London’, Medical History,  (): – and James Crimmins’s ‘Introduction’ to the modern published version. Bentham’s own preserved body is, of course, displayed at University College London; . ⁵⁹ See Clare Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic Era Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), –. ⁶⁰ William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres (London: W. Millar, ), . ⁶¹ Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, . ⁶² Anon., Monthly Review,  (London: Becket & Porter, ), . Like Dickens, Godwin eschewed ‘sumptuousness of decoration’ in monuments and sought a simple, modern mode of commemoration. He proposed simple grave markers in the countryside and a simple tablet in the pavement in the city; see Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, , .

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medical and materialist ideas and egalitarian principles. But all of this was missed or ignored, in the early nineteenth century, by those anti-radicals who hoped to shift Godwin from the ‘bad’ to the ‘good’ side of an ideological divide that has had a long and lasting legacy. One of the most striking things about Godwin’s commemoration scheme is the way it looks back to the Middle Ages while being grounded in modern medical theories about nerves, sensation, and psychological associationism.⁶³ In simplest terms, eighteenth-century associationists posited that objects and places resonated psychologically, just as nerves did physically. Since the virtues and actions of friends are inseparable from their ‘person’ or physical body, and since our feelings are connected to their homes and their possessions (a ring, watch, or book, for instance), then these things all have, as Godwin expresses it, ‘an empire over [our] mind’.⁶⁴ Ruins marked the fall of chivalric heroes as well as the everyday lives of those who have passed; objects elicited communion with the dead. For Godwin, living generations should make pilgrimages to the simply marked places where the dead were interred, where they could then properly speak to the great heroes of the classical, medieval, and more recent past. Public figures like ‘Schiller, and Kant, and Jeremy Bentham’ should have a place in the lives of the living, as should lesser known but important historical figures (including women whose deeds had been obscured by his-story), as well as our own dear departed friends.⁶⁵ Godwin’s egalitarian system of commemoration, as Mark Philp notes, undermines the established notion of history ‘as a narrative of public acts by public men’; it was concern for the living, as Thomas Laqueur observes, that led to this ‘new idolatry of the dead’.⁶⁶ For Godwin, as for Chadwick and Bentham, those individuals who had lived virtuously had a vital role, even after death, in purifying and elevating the sentiments of the living, through the conduit of memory. Significant correlations can also be drawn between Godwin’s memorial scenes at Kenilworth and Carlyle’s evocative tableau of medieval consecration in Past and Present. Inspired by Jocelin de Brakelonde’s twelfth-century chronicles of the ancient monastery of Bury St Edmunds, Carlyle recounts how a fire at the Abbey had damaged the altar upon which rested the ancient shrine of St Edmund. Under the instruction of Abbot Samson, repairs were subsequently carried out and the sacred loculus (antique wooden coffin) was opened, revealing ‘the glorious Martyr’s very Body’.⁶⁷ Carlyle describes how, in this, ‘the culminating moment’ of Abbot Samson’s life, he was ⁶³ Godwin’s materialist memorialization is based upon Humean and Lockean sensationalist philosophy, and David Hartley’s closely related philosophy of ‘associationism’. The general notion was that intangible things like ideas and sentiments could be sympathetically—i.e. physiologically—transmitted between people, and that people could intuit ideas and emotions from objects, buildings, and surroundings. ⁶⁴ Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, . ⁶⁵ Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, . ⁶⁶ Mark Philp, ‘William Godwin and the Idea of Historical Commemoration: History as Public Memory and Private Sentiment’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press, ), –, ; Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . ⁶⁷ Carlyle, Past and Present, .

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faced with, but refused to look on or touch the naked sacred flesh of St Edmund. Samson removes only the outer silk clothing, to trace St Edmund’s lineaments—his eyes, nose, breast, arms, fingers, feet, and toes—through the last layer of linen.⁶⁸ This physically and emotionally intimate engagement between the abbot and the saint may seem odd. The intimacy between the living and the dead is foreign, primitive, and perhaps even repulsive to modern readers. Medieval monks must appear as ‘stupid blockheads, to reverence their St. Edmund’s dead Body in this manner’, Carlyle notes wryly, yet this is an example of how the past—and veneration of both the material and immaterial remains of the dead—can reinvigorate the present. With his hands on the body of the long-dead saint, Abbot Samson is inspired to institute overdue reforms in the monastery he oversees. The remains of the dead are a measure of a life well-lived; a conduit to improvement, the first order of reform, and a means of reaching after the ideal. In fact, so important is the physical body to Carlyle’s arguments about social, economic, and cultural reform that at times it sounds as if he—the avowed enemy of materialists—privileges the body, even over the intangible higher virtues. Humans ‘do require to have an Ideal in them; to have some Soul in them’, he insists, ‘were it only to keep the Body unputrefied’.⁶⁹ If ‘the Ideal or Soul’ was placed in the ‘ugliest Body’, he writes, that soul would ‘gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful’.⁷⁰ The body is more than a metaphor here: it is the material centre of the vital, living community. Carlyle’s comments would seem, then, to reverse what is the general view of the Christian medievalist order of things, which identifies unity between body and soul, but still held the soul apart from, and higher than the body and its fleshly occupations of eating and drinking, labour, sex, decay, and death.

D     

.................................................................................................................................. Carlyle’s second-hand recounting of the scene of Samson’s encounter with St Edmund stands out against another second-hand retelling of a scene of bodily encounter. Instead of a medieval chronicle, however, Carlyle refers to a modern text, Dr William Alison’s  Observations on the Management of the Poor. In it Alison describes how in Edinburgh, a poor Irish widow and mother of three had been turned away from various charities and left to wander the streets. When she becomes sick and dies, she unintentionally leaves behind an unseen but deadly legacy: typhus. Using the language of political economy to press his point about how disinterestedness increases risk in already risky urban environments, Carlyle adopts the voice of ‘the humane Physician’ in order to ask: ‘would it not have been better economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you!—’.⁷¹ This passage is often referred to in ⁶⁸ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ⁷⁰ Carlyle, Past and Present, .

⁶⁹ Carlyle, Past and Present, ; emphasis mine. ⁷¹ Carlyle, Past and Present, .

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discussions about social responsibility, yet it is worth underscoring here that, as with the Stockport case, Carlyle’s retelling is informed by prevailing medical models of disease. Theories that disease spread via contagion (person-to-person infection), contamination (environmental infectivity), or miasma (spread of disease via unhealthy air or environments) had sociological counterparts.⁷² Emotions and behaviours were often represented as epidemics that spread rapidly via new modes of communication, and amongst newly forming urban populations. In the fourteenth-century monastic world of Abbot Samson, the ‘flesh’ of St Edmund signalled the sympathetic connection between the living and the dead. In modern urban society, this type of sustaining social connectivity had given way to infectious social degeneration (in the Stockport case) and biological contamination (in the Edinburgh case). Carlyle emphasizes this in a direct address to his readers: through disease, the poor Irish woman had confirmed, he writes, that she was ‘bone of your bone’ and ‘flesh of your flesh’.⁷³ ‘Biological connection’ had become, as Tina Young Choi puts it, the new cement of ‘social connection in urban environments’.⁷⁴ Individuals were at risk due to their proximity to other bodies (living and dead). ‘Nuisances’ motivated sanitarians, town planners, medics, architects, and engineers to develop civic designs and to implement urban reforms in order to decrease risk. Clearly, faith was very important to A. W. N. Pugin’s architectural considerations, but so too were material conditions, or concerns of the body. As his illustrated treatises indicate, Gothic design applied as much to a pump or water conduit as a cathedral. In fact, Pugin’s early sketchbook designs for medieval and modern water wells and conduits reveal his concern with practical matters of urban health. Prepared during the first cholera outbreak in Britain (–), these are early prototypes for the subsequent illustration that appeared in Contrasts (Fig. .). In the later ‘Contrasted Public Conduits’, the vertical lines, heavily decorated style, and Christian iconography of the medieval conduit encouraged benevolence and communal feeling, while the modern design (like its early prototypes) is associated with poverty, inequality, and by implication, urban epidemic. The massive lock, authoritarian policeman, and indifferent dandy indicate that clean water is not a public right in Victorian London. Together these drawings demonstrate how medievalist design should be combined with functionality and material considerations. It could be said that these designs are founded on a principle that sounds almost utilitarian: the beauty and utility of Gothic design leads to the greatest health and happiness for the greatest number of people. A similar tenet is enshrined in the majestic neo-Gothic pumping stations at Abbey Mills and Crossness—dubbed, respectively, as the ‘cathedral of sewage’ and ‘cathedral

⁷² Carlyle uses miasma as metaphor, for instance, in his discussion of how Kantian ideas—a kind of ‘scholastic miasma’—spread in Germany. See The Life of Friedrich Schiller (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske & Co., ), . ⁷³ Carlyle, Past and Present, . ⁷⁴ Tina Young Choi, ‘Writing the Victorian City: Discourses of Risk, Connection, and Inevitability’, Victorian Studies, / (Summer ): –, .

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Figure .. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Public Conduits’, Contrasts, .

on the marsh’ (see Fig. . and Fig. .). Designed in the s by the chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, architect Charles Driver, and others, these pumping stations were responsible for dealing with London’s sewage. They were also Venetian-styled architectural wonders that combined medievalist aesthetic principles with very modern materials and technology. In the Abbey Mills station, modern ironwork and cutting-edge engineering merge with John Ruskin’s brand of Gothic, as seen in the polychromatic façade, the tall arched windows, the deeply recessed cornices, and the mansard roof (double-sloped and punctuated by windows). We should not miss the high ideals of this enterprise: as Paul Dobraszczyk observes, the distinctly moral enterprise of Gothic revivalism applied as much to functional civic buildings as religious ones.⁷⁵ The cruciform layout, symbolic decorative elements, and Italianate medieval exteriors of the pumping stations communicate chivalric ideals, thereby lending it historical significance. Prosaic function and heavy machinery are elevated through architectural virtue into something magnificent and morally uplifting. ⁷⁵ Paul Dobraszczyk, Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Reading: Spire Books, ).

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Figure .. ‘Abbey Mills Pumping Station, Stratford, London,’ The Illustrated London News, .

Importantly, Abbey Mills and Crossness do not represent a blind recycling of an architectural vocabulary inherited from the Middle Ages. Rather they embody a materialist medievalism that answers a very modern problem by merging beauty with utility, and care of the body with care of the soul. These cathedrals of sewage are testaments to the way Victorian Gothic revivalists, utilitarian engineers, and urban sanitation reformers combined medievalism, social reform, and health concerns into one enterprise. Chadwick’s new cemetery, Bentham’s auto-icons, Godwin’s modern medieval pilgrimages, Carlyle’s memorialization of the medieval dead, Pugin’s Gothic conduits, and Bazalgette’s pumping stations are all considerably different things, but they each testify to a much more intricate, tensile relationship between medievalism, utilitarianism, and materialism than has been supposed. Aligning figures like Bentham, Godwin, and Chadwick on one side of a geological fissure, and medievalists such as Pugin and Carlyle on the other, prevents us from fully comprehending how the past was put to use in debates about disciplining, dissecting, interring, and commemorating the body. A more nuanced view of the ideological and aesthetic relationship between thinkers, architects, and reformers who are typically placed in opposing camps will

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Figure .. Interior of Crossness Pumping Station, photograph by Corinna Wagner, .

allow us to more accurately trace the development of cultural attitudes about the body, its value, and uses. In turn, we will also understand better how concerns about the body shaped such an influential movement as Victorian medievalism.

S  Blake, Kathleen, Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Bressani, Martin, and Cameron Macdonell, ‘Remedies External and Visible: Pugin’s Health and Pugin’s Gothic’, True Principles, / (Winter –): –. Camille, Michael, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). Choi, Tina Young, Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Collings, David, ‘Bentham’s Auto-Icon: Utilitarianism and the Evisceration of the Common Body’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, / (): –. Dobraszczyk, Paul, Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Reading: Spire Books, ).

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Gallagher, Catherine, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Goodlad, Lauren, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). Schofield, Philip, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Ulrich, John, Signs of their Times: History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, ). Wagner, Corinna, ‘ “Standing Proof of the Degeneracy of Modern Times”: Architecture, Society and the Medievalist Designs of A. W. N. Pugin’, in L. Holloway and J. Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances and Gothic Thrillers: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ). Weston, Rowland, ‘History, Memory and Moral Knowledge: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres ()’, The European Legacy, / (): –.

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  ......................................................................................................................

          , ,            ,   

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    . 

T chapter investigates the intersections of British medievalism and colonialism in two very different places in the world: early nineteenth-century Chile, as Britain exercised economic domination over parts of the former Spanish Empire (thus it will be termed neocolonial); and late-eighteenth-century India, as British officials devised strategies for extracting revenue from Bengal. Despite their many differences, in both cases an area beyond Europe is defined as Moorish and its present is associated with Europe’s past, specifically with the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. In both cases, too, medievalization forwards the economic interests at the basis of this temporal discourse, which is also fully enmeshed in the history of Orientalism. These similarities demonstrate the value of studying the under-examined effects of British medievalism beyond the familiar national frameworks, and, more broadly, underscore the importance of investigating the global dimensions of temporalizing phenomena. We focus on the writings of two British travellers who were separated by several decades and who may seem to have little in common. Their sojourns and their writings are nonetheless made possible by the same phenomenon: the global interconnections of Britain’s militarized trading network. Our first section examines the politics of British medievalism as they were refracted in the informal British Empire in South America, specifically Chile, by way of the travel account of Maria Graham, née Dundas, Lady Maria Calcott from her second marriage (–).¹ The daughter of a British ¹ For elements characterizing informal empire that are generally applicable to Spanish America see Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China’, in

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   



naval officer, Graham travelled to India with her father and published a journal as well as letters about her stay in that country (Journal of a Residence in India, ; Letters on India; with Etchings and a Map, ). After her first husband died off the coast of Chile on board his ship, she decided to stay in Chile on her own. She left detailed travel accounts of her sojourns in South America, especially her two stays in Brazil and her time living in Chile (Journal of a Residence in Chile, ; and Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, ).² We then study the early associations between medievalism and the development of colonial policy in India by focusing on the official writings of Philip Francis, who travelled to Bengal in  as a member of the newly formed Supreme Council of Bengal, appointed by Parliament to bring stability to the Indian territories and to rein in the excesses of the East India Company. As the most vociferous critic of GovernorGeneral Warren Hastings, Francis penned the ‘Plan for a Settlement of the Revenues of Bahar, Bengal, and Orissa’, which legitimized its arguments for land reform by importing to India the historical arguments and contemporary stakes behind British political debates.³ Francis wrote at a pivotal moment in Britain’s colonization of India, and his writings illustrate the inherent tensions and contradictions of British medievalism as it developed hand-in-hand with colonial policy.

C’  M 

.................................................................................................................................. The Spanish and Portuguese American colonies had been closed to travellers since the age of exploration. Graham was one of the early British travellers to the newly opened countries of the former Spanish American Empire, and also an important eyewitness to the tumultuous first years of political independence in the subcontinent. In general, British travels started when the alliance of powers in Europe changed with Spain’s  repulsion of the Napoleonic invasion. The Spanish and British Empires had been direct Wolfgang Mommsen (ed.), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Allen & Unwin, ), –. Osterhammel offers ten ideal characteristics for this type of asymmetrical power relation, including avoidance of direct rule, capability to impose basic policies, substantial economic establishment, significant control of public financing, and support from local rulers and elites who share the worldview of the stronger foreign party (–). ² For further discussion of Graham see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, ), esp. –. ³ The classic study of Francis is Ranijit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, ). For an excellent recent analysis see Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . See also Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Kathleen Davis discusses Francis and his ‘Plan’ extensively in Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), ch. .

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

    . 

enemies since the early European territorial expansion, fuelling the ‘Black Legend’ according to which Spaniards were especially cruel and fanatic in their practices of conquest and colonization. The invasion of Spain by Napoleonic troops and the country’s insurgence against Napoleonic France in  realigned Spain as a direct ally of Britain. British troops now helped Spain and Spanish American countries against possible Napoleonic invasion, and Britain walked a fine line in staying allied to both of them, which allowed Britain to open the vast economic markets of the South American subcontinent. Britain was indeed becoming the main source of capital and commercial investments in the area, a fact directly intertwined with travel accounts, which had been appearing by scores in the early s and peaked during the investment bubble of the s, before the economic bubble burst in . As studied by Kristine Jones, travel accounts like Graham’s proliferated in response to commercial interests in the area.⁴ As she further notes, studies of economies like that of Argentina— the country that attracted the most travel accounts in the former Spanish Empire and a particularly close neighbour to Chile—show that ‘English capital dominated the Argentine economy’ and that ‘British capitalists controlled almost all import and export trade’ (Jones ; quoting Vera Reber). Graham herself pointed to the dominance of British commercial interests and trade in Chile, describing at the beginning of her stay how ‘The English shops are more numerous than any’ () and noting that the preponderance of the English language, as well as of English tailors, shoemakers, saddlers, and inn-keepers, ‘would make one fancy Valparaiso a coast town in Britain’ (). The importance of the British Empire has been well recognized from early studies of nineteenth-century South America. Yet the most established line of intellectual history considers the ideologies of revolution and of national social thought as associated mainly with France.⁵ As Graham pointed out herself, having met revolutionaries like José de San Martín, ‘The reading of all South American reformers is mostly in a French channel; and the age of Louis XIV was talked of as the direct and only cause of the French revolution, and consequently of those in South America’ (). Our section on Maria Graham examines rather the importance of the British Empire, of which Graham was a part, by focusing on the orientalization that is at the core of neocolonial medievalism in Spanish America. This section thus challenges Tim Fulford’s interpretation ⁴ Kristine Jones, ‘Nineteenth Century British Travel Accounts of Argentina’, Ethnohistory, / (Spring ): –, . ⁵ Raúl Orgaz, for instance, examines at length the importance of French thinkers like Eugène Lerminier and Pierre Leroux in the Spanish American generation born around the independence period, particularly in the Southern Cone. Additional studies about the independence period in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru have also associated the discourse of independence with the French Revolution and the example of the newly independent United States. See, for instance, Ricardo Krebs and Cristián Gazmuri (eds), La Revolución Francesa y Chile (Santiago: Editorial universitaria, ); Noemí Goldman et al., Imagen y recepción de la Revolución Francesa en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, ); Claudia Rosas Lauro, Del trono a la guillotina: El impacto de la Revolución Francesa en el Perú (–) (Lima: IFEA-PUCP-Embajada de Francia, ); Solange Alberro, Alicia Hernández Chávez, and Elías Trabulse (eds), La Revolución Francesa en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ).

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   



that during Britain’s Romantic-era involvement in other parts of the globe, the peoples of the Spanish American contact zones were ‘not . . . represented as being the same, or even similar to Orientals (stereotypical or otherwise)’ (). As Graham’s travel account demonstrates through a wealth of examples, Spanish American neocolonies like Chile were noticeably orientalized, and thereby medievalized, by travellers from the British Empire. This medievalization and orientalization was achieved by reference to the Moorish character of medieval Spain. In other words, Spanish colonial societies were deemed oriental due to the early medieval Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula which had radically changed the inner character of Iberia. When a nineteenth-century writer advanced the notion that some characteristic of Spanish America was ‘Moorish’, this writer was medievalizing: Spanish America was considered Moorish because Spain had allegedly taken its own Moorish medieval character to its colonies. Additionally, since these colonies had been cut off from ‘civilizing’ contact with the ‘modern’ outside world, Spanish America had kept alive the Moorish medieval character of the mother country.⁶ Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile is a fitting example of how British eyes identified the lifestyle of Spanish American neocolonies as Moorish. At the time Graham wrote her Chilean account she had already travelled to India but not to Spain. One would have expected her sojourn in the East to have significantly aided or inhibited her orientalization of the southern country. Yet as the differences between Chile and India did not prevent her orientalization of this South American country, neither did the resemblance with what she had seen and experienced in India guide her orientalization of Chile. The Moorishness of the American neocolony stemmed instead from the already established idea of the oriental character of Spain that she brought with her to the Southern Cone.⁷ This section will focus mainly on Graham’s most noticeable and ⁶ Significantly, it was not only British and other European travellers who medievalized and orientalized Spanish America through Moorish Spain. In discussing the strong anti-Spanishness of the local generation of independence, Rómulo Carbia devoted a whole book to what he termed the ‘Spanish American Black Legend’—the reactivation of the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty and, we should add, of Spanish Moorishness—as one of the most effective intellectual tools used by the proponents of independence in the former Spanish American empire. ⁷ As is well known, there is a large amount of work on British and French orientalization of the Iberian Peninsula and many different avenues from which second-hand orientalization of the country might have reached Graham. Among the extensive bibliography see Margaret Greer et al.,’s Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ); Barbara Fuchs’s Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ); Antonio López Ontiveros’s La imagen geográfica de Córdoba en la literatura viajera (Córdoba: Publicaciones del Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, ); Christopher Baker, David Howarth, and Paul Stirton (eds), The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors, Goya to Picasso (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, ); Jesús Torrecillas’s España exótica: La formación de la imagen española moderna (Boulder, CO: Society for Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, ); and the volumes Imagen Romántica de España () and La imagen romántica del legado andalusí (). Before arriving in Chile, Graham had translated an account of Spain from the war, and she eventually tackled the topic of

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

    . 

recurrent point about Chilean oriental customs: the use of the estrado, the elevated dais which Spanish American colonial homes were believed to have inherited and kept from Moorish medieval Spain. The estrado was the neural point of the living space that Graham deemed the ‘common sitting-room’ of Chileans (). Her first description of a local family, who had once owned a large amount of land, seems identifiable as a description of Moorish lifestyles that only lacks the word oriental. From a veranda that she considered similar to her own, Graham enters into an orientalized sitting room which has, ‘according to custom’, a ‘low latticed window’⁸ and next to it an estrado (estrada in the Journal) covered with a locally made rug she identified as eastern: By the window, a long bench covered with a sort of coarse Turkey carpet made here, runs nearly the length of the room, and before this a wooden platform, called the estrada, raised about six inches from the ground, and about five feet broad, is covered with the same sort of carpet, the rest of the floor being bare brick. ()

Graham finds the same type of orientalized living space in the house of her landlord’s wife. In that house, however, the sitting room is in use: the women were lolling on the estrada, or raised platform covered with carpet (alfombra), supported by cushions, on one side of the room; and the men, with their hats on, were sitting on high chairs, smoking and spitting, on the other. Along the wall by the estrada, a covered bench runs the whole length of the room; and there I was invited to sit . . . ()

In later entries, she changes her already disapproving description of an indolent ‘lolling’ into the even more undignified ‘squatting’, which is contrasted with the more civilized, learned custom of sitting on chairs. As she posits, ‘It is but lately that the ladies of Chile have learned to sit on chairs, instead of squatting on the estrada’ (). The undignified character of a backwards custom can also be observed in additional descriptions. In complaining about prohibitive tariffs on foreign goods, Graham points out that, since there are no manufactures in Chile, among them no cabinet-makers, ‘the prohibitions of foreign chairs and tables will send the young ladies back to squatting on the estrada; and as it must be some years, perhaps centuries, before they will raise and weave silk here, or manufacture muslins, we shall have them clad in their ancient woolen mantos; and future travellers will praise the pretty savages’ (–). Similar differences between estrados and chairs in the timeline of civilization are found later in the house of Madame Carrera, who received Graham’s party ‘sitting on a very low sofa at the end of the estrada . . . while her daughters sat round on chairs and stools’ ().

Spain—although not the experience of travelling there—by writing in  A Short History of Spain that is heavy on discussion of the country’s Islamic past. ⁸ Latticed windows are also a ‘Moorish’ element in the text.

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   



Graham wished for a new generation that would introduce properly European customs into their backward country. Matching thus refractory Chilean customs like estrados to newer English customs like chairs, she explains the dinner as ‘a mixture of Chileno and English customs and cookery; the children and the grandmother being most Chilian, the young ladies most English’ (). Regarding how much Graham found Chileans to have carried on Spanish customs, she in fact found Chileans to be mostly Spanish in their culture and lifestyle, and overall more Spanish than Amerindian. In an important entry, she posited that Chilean customs were heavily reliant on Spanish ancestry: ‘The people here are so Spanish in their habits, that it would be difficult for any one to detect what portion of their superstitions, their manners, or customs, are derived from the aboriginal Chilenos’ (). Graham makes explicit in this entry that she arrived in Chile with an already established division of the two main cultural strands that make the country: Chilean character and lifestyles are either ‘Spanish Moresco’ or ‘derived from the aboriginal Chilenos’ (). There would be European customs shared by many in the Peninsula, in the British Isles, or anywhere else in the continent, but those customs she did not recognize as pan-European were specifically Spanish because they were Moorish customs. The Spanish strand was not merely Spanish then, but ‘Spanish Moresco’, because what distinguished Spain from the rest of Europe was specifically the heritage of its Islamic Middle Ages. It should be noted that Graham does not use the words Goths or Gothic in her travel account, except in one occasion where she mentions the ‘Gothic tyrants’ that forced the Jews and Moors of the Peninsula to jealously hide themselves (). In Spain and Spanish America, ‘Gothic’ was mainly associated with the inner core of a Spanish self due to the Visigothic Kingdom being overthrown by the Muslim invasion of .⁹ Perhaps surprisingly, then, from within a Peninsular Spanish perspective the concocted notion of a ‘Gothic Revival’ would link to the recovery of this inner Catholic essence during the so-called medieval Reconquest and the taking of Granada in  by the Catholic Monarchs. As an example of the belief in the Gothic ethnic origin of Catholic Spain and of the historically variegated uses of this constructed notion, the Spanish American revolutionaries referred to Peninsular Spaniards as ‘Goths’ during the early s wars of independence. The medievalization of Spanish American neocolonies is, as already noted, associated with the stagnation of customs and lifestyles that have carried on since the Spanish Middle Ages. Like those Moorish medieval characteristics that had continued on as remnants of a metropolitan Islamic past in the underdeveloped present of the South American subcontinent, backwards Chile had seen no change for centuries.¹⁰

⁹ For a more detailed account see Ruth Hill’s subchapter ‘Origins and Nación: Gothicism as Instrumental Metaphor’, in Hill (ed.), Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy, c. -, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ) –. ¹⁰ Interestingly, and in contrast to many European travellers and writers, Graham does not have a hostile perspective on a backwards Spain; she even wonders how Chile could be in such disrepair when

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

    . 

Considering this narrow strip of land as very fertile and going to waste, Graham highlighted the backwards state of agriculture, as well as the country’s lack of the most basic of industrializations. As she states most tellingly, ‘The plough, the harrow, the spade, of modern Europe, all are new here, where no improvement has been suffered for centuries’ (). Chile has ‘remained, of all others, the most backward’ () and Graham sees herself performing ‘the retrograde steps to a state that counteracts the blessings of climate’ (). Chile, however, was not merely backwards in its stage of progress but was stagnated in its backwardness: improvements had not been taken from within and if Chileans were left to their own devices centuries would pass without change. The agricultural tools praised by Graham were thus brought in from ‘modern Europe’, and the reader might recall how according to Graham arts like making muslins or even raising and weaving silk could be ‘some years, perhaps centuries’ away. The most evident political underpinning of this stagnation of Chile and other parts of the former Spanish Empire is the superiority of British culture and the material advantages that British capital and industriousness should improve these backward locations. As Graham’s pages convey, the British had a moral obligation to bring the country to present times in its industry and exploitation of the land, as well as in lifestyle and customs that were viewed as more civilized, like sitting on chairs instead of squatting on raised platforms. The superiority of Britain and of Graham vis-à-vis those around her exude from the pages of her journal, and British hands and approaches to land and investment are presented as being of evident benefit to this under-industrialized location. Chile’s medieval state under the Spanish Empire is a business opportunity for British imperialism. Britain, that is, would bring the needed tools to this backward yet fertile land that is ready to produce under modernizing British hands. This view is evident throughout, and is shown most clearly in Graham’s evident displeasure at the new regulations on trade, where ‘exorbitant duties . . . on various English goods’ will ‘retard civilisation . . . and drive the people back to their habits . . . discouraging the use of foreign stuffs’ (). Even Graham’s wish for the political independence of these countries shows its hidden mercantilist interest: she would want the British government to ‘acknowledge the independence of the states of South America at once and send proper consuls or agents to guard our trade, and to take from it the disgrace of being little else than smuggling on a larger scale’ (). Valparaiso, the reader might recall, was practically a British coastal town, yet Chile’s conspicuous ‘modernizing’ incorporation was still insufficient in the face of the desire for neocolonial domination of the medievalized former Spanish Empire.

Spaniards are so gallant a people: ‘Every thing here is so far back with regard to the conveniences and improvements of civilised life, that if we did not recollect the state of the Highlands of Scotland seventy years ago, it would be scarcely credible that the country could have been occupied for three centuries for so polished and enlightened a people as the Spaniards undoubtedly were in the sixteenth century, when they first took possession of Chile’ ().

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   



C, C,   T  M I

.................................................................................................................................. Several decades before Graham visited India, another British mercantile enterprise, the British East India Company, ran into trouble at home. Like other trading companies (such as the Dutch East India Company), the British East India Company had become militarized, and in  its army won a decisive victory over combined Indian forces in Bengal. A treaty was signed by which the Mughal Emperor granted the Company the diwani—the right to collect the lucrative territorial revenues of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. As in Spanish America, direct British involvement in the Indian economy prompted accounts by visitors, traders, and officials, but in this case the accounts accused the Company of corruption, mismanagement, and profiteering. These accounts—especially those of the disaffected Company employees and traders Alexander Dow and William Bolts—sparked public outrage and parliamentary concern, prompting a formal investigation that resulted in the  Regulating Act. One outcome of the Act was the appointment of a five-man Supreme Council of Bengal, charged with governance of the territorial acquisitions and revenues, and with curbing the excesses of Company servants.¹¹ The Council was factionalized from the start, with its three new members setting themselves against the policies of Governor-General Warren Hastings and long-time Company official Richard Barwell. As part of a larger struggle between the British government and the Company over jurisdiction and control of revenue, the Council’s internal wrangling brought to India British political agendas and ideologies that were grounded in the interpretation of history, particularly the history of the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. Nowhere was this reliance upon history more apparent than in the work of Philip Francis, the Council member who authored the ‘Plan for a Settlement of the Revenues of Bahar, Bengal, and Orissa’, which critiqued the revenue plan instituted under Warren Hastings and proposed an entirely new system. Francis was staunchly committed to Whig principles, particularly resistance against the Crown’s encroachments upon citizens’ constitutional rights. Arguments for protection of these rights had long been phrased in terms of the ‘ancient constitution’, claimed to have been inherited from England’s ancient Gothic forebears and preserved throughout English history despite the Norman Conquest.¹² Just as ‘Gothic’ came to be associated with the inner

¹¹ Travers, Ideology and Empire, . For detailed discussion see also H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ¹² See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  []).

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

    . 

core of a Spanish self that persisted despite the Muslim invasion, England’s ‘Gothic’ self was understood to have survived the Norman Conquest and to remain evident in common law. This historical paradigm was quickly applied to the controversy regarding the East India Company. As Robert Travers observes, the concerns of those opposed to monarchical over-reaching were easily transported to Bengal, ‘where the military-fiscal juggernaut of the East India Company appeared to embody many of the worst features of the British imperial state, including high levels of taxation and debt, standing armies, private profiteering among government officials, bribery, corruption and secret influence’.¹³ It is no surprise, then, that when Francis devised an economic plan for Bengal he would explain its legitimacy in terms of a Mughal ‘ancient constitution’ that must survive the British conquest of India, just as England’s ‘ancient constitution’ had survived the Norman Conquest. The story of Francis is multi-faceted, but the focus here will be the complex, sometimes conflicting, temporal logic of his revenue plan, which, he insisted, must be ‘permanent’. Francis grounded his plan in history; as a result, it connects historical interpretations of British and Indian polities to the contemporary nexus of orientalism, politics, economy, and empire. It will be argued here that the temporal work of Francis’s plan ‘medievalizes’, not in the sense that he considers eighteenth-century India as equivalent to ‘the Middle Ages’ (a term he does not use), but in the sense that he devises colonial policy on the basis of British historiography about the time that we now call ‘the Middle Ages’. The result is a Moorish history and an economic plan that bases its legitimacy upon an interpretation of eleventh- and twelfth-century British history. The British East India Company was of course eager to claim that it held the diwani legally, by virtue of transfer from the legitimate Mughal ruler. As Sudipta Sen explains, this was ‘a posture to keep the French [competitors in India] at bay and appease critics back in England who would not tolerate the violation of a cardinal principle of English constitutional law, which stated that British subjects could not acquire territories independent of the crown’.¹⁴ Thus, during the s and s the Mughal Empire (which had ruled since ) was deemed to have been legitimate, with ‘Moormen’ as the rightful ruling class and Hindus as tillers of the soil. Thus the Mughal Emperor could legally transfer the diwani. This legitimate transfer of the diwani was the starting point for Francis as he mounted an argument for direct revenue collection by native proprietors and an indirect, hands-off role for the British Company. This plan, he argued, would preserve the Mughal ‘ancient constitution’, which he interpreted as based in landed property and a class of proprietors (zemindars) whose rights stood against the tyranny of the Company, just as those of British landed gentry stood against tyranny of the Crown. ‘By the ancient constitution of the empire,’ he writes, ‘the principal Zemindars were invested with souzdary jurisdiction, and were answerable

¹³ Travers, Ideology and Empire, . ¹⁴ Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York and London: Routledge, ), xxii–xxiii.

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   



for the peace of their districts.’¹⁵ Arguing against the Company’s policy of direct control over tax rates and revenue collection, he asserts that in an ideal situation: Conforming to the simplicity of eastern manners, and to the summary and simple principles of Asiatic policy, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the internal administration should be committed to one or more considerable Moormen; that Moormen chiefly should be employed in the offices of government; that the cultivation of the soil should be left with the Gentoos [i.e. Hindus], whose property it is, and the revenue fixed for ever; that the Zemindars, or principal landholders, should be answerable for the internal peace and good order of their respective districts; . . . [and] that the East India Company, in their mercantile capacity, should go to market for their investment, with no other influence or advantage than that, which the superior weight of the purse would naturally give them. ()

Ironically, in Francis’s historical paradigm the conquered Mughals are equivalent to the Anglo-Saxons conquered by the Normans, and the contemporary British are the equivalent of the Normans. The issue is whether the British will respect the property rights ensconced in the Mughal Empire’s ‘ancient constitution’ just as—Francis and like-minded thinkers claimed—the Normans respected the property rights of the Anglo-Saxons. Thus the history of property relations under the Mughal Empire was crucial to all sides as they argued over policies for managing land and revenue collection. This history was complicated by an extra layer, in that the Mughals were themselves conquerors. It was important, then, to describe them as also not disturbing existing property rights.¹⁶ Working within the ever-burgeoning discourse on Oriental despotism and its role in debates over authoritarian governments in Europe, Francis describes Mughal rulers as benevolent despots who did not disturb the existing Hindu system of property relations after their conquest. This ‘moderate’ approach accounts for their success: The moderation of the tribute imposed by all the Mahomedan conquerors, and the simplicity of their method of collecting it, accounts for the surprising facility, with which they retained possession of their conquests. The form of their government was despotic; but, in fact, it was not oppressive to the mass of the conquered people. In general they introduced no change, but in the army and in the name of the sovereign.¹⁷

¹⁵ Francis, Original Minutes of the Governor-General and Council of Fort William on the Settlement and Collection of the Revenues of Bengal with a Plan of Settlement Recommended to the Court of Directors, January  (London, ), –; hereafter cited by page number. ¹⁶ The ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were themselves understood to be conquerors of Celtic Britain, of course, but because the British traced their lineage to the Germanic ‘Gothic’ (or ‘Teutonic’) tribes, and not to the Celts, this history was not considered in arguments about the ‘ancient constitution.’ ¹⁷ Francis’s reading of benevolent despotism is in part influenced by the Physiocrats. On his relation to the Physiocrats, particularly Henry Pattullo (who was in turn reliant upon the accounts of Bolts and Dow), see Guha, Rule of Property.

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

    . 

By contrast to the benevolent despotism of the Mughals, Francis asserts that British policy had overturned proper rule and engaged in the kind of behaviour described by Montesquieu (whom he cites) as destructive both to the economy and to liberty: With respect to the collection of the revenues, the system of the present [i.e. the Company’s] governance is upon principle, directly the reverse of what it ought to be, and, I believe, such as never was adopted by any other government. ()

The nature of Mughal government and its preservation of ancient property rights, Francis argued, demonstrated that the British should allow zemindars to collect the revenues of their lands, and that the Company should take only a permanently set sum from that revenue each year. These aims should not be construed as benevolent on Francis’s part. His aim was to devise a stable policy that would ensure for Britain permanent dominion and an uninterrupted flow of tribute from India. It should be noted that the sharp distinction between the roles of Muslims and Hindus in the quotation above was typical throughout British colonial policy in India, and has had dire repercussions that cannot be fully addressed here. Religious and political identities were never as discrete or stratified as the British imagined.¹⁸ The establishment of policy based on a Hindu/Muslim dichotomy was driven partly by ignorance and partly by a need to create categories of administration and control, such as those Francis devised in order to establish a ‘permanent’ system of revenue and sovereignty for Britain. Despite his pragmatism, Francis’s plan was firmly based on historical arguments and politically motivated principles that were as important for Britain as they were for India. By claiming that the Company’s disregard of property rights constituted a policy that ‘never was adopted by any other government’, Francis sides with Voltaire in contemporary debates over the history of despotism, and he thereby places the connections to British history within the broader discourse of world history and just government.¹⁹ According to his view, a conqueror (such as the Mughal Emperor, but also the British) could only lay claim by right to whatever the conquered prince had possessed, nothing more: The right of the sovereign is founded on conquest, by which he succeeds only to the state of the conquered prince; unless in the first instance, he resolves to appropriate or transfer all private property, by an act of power, in virtue of his conquest. So barbarous an idea is equally inconsistent with the manners and policy of the British nation. ()

¹⁸ See Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), and Travers, Ideology and Empire. For an excellent overview of the category of ‘medieval’ in South Asian historiography, see Daud Ali, ‘The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, / (): –. ¹⁹ For Francis’s use of Voltaire, see Guha, Rule of Property.

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   



In other words, it would be possible for a conqueror to seize all property by sheer force (the behaviour of a tyrant), but such action would betray the very nature of the British nation. Since the conquering Mughals had not arrogated all property rights to themselves, the British who succeed to their position also may not, lest they become tyrants. Francis’s citations of David Hume reinforce this point and illustrate his method of integrating Britain into a world history of empire. In an appendix to his plan, Francis provided testimony from local officials about the customs and history of Indostan. To the statement of Raja Shitabroy regarding the King’s respect for the customary hereditary rights of Bahar, he adds a footnote with the following quotation from Hume’s History of England: The Roman state, which spread its dominion over Europe, left the rights of individuals, in a great measure, untouched; and those civilized conquerors, while they made their own country the seat of empire, found that they could draw most advantage from the subjected provinces, by securing to the natives the free enjoyment of their own laws and of their private possessions. ()²⁰

Francis chooses not to mention that Hume contrasts this wise Roman rule to the violent and extreme behaviour of William the Conqueror, who (according to Hume) usurped all property rights—an interpretation of the Conquest that would counter Francis’s own history of respect for property rights and the ‘ancient constitution’. In any case, the Roman comparison in the quotation from Hume would seem to favour Mughal rule at the expense of the Company, and so it did—on the surface and in the short term. But we must remember that Francis’s ultimate goal was ‘permanency of our dominion’ (). He proposed that ‘undivided sovereignty shall be assumed and declared by his Majesty’, and for him the crux of the question at hand was: ‘in what manner it may be most expedient, to exercise it [sovereignty] for the permanent benefit of the governing power’ (–). In the long term of this project, the details of the comparison with the Norman Conquest became far less important than the temporal frame it established: when in India, the British were operating in the time zone, so to speak, of eleventh- and twelfthcentury England. The issues were conquest, domination, and the extraction of wealth, just as they had been for the Normans. And while the methods for maximizing the benefits of conquest would be debated, its permanency was not. Francis did not overtly connect his insistence upon ‘permanency’ with the temporality of his historiographical arguments. Nonetheless, his development of a theory of dominance and subjugation together with a history lodged in the centuries fast becoming ‘the Middle Ages’, and based upon a Hindu/Muslim divide, congealed with the escalation of colonial power and the annexation of new territories. Certainly its legacy is with us today.

²⁰ See Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution () (Boston: Little, Brown, ), i. . Kathleen Davis discusses the temporality of another of Francis’s citations of Hume in Periodization and Sovereignty, ch. .

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

    . 

As he wrote from Calcutta in the s, Francis had his sights on enhancing the wealth and sovereignty of the British Empire, despite his critique of the East India Company’s policies and his wish to curb the authority of the Crown. He argued from an international framework, not only by placing his arguments within the context of world history, but also by implicitly juxtaposing the situation in India with the costs of Britain’s heavy-handed tax policies in America. His plan for a permanent revenue settlement, he argued, would ensure moderate but enduring wealth and extended sovereignty for Britain, in contrast to the costly provocation of rebellion in America. As Robert Travers points out, ‘Philip Francis drew an ideological line from these Atlantic discontents to Bengal, not least through redeploying the rhetoric of the ancient constitution in India.’²¹ So situated, this rhetoric significantly advanced the entwinement of the ‘Orient’ with the centuries fast-becoming known as the ‘Middle Ages’, and it demonstrates the degree to which the process of working out colonial power relations across national boundaries was central to the development of the ‘medieval’ as we know it today.

C 

.................................................................................................................................. Despite the initial sense of distance between our cases, then, it is not hard to discern the connections between Philip Francis and Maria Graham. Our attention to the interconnectivity of British medievalism as a global temporalizing phenomenon has focused on common economic dimensions, observing how the medieval and oriental character of India and Chile intersect with their incorporation into Britain’s mercantilist empire. As another connecting thread regarding the medieval time zone in which these discourses operate, it is telling that Umberto Eco’s most famous essay on medievalism offhandedly mentions how in ‘ordinary terminology’ one is led to talk about the ‘“medieval condition” of the people of Bengal’²². The intellectual and cultural histories that produce the ‘medieval condition’ of Bengali people as commonplace are the same histories that have neglected to note the similarly commonplace association of Spanish Americans with the Orient and the medieval. Shown here through Graham’s striking connection of Spanish Americans with the Middle Ages and Moorishness, this chapter shows that the better known medievalization of the Indian subcontinent has a lesser known but quite explicit counterpoint in marginalized parts of the informal British Empire. In our global view of medievalism in the nineteenth century, and of particular interest to this volume, the notion of the ‘Gothic’ and thus of the ‘Gothic Revival’ also comes into question. As shown by its disparate use, the Gothic in the Peninsular and the Spanish American context can defamiliarize the common understanding found ²¹ Travers, Ideology and Empire, . ²² Umberto Eco, ‘Living in the New Middle Ages’ in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), –, .

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   



within British studies. More research remains to be done to explore the differences through which medievalizing discourses function in international and apparently disparate locations, even when these locations come under the umbrella of a common British mercantile empire that stretched from India to the Americas’ Southern Cone. As we hope to have demonstrated, when observed from a global perspective, the interminglings of medievalism, orientalism, and postcoloniality can still help unwrap unexpected vistas.

S  Altschul, Nadia, Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in NineteenthCentury South America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Altschul, Nadia, and Kathleen Davis (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ outside Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Ali, Daud, ‘The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, / (): –. Davis, Kathleen, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Fuchs, Barbara, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Fulford, Tim, ‘British Romantics and Native Americans: the Araucanians of Chile’, Studies in Romanticism, / (Summer ): –. Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). Sen, Sudipta, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Sen, Sudipta, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York and London: Routledge, ). Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). van der Veer, Peter, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).

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  .............................................................................................................

   .............................................................................................................

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        ......................................................................................................................

  

......................................................................................................................

 

F years ago, the history of the Gothic Revival in church architecture seemed settled. Indeed, it was little different to the accounts that the Victorians themselves had produced. In canonical works like Charles Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival () a story unfolded which identified the early nineteenth century as the setting ‘for one of the most remarkable revolutions in national art that this country has seen’.¹ Driven by the architectural polemicist Augustus Pugin and the Anglican controversialists centred on the Cambridge Camden Society, the Victorians were believed to have fatally confused ethics and aesthetics; to have broken with the tastes of previous decades; and to have insisted dogmatically that only medieval architecture was truly Christian.² The result was, depending on the author’s predilections, either an extraordinary efflorescence of creativity or—more commonly—a simple disaster. ‘History stopped in , then there was chaos’, observed the architectural historian John Summerson, recalling the attitudes with which he was imbued in the first few decades of the twentieth century.³ Although much of this analysis remains influential—not least its focus on the importance of Pugin and the Camden Society, it has nonetheless been substantially modified by further research.⁴ It is no longer true to say, as Nikolaus Pevsner did in

¹ Charles Eastlake, The Gothic Revival, ed. J. Mordaunt Crook (Leicester: Leicester University Press,  []), p. vi. ² Compare Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (London: Constable, ), ch. , and Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, rd edn, ed. J. Mordaunt Crook (London: John Murray,  []), . ³ John Summerson, quoted in Martin Pawley, ‘The Sense of the Modern’, Architects’ Journal ( and  Dec. ): –, . ⁴ Christopher Webster and John Elliott (eds), ‘A Church as it Should Be’: The Cambridge Camden Society and its Influence (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ); Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, ).

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

 

, that ‘no one can as yet write of the nineteenth century without fors and againsts’.⁵ Indeed, the tendency has been to reject the sort of moralizing approach that architectural historians inherited from their Victorian predecessors.⁶ Instead of describing the unchallenged triumph of Gothic, scholars have stressed the continuing pluralism of nineteenth-century architecture.⁷ Instead of seeing neo-medievalism as an essentially Anglican or Roman Catholic affair, they have pointed to the importance of a distinctive ‘Dissenting Gothic’.⁸ Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—research on earlier periods has challenged the exceptionalism of the Victorian experience by pointing to Gothic revivals as far back as the early seventeenth century.⁹ The eighteenth century, too, is now no longer seen as an era characterized by ignorance and neglect of Gothic architecture. The range and richness of neo-medieval Georgian churches is now quite clear; and it is also clear that these were not—as the Victorians sought to portray them—clumsy or amateurish attempts to evoke the Gothic.¹⁰ The extent to which the Revivalists of the s and s were participants in an ongoing debate about Gothic architecture, rather than the instigators of a new view of neo-medievalism, has also become plain, with important, as yet unpublished, theses by Philip Aspin and Simon Bradley tracing the origins of the Victorian Gothic Revival back to the s and s, if not before.¹¹ In that sense, it may be more helpful to talk about a—rather than the—Gothic revival in the nineteenth century. Certainly, it has become difficult to sustain the claim that the Victorians were unique in their enthusiasm for neo-medieval architecture. It does remain to be explained, however, precisely why they believed themselves to be exceptional. More than that, work evidently also needs to be done exploring exactly what did distinguish this nineteenth-century revival from those that went before it.¹² This short chapter will suggest that the ecclesiastical Gothic revivalism of the nineteenth century was the consequence of a wider change in contemporaries’ understandings of the nature of church buildings themselves. The product of new ideas about faith and time as well as novel notions about the nature of architecture, this revival was every bit as revolutionary and as distinctively Victorian as contemporaries believed it to be. ⁵ Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), v. ⁶ David Watkin, Mortality and Architecture Revisited (London: John Murray, ). ⁷ J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the PostModern (London: John Murray, ). ⁸ Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Non-Conformity (London: J. M. Dent, ), –; see also Bridget Cherry (ed.), Dissent and the Gothic Revival (London: Chapels Society, ). ⁹ Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, – (New Haven and London: Yale, ), –. ¹⁰ Terry Friedman, The Eighteenth Century Church in Britain (New Haven and London: Yale, ), esp. . ¹¹ Philip Aspin, ‘Architecture and Identity in the English Gothic Revival, –’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, ); Simon Bradley, ‘The Gothic Revival and the Church of England, –’, Ph.D. thesis (London University, ). ¹² For a useful analysis, see Michael Hall, ‘Introduction’, to Hall (ed.), Gothic Architecture and its Meanings – (Reading: Spire Books, ), –.

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  



Thus, although it is now impossible to argue that the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century completely replaced one style with another, it is possible to argue that a Gothic revival of the nineteenth century helped change conceptions of ecclesiastical architecture most profoundly.

F

.................................................................................................................................. The religious—or, more strictly speaking, the Ecclesiological—origins of Victorian ecclesiastical Gothic revivalism are well established.¹³ As early as , The Builder’s Magazine observed that ‘The Grecian taste certainly best suits . . . publick buildings . . . but for religious structures, Gothic, undoubtedly, ought to be preferred’.¹⁴ Although not universally accepted, such assumptions continued into the nineteenth century, and became increasingly influential within the established Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Each sought to counteract rising numbers of Nonconformists and Roman Catholics by the construction of more buildings, with  new churches erected in England alone in the three decades after , and a smaller but nonetheless significant number put up in Ireland and Scotland at the same time.¹⁵ Significantly, Gothic styles were often preferred for these new churches: partly because they were believed to be inexpensive; partly, as the Builder’s Magazine had suggested, because they were believed to be typologically appropriate; but—above all— because they enabled established churches to articulate a sense of continuity and thus assert their claims to be the national church. As Simon Bradley puts it, the appeal of neo-Gothic for the Church of England in particular had much to do ‘with keeping its buildings visually distinct from the Nonconformists’, who tended at that time to favour classically-inspired designs.¹⁶ A link between style and faith had consequently been established several decades before it was rearticulated by Augustus Pugin. His intervention, nonetheless, was vital, with architects like George Gilbert Scott recalling that they had been ‘morally awakened’ to neo-medievalism by his influence.¹⁷ That Scott would go on to build or

¹³ For a comprehensive survey, see Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint (eds), The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). ¹⁴ Quoted in Friedman, Eighteenth Century Church, . ¹⁵ M. H. Port,  New Churches: The Church Building Commission, –, nd edn (Reading: Spire Books, ); Jeanne Sheehy, ‘Irish Church-Building: Popery, Puginism, and the Protestant Ascendancy’, in Brooks and Saint, Victorian Church, –; Iain F. Maciver, ‘Unfinished Business? The Highland Churches’ Scheme and the Government of Scotland, –’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society,  (), –. ¹⁶ Simon Bradley, ‘The Roots of Ecclesiology: Late-Hanoverian Attitudes to Medieval Churches’, in Webster and Elliott, ‘A Church’, . ¹⁷ George Gilbert Scott, Personal and Professional Recollections, ed. Gavin Stamp (Stamford: Paul Watkins, ), .

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restore nearly  churches as well as thirty-nine cathedrals, and that he would train many of the leading architects of the subsequent generation was, in some respects, less important than the fact that he described his encounter with Pugin’s work in terms reminiscent of a conversion experience. For it is evident that Pugin’s writings— especially Contrasts () and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture ()—had an electrifying effect on many of their readers. At one and the same time passionate critiques of contemporary society and emotional evocations of medieval art and faith, they were, as Chris Brooks observed, the architectural equivalent of Carlyle’s Past and Present (): a condition of England novel disguised as a work of history.¹⁸ It was, therefore, not so much Pugin’s originality as his topicality which made him so influential. Little he had to say was new; much less his central claim that Gothic architecture was intrinsically Christian and classicism fundamentally pagan. What mattered was when he said it. Indeed, Pugin was fortunate that he wrote not just at a moment of perceived religious, social, and political crisis but also that his ideas were taken up by a new sort of architectural movement.¹⁹ In the empire, newly established colonial churches sought a model for their buildings.²⁰ At home, the intensification of denominational rivalry and the loss of its exclusive claims on the state galvanized the Church of England to engage in a series of structural reforms. As part of this process, diocesan church building societies were established across the country: from Chester and St Asaph in  to Carlisle in .²¹ The need to find an appropriate architectural idiom in which to build these new, assertive churches put a premium on confident statements of faith like Pugin’s. It likewise inspired the foundation of new—ostensibly antiquarian, but actually confessional—groups of scholars like the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture and the Cambridge Camden Society, both set up in .²² The latter was to prove particularly influential. As the Ecclesiological Society from  it became the dominant influence on the architecture of the Church of England, helping to confirm an existing preference for the Gothic in general and the Decorated Gothic in particular.²³

¹⁸ Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, ), . ¹⁹ William Whyte, ‘Shaping Material Reform: Pressure Groups in Great Britain and Ireland, –’, in Peter Jan Margry and Jan de Maeyer (eds), The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe, c.–c.,  vols, vi. Material Reform (Leuven: Leuven University Press, forthcoming). ²⁰ G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, – (New Haven and London: Yale, ). ²¹ Arthur Burns, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England, c.– (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²² Gill Chitty, ‘John Ruskin, Oxford and the Architectural Society,  to ’, Oxoniensia,  (): –. ²³ Webster and Elliott, ‘A Church’.

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Yet although Pugin was undoubtedly the right man at the right time, he was also a member of the wrong denomination: his Roman Catholicism lost him some patrons from the established Church, whilst his Gothicism failed to attract those of his co-religionists who were committed to the continental baroque of the Tridentine rite.²⁴ The Ecclesiologists—as members of Camden Society became known—were likewise controversial. For many, especially for many avowedly evangelical members of the Church of England, what they advocated sounded suspiciously like the ‘Restoration of Popery’.²⁵ The rising tide of High Church revival within Anglicanism nonetheless created an increasingly congenial environment for ecclesiology and even for Pugin. Their celebration of medieval church architecture chimed with the fascination for pre-Reformation theology which characterized the contemporary Oxford (or Tractarian) Movement, a group of academics who sought to emphasize the catholicity of the Church of England. In truth, some leading Tractarians were little interested in neo-medieval art, but many of their followers and still more of their successors were.²⁶ The result was that ritualists, High Church reformers, and their allies not just in the Church of England but the episcopal Church of Scotland—and even within the Presbyterian established Church of Scotland—came to believe that Gothic architecture was not just typologically but also theologically appropriate for—indeed, the only theologically correct form of—ecclesiastical architecture.²⁷

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.................................................................................................................................. The Gothic Revival, however, was also bound up with a wider, pan-European process identified by Neil Levine, who observes that in the s, ‘history replaced nature as the basis for generating architectural forms’.²⁸ This extraordinary paradigm shift left the old neoclassical canon increasingly marginalized, as the beliefs that underwrote it became irrelevant. The whole of the past—and especially the Gothic past—thus became a source book for architectural designers and their clients. Moreover, as Alexandrina Buchanan has recently argued, a turn towards history simultaneously provided a

²⁴ Howard Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford (New Haven and London: Yale, ), –; Michael Fisher, ‘Gothic For Ever’: A. W. N. Pugin, Lord Shrewsbury, and the Rebuilding of Catholic England (Reading: Spire Books, ), –. ²⁵ Francis Close, The ‘Restoration of Churches’ is the Restoration of Popery (London: Hatchard, ). ²⁶ Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). ²⁷ Stewart J. Brown, ‘Scotland and the Oxford Movement’, in Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ²⁸ Neil Levine, Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), .

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means by which architects could assert their professional status whilst also generating ‘a shared language through which patrons and practitioners could discuss appropriate form’.²⁹ In other words, what helped to sustain and promote ecclesiastical Gothic revivalism was as much a historical as a theological argument; a debate about time as well as faith. In an age of historicism, it could hardly be otherwise.³⁰ Such historicism naturally had some directly historiographical consequences, effecting a renewed scholarly interest in the architectural remains of the Middle Ages themselves. This is not to say that the eighteenth century had disregarded the Gothic past: recent research has shown that some Georgians were every bit as interested as their Victorian successors.³¹ Nevertheless, the approaches taken and the conclusions reached were rather different, not least because the early nineteenth century gave birth to a form of analysis which was novel. Following the fashionable example of the biological sciences, writers on architecture attempted to create taxonomies of Gothic, developing the terminology of Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular—or First, Second, and Third Pointed—that would structure all subsequent thinking on the subject.³² This taxonomic attitude shaped encounters with church buildings, which were broken down into their component parts; analysed for evidence of style and date; and compared and contrasted to agreed models of the type.³³ The Victorians, then, came to see Gothic architecture in general and ecclesiastical buildings in particular as a uniquely valuable historical source. In this context Gothic proved attractive not least because it could be defended as evidence of national history, bound up with the development of the state as well as of the Church. When the eminent—and eminently Whiggish—historian William Stubbs sought an epitome of English history, he visualized an ancient church; the prime example, in John Burrow’s words, ‘of endless renewal without loss of identity, of repairs and even of additions and improvements entirely compatible with the essential integrity and continuity of the structure’.³⁴ Although it soon became clear that Gothic did not, after all, have its origins in England, it nonetheless could be—and was—seen as somehow intrinsically insular.³⁵ This was an argument used by Pugin, of course; but it

²⁹ Alexandrina Buchanan, Robert Willis and the Foundation of Architectural History (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ), . ³⁰ Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ³¹ Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hambledon & London, ), ch. . ³² Brooks, Gothic Revival, –. ³³ Chris Miele, ‘Real Antiquity and the Ancient Object: The Science of Gothic Architecture and the Restoration of Medieval Buildings’, in Vanessa Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow Books, ), –. ³⁴ J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ³⁵ Simon Bradley, ‘The Englishness of Gothic: Architectural Interpretations from William Gilpin to J. H. Parker’, Architectural History,  (): –.

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was not one that relied on his theological programme: hence the stipulation in  that the rebuilt Palace of Westminster should be in ‘either Gothic or Elizabethan’. What else would do for the embodiment of the English constitution?³⁶ Similar ideas underpinned the work of the historian E. A. Freeman, who often clashed with the Ecclesiologists and rejected many of Pugin’s fundamental assumptions.³⁷ For Freeman, Gothic was an expression of race: tangible evidence of national character.³⁸ This new taxonomy of medieval building and the belief that Gothic was somehow intrinsically English were mutually reinforcing. Indeed, the combination was so powerful it even shaped the thinking of the Ecclesiologists. In a letter of , for example, the young J. M. Neale reflected that ‘in the different styles of architecture, we may perhaps find an analogy with the different stages of popular feeling in England’. Thus the Norman—‘heavy, dark, and gloomy’—could be associated with ‘the absence of liberty’ which he thought characterized the period; whilst the Decorated—‘the most perfect style’—spoke of ‘the happiest age of England’.³⁹ But the new emphasis on precision in classifying and dating medieval architecture also had a more general and pervasive effect, one that was enhanced by the appeals to national identity with which it was often coupled.⁴⁰ Put simply: this focus on the past placed a premium on accuracy— what historians have called ‘truthfulness’ and contemporaries termed ‘reality’—in the present.⁴¹ Not only was each style of Gothic architecture now seen as an epitome of the age which had produced it, but an architect or patron’s choice of style was understood as an attempt to evoke the animating idea of that time. If England, in Freeman’s words ‘was the chosen abode of Christian art’ in the fifteenth century, then fifteenthcentury art should be the obvious choice of English Christians.⁴² Yet there could be no agreement on which was the ideal age to imitate, nor whether imitation was itself appropriate. Surely, some argued, the Victorian age should evolve its own distinctive architectural expression? As a result, historicism begat further historicism, with nineteenth-century architects never able to escape what J. Mordaunt Crook has described as the terrible ‘burden of history’.⁴³

³⁶ Alexandra Wedgwood, ‘The New Palace of Westminster’, in Christine and Jaqueline Riding (eds), The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (London: Merill, ). ³⁷ E. A. Freeman, An Essay on the Origin and Development of Window Tracery in England (Oxford and London: J. H. Parker, ), ix. ³⁸ G. Alex Bremner and Jonathan Conlin, ‘History as Form: Architecture and Liberal Anglican Thought in the Writings of E. A. Freeman’, Modern Intellectual History,  (): –. ³⁹ Letters of John Mason Neale, ed. Mary Sackville Lawson (London: Longman’s, Green, ), . ⁴⁰ Philip Aspin, ‘ “Our Ancient Architecture”: Contesting Cathedrals and Late Georgian England’, Architectural History,  (): –. ⁴¹ For ‘truthfulness’ see Levine, Modern Architecture, . For ‘reality’ see Ecclesiologist,   (July ): . ⁴² E. A. Freeman, A History of Architecture (London: J. Maters, ), . ⁴³ J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘The Architect’s Secret’: Victorian Critics and the Image of Gravity (London: John Murray, ), ch. .

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.................................................................................................................................. Disentangling the theological and historical motivations which ran through the ecclesiastical Gothic Revival is understandably difficult. The two strands were intertwined, often inseparable and sometimes indistinguishable. A high-profile reordering of the Temple Church in London which began in the spring of  is a useful case in point. It has been described by one historian as the moment at which ‘ecclesiology engulfed antiquarianism’, as the theological ideas propounded by the Camdenians became dominant.⁴⁴ Yet it has been seen by another, more recent writer as an essentially ‘secular, historical’ project, in which ecclesiology played very little part.⁴⁵ Contemporaries were equally ambiguous. This was, proclaimed the leading proponent of the church’s restoration, an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ project; but it was one that the Ecclesiologists condemned because they thought it too antiquarian. This was also a historical project; but some of those who had argued for it initially were appalled by the theological implications of what was eventually done, fearing that a wholesale reintroduction of neo-medievalism—even a neo-medievalism that the Ecclesiologists sneered at—was somehow synonymous with Roman Catholicism.⁴⁶ As this suggests, the quest for historical and theological ‘reality’ in architecture was fraught with ambiguity.⁴⁷ It was consequently almost impossible for the Victorians to distinguish the historical from the theological. Nor is it apparent that subsequent scholars can be any more certain. Nonetheless, this coming together of new ideas about faith and time did have a remarkable—and discernible—effect on architecture. Indeed, it was a change so allconsuming that it helped reshape Victorian attitudes to buildings in general, not just to churches, much less just to those churches built in Gothic styles. What ran through ecclesiology and architectural history, driving each and at the same time giving an impetus to the process of reassessing neo-medievalism more generally was a new understanding of what architecture meant and how it was to be experienced. In short, the first generation of Victorians articulated a new conception of architecture as a sort of text.⁴⁸

⁴⁴ J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘The Restoration of the Temple Church: Ecclesiology and Recrimination’, Architectural History,  (): . ⁴⁵ Chris Miele, ‘Gothic Sign, Protestant Realia: Templars, Ecclesiologists and the Round Churches at Cambridge and London’, Architectural History,  (): . ⁴⁶ William Whyte, ‘Restoration and Recrimination: The Temple Church in the Nineteenth Century’, in Robin Griffith-Jones and David Park (eds), The Temple Church: History, Art, and Architecture (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, ), –. ⁴⁷ Crook, Dilemma of Style, . ⁴⁸ William Whyte, ‘Sacred Space as Sacred Text: Church and Chapel Building in Victorian Britain’, in Joe Sterrett and Peter Thomas (eds), Sacred Text–Sacred Space: Architectural, Literary, and Spiritual Convergences in England and Wales (Leiden: Brill, ).

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Once noticed, this assumed analogy between buildings and language can soon be seen everywhere in the architectural writings of the nineteenth century.⁴⁹ It is present in John Ruskin’s ambition to inspire an architecture which would leave the viewers ‘reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas’.⁵⁰ It is evident in the influential Coleridgean notion of a Gothic church as ‘petrified religion’.⁵¹ It is even there in some evangelical and Nonconformist accounts of architecture, like the Congregationalist James Cubitt’s celebration of churches in which ‘every stone . . . tells in a universal language’ of the idea for which it was built.⁵² And it can be found throughout the heated discussions of antiquaries, architects, and others as they sought to define the relationship between built form and the ideas—especially the theology—which were believed to have inspired it. In the early years of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, for example, questions about the ‘symbolical meaning’ of church architecture drew in speakers ranging from Mark Pattison to E. A. Freeman, by way of Basil Jones, later Bishop of St David’s, and the future founder of Radley College, William Sewell.⁵³ The notion that buildings could communicate—could, in some senses be read—was of course scarcely novel. The historian Vaughan Hart, for instance, has seen this idea as the key to understanding the work of eighteenth-century architects like Sir John Vanbrugh.⁵⁴ That architecture had a symbolic dimension was a commonplace of still earlier writers on buildings too.⁵⁵ Indeed, Vitruvius himself had played with this idea in his foundational text, De architectura (c. ).⁵⁶ The coming together of Victorian historicism and religious revival, however, placed a new emphasis on this old idea, with nineteenth-century authors, architects, and patrons forced to engage in a long-running and formative debate about the nature of architectural meaning.⁵⁷ That previous

⁴⁹ See also Neil Levine, ‘The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Genevieve’, in Robin Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, ). ⁵⁰ John Ruskin, Collected Works, ed. E. J. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, –), x. . ⁵¹ Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . ⁵² James Cubitt, Church Design for Congregations (London: Smith, Elder, ), . ⁵³ Proceedings of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, Mar. ; Nov. ; Mar. ; Feb. . ⁵⁴ Vaughan Hart, Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ); though see Anthony Geraghty, ‘After Colvin’s Canterbury Quadrangle’, in Malcom Airs and William Whyte (eds), Architectural History After Colvin (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, ). ⁵⁵ Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), –; Judi Loach, ‘On Words and Walls’, in David Graham (ed.), An Interregnum of the Sign: The Emblematic Age in France (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, ). ⁵⁶ William Whyte, ‘How do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History and Theory,  (). ⁵⁷ Edward N. Kaufman, ‘Architectural Representation in Victorian England’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,  (), .

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generations had touched on similar themes only served to legitimate this analysis all the more, with medieval texts on the subject like the highly allegorical thirteenth-century Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of William Durandus seized on as evidence that contemporary conceptions of architectural meaning were shared with those who built the churches and cathedrals of the past.⁵⁸ Even individuals like the expressly empirical architectural historian Robert Willis, who used archaeological research to cast doubt on Durandus and his ecclesiological champions, nonetheless came to accept that there was an inherent ‘symbolical’ character to all church buildings.⁵⁹ The ‘textual turn’ in architecture—to borrow a phrase from the poet Jeff Derksen— was not solely fostered by the new ideas about faith and time that we have already explored.⁶⁰ It also drew on a wider revival of interest in symbolism more generally, something exemplified by Coleridge’s influential writings on the need for Christian truth to be transmitted in symbolic form.⁶¹ A revival of typological analysis in biblical studies, in art, and in literature similarly encouraged a new sort of architectural analysis.⁶² Just as a Pre-Raphaelite painting or poem was intended to be read—almost decoded—for its deeper meaning, so church buildings came be seen as vehicles for holy writ. ‘Every stone, every window, was found to be telling its own appropriate tale, to bear its own particular meaning’, observed the influential Ecclesiologist A. J. B. Beresford Hope in .⁶³ Others went even further still, with some Tractarian writers coming to see church buildings as a sort of sacrament in their own right: a point in which past and present met; a ‘time out time’; a kind of palimpsest on which the history of the Church as well as of a church had been inscribed.⁶⁴ In a sense, indeed, the Gothic Revival was a symptom rather than a cause of changing ideas about architecture. It was because people sought symbolism that that they chose a style that was believed, for a variety of different reasons, to be symbolic. Far from creating this attitude, the Ecclesiologists and Pugin were simply very successful in articulating it, giving voice to a more general sense that ‘that in pointed

⁵⁸ J. M. Neale and Benjamin Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments: A Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, Written by William Durandus (Leeds: T. W. Green, ). ⁵⁹ Buchanan, Robert Willis, , . ⁶⁰ Jeff Derksen, ‘ “The Obvious Analogy is with [Architecture]”: Megastructural My Life’, in Marìa Eugenia Dìaz Sánchez and Craig Douglas Dworkin (eds), Architectures of Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ), . ⁶¹ Anthony John Harding, ‘Development and Symbol in the Thought of S. T. Coleridge, J. C. Hare, and John Sterling’, Studies in Romanticism,  (): . ⁶² Herbert L. Sussman, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ); George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). ⁶³ Proceedings of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture,  June , . ⁶⁴ Jerome Bump, ‘The Victorian Radicals, Time, Theology and Ontology in Hopkins, Pusey and Müller’, in Jude V. Nixon (ed.), Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ).

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architecture Christian symbolism has found its most adequate exponent’.⁶⁵ Naturally, not everyone agreed. But even those who rejected such claims for neo-medievalism were forced to frame their arguments within the terms of the textual turn. So it was that when the great Scottish architect, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson attempted to prove the ‘Unsuitableness of Gothic Architecture to Modern Circumstances’, he simply argued that it was classicism which conveyed the higher spiritual truth, whilst the architecture of the ‘Romish church’ merely sought to impress with unmeaning spectacle.⁶⁶ Strikingly, by  even the evangelical, Nonconformist Eclectic Review was signing up to the symbolic supremacy of neo-medievalism. ‘In studying Gothic,’ it declared, ‘we study architecture in the fullest development of its most essential primary conditions of being.’⁶⁷

A   

.................................................................................................................................. As a result of these conjoined and mutually sustaining developments what might have remained a small-scale, almost exclusively Anglican architectural movement escaped the boundaries of the established Church. Neo-medievalism was embraced by almost all of Britain’s Christian denominations. ‘Gothic architecture is Christian architecture’ argued the Wesleyan Methodist F. J. Jobson in . It was Christian, he went on, because of its history, but still more because it communicated the purpose of the building in its architecture. Who has not felt the uncertainty of apprehension, and the incongruity of ideas, arising from the sight of a Chapel in Roman or Grecian Architecture when he entered a city or town for the first time? On looking upon the building (unless an inscription board was on it) he could not tell whether it was a Concert-room, a Theatre, a Town-hall, or a Chapel. But who, on seeing a Gothic chapel, has had any difficulties in determining its appointed purpose? Its ecclesiastical form made known its use, at first sight, and without any possibility of mistake.

This was not ecclesiology—indeed Jobson hoped that ‘the day will never come when painted scenes and sculptured figures shall be introduced into Methodist chapels’, and he was clear that medieval façades should not be paired with medieval plans, for

⁶⁵ Ecclesiologist,   (): . ⁶⁶ Alexander Thomson, ‘On the Unsuitableness of Gothic Architecture to Modern Circumstances’, in Gavin Stamp (ed.), The Light of Truth and Beauty: The Lectures of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, – (Glasgow: Alexander Thomson Society, ), . ⁶⁷ ‘The Literature of Gothic Architecture’, Eclectic Review,   (Jan. ): .

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 

‘Methodism—in a word—requires Chapels, and not Churches’.⁶⁸ But it does reveal the ubiquity of a belief that Gothic was preferable because it was uniquely able to convey religious ideas. Strikingly, these arguments even affected non-Christian architecture, as at the Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool, which in the s merged a conventional Moorish idiom of the sort adopted by Jews across Europe with a distinctive thirteenthcentury Gothic.⁶⁹ The widespread acceptance of neo-medievalism nonetheless presented its own problems. There were multiple Gothics for a multitude of competing denominations, with no commonly accepted standard ever emerging. How could there be, given the profoundly different histories, cultures, and liturgical practices which characterized these widely divergent religious groups? Even within each Church—indeed, within every congregation—there could be a strikingly broad spectrum of opinion.⁷⁰ Moreover, Gothic revivalists never shed the burden of history, especially when erecting ecclesiastical buildings. Their ideas about faith and time could—and did—come to undermine each another. As they learnt more about medieval art, so it became harder to determine which phase of Gothic architecture was the most appropriate to use. The exclusive claims of English medieval architecture were also questioned, as critics like John Ruskin and architects like George Edmund Street explored and advocated the use of continental forms.⁷¹ Little wonder that in , the architect T. G. Jackson complained that over the last thirty years the British had ‘twice run through all those varieties of Gothic architecture which represent the steady growth of four centuries’.⁷² No one, ‘true’ Gothic had ever been found, and Victorians increasingly lost faith in the capacity of church buildings to convey meaning; something revealed in the decision of leading architects like G. F. Bodley to abandon narrative and theological symbolism in their decorative schemes in favour of ornament derived from textile patterns.⁷³ Similar problems faced those involved in church restoration. Here again, notions about history and theology were often inevitably in tension. Seeking to return a building to its ideal form might mean radical reconstruction. In the words of George Gilbert Scott, the pre-eminent mid-Victorian Goth, ‘even entire rebuilding’ could be seen as restoration if what was being restored was the essence of the church at its most perfect.⁷⁴ Yet this self-evidently meant removing precisely the material remains of the

⁶⁸ F. J. Jobson, Chapel and Church Architecture as Appropriate to the Buildings of Non-Conformists, Particularly to those of the Wesleyan Methodists (London: Hamilton & Adams, ), , , , –. ⁶⁹ Joseph Sharples, Liverpool (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ⁷⁰ Christopher Stell, ‘Nonconfomist Architecture’, in Webster and Elliott, ‘A Church’. ⁷¹ Michael W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, ); G. E. Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (London: Dent, ). ⁷² Quoted in William Whyte, Oxford Jackson: Architecture, Education, Status, and Style, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁷³ Michael Hall, ‘What do Victorian Churches Mean?’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,  (): . ⁷⁴ G. G. Scott, A Plea for the Faithful Restoration of Our Ancient Churches (London: Parker, ), .

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past—and often of the medieval past—that the revivalists claimed to admire.⁷⁵ More problematically still, the idea of the church building as a sort of text had implications for those who wished to alter it: changing the church changed the text. Responding to the restoration of the University Church in Oxford in , for example, critics condemned what they described as the ‘effacement . . . of a social, racial document’.⁷⁶ By the end of the nineteenth century restoration practices changed, as architects sought not to return churches to some moment in the past, but to freeze them perpetually in the present.⁷⁷

C

.................................................................................................................................. Neo-medievalism survived the challenges of the late nineteenth century. Although other styles continued to be deployed—with Roman Catholics choosing a revived Byzantinism for Westminster Cathedral in  and Wesleyan Methodists employing Baroque for the equally high-profile Westminster Central Hall in —the fact remained that Gothic was the most widely used architectural idiom for churches well into the twentieth century.⁷⁸ Yet the arguments in favour of medievalism undoubtedly changed. When Giles Gilbert Scott defended his neo-Gothic Liverpool Cathedral in , he did not talk about text, nor see the style as a vehicle of communication, but stressed its psychological impact: its ‘solemnity and ‘mystery’. More strikingly still, he did not emphasize the role of the structure or decoration in conveying these effects, but stressed the significance of the spatial configuration of the place, insisting, ‘Don’t look at my arches, or the tracery of the windows, or the carved ornamentation; look at my spaces.’⁷⁹ Here, then, was another, very different sort of Gothic revival, in some respects closer to the ideas that had been common before the Victorian era. The legacy of the nineteenth century, however, is still with us: in the hundreds of churches built and the thousands restored; each one exhibiting not the overwhelming influence of a single man like Pugin or a single group like the Ecclesiologists, but rather demonstrating a remarkable revolution in architectural epistemology, an apparently irresistible textual turn.

⁷⁵ Chris Miele, ‘Real Antiquity and the Ancient Object: The Science of Gothic Architecture and the Restoration of Medieval Buildings’, in Brand, Study of the Past, –. ⁷⁶ Henry Wilson quoted in Whyte, Oxford Jackson, . ⁷⁷ Chris Miele, ‘ “Their Interest and Habit”: Professionalism and the Restoration of Medieval Churches, –’, in Brooks and Saint, Victorian Church, –. ⁷⁸ Kenneth Richardson, The ‘Twenty-Five’ Churches of the Southwark Diocese: An Inter-War Campaign of Church-Building (London: Ecclesiological Society, ). ⁷⁹ Quoted in Joe Riley, Today’s Cathedral: The Cathedral Church of Christ, Liverpool (London: SPCK, ), –.

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 

S  Bremner, G. A., Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, – (New Haven and London: Yale, ). Brooks, Chris, and Andrew Saint (eds), The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). De Maeyer, Jan, and Luc Verpoest (eds), Gothic Revival: Religion, Architecture, and Style in Western Europe, – (Leuven: Leuven University Press, ). Hill, Rosemary, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Penguin, ). Webster, Christopher, and John Elliott (eds), ‘A Church as it Should Be’: The Cambridge Camden Society and its Influence (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ). Whyte, William, Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Yates, Nigel, Buildings, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

               

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 

I  Queen Victoria conferred a knighthood upon George Gilbert Scott, an act that acknowledged his role in the creation of the Albert Memorial; the spectacular monument built to commemorate Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens (Fig. .). Royal patronage, the importance of the commission, and the dramatic appearance of the monument all confirmed the high status of the revived Gothic style and its prominence within mid-Victorian culture. The s and s witnessed a series of spectacular Gothic projects that rose out of the streets of Victorian cities: Scott’s own Midland Grand Hotel (–), G. E. Street’s Royal Courts of Justice (–), and Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester Town Hall (completed ) are all examples of the success and status of the Gothic style beyond the confines of ecclesiastical design. In retrospect, however, these buildings can be seen as the apex of Gothic’s success as a civic style and to younger architects and designers they soon became symptomatic of the architectural aspirations of a previous generation.¹ While acknowledging that much of the commercial and ideological impetus for the Victorian Gothic Revival was generated through ecclesiastical design, this chapter will trace how the Gothic debate was translated into secular contexts and will evaluate its influence and position within Victorian design theory and practice. I will suggest that the early defenders of the Gothic style presented their case in such a way that their arguments became self-defeating in the cultural context of the later Victorian period. Gothic was not defeated by classicism, or for that matter any other style, but elements of the Gothic debate were co-opted in such a way that the rationale for the exclusive use of Gothic dissolved. ¹ Gavin Stamp, ‘George Gilbert Scott, The Memorial Competition, and the Critics’, in Chris Brooks (ed.), The Albert Memorial: The Prince Consort National Memorial: Its History, Contexts, and Conservation, (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –.

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 

Figure .. George Gilbert Scott, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, c.–, photographer unknown.

One of the complexities of an essay about this subject is that ‘medievalism’ covers a very wide range of styles. The Albert Memorial was very different from the domestic Gothic of the eighteenth century, the ‘commissioners Gothic’ of the s, and the ecclesiological Gothic of the s and s. The rebuilding of the Palace of

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    



Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament) illustrates this problem well. Although Barry and Pugin’s building is commonly seen as a landmark of the Gothic Revival, its medieval credentials are mixed. First, the decision to determine the style was largely contextual: after the fire of  the remains of both Westminster Hall and St Stephen’s crypt implied that the new building should acknowledge these important survivals of the medieval fabric. Secondly, the competition stipulated that the building should be ‘either Gothic or Elizabethan’ and Barry and Pugin’s building is largely understood as a classically planned building elaborated with Gothic ornament, Pugin himself dismissing it later as ‘All Grecian, sir; Tudor details on a classic body’.² The stylistic mix of the Palace of Westminster shows the form that medievalism took in the nineteenth century was contentious. Between the fire at the Palace of Westminster and Scott’s knighthood a vigourous debate took place about the nature of medievalism, what the physical forms of Gothic meant, and how they related to the contemporary world. This debate was both literary and material: Victorian medievalism was formulated and articulated in both literature and the physical matter of buildings and artefacts. These two elements are often closely related, as many of the most important authors were professionally engaged in shaping the forms of Victorian medievalism.

A. W. N. P

.................................................................................................................................. A. W. N. Pugin is largely remembered as an ecclesiastical designer but he had a great deal to say about secular design.³ His method of analysing Gothic became a key influence in its own right: he claimed to have discovered an underlying system of principles that determined the forms of Gothic design; he defined these principles and then went on to criticize or endorse a series of objects, designs, or buildings through this method. He was unequivocal about the scope of these rules: The two great rules for design are these: st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; nd, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.⁴ ² Michael Charlesworth (ed.), The Gothic Revival –: Literary Sources and Documents,  vols, iii. Gothic and National Architecture (Mountfield: Helm Information, ), ; Benjamin Ferrey, Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin: and his Father Augustus Pugin (London: Edward Stanford, ), . ³ A. Welby Pugin, Contrasts, or a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste. Accompanied by Appropriate Text (London: Charles Dolman, ) and A. Welby Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London: John Weale, ). Many of the most famous images from Contrasts were added in this nd edn. ⁴ Pugin, True Principles, .

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 

Pugin portrayed the link to Gothic as incidental: ‘Strange as it may appear at first sight, it is in pointed architecture alone that these great principles have been carried out’.⁵ The logic here is that it is not Gothic per se that is being promoted, but a set of design principles that are rooted in integrity and honesty. The principles determined the criteria of the test but only the Gothic style passed. Although Pugin implied that the principles preceded his conviction of the superiority of Gothic, there is little doubt that he developed them in order to justify his preference. Echoes of his approach can be detected not only in the writing of Ruskin and Scott, but also in a whole range of publications about medieval architecture and design in the Victorian period. We might well ask why Pugin felt this kind of rhetorical effort was needed. First, it is important to notice that his critique of contemporary design was aimed not just at the various forms of classicism in use in the early Victorian period but also at eighteenthcentury Gothic and its descendants: his ‘Illustration of the extravagant style of Modern Gothic Furniture and Decoration’ (Fig. .) contains many features that could be found in domestic Gothic interiors of the later eighteenth century along with other objects that we would now associate with Regency style. This feature of True Principles underlines that revived Gothic was not new at the start of the Victorian period: Pugin’s task was not just to undermine classicism but to discredit the Gothic style as it had been used for the previous century. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artefacts were often described as ‘gothic’ when a pre-existing form was embellished with Gothic ornament: a Gothic Chippendale chair is still recognizably Chippendale. In the context of the earlier Gothic Revival styles, Pugin needed to minimize the significance of the ornamental vocabulary of Gothic and to define the real nature of Gothic in another way. This is just what he built into his two principles: construction should be privileged over ornament and the latter without the former is Gothic in only the most superficial sense. The idea of constructional rationality was not new, but the centrality and rhetorical weight given to this subject in Pugin’s work make his arguments very distinctive.⁶ Pugin’s other problem was how to explain the popularity of the styles that he did not like: whose fault was it that his two famous rules were neglected? His response amounts to a satire of the promotional tactics of artisans, shopkeepers, and builders. Someone seeking a good piece of Gothic ironwork will be met with ‘the vacant stare of the miserable mechanic’ which ‘soon convinces you that the turning up of a horse-shoe is the extent of his knowledge in the mysteries of the smithy’.⁷ Pugin mocked the ‘enlightened age of mechanics’s institutes and scientific societies’, the former being ‘a mere device of the day to poison the minds of the operatives with infidel and radical doctrines’, an unwelcome educational competitor to ‘the great and never failing school’

⁵ Pugin, True Principles, . ⁶ Rosemary Hill, ‘Ruskin and Pugin’, in Rebecca Daniels and Geoff Brandwood (eds), Ruskin and Architecture (Reading: Spire, ), –. ⁷ Pugin, True Principles, .

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    

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Figure .. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Modern Gothic Decoration’, in True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, .

of the Church.⁸ ‘Roman-cement men’ (i.e. those who build Italianate houses) ‘buy their ornaments by the yard, and their capitals by the ton’ and ‘every linen-draper’s shop apes to be something after the palace of the Caesers’.⁹ This critique of commercial activity was famously articulated in the second edition of Contrasts: Pugin’s mockery of ‘The Trade’ exemplifies the tendency to attribute bad taste to the commercial sector.¹⁰ ⁸ Pugin, True Principles, .

⁹ Pugin, True Principles, –.

¹⁰ Pugin, Contrasts, p. vi.

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 

This satire signals a widespread anxiety among those associated with design reform; those in the commercial sector were seen as having an influence on taste that was not justified by their educational background—commercial prerogatives could not be trusted to produce a tasteful Britain. Pugin’s table for Horstead Place, is a physical expression of his principles. It is obvious in structure but restrained in decoration: the absence of veneer, lack of carving, and exposed joints all signal an object that celebrates necessary construction and relegates ornament.¹¹ The studied simplicity, chamfered frame, and tusked tennon joints (protruding from the base rail) all became marked features within the stylistic vocabulary of Gothic Revival furniture. Pugin’s objects were a conspicuous success in the Great Exhibition of , where his ‘Medieval Court’ was arguably the highlight of what was perceived by many as a weak display of English design.¹²

J R

.................................................................................................................................. Ruskin’s preface to The Stones of Venice (–) explicitly defines his reader as a member of the middle class who will have to make decisions about architecture: I am especially anxious to rid this essay of ambiguity, because I want to gain the ear of all kinds of persons. Every man has, at some time of his life, personal interest in architecture. He has influence on the design of some public building; or he has to buy, or build, or alter his own house. It signifies less whether the knowledge of other arts be general or not; men may live without buying pictures or statues: but, in architecture, all must in some way commit themselves; they must do mischief, and waste their money, if they do not know how to turn it to account.¹³

This immediately differentiates his writing from Pugin’s whose implied readership was far more specialized. Ruskin’s purpose was not to reform ecclesiastical architecture but to equip the public with the knowledge that protects them against ‘the caprice of architects, or mercy of contractors’.¹⁴ The seminal chapter from volume , ‘The Nature of Gothic’, had a huge influence on Victorian design; William Morris described it in the preface to his own Kelmscott edition as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century’.¹⁵ Arguably the most famous passage is essentially a lesson on the ethics of consumption: ¹¹ Victoria and Albert Museum, London, museum number W.– . ¹² Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, ), –. ¹³ John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice,  vols, i. The Foundations (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., ), i. xi. ¹⁴ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, i, xi. ¹⁵ William Morris, ‘Preface’, in The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter of the Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, ), i.

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    



And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek.¹⁶

Ruskin instructed his readers to rethink what they admired in their domestic interiors. The ‘accurate mouldings’, ‘unerring adjustments’, and ‘perfectnesses’ were not to be admired—they should be deplored as signs of the degrading labour that produced them. The solution was to be found in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Middle Ages: the ‘ugly goblins’ and ‘formless monsters’ that could be found on the ‘old cathedral front’ should be seen as signs of ‘the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone’.¹⁷ Ecclesiastical Gothic might be the solution but the problem was firmly located in the English domestic interior and by implication, those who decided to redecorate their rooms should think deeply about the implications of what they were doing. Although Ruskin was preoccupied with the politics of work, his purpose was to empower the consumer. He wanted to create the kind of person that could overrule Pugin’s vacant artisans and demonstrate to ‘the trade’ that there was a market for the products of satisfying work, and, to Ruskin, this kind of work was strongly associated with medievalism.

G. G. S’ R  S  D A

.................................................................................................................................. In , having built his reputation through ecclesiastical Gothic, George Gilbert Scott published Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, a book that articulated the ambition of Gothic designers to widen their sphere of activity into more secular territory.¹⁸ By this date it was widely perceived that Gothic had become the accepted style for ecclesiastical architecture, or as Scott put it in a triumphalist manner: the great fact is this; that whereas forty years ago no one dreamed, if a new church were to be built, of attempting to assimilate it in style to those bequeathed to us by

¹⁶ John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. The Sea-Stories (London: Smith, Elder and Co., ), . ¹⁷ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. –. ¹⁸ George Gilbert Scott, Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture: Present and Future (London: John Murray, ).

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 

our forefathers, the reverse is now the case: no one ever now entertains the idea of building one in any style but those of our own churches.¹⁹

In line with Pugin, Scott did not present himself as being primarily interested in promoting the Gothic style but went further in his denials. Statements such as: ‘I am no medieaevalist [sic]; I do not advocate the styles of the middle ages as such’²⁰ contest the idea that Gothic was a stylistic choice; he claimed the choice of style was a matter of practicality, Gothic was the system of building most able to meet modern needs: our business being merely to cull from works of any date, or from our own conceptions, such ideas as are practically suited as to meet our requirements, and to express them consistently with the feeling of the style in which we are working; and if the result should differ from anything before done, so much the better, if only it be good.²¹

The idea that Gothic fulfilled a series of external principles is still present in Scott’s Remarks, but he relied much less on arguments about structural integrity and truth to materials, and more on stressing an interest in human needs and explaining how Gothic was best suited to meet those needs. Scott made strenuous efforts to portray Gothic as the English style, a position he could adopt with less controversy than Pugin, whose Roman Catholicism made his nationalist credentials suspect for the Anglican majority.²² Scott was from an evangelical background and less associated with the High Anglican Church than other major Gothic Revival architects such as G. E. Street or William Butterfield—to the moderate Anglican he was considered less partisan. Through nationalism Scott again side-lined the stylistic features of Gothic in favour of its intrinsic connection to the nation: We do not wish to adapt ourselves to medieval customs, but to adapt a style of art which accidentally was medieaval, but is essentially national, to the wants and requirements of our own day.²³

Scott’s elusive championing of Gothic was partly defensive, an effort to refute critics of the Gothic Revival who liked to portray it as a fashion. He addressed this accusation directly in chapter , which contains the essence of his defence of the style. In a note Scott observes: ‘Nothing seems so much to gratify our opponents as to hear our great movement styled a “fashion,”—as if they were doing honour to the noblest of arts by degrading it to the level of the trades of the tailor and the mantua-maker!’²⁴ As a retort he stressed the earnestness of the movement: the revival of Gothic was ‘not a mere fashion,—it is no popular caprice; it is a deep-seated, earnest, and energetic revolution ¹⁹ Scott, Remarks, . ²⁰ Scott, Remarks, . ²¹ Scott, Remarks, . ²² Ruskin felt obliged to distance himself from Pugin in a particularly spiteful appendix: John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, i, –. ²³ Scott, Remarks, . ²⁴ Scott, Remarks,  n. b.

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in the human mind’.²⁵ Like Pugin and Ruskin, Scott acknowledged the power of the commercial world through his attempted separation from it: he portrayed the superficial nature of commercial fashion as the opposite to the moral integrity of revived Gothic. Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture marks the point at which the Gothic Revival had ambitions to transform the material culture of the secular world. Scott adopted a strident militarist tone about the need to assert the superiority of Gothic in a secular context: ‘We have made our reconnaissances but the real brunt of the attack is still to come. Let us gird on our harness for this new contest.’²⁶ This was a campaign that failed: Gothic never became the dominant or even default style for secular building but this was a complex failure, as in certain areas the lingering discourse of Gothic design had profound and wide-reaching effects. On one level, the reason for this failure is quite easily explained. The success of ecclesiastical Gothic is a story about realigning a relatively narrow group of potential patrons—clergymen, rectors, lay Christians—to a tradition of architecture that still dominated the material culture of Christian England. The ideological and social range of this group was quite narrow: there may have been loud and heavily publicized arguments within the Anglican Church and between Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Nonconformists, but all these parties were Christian. Asserting a degree of cultural consensus upon this group was quite an achievement but a tiny task compared with converting the entire population to the Gothic cause. The attention paid to the ‘trade’ or commercial sector is a tacit acknowledgement of this problem: while a vicar might retain some control over a stained-glass window installed in his church, there was no comparable figure vetting what type of furniture was purchased for a domestic drawing room.

C. L. E’ H  H T

.................................................................................................................................. The promotion of the Gothic style was moving in several directions: from ecclesiastical to secular, from specialist audience to general audience, and from those with considerable wealth to those who lived on a more modest income. This change of direction is well represented by Charles Locke Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste, a book that had a significant influence in England and America, that laid out a coherent programme for improving domestic taste through an adapted Gothic Revival style. Unlike Scott and Pugin, Eastlake was not an architect or practising designer, although he had trained as both an architect and a painter.²⁷ Hints has journalistic origins: a series on ‘The Fashion

²⁵ Scott, Remarks, . ²⁶ Scott, Remarks, . ²⁷ F. W. Gibson, ‘Eastlake, Charles Locke (–)’, rev. Charlotte L. Brunskill, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ODNB.

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of Furniture’ in the Cornhill Magazine led to a series on the same subject in The Queen, which was combined with other material that Eastlake had written for the London Review.²⁸ He was explicit in locating his inspiration for the book among the theorists of the Gothic Revival: ‘Mr Ruskin has eloquently described to us the poetry of medieval art; Pugin and other writers have shown its practical advantages’.²⁹ That Scott was one of the ‘others’ is clear in Eastlake’s preface to his History of the Gothic Revival, where Scott’s Remarks is cited as a seminal publication concerning ‘the application of Medieval design to the specific requirements of domestic . . . architecture’.³⁰ Eastlake defined his target audience against those who were used to hearing theories of design; his purpose was: ‘to suggest some fixed principles of taste for the popular guidance of those who are not accustomed to hear such principles defined’.³¹ By implication the audience is the rapidly expanding middle class and although Eastlake’s idea of his audience (and some of the text) is high handed and patronizing, he expressed an awareness of a major shift in Victorian culture: ‘taste’ was increasingly mediated through publishing, both in the form of literature that described appropriate taste and the reproduction of images that illustrated suitable design sources. Eastlake addressed both these areas, describing acceptable objects and decoration and illustrating his comments with images, many of which he had drawn himself. He guided his reader in turn through every room in the house and then addressed object categories such as ‘crockery’, ‘table glass’, ‘dress and jewellery’. He sustained the oblique approach to advocating Gothic; in reply to criticisms of his ‘medieval predelictions’ in the preface to the second impression, he denied stylistic loyalty: ‘It is the spirit and principles of early manufacture which I desire to see revived, and not the absolute forms in which they found embodiment.’³² Although Eastlake clearly associated himself with the theorists of the Gothic Revival it is interesting to notice how the Gothic style started to recede from the illustrations in the book. Plenty of post-medieval objects are illustrated as exemplars: a ‘Windsor chair’, a ‘Hall Table at Cothele’, a Jacobean ‘Dining Room Table’, an ‘Ancient Arm Chair at Knole’. To Pugin and Scott, Gothic architecture had started to decline in the late Middle Ages but to Eastlake, the Tudor of Cothele or the Elizabethan/Stuart of Knole suited his purpose well enough. His own designs might be described as stylistically ambiguous, as can be seen in plate XII, a ‘Dining-room Sideboard’.³³ Someone familiar with Pugin or the furniture designed by Street, Butterfield, or Burges would immediately associate the chamfered frame, tusked-tennon joints, prominent hinges, and revealed construction with the products of the Gothic Revival, but we might question the extent to which Eastlake’s non-specialist audience identified this object

²⁸ Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, nd edn (London: Longmans, Green and Co., ), v. ²⁹ Hints, . ³⁰ Charles L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (London: Longman, ), vi. ³¹ Eastlake, Hints, vi. ³² Eastlake, Hints, ix. ³³ Eastlake, Hints, plate XII facing, .

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with the Gothic style. And to confuse matters, the objects on the sideboard suggest Italian Renaissance and Chinese ceramics displayed alongside medieval decanters and Venetian glass. Other illustrations exhibit similar contradictions: ‘Examples of Encaustic Tile Hall Pavements’ includes one border tile in a medieval style, but the majority are geometric, classical, or post-medieval in inspiration.³⁴ In Eastlake’s Hints, the theoretical positions were generated by the Gothic Revival but the objects that he recommended were starting to drift away from the style as conceived by Pugin and his followers. Books offering advice on interior design were published in large quantities in the following decades but Eastlake’s Hints was the last to follow the logic of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Many of these books were aimed lower down the social scale; for instance, Reverend William Loftie’s A Plea for Art in the House, the first in a wellknown series, was explicitly aimed at ‘people of moderate or small income’.³⁵ Loftie was a clergyman and a Gothic enthusiast but no promoter of Gothic in a domestic context, as evidenced by his statement that ‘the best periods of domestic furniture are not gothic’.³⁶ Later volumes in the series pointed away from Gothic, anticipating the Queen Anne style and the emerging ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement.³⁷

M     

.................................................................................................................................. This dilution of the Gothic style was evident in other directions. From the late s Henry Cole assembled an apparatus around himself that sought to improve the nature and quality of British design.³⁸ The Government Schools of Design, the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), and the Great Exhibition of  were all closely related to Cole’s emerging department, which, like Scott and Eastlake, attempted to educate both designers and the general public in good taste. Cole and his circle absorbed Pugin’s principles, but did not necessarily see Gothic as the solution. The South Kensington museum acquired a significant array of medieval objects as examples of good design and some of Pugin’s exhibits from the Great Exhibition were acquired for similar reasons, but Gothic style objects only constituted one facet of the museum’s ³⁴ Eastlake, Hints, plates VI, VII, VIII, and IX between pp.  and . ³⁵ W. J. Loftie, A Plea for Art in the House, nd edn (London: Macmillan, ), cited in Emma Ferrey, ‘ “The Other Miss Faulkner”: Lucy Orrinsmith and the “Art at Home” Series’, Journal of William Morris Studies, / (): . ³⁶ Loftie, Plea for Art, . ³⁷ For an overview of this series see Emma Ferry, ‘ “Information for the Ignorant and Aid for the Advancing . . .”: Macmillan’s “Art at Home” Series, –’, in Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde (eds), Design and the Modern Magazine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ³⁸ Elizabeth Bonythorn and Anthony Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole (London: V&A publications, ).

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collecting policy. In this context Gothic could be an example of good design but so could objects designed in the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance styles—Gothic was not the solution, just one of the options. The best known publication of Cole’s circle was The Grammar of Ornament, written by Owen Jones and published in . Jones started the book with thirty-seven ‘Propositions’, which he put forward as ‘General principles in the arrangement of form and colour . . . which are advocated throughout this work’. Several of Jones’s propositions were taken from Pugin, including number : ‘Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed’ is derived directly from True Principles and proposition  about coventionalizing natural forms, relied heavily on Floriated Ornament.³⁹ Despite its debt to medievalism, the Grammar of Ornament made no attempt to promote Gothic over other styles. ‘Medieval Ornament’ accounts for  of the  colour illustrations—as much as any other style or category—but Gothic was not presented as the best or even the preferable solution. Jones was far more international in his inspiration and proposed a more universal understanding of the principles that lay behind design. In his introduction to ‘Medieval Ornament’ he suggested that: In the thirteenth century, beyond all others, architecture was in its zenith. The mosques of Cairo, the Alhambra, Salisbury, Lincoln, Westminster all possess the same secret of producing the broadest general effects combined with the most elaborate decoration. In all these buildings there is a family likeness; although the forms widely differ, the principles on which they are based are the same.⁴⁰

In some respects this passage relies on the ideas that fed into the Gothic Revival but its purpose and effect is almost the opposite. While celebrating some of the major English Gothic cathedrals, Jones argues that the principles that determined their form were shared by the great Islamic buildings of the thirteenth century. This was a far more powerful critique of the Gothic Revival than simply suggesting classicism was superior, Jones implied that the advocates of Gothic had some good ideas but did not really understand what they had discovered. Perhaps this is what Scott had in mind when he suggested in Remarks that the emergence of art history was ‘a hindrance rather than an help to us as artists’.⁴¹ The problem for Scott was that the selective historicism of Gothic had started to look narrow. Championing Gothic for Christian buildings still had a compelling logic but promoting the same style for the secular world was far more problematic in the face of Jones’s internationalist historicism. The oblique defence of medievalism, made through the claim that it followed principles rather than historical precedent, had actually resulted in the dilution of the very stylistic programme that the advocates of Gothic had initially set out to promote. Reducing the superiority of Gothic to abstract principles allowed advocates of other styles to argue against the initial ³⁹ Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day & Sons, ), , . Augustus Welby Pugin, Floriated Ornament: A Series of Thirty-One Designs (London: H. G. Bohn, ). ⁴⁰ Jones, Grammar of Ornament, . ⁴¹ Scott, Remarks, .

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proposition and Pugin’s principles were general enough for others to claim that they did not necessarily imply pointed arches and flying buttresses.

T    G R

.................................................................................................................................. Although Scott’s vision of secular medievalism never became dominant, the ideas, innovations and aesthetics of the Victorian Gothic had a profound influence on the emerging cultural initiatives of the late nineteenth century. The debt of the Arts and Crafts movement to Victorian medievalism is widely accepted but historians of Aestheticism have been far more resistant to acknowledge its influence.⁴² While a series of young architects who had trained with Goths became the pioneers of the aesthetic leaning ‘Queen Anne’ style, others revised their approach to Gothic along more aesthetic lines. G. F. Bodley, George Gilbert Scott junior, and J. J. Micklethwaite all rejected High Victorian Gothic in favour of a medievalism that was very different in tone. Anyone who visits Bodley’s All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, to this day will find a Gothic Revival interior furnished by William Morris’s firm in a style that many would associate with Aestheticism.⁴³ Secular Aestheticism was far more heavily influenced by medievalism than most recent historians are prepared to acknowledge. In , just after Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel was finished and before the completion of Street’s Royal Courts of Justice, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience was performed for the first time at the Opera Comique. This light opera is an extended parody of Aestheticism: ‘Bunthorne’ pretends to be poetic and intense in order to court favour with impressionable women, forcing spurned lovers (two soldiers and a duke) to assume an aesthetic demeanour to win them back. Bunthorne’s confession that he is not an aesthete suggests medievalism was integral, not opposed to the new movement: Let me confess! A languid love for Lilies does not blight me! Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me! I do not care for dirty greens By any means. I do not long for all one sees That’s Japanese. ⁴² See Lynn Federle Orr, ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde in Context’, in Stephen Calloway and L. F. Orr (eds), The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde – (London: V&A Publishing, ), –. ⁴³ For an account of the reaction against High Victorian Gothic see Gavin Stamp, An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (–) and the Late Gothic Revival (Donnington: Shaun Tyas, ), –, for All Saints Jesus Lane see: Michael Hall, ‘The Rise of Refinement: G. F. Bodley’s All Saints, Cambridge, and the Return to English Models in Gothic Architecture of the s’, Architectural History,  (): –.

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I am not fond of uttering platitudes In stained-glass attitudes. In short, my mediaevalism’s affectation, Born of a morbid love of admiration.⁴⁴

Bunthorn’s confession acknowledges Japanese design, lilies, and muted colours but he summarizes his ‘affectation’ as ‘medievalism’ and the mannered postures adopted by aesthetes are characterized as ‘stained glass attitudes’, clearly referring to medieval style figures in Gothic Revival churches. The figure that personifies this later Victorian blend between medievalism and Aestheticism is William Burges, arguably the most spectacular Gothic Revival architect of all. His friendship with E. W. Godwin is instructive: Godwin’s early medievalism gave way almost completely to Anglo-Japanese Aestheticism while Burges incorporated Aesthetic elements within his predominantly Gothic designs. Although Burges’s work continued to be dominated by Gothic, he seems to have accepted the primacy of design principles over style quite literally. He organized the Medieval Court in the International Exhibition of  but saw more ‘medievalism’ in the Japanese Court: ‘If, however, the visitor wishes to see the real Middle Ages, he must visit the Japanese Court, for at the present day the arts of the Middle Ages have deserted Europe, and are only to be found in the East.’⁴⁵ His published account of the Japanese Court describes his amazement at the sophistication of Japanese design: ‘these hitherto unknown barbarians appear not only to know all that the Middle Ages knew, but in some respects are beyond them and us as well’.⁴⁶ Burgess’s use of the term ‘barbarian’ is not just bigotry, it is a reference to the Gothic political theory that depicted the barbarian Gothic tribes as the righteous liberators of late Classical Europe.⁴⁷ Like Owen Jones, Burges seems to have believed that the underlying principles of good design could be expressed without using the Gothic style at all. The washstand that Burges designed in  is a good example of his eclectic designs.⁴⁸ The overall impression that the object creates is still medieval, signalled by the heavy construction, the prominent strap hinges on the doors, and the quatrefoils that frame the upper mirrors and shape the piercings in the flanks. But a variety of eclectic influences modify the feel of the washstand. Japanese influence is clear: butterflies are carved into the wood, carp inlaid in silver into the marble bowl, and painted motifs above and below the cupboard doors are derived from ‘mon’—Japanese family crests. Above the tap, either side of a Romanesque shaped mirror, are painted patterns that

⁴⁴ W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride (New York: Stoddart, ), –. ⁴⁵ William Burges, ‘The International Exhibition. Second Article’, Gentleman’s Magazine,   (July–Sept. ): . ⁴⁶ William Burges, ‘The Japanese Court at the International Exhibition’, Gentleman’s Magazine,   (July–Sept. ): . ⁴⁷ For the roots of Gothic political theory and its influence on medievalism see Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, ), esp. –. ⁴⁸ Victoria and Albert Museum, London, museum number W. to D- .

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derive from Italian Renaissance ornament and the tap itself takes the shape of a beast that Burges probably found in his extensive research into illuminated manuscripts in the British Library. Burges commissioned this piece of furniture for the guest room in the Tower House, a large mansion that he built as his home in an early medieval style in Holland Park. Within this Gothic palace there is little doubt that visitors would experience this object as a facet of Victorian medievalism but it is a fusion of medieval, Romanesque, and Renaissance with English, Japanese, and Italian design, which shows that medievalism did not disappear so much as merge with the wider influences of the s. Late in his career, Burges, like Ruskin, hoped that a reformation in taste would start in the bourgeois interior: It appears to me that our art, especially in this country, is domestic, and that the best way of advancing its progress is to do our best in our own houses. It is probable, if we once manage to obtain a large amount of art and colour in our sitting-rooms, that the improvement may gradually extend to our costume, and perhaps eventually to the architecture of our houses.⁴⁹

Burges’s attitude is far less polemic that that of Pugin or Scott, but suggests that he acknowledged the complexity of imposing ‘good taste’ upon an expanding population. He is often characterized as the arch-medievalist but this is a simplistic portrayal of a far more complex attitude: he openly admired architecture and ornament from around the world and merged it creatively within the medievalism that he had developed throughout his career. The work of William Burges demonstrates that Aestheticism was not just a reaction against Gothic but a strand of design that developed in parallel to and sometimes within the framework of Victorian medievalism. Ultimately then, Pugin’s conviction that the true principles of design could only be found in Gothic was less influential than the principles themselves. It was not so much that medievalism had failed but that the selective historicism that underlay it gradually lost its credibility. By the later nineteenth century the audience that design reformers addressed was far wider than the group that Pugin hoped to influence in the s. The principles of ‘correct’ design were promoted by museums, the Schools of Design, and a range of authors, but these principles no longer led exclusively to medievalism.

S  Bonythorn, Elizabeth, and Anthony Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole (London: V&A publications, ). Brooks Chris (ed.), The Albert Memorial: The Prince Consort National Memorial: Its History, Contexts, and Conservation. (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). ⁴⁹ William Burges, Art Applied to Industry (Oxford: J. H. Parker, ), .

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Brooks, Chris, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, ) Charlesworth, Michael (ed.), The Gothic Revival –, Literary Sources and Documents,  vols, iii. Gothic and National Architecture (Mountfield: Helm Information, ). Daniels, Rebecca, and Geoff Brandwood (eds), Ruskin and Architecture (Reading: Spire, ). Ferry, Emma, ‘ “Information for the Ignorant and Aid for the Advancing . . .”: Macmillan’s “Art at Home” series, –’, in Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde (eds), Design and the Modern Magazine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. Hall, Michael, ‘The Rise of Refinement: G. F. Bodley’s All Saints, Cambridge, and the Return to English Models in Gothic Architecture of the s’, Architectural History,  (): –. Hill, Rosemary, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, ). Stamp, Gavin, An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (–) and the Late Gothic Revival (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

                

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The growth of a tree must be looked for at its extremities. If there is no life at the ends of its branches, its heart is dead. (British MP Gathorne Hardy, speaking of the Melanesian Mission in )

D the Victorian period Britain presided at the head of the largest territorial empire the world had ever known. It naturally followed that its architecture was exported across the globe. Indeed, Britain’s standing as a centre of manufacturing and cultural production during this period ensured that its creative and technological influence extended well beyond its shores, even its own empire. This included other Anglophone cultures such as that of the United States of America. Of course, the United States had once been part of Britain’s burgeoning imperial enterprise—its very origins, in fact—but even after American independence in the late eighteenth century, British art and industry continued to exert an appreciable influence on artistic production there, none more so than the Gothic Revival movement in architecture during the early to mid-Victorian period. In many ways, Britain’s story vis-à-vis the Gothic Revival is also that of much of the English-speaking world. In this chapter I shall concentrate on the extension of the Gothic Revival movement in architecture outside of Europe as it developed in Britain’s former colonial empire and the United States of America. The Gothic Revival was of course a style of architecture that, although heavily associated with religion and ecclesiastical architecture, found its way into all manner of building types, including government buildings, museums, schools, universities, factories, train stations, and even domestic dwellings. At the height of its influence in the s and s, virtually no building type was considered immune from its treatment. However, owing to the Gothic style’s strong connection to church architecture dating back to the Middle Ages, it was in the sphere

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of religious architecture that we perhaps see the Gothic Revival’s most obvious, extensive, and even dramatic application beyond Europe.

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.................................................................................................................................. Before examining the subject of ecclesiastical Gothic at length, it is worth making a few remarks about the influence of the Gothic Revival in civic and secular architecture beyond Europe. As mentioned, the style found its way into many different types of building during the Victorian period. While it may have seemed logical for the Gothic style to be used for purposes other than ecclesiastical—after all, it was applied to more than just churches during the Middle Ages—this was neither assumed by those who promoted it nor ever fully accepted by those who challenged it, especially with respect to its use in the design of monumental civic buildings. In Britain ‘secular Gothic’, as it became known, had to force its way into professional respectability. It was of course up against the entrenched claims of classicism as the lingua franca of public and state architecture dating back to the early seventeenth century. This was a prejudice that proved hard to overcome, particularly in the minds of those who were responsible for controlling public monies, as demonstrated in the controversy over the design of the new government offices in Whitehall between  and —following the budgetary debacle that tainted the building of the new Houses of Parliament, the first great revival of Gothic architecture in a state building.¹ But thanks in no small part to the efforts of architects and critics such as G. G. Scott, G. E. Street, and John Ruskin, especially Scott with his publication of Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture in , the Gothic Revival did for a time become both accepted and fashionable in the design of non-religious buildings. To be sure, it had already made inroads in the domestic realm by this time, but was now considered appropriate for civic and state architecture too. Ironically, some of the best and most extensive set-pieces of Gothic Revival urbanism in the world during this time are to be found outside the British Isles. One such was the city of Bombay, which had experienced an economic boom during the s owing to the cotton trade. What resulted was a dazzling array of Ruskinian-style structures designed and built between about  and . Marked by their polychrome vitality, these buildings adopted Southern rather than Northern European forms largely in response to the climate. Most prominent among them were the Public Works Office (–), the High Court (–), the New Post Office (–), and Elphinstone College (). The most spectacular, however, is the Victoria Terminus (–) by F. W. Stevens. A behemoth of a building, bristling with Gothicized ornament of every conceivable description, this structure, as a key nodal point in the extensive network of ¹ G. A. Bremner, ‘Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of Mid-Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, / (): –.

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Figure .. G. G. Scott, Convocation Hall, University of Bombay, –. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, photograph by Francis Frith (–), acquired from F. Frith & Co., .

railways that snaked their way through some , miles of the Indian Subcontinent, symbolized above all the command Britain exercised over the region. Well-known architects were also involved here, such as G. G. Scott with his designs for the University of Bombay (-) (Fig. .). Rendered in an exquisitely detailed Venetian Gothic to suit the ‘Oriental’ context, the university’s buildings are the most authoritative and skilfully composed of the Gothic Revival structures in nineteenthcentury British Bombay. Interestingly, the project was a collaborative enterprise between the imperial authorities and local Parsi philanthropists. Relationships of this kind led to further collaborations that saw the erection of numerous hospitals and schools for native inhabitants throughout the city, many of which were designed by the Parsi engineer-cum-architect M. C Murzban, in what by the s had become a recognizably ‘Bombay Gothic’ idiom.²

² P. Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.

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Other important locations for this kind of architecture include Christchurch, New Zealand, with its wonderful array of civic buildings designed by the English émigré architect Benjamin Mountfort. Until their grizzly destruction by two successive earthquakes in  and , these structures, which comprised the Provincial Council Buildings (–), the Museum (–), Christ’s College (–), and Canterbury College (–), among others, were arguably the most complete and interesting concentration of Gothic Revival buildings anywhere in the world.³ As Mountfort was an architect touched by the full spirit of the Gothic Revival movement, it is hardly surprising that the city of Christchurch ended up looking akin to a Puginstyle medieval village. Similarly, in Ottawa, Canada, the Canadian Parliament buildings atop Parliament Hill (–) by Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones dominate their surroundings with their multiplicity of towers and turrets rising high above the city. After the Battle of the Styles debate in London, these buildings were perhaps the first significant retaliation of the Gothic Revival cause in the secular domain following Scott’s humiliating defeat by Lord Palmerston over the design of the Foreign Office in .⁴ Commercial institutions were not immune from the Gothic Revival either. The ANZ (former ES&A) Bank building on Collins Street, Melbourne (–), by Pugin-trained revivalist William Wardell is a particularly fine example, with its medieval palace-type façade and rich polychrome interiors. Likewise, in the United States, the Gothic Revival was making significant inroads into the commercial world through the bold, near aggressive buildings of the Pennsylvanian architect Frank Furness. In his Provident Life and Trust Building (–) in Philadelphia, for example, there is an astonishingly energetic articulation of Gothic forms and motifs jostling with one other across the façade, leading to a style that is recognizably medieval if idiosyncratic.⁵ Educational buildings, too, were often rendered in one or other medieval style during this period, ranging from Romanesque through to Tudor Gothic. With significant expansion of the higher education sector in Britain’s colonies during the latter part of the nineteenth century, college and university architecture especially was representative of this trend. This was in large part owing to its emulation, if not imitation, of the Oxbridge collegiate model. Prominent examples include Edmund Blacket’s buildings at the University of Sydney (–), in particular the Great Hall; the Old Quadrangle (F. M. White, –) and Wilson Hall (Joseph Reed, –) at the University of Melbourne (Fig. .); and the High Victorian tones of the Mitchell Building, University of Adelaide (–), by William McMinn.⁶ Elsewhere we ³ Ian Lochhead, A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, ), –. ⁴ Harold Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture,  vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ii. –. ⁵ Furness designed many such commercial buildings in the city of Philadelphia. See M. J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ). ⁶ For Melbourne, see P. Goad and G. Tibbits, Architecture on Campus: A Guide to the University of Melbourne and its Colleges (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, ); J. Benjamin and E. Wubben,

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Figure .. Joseph Reed, Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, –, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

have the Clocktower Building and Geology Block at the University of Otago (–), Dunedin, New Zealand, by Maxwell Bury (recalling Scott’s clocktower at the University of Glasgow), as well as the University of Bombay library and convocation hall by Scott already mentioned. Also in British India could be found Government College, Lahore (–), now Pakistan, by W. Purdon, with its purer Gothic formality; while in Canada we see something altogether different with the adoption of Neo-Romanesque at the buildings for University College, Toronto (), by Cumberland and Storm, and Theological Hall, Queen’s University, Kingston (), by Gordon and Helliwell.⁷ Related to educational buildings were public institutions such as museums and galleries, also prone to Gothic treatment, as already noted in the case of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. Although this tendency had begun with Deane and Woodward’s much publicized design for the Natural History Museum, Oxford (–), one of the more striking examples of this type was Peter Bonnet

Architectural Ornament: The History and Art of Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, ). ⁷ Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India – (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), .

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Wright’s National Academy of the Arts, New York (–), recalling with incredible vividness the medieval façade of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice.⁸ Equally intriguing is the Thornhill and Mayne Memorial, Allahabad, India (), by Roskell Bayne, which was a public library and museum, rendered in an extraordinary Burgesian form of heavy French Gothic.⁹ In a similar but more spectacular vein is Furness & Hewitt’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (–), which, although contained within a rather modern, regularized massing of forms, was unmistakably embroidered with medieval Gothicized detail.

R   E

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The established Church of England and its imperial mission Despite the spread of secular Gothic Revival architecture in the nineteenth century, the style’s presence outside Europe was mostly apparent in religious buildings. This may be explained in large part by the dramatic surge in church extension and missionary activity during the period. The Christian missionary enterprise in its broadest, nondenominational sense had long been a concern to Britain as a colonizing power, but it was only following the great waves of religious enthusiasm and spiritual renewal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that a serious organizational imperative arose. The vast energies released by these spiritual reform movements led to the formation of churches and institutions that enabled a more focused and orderly extension of Christianity across the globe. To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church had long been active in this domain owing to its transnational constitution, having promoted systematic Christian evangelization for centuries. Although the Church of England, by the year , had three affiliate missionary organisations—the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (), and the Church Missionary Society ()—little had been accomplished in terms of evangelizing the non-European world. Indeed, Dissenting and Nonconformist Protestant sects and churches had done more by the beginning of the Victorian era. It was not until around the beginning of the s that the perceived need to promote Christianity as a plank in British imperial policy really took root in the ‘official mind’ of the British ruling classes. As K. T. Hoppen has observed, ‘never was Britain more religious than in the Victorian age’, and this necessarily affected the way Britain perceived itself and its moral ⁸ Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, ), –. ⁹ Indeed, Philip Davies believes that, as William Emerson was in the area, he may well have played a hand in its design. See Davies, Splendours of the Raj, .

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‘obligation’ to the wider world, particularly with respect to its own colonial empire.¹⁰ Thus, in  was launched the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund (CBF) for the purpose of establishing officially sanctioned Church of England dioceses throughout the British empire. A number of Anglican dioceses already existed in parts of Britain’s empire, such as those in Nova Scotia (), Calcutta (), and Jamaica (); but the advent of the CBF, along with the reinvigoration of the moribund Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), upped the ante considerably in terms of motivation, money, and manpower. In the thirty years between its inauguration and c., the CBF was responsible for erecting around forty new dioceses, whereas only ten had been founded in the previous  years of British colonial expansion. With this came a wave of church-building activity. As William Whyte explains elsewhere in this volume, Pugin had already transformed the world of ecclesiastical architecture in Britain through his polemics regarding pointed, or ‘Gothic’, architecture as the only style fit for a self-confessed Christian nation. Although he was a Roman Catholic convert, Pugin’s ideas soon became more widely accepted, penetrating Anglican circles and leading to the formation of societies dedicated specifically to the study and promotion of medieval Gothic architecture, including the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society and the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, both founded in . The Camden Society’s ideas were especially widespread and influential owing to its principal organ The Ecclesiologist, a bi-monthly periodical dedicated to the study and revival of medieval architecture. As a style, the Gothic Revival had of course been extant for quite some time, but it was not until Pugin and the ecclesiologists that it acquired the lustre of a more serious, ‘scientific’, and even crusade-like endeavour characteristic of the Victorian age. The ideologies entrenched concerning medieval architecture’s claims to origins, authenticity, and ‘truthfulness’—all notions that appealed to the morally encumbered Victorian frame of mind—were carried to Britain’s colonies via a new and younger breed of Oxbridge-educated clergyman who saw it as partly their responsibility to promulgate this form of architecture in order to usher in a novel regime of orderliness and propriety with respect to the religious character, moral veracity, and even loyalty of colonial society. This included a greater sense of urgency towards evangelizing the indigenous peoples of the non-European world, who were not to be neglected in this project to elevate and fortify the moral fibre of empire. In this sense, the rather sudden and urgent deployment of this newly constituted form of Gothic architecture essentially had a fourfold purpose: to inspire and thereby transform the state of Christianity among the expatriate settler communities of the British empire through its self-evident beauty, integrity, and solemnity; to introduce higher levels of reverence, spirituality, and propriety through reformed liturgical ¹⁰ K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . For the politics surrounding the need for more systematic religious extension and its architectural consequences, see G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.– (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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practices; to mark out and identify the urban and rural landscapes of Britain’s empire as ones associated with a particular culture and the current social agenda of that culture; and, finally, to form, as one colonial bishop put it, a strong and convincing outward ‘face’ to ‘heathen’ indigenes within a broader programme of missionary evangelization, using architecture not only as a means to entice converts but also to correct their habits through its spatial and symbolic machinery. The early leaders in this endeavour were clergymen, not architects, as very little if any architectural expertise existed on the colonial frontier, especially with respect to contemporary ecclesiastical design. We therefore find numerous examples of clergymen acting as both designers and builders of churches in these environments, such as the Reverend F. H. Cox of Tasmania. Cox, like his bishop, the Reverend Francis Nixon of Hobart, were representative of this new breed of Anglican cleric who took the idea of ‘correct’ church architecture very seriously. The Tractarian spirit with which they were imbued necessitated that they hold the proper ordinance of the sacraments in high regard, along with their formal configuration. It was here that organizations such as the Ecclesiological Society proved particularly useful. Seeing the British colonial world as very much within its ambit, indeed a special and necessary aspect of its activity, the Society sent three church designs to Tasmania in the form of drawings and models, produced by one of the Britain’s most promising young architects of the Gothic

Figure .. R. C. Carpenter, St John the Baptist, Prosser Plains, Tasmania, –.

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Revival, R. C. Carpenter. The designs were for three church buildings of varying sizes, to be used depending upon the circumstances, with Cox using the smallest of the three as the basis for the parish church of St John the Baptist (), Prosser Plains (Buckland), near Hobart (Fig. .). This approach, which exploited the extensive network of Anglican clerical ties throughout the ever-expanding British world, would become something of pattern as more and more Anglican dioceses were erected across Britain’s empire during the course of the nineteenth century. In time, the Ecclesiological and Oxford Architectural societies would produce a series of published church designs specifically for use in colonial contexts, the best known collection of which is perhaps Instrumenta Ecclesiastica (–)—a type of pattern book for ‘correct’ church architecture and its accoutrements. There are many more examples of this kind where one can find assistance and advice being offered by the architectural societies to colonial bishops and clergymen, such as G. A. Selwyn in New Zealand, John Medley in New Brunswick, and James Chapman in Sri Lanka. Indeed, when asked how many churches around the world had been affected by the ideas of the Ecclesiological Society, John Mason Neale (one of the Society’s co-founders) is reputed to have replied: ‘It would be as difficult almost as to count the stars on a clear frosty night’.¹¹ This type of networking, it should be observed, was not the preserve of the High Church or Tractarian wing of the Church alone. Evangelicals, too, through the auspices of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), worked their contacts both within Britain and across the empire to establish principles and strategies for dealing with built infrastructure in the mission field, especially with respect to native agency (see later in the chapter).¹²

Episcopalians in the United States The ideas of these societies were transmitted further afield, beyond Britain and its empire, via Anglican networks. In the United States, for example, the Episcopal Church was receptive to these developments, establishing its own architectural society in the form of the New York Ecclesiological Society (), which printed its very own periodical, The New York Ecclesiologist. This organization involved the participation of some of nineteenth-century America’s most able and accomplished ecclesiastical architects and ecclesiologists, including Frank Wills, Richard Upjohn, and John Notman—all British immigrants.¹³ Wills and Upjohn quickly established reputations ¹¹ M. S. Lawson (ed.), Letters of J. M. Neale (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), . ¹² Emily Turner, ‘The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c.-’, Architectural History,  (), –. ¹³ Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). See also Lewis, Gothic Revival, –. Notman was Scottish, while Wills and Upjohn were English.

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as sure hands in proper Anglican church design, not only through their learned publications, but also through the many ‘correct’ buildings they designed across the fledgling United States. Notman, too, became noted for his adaptations of known English models, such as St Mark’s, Philadelphia (), based on R. C. Carpenter’s design for All Saints’, Brighton (), and St Stephen’s, Westminster (), by Benjamin Ferrey.¹⁴ Although Upjohn had produced a relatively competent rendition of late medieval English Gothic as early as  with his design for Trinity Church, New York (–), it was the earlier and smaller parish church of St. James the Less (–), also in the city of Philadelphia, with its pure and more sober Early English aesthetic—essentially an adaptation of the ancient and ‘approved’ medieval church of St. Michael’s, Longstanton (near Cambridge)—that set the tone for future developments in American Episcopalian architecture. The influence of Wills and Upjohn stretched as far south and west as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and even California where so-called ‘carpenter gothic’ (i.e. timber) versions of Gothic Revival parish churches were often considered more appropriate to the rapidly evolving economic and religious circumstances of these frontier environments. A contributory factor in the popular, near fanatical reception of medieval forms in the US, particularly in the southern states, was the seduction of medieval romance transmitted through an insatiable appetite for the novels of Walter Scott. This was especially the case among the planter classes who, owing to their English sympathies and connections, tended to be Episcopalian, and who had both the means and inclination to recreate this ‘medieval world’ in built form.¹⁵ The Gothic impulse in ecclesiastical architecture would continue well into the early twentieth century in the United States, as demonstrated by the monumental efforts of Ralph Adams Cram at the Episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York City (–), and Lewis P. Hobart at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco (–).¹⁶

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.................................................................................................................................. If Anglicans initially were not well prepared, the same cannot be said for the Roman Catholic Church and its missionaries. Church ritual and ceremony, including its ¹⁴ Stanton, Gothic Revival, –. ¹⁵ Stephen McNair, ‘Richard Upjohn and the Gothic Revival in Antebellum Alabama’, in T. BrittainCatlin, J. De Maeyer, and M. Bressani (eds), Gothic Revival Worldwide: A. W. N. Pugin’s Influence Worldwide (Leuven: Leuven University Press, ), –. There were also some correct and handsome brick and stone churches built by these architects in these parts of the US, such as Christ Episcopal Church, Napoleonville, Louisiana (c.) by Wills. See Stanton, Gothic Revival, –. ¹⁶ Although St John the Divine was commenced in  to the Romanesque designs of Heins and Lafarge, Cram took over in , changing the design to Gothic Revival. See Lewis, Gothic Revival, –.

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proper architectural setting, were of course central to Catholic worship. This concern, more or less, followed Catholics wherever they went, including into British colonial territory. Through emancipation, enhanced seminary education, and the efforts of internationally orientated organizations such as the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, plans to extend the presence of the Catholic faith in Britain’s colonies through missionary work and the erection of new dioceses were well under way by the early part of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Again, Australia was targeted early on by Catholics, owing partly to its large Irish immigrant population (both convicts and those escaping poverty and starvation in Ireland), and partly because of the potential it offered to extend Roman Catholic influence in a society that was often characterized as comparatively irreligious. Architecturally speaking, this endeavour could not have been better equipped, for it had at its disposal none other than the ‘father’ of the modern Gothic Revival movement in Britain, A. W. N. Pugin. Following the erection of the Roman Catholic diocese of Hobart Town in  (covering virtually all of what was Tasmania, originally Van Diemen’s Land), Robert William Willson, a close friend of Pugin’s, was installed as bishop. Willson had a clear vision for his new diocese that included the rolling out of the full and proper ordinances of the Church in all their splendour and glory—the creation of nothing less than a ‘Gothic paradise’ in the Antipodes, as Brian Andrews has observed.¹⁸ To this end Pugin was engaged to design the full kit and caboodle—everything from church plate, vestments, and stained glass, through to headstones, fonts, and whole church buildings.¹⁹ Indeed, the two complete designs for parish churches he presented to Willson—what would become St Paul’s, Oatlands (–), and St Patrick’s, Colebrook (–)—were masterful specimens in the Gothic Revival idiom, and would have counted among the neatest and most correct examples of church architecture based on medieval precedent to be found anywhere in Britain’s colonies at the time. When one considers the distances involved, and the remoteness of the location, Willson’s and Pugin’s vision for a revived Gothic world in the wilds of Tasmania was truly remarkable. Pugin was also keen to assist Willson’s colleague in Sydney, Bishop John Bede Polding, to whom he sent a number of designs for churches. As Pugin himself confidently remarked with respect to these developments:

¹⁷ For a concise account of the extension of Catholicism in the British empire, see Hilary M. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.– (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ¹⁸ Brian Andrews, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin at the Antipodes (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, ). ¹⁹ For a concise account of Pugin in Australia see Brian Andrews, ‘ “Solemn Chancels and Cross Crowned Spires”: Pugin’s Antipodean Vision and its Implementation’, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design,  (): –.

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more than one Bishop has departed across the ocean to the antipodes, carrying the seeds of Christian design to grow and flourish in the New World, and soon the solemn chancels and cross-crowned spires will arise, the last object which the mariner will behold on the shores of the Pacific till their venerable originals greet his glad view on England’s shores.²⁰

In time these rather modest beginnings, both Anglican and Catholic, would lead to some of the most ambitious projects for Gothic Revival cathedrals anywhere in the world, involving some of the biggest names in Victorian architecture such as G. G. Scott, William Butterfield, G. F. Bodley, William Burges, J. L. Pearson, and William Emerson. Indeed, Scott’s hybrid timber/stone design for Christchurch, New Zealand (), as well as William Butterfield’s proposals for Melbourne (St Paul’s, ) and Adelaide (St Peter’s, ), if built as planned, would have been among the most unique and spectacular of the Victorian period.²¹ Later came J. L. Pearson’s no-nonsense masculine vision for St John’s cathedral, Brisbane (–), following a somewhat similar unbuilt proposal by Burges (). Vying with these for beauty and scale, if not surpassing them, are William Wardell’s truly impressive Roman Catholic cathedrals of St Patrick’s, Melbourne (–), and St Mary’s, Sydney (–)—with St Mary’s being on a scale comparable with that of an ancient European cathedral.²²

O     

.................................................................................................................................. By the s Presbyterian and Nonconformist congregations had also begun getting in on the act, having absorbed the lessons of the Gothic Revival and its application to ecclesiastical architecture. Until this point, Nonconformist architecture, especially, had been a largely practical affair. The other-worldly theology of orthodox Protestantism had not encouraged the pursuit of such lowly matters as architecture—almost any building could serve as a Methodist chapel. To be sure, although John Ruskin’s elegant musings on the nature and meaning of medieval forms in architecture had begun to free Gothic architecture from ‘popish’ associations, it was not until the publication of the Reverend Frederick Jobson’s Chapel and School Architecture () ²⁰ Pugin quoted in Andrews, ‘Solemn Chancels’, . ²¹ Notwithstanding, the Victorian Architect interior of Butterfield’s cathedral in Melbourne must stand as one of his most impressive interiors, and a classic of the High Victorian idiom. See Paul Thompson, William Butterfield: (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), ; Bremner, Imperial Gothic, –. ²² For Wardell, see Ursula de Jong, (ed.), W.W. Wardell: The Architect and his Era—Centenary Papers (Geelong: Deakin University, ).

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that Nonconformist attitudes towards Gothic really began to change. Jobson suggested that the Gothic style of architecture was not only economical but also preferable in northern climates. More importantly, as Christopher Wakeling has reminded us, Jobson declared, in a manner indeed redolent of Ruskin, that ‘Truth in Architecture is not necessarily connected with Error in Religion.’²³ Gothic was now safe for strict Protestant use. In the colonies, Nonconformists wasted little time in adopting the new style. By the s and s nearly all the major Nonconformist congregations were beginning to build, or had already built, churches in one or other medieval style. In some cases this occurred even earlier. We find evidence of this as early as  in South Africa in Thornley Smith’s design for the Commemoration Methodist Chapel (–), Grahamstown.²⁴ Although this was not a sophisticated use of the style (it would have horrified Pugin), it nevertheless demonstrates that Nonconformists were open to Gothic architecture from an early date. Other prominent examples of such congregations utilizing the Gothic style in ecclesiastical architecture can be found in the city of Melbourne. For example, facing each other across Russell Street on the south-western edge of Eastern Hill, are St Michael’s (Unitarian) and the Scots’ Church (Presbyterian). These buildings were completed in , one in a richly polychromatic, neo-Lombardic style (St Michael’s), the other in a rather heavy, nondescript, decorated Gothic (the Scots’ Church) (Fig. .). At the time, these buildings were comparable, if not superior, to the then Anglican cathedral of St Paul’s on Flinders Street. This pattern of denominational representation through church architecture was repeated in towns and cities across Australia in the latter part of the nineteenth century, many in the Gothic Revival style. Other, and even earlier, examples in and around the city of Melbourne include the Wesleyan churches on Lonsdale Street () and at the corner of Fitzroy and Princes streets, St Kilda (–), and the Congregational church, Malvern Road, Prahran ()—the Lonsdale Street church being a particularly fine example of Gothic Revival architecture in the city.²⁵ In Canada, too, it is possible to trace the rise of Gothic Revivalism in Nonconformist architecture at this time. Perhaps the most spectacular specimen of this phenomenon came in the form of Henry Langley’s Metropolitan Methodist Church in Toronto (–). Envisaged on a huge scale, it was quite literally a ‘cathedral of Methodism’. In terms of visual impact in the urban landscape, it certainly challenged, perhaps even ²³ Jobson quoted in Christopher Wakeling, ‘Nonconformity and Victorian Architecture’, in B. Cherry (ed.), Dissent and the Gothic Revival (London: The Chapels Society, ), . Serious consideration of Gothic architecture for Nonconformist churches can be traced back even further, to the Wesleyan’s Model Plan Committee (established ) and an article on Nonconformist chapels that appeared in the Congregational Year Book for . ²⁴ Leslie A. Hewson, They Seek a City: Methodism in Grahamstown (Grahamstown: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, ), –. ²⁵ See Miles Lewis (ed.), Victorian Churches: Their Origins, their Story and their Architecture (Melbourne: National Trust of Australia, ).

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Figure .. Reed & Barnes architects, The Scots’ Presbyterian church (left, –), and St Michael’s Independent (Congregationalist) church (right, ), on Collins Street, Melbourne, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

surpassed, the Anglican cathedral of St James (–). Langley also helped to realize the aspirations of Baptist congregations in this regard through his designs for the New Baptist Church, Port Hope (), and the Jarvis Street Church, Toronto (). Likewise, Presbyterians were forging ahead with distinctive and impressive designs of their own. In terms of religious equality in the colonies, adherents of the Church of Scotland had a point: after all, the empire was British, not exclusively English, and theirs was an established Church, too.²⁶ There had, of course, been a long tradition of ²⁶ Indeed, in parts of British India, for example, Presbyterian clergy were allowed to appropriate Anglican churches from time to time to minister to Scottish soldiers in the Indian army. See Colonial Church Chronicle,  (Feb. ): –. An argument of this kind had also been made by Francis

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Figure .. Jacob Wrey Mould, All Souls Unitarian Church, New York, –.

classicism associated with Presbyterian churches in Britain’s colonies, but Gothic was also being freely adapted by the mid-nineteenth century, often with distinctive results. Again, the Scots’ Church, Melbourne, is one example of this, as is the intriguing design for St Andrew’s, King Street, Toronto (), with its Romanesque-cum-Scottish Baronial aesthetic. It was the earlier and somewhat simpler forms of medieval architecture such as the Romanesque or Early English that proved most popular in the United States of America among denominations other than Anglican and Roman Catholic, where the likes of Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans were predominant.²⁷ As Michael J. Lewis has observed, these ultra-Protestant denominations in America—mainly middle-class and far from immune to architectural Makemie in the eighteenth century. See Boyd Stanley Schlenther, ‘Religious Faith and Commercial Empire’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²⁷ For example, for the context surrounding the rise and spread of Methodism, see David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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fashion—preferred earlier styles for they viewed them as being free of the taint of Catholic ritualism, especially the Romanesque, which was understood to link congregations to the simpler forms of early Christianity as opposed to the ‘corruption’ of the Gothic Middle Ages.²⁸ In realizing this ambition they were assisted by publications such as that by Jobson and, perhaps more importantly, A Book of Plans for Churches and Parsonages, produced in  by the Central Committee of the Congregational Churches in the United States, which contained numerous designs for churches based loosely on Romanesque or Rundbogenstil models. The results of this approach could, in some instances, be quite spectacular, such as All Souls Unitarian church, New York (–), by Jacob Wrey Mould, with its visually arresting polychrome effect (Fig. .).²⁹ Now mysticism free, various styles of Gothic architecture also became increasingly popular among Protestant congregations. Examples of this trend can be seen in the Perpendicular Gothic designs of Minard Lafever in New York (e.g. Church of the Divine Unity, Broadway, ), or, later, in the High Victorian muscularity of Frank Furness and George Hewitt’s design for the Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion, Philadelphia (–).³⁰

A    

.................................................................................................................................. One of the key aspects and, indeed, differences between Gothic Revival church architecture in Britain and the wider British world during the Victorian period was the necessity for adaptation. Theories concerning how best to adapt Gothic forms— forms that originally evolved in the temperate climes of Northern Europe—to the extreme conditions experienced in much of Britain’s empire (both hot and cold) were at the heart of progressive, mid-nineteenth-century ecclesiology. Informed by advances in geology, natural science, and theology, including nascent theories of evolution, architectural adaptation of this kind yielded some unique if unexpected results, pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in ecclesiastical design. This tactic was both encouraged and promoted by the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society, which discussed and debated the subject at length in the pages of The Ecclesiologist, considering it fundamental to the advancement of what they termed ‘colonial ecclesiology’. Connected to wider debates then current in British architecture, such as the theory of ‘developement’, discussions around adaptation looked to a new, vital, and ultimately ²⁸ Lewis, Gothic Revival, . ²⁹ M. J. Lewis, ‘Churches of the Holy Zebra: The Technicolour Meeting House in North America’, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design,  (): –. ³⁰ Lewis, ‘Churches of the Holy Zebra’, –.

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flexible future for ‘modern’ church design. Thus, it was important to appreciate the difference between ‘essentials’ and ‘accidentals’, argued Benjamin Webb, if a genuine ‘Tropical Pointed’ was to evolve in Britain’s colonies: ‘if the result be unlike an English church’, he exclaimed, ‘what will that matter, provided we have a building correct in plan and detail, and accurately suited to the particular climate’.³¹ Indeed, at around the same time, Webb’s friend and colleague, A. J. B. Beresford Hope, who was a key member and patron of the Ecclesiological Society, opined that: Our present studies proceed upon the ever-present assumption that the Christian Church is a living and an energizing body . . . We have to sift, and probe, and test the methods which she has adopted . . . We must not for this discovery confine ourselves to England or to the Western Church, we must penetrate to the East and her venerable hereditary uses . . . we must be as familiar with San Clemente, Santa Sophia, and the church of the Holy Sepulchre, as with Heckington and York Minster . . . We should remember that Great Britain reigns over the torrid and the hyperborean zone, that she will soon have to rear temples of the True Faith in Benares and Labrador, Newfoundland and Cathay.³²

In practice the issues focused on pragmatic concerns, such as how climatic limitations might affect the size, shape, and materiality of buildings, as well as certain cultural considerations, including the best ways to present Christian architecture to a nonChristian (‘heathen’) audience. Two main approaches for adapting Gothic forms to extreme conditions were developed: the speluncar, or ‘cave-like’, approach that relied on what today would be referred to as thermal mass (heavy, thick walls with few openings to shut out the heat), and the so-called ‘draft-admitting’, which was essentially a passive cooling approach reliant on cross-ventilation (open, lightweight structure with large windows and shading devices). Oftentimes, however, a combination of these was used. Such strategies were seen as critical to the success of the Anglican missionary cause, again, linking this agenda for architecture back to the aims of organizations such as the CBF and SPG. There are many examples of this that one could point to in the world of British ecclesiastical architecture at the time, far too many to mention here.³³ For instance, both the cathedrals at Allahabad and Christchurch were examples of this approach, each adapted in its own way to prevailing conditions—the former for climatic reasons, the latter for seismic. Again, as with Burges’s proposal for Brisbane, Emerson’s design for All Saints’, Allahabad, is marked by its heavy French character, with plate rather than English mullioned tracery, including Mughal-inspired jali screens (Fig. .). Consequently, the windows are small and accompanied by deep arcaded eaves at clerestory level, making for a dark and cool interior. In many respects,

³¹ The Ecclesiologist,  (Nov. ): –. ³² The Ecclesiologist,  (Mar. ): –. ³³ E.g. see M. Lewis, ‘The Ecclesiology of Expediency in Colonial Australia’, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design,  (): –.

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Figure .. William Emerson, All Saints’ Cathedral, Allahabad, India, –.

Allahabad was the ultimate realization of numerous similar proposals for ‘torrid zones’ put forward in the s and s, such as R. C. Carpenter’s design for Colombo cathedral, Sri Lanka (). Here we see the very beginnings of how these theories were developed in practice, demonstrating ways in which an ecclesiastical building could remain fundamentally ‘church-like’ while insulating itself from the worst effects of the surrounding environment. Although Carpenter’s church was not built as designed, the same basic approach was followed nearby in the construction of All Saints’, Pointde-Galle (–), by Joseph Clarke, with its thick walls, open aisle-cum-cloister, and unglazed clerestory windows, all compressed within a neat French Gothic frame. Likewise, we see something analogous at St George’s, Basseterre (St Kitts), by William Slater (a former pupil of Carpenter), with its broad, low-lying forms and heavily buttressed tower as defences against hurricane-force winds and earthquakes. Among the most representative examples of this tradition is St Barnabas’s mission church on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific. This was the headquarters of the idealistic Melanesian Mission formed in  and led by the Reverend John Coleridge Patteson, friend and colleague of Bishop Selwyn. Here we see a small but sturdy edifice clearly adapted to its circumstances—a building that is at once familiar yet unfamiliar; clearly a Christian church but one that is obviously mutated. Aware of the potential for

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Figure .. T. G. Jackson, Patteson Memorial Chapel (St Barnabas’s church), Norfolk Island, New Zealand, – USPG Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, courtesy of United Society Partners in the Gospel.

high winds and earthquakes, the architect (T. G. Jackson) deliberately reinforced the structure at every opportunity, resulting in its heavy, muscular appearance (Fig. .). As the environment was hot and the light intense, the building also has small windows placed high up beneath the projecting eaves to shield the interior from the sun’s rays. In this respect the church looks every bit as though it were a perfect specimen of ‘speluncar’ ecclesiology. Nevertheless, every care was taken to ensure a sense of simple medieval integrity, including a full set of Morris stained-glass windows. The structural materials were locally sourced reef stone and Norfolk pine, expressing what ecclesiologists would have described as its ‘appropriateness’ and therefore essential honesty.³⁴ As mentioned, timber, in many instances, was an easily accessible and flexible material in colonial contexts. This led to a whole new tradition in the revival of Gothic architecture. Again, there are many examples of this unique form of adaptation that one could point to, but perhaps the most advanced and spectacular is that to be found in New Zealand. Initially developed under the close supervision of Bishop Selwyn, timber churches in the so-called ‘Selwyn Gothic’ style were developed as a response to the rather windswept and earthquake-prone environments experienced by Anglican missionaries in that part of the world. Initially, at least, there was also a lack of good ³⁴ G. A. Bremner, ‘Gothic in extremis: Missions, Mediation, and the Case of the Patteson Memorial Chapel in the South Pacific’, in T. Brittain-Catlin, et al., Gothic Revival Worldwide: A. W. N. Pugin’s Global Influence (Leuven: Leuven University Press, ), –.

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building stone. Despite the trying conditions, this tradition of timber Gothic, correct in nearly every detail, flourished, culminating in the truly magnificent exemplars of St Paul’s, Wellington (–), by Frederick Thatcher, and St Mary’s pro cathedral, Auckland (–), by Benjamin Mountfort—both built entirely of native woods.³⁵ In Canada, too, timber was seen as a viable alternative to stone. Early on we find the Reverend William Grey in Newfoundland and Labrador designing and erecting perfectly correct Gothic revival parish churches in timber, intended to cope with the extreme cold in which ordinary masonry construction literally ‘shivered to pieces’. Meanwhile, back in Britain, theories were being developed to justify the use of timber as a structural material for ecclesiastical architecture. This argument was mounted in the pages of The Ecclesiologist by the bishop of Newfoundland’s (Edward Field) friend and agent in London, the Reverend William Scott of Hoxton, who persuasively claimed that timber ecclesiology was the most original and therefore truest form of church architecture because it represented the very beginnings of church building, the socalled ‘first type’ of ‘Spiritual Church’ identified in Noah’s ark.³⁶ Timber was now acceptable as a proper ecclesiological material. Off the back of this would come a similar and equally spectacular tradition of timber church construction to that of New Zealand in Atlantic Canada, spearheaded by the architect-cum-priest Edward Medley, son of the bishop of Fredericton (Fig. .).³⁷ Culturally speaking, adaptation was also important for reasons of church discipline. In foreign contexts, and on the mission field, particularly where clergymen encountered large numbers of non-Christian indigenous inhabitants, means of controlling access to church buildings became a problem. Therefore, in such contexts, the resurrection of medieval spatial devices such as porches and narthexes became necessary.³⁸ We can see this device present in Carpenter’s plans for Colombo cathedral, where it was used to house ‘inquirers’. We also see it adopted in the context of East Africa under the auspices of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), where careful liturgical arrangements were made in the design of churches to separate noncommunicants and ‘inquirers’ from Christians, all with a view to encouraging curiosity and eventual conversion. This practice was evident in the smallest and most humble of the UMCA’s churches, located in the Shiré Highlands, all the way up to the mission’s cathedral, the ‘Slave Market Church’, in Stone Town, Zanzibar.³⁹ Importantly, this

³⁵ Margaret H. Alington, An Excellent Recruit: Frederick Thatcher—Architect, Priest and Private Secretary in Early New Zealand (Auckland: Polygraphia, ); Lochhead, Dream of Spires, –. ³⁶ See ‘On Wooden Churches’, The Ecclesiologist,  (Aug. ): –. ³⁷ Peter Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic (Quebec: Éditions Multimondes, ), –. See also D. S. Richardson, ‘Hyperborean Gothic, or Wilderness Ecclesiology and the Wood Churches of Edward Medley’, Architectura,  (), –. ³⁸ G. A. Bremner, ‘Narthex Reclaimed: Reinventing Disciplinary Space in the Anglican Mission Field, –’, Journal of Historical Geography,  (): –. ³⁹ G. A. Bremner, ‘The Architecture of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa: Developing a Vernacular Tradition in the Anglican Mission Field, –’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, / (): –.

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Figure .. Edward Medley, Christ Church, St Stephen, New Brunswick, –, photograph by Peter Coffman.

approach to formal arrangement was accompanied by romantic notions of primitive Christianity, with the missionaries perceiving themselves as reliving the experiences of the early Church fathers and thus following in their footsteps.⁴⁰ ⁴⁰ Bremner, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa’, –.

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. . 

This attitude towards missiology would also lead in some quarters to species of ecclesiastical architecture being developed that encouraged the cross-fertilization or even deliberate ‘hybridization’ of European and indigenous forms. This was of course a process familiar to Roman Catholic missionaries, known as ‘inculturation’, which had been occurring for centuries in places such as colonial America. But as far as Britain and its Victorian empire were concerned, we see this appearing in Africa with the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, particularly in regard to the pressures its architecture was responding to on the island of Zanzibar, which was an Islamic sultanate. Perhaps the most prominent example of this hybrid tradition was Christ Church cathedral, Stone Town (–), with its intermingling of Arabic and Christian forms—a piece of architectural diplomacy intended largely to assuage the concerns of the Sultan over the presence of a Christian mission in his city. On the mainland, too, the UMCA adopted indigenous building practices and technologies in adapting their architecture to both the climate and its civilizational context, in some cases erecting properly arranged churches out of bamboos and elephant grass. Among the earliest examples of such an approach in the Anglican confession were the CMS missionary churches in New Zealand, in particular Rangiātea church, Ōtaki (–). As a centre of Christian worship, it was intended for both Māori and Pākehā (Europeans) (Fig. .).⁴¹ Externally the building was a rather conventional looking parish church (excluding chancel) in timber, complete with mock wooden buttresses. Internally, however, it was anything but conventional. The roof covering the main space rested upon a huge, single-wrought, ridge beam of totara (signifying the one true Christian God) which was in turn supported by three massive tree trunks of the same timber (signifying the Holy Trinity). The rafters were decorated with a sacred motif known as the mangōpare (hammerhead shark pattern), while the walls were hung with woven tukutuku panels signifying the Milky Way (the heavens).⁴² A number of such native chapels were built in the north island of New Zealand in the s and s, the largest and most magnificent being that referred to as Manutūkē IIB (–), measuring some  feet by  feet. Although orchestrated by CMS clergymen, these chapels were fabricated almost entirely by Christianized Māori craftsmen.

⁴¹ Allan K. Davidson, ‘Culture and Ecclesiology: The Church Missionary Society in New Zealand’, in Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (eds), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, – (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, ), . ⁴² Rangiātea: Ko Ahau te Huarahi te Pono me te Ora (Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, ), –, –. This Milky Way pattern, otherwise known as the purapura whetū (stardust) motif, was supposed to illustrate the hope of the incumbent chief, in this case Te Rauparaha, that there would be as many Christian converts as there were stars in the sky. See Deidre Brown, Māori Architecture: From Fale to Wharenui and Beyond (Rosedale: Raupo [Penguin Group], ), . See also Turner, ‘Church Missionary Society’, –. A similar approach to incorporating indigenous symbols and motifs into ecclesiastical architecture was adopted by evangelical missionaries in the Pacific Islands. See Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

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    



Figure .. Charles Decimus Barraud (lithographer), Interior of Rangiātea Church, Ōtaki, New Zealand, –.

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

. . 

Thus, when compared with traditional Māori architecture, it is clear that many of the construction techniques employed in these buildings were indigenous in origin, resulting in a unique form known as whare karakia (house of prayer).⁴³

C

.................................................................................................................................. What these examples demonstrate—both secular and religious—is that the Gothic Revival in architecture, along with its medievalizing ideals and tendencies, was neither only nor predominantly a European phenomenon. Indeed, it may be counted among the main architectural impulses that spread beyond Europe, particularly Britain, into the wider world during the Victorian period through various political and institutional imperatives. In this respect, the extension of Britain and British culture through its empire was a key factor in giving the Gothic Revival a field of activity and engagement that it would not otherwise have had. Moreover, this extension disrupted and transformed the conventions of the genre itself by forcing it to adapt to new and foreign climates and cultural contexts. It was precisely this malleability (symbolic, material, typological) that made the Gothic Revival style suitable as a mode of architectural expression in an age of rapid social, cultural, and technological change. It could just as easily, and without loss of propriety, adapt to the new material conditions of iron, as in the atrium of the Natural History Museum at Oxford, as it could to elephant grass and bamboo in the smallest of Christian mission churches in the Shiré Highlands of Central Africa.

S  Andrews, Brian, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin at the Antipodes (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, ). Benjamin, Jason, and E. Wubben, Architectural Ornament: The History and Art of Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, ). Bremner, G. A., Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.– (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Brown, Deidre, Māori Architecture: From Fale to Wharenui and Beyond (Rosedale: Raupo [Penguin Group], ). Brittain-Catlin, Timothy, J. De Maeyer, and M. Bressani (eds), Gothic Revival Worldwide: A. W. N. Pugin’s Global Influence (Leuven: Leuven University Press, ). Cherry, Bridget (ed.), Dissent and the Gothic Revival (London: The Chapels Society, ).

⁴³ The most complete study of these unique churches is Richard A. Sundt, Whare Karakia: Māori Church Building, Decoration and Ritual in Aotearoa New Zealand, – (Auckland: Auckland University Press, ).

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

Chopra, Preeti, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, ). Coffman, Peter, Newfoundland Gothic (Quebec: Éditions Multimondes, ). Davies, Philip, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India – (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). De Jong, Ursula (ed.), W. W. Wardell: The Architect and his Era—Centenary Papers (Geelong: Deakin University, ). Lewis, Miles (ed.), Victorian Churches: Their Origins, their Story and their Architecture (Melbourne: National Trust of Australia, ). Lewis, Michael J., Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ). Lewis, Michael J., The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, ). Lochhead, Ian, A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, ). Stanton, Phoebe B., The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Sundt, Richard A., Whare Karakia: Māori Church Building, Decoration and Ritual in Aotearoa New Zealand, – (Auckland: Auckland University Press, ). Turner, Emily, ‘The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c.–’, Architectural History,  (): –.

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  ......................................................................................................................

   -            Medievalism and Victorian Visual Culture ......................................................................................................................

 

A  :  P-R   M A

.................................................................................................................................. M than any other movement in British art, the Pre-Raphaelites marshalled the Middle Ages to create a new artistic world deeply and paradoxically concerned with modernity and the pressing concerns of their Victorian generations. Like the nineteenth century’s Gothic Revival architects such as George Gilbert Scott, G. F. Bodley, and A. W. N. Pugin, the Pre-Raphaelites believed that medievalism was a method for making modern objects, whether these things might be a painting, an embroidery, a ceramic tile, or a vast cathedral. The artist Edward Burne-Jones described biblical narrative and the Book of Kings in particular to his son Philip as ‘a glorious heap of antiquity’.¹ This evocation, as Caroline Arscott has recently observed, suggests that Burne-Jones saw this text as a ‘three-dimensional accumulation of items . . . piled up just as robes, crowns, ritual vessels and masonry might be’.² For Burne-Jones, as for all the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates from the mid-nineteenth century forward, the richly layered cultural histories of the Middle Ages, spanning a millennium of European human activity, were also a ‘glorious heap’ of material, taken up selectively and dextrously as a set of profoundly important resources for a thoroughly modern art world. Indeed, it is the Pre-Raphaelites’ engagement with medievalism that makes them undeniably modern in their artistic and cultural outlook, whether painstakingly ¹ Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan, ), i. . ² Caroline Arscott, ‘Edward Burne-Jones’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

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

painting details of knights questing across a tapestry woven by the Lady of Shalott, or decorating a piece of furniture with imagery based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) formed in London in  with seven members: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his brother William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, and Frederic George Stephens. Stephens and W. M. Rossetti were art critics, Woolner a sculptor, and the rest painters and writers. Painters such as Charles Allston Collins and Ford Madox Brown—Rossetti’s chief mentor—were close associates. With his connections to the German Nazarene art movement and its qualities of medievalist brotherhood, William Dyce, too, is in the Pre-Raphaelite network.³ Dyce’s mural on the east wall of William Butterfield’s Gothic Revival church All Saints Margaret Street in London (–) and his Arthurian cycle of murals in the Queen’s Robing Room at the New Palace of Westminster are two internationally important projects that characterize Victorian visual culture’s use of medievalism to create new works of art.⁴ Arthuriana gripped the British art scene, and Dyce’s work in Parliament was complemented by H. H. Armstead’s later series of Arthurian sculptural relief panels in the Queen’s Robing Room (–).⁵ In Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin’s New Palace of Westminster, the first room the monarch entered along the processional route was a thoroughly medievalist one, in which royal values were aligned with tales from the Morte d’Arthur.⁶ Recent exhibitions that have focused on Pre-Raphaelite visual culture, including the Tate’s major  Pre-Raphaelites survey, Tate Britain’s  exhibition on John Everett Millais, and even more recent exhibitions on Pre-Raphaelite photography, the Pre-Raphaelites in Italy, and The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde (which attracted over a quarter of a million visitors) demonstrate a rising interest in PreRaphaelite studies. Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued persuasively that Pre-Raphaelitism, whether criticized or celebrated, has never been out of the public or artists’ eye since its Victorian beginnings. These artists’ handling of medieval themes is a key reason why they maintain such a strong and stimulating hold on public interest and specialist research. From the mid-nineteenth century, Pre-Raphaelite artists worked with sacred and secular interiors in a range of media across the British Empire and in North America. Gothic Revival churches and cathedrals feature a vast number of stained glass panels designed by this circle of artists, as well as textiles and murals. Their impact was

³ Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ⁴ For a discussion of Dyce’s medievalist commissions, see Marcia Pointon, William Dyce –: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). ⁵ Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt (eds), Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, – (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. ⁶ The Morte d’Arthur was a translation by Thomas Malory, first published in . This was a key text for Victorian medievalists, and for Tennyson in particular. See Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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

 

wide and broad, but not always positively received. In  a critic in The Times wrote caustically of the phenomenon: ‘It is the outcome in painting of the influences which breed ritualism in worship, what has been called Mort d’Arthurism [sic] in poetry, and the worship of Gothic run mad in architecture . . . [it] would fain, if it dared, dress itself in the garb of the th century’.⁷ Critics often accused the Pre-Raphaelites of masquerade, escapism, theatricality, and a vague and dreamy avoidance of Victorian reality. The Pre-Raphaelites and their circle also combined legend and literature with new technology. Unlike many of their contemporaries trained at the Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelites painted directly from close observation of the natural world, and reinvented subjects from history and modern life with a shockingly bright palette of tart greens, glowing oranges, and flaming reds. They used new chemical innovations in paint production and also worked with photography and photographers, harnessing recent Victorian technological innovations and yoking them to tales and symbolism traced back to the Middle Ages. The old and new were consistently interlaced with remarkable and unexpected effects, from colour to mass-movement spectacle. For the critic Harry Quilter, the Pre-Raphaelites and medievalism were synonymous, and practically interchangeable terms in the Victorian art world.⁸ By the end of the nineteenth century, Pre-Raphaelite painting was strongly popular and John Everett Millais, who had railed so strongly against the Royal Academy in the foundation of the PRB in the late s, had become so firmly entrenched within the art establishment that he was, briefly, President of the Royal Academy. Meanwhile, William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World, depicting Christ knocking at the overgrown and locked door of a human soul in a dark woodland, travelled through the British Empire for sixteen months and was seen by  million people.⁹ There are strong ties between the Pre-Raphaelites’ founding members and younger artists including Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, as well as later contributors to the Arts and Crafts movement and the Art Workers Guild. The Aesthetic Movement, which turned towards ‘art for art’s sake’ and beauty as art’s sole goal from the s onwards, also incorporated Pre-Raphaelite artists, chiefly Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.¹⁰ The fusion of medievalism and Aestheticism is richest in Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin (), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery’s famous displays of leading lights in ‘art for art’s sake’, which included James McNeill Whistler and G. F. Watts. The Arthurian medieval narrative of Merlin’s seduction and entrapment by the wily Nimue is transposed from the visual conceits of the revived Middle Ages to the inheritance of Classical sculpture. Botticellian handling of the bodily detail and Giorgione-esque colouring complements Nimue’s contraposto pose. ⁷ Anon., The Times,  Feb. , . For a discussion of Victorian medievalism’s relationship to ritualism, see Dominic Janes’s Chapter  in this volume. ⁸ Harry Quilter, Preferences in Art, Life and Literature (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., ), . ⁹ Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘The Religious and Intellectual Background’, in Prettejohn, Companion, . ¹⁰ For a discussion of the involvement of Rossetti and Burne-Jones in the Aesthetic Movement, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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

From the outset their activities in the fine arts were intermingled with the written word, as Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer amply demonstrate.¹¹ They established a short-lived journal for art and literature, The Germ, which would later inspire William Morris to create the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine when an Oxford undergraduate.¹² The List of Immortals, the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto drawn up by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his associates, is an invaluable starting point for exploring the Brotherhood’s aims and identity. The document’s blend of Carlylean hero-worship, contemporary Victorian culture, and the tracing of civic values in the arts—visual art and literature in particular—across millennia assists in forging an understanding of how and why the Pre-Raphaelites turned to the Middle Ages for resources to power their radically avant-garde nineteenth-century project. It did not take long for the PreRaphaelites to be seen as heroic influencers themselves. The artist and critic John Ruskin—whose key works include highly significant medievalist architectural history in The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture—famously championed them in a lengthy letter to The Times in .¹³ He followed this up with steady patronage of Millais, Rossetti, and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Elizabeth Siddall, and offered vocal public support throughout the early s. In , Ruskin delivered a lecture in which he lavished praise on these young men and claimed boldly that the Pre-Rapahaelites’ ‘adversaries have no chance with them. They will gradually unite their influence with whatever is true or powerful in the reactionary art of other countries; and on their works such a school will be founded as shall justify the third age of the world’s civilisation, and render it as great in creation as it has been in discovery’.¹⁴ Eager to pin his colours to the mast of an exciting and controversial group of artists following his earlier championing of J. M. W. Turner in his s publication Modern Painters, Ruskin used medievalist language to describe the PRB cause as a ‘crusade’.¹⁵ Ruskin’s influence was a nourishing one for many. In the preface to his Kelmscott Press edition of Ruskin’s essay ‘The Nature of Gothic’, William Morris wrote that it was ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century . . . it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel’.¹⁶ As the British art world travelled along a medievalist road, some were made to walk along its edges. There are a small number of women on the Pre-Raphaelites’ List of ¹¹ For a wealth of primary sources on Pre-Raphaelite texts, see Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer, Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). ¹² For a full account of the run and contents of The Germ, see The Germ. Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art accessed May . ¹³ John Ruskin, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Artists’, The Times,  May . ¹⁴ John Ruskin, Lectures on Art (London: Smith & Elder, ), in E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), Collected Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen & Unwin, –), xii. . ¹⁵ Ruskin, Lectures on Art, Works, xii. . Quoted in Francis O’Gorman, ‘Did Ruskin Support the Pre-Raphaelites?’, in Keith Hanley and Brian Maidment (eds), Persistent Ruskin: Studies in Influence, Assimilation and Effect (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . ¹⁶ William Morris, ‘Preface’, in John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic A Chapter of the Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (Hammersmith Kelmscott Press, ).

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

 

Immortals, and the roles of women have been variously interpreted as model, muse, and matron in Pre-Raphaelite histories.¹⁷ Since the s, feminist art history has offered a wealth of fresh and much-needed perspectives on Pre-Raphaelite women and even the productive notion of a PRS, a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood.¹⁸ In addition to classic texts on Rossetti by Griselda Pollock and on women’s roles in this artists’ network delineated by Jan Marsh, more recent work by Deborah Cherry on Elizabeth Siddall and Wendy Parkins on Jane Morris has further developed interest and understanding regarding the powerful roles that women took within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.¹⁹ The perennial theme of sensuality, gender diversity, and eroticism in Pre-Raphaelite work continues to benefit from new scholarly attention incorporating theoretical vantage points from gender studies and queer theory.²⁰ In addition to these themes, the key technique that signals Pre-Raphaelitism is meticulous detail. In Millais’s early Pre-Raphaelite paintings every blade of grass and strand of hair is distinct and uncompromisingly, painstakingly clear. In his s work, Burne-Jones would regularly produce models of armour in the studio for the medievalist heroic knights and figures from mythology to wear in his paintings. Detail could also be gained through exploring photography’s crystalline capture of nature, architecture, and the human body. In The Crayon, Pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti wrote of ‘the influence which Pre-Raffaelitism [sic] and photography have exercised upon our artists in the promotion of greater closeness of study; and completeness of representation’.²¹ That finality—that sense of conclusiveness, however elusive or even chimeric—was a constant Pre-Raphaelite theme across all media and across half a century. As a mode of historicism and artistic envisioning, medievalism provided an intricate world filled with refined detail that invited new Pre-Raphaelite interpretation, which always blended the new with the old. In order to extend and amplify the double importance of literature and visual culture for the Pre-Raphaelites, and to complement discussions of Pre-Raphaelite writing elsewhere in this volume, my viewpoint on the Brotherhood and its circle ranges across key medieval sources that interlace text and image. From the beginnings of PreRaphaelitism in the s until the turn of the twentieth century (and, indeed, beyond) ¹⁷ Recent books that chart this territory include Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelites: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber, ) and Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: André Deutsch, ). ¹⁸ For feminist viewpoints on the Pre-Raphaelites see Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, ‘Patriarchal Power and the Pre-Raphaelites’, Art History, / (Dec. ): –; Jan Marsh, PreRaphaelite Sisterhood (London: Quartet, ). ¹⁹ For an account of Elizabeth Siddall’s importance in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, see Deborah Cherry, ‘Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall’ in Prettejohn, Companion, –. ²⁰ For queer perspectives on Pre-Raphaelite studies see Colin Cruise, ‘ “Lovely Devils”: Simeon Solomon and Pre-Raphaelite Masculinity’, in Ellen Harding (ed.), Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –; Whitney Davis, ‘The Image in the Middle: John Addington Symonds and Homoerotic Art Criticism’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn (ed.), After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ²¹ William Michael Rossetti, ‘Art News from England. Letter XIII’, Crayon, / (May ): .

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three medieval figures held court in the Pre-Raphaelite imagination. They were Dante, Chaucer, and Arthur. Additionally, from its beginnings, Pre-Raphaelite art demonstrated a strong investment in religion and aspects of medieval monasticism in particular. This is a trope that continued across multiple generations of PreRaphaelitism, and works its way through the permeable boundaries of medievalist sources across media including furniture, textiles, painting, sculpture, and drawing. Predominant emotional themes in Pre-Raphaelite work are love, longing, death, hope, and melancholy. In each case, medievalism provided a vital historical language for the communication of these resonant and intimate affective themes.

W  M A: D, C,   P-R

.................................................................................................................................. Medieval Italian literary sources were crucial for the Pre-Raphaelites. In addition to the importance of Boccaccio’s Decameron for works like Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata, The Blue Bower, and related images of female figures surrounded by sumptuous interiors and objects, Rossetti and his Brothers were profoundly drawn to Dante Alighieri. As Alison Milbank has shown, Dante’s Vita Nuova was broadly influential in nineteenth-century European culture and British interest in Dante was not solely confined to the artistic intensity of the Pre-Raphaelites.²² Dante did, however, play a key role in Pre-Raphaelite visuality. The eldest son of the Dante expert Gabriele Rossetti was christened Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. When this young man and Pre-Raphaelite translated Dante’s Vita Nuova in , he began to style himself Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Indeed, as Elizabeth Prettejohn and others have shown, the importance of Dante for the Pre-Raphaelites and for Rossetti in particular is at the very heart of their Victorian art world.²³ In works such as his Salutation of Beatrice (), the somewhat awkward position of the figures is a deliberate attentiveness to pre-Renaissance attitudes to perspective. It serves to emphasize emotional intensity between Beatrice and Dante, and to show, as Prettejohn argues, that ‘earthly and heavenly love are profoundly related and it is not necessary to place them in hierarchical order. The only equivalent, perhaps, for the power of either one is that of the other.’²⁴ The hard-edged lines of Rossetti’s Dante Drawing an Angel on the First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, completed months after the Brotherhood’s formation, indicate a careful study of late medieval engravings. He also completed the drawing Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune in  and gave it to his fellow-Pre-Raphaelite Frederic ²² For an account of Dante’s impact in nineteenth-century Britain, see Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). ²³ Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, . ²⁴ Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, .

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Stephens.²⁵ Rossetti was inspired by the poet Robert Browning’s interpretations of narratives from Dante, in which sexual gesture and power dynamics spiral around a young man challenged by a city’s arrogant ruler. Here, a medievalist narrative provided an opportunity to explore social etiquette and erotic signs. The attention to detail, investment in narrative, high emotional tension, and awkwardness of the figures all contribute towards the development and solidification of a recognizably Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. His  painting Dantis Amor pairs the love-stricken Dante and Beatrice as sun and moon, heaven and earth, lover and beloved. He used William Morris and Jane Morris as models, once again making a strong connection between his own relationships and his primary medieval literary source. A red-winged full-lipped angel bearing a sundial (which remained unfinished in Rossetti’s painting) combines this allegorical and highly decorative scene with the powerful contemplative trope of the passage of time and the inevitability of death. The division of space, while bold and modern, relies on compositional tactics of medieval heraldry and stained glass windows. The artist Simeon Solomon also interacted with Dante’s legacy and forged bonds with Pre-Raphaelitism and Rossetti in particular with his drawing Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (–).²⁶ Founding Brother John Everett Millais, though he incorporated stained glass into his painting of Mariana and engaged frequently with the medievalist poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, was not as devoted to Dante as Rossetti.²⁷ However, his affinity with the Italian medieval poet did extend to donning historic costume for the series of photographic portraits produced by David Wilkie Wynfield in the early s (Fig. .).²⁸ Millais is shown in flowing robe, medieval-type hood, and crowned with laurel leaves, in the style of Botticelli’s late fifteenth-century image of Dante. His identification with this Pre-Raphaelite hero of European literature and culture parallels the pattern of Rossetti’s formation of links between Dante’s medieval life and his own Victorian one. Dante was also allegorized by the PRB and their circle. William Burges, the architect and furniture designer, produced the Yatman Cabinet and Fry Cabinet in the late s. In both cases, three figures in Gothic arches represent the evolution of writing through history: an Assyrian carving a tablet, Caxton at his printing press, and, in the centre, Dante in his characteristic garb lost in thought as he grasps his quill.²⁹ ²⁵ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune (), accessed May . ²⁶ Elizabeth Prettejohn notes that until the s this was one of the only works of art by Solomon displayed in Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions, largely because it offered no hint of his sexuality. Gay and lesbian studies and queer theory have expanded research on Solomon and explored links between PreRaphaelitism, Aesthetes, and sexuality. See Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, . ²⁷ Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate Publishing, ), . ²⁸ David Wilkie Wynfield, John Everett Millais (s). accessed May . ²⁹ Jeremy Cooper, ‘A Burges Discovery’, Apollo (Nov. ): –; William Burges, Yatman Cabinet (). accessed May .

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

Figure .. David Wilkie Wynfield, John Everett Millais as Dante, c. early s, National Portrait Gallery.

Artistic representation of the act of writing medieval literature provides a link between Dante in Italy and Chaucer in England. As in the case of Dante’s influence, Chaucer’s trace is present across many Pre-Raphaelite endeavours. The English poet was as central for Edward Burne-Jones as Dante was for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Ford Madox Brown looked to Chaucer as a vibrant, accessible, and indeed modern British cultural hero.³⁰ Madox Brown’s The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry () shows Chaucer in the centre of a Gothic-arched structure containing a pantheon of British poets, his medieval verse interpreted as the genesis of modern poetic life and thought. In  Madox Brown went to the British Museum to read about Chaucer in James Mackintosh’s A History of England and this ‘at once fixed me, I immediately saw visions of Chaucer reading his poems to knights and Ladyes [sic] fair, to the king & court amid air & sun shine’.³¹ He translated this vision into his painting Geoffrey Chaucer Reading the ‘Legend of Custance’ to Edward III and his Court, at the Palace of

³⁰ Tim Barringer, ‘Ford Madox Brown’, in Prettejohn, Companion, –. ³¹ Ford Madox Brown, The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), –.

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 

Sheen, on the Anniversary of the Black Prince’s Forty-Eighth Birthday, completed in . It is Burne-Jones, however, who takes up the works of the poet and the figure of Chaucer himself as a banner for art in a truly personal and persistent way. When he displayed his ‘Legend of St Dorothea’ and ‘Chaucer’s Dream’ early in his career, BurneJones attracted negative critical attention for his apparently naïve investment in medievalism: ‘we freely concede to him a measure of childlike, fantastic, colour-loving fancy which will pass for the true afflatus with the very young, the very morbid, and the very medievally minded’.³² Burne-Jones and his associates were indeed medievally minded: in Burne-Jones’s Chaucer Asleep (), the medieval writer languidly fingers a daisy as he stretches out on a verdant patch of garden and contemplates poetic dreams, conjuring the allegorical figure of Love. Colin Cruise observes that, instead of the happy pleasures of a nostalgic ‘merrie England’ medievalism, Burne-Jones’s medievalism is melancholic, which evolves towards a languid decadence and perpetual enchantment later in the nineteenth century.³³ Burne-Jones’s intensively dream-like imagery was a conscientious effort, as Cruise observes, that ‘avoided reproducing nature or illustrating his sources’.³⁴ Dreams and the trope of the boundary between life and death being akin to the threshold between waking and sleeping come to the fore in Burne-Jones’s painted wardrobe for William and Jane Morris, which he completed in  as a wedding present for the couple (Fig. .). It is the precursor to Chaucer Asleep, as it is, I argue, very much a case of Chaucer’s creative wakefulness that drives the rich visual description in this unique piece of furniture’s painted programme. His choice of narrative was a dark and, indeed, anti-Semitic one. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Prioress tells of a -year-old Christian boy who learns to sing ‘Alma redemptoris mater’, a hymn to the Virgin Mary. He sings it loudly and boldly, and so neighbouring Jews decide to murder him. The Virgin sees this tragedy from heaven and appears in a miraculous vision, placing a grain on his tongue, and raising the boy from the dead so that he can continue to sing. Burne-Jones used a Chaucerian middle English lingual twist to make a connection between the story’s most horrifically abject moment and the commission he carried out as a medievalist Pre-Raphaelite gift for his fellow-artists and friends. The Prioress describes the scene: ‘I seye that in a wardrobe they hym threwe’.³⁵ Chaucer’s ‘wardrobe’ is a cesspit, a dehumanizing burial place for an innocent child, while BurneJones’s wardrobe for the Morrises was an item of domestic furniture, sophisticatedly decorated in a manner that prioritized narrative and beauty in its double depiction of Chaucer’s text and an angelic chorus of heaven surrounding the Blessed Virgin Mary.³⁶ ³² Anon., ‘Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-colours’, Illustrated London News,  May , . ³³ Colin Cruise, ‘ “Sick-Sad Dreams”: Burne-Jones and Pre-Raphaelite Medievalism’, Yearbook of English Studies, /– (): . ³⁴ Cruise, ‘Sick-Sad Dreams’, . ³⁵ Mark Allen and John H. Fisher (eds), The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, rd edn (New York: Heinle & Heinle, ), . ³⁶ Allen and Fisher, Chaucer, .

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Figure .. Edward Burne-Jones’s painted wardrobe for William and Jane Morris, c..

This dark humour is paired with Burne-Jones’s sumptuous decorative patterns and figural designs in golds, blues, reds, and greens. On the right panel, the Virgin in heaven is surrounded by angels playing musical instruments as she prays with pity, a dove representing the Holy Spirit unfurling its wings and heading towards the scene of mercy on the left. The main scene painted across the two doors is a medievalist conflation of events that combines multiple lines of perspective. In the background, the town is the setting for details of the tale. In the foreground, the Virgin leans down to place the healing grain on the boy’s tongue as he rises, not from a pit filled with human waste, but from a verdant ground covered in blossoming flowers. Beneath, birds and flowers surround a scroll pinned to a wall, with Burne-Jones’s own painted medievalstyle illuminations. Burne-Jones painted a portrait of Chaucer himself on the bottom right corner of the wardrobe. It is based on an early fifteenth-century portrait of Chaucer which Burne-Jones may well have seen at the British Museum.³⁷ BurneJones augments the medieval portrait by giving Chaucer a quill and parchment filled ³⁷ Unknown artist, Geoffrey Chaucer (after ), National Portrait Gallery. accessed May .

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 

with text. This is a fascinating addition, as it suggests that from his own heavenly realm on the ‘divine’ side of the wardrobe, Chaucer is witnessing and writing the Prioress’ Tale as it unfolds across the wooden surface of this domestic furniture. In the s, Morris met Philip Webb in the architectural office of George Edmund Street. Webb would go on to become a major Arts and Crafts architect. His first project was to design a house for the Morrises at Bexleyheath near London. This was Red House, with its wide light-filled corridor for displaying works of art, integrated furnishings, and what Morris romantically called the Pilgrims’ Rest.³⁸ The walls, ceiling, and furniture were painted with biblical, medieval, and decorative scenes. Windows were filled with stained glass designed by Webb. The Morrises, together with Edward Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana Burne-Jones, taught themselves how to embroider by studying old embroideries and unpicking the stitches.³⁹ They devised a series of large panels for the Red House dining room depicting figures in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. They are accompanied by spears, swords, and shields, their dresses bearing iconographical emblems. The detail of Chaucerian imagery was also a key component of the unique integration of text and image in the Kelmscott Chaucer, one of the most famous and sumptuous of the Kelmscott Press books produced by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in the s. The Press also published texts drawn from Arthurian legends, and more contemporary revivalist material including Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’.

A, S,  L:  A P-R

.................................................................................................................................. Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was an endless source of inspiration for the PreRaphaelites. Arthurian legend, mediated by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s extensive output of Arthurian poetry, regularly appears freshly interpreted by the Pre-Raphaelites from their earliest moments. William Holman Hunt, and later, the ‘last’ Pre-Raphaelite J. W. Waterhouse, repeatedly created images of the ill-fated Lady of Shalott.⁴⁰ Lancelot, Guenevere, Merlin, and Arthur feature across the broad sweep of Pre-Raphaelitism’s intersections with medievalism. Edward Burne-Jones’s work along chivalric themes was inspired by additional medieval sources, including the Roman de la Rose (c.–) and Rene d’Anjou’s Livre du Cueur.⁴¹ In , William Morris published his first book of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere. This endeavour was directly in response to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting The ³⁸ Sheila Kirk, Philip Webb: The Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, ), . ³⁹ Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber, ), . ⁴⁰ Elizabeth Prettejohn, Peter Trippi, Robert Upstone, and Patti Wageman, J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite (London: Royal Academy, ), , –. ⁴¹ Cruise, ‘Sick-Sad Dreams’, .

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Blue Closet (–), which was itself an imaginative and highly musical reply to Rossetti’s encounter with Bernardo Daddi’s painting of Four Musical Angels, a c. fragment of an altarpiece that Rossetti had seen in Christ Church Picture Gallery.⁴² This experience of Quattrocento art was directly connected to Rossetti’s presence in Oxford alongside William Morris, Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones, and Val Prinsep, who were busily decorating the Oxford Union’s debating chamber with murals inspired by the Morte d’Arthur in the summer of .⁴³ Morris’s poem could be said to be in the key of blue, the colour appearing some thirty times in the text. Rossetti praised its ghostly tale of ‘queens’ and ‘damozels’ who make music from beyond the grave: ‘Once every year on Christmas-eve, / To sing in the Closet Blue one song . . .’.⁴⁴ In his critique of Morris’s volume, Walter Pater recognized a turning point in the PreRaphaelite usage of medievalism. Pater calls it a ‘profounder medievalism’, less concerned with the minutiae of historical moments and idealized purity in the Middle Ages and instead more committed to a sense of atmosphere and affective sensuous languor.⁴⁵ Morris’s early poetic work may indeed have Arthurian themes, but it is more indebted to Froissart’s Chronicles, a French illuminated text describing the horrors of the Hundred Years War. First published in the fifteenth century, it was republished in , replete with imagery of executions, wild men, and vivid medieval energy.⁴⁶ William Morris’s own copy proved invaluable for his ornamental designs as well as his poetry.⁴⁷ The importance of this concentrated Oxford-inspired work quickly spread beyond young painters to the architectural world. The poet and critic Coventry Patmore immediately saw their medievalist character and wrote that the walls ‘look like the margin of a highly illuminated manuscript’. Unfortunately, the murals’ colour and detail decayed swiftly, as they were painted directly onto the brick walls without proper attention to how the paint would react to the building’s interior conditions.⁴⁸ In , the Gothic Revival architect G. E. Street singled out the Oxford Union’s new Arthurian murals as useful models for future church decoration. More than this, he argued in The Ecclesiologist—a key text for Gothic Revival architects and clergy—that ‘the PreRaphaelite movement is identical with our own: and that the success of one aids immensely therefore in the success of the other. Nor, indeed, could our revival have been in any degree complete unless it had borne fruit in every branch of art.’⁴⁹ ⁴² Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, . ⁴³ Barringer, Reading, . ⁴⁴ William Morris, The Defence of Guenevere in The Collected Works of William Morris,  vols, ed. May Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  []), i, . Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, –. ⁴⁵ Walter Pater, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: Signet, ), . ⁴⁶ H. N. Humphreys, Illuminated Illustrations of Froissart, Selected from the MS in the Bibliotheque Royale, Paris, and from Other Sources (London: William Smith, ). ⁴⁷ Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. ⁴⁸ Barringer, Reading, . ⁴⁹ George Edmund Street, ‘On the Future of Art in England’, Ecclesiologist,  (Aug. ): –.

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

 

In  Morris produced the only major easel painting of his career, La Belle Iseult, which is a medievalist semi-portrait of Jane Burden, whom he met while working on the Oxford murals and later married. The reverse of the canvas is inscribed, ‘I cannot paint you, but I love you.’ In this gesture, Morris identified his own life intimately with the courtly passions of medieval literature, just as Rossetti identified his relationship with his wife and fellow-artist Elizabeth Siddall—who died from a laudanum overdose in —with Dante’s love for Beatrice. This conflation of medievalism with PreRaphaelite modern experience is especially evident in his own semi-portrait of Siddall, Beata Beatrix (-) in which Siddall’s death is expressed through the prism of Dante-infused allegory. Jane Morris, her sister Bessie Burden, and the Morrises’ daughter May were significant medievalist artists in their own right, producing highly complex embroidery designs from the late s onwards.⁵⁰ Indeed, May Morris also carried responsibility for William Morris’s design firm after his death in , founded the Women’s Guild of Arts in , and was a leading figure in the Royal School of Needlework.⁵¹ Jane Morris’s style of dress, inspired in part by medievalist dress, was strongly connected to what Inga Bryden terms the ‘Victorian Arthurian Revival’, which was imbued with a ‘reformist spirit’ in its flowing fabrics and natural waistlines that foreshadowed the corset-free New Woman of the fin-de-siècle.⁵² As Carol Jacobi poignantly observes, the Pre-Raphaelites were part of a wider feeling in Victorian culture: ‘an understanding of the contemporary age as historyin-the-making’.⁵³ This historical self-consciousness is particularly interesting when considered in relation to the self-fashioning and artistic output of Pre-Raphaelite women. Helen Nina Taylor argues that the Brotherhood and what might be termed a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood engaged with medieval literary sources differently. In works like Elizabeth Siddall’s Clerk Saunders () and The Lady of Shalott () women are depicted as empathetic figures of sustained emotional complexity. Taylor writes, ‘in order to provide their own, independent, perspective on events . . . their women are often presented as both physically and mentally stronger’ than in the images of their counterparts in the PRB.⁵⁴ The Lady of Shalott was a perennial theme, and Holman Hunt explored the image of this female figure on the brink of collapse and ruin throughout his life, from the early s through the turn of the twentieth century. In his The Lady of Shalott (–), the threads of her tapestry swirl around her body, twisting and twining through the air and entrapping her with the sign of her doom. A slash of white paint fragments the vision of chivalry ominously present behind the imprisoned woman. ⁵⁰ Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy, – (London: National Portrait Gallery, ), . ⁵¹ Anna Mason, Jan Marsh et al., May Morris: Arts & Crafts Designer (London: V&A/Thames and Hudson, ). ⁵² Inga Bryden, ‘All Dressed up: Revivalism and the Fashion for Arthur in Victorian Culture’, Arthuriana, / (Summer ): . ⁵³ Carol Jacobi, ‘William Holman Hunt’, in Prettejohn, Companion, . ⁵⁴ Helen Nina Taylor, ‘ “Too Individual an Artist to Be a Mere Echo”: Female Pre-Raphaelite Artists as Independent Professionals’, British Art Journal, / (Winter –): .

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Hunt’s sensuous interior is marked by orientalist and Renaissance motifs, the central round mirror revealing Sir Lancelot on horseback, sword raised, riding into the distance between the open tracery of Gothic architecture. Hunt, like Siddall, Waterhouse, and others illustrated the climactic turning point in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s  poem: Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me’, cried The Lady of Shalott (–).⁵⁵

The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who produced portraits of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and her Isle of Wight neighbour Alfred, Lord Tennyson, created a large number of images based on medievalist themes. Painting with light, Cameron’s practice also intersected strongly with the Aesthetes and, as Diane Waggoner demonstrates, her Pre-Raphaelitism was also a key aspect of her work.⁵⁶ Cameron’s Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ and Other Poems was published in –. The Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere concentrates on the intimacy between the soft-haired and white-robed queen and the departing knight. Cameron’s technique intensifies the glint of Lancelot’s armour, each link of chainmail expressing medievalist sentiment and acting as a metaphor for embrace and emotional vulnerability. Waggoner makes a key compositional connection between Cameron’s photograph and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s  watercolour Arthur’s Tomb, at which a knight and lady meet for an erotic encounter directly over the stony effigy of the king who— according to the Morte d’Arthur—never dies but sleeps deeply in Avalon. Rossetti’s painted tomb, decorated with scenes of the round table and Arthur bestowing a knighthood in chivalric ritual, anticipates the medievalist furniture produced by William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, Rossetti, and their associates at Red Lion Square. The eternal Arthur, and the legend’s sense of timeless heroism pointing towards eschatology and the longed-for ‘return of the king’, captivated the Pre-Raphaelites and created a social and artistic bond between the old story and their innovative art. Indeed, the day that Burne-Jones died he was at work on his monumental The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, in which the face of Arthur, surrounded by protective and watchful queens, is Burne-Jones’s own ageing self-portrait.⁵⁷ In the years before Burne-Jones was transported to his own Avalon, he was particularly influential for a new generation of Victorian medievalists. Aubrey Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur and

⁵⁵ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks, nd edn (Harlow: Longman, ) i, –. ⁵⁶ Diane Waggoner (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting – (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, ), –. ⁵⁷ For an analysis of Burne-Jones’s painting, see Alison Smith, The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (London: Tate Publishing, ).

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 

his Wagnerian images from  were indebted to the surface saturation, symbolism, and languid emotional atmosphere of Burne-Jones’s late Victorian paintings. Indeed, Beardsley presented his drawing for Siegfried, Act II to the older painter as he believed it to be the finest work he had accomplished. Surrounded by spiky floral blooms and enticing buds, the boy-hero Siegfried points his sword towards a grimacing dragon, its wings unfurling.

H  

.................................................................................................................................. St George, the dragon-slayer patron saint of England, was also an important feature of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. The story of St George, the dragon, and princess Sabra was told in multiple media by Rossetti, most famously in a series of stained glass panels featuring a monstrous dragon overpowered by the brave armoured knight and then served on a platter at a celebratory banquet. Pre-Raphaelite interaction with medievalist iconography of saints was also prevalent in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.’s stained glass windows for churches, which they began producing after the firm was founded in London in . In the mid-s, Morris reorganized the company as Morris & Co., and though Burne-Jones stayed throughout, early participants like Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti no longer worked with the company’s array of textile and decorative arts commissions after the s. Their first commissions came through the Gothic Revival architect George Frederick Bodley, and his churches of All Saints, Selsley (–) and St Martin’s, Scarborough () are filled with paintings, glass, and textiles by Morris, Webb, Burne-Jones, and their associates.⁵⁸ William Dyce described the Morte d’Arthur as a ‘religious allegory, strongly tinctured with monastic ideas of the th century’.⁵⁹ For him, it was less a question of the tale’s sexual and romantic content as its moral message. In Edward Burne-Jones’s  watercolour The Merciful Knight, both sensuality and morality are in play. A knight, John Gualbert, met his dead brother’s murderer, but chose not to seek revenge. Following this act of mercy, the knight prays at a roadside shrine and his prayer is rewarded with a miracle: a sculpted crucifixion within the small wooden sacred hut comes to life, and Christ leans from the cross to embrace the devout man. The image was inspired by an eleventh-century tale outlined by Kenelm Digby in The Broadstone of Honour and the detail of embrace—which earlier versions show to be a more homo erotically charged kiss—and the lush garden surrounding the shrine

⁵⁸ For an extensive discussion of Bodley’s collaborative work with Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., see Michael Hall, George Frederick Bodley and the Late Victorian Gothic Revival in Britain and America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). ⁵⁹ William Dyce, quoted in Barringer, Reading, .

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 -:  



are both Burne-Jones’s embellishments of the text. John Everett Millais’s combination of sensuality, religious experience, and indeed ecstasy is most poignant in two early works: his drawing of The Disentombment of Queen Matilda () and the painting Mariana (). In Millais’s Disentombment, nuns exhibit horror, fear, and outright hysteria in reaction to a group of sixteenth-century Protestant iconoclastic looters digging up the body of Matilda in a Catholic convent. Millais expressed neither a pro-Catholic nor pro-Protestant stance in this work, but rather used this dramatic historical moment as an opportunity to revel in ‘brittle’ delicate ink forms and his ‘delight in the grotesque, which encompasses the nuns as well as their abusers’.⁶⁰ Oppositional forces are less dramatically entwined and more psychologically melancholic in Millais’s Mariana. The solitary female figure arches her back in a flowing velvet gown, her pose amplifying the scene of neglect and longing described in the Tennyson poem that Millais explored in paint.⁶¹ The stained glass window through which Mariana looks features bright blue and red quarries framing the figures of Gabriel and the Virgin Mary in an Annunciation scene based on medieval models, and a small domestic altar is highlighted by a lit candle in the background. As Alison Smith notes, Mariana’s voluptuousness and isolation intensify ‘the dichotomy between the self-negation of Mariana’s nun-like existence and her sexual languor and frustration’.⁶² In addition to strong and fruitful interactions with the medievalist poetry of their Victorian contemporaries, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Coventry Patmore, and Christina Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites were also inspired by the symbolic and intensive poetic language of the Tractarians. The Oxford Movement instigated a new vigour in the Church of England by turning to theology, ecclesiology, and eventually the art and architecture of Europe before the Reformation. As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra argues, Pre-Raphaelites were profoundly influenced by the Tractarian poetry of John Keble’s The Christian Year () and Isaac Williams’s The Altar, or Meditations in Verse on the Great Christian Sacrifice (). Tractarian poetry appealed to Pre-Raphaelite sensibilities because of its symbolic exploration of ‘the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith through the indirect method of “reserve” in imitation of God’s example of concealment and gradual revelation in scripture and nature through figures, types and analogies’.⁶³ Tractarianism, together with Roman Catholic emancipation in , gave rise to a surge of interest, growth, and suspicion of monastic communities for both men and women.⁶⁴ Pre-Raphaelitism was attuned to these changes in Britain’s religious ⁶⁰ Alison Smith and Jason Rosenfeld, Millais (London: Tate Publishing, ), . ⁶¹ Carol Jacobi, ‘Sugar, Salt and Curdled Milk: Millais and the Synthetic Subject’, Tate Papers,  ( Nov. ). accessed May . ⁶² Smith and Rosenfeld, Millais, . ⁶³ Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, ‘Elizabeth Siddall’, in Prettejohn, Companion, . ⁶⁴ For a comprehensive exploration of convent culture in Victorian Britain, see Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press, ).

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landscape towards medievalist models in theology and communal living. Charles Allston Collins’s Convent Thoughts, bought by the Oxford University Press leader Thomas Combe, and featuring a frame of gilded lilies in high relief designed by John Everett Millais, depicts a nun in white contemplating a passion flower in a walled garden, an illuminated medieval-style missal in other hand opened to display a vividly coloured image of the crucifixion. William Holman Hunt and Millais also explored the nun as a figure of controversy and feminine purity in Claudio and Isabella () and The Vale of Rest () respectively. Punch described the year  as ‘the year Mr Millais gave forth those terrible nuns in the graveyard’.⁶⁵ This was, perhaps, pleasurable frisson as much as revulsion.⁶⁶ As Susan Casteras shows, this theme of the nun ‘amounted to an entire iconographic vocabulary that sustained a sense of awe, beauty, innocence, and sexual repression all in one’.⁶⁷ Cultural historian Isobel Armstrong points out that the Pre-Raphaelite ‘Creed’ that constituted their  definitive List of Immortals was a kind of Rossettian subversive blasphemy, and ‘a fresh reading of Christianity as well as a book list and roll call of PRB celebrities’.⁶⁸ Indeed, the List begins, ‘We the undersigned declare that the following list of Immortals constitutes the whole of our Creed, and that there exists no other Immortality than what is centred in their names and in the names of their contemporaries, in whom this list is reflected.’⁶⁹ Jesus Christ is on the list of course, and its highest ranking member, but it is certainly a pantheon, and through association the Pre-Raphaelites themselves were being rendered divine and eternal. They believed that the past, and the Middle Ages in particular, was an endless wellspring of artistic resources that could transform their present, and even offer them a place in their own radical pantheon of ‘immortals’. The Pre-Raphaelites wielded their medievalism as a subversive tool against the established art world’s tastes and beliefs founded on the post-Raphael canon of high Renaissance and early modern history painting. ‘Medievalist mannerism’ was a cause for reproach as it indicated a worryingly ‘grotesque’ and ‘Giottoesque’ infantilism, sectarianism, and deviance. As Giebelhausen notes, ‘evaluations of the Giottoesque and the grotesque . . . related to the larger question of defining and protecting the practices of high art’.⁷⁰ This apparent misalignment between past and present, and the expert instrumentalization of themes and sources from the Middle Ages, made the

⁶⁵ Quoted in Herbert Sussman, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister” ’, Browning Institute Studies,  (): . ⁶⁶ Sussman, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites’, . ⁶⁷ Susan P. Casteras, ‘Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and Novices’, Victorian Studies, / (Winter ): . ⁶⁸ Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Literature’, in Prettejohn, Companion, . ⁶⁹ William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelites,  (): . ⁷⁰ Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), .

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 -:  



Pre-Raphaelites a sensation that, whether audiences approved or opposed them, could not be ignored. The Pre-Raphaelites conscientiously resisted easy categorization. They blended medievalist sources and aesthetics with mythological, Classical, Renaissance, folkloric, and more modern themes and were ‘determined to be transgressive’ in their deliberately eclectic fusion of styles, histories, and genres.⁷¹

S  Arscott, Caroline, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Barringer, Tim, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Barringer, Tim, and Michaela Giebelhausen (eds), Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Barringer, Tim, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate Publishing, ). Cherry, Deborah, and Griselda Pollock, ‘Patriarchal Power and the Pre-Raphaelites’, Art History, / (Dec. ): –. Droth, Martina, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt (eds), Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, – (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Giebelhausen, Michaela, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Hall, Michael, George Frederick Bodley and the Late Victorian Gothic Revival in Britain and America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Hanley, Keith, and Brian Maidment (eds), Persistent Ruskin: Studies in Influence, Assimilation and Effect (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Harding, Ellen (ed.), Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Hawksley, Lucinda, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: André Deutsch, ). Kirk, Sheila, Philip Webb: The Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, ). MacCarthy, Fiona, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber, ). Marsh, Jan, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (London: Quartet, ). Milbank, Alison, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Mumm, Susan, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press, ). Prettejohn, Elizabeth (ed.), After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). ⁷¹ Armstrong, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Literature’, .

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Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Peter Trippi, Robert Upstone, and Patti Wageman, J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite (London: Royal Academy, ). Sussman, Herbert, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister” ’, Browning Institute Studies,  (): –. Waggoner, Diane (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting – (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

   

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 

T discovery in summer  of the original wall-paintings and decoration at Red House, the home in Kent designed for him by Philip Webb, offers an apt way into an account of the influence of Victorian medievalism on William Morris, and his influence on it. The high fully decorated south wall in the drawing room has, from floor upwards: a dado of horizontal coloured bands with stylized poppies and heraldic-style scrolls with the motto ‘Qui bien aime tard oublie’; three figurative murals depicting scenes from the romance of Sir Degravant, with textual quotations above; and a repeating, freehand pattern of pink roses and buds on dark green. The wall-painting in the adjoining bedroom has five stiff figures, set in a trompe l’il design of dark blue fabric hanging in loose folds, with a stylized tree between each figure and a blank scroll for their names above each and, below all, lines in archaic script, also as if on the fabric, carrying quotations from Genesis. Text and attributes identify the figures as Adam and Eve, either side of the serpent’s tree; Noah holding a model ark; Rachel wearing a medieval gown; Jacob with a short ladder. Part of the text is not from the King James Bible, but from Voragine’s Golden Legend, translated and printed by William Caxton in . The drawing-room Sir Degravant is a little-known romance from manuscripts dated around ,¹ which was published in  by the Camden Society.² The motto

¹ Dated to the early fifteenth century, the romance has no known sources or analogues. It survives in two manuscript compilations from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the Findern Anthology (Cambridge University Library, MS Ff..) and the Lincoln Thornton MS (Lincoln, Dean and Chapter Library MS ). ² The Thornton Romances: The Early English Metrical Romances of Perceval, Isumbras, Elgamour, and Degravant, Selected from the Manuscripts of Lincoln and Cambridge, ed. J. O. Halliwell Phillips (London: Camden Society, ). A copy which may have belonged to Burne-Jones was presented to the London Library by his daughter Margaret Mackail.

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 

‘qui bien aime’ is from Chaucer’s Parlement of Foulis, as is the inscription ‘Ars Longa Vita Brevis’ painted high on the chimney breast. Other textual sources may yet be found at Red House, where painted decoration covered very many original surfaces. But these citations are sufficient to indicate William Morris’s adoption in  of late medieval literature as a touchstone for his new-built house—which was of course also sited close to the road from London to Canterbury travelled by Chaucer’s pilgrims. These texts remained favourites, The Golden Legend, Degravant, and the Canterbury Tales being among the productions of Morris’s last great project, the Kelmscott Press, directly inspired by early English printed books. William Morris was in fact such a thoroughgoing medievalist, with equal passions for literature, art, architecture, textiles, and history, that a full account can virtually retell his life story. This chapter will endeavour to cover most of these areas, albeit in summary form and concentrating on those where his influence was widest and most long-lasting. For while his knowledge was deep and often scholarly, it was not merely antiquarian; rather Morris aimed to share and develop his medievalist passions in new creative ways, to shape the present and future as well as appreciate the past. Born in , William Morris like so many Victorians first encountered medievalism through the romances of Sir Walter Scott, which he ‘devoured’ as a child and continued to read. ‘I yield to no one, not even Ruskin, in my love and admiration for Scott’, he wrote at the age of .³ Like many small boys of his class, he also had the outfit—a ‘medieval-style’ suit of armour to wear while riding his pony in the park of Woodford Hall, or through Epping Forest to the ancient timber building known as Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge. When he was , his father, a City financier, obtained a heraldic coat of arms: ‘azure, a horse’s head erased argent between three horse-shoes or’ with a crest ‘on a wreath of the colours, a horse’s head couped argent, charged with three horseshoes in chevron sable’.⁴ Encouraged by his pious mother and sisters, and perhaps in reaction to his father’s world of commerce and investment, as a teenager he planned to enter the Church and reform contemporary society—an ambition one can infer was influenced by Carlyle’s Past and Present, with its invocation of Abbot Samson of St Edmundsbury (whose life story was also published by the Camden Society⁵) and its denunciation of most modern forms of religion. This idealism, and indeed all belief, was quenched at Oxford, where by the s Tractarian fervour was fading, and transferred to pre-modern literature, architecture, and applied art, eagerly inspired by Ruskin’s Stones of Venice () with

³ William Morris, ‘My  Best Books’, Pall Mall Gazette ( Jan. ): ; repr. in the Pall Mall Gazette Extra,  ( Feb. ): –. ⁴ J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris,  vols (London: Longmans Green, ), . ⁵ J. G. Rokewood (ed.), Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda de Rebus Gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi (London: Camden Society, ). WM may have read the translation and notes in T. E. Tomlin, Monastic and Social Life in the Twelfth Century in the Chronicle of Jocelyn de Brakelond ().

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   



its key section ‘The Nature of Gothic’, which Morris later described as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century. To some of us when we first read it . . . it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel.’⁶ He sought out the illuminated books in the Bodleian, visited the oldest college chapels and sites like Godstow and Dorchester-on-Thames; hung his rooms with Dürer woodcuts and brass rubbings from a vacation church crawl; joined a plainsong society; toured Belgium, the Musée de Cluny, and the Gothic churches of northern France; and began writing poems in archaic modes derived from old French chansons and English ballads. He and his student friends, including Burne-Jones, adored Charlotte Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe (), while Morris was especially energized by Froissart’s Chronicles, probably in the translation by Thomas Johnes, in original manuscript form, and in the coloured editions by H. N. Humphrys of  and .⁷ In  he bought Southey’s edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, which became a sourcebook for his circle of artist friends. Morris seems to have relished medieval battle scenes as much as courtly ones and in  will have seen the great collection of antique armour at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. From  he studied with the Gothic Revival architect G. E. Street, who favoured earlier, robust elements such as round apses and plate tracery over crockets and finials, but also promoted the polychrome use of brick and a high level of colourful interior decoration. So far, Morris was absorbing medievalism rather than creating it. He had an acute visual memory and by this date impressive knowledge of (late) medieval history, literature, art, and architecture. It may be noted, incidentally, that like many others he regarded the Middle Ages as lasting at least to —until the influence of neoclassicism became dominant in literary and artistic culture. His fascination with material objects—buildings, books, metalwork, stained glass— gave his interest a practical cast which was less romanticized than some other manifestations; as his early poetry shows, he understood the cruelty and violence of the period and something of the social injustice. Nonetheless, his fantasy, described in Story of an Unknown Church, was to have been a fourteenth-century stonemason, working independently (in the manner of a Romantic artist) and (improbably) alongside his sister, in traditional craft practice: that day, that I specially remember, I was carving in the central porch of the west front: (for I carved all those bas-reliefs with my own hand;) beneath me my sister Margaret was carving at the flower-work, and the little quatrefoils that carry the signs of the zodiac and emblems of the months . . . ⁸ ⁶ William Morris, preface to The Nature of Gothic A Chapter of the Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, ). ⁷ Chronicles of England, France, Spain and The Adjoining Countries, from the latter part of the Reign of Edward II to the Coronation of Henry IV, trans. from the French by Thomas Johnnes, Esq.  and ; Illuminated Illustrations of Froissart: Selected from the MS. in the British Museum by H. N. Humphreys, esq. (London, William Smith, ). ⁸ William Morris, ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’, first published Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (): –.

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 

Being also a wealthy young man, owing to his father’s investments and premature death, when in  he was recruited to the team of young artists allowed (invited is too formal and employed quite misleading) to decorate the upper walls of the new Oxford Union debating chamber, he not only contributed a speedily completed and very naïve mural of Sir Tristram, La Belle Iseult, and Sir Palomides after Malory, he also commissioned a sword, a chainmail surcoat, and a brass helmet (now in the William Morris Gallery) from a local blacksmith. As Burne-Jones recalled: ‘The basinet was being tried on, but the visor, for some reason, would not lift; and I saw Morris embedded in iron, dancing with rage and roaring inside.’ However, ‘the mail-coat was so satisfactory to the designer that the first day it came he chose to dine in it. It became him well; he looked very splendid.’⁹ At this period Morris also compiled his first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, with pieces inspired by Froissartian themes, old French verse forms, archaic language, ballad refrains: There was a lady lived in a hall, Large of her eyes, and slim and tall; And ever she sung from noon to noon, Two red roses across the moon.

Published in , the book was barely noticed, but had an effect on younger poets such as Swinburne, and would be a favourite with a much later generation including H.D. and Ezra Pound, and the artist Margaret Macdonald who translated the poems into decorative motifs.¹⁰ Morris also tried his hand at carving, calligraphy, clay modelling, wood-engraving, and needlework. Young Georgiana Macdonald recalled his engraving tools held in the loops of a long white evening tie nailed to the wall, and a fragment survives of thick, stitched woolwork with motifs of fruit-tree, parrot, and stylized scroll holding the French version of Jan Van Eyck’s motto, ‘si je puis’, adopted by Morris as his own.¹¹ It also features at Red House. In London, he designed items for the rooms occupied by Burne-Jones and himself; according to Rossetti, ‘Morris is rather doing the magnificent there, and is having some intensely medieval furniture made—tables and chairs like incubi and succubi. He and I have painted the back of a chair with figures and inscriptions in gules and vert and azure, and we are all three going to cover a cabinet with pictures.’¹² Although Burne-Jones described these ‘as beautiful as medieval work’ which would be ‘perfect marvels’ when decorated with ‘knights and ladies’,¹³ they are

⁹ Edward Burne-Jones quoted verbatim in Mackail, Life of William Morris, . ¹⁰ See e.g. ‘Two red roses across the moon’: watercolour –; photograph in Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow (GLAHA ). ¹¹ From the Flemish ‘als ich kan’, meaning ‘as well as I am able’ rather than ‘if I can’. ¹² Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham,  Dec. ; Fredeman letter no. .. ¹³ Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (New York: Macmillan & Co., ), .

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crudely planked, roughly painted, and as heavy as cast-iron; left behind when Morris sold Red House and long lost, they are now displayed at the Delaware Art Museum. Such was the context for the building and finishing of Red House in . Designed by Webb, whom Morris met at Street’s, this was to prove an influential architectural model. Although often described as ‘medieval’, nothing in that style as it appears in, say Haddon Hall, Ightham Mote, or any surviving hall-and-passage or timbered manorhouse is visible; instead it is a multi-roofed brick parsonage of two wings joined by a staircase tower topped with wind vane. The fenestration is irregular and the entrance doors concealed by arches. Inside, moveable items included hefty Puginesque tables and embroidered hangings with designs borrowed from Harleian manuscripts. Together with the murals and polychrome patterning walls, woodwork, and ceilings, the interior must have resembled a tiny medieval illumination made real. Such all-over decoration graced several churches, especially those designed by Pugin, but few private homes. One early visitor to Red House was architect William Burges, who would later provide very comparable professionally painted interior decoration, for example at Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch. Notable among the Red House decorations were the wall-paintings mentioned above, inspired by late medieval texts. Others based on Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy were planned, together with abandoned drafts of accompanying verse versions.¹⁴

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.................................................................................................................................. In  Morris and his family moved to live in smoky central London, to enable him to manage his new enterprise, the design and craft partnership Morris Marshall Faulkner & Co., usually known as ‘the Firm’. He must have left Red House with regret, but Morris did not do nostalgia; for one so emotionally invested in the past he seldom looked back, preferring always to plunge into the next project. The Morris Firm’s first public appearance was at the  International Exhibition—ill-fated owing to the death of Prince Albert five months earlier—where stained glass, painted furniture, church embroidery, painted tiles, and some jewellery and metalwork were displayed. It was ‘a somewhat motley collection’¹⁵ and aroused some amusement: Who could have believed that it represented manufactures of the nineteenth century—the age, par excellence, of cog-wheels and steam rams and rifled cannon? Six hundred years have passed since the style of yon cabinet was in vogue. On such a

¹⁴ Fragments of an incomplete cycle of Troy poems were first published in  in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, Green and Co., –). ¹⁵ Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for our Time (London: Faber & Faber, ), .

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faldstool as this the good St Louis must have prayed. Can’t you imagine Blanche of Castille arranging her tresses at that mirror?¹⁶

‘Yon cabinet’ was a large piece for an architectural office, decorated with designs showing the fine and applied arts, inspired by Scott’s account of King René of Anjou in Anne of Geierstein (). Described by Morris’s daughter as ‘a peep-hole [into] a medieval town’,¹⁷ it is now in the Victorian and Albert Museum (V&A).¹⁸ Foremost among the Firm’s early products were painted or stained-glass windows for domestic and ecclesiastical buildings. Other firms such as Clayton & Bell, Lavers & Barraud were already in business, but the Morris Firm was notable for its insistence on medieval practices, using bold leading, coloured pot glass, and silver oxide, as well as painting only for details and shading, in emulation of windows at Canterbury, Chartres, and Merton College—and inspired by allusions to secular examples like the ‘wyndowes wel yglased’ with ‘al the story of Troy . . . ywroghte thus’ in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess.¹⁹ ‘Glass painting is no lost art’, Morris wrote in an essay, after tracing the rise and fall of stained glass from the twelfth century. But there has been too much mere copying of medieval designs; it has been forgotten that the naiveties of drawing of an early stage of art which are interesting when genuine and obviously belonging to their own period, become ridiculous when imitated in an epoch which demands at least plausibility of drawing from its artists. But that very demand for plausibility and the ease of its attainment form another snare for the stained-glass designer, whose designs, though made with a knowledge of the requirements of the art, and though not actually imitative of medieval work, are too often vacant and feelingless, mere characterless diagrams. Rather than the expression of thought and emotion, as the work of the Middle Ages always was in spite of any rudeness of drawing or shortcoming in knowledge.²⁰

Here as elsewhere Morris argues for contemporary work in the spirit of medieval work, reflecting his Ruskinian belief that aesthetic quality should go hand in hand with sincere thought and feeling, and that the further progress of art depended both on technical knowledge and on genuine sensibility—such as he ascribed to medieval workmen. Early windows from the Morris Firm were often naïve in character, which was in keeping with their models and with their designers’ level of skill; over time the ¹⁶ London Society (Aug. ), quoted MacCarthy, Morris, . ¹⁷ May Morris (ed.), William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist,  vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), i. . ¹⁸ Acc. No. W.: to –. ¹⁹ Joanna Banham and Jennifer Harris (eds), William Morris and the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), . ²⁰ William Morris, ‘Glass, Painted or Stained’, in D. Patrick (ed.) Chambers Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, New Edition,  vols (London and Edinburgh: Chambers, –), v. a.

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designs became more suave and assured; but the process remained the same and influenced many generations of stained-glass artists through the Arts and Crafts period and beyond—a revival of medieval methods that has continued. The Firm’s embroidery in the medieval mode was inspired by surviving samples of ecclesiastical work such as opus anglicanum and later pieces like those preserved at Hardwick Hall. As Jane Morris recalled, ‘we studied old pieces and by unpicking &[c]: we learnt much but it was uphill work’.²¹ While never eclipsing the High Victorian decorative taste in domestic terms, the Gothickry of these designs had a significant minority influence, most especially in ecclesiastical circles, where medieval-style pews, thrones, candlesticks, altarcloths, and reredoses became standard fixtures, together with traceried windows, figured glass, and stencilled walls. After its initial phase in which church commissions were more numerous, the Firm also prospered in secular markets. Although Morris & Co., has often been hailed as a pioneer of hand-made, craft-based products, in a supposed revival of pre-industrial practice, the manufacturing processes were not in fact dissimilar to, albeit less mechanized than, others of the age, in glass, furniture, textiles, and wall-paper production. Nonetheless Morris retained his admiration for ‘old’ processes and materials, including vegetable dyes, and when in the late s he felt commercially confident, he plunged enthusiastically into reviving the medieval technique of high-warp tapestry production in emulation of Flemish fifteenth-century work. He declared this ‘the noblest of the weaving arts’, displaying the ‘crispness and abundance of beautiful decoration which was the special characteristic of fully developed Medieval Art’.²² As well as producing some of finest examples in his own time, such as the Holy Grail series commissioned in , Morris also advised the South Kensington (now V&A) Museum on tapestry acquisitions. Indeed, this advisory role, which extended to other media, is further evidence of his influential medievalizing, assisting with his knowledge and passion the creation of major collections of significant applied art. Famously he once observed that the Museum was ‘really got together for about six people’ including himself and Webb, and that he had ‘used it as much as any man living’;²³ but at the same time his input helped make the Museum.²⁴ In the s Morris also returned to poetry, now deploying an extended narrative form loosely derived from the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales (and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King), retelling classical and medieval myths in English blank verse and couplets. His delight in old tales prompted also his first purchases of incunabula, of which he built a much-prized collection. By this date he had acquired a wide and deep

²¹ Jane Morris to May Morris (fragment) c., Frank C. Sharp and Jan Marsh (eds), The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, ), . ²² William Morris, ‘Textiles, Introductory Essay’, Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society Catalogue (London, ), –. ²³ William Morris, , quoted Mackail, Life of William Morris, . ²⁴ Major acquisitions he promoted include the Ardabil carpet (Museum no. –) and tapestry depicting the Trojan War (Museum no. –).

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knowledge of medieval literature in French and English, and saw this retelling as part of an ongoing tradition where ‘originality’ was not prized. On later writing, he noted that: since the dawn of history mankind has invented no typal new stories. Think now: the same story which Herodotus has heard from an Egyptian priest was told in our fathers’ days by a Swabian peasant to Grimm, and two years ago by a Hindoo nurse to an English child . . . You may be sure that as long as art exists people will consciously or unconsciously go on telling the same stories, though doubtless when art is real they will do it in their own way.²⁵

To preface The Earthly Paradise, of which the first volume was published in , he compared the compendium of stories to gathered flowers: THINK, listener, that I had the luck to stand, Awhile ago within a flowery land, Fair beyond words; that thence I brought away Some blossoms that before my footsteps lay, Not plucked by me, not over fresh or bright; Yet, since they minded me of that delight, Within the pages of this book I laid Their tender petals, there in peace to fade . . . . So in these pages month by month I show Some portion of the flowers that erst did blow In lovely meadows of the varying land, Wherein erewhile I had the luck to stand.

Alongside the Greek stories of Atalanta, Alcestis, Croesus, Pygmalion that Morris and his male companions knew so well from their schoolbooks, came less familiar tales: Ogier the Dane from a French romance in Corps d’extraits de Romans de Chevalerie;²⁶ The Man Born to be King, blending elements from the Gesta Romanorum, Li Contes du Roi Constant, and the Brothers Grimm; The Watching of the Falcon, drawing on the Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Jean d’Arras’s Tale of Melusine. Indeed, so unfamiliar were they that in his (very favourable) review Henry James, himself classically educated, excused his failure to address the non-classical tales by pleading lack of space.²⁷ In the subsequent volumes, Morris included stories from Nordic sources, at that time hardly known in Britain. And thanks to what James called the ‘thoroughly agreeable way’ in which Morris wrote, so that ‘while he tells us what we may call a sensuous story in all its breadth, he likewise tells it in all its purity’, The Earthly Paradise

²⁵ Letter to T. C. Horsfall,  Mar. . Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin,  vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, –), letter . ²⁶ By Louis Elisabeth de la Vergne, Comte de Tressan, . ²⁷ Review of William Morris, The Earthly Paradise: A Poem (Boston: Roberts Bros., ) originally published in The Nation,  July .

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was a popular success, widely read aloud within the home, and thereby introduced new generations to accessible versions of long-lost medieval legends. During the s, Morris returned to calligraphy in emulation of medieval manuscript production. ‘I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages’ he wrote later.²⁸ Done as a relaxation from daily work for the Firm, he called it ‘my pleasure work of books’,²⁹ and appears to have cast himself in the role of medieval scribe, copying ancient texts and some original verse, with decorated initials, ornaments, and occasional illustrated openings. The Aeneid was, he wrote, ‘my great joy for months’.³⁰ His daughter May recalled his delight in materials: cakes and sticks of pigment, crisp brushes and quills, ‘knives and elegant rules and compasses’,³¹ and the physical experience of making, always important to Morris, was something he ascribed to craft workers of all ages, and wished to transport, as it were, directly from the Middle Ages to the present, to replace machine-minding. Calligraphy, however, was a private, personal pleasure, rather than one offered to the world like poetry and stained-glass windows. Yet the century saw the revival of calligraphy and illumination, so although Morris’s examples cannot be cited as influential, they were part of the revaluation of medieval skills.

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.................................................................................................................................. ‘Not seldom I please myself with trying to realize the face of medieval England’, Morris wrote in his Socialist years: the many chases and great woods, the stretches of common tillage and common pasture quite unenclosed . . . The scarcity of bridges, and people using ferries instead, or fords where they could; the little towns well be-churched, often walled; the villages just where they are now (except for those that have nothing but the church left to tell of them); their churches, some big and handsome, some small and curious, but all crowded with altars and furniture, and gay with pictures and ornament; the many religious houses, with their glorious architecture; the beautiful manor-houses, some of them castles once . . . some new and elegant; some out of all proportion small for the importance of their lords. How strange it would be to us if we could be landed in fourteenth-century England . . . ³²

²⁸ William Morris, ‘On the Printing of Books’, The Times,  Nov. . ²⁹ William Morris to Louisa Baldwin,  Mar. , quoted Mackail, Life of William Morris, i. . ³⁰ William Morris to Louisa Baldwin,  Mar. . The half-complete Aeneid is now in the Andrew Lloyd Webber collection. ³¹ May Morris, Introductions to The Collected Works of William Morris,  vols (New York: Oriole Press, ), i. . ³² William Morris, ‘The Hopes of Civilization’, Signs of Change, Seven Lectures Delivered on Various Occasions (London: Reeves and Turner, ), .

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From his teenage years, he sought out old buildings and historic sites, amassing knowledge of ecclesiastical and domestic architecture throughout Britain and northern France. While working with Street, he studied churches and fitments with a retentive and professional eye. Later, whenever travelling for business or pleasure, he took the opportunity to visit and revisit places. Memorably, he wrote of his reaction to visiting Hall Place in Kent, that: ‘it made the stomach in me turn over for love of an old building’.³³ In the s, as he began an active role in public life, he grew concerned about threats to old and especially medieval buildings posed by demolition and restoration, which in context usually meant rebuilding. In this, he opposed those leading Gothic Revival architects who did so much to promote the style and believed in remodelling decayed fabric anew. Again, he was not alone in this, but in  he took a decisive step in a letter to the press: My eye just now caught the word ‘restoration’, and on looking closer that time it is nothing less than the Minster of Tewkesbury that is to be destroyed by Sir Gilbert Scott. Is it altogether too late to do something to save it—it and whatever else of beautiful or historical that is still left to us on the sites of the ancient buildings we were once so famous for? Would it not be of some use once for all, and with the least delay possible, to set on foot an association for the purpose of watching over and protecting these relics, which, scanty as they are now become, are still wonderful treasures, all the more priceless in this age of the world, when the newly-invented study of living history is the chief joy of so many of our lives?³⁴

He proposed an association ‘to keep a watch on old monuments, to protect against all “restoration” that means more than keeping out wind and weather . . . and to awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are . . . sacred monument of the nation’s growth and hope’. So was launched the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), the first such heritage organization, with a double remit of identifying sites and campaigning for their protection against what was dubbed ‘scraping’ or the removal of all old fabric. With characteristic dispatch he recruited a committee that included Carlyle and Ruskin as well as antiquarians like William Aldis Wright, Stopford Brooke, and F. J. Furnivall.³⁵ Where Morris led, others followed, creating an effective body at a time when no statutory provision existed, and which from that date has been based on the principles that Morris laid down: ‘to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof . . . to resist all tampering with either the fabric or the ornament of the building [and] to treat our ancient buildings as monuments of a bygone art . . . that modern art cannot meddle with without destroying’.³⁶ ³³ ³⁴ ³⁵ ³⁶

To Jane Morris,  Mar. , Collected Letters, ed. Kelvin, i. . WM to Athenaeum,  Mar. , published  Mar. . The full list of inaugural members was published as a loose folded sheet by SPAB on  Aug. . Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), Manifesto (London, ).

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He used his forceful voice in defence of many medieval buildings, from obscure village churches to Westminster Abbey. Tiny Inglesham church, he wrote, ‘has never been “restored” and thus has escaped the process which has obliterated so much of the history of our ancient churches’;³⁷ while plans to install more ‘hideous’, ‘loathsome’, and brutal monuments in the Abbey were vigorously opposed: St Paul’s should be utilised for the stowage of such fatuities; and that all the more as it was clearly meant to fulfil that function . . . properly speaking it is a modern building, the product of an architect’s office, a work conceived and carried out under much the same conditions as such a building would be now, and expressing much the same aspirations and ideas as ours. Whereas between us and the mournful but beautiful ruins of Westminster Abbey, once built by the hands of the people for the hearts of the people, lies a gulf wide, deep, unbridgeable, at least at present.³⁸

According to May Morris, his zeal for SPAB never slackened: He may have been lecturing for a branch of the Socialist League in Bradford on Wednesday night, but Thursday afternoon would see him turning up as a matter of the course at the Anti-Scrape committee; and when required, he would cheerily sandwich a journey to a village church in need of attention between a business-visit to some historic country-house and a Socialist campaign in the unexplored wilds of London.³⁹

Under Morris’s energetic and opinionated leadership, SPAB developed into a foremost heritage organization, complemented but not superseded by Ancient Monuments legislation (, , ⁴⁰) and the National Trust (). As well as spearheading the heritage movement, SPAB also paved the way for conservation architecture, to preserve and protect buildings using traditional practices and materials that like thatching, stonemasonry, brickmaking, and blacksmithing go back at least to the Middle Ages. This is a major example of how Morris’s medievalist knowledge and passion had a lasting material and cultural effect. SPAB craft fellowships are named in his memory.

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.................................................................................................................................. Political engagement followed directly from the preservation campaigns, as Morris developed a public career, with the secure support of his Firm to assist him. His ³⁷ WM Appeal , reprinted in May Morris, William Morris i. . ³⁸ WM to Daily News,  Jan. ; subsequent additional protests are reprinted in AWS –. ³⁹ May Morris, Introductions, ii. . ⁴⁰ This substantive legislation was in fact drawn up by SPAB and the National Trust (which initially sought to protect open country rather than historic buildings).

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first efforts were within the protest movement against potential British military involvement in the ‘Eastern Question’, when the government of Disraeli and its jingoist supporters argued for intervention in conflict between Russia and the Ottoman regime over Bulgaria. For a time, Morris hoped that the Liberal Party would offer a radical lead in both foreign and domestic policy, but when in the early s this hope was abandoned, he turned, in a highly radical personal decision, to the nascent Socialist movement, then led by the Social Democratic Federation—and not, at this stage, very closely aligned with the trades and craft unions which were starting to politicize their membership. In taking this step, Morris was inspired by futurist idealism rather than angry nostalgia for a vanished past in the manner of Carlyle’s Past and Present, Pugin’s Contrasts, or Ruskin’s Unto this Last. He rejected Ruskin’s advocacy of ‘chivalry’—care for the weak by the rich and powerful—in favour of a forward-looking egalitarianism.⁴¹ And a summary of his experience and struggles in the Socialist movement is chiefly relevant here in respect of his invocation of antecedent struggles against oppression and inequality. For this Morris returned to his earlier enthusiasms including Froissart’s Chronicles. As editor of the Socialist League newspaper Commonweal (which he also largely funded), as well as prolific commentator on current political affairs and expositions of Socialist theory, he wrote some imaginative pieces. Among these was A Dream of John Ball, published in eleven instalments from November  and in book form in April . It begins with an account of Morris’s customary dreaming— of medieval and Tudor buildings as when new made: As once, when I was journeying (in a dream of the night) down the wellremembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a clearseen medieval town standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old.⁴²

The present dream, or fiction, is of waking from a roadside doze somewhere in Kent, dressed in a black cloth gown, carrying a writing case and a small sheath-knife. The buildings at hand are described in detail, and then the villagers, among whom the menfolk all carry long-bows. One whispers the watchword: ‘John the miller, that ground small, small, small’ and the dreamer responds automatically, ‘the king’s son of heaven shall pay for all’. His interlocutor is Will Green and the dream is of joining the Peasants’ Revolt in . The subsequent narrative introduces John Ball, whom the mob has freed from prison, and his banner showing the slogan ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?’ The time-traveller follows the throng into battle against armed opponents (from boyhood Morris had been keen on medieval fighting) and ⁴¹ Banham and Harris, Morris and the Middle Ages, . ⁴² William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson, (London: Reeves & Turner, ), ch. .

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afterwards foretells how the peasants ‘shall fight and overcome, because of their lack of knowledge, and because of their lack of knowledge shall they be cozened and betrayed’ but in due course villeinage will be ended—although men will be free only to sell their labour ‘to the master that suffers him to work, and that master shall give to him from out of the wares he maketh enough to keep him alive . . . and the residue shall the rich man keep to himself ’. Thus Morris enlivens Marx’s account of capitalism and links his medievalist passions to his present-day politics. As May Morris noted, the ‘strange and vivid’ account of participating in the Revolt reveals ‘the living man who stands yearning between two dreams, one of the past, one of the future’.⁴³ There followed a retelling of the Revolt of Ghent in six instalments,⁴⁴ which opens with a statement of political intent: The events of which an account is here given took place towards the close of the fourteenth century amongst a people of kindred blood to ourselves, dwelling not many hours journey (as we travel now) from the place where we dwell; and yet to us are wonderful enough, if we think of them. Few epochs of history, indeed, are more interesting than this defeated struggle to be free of the craftsmen of Flanders, whether we look upon the story as a mere story, a true tale of the Middle Ages at their fullest development, rife with all the peculiarities of the period, exemplifying their manners and customs, the forms that their industry, their religion, their heroism took at the time; or whether we look upon it, as we Socialists cannot help doing, as a link in the great chain of the evolution of society, an incident, full of instruction, in the class struggle which we have now recognised as the one living fact in the world, since civilisation began, and which will only end when civilisation has been transformed into something else. Whether we look upon the Revolt of Ghent as a story of the past or as a part of our own lives and the battle which is not wasting, but, using them, it is one of the great tales of the world.

News from Nowhere, first published in , in which Morris envisions a Socialist future of equality and peace and environmental beauty, also owed much to his medievalizing imagination, although to my mind only in very general terms, for the social and economic dispositions in Nowhere, with its low population density and communal life owe more to Morris’s view of contemporary Iceland than to historical epochs. As the revolutionary Socialist movement of the s stuttered and dwindled in Britain, Morris’s health began to fail, and his remaining energies went into two new projects. One was the composition of ‘late romances’ in the form of prose tales set in the distant Gothic past, which seem to evoke the spirit of Walter Scott as well as the histories of the Dark Ages that were now emerging—and which point forward to the ⁴³ May Morris, Introductions, ii. . ⁴⁴ The Commonweal: The Official Journal of the Socialist League,  (July–Aug. ). Louis-Élisabeth De la Vergne, Comte de Tressan, Corps d’extraits de Romans de Chevalerie (Paris, ).

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high fantasy epics of J. R. R. Tolkien. His source material for The House of the Wolfings and all the Kindred of the Mark () and the Roots of the Mountains () combines the Marxian notion of primitive pre-feudal communism with material from Theodore Mommsen’s accounts of the Roman frontier provinces published in English in , as well as an imaginative account of the Goths’ struggle against domination, all cast in a narrative mode drawn from ancient tales of heroic and supernatural events. According to its recent editor, Florence S. Boos: The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains constitute Morris’s most concrete reconstruction of an idealized pre-socialist society - its economic organization, political features, and heroic ideals in war and peace. Morris largely followed his sources’ accounts of the tribal structures of work, farming, law, and kinship, but these structures also provided him with a narrative framework for his egalitarian social ideals and intuitive understanding of many forms of work, and encouraged him to identify the best features of medieval life.⁴⁵

Other similar novels followed and, though their readership today is a niche one, their formulae of heroism, fighting, magic, and romantic but unsentimental love, effectively form a link between Morris’s medieval reading and the elaborate fantasy fiction of the twentieth century, blending dreams of past and future.

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.................................................................................................................................. Finally—though only thus owing to Morris’s shortened life—he revived the late medieval craft of book printing. In many ways, printing belongs to—even defines– the early modern era. Yet, the Victorians saw Gutenberg, Caxton, and their companions as firmly medieval, in terms of a literary style and approach to aesthetics and craft that antedated the Renaissance, the Reformation and neoclassicism. Briefly, being dissatisfied with the visual appearance of his own published books, Morris determined to ‘turn printer’ and do it himself in close emulation of the earliest volumes he had seen and purchased—such as Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, printed by Johannes Zainer in Ulm in , a copy of which he had bought as long ago as , and whose texts were linked with his own work at Red House. (The volume had been sacrificed with other incunabula when funds were needed for Socialist affairs, but a replacement followed, along with other samples of admired fifteenth-century printing.) The Kelmscott Press, which proved Morris’s last venture in combining medieval with modern practice, began with the design and casting of new typefaces, or fonts as they are now called, with the production by a contemporary manufacturer of fine ⁴⁵ Florence S. Boos, ‘Morris’s German Romances as Socialist History’, Victorian Studies, / (Spring ), -, .

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quality rag-paper, complete with ‘WM’ watermarks, and with the setting within his own page design largely founded on Caxtonian examples of ancient texts long dear to Morris’s heart. Voragine’s Golden Legend was to have been the first—hence the naming of the ‘Golden’ typeface. Roughly half the titles were medieval, half modern; they included Reynard the Foxe, The Nature of Gothic, Utopia, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy (which he described as ‘purely medieval’⁴⁶), Sir Ysumbrace, History of Godefrey of Boloyne, Psalmi Penitentiales, Caxton’s Order of Chivalry, Sir Percyvelle de Gales, and, of course, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Virtually all dated back to his earliest enthusiasm. Though it cannot be said that the Kelmscott volumes were greatly influential in bringing medieval texts to new generations of readers, they helped keep them current. Having long experience of running commercial workshops producing furniture, glass, textiles, and wallpaper, Morris established a small workforce of skilled printers at the Kelmscott Press, and presided over this in what seems a Caxtonian manner. Unlike some later printers, he did not set the type or work the press himself; rather he instructed and supervised others in the style of a master-guildsman. While the Kelmscott Press was not the only craft press of the time, it was more professional than most, and succeeded in paying its way—as long as Morris’s own time and skills were excluded from the balance sheet. In six years, it produced over fifty titles, in print runs averaging , copies. The great Chaucer was completed as he lay dying, in autumn . Almost every aspect of William Morris’s career, indeed his whole life, may be seen as an quixotic endeavour to valorize and revivify medieval culture in preference to that of the centuries from  to . His achievement was to do so without nostalgia or antiquarianism, despite his fervent love of old things for their own sake (he did not join the Society of Antiquaries until June ) and in such a way as to create practical pathways for future enterprises in literature, building, decoration, and, possibly, political action. For Morris’s signature method was not to describe or copy the Middle Ages, but to imaginatively inhabit them—preferably his favoured fourteenth century—and then make new things in the same spirit.

S  Arscott, Caroline, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). Banham, Joanna, and Jennifer Harris (eds), William Morris and the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Bennett, Phillippa, and Rosie Miles (eds), William Morris in the Twenty-First Century (Bern: Peter Lang, ). Fredeman, William E. (ed.), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,  vols (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, –).

⁴⁶ WM note quoted William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), .

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Kelvin, Norman (ed.), The Collected Letters of William Morris,  vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, –). MacCarthy, Fiona, William Morris: A Life for our Time (London: Faber & Faber, ). MacCarthy, Fiona, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, ). Morris, May (ed.), William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist,  vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). Peterson, William S., The Kelmscott Press: History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Sharp, Frank C., and Jan Marsh (eds), The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, ).

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T Arts and Crafts movement was a nebulous, inconsistent, and internationally widespread constellation of ideas, people, and practices, and it stretched for several decades from the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. A common thread might be discerned in its focus on reforming design and processes of production, which it saw as having the potential to be powerful agents of transformation in an increasingly unjust society. Arts and Crafts philosophies, while neither a clearly defined nor exclusive category, appear to have first emerged in the United Kingdom, and by the turn of the twentieth century had spread and connected with similar theories in various parts of the world. This precipitated many national and regional versions of the movement, encompassing a huge range of concerns—social, political, economic, ethical, environmental, and so on—and giving rise to diverse systems of thought, associational networks, and material cultures.¹ While many seemingly basic details about the movement, such as its start and end dates, remain sources of scholarly contention,² ‘medievalism’ in the Arts and Crafts is ¹ It is not easy to define the limits of Arts and Crafts. While the movement appears to have been led by charismatic individuals and highly self-conscious organizations, a great many other protagonists and communities ensured its growth, influence, and spread. These people were not necessarily aware of the movement or intending to be part of it. Workshops and communities existed and appeared all over Britain in response to local issues or social needs, and while some of their participants intentionally followed Arts and Crafts ideals, many did not. ² A conservative estimate might suggest that the movement began in the s and ended during the First World War. Others would argue that the Arts and Crafts began significantly earlier and ended much later, especially when international contexts are taken into account. However, as Imogen Hart has

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widely observed in the literature, and it is universally held that the movement in Britain—the focus of this chapter—found inspiration in the ‘Middle Ages’. However, discussions of Arts and Crafts medievalism—or, more accurately, medievalisms—tend to reflect broader imbalances in the scholarship on the movement. Although the Arts and Crafts encompassed an exceptionally diverse array of ideas, variously systematized into apparently holistic (but frequently inconsistent) worldviews, and often with widespread and revolutionary intentions, narrow canons have formed across arthistorical accounts of the movement, privileging charismatic objects but somewhat neglecting other aspects of the Arts and Crafts as peripheral or atypical. This chapter therefore seeks to consider medievalism in the Arts and Crafts by looking beyond formal and iconographical aspects of the movement’s craft objects. While inspiration drawn from the Middle Ages has been presented as one of the movement’s most recognizable visual features, this misleads on various counts: as well as implying that the Arts and Crafts movement might be identified principally in terms of certain formal idioms and visual motifs, this also under-represents both the diversity of influences—formal and philosophical—through which the movement’s protagonists reimagined the world of things. While such a focus on material culture also obscures the range of activities that constituted the Arts and Crafts, and the areas of life it sought to address, it should be noted that the European medieval was by no means the only stylistic referent of Arts and Crafts design, and the movement variously appropriated from an enormous range of cultures past and present—Elizabethan, Byzantine, Persian, Georgian, Indian—even the much-maligned Classical. Furthermore, Arts and Crafts medievalisms were expressed widely in the movement’s more transitory manifestations, such as in the social relations of its protagonists. In the Arts and Crafts movement as elsewhere, the Middle Ages offered a malleable and fertile terrain onto which escapist and utopian tendencies of thought were projected, and it was variously seen as a means of resisting, reforming, or accommodating the myriad changes associated with advancing modernity. Recurrent but often little-interrogated observations of the influence of the medieval on the Arts and Crafts also appear to overlook just how entrenched, multifarious, and increasingly institutionalized interest in the Middle Ages actually was in the cultural life of Victorian Britain. Not only was medievalism far from new by the time the movement began to emerge, but the Arts and Crafts’ adoption of it was not particularly novel. Indeed, Michael Alexander shows how medievalism had by this stage in the century become the source of much parody, its ubiquitous humour accessible to wide

shown, many impressions of what ‘the Arts and Crafts Movement’ encompassed are retrospective, as it was not until  that the phrase was set down in print (in Walter Crane’s Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, ). Regarding attempts to define the Arts and Crafts movement, Hart further notes how ‘Our current understanding of the “movement” languishes in a paradox. The concept of the “Arts and Crafts movement” is both independent of and dependent on its organisations and its objects’. See Imogen Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, ), –.

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audiences.³ However, the earnestness of the Arts and Crafts necessitated an approach to medievalism that restored what many of the movement’s protagonists saw as its radical transformative potential. Perhaps because of this, Arts and Crafts practitioners were prone to avid idealizing of the medieval period. This is illustrated in a lecture by influential Arts and Crafts theorist and designer William Richard Lethaby. Addressing an engaged London audience from the platform of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Lethaby claimed that In the Middle Ages the mere getting through of life appears to have been made romantic: the people seem to have played at war romantically, to have traded artistically, and to have built fairy architecture . . . everything written and wrought seems to show that these people rather liked being alive. Everywhere it is apparent that they knew they were having a good time.⁴

This possibly humorous but heavily romanticized view typifies the Arts and Crafts’ insistence on the inextricable ties between art, material culture, and life. Fanciful vignettes such as this appeared frequently in texts written by figures connected to the movement, and while these passages might now be seen as detrimental to the credibility of the Arts and Crafts’ purported goals, they must be recognized as an integral part of what the movement was. Furthermore, it would be limited to interpret Lethaby’s musings at face value. We might instead see Lethaby here as self-consciously performing the idealism and naïveté within the Arts and Crafts, in which medievalism played an important role.⁵ Lethaby might also have been catering to contemporary cultural preoccupations: because medievalism was pervasive and popular within British culture at the time, listeners (and readers) might have been particularly receptive to his choice of imagery.⁶ This would suggest how Arts and Crafts practitioners to some extent instrumentalized notions about the Middle Ages: as a well-known imaginary, medievalism offered a familiar utopian metaphor and a vision of revolutionary transformation that to some would have been less threatening than they perceived socialism to be. This visualizing of a socialist utopia appears to have been a principal function of medievalism within the Arts and Crafts movement, but this imagery persisted even as

³ See Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), –. ⁴ William R. Lethaby, ‘Of Beautiful Cities’, in Art and Life, and the Building and Decoration of Cities: A Series of Lectures by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, delivered at the Fifth Exhibition of the Society in  (London: Rivington, Percival, & Co., ), –. ⁵ Indeed, as John M. Ganim argues, medievalism has now ‘acquired the function of licensing innocence’; in Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . ⁶ Lethaby’s lecture was delivered as part of the events programme accompanying the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’s fifth show, in . These were arguably the principal public events of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the Society expressly sought to make its ideas accessible, hoping to attract a wide following to the objectives of the Arts and Crafts.

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the most fervent Arts and Crafts protagonists came to recognize—with varying degrees of frustration—that under capitalism such an ideal would remain symbolic rather than attainable. As Krishan Kumar has argued, ‘The utopian mode of persuasion is “to paint pleasing pictures of daily life”, such that we are impelled to want to make the world that is thus portrayed’.⁷ In the Arts and Crafts, which aimed in various ways and to differing degrees for societal transformation (even within existing hegemonies), medievalism supplied such images. Kumar also notes how ideas of utopia have rested upon ‘the elements of hope and of history’,⁸ both of which were central to the Arts and Crafts’ interest in medievalism. However, not only did the movement present history as hope, but as Lethaby’s quotation suggests, it also presented hope as history. The lecture in which this appeared, titled ‘Of Beautiful Cities’, was characteristic of a common trope in Arts and Crafts texts of sweeping yet highly selective quasi-historical ‘surveys’ that sought to authenticate the movement’s ideas, and position it as both the inheritor of Britain’s medieval legacy and the chivalric force which might rescue this from neglect and incomprehension. These aims, in addition to having implications for how histories were written in the Arts and Crafts, also motivated the movement to search for what its protagonists saw as ‘the extant past’—as well as to attempt to create it. The historical trajectory constructed in ‘Of Beautiful Cities’ indicates how Arts and Crafts ideals were encoded within histories that posed as authoritative. The lecture ranges selectively through different places by way of a dizzying chronology, then stops abruptly in  to leap conveniently from medieval buildings to those of Lethaby’s day. This registers as a jolt, shifting the notion of a ‘middle’ age of architectural ‘wilderness’ onto the Enlightenment period, and positing the Arts and Crafts as heir to and logical extension of medieval heritage: ‘I cannot stay, nor have I the will, to follow the history of London after the fire’.⁹ The lecture’s geographic and chronological range is used to position the medieval period at the apex of a long cycle of progress and decline, and also draws space and time into ambiguous relation. This problematic device is characteristic of Arts and Crafts medievalisms, and is articulated in Edward Burne-Jones’s descriptions of his own medievalizing images: ‘I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire’.¹⁰ Burne-Jones’s paintings reflect this idea by evoking an atmosphere of the past while remaining unbeholden to accuracy of detail, and scholars have remarked upon their highly ambiguous geographies.¹¹ Lethaby’s own blurring of time and space has roots in his earlier architectural treatise Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, published in . This rich yet under⁷ Here Kumar is responding to an idea of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s. See Krishan Kumar, ‘Aspects of the Western Utopian Tradition’, in Jorn Rusen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger (eds), Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, ), . ⁸ Kumar, ‘Aspects’, . ⁹ Lethaby, ‘Of Beautiful Cities’, . ¹⁰ Quoted in Alexander, Medievalism, . ¹¹ See e.g. Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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examined work of pseudo-scholarship adopts an ostensibly cosmopolitan purview while ultimately asserting its preference for European medieval architecture, and might be read as a significant example of ‘Orientalism’.¹² Indeed, the presence in the British Arts and Crafts movement of ideas that align with Orientalist tendencies to ‘other’—by collapsing complexities and self-defining through distorted comparisons— is yet to receive sustained attention, but such approaches were prevalent and influential. These were fuelled by Arts and Crafts preoccupations with ideas about ‘origins’, ‘authenticity’, and regional ‘propriety’, against a backdrop of feverish imperialism with which the movement variously engaged. As Eileen Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke (writing as the Petropunk Collective) note, ‘Western culture gazes at the Middle Ages as a self-image that impossibly blurs the distinction between identity and alterity’.¹³ In Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, medievalism can be seen acting as a go-between, aiming to illuminate links between Arts and Crafts ideas and objects and the diverse range of international visual and material culture acting within and upon British design. The book, which Lethaby referred to as ‘Cosmos’, brought architecture from all over the world (and especially the British Empire) into comparative relation, freely mixing examples from medieval Europe into discussions of earlier, more distant, or less well chronicled belief systems. The Middle Ages were given pre-eminence within this, paralleling the ambivalent positioning of architecture by Arts and Crafts practitioners as simultaneously interdependent with and supposedly superior in relation to the socalled ‘lesser arts’. The book’s wilfully broad scope evokes a sort of cosmology of its own, an aesthetic which itself might borrow from medievalism; as a reviewer writing in  for The Architect noted, ‘such a multiplicity of examples . . . make this book appear to be the production of a past age, when scholarship of the kind could be appreciated’.¹⁴ The twelve chapters of ‘Cosmos’ each set out to trace the recurrence or genesis of a different architectural motif or trope. To do this, the text attempts to synthesize differing belief systems in support of the book’s central concern, summed up by a question from French architect and writer César Daly. This, which the rest of the book seeks to answer in the affirmative, is quoted on the title-page: ‘Are there symbols which may be called constant; proper to all races, all societies, and all countries?’ However, the structure of the ensuing text reflects Lethaby’s privileging of European examples in his approach to this question. Each chapter begins with a quotation from a ‘Western’ literary source—sometimes nineteenth-century, sometimes medieval—before reaching backward in time or outward in space to attempt to divine a common thread running through the different worldviews and visual forms of diverse civilizations. The tone and

¹² For the genesis of this concept, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, ). ¹³ The Petropunk Collective, ‘Speculative Medievalisms: A Précis’ in Petropunk Collective (ed.), Speculative Medievalisms Discography (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, ), iii. ¹⁴ Review of W. R. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth of , in The Architect,  Jan. .

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premise of the text are Orientalizing: the descriptions are sensationalized, and a dual horror and fascination bubble to the surface in places. For example, in advocating the form to which contemporary buildings should aspire, Lethaby warns that ‘this message cannot be that of the past—terror, mystery, splendour . . . No barbaric gold with ruddy bloom; no jewels; emeralds half a palm over, rubies like an egg, and crystal spheres, can again be used more for magic than for beauty’. He follows with a list of predominantly non-European architectural feats, describing them as ‘closing in on the awed worshipper and crushing his imagination’, before going on to urge readers to ‘Think of the Sociology and Religion of all this, and the stain across it, “each stone cemented in the blood of a human creature”’.¹⁵ This contrasts sharply with his eulogy to a sanitized Middle Ages in his Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society lecture, delivered only a few years after Architecture, Mysticism and Myth was published. Lethaby also emphasized links between the Middle Ages and his own day, as reflected in the chapter-heading quotations which seamlessly mixed and equated the medieval and the contemporary. For example, a quotation from the Kalevala frames the first chapter, where it is made to speak to the theme of ‘The World Fabric’; Chaucer begins the sixth chapter on ‘The Planetary Spheres’; and Ossian (whose contested identity reflects aptly the medievalism of the long nineteenth century) introduces the theme of ‘The Labyrinth’.¹⁶ Lethaby’s ambitious synthesis was not novel, however. As well as echoing Owen Jones’s significantly earlier claim that there was a ‘family likeness’ across a geographically and culturally diverse range of thirteenth-century buildings,¹⁷ it was reflective of the late nineteenth-century tendency to imagine the medieval, as John M Ganim observes, ‘as both foreign and indigenous’.¹⁸ Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul also note ‘the interrelated histories of medievalism and colonialism’,¹⁹ and describe how the concept of ‘the medieval’ has ‘supplied a spatiotemporal baseline for many dominant narratives’.²⁰ Notions of the Middle Ages might therefore be seen in part as offering to Arts and Crafts thinking a way of addressing the global using a framework regarded as local. A central tenet of the movement, deriving from A. W. N. Pugin’s architectural principles and the ideas of Ruskin, Morris, and others, advocated fidelity to place through the use in architecture and craft of regionally specific materials, methods, and ¹⁵ William R. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (Bath: Solos Press, ), . ¹⁶ The works attributed to Ossian were from the beginning questioned and linked to Scottish poet James Macpherson. It is potentially revealing of Arts and Crafts approaches to history, imagination, and accuracy that Lethaby persists in attributing the quotation to the legendary figure of Ossian, even though his identity and authorship had been widely doubted by the time Lethaby wrote Architecture, Mysticism and Myth. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, , , . ¹⁷ Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day & Son, ), . ¹⁸ Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism, . ¹⁹ Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, ‘Introduction: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” outside Europe’, in Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ outside Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . See also their Chapter  in this volume. ²⁰ Davis and Altschul, ‘Introduction’, .

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motifs. This, it was believed, held the promise of a ‘living’ tradition which would have continued relevance into the future. However, what exactly constituted the ‘local’ at this time is less certain, and despite the intercontinental scope of the medieval, the Arts and Crafts tended to conflate it with temporally vague notions of European or British vernaculars, and presented it as a source of authentic (and sometimes specifically national) identity. In this especially, the movement’s thinking followed Ruskin, who had argued that the Gothic was appropriate and virtuous, indicative of particular characteristics of ‘noble peasants’ of Northern Europe. For Deborah van der Plaat, Lethaby’s approach in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth to some extent follows this canonical Arts and Crafts idea, remaining fixed ‘to a celebration of the past or tradition, and more specifically to Ruskin’s identification of the Gothic spirit as a paradigmatic model for future practice’.²¹ Lethaby was indeed a keen disciple of Ruskin, whom he spoke of as the first of his ‘prophets’,²² but the aims of ‘Cosmos’ differed from and even contradicted Ruskin’s. Rather than attempting to isolate a ‘pure’, regionally specific, and supposedly therefore appropriate architectural language, Lethaby’s book argued for hybridity, interconnectedness, and universality, positioning the Gothic within an expansive architectural cosmology which preceded it by many centuries.²³ This approach was not necessarily unusual within the Arts and Crafts, and yet it has been somewhat disappeared from the movement’s histories. Still, some scholars have drawn attention to how international influences were prevalent within the movement’s material culture, sometimes overtly and at other times hiding in plain sight.²⁴ The prominence of the South Kensington Museum (later, the Victoria and Albert Museum) within Arts and Crafts London ensured a rich and popular resource for research and design inspiration from many places, and while some practitioners’ trips to the Museum are well-known, the ways in which these impacted upon their designs are seldom thoroughly analysed.²⁵ ²¹ Deborah van der Plaat, ‘The Significance of the “Temple Idea” in William Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth ()’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, / (Spring ). accessed May . ²² Julian Holder, ‘Architecture, Mysticism and Myth and its Influence’, in Sylvia Backemeyer and Theresa Gronberg (eds), W. R. Lethaby –: Architecture, Design, and Education (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, ), . As Robert Schultz Weir later noted, Lethaby had by  ‘read everything that Ruskin had ever written and had absorbed his teaching’. Quoted in Holder, ‘Architecture, Mysticism and Myth and its Influence’, . ²³ Lethaby’s text also celebrates many examples that Ruskin likely would have not. ²⁴ Barringer points out the influence of patterns from Indian textiles in Morris & Co. fabric designs. Barringer, Men at Work, –. ²⁵ Aside from hybridity within Arts and Crafts medievalisms and design, it should also be noted that there were members of the wider Arts and Crafts milieu whose interest in the medieval was expressly not confined to Europe. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s Mediæval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, ), for example, was one of several volumes he published with the Essex House Press. As he described in its introduction, ‘It is of interest to record, in connection with the arts and crafts . . . that this book has been printed by hand, upon the press used by William Morris for printing the Kelmscott

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Architecture, Mysticism and Myth clearly demonstrates a debt to the collections of the South Kensington Museum. Among the material culture from the Indian subcontinent woven into the narrative, there is an illustration in silhouette in the chapter on ‘The Golden Gate of the Sun’ of a torana. This example is one of the four gateways from the Great Stupa at Sanchi, and a plaster cast of it was held by the Museum from the early s to the mid-s. Lethaby also relied heavily upon written sources for Architecture, Mysticism and Myth but was later disparaging of his ‘uncritical and inexpert’ use of these second-hand colonial researches.²⁶ Other Arts and Crafts practitioners focused on the British countryside, where they searched for extant traces of the medieval past. Edward Schroeder Prior, a friend and colleague of Lethaby’s (and among those who assisted with ‘Cosmos’),²⁷ also wrote extensively on architecture, and his texts such as A History of Gothic Art in England of  and Eight Chapters on English Medieval Art: A Study in English Economics²⁸ demonstrate the kind of fieldwork frequently conducted by Arts and Crafts protagonists. This saw them journeying to rural areas to study and draw selected historic structures, the majority of their choices being at least in part medieval. Sometimes this was related to preservation efforts on the fabric of these structures, such as those conducted under the auspices of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, an organization closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. However, often these were sketching trips,²⁹ social occasions, or combinations of the two, suggesting the relationship between the search for the medieval and the construction and reinforcement of social bonds. The licence—granted in part by the Arts and Crafts’ partial conflation of ‘medievalism’ with ‘vernacular’, at least in Britain—to imagine the past in adaptable ways meant that the movement’s search for what some of its practitioners framed as the ‘extant past’ was not limited to material things, and evidence of the medieval was sought in living traditions too. The Arts and Crafts emphasis on the ‘spirit’ of Gothic rather than exact accuracy meant that buildings and craft from a significantly wider date range could be seen as embodying an ‘essence’ of the Middle Ages, and the movement’s interest in and occasional championing of rural craftspeople might be read as an example of the Arts and Crafts’ problematic attempts to locate the ‘Middle Ages’ spatially. With the frequently worthy intention of ensuring the survival of craft

Chaucer. The printing carried on in the Norman Chapel at Broad Campden has occupied some fifteen months. One cannot help seeing in these very facts an illustration of the way in which the East and the West may together be united in an endeavour to restore that true Art of Living which has long been neglected by humanity’. ²⁶ W. R. Lethaby, Architecture, Nature & Magic (London: Gerald Duckworth, ), . ²⁷ Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, . ²⁸ These were first published in , eleven years after Prior had delivered them as part of the Carpenter Lectures at University College London in . In the preface, he notes that this published version has been ‘Recast for Cambridge students’. E. S. Prior, Eight Chapters on Medieval Art: A Study in English Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), n.p. ²⁹ Many motifs surveyed in this way were adapted for use in Arts and Crafts designs.

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traditions, figures in the movement sought to acquire ‘authentic’ skills and knowledge from country practitioners who utilized pre-industrial working methods. This was in the fraught and paradoxical hope that these techniques might be simultaneously preserved and proliferated for the good of contemporary design, something that reflects how both the Arts and Crafts and medievalism more generally embodied reactionary and progressive tendencies at the same time. As Morris claimed, at the present time those who take pleasure in studying the life of the Middle Ages are more commonly to be found in the ranks of those who are pledged to the forward movement of modern life; while those who are vainly striving to stem the progress of the world are as careless of the past as they are fearful of the future . . . the past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.³⁰

One example of the movement’s attempts to connect their designs with an ‘authentic’ provenance is the architect James MacLaren’s ‘discovery’ in  of Philip Clissett, a rural chairmaker working near Ledbury. D. S. McColl, MacLaren’s travelling companion, later recalled how ‘we found, in a little Worcestershire village, a real survival of village industry, an old man who made rush-bottomed chairs with no other apparatus than his cottage oven for bending the wood’.³¹ Through this, Clissett became known to the Arts and Crafts cognoscenti. While such relationships might have been premised on mutual agency and benefit—Clissett, for example, received commissions, including the one for all the chairs in the Art Workers’ Guild meeting hall—the enthusiasms of the well-connected Arts and Crafts inner circle strayed easily into appropriation of other craftworkers’ designs. Ernest Gimson, for example, who had an extensive network of patrons, studied chairmaking with Clissett and subsequently incorporated the chairmaker’s methods and designs into his own well-known ladder-back chairs. This reads ambivalently: while it might have contributed to the preservation of the design, it also appropriated and possibly competed with Clissett’s work.³² Furthermore, any ‘preservation’ of such designs should be read critically, especially given what McColl’s account of this first meeting with Clissett reveals: ‘MacLaren made him one or two drawings improving a little upon his designs, which he was quite content to do at eight shillings apiece’.³³ Such cases could be interpreted as vernaculars being colonized by

³⁰ Quoted in May Morris (ed.), William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist,  vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Press, ), i, –. ³¹ Quoted in Mary Comino, Gimson and the Barnsleys: ‘Wonderful Furniture of a Commonplace Kind’ (London: Evans Brothers, ), . ³² Other rural craftworkers whose work influenced the Arts and Crafts have likely disappeared from histories of the movement, either from insufficient recognition being granted to them by Arts and Crafts protagonists, or by subsequent scholarly emphasis on well-known names. This obscures a significant aspect of the social relations within the Arts and Crafts. ³³ Quoted in Comino, Gimson and the Barnsleys, .

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Arts and Crafts medievalism, as the traditional forms and techniques the movement sought to ‘discover’ were distorted in the process. Attempts to locate trappings of the medieval spatially speak to a larger tension that has been identified within the Arts and Crafts, in which the urban elite that led the movement saw the countryside as an exploitable resource—of inspiration, materials, skills, and surviving heritage. This seeking of a different time through place might be seen as the corollary of the trope within medievalist fantasies in which characters wake up in a bucolic past or future, a changed place resembling the Middle Ages, such as in William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest). As Rosalind P. Blakesley notes, ‘the countryside was seen as a panacea to urban degeneracy’,³⁴ as many Arts and Crafts theorists believed that it was spiritually improving and embodied the values they promoted. Furthermore, the idea of the countryside as a potential repository for ‘disappearing’ ways of life and the living spirit of the medieval was echoed by some theorists who regarded colonized cultures within the British Empire in comparable ways. Colonial official and art theorist George C. Birdwood, for example, saw in the art and material culture of the Indian subcontinent a medievalist ideal, and championed the village-based production he observed there as the source that might reinvigorate British design. For those like Birdwood, non-European cultures held the key to the recuperation of the medieval ideal in the present day.³⁵ Echoing nineteenthcentury racist pseudoscience, these cultures were problematically imagined by some as being at an ‘earlier’ stage of development and therefore as embodying the past in the present. This presentation of the ‘foreign country’ as the past, to reverse the wellknown phrase,³⁶ was pervasive in late nineteenth-century imperialist systems of thought and suggests the multiple coding possible within the idea of the medieval. In addition to constructing the Middle Ages through architectural histories and searching the countryside for remnants of what could be imagined as its continued existence, Arts and Crafts protagonists sought in some ways to reconstruct it in their present day. This was attempted through setting up organizations that aimed in part to revive what was understood as the medieval spirit, and while collaborative groups taking many different forms animated so much of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the most prominent of these in Britain were metropolitan fraternal organizations. The formation in  of the Art Workers’ Guild heralded an energetic new phase in the growth of the Arts and Crafts, and arguably mobilized the beginnings of a consciousness that its unifying concerns might amount to a ‘movement’.³⁷

³⁴ Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London and New York: Phaidon, ), . ³⁵ See Barringer’s discussion of George C. Birdwood and others in Barringer, Men at Work, –. ³⁶ See e.g. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ³⁷ It was out of the Art Workers’ Guild that the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society developed, three years later in . This was the British Arts and Crafts movement’s most public face, and it held regular large-scale exhibitions and events, at one of which Lethaby delivered his lecture ‘Of Beautiful Cities’.

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The men-only Art Workers’ Guild made use of medievalizing tropes in its structure and conduct. Motivated in large part by a professed weariness with its own day, the Guild was escapist and defined itself in large part in relation to a pessimistic image of the outside world. The medievalism of the Guild appears to have borrowed substantially from Freemasonry, and it maintained private, lodge-like premises for a range of events, discussions, and exclusive socializing—all of which constituted important currency within the Arts and Crafts movement.³⁸ Similarly, guildsmen used medievalizing rhetoric and nomenclature to construct a collective self-image as enlightened, paternalistic guardians of supposedly ‘universal’ or ancient knowledge. The word ‘guild’ conjures up the Middle Ages, while the group invoked medieval monasticism in its use of terms such as ‘brother’ for its members (which they apparently used even in public).³⁹ As Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan have observed, medievalism was a common characteristic within artistic brotherhoods in Europe in the nineteenth century,⁴⁰ and for the Art Workers’ Guild it provided an imaginary that resonated with their concerns on a number of levels. As Lethaby was to describe in his public lecture at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, he located ‘the central principle of the Middle Ages not in feudalism, not even in the Church, but in the guild system’.⁴¹ Lethaby read into this system not only the means of pursuing useful and emancipated labour, but also a structure that institutionalized respect for good work by the social standing it offered to craftworkers: ‘By means of their guilds the craftsmen, too, won a place, and built up and governed the free cities . . . The place taken by the craftsman, and medieval art, are complementary phenomena’.⁴² The fraternal ideal of the medieval workshop also inspired and accommodated the Arts and Crafts’ aversion to the division of labour (theoretically at least), as it was imagined, following Ruskin, that despite the collective environment in which many medieval craftspeople worked, each worker made an object in its entirety—notwithstanding the different processes involved. This also suited the polymathic aspirations of prolific Arts and Crafts practitioners. The movement’s enthusiasm for Ruskin’s denouncement of the division of labour aimed not at promoting the isolation of the craftworker, but was instead something that might wind back the alienation linked to industrialized production

It also should be noted that both the Society and the Art Workers’ Guild still exist today, the Society having changed its name to the Society of Designer Craftsmen. ³⁸ Both Gillian Naylor and Wendy Hitchmough have observed the Guild’s lodge-like setting. Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design Theory (London: Trefoil Publications, ), ; Wendy Hitchmough, The Arts and Crafts Home (London: Pavilion Books, ), . ³⁹ H. J. L. J. Massé, The Art-Workers’ Guild – (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, ), . ⁴⁰ Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), . ⁴¹ Lethaby, ‘Of Beautiful Cities’, . ⁴² One senses Lethaby’s frustration at the increasing marginalization of craftwork. Lethaby, ‘Of Beautiful Cities’, –.

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under capitalism, and recover a prelapsarian continuum of art and life that Arts and Crafts protagonists presumed to have once existed. However, the purpose of the Art Workers’ Guild was not to make objects, and despite occasional calls for the establishment of a workshop space on its premises, it primarily served to provide a space in which cohesion could be fostered among craftworkers. Guild members appear to have exhibited a range of associational behaviours: a key criteria during the Guild’s early search for premises, for example, was ‘a place where we can smoke, and, if possible, get a drink’.⁴³ This stipulation is reflective of the Guild’s positioning of itself as a gentlemen’s refuge from the modern world⁴⁴—as one Guild Master wistfully described, its members saw it as ‘a spiritual oasis in the wilderness of modern life, a haven and a heaven’.⁴⁵ Medievalism facilitated this figurative withdrawal from the present day, and the records of the Guild suggest a predilection for nostalgic and bond-reinforcing rhetoric and activities. The ‘brethren’ came from a swathe of professional backgrounds, and with the group having been established in part to combat the estrangement between craftworkers and artists in different fields, operated under the motto ‘Art is Unity’. Proceedings were also frequently jovial, and play-acting—such as occasional costumed debates, which saw Guild members dressing up elaborately and adopting theatrical personae—was a regular feature, fostered by the Guild’s fraternal and sequestered environment. Following the success of their elaborately produced masque of , Beauty’s Awakening: A Masque of Winter and of Spring, which aimed to reflect ‘the method and manner of the masque of older and earlier days’,⁴⁶ ‘revels’ became popular events at the Guild, and a source of much excitement among members.⁴⁷ While little detail is known about their exact nature, the influence of medievalism is suggested by the Guild’s adoption of this type of musical and theatrical form. Through their establishment of ‘Annual Country Meetings’, the Guild also organized days out to sites of architectural significance. These formalized the ‘seeking’ of medieval Britain as a group endeavour, cultivating a collective spirit of fraternal bonds and providing design inspiration (many members took sketchbooks along). The countryside’s perceived role in spiritual well-being and artistic creativity was also championed by Charles Robert Ashbee, who between  and  engineered the relocation of his London-based Guild of Handicraft to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, a settlement with significant medieval heritage. The move from the city had been determined

⁴³ Quoted in Massé, Art-Workers’ Guild, . ⁴⁴ Morowitz and Vaughan describe how ‘the retreat of the brotherhood is symbolic in nature, a fortress within the modern world’, in Artistic Brotherhoods, . ⁴⁵ Minutes of the Art Workers’ Guild, Annual Report of ,  (archive housed at the Art Workers’ Guild,  Queen Square, London). ⁴⁶ ‘Beauty’s Awakening: A Masque of Winter and of Spring. Presented by the Members of the Art Workers’ Guild’, The Studio (‘Summer Number’ ): . ⁴⁷ However, as Guild member and group biographer H. J. L. J. Massé recalled, ‘There were some, no doubt, who thought any such frivolous amusement was beneath the dignity of a serious society such as the Guild’. Massé, Art-Workers’ Guild, .

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by a vote among the members of the Guild, most of who were Londoners and city-dwellers, so it is revealing that Ashbee was to write in his journal a few days later, ‘I am glad to think that the men themselves have decided that on the whole it is better to leave Babylon and go home to the land’.⁴⁸ Even before this relocation ‘home to the land’, Ashbee had taken his Guild on regular river trips through iconic British countryside, echoing the journey of William Guest, the central protagonist in Morris’s News from Nowhere.⁴⁹ The fraternal Guild of Handicraft—in contrast to the Art Workers’ Guild—had workshops which produced various types of furniture and applied arts and comprised a mixture of experienced craftsmen and younger apprentices, many of who were from impoverished neighbourhoods in the East End of London. The country holidays were in part to foster Ashbee’s ideal of comradeship, as well as a greater appreciation of the outdoors and Gothic architecture.⁵⁰ Music was also a part of how cohesion was cultivated within the group, and Ashbee’s wife Janet Ashbee compiled The Essex House Songbook (–) from medieval and vernacular songs she had collected; these were ‘sung after Wednesday suppers in Mile End, or round the camp fire on river trips’.⁵¹ C. R. Ashbee considered the book among the best that his Essex House Press had made,⁵² and Alan Crawford’s description of it—‘the history of English song quarried, not with scholarly detachment, but with an eager sense of its modern value, its idealism’⁵³—encapsulates the approach of Arts and Crafts medievalism more generally. Janet Ashbee’s efforts were part of a wider climate of interest in folk songs in Britain around the turn of the twentieth century, a revival that did much to preserve this cultural heritage, but also aligned it with a nationalist agenda. Medievalism was also implicated in this too—both in the Arts and Crafts movement and more broadly, it frequently carried dubious associations, and was sometimes used to express bourgeois nostalgia and to promote insular, jingoist agendas. The themes of fraternalism, wandering, and music were intertwined within the chivalric ideal, which as Mark Girouard has shown, had from the late eighteenth century undergone a significant revival in Britain and its empire.⁵⁴ This ideal dovetailed with the patriarchal nature of these colonial societies, and became a guiding component in the image of Victorian manhood.⁵⁵ The figure of the knight also recurred ⁴⁸ Quoted in Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ⁴⁹ Interestingly, the Guild of Handicraft’s river trips began around , a year after the first instalments of News from Nowhere started appearing in the socialist journal Commonweal. These trips were of great significance to C. R. Ashbee, and his  book From Whitechapel to Camelot (London: Guild of Handicraft, ) is ‘Dedicated to the five boys of the first river expedition’. Crawford, Ashbee, . ⁵⁰ Crawford, Ashbee, . ⁵¹ Crawford, Ashbee, . ⁵² Crawford, Ashbee, . ⁵³ Crawford, Ashbee, . ⁵⁴ As Girouard notes of the period from the late eighteenth century to the First World War, ‘Once one starts looking for the influence of chivalry in this period one finds it in almost embarrassingly large quantities’. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). ⁵⁵ See Girouard, Return to Camelot.

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within the Arts and Crafts imaginary, and is indicative of the movement’s intertwined medievalism and paternalism, and its notion of performing chivalrous duties towards art. The cover design by Selwyn Image for The Hobby Horse, the artistic periodical produced by the small collective of craftworker-designers that called themselves the Century Guild, combines the motif of knights with foliage—another common (and allegorical) trope within Arts and Crafts medievalizing imagery. The motif of a tree seen in this design, as well as recurring throughout the movement’s visual culture (such as in Morris & Co. tapestries and stained glass), was also a prominent metaphor within textual sources. ‘The jewel-bearing tree’ is the theme of one of the chapters in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, and the tree also appears to have been central within the Art Workers’ Guild’s self-image, many Guild Masters finishing their annual speech with the wistful refrain, ‘Prosperity to the Art Workers’ Guild, root and branch, may the main flourish for ever’.⁵⁶ Such aspirations of longevity were buttressed by imagined medieval sources, as these offered a sense of tradition and history in which Guild members anchored their aims and endeavours. Metaphors of an antiquated tone were frequently used by the Guild in their written and spoken addresses, reflecting a ‘corporatist impulse’ which, as Mary Ann Clawson has noted, was characteristic of fraternal organizations more generally.⁵⁷ Through the culture of chivalry—a gendered practice—medievalism thus reinforced the patriarchal nature of the Arts and Crafts. The movement was steered by an elite of largely middle-class men, who made frequently well-intentioned but impracticable pronouncements about how the rest of society should live.⁵⁸ The exclusion of women from fraternal groups such as the Art Workers’ Guild, and their subsequent historiographical erasure, was reinforced by the assumption that medieval craft guilds were all-male— something that has since been shown, by Pat Kirkham among others, to be false.⁵⁹

C

.................................................................................................................................. Medievalisms pervaded many aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement, both material and more ephemeral, and were not limited to design inspiration for objects or settings ⁵⁶ See, for example, Minutes of the Art Workers’ Guild, Annual Report of ,  (archive housed at the Art Workers’ Guild,  Queen Square, London). ⁵⁷ See, for example, Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), , , . ⁵⁸ Membership of the Art Workers’ Guild is a reasonable indicator of where this elite might be located, but it is also possible that this is a historiographical distortion. This is because Guild membership has canonized certain practitioners, while their equally active counterparts outside of the group have often faded into obscurity. ⁵⁹ However, women did not have equal status or representation within medieval craft guilds. See Pat Kirkham, ‘ “If you have No Sons”: Furniture Making in Britain’, in Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, (eds.) A View from the Interior, : Feminism, Women, and Design (London: Women’s Press, )–.

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     



for literary works. To many connected with the Arts and Crafts, the Middle Ages were neither static nor solely in the past, but might be connected with or revived, reframing questions of time, space, and ‘progress’. The flexibility with which ideas of the medieval, the Gothic, and the vernacular were treated left scope for the Middle Ages to operate as an ideal highlighting the need for societal change, rather than a reality to be replicated with exactitude. Medievalisms also helped the movement visualize a utopian ideal, and Arts and Crafts protagonists therefore wrote the imagined medieval into their socially focused architectural histories, sought it in the British countryside and overseas, and summoned it as a guiding spirit for their organizations and collective self-image. In the Arts and Crafts, medievalisms thus blurred any boundaries between the movement’s art and its research—the ‘histories’ written were imaginative, and even the more prosaic workings of the Arts and Crafts Movement often suggest an inventive, medievalist guiding spirit. However, just as the Arts and Crafts was heavily influenced by existing imaginings of the Middle Ages, the movement itself had significant agency in the history of Victorian medievalism. The Arts and Crafts movement assisted in perpetuating medievalism and diversifying its aesthetics, increasing its presence in the domestic sphere both in Britain and overseas, and reimagining histories of material heritage through its lens.

S  Attfield, Julie, and Pat Kirkham (eds), A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women, and Design (London: Women’s Press, ). Backemeyer, Sylvia, and Theresa Gronberg (eds), W. R. Lethaby –: Architecture, Design, and Education (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, ). Barringer, Tim, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Blakesley, Rosalind P., The Arts and Crafts Movement (London and New York: Phaidon, ). Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Crawford, Alan, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Davis, Kathleen, and Nadia Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ outside Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Ganim, John M., Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Hart, Imogen, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, ). Hitchmough, Wendy, The Arts and Crafts Home (London: Pavilion Books, ). Lethaby, William R., Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (Bath: Solos Press, ).

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

 

Morowitz, Laura, and William Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Naylor, Gillian, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design Theory (London: Trefoil Publications, ). Petropunk Collective (ed.), Speculative Medievalisms Discography (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

                     

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 

T Victorians, like us, were afflicted with ‘presentism’.¹ Their view, subsequently repeated in histories, was that they had rescued the music and dance of the Middle Ages from oblivion.² They had not. Indeed, the two principal ideas about medieval music and dance as dear to them as to us their heirs, the Victorians had ultimately taken from the Elizabethans: () that medieval music needed reviving, and () that a kernel of it had been preserved in the rustic music of the people, the folk music of their day. From the s to the s, this supposed folk remnant of medieval ‘Antiquity’ was assumed to be ever on the cusp of disappearing and in urgent need of codification.³ Still, the Victorian adaptation of these two long-lived ideas was unique, given the sudden acceleration of industrialism in their times that affected all areas of society, including music and dance. For working musicians, the crisis was nearly as drastic as the one a century later when sound film put tens of thousands out of work.⁴ The class ¹ On the scholarly-philosophical use of this word rather than the more general sense taken here, see, inter alia, Ernâni Magalhães and Nathan Oaklander, Presentism: Essential Readings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, ) and Craig Bourne, A Future for Presentism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), esp. –. ² John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  and  n. . For representative statements of the said view, see Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, ), , and Theresa Buckland, ‘Traditional Dance: English Ceremonial and Social Forms’, in Janet Adshead-Landsdale and June Layson (eds), Dance History: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, ), –. ³ Ruth Solie, ‘Music’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , where the author maintains that folklorists of the present see Victorian times as the ‘moment of transition in which the presumably authentic folk music of an earlier and more rural time becomes enmeshed in developing capitalist modes of marketing music to a mass audience, blurring the line between folk and popular song’. ⁴ At the height of the silent film period there were some , musicians working in England alone; Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, ), .

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

 

revolution of the nineteenth century created a ‘new and tyrannical public’⁵ to whom performers of all kinds now had to cater. The accompanying shift, in the thin space of the Victorian century, from the old aristocratic patrons to late capitalism’s state-supported corporations, yielded in the twentieth century the ultimate song-and-dance entertainment of the machine age, custom-made to mollify the working masses: film.

T M A    

.................................................................................................................................. When but a few decades ago Bertrand Bronson wrote in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians concerning the English ballad’s ‘long and unbroken . . . heritage of tradition’, that ‘ballad tunes are a part of the general body of folk music, only hypothetically separable from the mass of lyric folksong [that] have travelled down from at least the later Middle Ages’, he was repeating an idea that went back to early modern times.⁶ Already in the sixteenth century, medieval ‘Antiquity’ was being defined as the primary locus of modern nostalgia over Ancient Greece and Rome.⁷ All the more so in the nineteenth century. As Thackeray put it, there were two ages; now—‘the age of steam’—and then: ‘stage-coaches . . . knights in armour . . . Ancient Britons’ all blending together to form ‘the old world’.⁸ Already a fully formed historical complex by the late s, the Middle Ages (although not yet so named) was at once chivalric and brutal, both distant and close.⁹ Such was medieval music and dance from the early modern era onward. Victorians believed that medieval music and dance was maintained by the common people of their day because the idea had held sway since the sixteenth century.¹⁰ The earliest transatlantic explorers even saw an affinity between the Middle Ages and the Edenic peoples of the New World, a connection made explicit by Thomas Harriot in ⁵ Deborah Rohr, The Careers of British Musicians, –: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁶ Bertrand Bronson, ‘Ballad, §I, : Folk and Popular Balladry, Melodies’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, ), ii. . ⁷ Pace the much cited dictum by Lord Acton concerning Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the ‘two great principles’ dividing the modern world; Acton as cited in Joanne Parker, Review of Michael Alexander’s Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (), English Historical Review,  (): . ⁸ Thackeray cited in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), . ⁹ On the six ‘moods’ of the Middle Ages, see John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (New York: Routledge, ), –. ¹⁰ For some examples substantiating this statement, see John Haines, Eight Centuries, , , and –; Haines, ‘Antiquarian Nostalgia and the Institutionalization of Early Music’, in Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music Revivals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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   



Figure .. Frontispiece from Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies ().

his report on the Algonquians of North Carolina.¹¹ Medieval song and dance was seen as being paradoxically kept in remote and unlikely places. Thomas Percy, author of the influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (), stated his belief that ‘ancient English’ lyric had been preserved, not in the poetry of men of letters but in the songs of bards. It was in the corners of the British Empire, at the great hall of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, rather than in the crowded streets of London, that this song could be found.¹² Nineteenth-century writers favoured finding English medieval song outside of England, as in Walter Scott’s Scotland or Thomas Moore’s Ireland. The frontispiece of Moore’s Irish Melodies (Figure ..) paid homage to the bard’s supposed fundamental role in the conservation of English musical heritage, ever on the verge of disappearing. In his preface, Moore railed against ‘the utter extinction of Ireland’s Minstrelsy’, the ‘itinerant harpers’ thanks to whom ‘our ancient music had been kept alive’; he nostalgically recalled at one point ‘a great music-meeting held at Belfast in the year ’.¹³ The chronological ambiguity of the medieval Golden Age evident here—and ¹¹ Haines, ‘Antiquarian Nostalgia’. ¹² Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), ; on the third volume of Percy’s Reliques with medieval content, see  and –. ¹³ Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, ), viii. Generally on this work, see Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –.

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

 

generally typical of Victorians and Elizabethans alike—was neatly expressed in the full title of Percy’s Reliques, a collection of ‘ancient’ and ‘old’ songs, ‘together with some few of later date’.¹⁴ This quintessentially early modern idea that medieval song and dance had been unwittingly preserved by the common folk was given renewed impetus during the Victorian era, thanks to the following societal changes that would have major consequences for future medievalisms. Urbanization and the rise of the factory resulted in the mass entertainment of the music halls ruled by the above-mentioned ‘tyrannical public’. Industrialization and the mushrooming middle class produced public musical events: edifying concerts on the one hand and, on the other, social dance events featuring the newly fashionable quadrille and waltz.¹⁵ Secularization in the wake of the French and American Revolutions led to the reform of chant over the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ The growth of universities across Europe in tandem with the related academic publishing boom made possible important institutions such as the Folk-Lore Society () and the Royal College of Music ().¹⁷ And the increased mechanization of music, having yielded sound recording at the end of the Victorian century, eventually gave way to the template-changing cinematic art. All of the changes summarized in the previous paragraph did indeed translate into unprecedented expressions of nostalgia for a pre-industrial medieval Golden Age during the Victorian era, as is often maintained. Nevertheless, Victorians, along with the historians that subsequently codified them, would exaggerate the novelty both of their role in the longer history of medievalism and of their unprecedented ‘desire to preserve vanishing forms in the face of modernized urbanization’, in the words of one recent writer.¹⁸ It cannot be stressed enough at present that the Victorian ‘medieval craze’,¹⁹ despite the above-mentioned innovations specific to the time, was not a new thing. Rather, it owed to a centuries-old tradition of medievalist nostalgia going back to early modern times. If architect Augustus Welby Pugin could write in  of ‘the present decay of taste’ compared to that of the late Middle Ages, it was because

¹⁴ The full title of the  st edn is Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date. ¹⁵ On early nineteenth-century middle-class patronage, see Rohr, Careers of British Musicians, –; on the quadrille and waltz, see Frances Rust, Dance in Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), –. ¹⁶ On which, see Bennett Zon, The English Plainchant Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), and the discussion below. ¹⁷ Regarding the RCM, for the contrasting situation in the first half of the century see Rohr, Careers of British Musicians, –. ¹⁸ Kate Flint, ‘Literature, Music, and the Theatre’, in Colin Matthew (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: The British Isles: – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ¹⁹ Richard Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, ), .

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   



antiquarians like Michael Drayton centuries earlier had shunned their own ‘lunatique Age’ in favour of medieval ‘Antiquity’.²⁰

M 

.................................................................................................................................. When speaking of Victorian medievalism, and in particular of antiquarianism and its nineteenth-century successor archaeology, the word ‘revival’ is frequently used.²¹ Here again, it is important to stress that the concept of reviving medieval music goes back to the earliest shaping of the Middle Ages, that sixteenth-century historiographic construct of a younger ‘Antiquity’ post-dating the Fall of Rome. Chant (also called plainchant or Gregorian chant) can boast to being the earliest antiquarian project related to medieval music. The revival concept was crucial here, evident in the language of early modern chant antiquarians. Following the Council of Trent, the mandate came from Rome to purge (purgare) corrupted liturgical chant (correptio cantus), to restore (restituere), emend (emendare), and reform (reformare) it back to a pristine state.²² English Reformers used the same language. In the fifth book of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (), Richard Hooker advocated a return to the ‘simple and plaine’ music of the early Church. The ‘later invention’ introduced in the Middle Ages of responsorial and antiphonal psalmody, Hooker argued, should be abandoned in favour of ‘the people all jointly’ praising ‘God in singinge of psalmes’, which was the ‘ancient custome’ of ‘the fathers of the Church’.²³ From this early modern antiquarianism of chant flowed the now famous nineteenthcentury chant reform, spearheaded in England by Thomas Helmore in the s and resulting in the founding of the Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society ().²⁴ For Victorians as for their predecessors, the presumed revival of chant lay somewhere between an actual revival and a continuation of existing performance traditions. ²⁰ Pugin cited in Altick, Victorian People, ; Drayton cited in Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press ), . I have elaborated on this point in ‘The Many Medievalisms of Disney’, in Kristen Yri and Stephen Meyer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). ²¹ E.g. Thomas Helmore writing in  that ‘revival implies decay, restoration follows upon dilapidation’ (Zon, English Plainchant Revival, ). Generally on the ‘revival’ concept, see John Haines, ‘The Revival of Medieval Music’, in Mark Everist and Thomas F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). ²² Jean-Yves Hameline, ‘Le plain-chant aux lendemains du Concile de Trente’, in Jean Duron (ed.), Plain-chant et liturgie en France au XVIIe siècle (Versailles: Royaumont, ),  and . ²³ Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book Five (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. , line , p. , line , p. , line , and p. , lines  and –; from chs –. ²⁴ Zon, English Plainchant Revival, –; Percy Scholes, The Mirror of Music, – (Oxford: Novello, ), ii. . Generally on the subject, see also John Harper, ‘Gothic Revivals: Issues of Influence, Ethos and Idiom in Late Nineteenth-Century English Monasteries’, Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies,  (): –.

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

 

The key question remained the following: how could one mine medieval gold from the ore of modern practice? The idea of a medieval chant latent in the popular liturgy, a notion implicit in chant reform from the sixteenth century onwards, is heard repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century. Representative is one writer’s advocacy in  of ‘the old Ecclesiastical Chant’, which he describes as ‘music of the simplest description . . . rarely now heard’, ending with the exhortation to let ‘the good old custom be restored’.²⁵ Just as Pope Gregory XIII in  had railed against the ‘barbarisms, obscurities, contrarieties and superfluities’ in chant surviving from the Middle Ages,²⁶ both Anglicans and Nonconformists of the Victorian era believed that Gregorian chant could be returned to its ‘antique simplicity’ by being purged of ‘mongrel Gothic’ elements.²⁷ Closest to an actual revival of medieval music in the nineteenth century, and a true product of the antiquarianism of the age of steam, is the case of the motet. Very few had heard medieval polyphony prior to the late nineteenth century, and even fewer liked the sound of it.²⁸ Admittedly coming at the very end of the Victorian period and originating on the Continent, research on the motet by Latin scholar Wilhelm Meyer in  nevertheless did allow H. E. Wooldridge three years later in The Oxford History of Music to highlight the special role of England in the transmission of polyphony.²⁹ That same year () there appeared posthumously a seminal musicological work featuring facsimiles of English polyphonic works: Early Bodleian Music by John Stainer, professor of music at Oxford since .³⁰ The academic nature of medieval polyphony was signalled by Germany’s two earliest musicological professorial appointments around this same time, both specialists of the medieval motet: Gustav Jacobsthal () and Friedrich Ludwig ().³¹ Appearing even closer to the end of the Victorian period, and only slightly less provincially academic, was the antiquarianism of medieval dance. Here we are provided with an even clearer example of the resurrection myth.³² As the story goes, Cecil Sharp, then principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, London, first witnessed the performance of a Morris team on Boxing Day  in the village

²⁵ Zon, English Plainchant Revival, –. ²⁶ Tr. from the Latin in Robert Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Music,  A.D. to  A.D. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, ), . ²⁷ Here conflating two different writers from  and , quoted in Zon, English Plainchant Revival,  and , respectively. ²⁸ Haines, Eight Centuries, –. ²⁹ Haines, Eight Centuries, ; H. E. Wooldridge, The Oxford History of Music, i. The Polyphonic Period, part , Method of Musical Art, – (London: Oxford University Press, ), esp.  on ‘the Anonymous of the British Museum’ (i.e. Anonymous IV). ³⁰ J. F. R. and E. C. Stainer, Early Bodleian Music,  vols (London: Novello, ); see Peter Charlton, John Stainer and the Musical Life of Victorian Britain (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, ), –. ³¹ John Haines, ‘Friedrich Ludwig’s “Medieval Musicology of the Future”: A Commentary and Translation’, Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music,  (): –. ³² For another example related to chant in this same period, see Haines, Eight Centuries, .

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of Headington, near Oxford. Over the next few years, he documented these dances’ choreographies and their accompanying melodies, eventually producing his landmark study, The Morris Book (–).³³ The Morris Dance would go on to become in twentieth-century historiography the canonical representative of English medieval dance.³⁴ A more significant—i.e. mainstream—project of Victorian antiquarianism, and one illustrative of the broader trends already mentioned in this chapter, is that of vernacular medieval monophonic song. The archeological reception of this corpus can be traced back to the s. As with chant, the central dilemma of this reception was how to extract a precious medieval kernel from a heap of folk noise. To be fair, the archaeology of popular song in early modern times was a bigger movement on the Continent than in England, as seen in the romancero. Originating in Spain in the fifteenth century, the romancero spread to other Romance countries where it became a type of nationalistic song collection.³⁵ Throughout the age of print, the ever popular romancero was assumed to possess high medieval content. The English counterpart of the continental romancero was the broadside, and the mystical ancient songs of the people here came to be subsumed under the word ‘ballad’. As early as the s, broadside ballads were sung and avidly collected. In the late sixteenth-century Captain Cox was said to have owned ‘a bunch of ballets and songs, all auncient . . . fair wrapt up in parchment’; one of the most important pre-Victorian collectors, Samuel Pepys, had a compilation fully five volumes strong.³⁶ Of the well-known ballads on the Middle Ages, some of the most famous were those on Robin Hood.³⁷ When in the late s, Thomas Percy, the English counterpart of Johann Gottfried von Herder, set to systematize the ballad, he could claim that ballads about Robin Hood were ‘on every stall’.³⁸ Following Percy’s Reliques, the main ballad collections of the nineteenth century—James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (–), Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–), W. Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (–), and Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (–)— began to place a relatively new emphasis on a broad-based oral tradition, in contrast to Percy’s solitary bard figure.³⁹ Still, the stereotype of the singing minstrel remained the

³³ Buckland, ‘Traditional Dance’, – and ; Scholes, Mirror of Music, ii. . ³⁴ E.g. Ethel Urlin, Dancing: Ancient and Modern (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., ), – and A. H. Franks, Social Dance: A Short History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), –. ³⁵ On the romancero as a musical medievalism, see Haines, ‘Antiquarian Nostalgia’. ³⁶ Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, ), –. ³⁷ Gerould, Ballad of Tradition, –, and J. S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (London: Macmillan, ), . ³⁸ Gerould, Ballad of Tradition, –; Albert Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . On Herder and his predecessors, see Haines, Eight Centuries, –. ³⁹ Paula McDowell, ‘ “The Art of Printing was Fatal” ’: Print Commerce and the Idea of Oral Tradition in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse’, in Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee (eds), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –.

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Figure .. ‘Parody of the Singing Minstrel’, Punch,  (): .

most enduring icon of the Middle Ages in Victorian times. One example among many in the pages of Punch is a cartoon parody of the controversy between actor William Charles Macready and stage manager Alfred Bunn, the latter depicted at left in Figure . as a harping minstrel with a lyre ‘whereto he sings his ravishing strands’.⁴⁰ Rounding off this section on musical antiquarianism, I should briefly mention the Early Music movement and the individual generally recognized as having pushed the boundaries of performance back from Bach and Handel to the Middle Ages, the iconoclastic Arnold Dolmetsch. Dolmetsch emigrated in  from Belgium to England, where he specialized in Elizabethan repertoires while occasionally venturing into late medieval repertoires, thus laying the foundation for the Early Music movement that would flourish in the following century.⁴¹

⁴⁰ ‘The Last Farce at Drury Lane’, Punch,  (): . See George Biddlecombe, ‘Bunn, Alfred’, in ODNB and the bibliography cited there. ⁴¹ Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (Mineola, NY: Dover, ), –.

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M 

.................................................................................................................................. Although antiquarianism on medieval song and dance was often distinct from looser medievalisms such as the ballad, the two strands of medievalism—antiquarian and popular—frequently overlapped. For example, the first volume of Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time, written for a lay audience, opened with a facsimile of ‘Sumer is icumen in’ and featured an historical ‘Essay on English Minstrelsy’.⁴² Chappell’s work contained folk melodies that were harmonized by composer G. Alexander Macfarren, partly on account of the latter’s interest in Elizabethan music but also thanks to a family connection.⁴³ Several of the folksongs in Chappell’s collection for which the original words were lost had been supplied with verses by the composer’s father George Macfarren.⁴⁴ As the son would later recall, Chappell and the two Macfarrens shared a deep patriotism that imbued Popular Music of the Olden Time.⁴⁵ Some two decades after this work’s publication, Macfarren published an article strikingly similar to Chappel’s introductory ‘Essay’, in which he attacked ‘the almost proverbial saying among English people, “The English are not a musical people”’ (later expressed in the famous phrase about England as ‘das Land ohne Musik’), maintaining that it was the English rather than mainland Europeans who had pioneered modern harmony in the Middle Ages, as evidenced by ‘Sumer is icumen in’.⁴⁶ This same blend of medievalism and patriotism can be heard in Alexander Macfarren’s opera from around the same time, Robin Hood (), with its famous aria ‘Englishmen by birth are free’. Robin Hood was one of three important medievalist operas in the nineteenth century by composers native to the British Isles. All three were thoroughly Victorian in musical style despite the occasional modal touch for an authentic flair.⁴⁷ Robin Hood became one of the best-loved English operas of the day following its enthusiastic premiere: ‘the crowd was immense, the excitement unusual, and expectation on tiptoe’, reported the Musical World.⁴⁸ Its impact would be felt decades later; across the Atlantic in Reginald De Koven’s Robin Hood () and into

⁴² W. Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (London: Cramer, Beale & Chappell, ), i, frontispiece and –. ⁴³ Whereas in the original  edn Macfarren was one of several musical editors, in subsequent editions he was solely responsible for harmonizations; see Henry Banister, George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works, and Influence (London: George Bell & Sons, ), –. ⁴⁴ Nicholas Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism in English Romantic Opera’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, ), –. ⁴⁵ Banister, George Alexander Macfarren, , cited in Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism’, . ⁴⁶ Banister, George Alexander Macfarren, –. Macfarren’s essay was published in ; Oscar Schmitz’s famous saying dates from  (see Solie, ‘Music’,  and n. ). ⁴⁷ Here paraphrasing Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism’, –. ⁴⁸ Cited in Banister, George Alexander Macfarren, ; see also Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism’, .

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the age of cinema, beginning with one of the most successful films of the silent era, Robin Hood (, with a score by Victor Schertzinger).⁴⁹ A few decades after Macfarren’s Robin Hood appeared Alexander Mackenzie’s The Troubadour () whose ‘blood-curdling libretto’ by troubadour scholar Francis Hueffer ‘hindered its success’, in the words of music historian Ernest Walker.⁵⁰ Despite a lacklustre reception, this opera presaged the popularity of the troubadour idea in the twentieth century.⁵¹ The third indigenously British medievalist opera was Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe (), the most successful of the three; Edward Dent once called MacFarren’s Robin Hood ‘very full of good fun and on the way to Sullivan’.⁵² Based on Walter Scott’s popular novel of the same name, Sullivan’s Ivanhoe became the benchmark for future medieval stage productions. It was, as Percy Sholes once pointed out, the only English opera ever produced that had a continuous run of  performances.⁵³ Echoes of its success could still be heard over a half century later in Miklós Rózsa’s compelling score for the lavish MGM production Ivanhoe ().⁵⁴ These medievalist operas all belong to a category of music Victorians considered popular. As literary scholar Dennis Denisoff has pointed out, the Victorians’ definition of ‘popular’ differed from ours: not ‘the practices, values and entertainments favoured by a considerable portion of the general population’ but rather ‘those that the middle classes advocated as tools for giving those people whom they saw as beneath them civilizing and moral inspiration’.⁵⁵ The music halls discussed shortly did not fit this definition, but public events such as the performances of Schumann and Handel at the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts did. Popular by Victorian standards, Robin Hood and Ivanhoe were nevertheless not considered ‘serious’ (i.e. high art) music; this tended to be foreign rather than English. Indeed, many prominent musicians in English life, including the Royal Academy of Music’s own instructors, were continental Europeans.⁵⁶ Featured prominently on the Victorian stage were works by three foreigners who were not only the most famous musical medievalists of the era but also the most significant pre-cursors to the music of medievalist cinema: Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod, and Richard Wagner.⁵⁷

⁴⁹ On which, see Kevin Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), –. ⁵⁰ Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England. rd edn, ed. J. A. Westrup (Oxford: Clarendon, ), . ⁵¹ John Haines, ‘Living Troubadours and Other Uses for Medieval Music’, Popular Music,  (): –. ⁵² Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism’, . ⁵³ Scholes, Mirror of Music, i. . ⁵⁴ On which, see Haines, Music in Films, –. ⁵⁵ Dennis Denisoff, ‘Popular Culture’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁵⁶ Rohr, Careers of British Musicians, –. ⁵⁷ Solie, ‘Music’, –; Scholes, Mirror of Music, i. – and –.

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T     

.................................................................................................................................. As illustrated off and on throughout this chapter, the main methodological predicament for historians of music and dance is that of recovering live performance traditions from written and printed sources, a problem especially acute when it comes to popular art.⁵⁸ The poor are poorly represented. Although we can neither prove nor disclaim, for example, Frances Rust’s statement in Dance in Society () that in Victorian England ‘dancing was unlikely to have played much part in the lives of the underprivileged, except, possibly, those who were attached to the households of the rich’, the assumption behind it is not only problematic but potentially disastrous historiographically speaking.⁵⁹ With such rash statements as these are wiped out of history the experiences of tens of thousands. Histories of Victorian music, especially afflicted with ‘Great Man’ syndrome, have stubbornly clung to what is still called by some ‘serious’ music.⁶⁰ In Percy Sholes’s journalistic survey of late Victorian music, the topic of music halls receives a fleeting four pages as part of an afterthought entitled ‘Lighter Musical Manifestations’.⁶¹ Despite headway made in the last decade under the aegis of Bennett Zon’s ‘Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ series,⁶² it will take some time yet to completely shake off the cherished assumption that Nicholas Temperley in his introduction to The Lost Chord () so neatly formulated: ‘popular and functional music, almost by definition, do not invite critical evaluation’.⁶³ In the long history of musical medievalism running from the sixteenth century to the present day, of all the episodes mentioned so far in this chapter—the antiquarianism of chant, polyphony, monophonic song and dance, Early Music, and operas based on medieval stories—none of these weighed as heavily in Victorian life as what I am calling in this section the medievalism of the music hall. All throughout the Victorian period the music hall fostered an impressive variety of medievalisms involving both dance and music, and to the widest of audiences. Add to this host the throngs across the Atlantic in the parallel phenomenon of American vaudeville.⁶⁴ The music-hall or vaudevillian approach to the Middle Ages would become even more prominent in the following century. In particular, nineteenth-century music hall and vaudeville fostered what I have called a satirical Middle Ages, one made popular thanks to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (). Twain’s successful publication ⁵⁸ ‘Popular’, of course, in our sense of the word and not that of the Victorians mentioned earlier. ⁵⁹ Rust, Dance in Society, . ⁶⁰ E.g. Rohr (Careers of British Musicians, ) writes of ‘the composer who wrote serious works for large ensembles’. ⁶¹ Scholes, Mirror of Music, i. –. ⁶² Notably Alexandra Carter’s Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). ⁶³ Temperley, ‘Introduction’, in The Lost Chord,  (–). ⁶⁴ On which generally see Robert Lewis, From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).

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launched a prolific medievalism that found its perfect home in the cinematic medium, and whose most recognizable product is Monty Python and the Holy Grail () but which in fact spans over a century’s worth of movies, from George Mélies’s Le chevalier mystère () to Shrek Forever After (), and beyond.⁶⁵ The expression ‘music hall’ refers to a wide range of Victorian venues and entertainments. Conventional historiography often side-steps this diversity by conforming to a Darwinian narrative, as satirized by Laurence Senelick: beginning with the Palæozoic era of all-male song and supper rooms and taverns in the s, moving through the Mesozoic era kicked off by the  Theatre Act emancipating theatre from drink, then crawling ‘on to the shores of theatre history’ to arrive at the ‘first real music hall’ (Charles Morton’s Canterbury Hall in ) and the lavish palaces at the end of the century.⁶⁶ This idealized history partly owes to paltry documentation. Writes Senelick, ‘the theatre historian, unlike the palæontologist, is faced with a very sparse fossil record’.⁶⁷ This is all the more unfortunate since music halls accounted for more entertainment than any other type of venue, with audiences ranging from wealthy male clients to female factory workers—i.e. Rust’s ‘underprivileged’ cited earlier.⁶⁸ The historiographic dilemma for this sea of song-and-dance entertainment is similar to that for silent film in the period immediately following the Victorians.⁶⁹ If the historical anthropology of medievalism in the music hall is ever written, it will equally be a history of music employment in the Victorian era. From a primarily aristocratic patronage system at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the market for music gradually expanded to the urban middle and lower classes, emerging in capitalism now run amok.⁷⁰ Still in , music halls had employed less than  per cent of working musicians.⁷¹ But by  the flood, as Cyril Ehrlich has called it, had come: unrelenting urban growth and a boom of mass entertainment, with music halls overrunning theatres as the venue of choice.⁷² What made the music hall so popular was its eccentricity and diversity. A given evening’s entertainment could range from a simple song-and-dance number to a ‘troupe of highly trained elephants’.⁷³

⁶⁵ On Twain and the satirical Middle Ages, see Haines, Music in Films, –. ⁶⁶ Laurence Selenick, Tavern Singing in Early Victorian London: The Diaries of Charles Rice for  and  (London: Society for Theatre Research, ), pp. xi-xii, as well as Carter, Dance and Dancers, – and –; on the  Act, see Bratton, Victorian Popular Ballad, . A representative history is Archibald Haddon, The Story of the Music Hall: From Cave of Harmony to Cabaret (London: Fleetway, ), –, that begins with the heading ‘evolution from underground haunts’ (the ‘first real music hall’ rubric is found at p. ). ⁶⁷ Senelick, Tavern Singing, p. xii. ⁶⁸ Carter, Dance and Dancers, ; Solie, ‘Music’, . ⁶⁹ Rick Altman, ‘The Silence of the Silents’, Musical Quarterly,  (): –. ⁷⁰ Rohr, Careers of British Musicians, – and –. ⁷¹ Rohr, Careers of British Musicians, . ⁷² Ehrlich, Music Profession, – and –; between  and  the number of working English musicians increased sevenfold (p. ). Of the five musical benefit societies listed by Charles Booth (), two were devoted to the music hall (Rohr, Careers of British Musicians, ). ⁷³ Haddon, Story of the Music Hall, figure facing p. .

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Accordingly its performers had to be versatile. As one American observer put it in , ‘an actress . . . must be willing to play any part . . . sing a song, dance a jig, swallow a sword, ride a bare-backed horse . . . upon occasion play male parts . . . and drink raw-whiskey without making faces’.⁷⁴ The music-hall industry, operated over the course of the century by fewer and fewer professionals, acted as a model for the film industry with its small number of powerful corporations.⁷⁵ The shift from music hall to picture theatre occurred seamlessly, with musicians migrating from the former to the latter; already by  some  per cent of working musicians were finding jobs in movie theatres.⁷⁶ The medievalisms of the music hall ranged from solo songs to group dance numbers. Here the ballad found its rightful home, with the bawdy comic ballad taking the lead; Robin Hood remained a popular theme.⁷⁷ The loose medievalism of many a ballad also showed up in sung melodramas such as ‘Rosina Meadows, the Village Maid’ and chorus-girl revues such as ‘Robin Hood’. What characterized these performances was their narrative incoherence and rambunctious character.⁷⁸ Music hall also featured performers specializing in the Middle Ages, most famously Yvette Guilbert; but other lesser known ones, too, such as Cecilia (Cissie) Loftus.⁷⁹ Even so banal a music-hall medievalism as the trumpet flourish regularly punctuating exits and entrances was significant, since this tradition would blossom into one of medieval cinema’s most recognizable musical icons, the trumpet fanfare.⁸⁰

C

.................................................................................................................................. The impressively varied species of Victorian medievalisms for dance and music endured well into the twentieth century, beginning with the antiquarian project of chant. Few present at the first meeting of the Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society in  could have envisioned the transmogrification of chant exactly a century later as dance club music in Enigma’s hit single ‘Principles of Lust’ ().⁸¹ As for the study of medieval polyphony, it remained one of the most prestigious areas of musicology in academia for most of the s. Within the medieval university sub-culture arose ⁷⁴ Lewis, From Travelling Show, . ⁷⁵ Ehrlich, Music Profession, , and Lewis, From Travelling Show, –. ⁷⁶ Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, , –, and –. ⁷⁷ Bratton, Victorian Popular Ballad, –. ⁷⁸ Lewis, From Traveling Show, , –, and . ⁷⁹ On Gilbert, see Haddon, Story of the Music Hall, –. On Cecilia (Cissie) Loftus, see Frank Cullen, Vaudeville Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America (New York: Routledge, ), ii. –. Loftus appeared among others in a play on the life of François Villon titled If I were King (), which play was the basis for the first sound-era musical film on the Middle Ages, The Vagabond King (), on which see Harty, Reel Middle Ages, –. ⁸⁰ Haines, Music in Films, –. ⁸¹ From Enigma, MCMXC a.D. (Virgin Records, ).

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performance groups in areas ranging from dance to Early Music, the latter one of academia’s elite institutions for most of the twentieth century. These post-Victorian medievalist recreations regularly drew on contemporary folklore of all kinds, from Bulgarian choral song to Maghrebi classical traditions, thus perpetuating the centuriesold assumption that something ineffable from the Middle Ages survives in music and dance of the present. The most prolific Victorian medievalism in post-Victorian times, however, has been that of the hybridizing and carnivalesque music hall. Its spirit has lived on in cinema, the leading capitalist Gesamtkunstwerk that inherited from the Victorians their anxieties, their technologies, and most important of all, their cherished Middle Ages.

S  Carter, Alexandra, Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Haines, John, ‘Antiquarian Nostalgia and the Institutionalization of Early Music’, in Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music Revivals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Haines, John, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Haines, John, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (New York: Routledge, ). Haines, John, ‘The Many Medievalisms of Disney’, in Kristen Yri and Stephen Meyer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Haines, John, ‘The Revival of Medieval Music’, in Mark Everist and Thomas F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Harty, Kevin, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ). Hoagwood, Terence Allan, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Plantinga, Leon, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, ). Rohr, Deborah, The Careers of British Musicians, –: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Temperley, Nicholas (ed.), The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, ). Zon, Bennett, The English Plainchant Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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   -           Medieval Modernism ......................................................................................................................

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P-R medievalism depended upon a developed sense of the pastness of the past in its relation to the present, a product of the historicism of the earlier nineteenth century. But it required that sense to disrupt it: returning to the past to discover the modern. Two generations of Pre-Raphaelites practised what one might call a medieval modernism. Dante Gabriel Rossetti belonged to the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) of the late s and early s, which included, besides Rossetti, the painters William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Both Rossetti and his sister, Christina Rossetti, contributed significant poems to the short-lived PRB journal of , The Germ. After the original PRB dispersed, a second group of younger men formed in the later s around Rossetti, including poet and designer William Morris, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and more distantly, the young Algernon Charles Swinburne. Both generations were restlessly intolerant of a present tied to the traditions and conventions of the preceding century. They looked much further back to the long Middle Ages for fresh ideas. Unlike historicists, Pre-Raphaelites rebelled against a model of history dependent on understanding the present as the consequence of an orderly onward progression. For them, the new might be not just the ‘next’ but the something-not-yet-over. This was a more unruly history than either historicism (with its ties to teleology and cause and effect) or its most significant challenger in the nineteenth century, commercial cyclicity (fashion), can easily tolerate: a past that does not stay past but erupts unpredictably as the new, the modern. Proponents of the modern have typically defined it against what has come before: to be modern is, precisely, to break with the present and its indebtedness to the past. And indeed, like the Romantics, with whose ongoing and still incompletely accepted modernity both they and their contemporaries identified their work, Pre-Raphaelites in the middle of the nineteenth century defined themselves in large part against

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the eighteenth century. But part of modernism’s project of purification is often accomplished by rediscovering the ‘primitive’—a yet more distant past or a foreign culture. Pre-Raphaelites disrupted what they experienced as a stale present in both painting and poetry by returning to a primitivism of the visual, the musical, and the poetic arts: painting up to Raphael (referred to by contemporaries as the Primitive Italian School) together with the arts and crafts of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries; traditional ballads and songs; medieval plain song or chant; and English and European literary forms and languages from before the eighteenth century: Chaucer, Dante, Malory, Froissart, Villon. Pre-Raphaelites wrote in a spirit of studied simplicity—the simple recovered as a product of conscious and indeed extensive historical study. In painting, first-generation Pre-Raphaelites returned to earlier conventions of depiction and used them to look with fresh eyes—and in a scientific experimentalist spirit not so distant from that of the early religious painters who explored the visible and the invisible worlds of faith—at things studied from nature rather than the Old Masters.¹ In literature, they and their successors in the later s turned to older modes of speech and forms of writing and thinking whose unfamiliarity, breaking contemporary metrical and formal conventions and offending social and religious as well as poetic decorum, seemed to have the raw immediacy of the newly invented—or perhaps the just plain wrong. They also turned to the idealized figure of an older artist/poet/craftsman/musician who seemed to them to integrate the body with the spirit of art. They embraced literature’s material as well as its poetic and linguistic forms, and explored its potential to move others not simply as semantic and symbolic form but as language realized in performance or as crafted object: the sung, chanted, or recited poem; the printed or written poem on the page and in the book. This medievalizing reunion of body and spirit, craft and art in the practice of poetry was, not surprisingly, differently understood by each of the poets with which this chapter is concerned. I will focus particularly on the modern medieval poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris in the early stages of their careers, from  to the early s.²

¹ John Ruskin, lecturing on the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites in , traced the otherness of medieval to modern art to ‘a radical change in temper’ during the Renaissance. Early painters were literalists of the Christian imagination; art after Raphael focused on aesthetic effect rather than truths of the seen or unseen. The Pre-Raphaelites, he argued, sought to return to the spirit of that art’s search for truths of eye and imagination. John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin,  vols, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen and Unwin, –), xii. –. ² For Swinburne’s contributions to Victorian medievalism, see Antony Harrison’s Chapter  in this volume; for Morris’s later work, including the prose romances, Marcus Waithe’s Chapter ; for more on the same poets’ contributions as artists and designers, Chapter  by Jan Marsh on Morris and Chapter  by Ayla Lepine on the Pre-Raphaelite visual arts. For arguments that Christina Rossetti’s poetics were deeply influenced by the revival of the liturgical practices of the Middle Ages, including plain song, in the High Anglican church she attended, see Karen Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, ), chs  and , and Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, ), ch. .

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I shall argue that these poets’ work in the late s and the s sought to turn modern poetry in English in new directions by reinterpreting both the body and the spirit of the arts practised in Europe and England before Raphael, particularly during the period from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. The forms of that modernity for which they meant to make way were certainly unclear to contemporaries, often including themselves. More than a hundred and fifty years later, we can perhaps begin to appreciate their discoveries: the different ways of organizing space and time, for example, that they found for poetry by returning not only to the literature but to the musical, visual, and decorative arts of the centuries before the Renaissance. Their poetry as we normally encounter it now gives a very imperfect view of how these poets meant to make the medieval modern. Although Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, appeared in , Rossetti did not publish a volume of original verse until his Poems (). Both poets would have differently experienced their own poetry in the art and literary contexts of the PRB and the communal art- and music-making of – at Oxford, in London, and at Morris’s new Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent. Readers would have encountered these poems differently in a series of published, planned, or merely dreamt of projects: in The Germ of ; in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, , edited by Morris; in Morris’s Defence of Guenevere, had it lived up to his original typographic and material hopes (not to be fulfilled until Morris republished it at his own Kelmscott Press in the s); and in Rossetti’s numerous publishing projects, especially ‘Songs of the Arts Catholic’, the working title he chose for his poetry in ; his translation, with designs, of Dante’s Vita Nuova and other work of the Italian stilnovisti (finally published in an expanded version, but without Rossetti’s pictures, as his The Early Italian Poets in ); and ‘Dante at Verona and Other Poems’, his title in the late s for a proposed collection of his own verse to accompany Early Italian Poets. For Rossetti and Morris, the return to medieval materials was not a matter of casual appropriation. Four things marked their encounters with the distant past. First, both preferred to go directly to primary sources, often to sources unfamiliar to most contemporaries and not yet translated into modern English, much less absorbed as usable poetic and artistic history in mid-century Britain. Second, they often began by making their own translations, whether in verbal or in visual form. Translation became a way to engage directly with the difficulties posed by differences of materials, language, medium, and ways of thinking. The act of translating brought to consciousness the particularities of both past and present practices. Third, both moved from translation to imitation, pastiche, and invention, finding ways to use the past in all its difference as a means to create in the present the shock of the new. And finally, for both Rossetti and Morris, quite young and setting out on their careers, these activities quickly became shared projects, fired by the exchange of work and ideas among a circle of family, friends, and fellow artists and poets. Between  and , for example, the bi-lingual Rossetti translated not only all of the poems in the Vita nuova but also over a hundred others, including sonnets, canzoni, canzonette, ballate, madrigals, catches, a sestina, and a dialogue, by Dante

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himself and by other members of his circle, as well as poetry by their predecessors.³ He also created accompanying designs—drawings and watercolours—which drew on his study of paintings in the National Gallery and of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings and Carlo Lasinio’s outline etchings and engravings after the medieval frescoes in the Campo Santo di Pisa, supplemented, in , by his discoveries of Jan Van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Gerard David on a visit to painting collections in Paris and Belgium. For the poems, Rossetti reconstructs, through his non-literal but formally attentive translations, both the major sources and the intricate web of social and professional exchanges which form the context of Dante’s long work. He used the best Italian editions then available—he cites ten in the  volume—most published in Italy between the beginning of the century and the mid-s, drawing on his Italian father’s extensive library and on the resources of the British Museum. Nor was his work limited to medieval Italy. In this period he also translated from French, German, and Middle English, including two passages from Guilliame de Lorris’s portion of the Roman de la Rose; parts of the Niebelungenlied (which do not survive); Hartmann von Auë’s ‘Der Arme Heinrich’ (‘something between a translation and a paraphrase’⁴); a poem about the Virgin Mary taken from the Middle English devotional poem, ‘Joachim and Anne’ (printed in  from the Auchinleck Manuscript in Legendae Catholicae. A Lytle Boke of Seyntlie Gestes); and twelve ‘ancient Christmas Carols’ (texts of all but two taken from a collection published in  by William Sandys, but apparently also using other sources, probably from the British Museum). Rossetti also loved traditional English, Scots, and Border ballads and, from the s, both imitated and inventively adapted them in poems like ‘Dennis Shandy’ () and ‘The Staff and the Scrip’ (sketched September , probably written –). He certainly knew Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and possibly also collections published in the late eighteenth century by Bishop Thomas Percy () and Joseph Ritson (). There are sketches from – illustrating one of his favourites from Scott’s Minstrelsy, ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annie’, and he gave a copy of the Minstrelsy to Elizabeth Siddall in  when she and he were planning to illustrate a collection of ballads to be edited by his friend William Allingham. His ‘Sister Helen’ (–) is particularly successful in reworking, formally and thematically, medieval Irish material into a psychologically tense and formally innovative modern ballad. Morris was equally serious in his medieval scholarship. Before he arrived at Oxford in  he was already pursuing twin passions for medieval architecture and music.⁵ ³ For much valuable information on the textual sources and stages of composition of the poems in Rossetti’s various projects in this period, and on his pictorial designs, see the Rossetti Archive, ed. Jerome McGann. ⁴ McGann, Commentary to ‘Henry the Leper. A Swabian Miracle-Rhyme’, Rossetti Archive, accessed May . ⁵ See J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (),  vols (Repr. New York: Dover Publications, ), : ‘The older church music appealed to him with a force only less than that of medieval architecture’. Mackail is the most detailed source for Morris’s medieval studies at Marlborough and Oxford, but see also Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris (New York: Alfred Knopf, ).

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He had visited and drawn Gothic churches all over southern England as a schoolboy, deepening his knowledge with works on archaeology and ecclesiastical architecture at the Marlborough College library. While at Marlborough he had fallen in love with the early church music then being revived in the college chapel, as in other High Anglican services influenced by the Tractarian or Oxford Movement—an interest supported by family connections (his favourite sister married a High Anglican clergyman; his maternal grandfather and two great-uncles were singing canons and teachers of Anglican chant). In , on his first trip abroad, he too discovered the painting of Van Eyck and Memling, as well the engravings of Dürer, the medieval collections of the Musée Cluny in Paris, and the cathedrals of Amiens, Beauvais, and Chartres. At Oxford Morris and Burne-Jones joined the newly founded Oxford Plain Song society and sang at the daily morning services in St Thomas’s church. Morris regularly read The Builder’s articles on Gothic Revival architecture, studied medieval design and colouring in manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, and immersed himself in medieval chronicles and romances. Not only Geoffrey Chaucer’s works but Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (in William Caxton’s version, ), Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (in the  Caxton version), and Jean Froissart’s Chronicles were favourite books. He and Burne-Jones also read the modern English poetic romances of Scott, Keats, and Tennyson and discovered the painting and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), republishing several of Rossetti’s poems in Morris’s Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. When Morris and Burne-Jones left Oxford in  to pursue lives in art, Morris went to work in the offices of leading Gothic Revival architect and designer, George Edmund Street, while Burne-Jones went to London to paint with Rossetti, followed soon by Morris. In the summer and autumn of , they joined the charismatic Rossetti’s project to decorate the debating room of the new Gothic Revival Oxford Union with Arthurian murals and a painted ceiling (Morris). In , after Morris and his new wife, Jane Burden, commissioned the revival architect Philip Webb to build the medieval-style Red House outside London, they were joined in decorating it by the newly married Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall, and Burne-Jones and Georgiana Macdonald (herself a gifted musician who played and sang old ballads and French songs for the group).⁶ From that collaboration emerged Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., the decorative arts and design firm which revived old crafts processes to bring to both church and domestic design (of furniture, stained glass, wallpapers, woven fabrics, embroidery, rugs, and tapestries) a distinctive visual and material modern medievalism. But how exactly did their medieval scholarship affect their modern poems? In the first months of , when Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Songs of One Household No.  (My Sister’s Sleep)’, ‘Hand and Soul’, and ‘The Blessed Damozel’ appeared in the pages of The Germ: Being Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art, it might have been hard to discern much common ground among them. The brief statement on ⁶ For more on early music in the life of the group in London and at Red House, –, see Helsinger, Poetry, esp. –; also, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones,  vols (London: Macmillan, ).

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the back covers of the first two issues was not especially helpful, insisting as it did merely on ‘an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature’ as part of the journal’s effort ‘to claim for Poetry that place to which its present development in the literature of this country so emphatically entitles it’.⁷ The statement on the back covers of the third and fourth issues (retitled Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts towards Nature Conducted principally by Artists) offered an important clue, however. It stressed a deliberate editorial principle of displacement, starting with medium: ‘With a view to obtain the thoughts of Artists, upon Nature as evolved in Art, in another language besides their own proper one, this Periodical has been established’ (Germ, , ; emphasis in the original). That act of deliberate trans-mediation—not a translation, but ‘thoughts’ produced by working in a medium other than one’s own—points first to the reflexive character of the enterprise but, second, to the deliberately unsettling means taken to produce those thoughts by willed imaginative estrangements. Such estrangements are evident in the subjects and styles of the journal’s poems, fiction, essays, and etchings. D. G. Rossetti’s ‘Hand and Soul’, in the first issue, is a work of prose fiction by a poetartist. It is set in Italy in the middle of the thirteenth century but is narrated by a modern English student of painting in a present to which it returns. This double displacement, from painting to prose, from present to distant past, frames the author’s effort to conceive the mind of a medieval painter from the inside without losing its difference or strangeness: the pastness of the past, as seen from the present. Rossetti uses tropes and phrases learned from his translations of Dante and the poets of his circle. Thus not only is the idiom deliberately archaic, but the moment of selfknowledge achieved by Chiaro dell’Erma, the fictional artist he imagines, arrives as it might to a thirteenth-century Christian painter. Deeply discouraged by the bloody fighting in front of his pictures that he has just witnessed, he falls into a feverish trance that produces a waking vision: suddenly he found awe within him, and held his head bowed, without stirring. The warmth of the air was not shaken; but there seemed a pulse in the light, and a living freshness, like rain. The silence was a painful music, that made the blood ache in his temples; and his lifted his face and his deep eyes. A woman was present in his room . . .⁸

She is, she tells him, the image of his own soul in the body of a woman. Rebuking him for his misplaced pride in his own sense of divine will, she instructs him to ‘paint me thus, as I am, to know me: weak, as I am, and in the weeds of this time . . . Do this; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and perplex thee no more’ (CP ).

⁷ The Germ,  (Jan. ) and  (Feb. ),  and . ⁸ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), –, . Hereafter, CP with page number (for prose) or line numbers (for poetry).

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The woman of his vision directs Chiaro to study psychological truths, literally the logos, or knowledge of the psyche, the human soul, beginning with the visual study of his own. Chiaro obeys, abandoning his earlier, fruitless efforts to paint either religious doctrine or what he observes in the world around him and instead taking his materialized soul as subject. The painting he produces (which the story’s narrator has discovered in a dusty corner of the Uffizi in Florence) becomes a visual artist’s analogue of the soul’s story, a spiritual (auto)biography like that Rossetti understood Dante’s Vita nuova to be, and which Rossetti was himself to offer in his own long poem, ‘The House of Life’ (, ). This is very much a modernizing, nineteenth-century perspective on the painting of the thirteenth century. But that is exactly what Rossetti’s prose story aims to achieve by its acts of imaginative translation and trans-mediation. Pre-Renaissance visual art is reinterpreted in a prose fable as it can be understood, and used, by contemporaries looking for ways to renew their own and their culture’s arts. Rossetti’s other contribution to the first Germ, ‘My Sister’s Sleep’, was a deliberate exercise in writing in a contrasting style and subject: it does not return to the thirteenth century. Yet read alongside ‘Hand and Soul’ it can help us to see what Rossetti is after. Its nineteenth-century speaker, hyper alert to the least sensations from objects in the domestic room in which he sits, offers a psycho-physiological explanation (‘I had been sitting up some nights, / And my tired mind felt weak and blank’) for what comes to him, a few verses later, as the sudden knowledge that his sister has died.⁹ By contrast, the thirteenth-century Chiaro ‘found awe’ (CP ) and believed utterly in the reality of a vision that is at once his (‘thine own soul within thee’: CP ) and external to his embodied self, a speaking vision from God. We might describe Rossetti’s aim in ‘Hand and Soul’ as a fully imagined sense of habits of thought and modes of representation foreign to the present, as foreign—something that can only be perceived by sharply juxtaposing them with an equally fully imagined account of what it is like to think about art as a young painter in the present. Hence the thoughts and feelings of the story’s intensely realized thirteenth-century artist-subject abruptly dissolve into those of an English painting student in . And hence, too, in the first issue of The Germ, ‘Hand and Soul’ immediately follows ‘My Sister’s Sleep’: the foreignness of the medieval framed by not one but two studied representations of how someone thinks, looks, and imagines in the present. The effect is to expose the particularity and the oddness of present mental and representational habits no less than those of the distanced past. It is a way to call into question the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. The point can perhaps be made more clearly with a poem Rossetti contributed to the Germ’s second issue. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is a ballad-like narrative using poetic and typographic form to stage as sensory confusion and perspectival clash the similarity-indifference that binds and separates two people and their worlds. It is probably meant to recall not only the Vita nuova but Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, which portrays the mutual incomprehension of its two central characters, another damozel of vaguely

⁹ Rossetti, CP, pp. –, ll. –.

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medieval origins and the Arthurian Lancelot. Rossetti’s poem also brings into sudden, disorienting proximity the temporal, spatial, and psychological perspectives that normally keep two characters apart. Poetic form—at once seen and heard—effectively brings them together in their difference, but not by narrative means. Like Tennyson, Rossetti adapts a once popular oral storytelling form (the ballad) in which events are starkly but obliquely presented, often through dialogue, without explanatory commentary. Repeating phrases, rhythms, and rhymes impart a sense of inevitability to the story’s apparently inexorable unfolding. Stylized diction and occasional archaic terms (‘damozel’) enhance the effects of her distance and difference, contradicting the expectations of modern readers conditioned by contemporary poetry and novels. Rossetti exaggerates the strangeness of the form for present readers while making the difference between the poem’s two principal figures nearly absolute. The damozel is dead and in heaven; her lover still living on earth. The two also seem to belong to radically different historical moments: the lover on earth speaks, and thinks, like a nineteenth-century Romantic poet, but the damozel’s stanzas are replete with archaisms, apparently significant iconographic details of dress, and a literally seen heaven with musically named, white-robed angels, the Virgin Mary, and God—as if in a Fra Angelico painting. Punctuation, language, imagery, and indeed psychological states dramatize a complete absence of any common ground between damozel and lover. The poem shifts back and forth between the damozel, leaning out from heaven’s barred gates over the abyss of time and space, and her still-living lover lying in an autumn fall of leaves: Herseemed she scarce had been a day One of God’s choristers; The wonder was not yet quite gone From that still look of hers; Albeit, to them she left, her day Had counted as ten years. (To one, it is ten years of years. . . . Yet now, and in this place, Surely she leaned o’er me–her hair Fell all about my face. . . . Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves. The whole year sets apace.)¹⁰

The lover senses something, but cannot quite convince himself it is the longed-for presence of the damozel. From his perspective, time, space, and mortality erect absolute barriers: it has been ‘ten years of years’ since her death, and his inability to believe in her God or her Heaven will prevent his ever rejoining her. From her precarious perch on heaven’s gates, time and space mean little: they have been separated only a moment ¹⁰ ‘The Blessed Damozel’, CP, pp. –, ll. –.

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- 



and she is constantly anticipating their reunion. Looking down, she sees vast gulfs of space and time instantly traversible by heavenly light and song. When she speaks, however, it quickly becomes clear that she is no better able than he to perceive him or the world he inhabits: she can only imagine a future together in a medievalizing pastiche of Heaven: ‘When round his head the aureole clings, And he is clothed in white, I’ll take his hand and go with him, To the deep wells of light; As unto a stream we will step down, And bathe there in God’s sight.’ (CP –)

The perceptual difference that keeps them invisible and inaudible to one other is enacted for readers by the poem’s typography. The damozel’s speech is marked by quotation marks; the lover’s unvoiced thoughts are enclosed within parentheses. For the reader, it is as if the lover’s close, autumnal woods were disconcertingly inserted into the damozel’s views of a vast, spatialized eternal present. In the midst of a description of her view from the gates, we are thrust into the modern, earth-bound lover’s mind. The poem experiments with the disorienting effects on modern readers of a non-realist style in which one representational mode is enclosed within another. The lovers’ radical spatial and temporal difference is enacted typographically to create a perceptual shock inflicted on the reader. Rossetti’s experiments with ballad form stimulated first his own and then his friends’ explorations of a medieval modernism a few years later. Their poems and pictures place archaic and contemporary modes of representing and narrating, and visual and auditory spheres of perception, in productive tension within the same image. They suggest the world as a fractured surface or discover new possibilities for patterns in line and colour, where the usual conventions of realist perspective will no longer apply. In such an art, figure and ground may change places or merge while a new order of representation struggles to be born. This is what is happening in two strange watercolours Rossetti made in , medievalizing both in their subject matter and in their style. The Tune of Seven Towers and The Blue Closet depict oddly disaffected, medievally garbed figures playing and listening to old instruments, in settings littered with highly patterned, crafted objects— a pennant and lance, a curiously designed chair with built-in psaltery and bells, a small double-sided organ decorated with heraldic designs, a background of painted tiles.¹¹ The flattened space and rich colours have the look of medieval stained glass. Morris bought both pictures and wrote poems under the same titles. His poems, which resemble both ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and the older ballads on which it was based, ¹¹ Rossetti, The Tune of Seven Towers (); watercolour, ⅜  ⅜ in., Tate Britain. The Blue Closet (); watercolour, ½  3/4 in., Tate Britain. For images of both, see the Rossetti Archive.

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 

are also a kind of trans-mediation of the disturbances of spatial form and temporal location that Rossetti’s earlier poems and prose had made visible through forced contrasts between medieval and modern ways of thinking and perceiving. Both poems appeared in The Defence of Guenevere in , together with a number of Morris’s other reworkings of ballads, narratives, and songs (‘The Gilliflower of Gold’, ‘The Sailing of the Sword’, ‘Golden Wings’, ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Sir Giles’ War-Song’). Other poems elaborated characters and stories found in Malory (‘The Defence of Guenevere’, ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’, ‘Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery’, ‘The Chapel in Lyonesse’) and Froissart (‘Concerning Geffray Teste Noire’, ‘A Good Knight in Prison’, ‘The Haystack in the Floods’). Morris’s poems are unusual for their attention to the physical and sexual brutality of the medieval lives he evokes in stunning, often highly decorative detail. The poems’ heavy use of rhyme, repetition, and refrain also recall songs Morris would have known from a collection published by J. B. Wekerlin in Paris, Échos du temps passé. (Morris gave an inscribed copy of this book to Jane Burden, about to become his wife; Georgie Burne-Jones used the collection to play for the friends in London and at Red House.) In Morris’s poems, however, a quite modern sense of psychological disturbance finds formal expression in ballad-like abrupt shifts of focus and an absence of narrative transitions, commentary, or reflection. Here, for example, are the opening stanzas of ‘The Blue Closet’: The Damozels Lady Alice, lady Louise, Between the wash of the tumbling seas We are ready to sing, if so ye please; So lay your long hands on the keys; Sing, Laudate pueri. And ever the great bell overhead Boom’d in the wind a knell for the dead, Though no one toll’d it, a knell for the dead.¹²

‘Alice the Queen, and Louise the Queen’, accompanied by their ‘two damozels wearing purple and green’ are enclosed in the Blue Closet, playing and singing, just as in Rossetti’s watercolour (DG , ). Rossetti’s sad-faced, blank-eyed, but colourfully clothed women, who do not look at each another, perform symmetrically balanced gestures against a background of painted blue and white tiles. The two foreground women use opposite hands to play both sides of a double keyboard, while one with her other hand plucks the strings of a standing instrument on one side, and the other uses her free hand to pull the cord attached to a small set of gold bells, on the other. Morris’s poem is in effect a staged, verbal realization of their song, with accompanying burden or base note (the italicized verses) provided by the tolling bell he imagines ‘overhead’ ¹² William Morris, The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), –, ll. –; hereafter, DG with line numbers.

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

(alternating, as we learn in the burden’s next return, with the sound of the flapping ‘banner of the dead’: DG ). The rhymed, chant-like verses with their returning, interrupting burden of bells and flapping banners heighten both the rhythmic character of the visual design and the sense of spatial, temporal, and emotional dislocation that seems to freeze the women’s abstracted, expressionless gazes just as it stops time: nothing apparently happens from Christmas to Christmas, as they live out their lives in a kind of limbo. Even their singing—permitted, we learn, once a year on Christmas Eve—sounds hypnotically monotonic. Indeed, the fragment of Latin (Laudate pueri) suggests the two damozels in the opening stanzas, quoted above, are inviting the two ladies to chant in plain song. After their introductory song, punctuated by the returning burden of tolling bell and flapping banner outside, Lady Alice begins a sort of recitative in an eighteen-line passage that reconstructs their situation and opens the doors to memory. But this too is interrupted by yet another change of voice and stanzaic pattern, again typographically and semantically marked on the page: They sing all together. How long ago was it, how long ago, He came to this tower with hands full of snow? Kneel down, O love Louise, kneel down! He said, And sprinkled the dusty snow over my head. (DG –)

The memories awakened through their singing unfold for several more stanzas, only to break off, once again, when Through the floor shot up a lily red, With a patch of earth from the land of the dead, For he was strong in the land of the dead. (DG –)

The irruption of the red lily comes as a shock, interrupting the grey monotony of dusty snow and chanted song with something much more vivid and unexpected. The poem seems to dramatize a moment when a past, gently recalled by means of chant and song, stumbles on something that breaks up the pleasures of memory. And indeed, the poem ends with Alice and Louise following their dead lover to the bottom of the sea: its last lines, in the italics of the returning burden, are ‘For their song ceased, and they were dead’ (DG ). The appeal of poems and pictures like these—Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’, his watercolours Tune and Blue Closet, and Morris’s poems for them—is frankly not to a reader’s or viewer’s pleasure in a human story, at least not one where the elements of time (yesterday, today, tomorrow), physical space (foreground, middle ground, background), or personal feelings can be related to one another in a way we would recognize as realistic. The connections that a narrative’s different moments ordinarily invite us to imagine are suppressed or distorted. Orderly temporal plod and spatial recession are replaced by the instantaneous co-presence of all times and places; foreground and

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 

background, heaven and earth, the possibly lived past and the present sounds of singing jostle one another in illogical simultaneity. In place of the clear relationships we expect, we are confronted by intricate interlocking shapes in line and colour or the rhythmical verbal sounding of language arranged in printed lines and stanzas. Neither pictures nor poems will easily resolve into human story or scene. For us as for nineteenth-century readers, these old/new poems and pictures appear, as they were meant to appear, very strange. Both poets and artists across two generations of Pre-Raphaelite experimentalism mine work of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance to challenge audiences who expect realist portrayals of space and time, human characters with interiority and motivation, and the clear distinction between senses in their respective media of representation. The poems read less like narratives than perplexing audio-visual arrangements, polyphonic compositions where various ‘voices’ perform their parts without apparent reference to one another, as if in obedience not to any sense of the ‘real’ but to some larger formal pattern perceptible only to the eye on the printed page. The artists’ designs, though they appear to illustrate figures in narrative or dramatic scenes, disconcertingly allow these to disappear into decorative arrangements of flat and figured patterns, absorbed into an art whose formal rules we cannot quite understand. This deliberate invoking of the alien, studied forms of a distant past to unsettle conventions of realist representation and confound narrative expectations, undertaken at once in poems and in visual designs, corresponds or rhymes across verbal and visual arts. The result: what is ancient is suddenly the way to what might be modern. Or as the historian Michel de Certeau put it, such works open an ‘interstice . . . within the events [and perceptions] of the day through the representation of difference[s]’.¹³ By selective redeployments of rhyming poetic and visual forms, old ballads remembered provoke analogous but different estrangements in poetic and visual form: they open a gap between the pastness of the past and the known present. Through that productive gap, the joint creation of poets and artists, something new might one day emerge.

S  Burne-Jones, Georgiana, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones,  vols (London: Macmillan, ). Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Dieleman, Karen, Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, ).

¹³ Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .

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

Helsinger, Elizabeth, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, ). MacCarthy, Fiona, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (New York: Alfred Knopf, ). Mackail, J. W., The Life of William Morris,  vols. (Repr. New York: Dover Publications,  []). Morris, William, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ). Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Rossetti Archive, ed. Jerome J. McGann, . Ruskin, John, The Complete Works of John Ruskin,  vols, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen and Unwin, –). The Germ: The Literary Magazine of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Elliot Stock, ; repr. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, ).

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  ......................................................................................................................

            

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  

[T]he rapturous acclamations that drowned the pealing of the bells and the thunders of the artillery, at the recognition of our beloved liege Lady, Queen Victoria, in Westminster Abbey, can never be forgotten by those who then heard the voices of a united nation uplifted in assent.¹

N- women used medievalism to describe their social and imaginative experience, from the accession of the ‘liege Lady, Queen Victoria’ to the suffragists who marched in the guise of Joan of Arc at the beginning of the twentieth century. Post-Conquest England could be perceived as a time where women enjoyed a climate of greater rights and freedom than their nineteenth-century present, the Middle Ages envisioned ‘as a time in which at least some women had control over their property and destiny and the courage to venture into the “male” arenas of politics and war’.² At the same time, the duty, obedience, security, and purer life other writers saw in a medieval society made it an appealing exemplar for the questioning, fraught turmoil of their industrial, modern day. During the Victorian age, the medieval revival, always present in post-medieval British culture, reached its apotheosis: the Anglo-Saxonisms and medievalisms in women’s literary, social, political, and historical writings through the century offer a complex variety of views and debates.³

¹ Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest,  vols (London: Colburn, –), i, p. xvi. ² Deborah Byrd, ‘Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Evolution as a Feminist Poet’, Browning Institute Studies,  (): –, . ³ Pugh and Weisl echo Davis and Altschul’s astute observation that medievalism ‘can only be considered in the plural’, stressing the necessity of considering ‘the various intersections of medievalisms uniting in a given work’. Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, ), . See also Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, ), .

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    



Victoria continually manipulated chivalric ideas in her self-presentation, to win support for herself and for her German consort. It was through images of legendary and historical kings that Victoria directed a public relations campaign for her husband, both during his life and to safeguard his memory. Victoria was variously a damsel in distress, in need of the chivalric support of government and nation, a liege Lady demanding and deserving the fidelity and love of her people, and, during the unpopular Crimean War, the epitome of the lover/mother/sister waiting for news of returning warriors. Responding to the press reports of the hesitant new Queen’s accession speech, which had focused on Victoria’s maidenly weeping, that she ‘burst into tears’, which continued to ‘flow in torrents down her now pallid cheeks’,⁴ Elizabeth Barrett (EBB) considered the actual potency of Victoria’s display of feminine fragility in two commemorative poems, ‘The Young Queen’ and ‘Victoria’s Tears’, both first published in The Athenaeum in .⁵ ‘The Young Queen’ takes its epigraph from Victoria’s accession speech: the poem attributes the queen’s power to traditionally feminine qualities: ‘A nation looks to thee / For steadfast sympathy: . . . And as thy mother joys in thee, in them shalt thou rejoice’. In ‘Victoria’s Tears’, EBB muses on the contradiction that in displaying weakness Victoria strengthens her authority: ‘the tyrant’s sceptre cannot move, / As those pure tears has moved!’. As George Eliot also later recognized, ‘Our little humbug of a queen is more endurable than the rest of her race because she calls forth a chivalrous feeling’.⁶

M    

.................................................................................................................................. From the beginning of Victoria’s reign, commentators like Agnes Strickland characterized her monarchy using medieval terms of reference: the concept of queenship, and the reappraisal of the role of queen, infused Victorian literature. Biographies of historical queens and queenly women, ‘role model anthologies’, flooded the literary market.⁷ The historical purpose of these works is often secondary to the didactic one— to show how a contemporary woman should behave through the praise or censure of a historical woman’s conduct. In addition to royal queenship, these anthologies developed the idea of domestic ‘queenship’, further promoted by Ruskin among others. These historical biographies of eminent women were complicit in the commodification ⁴ The Times,  June , original emphasis. ⁵ The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: John Murray, ), –. All references to EBB’s poetry are taken from this edition. ⁶ The Letters of George Eliot, ed. G. S. Haight (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, –), i. . ⁷ See Alison Booth, ‘Illustrious Company: Victoria among Other Women in Anglo-American Role Model Anthologies’, in Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (eds), Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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  

of a nineteenth-century ideal of domestic femininity, propounded in the annuals and gift book market that had emerged from the late s: but they also offered a crucial commercial publishing outlet to professional women writers and historians. While history ‘was the principal non-fiction genre and assumed to be a distinctly male preserve’,⁸ publishers were eager to exploit the growing public appetite for historical biography, and were willing to commission women like Louisa Stuart Costello, Anna Jameson, and Agnes Strickland to undertake life writing. Through this outlet, and in articles for annuals, gift books, and journals, women historians could express their interest in medieval history, and in the changing role of women through history. Costello and Jameson found a further vehicle for their scholarship in medieval history and art criticism, respectively, through the new and developing genre of travel writing. The end of the Napoleonic Wars reopened the possibility of continental travel: the establishment of the first travel agency by Cook in , and the emergence of the guidebook publishing by Murray and Baedeker in the same decade, heralded the rise of tourism rather than Grand Tourism, and a corresponding surge in travelogues, essential reading for those who considered themselves travellers rather than tourists. The greater numbers of women travelling to the Continent meant that this was a market in which women writers could excel. Jameson used her travel writing in works such as Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad () and Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals () to springboard her incisive works of art criticism in a male-dominated market. Costello’s successful and acclaimed travel books, A Summer amongst the Bocages and the Vines (), A Pilgrimage to Auvergne from Picardy to le Velay (), and Béarn and the Pyrenees: A Legendary Tour of the Country of Henry Quatre (), and A Tour to and from Venice () recount her journeys around France and Italy. However, they crucially provide a medieval history of both countries, a platform for the professional writer to publish her academic medieval studies, and to express her interest in regional changes and variations in Arthurian literature. The commercial success of her travel books was influential in Costello’s publishing success with a range of biographies of medieval French figures: Catherine de Medici (), Jacques Coeur (), Mary, Duchess of Burgundy (), and Anne, Duchess of Brittany, Twice Queen of France ().⁹

T

.................................................................................................................................. Costello’s travel books also enabled her to continue the quest she began with Specimens of the Early Poetry of France () to introduce medieval French literature ‘to the ⁸ Felicia Gordon and Gina Luria Walker (eds), Rational Passions: Women and Scholarship in Britain, – (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, ), . ⁹ For further discussion of Costello’s medievalism, historical biographies, and travel writing see Clare Broome Saunders, Louisa Stuart Costello: A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life (New York: Palgrave, ).

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    



English public’, publishing translations of regional poems, and rewriting her own versions of the varied Arthurian Celtic myths she encounters.¹⁰ Costello does not shirk from subjects which society might deem unsuitable for a woman writer: for example, the two Lais of Marie de France that she chooses to include are Chevrefoil, a tale of the adulterous love of Tristan and Yseult, and Bisclavret, the story of a werewolf trapped by his adulterous wife and her lover. However, to ensure the circulation of the poems, and to attempt to guide them to a positive reception, Costello avoids a direct translation of lines with sexual or violent content. So while, in a literal translation, Bisclavret’s wife propositions the suitor knight ‘I offer you my love and my body; / make me your mistress!’¹¹, in Costello she swears a toned down ‘deadly oath of love’ (). Like many nineteenth-century translators, Costello often uses archaisms to emphasize the poetic beauty of the medieval language, and to increase the appeal of the work by instilling a sense of antique charm. While Costello’s most recent templates came from male writers, such as George Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets (), she was actually building on a tradition of scholarly women translating from medieval languages and Anglo-Saxon which had been established at least the century before, most prominently by Elizabeth Elstob. Historically, linguistic translation was a female stronghold: since translators worked with texts written mainly from a viewpoint of male authority, their work did not threaten the establishment in the way that original writing, expressing personal opinions, might—which image facilitated the widespread use of translation as a screen for subversion. A century after Elstob’s first publication in , Anna Gurney took up the linguistic Anglo-Saxonist mantle, publishing A Literal Translation of the Saxon Chronicle in , an exceptionally scholarly work with clear and professionally presented notes and references. Ann Hawkshaw retells the history of Britain from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest in her Sonnets from Anglo-Saxon History (), which built on some of the Anglo-Saxons poems in her first poetry volume, Poetry for My Children (). Hawkshaw ‘responds to, and challenges, prominent Anglo-Saxon scholars of her day through her reflective and suggestive response to history and through the idiosyncratic formatting of her volume’, as ‘each of her sonnets are faced with a short prose extract from the work of prominent historians of the Anglo-Saxon period or early nineteenth century translations of Anglo-Saxon texts’.¹² Hawkshaw here is interacting with historians rather than citing sources, expressing her own poetic vision of history at a time when King Alfred was emerging as a symbol of all that was best in British Empire and nationhood. In her translation of The Mabinogion (–), Lady Charlotte Guest was responding to the literary and cultural antiquarianism of the Romantic period, especially the Celtic interests of Scott and the scholarship of Southey’s  popular edition of ¹⁰ Louisa Stuart Costello, Specimens of the Early Poetry of France (London: William Pickering, ), p. vii. ¹¹ The Lais of Marie de France, tr. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, ), , l. . ¹² The Collected Works of Ann Hawkshaw, ed. Debbie Bark (London: Anthem Press, ), –.

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

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Malory. Guest dedicates her translation to her children, in the hope that they will ‘become early imbued with the chivalric and exalted sense of honour, and the fervent patriotism’ shown in the historical Welsh tales.¹³ Guest’s translation displays the expected euphemism, like Costello avoiding sections of the original text with explicit sexual or violent content: sex in Guest is couched in terms of marriage, where characters speak of becoming brides and taking wives, rather than in the more explicit original. For all that, Guest is faithful to the story and characterization of Enid from the Welsh tale, even though at the ‘very heart of this subversive story is the willed disobedience of Enid’, who deliberately and consistently goes against her husband’s wishes and speaks out of love for him.¹⁴ Enid, in Guest’s translation as in the original, is consistently rational, active, and in need of speech: her disobedience is virtuous as it makes Geraint realize his false categorization of women, while proving her enduring love for her husband. When Tennyson came to use Guest’s Mabinogion as a source text for his Idylls of the King, however, the social message and moral framing of his text leads him to transform the role of the female characters. Marriage and the idea of ‘true wife’ are central to Tennyson’s version: in , when marriage legislation was at the heart of social discussion in the run up to the  Married Women’s Property Act, Tennyson split his ‘Enid’ into two parts, one of which focuses on ‘The Marriage of Geraint’. Geraint and Enid are ‘wedded with all ceremony’ in Tennyson,¹⁵ a Victorian marriage not the rather vague ‘usual bond made between two persons was made between Geraint and the maiden’ () of Guest’s Mabinogion. For Guest, Gwenhwyvar appears only as a benevolent queen, accorded all the rights and respect of the court, rational and of sound judgement: the marriage of Gwenhwyvar and Arthur is one of trust, equality, and authority, unlike the stern judge and grovelling penitent at the end of the Idylls.

A

.................................................................................................................................. Arthuriana was a consistent and powerful strain of the medieval revival. With Arthurian chivalric ideals at the heart of the cult of the English gentleman, Arthur became a potent image, and a focus of reassessment for writers throughout the century. Arthurian legend ‘is so very representative of patterns of failure in social and cultural life’ that writers, who sought for the purer religious and social ideals that they saw in the Middle Ages, used the characters of Arthuriana to reflect on the problems in their modern society.¹⁶ Tennyson’s publication of his first four Idylls of the King as ‘The True and the ¹³ The Mabinogion, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest (London: Dent, ), dedication. ¹⁴ Jeanie Watson, ‘Enid the Disobedient: The Mabinogion’s Gereint and Enid’, in Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (eds), Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, ), –, . ¹⁵ The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks, nd edn (Harlow: Longman, ), i, , l. . ¹⁶ Judith Johnston, George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (Turnhout: Brepols, ), .

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False’ demonstrated how easily the women of Arthurian legend could be used to categorize types of womanhood. Dinah Mulock Craik’s short story ‘Avillion: or the Happy Isles’ (), another source for Tennyson’s Idylls, is a didactic tale of the afterlife, which preaches the reward of eternal peace for a Christian life.¹⁷ The focus is the justice of Guinever’s eternal punishment for adultery, Craik negating Guinever to ‘False queen, false wife, false woman’ (). Guinever is denied the right to articulation permitted to Elaine la Blanche, upon whom her role as constant lover is displaced, and who appears in her funeral barge, to tell how she still loves Launcelot in Paradise. Conversely, many women writers, often influenced by the assertive heroine of William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’ (), use the Arthurian queen to reflect critically on women’s role in Victorian society. In an analogous poem, ‘Queen Guinevere’ (), Mary Elizabeth Braddon uses Guinevere to explore issues of particular contemporary significance: the expectations of a woman in a public role, and restrictions placed on women in areas of love, sexuality, and marriage.¹⁸ Similarly, through the Guinevere figure in ‘Lancelot and Guinevere’(), Violet Fane explores love in a society where marriage was often a contract rather than a choice for women.¹⁹ In an age where women’s behaviour and rights were codified more than ever before, many women writers found inspiration from the female characters of Arthuriana, which often jarred with more traditional interpretations of Arthurian legend. While the figures of Enid and Elaine, chaste wife and pure maiden, held particular appeal for conservative views of woman, some women writers used these figures more subversively. As early as , Louisa Stuart Costello had presented a Lady of Shalott who was a far cry from Tennyson’s cursed maiden, and the ‘sweet and serviceable’ Elaine of his Idylls. Translating from the original Lady of Shalott story in the medieval Cento Novelle Antiche, Costello’s Lady, in ‘The Funeral Boat’, is the lucid mistress of her actions and her space, one who is not simply pining away through love but, seduced and betrayed by Launcelot, is making a choice to surrender her life.²⁰ In a society where women’s reputation is all, loss of good name is tantamount to death, and the Lady chooses to die. The richness and beauty of the jewels, fabrics, and flowers with which the Lady decorates the funeral boat are imbued with the allegorical significance they have in the medieval literature of the French Romance tradition in which Costello was steeped. Writing for Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-Book for , Letitia Elizabeth Landon offers another version of the Lady of Shalott in ‘A Legend of Tintagel Castle’. Lancelot is here guilty of causing his lover’s death, deserting the lady after a sexual relationship

¹⁷ Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, ‘Avillion: or the Happy Isles’, Avillion and Other Tales,  vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., ), i. –. ¹⁸ Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Garibaldi and Other Poems (London: Bosworth & Harrison, ), –. ¹⁹ Violet Fane, From Dawn to Noon: Poems (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), –. ²⁰ Louisa Stuart Costello, ‘The Funeral Boat: A Legend’, Forget Me Not; A Christmas and New Year’s Present for MDCCCXXIX (London: R. Ackermann, ), –.

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and replacing her in his affections with ‘the proud and the beautiful queen, / Whose image was treasured as her’s once had been’.²¹ Both Costello’s and Landon’s poems appear in the literary annuals that, on the surface, offer an ideal view of domestic femininity and beauty, ‘but they frequently suggest contexts that threaten to disturb the domestic fabric’.²² Women writing in these annuals often distanced their subjects by using mythological or medieval imagery to maintain the surface respectability of their subjects, and to ‘quiet evangelical protestations of impropriety’ ().

W  

.................................................................................................................................. Medievalism gave intellectual and politically astute women the imaginative means to discuss contemporary social issues and problems without facing the censure that more open social comment might induce. Amelia Opie had demonstrated how medievalism could be used for political reasons in ‘The Warrior’s Return’ (), in which she criticized the wars with France, especially the bloodiness of the Peninsular Wars and the political vanity that had caused Britain to enter many unnecessary wars. When Anna Barbauld published her searing and finely wrought Eighteen Hundred and Eleven () on the same theme four years later, the unmitigated, appalled critical backlash destroyed Barbauld’s poetic career, and brought into focus ‘the limits imposed on women’s direct, historically informed and unsentimental intervention in the most crucial aspects of national culture’.²³ Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon followed Opie’s example and used medieval images and settings in poetry that considered women’s contemporary social position, and contemporary politics. Hemans, like Opie, demonstrates a particular interest in the position of women in war, in that, across cultures and through history, women have been the victims of men’s power struggles, as she explores most obviously in Records of Woman (). The young poet was fascinated by the war: yet, beneath the apparent simplicity of many of her patriotic eulogies, Hemans’s work often manifests the same tension that was apparent in public opinion of the day, between the enthusiasm that made iconic heroes of Nelson and Wellington, and the concern about the wars that had dominated the first quarter of the century. In a letter to her aunt in , the teenage Hemans, then Browne, identifies the central irony of women’s discussion of war at the turn of the nineteenth century,

²¹ Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, ), –. ²² Terence Allan Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter, ‘Colour’d Shadows’: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . ²³ Fiona Robertson (ed.), Women’s Writing, –: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

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namely that although women were bound up in war by the presence of their brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers, ‘females are forbidden to interfere in politics’.²⁴ Hemans decided not to publish two political verse satires ‘The Army’ ( March ) and ‘Reform’ (n.d. /), both dealing with post-war economic distress and financial cuts to the armed forces, ‘because such overtly satirico-political verse would have been considered by many to be unfeminine’ (). Instead Hemans presents ‘unfeminine’ subjects in a ‘feminine’ framework. Contrary to expectations set up in the title, the subject of The Domestic Affections () is war, and the ways in which the ‘domestic bliss’ of home is destroyed by the horrors of war. War here is not glorious, Hemans writing instead of ‘carnage’, ‘rage of combat’, and ‘the ensanguined plain’. Hemans’s most thought-provoking works on the effects of war and women’s role in war and politics were two retrospective ones, both of which have historical settings: ‘The Abencerrage’ (Tales and Historic Scenes, ), is set in medieval Andalusia, and the dramatic poem The Siege of Valencia (), inspired by two late thirteenth-century city sieges, charts an imaginary siege of the city by Moors. Similarly Landon, in the feminine guise of her persona ‘L.E.L.’, uses medievalism as the screen through which to write about the socio-political topics that interested her. Landon’s early war poetry focuses on the plight of the families of the combatants. In The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems (), shielded behind the Italianate discussion of female genius in the title poem, Landon explores the position of women in the Napoleonic Wars that had ended nine years earlier: the widow in ‘The Deserter’; a bereaved lover who dies of grief in ‘The Grey Cross’; the wife and child mourning a soldier who had returned from the war, but never recovered in ‘The Soldier’s Grave’.²⁵ Despite the contemporary focus in these works, the majority of the war poems in the volume use a medieval setting as a screen through which Landon can offer a critique of war. In ‘Roland’s Tower: A Legend of the Rhine’ (–) Isabelle is served a double blow: Roland leaves to fight for her father, but in his haste to win military glory, Roland kills her father by mistake, echoing the fatal error in Opie’s ‘The Warrior’s Return’. The protagonist of ‘The Crusader’ (–) returns from ‘the sainted battles of Palestine’ to find his lover and family dead and his home destroyed: he returns to the battle in desperation to find death. After a courtly preamble that describes the parting of knight and lady, the field of battle in ‘The Warrior’ (–) comes as a hideous contrast, where ‘the crow and the raven flock over head / To feed on the hearts of the helpless dead’ (). Chivalry and courtliness may screen war, but cannot erase its horrors. Professional writers like ‘L.E.L.’ and Hemans, who had to publish relentlessly to support themselves and their family, found the screen of medieval distance a useful vehicle to safeguard commercial success.

²⁴ Felicia Hemans, Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, ), . ²⁵ L.E.L., The Improvisatrice and Other Poems (London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., ), –, –, –.

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F  

.................................................................................................................................. With perhaps less financial reason to need a strategic historical screen, EBB demonstrates a fascination with medieval poetic forms and imagery throughout her career. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (), once dismissed as wifely outpourings of love for her poet-husband, demonstrate EBB’s long-held fascination with the medieval sonnet form that predates her correspondence with Browning. EBB throws her work, and a poetic form dominated from its medieval origins by men, into a female focus and remoulds it to create a language of equality. While the traditional sonnet sequence employs the language and expectations of courtly love, EBB subverts the set roles, of the iconicized (female) beloved and active (male) lover, primarily through her very act of (female) composition. Finding the role of beloved humiliating, EBB ‘does not simply reverse the sexual roles; she disturbs them’,²⁶ refashioning them to suggest an equality and interdependence between the lovers. Other women writers followed EBB’s lead in using the sonnet sequence in innovative ways, although in the preface to her Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets (), Christina Rossetti overlooks EBB’s achievement when she emphasizes her intention to give voice to the silent ‘lady’ of the traditional love sonnet.²⁷ George Eliot later expressed filial love in her Brother and Sister sonnets (), while Augusta Webster used the sonnet sequence to describe maternal rather than erotic love in Mother and Daughter (). Just as EBB overhauled the medieval form of the sonnet, she also used the ballad form in innovative way, employing ‘the starker power structures of medieval society to foreground the status of women as objects in a male economy of social exchange, and to unmask the subtler preservation of gender inequities in contemporary Victorian ideology’.²⁸ While Aurora Leigh dismisses medievalism, ‘I do distrust the poet who discerns / No character or glory in his times, / And trundles back his soul five hundred years, / Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court’ (book V, , ll. –), EBB herself ‘was not just brushed by the fringes of Romantic and Victorian medievalism, . . . she was a serious medievalist, that is a scholar who applied her knowledge seriously; and . . . her familiarity with primary medieval texts, . . . was not temporary or superficial, but developed and woven into the fibre of her art’.²⁹ EBB uses medievalism to show contempt for contemporary gender ideals that demand female passivity; what she called in a letter to Mitford, ‘the sin and shame of those divine angels, called women, daring to tread in the dust of a multitude, when they

²⁶ Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Brighton: Harvester, ), . ²⁷ The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump,  vols (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, ), ii. . ²⁸ Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: St Martin’s Press, ), –. ²⁹ Karen Hodder, ‘Elizabeth Barrett and the Middle Ages’ Woeful Queens’, Studies in Medievalism,  (): –, .

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ought to be minding their clouds’.³⁰ The disguised page in ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ sacrifices herself in disillusionment at her knight-husband’s hypocrisy, and because of the social impossibility of her position as ‘False page, but truthful woman’ (, l. ). Brought to cynical despair by the realization that she has risked herself for an unworthy husband—‘Have I renounced my womanhood / For wifehood unto thee’ (, ll. –, EBB’s emphasis)—the page ultimately achieves the final victory by her death. In a reversal of the usual chivalric roles, the woman page dies as champion of the (unknowingly) passive, and therefore socially emasculated, knight, recognizing her triumph over her social confinement, and so dying ‘With smile more bright in victory / Than any sword from sheath’ (, ll. –). As in Sonnets from the Portuguese, EBB’s revisions for the  version of the poem demonstrate the constrictions of the chivalric code for men as well as women: the male knight is also a victim, forced into a marriage of obligation with a woman whom he had never seen. Similarly, in ‘Rhyme of the Duchess May’, a striking reworking of ‘Edom O’Gordon’ from Percy’s Reliques, Sir Guy is a victim of the gender structures he propagates. Guy’s error is to misjudge his wife and expect her to slot into a dutiful role when she had shown her determination to follow her own will in marrying him. The Duchess refuses to leave her husband, as to do so would be ‘unwomanly’ in her terms: ‘Meekly have I done all thy biddings under sun / . . . / But by all my womanhood, which is proved so, true and good, / I will never do this one’ (, ll. –, –). While the wife in ‘Edom O’ Gordon’ is, with her children, a sitting target in her castle, the Duchess May demands the right to choose a noble death with her husband, rejecting the position of woman as war-chattel: ‘Go to, faithful friends, go to! judge no / more what ladies do’ (, ll. –). Mid-century novelists also use medievalism to criticize the passivity of women in their society, and to explore the social transitions occurring in their ‘modern’ world. In her landmark study George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism, Judith Johnston explores how ‘Eliot, recognizing that “many things were possible” in medieval literature, utilizes its discourses both for their potential for subversiveness and their potential for mediation, to affirm that many things are possible socially, culturally, and politically in her modern contemporary world, if only the opportunity is there’.³¹ Eliot uses the structures of Arthurian discourse in Daniel Deronda ‘even as she shifts and distorts them at will’ (): the eponymous hero undertakes a chivalric quest for religious and spiritual revelation, and Gwendolen Harleth is cast as a disrupted Guinevere figure, a character who embodies lust, loss, tears, and penitence. In Middlemarch, Eliot uses medievalism to articulate Dorothea Brooke’s precarious position as ‘a woman on the cusp of a radically and rapidly changing world’ (). Medieval hagiography expresses the complexity of Dorothea’s place in society, associating her with numerous female saints and martyrs, in particular the scholarly St Theresa of Avila. In addition to her intellectual engagement with nineteenth-century medievalism, Eliot was also a keen ³⁰ The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson,  vols (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, –), x. . ³¹ Johnston, George Eliot, .

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scholar of medieval texts: Lewes reported to John Blackwood in  that she was ‘buried in the Middle Ages’ in preparing material for Romola.³² Eliot was not the only novelist to imbue her novels with medieval imagery to explore contemporary issues. Margaret Hale’s reversal of the ‘damsel-in-distress’ icon of passive chivalric femininity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (–) allows her to cope with the public and private turbulence in her life. In a key scene she goads John Thornton into action to face his workers, with reference to chivalric qualities: ‘If you have any courage or noble quality in you, go out and speak to them, man to man’.³³ Subverting the usual gender roles of chivalry, Margaret protects him with her body, the thrown pebble striking her head instead: ‘She threw her arms around him; she made her body into a shield from the fierce people beyond’ (). Similarly, at the novel’s close, it is the independent Margaret who can save Thornton by providing the financial backing to keep him at Marlborough Mills. Like Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë also negotiates the gender stereotypes of chivalric romance. The independent and wealthy Jane Eyre returns to save the damaged and powerless Rochester: despite still calling him ‘my dear Master’, it is Jane who was forced to embark on a quest to save herself, and Jane who returns on her own terms and able to make her own choices.³⁴ Shirley Keeldar, from a family who ‘by virtue of their antiquity, and their distinction of lords of the manor, took precedence of all’, is introduced like a courtly gentleman: ‘I am an esquire: Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position: it is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood.’³⁵ Medievalism supplies a wealth of images through which women novelists could explore the complexities of women’s changing positions in society, and demand a reappraisal of their social roles. Conversely, medievalism was used to uphold the status quo and ideas of gentlemanly chivalry that ‘became a shaping force in British imperialism which contributed in no small measure to the spread of Britain’s colonial power’.³⁶ Charlotte Mary Yonge, a leading proponent of the Oxford High Church movement and a friend of John Keble, saturates the nineteenth-century chivalry in her writing with her deeply held religious beliefs in discipline, obedience, and a ‘resolute fulfilment of duty’.³⁷ Sir Guy Morville, hero of The Heir of Redclyffe (), is, in the words of his cousin Charlotte, a ‘true knight’: he is ‘a very chivalrous lover; the polish and courtesy that sat so well on his frank, truthful manners, were even more remarkable in his courtship’, and a

³² Johnston, George Eliot, . ³³ Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (–), ed. Angus Easson, , ; introd. Sally Shuttleworth,  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ³⁴ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (), ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, , ), . ³⁵ Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (), ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford. Oxford University Press, ; ), , . ³⁶ Johnston, George Eliot, . ³⁷ Charlotte Mary Yonge, A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands (London: Blackie, ), .

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contemporary Galahad, the character he defends so vehemently.³⁸ The women in The Heir serve only as foils to the male characters, and seem ‘to exist less for themselves than to complete the lesson offered by the men with whom they are linked—we encounter them largely as daughters, sisters, lovers, mothers, wives, and their role in the novel is to complement the male programme’ (xx). The Heir was influential for a generation of medievalists, like William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Charlotte’s younger brother, Julian, told her that most of his fellow subalterns in the Rifle Brigade serving in the Crimea had a copy of The Heir, and in the crowded hospitals of Scutari it was the book most constantly requested.

C W

.................................................................................................................................. During the Crimean War the clash between those writers for whom the values of chivalry were ideals on which to build an Empire, and those using medievalism to critique the status quo and demand new possibilities for society, was brought into high relief. The imagery of the medieval crusade is most obviously exploited in the vast range of poetry written to commemorate the now infamous example of military mismanagement, the Charge of the Light Brigade, at the Battle of Balaklava ( October ). Caroline Hayward writes of Lord Cardigan’s succeeding to the ‘lion-heart’ of the crusading Richard I; Helen Macgregor suggests ‘No shade hath past o’er England’s star, / No rust hath dimmed her steel’, despite the fact that the Charge was a demonstration that contemporary ‘strife prove harder, / Than e’en in days gone by’.³⁹ Louisa Stuart Costello’s use of a medieval setting to communicate an anti-war stance comes as a direct confrontation to this morale-boosting chivalry with its echoes Walter Scott and Charlotte Yonge.⁴⁰ In her long poem The Lay of the Stork (), Costello shrinks neither from the vivid description of the horrors of war with the ‘full tides of crimson gore / And mangled forms, from either host, / Hurl’d down, and in abysses lost’ (), nor the suffering enforced on the waiting women: ‘Sisters! there your brothers lie: / Mothers! there your sons are prone / Wives! your husbands mangled die, / Bleedingfever’d-crush’d-alone! (). Costello blurs the boundaries of the medieval and the present: she does not indicate that she is telling a contemporary story until the mention of Scutari almost three-quarters of the way through the poem, when the ‘band of pilgrims blest, / Speeding onward to the East’ () become identifiable as Nightingale’s nurses. Lila, Costello’s female protagonist, is cast as the Lady of Shalott, who lives in a ‘shelter’d castle’ (), the subject of local legend. Unlike the Lady of Shalott, Lila’s ³⁸ Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe, ed. Barbara Dennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , –. ³⁹ Patrick Waddington,‘Theirs But to Do and Die’: The Poetry of the Charge of The Light Brigade at Balaklava,  October  (Nottingham: Astra Press, ), , . ⁴⁰ Louisa Stuart Costello, The Lay of the Stork (London: Cash, ).

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solitary life is self-enforced to aid her search for knowledge, so she can think away from the ‘falseness and imperfect show’ () of society. Her physical separation reflects her enforced mental and spiritual position, as a woman absorbed in thinking about world issues in a society which bars her from political discussion. The Lay of the Stork highlights the cost of women’s exclusion from politics, and the contribution women could make if given the opportunity. When Lila’s message of peace, sent tied around a stork’s neck, is ignored, she takes the only active option open to her: joining the ‘angel band’ () of Nightingale’s Scutari nurses. Lila’s message, which Khalid has held at his breast, saves his life by shielding him from a blade, symbolizing its life-affirming nature: if the message had been heeded, it could have stopped the death and misery of war. Peace, when it comes, brings with it shame at the ‘angry past’ and war (). When a Day of Fasting and Prayer was declared at the outbreak of the Crimean War, Punch ( May ) printed a complex image of Victoria dressed in armour, England’s War Vigil (Fig. .). Here Victoria represents Britannia, shield and helmet in the background: however, the kneeling woman offering her sword to God in this image has most obvious echoes of Joan of Arc.⁴¹ The cross-dressing, arms-wielding Joan fascinated the nineteenth century, particularly influenced by the historical records of her life and death as presented in Jules Michelet’s  ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ volume for his Histoire de France, and Jules Quicherat’s ground-breaking publication of the first valid edition of the records of Joan’s trial and related documents (–), which were translated into English in . For many politically conservative women, Joan was an icon of womanhood and female piety, who paid the ultimate sacrifice by putting patriotic duty before her own safety. The market was littered with female-authored didactic tales for girls who held the complex Joan as an exemplar—‘the most womanly of women who ever breathed’.⁴² The historical facts of a woman who could be saint, warrior, and presenter of her own lucid self-defence were inspirational, at the same time, to supporters of women’s suffrage at the end of the century. Joan’s fate was a demonstration of the irrational fear of martially and politically active women, refused a ransom by the country that she saved because of its unease at the power of her role. In , Barbara Leigh Smith proposed the first petition on women’s suffrage to John Stuart Mill, signed by , people including Leigh Smith’s cousin, Florence Nightingale, and Mill made his first presentation of the Private Members’ Bill to the House of Commons. In the same year, Augusta Webster published her Dramatic Studies, which include the dramatic monologue that gives expression to the compelling and lucid voice of ‘Jeanne D’Arc’. Joan examines her role, her difference from other women, the tragedy of her isolation, and the enormity of her sacrifice for the public good: Ah! I like other women might have lived A home-sweet life in happy lowly peace, ⁴¹ Especially if England’s Vigil is compared with John Everett Millais’s  portrait of the French saint. ⁴² Amabel Kerr, Joan of Arc (; London: Catholic Truth Society, ), .

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

Figure .. ‘England’s War Vigil’, Punch,  ( May ): 

And France had not been free . . . But I obeyed the visions: I arose, And France is free—And I ere the next sun Droops to the west shall be whitened mass— Dead ashes on the place where the wild flames Shot up—oh horrible! (–)

Joan was an icon for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in the fight for women’s suffrage, and became closely associated with Christabel Pankhurst, organizing secretary of the WSPU and editor of The Suffragette, the newspaper that claimed ‘Joan is the militant women’s ideal’.⁴³ Joan of Arc appeared on many covers of its issues, and on advertising posters: women on horseback, dressed as Joan, led many WSPU demonstrations.⁴⁴ The age which opened with the image of the medieval damsel in distress, closed with the icon of the medieval militant woman, before the madness and

⁴³ The Suffragette ( May ): . ⁴⁴ Many of these are shown in Diane Atkinson, The Suffragettes in Pictures (Stroud: The History Press in Association with the Museum of London, , ).

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horror of the First World War exploded all images of Victorian chivalry, in the noise of the armaments factory, and the mud, mutilation, and carnage of the battlefield.

S  Broome Saunders, Clare, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York: Palgrave, ). Broome Saunders, Clare, Louisa Stuart Costello: A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life (New York: Palgrave, ). Byrd, Deborah, ‘Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Evolution as a Feminist Poet’, Browning Institute Studies,  (): –. Davis, Kathleen, and Nadia Altschul (eds),. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Gordon, Felicia, and Gina Luria Walker (eds), Rational Passions: Women and Scholarship in Britain, – (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, ). Hoagwood, Terence Allan, and Kathryn Ledbetter, ‘Colour’d Shadows’: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Hodder, Karen, ‘Elizabeth Barrett and the Middle Ages’ Woeful Queens’, Studies in Medievalism,  (): –. Johnston, Judith, George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (Turnhout: Brepols, ). Pugh, Tison, and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, ). Yonge, Charlotte Mary, The Heir of Redclyffe, ed. Barbara Dennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

  The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere ......................................................................................................................

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T utopian tradition, which reaches back through the urban and institutional visions of Le Corbusier, Charles Fourier, Francis Bacon, Tommaso Campanella, and Plato, is not obviously associated with the backward glance of medievalism. Its emphasis is on rationalism, planning, and geometric form, while the situational premise has been that the city is the natural home of futurity. In reality, there has always been a close relationship between utopianism and medievalism. Le Corbusier’s emphasis on urban cells reflects the monastic influence on his austere modernism.¹ Campanella, author of The City of the Sun (), was a Dominican monk; Bacon and Plato emphasized institutions and closed orders according to the principle that one must withdraw from the world in order to reform it.² The most compelling evidence for these mixed sources is apparent in the work of the man who coined the term utopia. Thomas More’s philosophic seafarer, Raphael Hythloday describes an island state whose imperial sway recalls the power of Renaissance Venice, and whose concern with numerical quotas in distributing population, and with surveillance in shaping manners, depended on the example of Plato’s Republic.³ But More’s preference for order, interpersonal bonds, and collective thinking, aligned him just as closely with the

¹ Nathaniel Colman, Utopias and Architecture (London: Routledge, ), ; Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism, tr. Radka Donnell (Cambridge, MA: MIT, ),  . ² Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, tr. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ); Plato, The Republic, tr. Paul Shorey,  vols (London: William Heinemann, ); Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),  . ³ Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

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medieval world. In the Foreword to the Kelmscott Press edition of Utopia (), William Morris remarked on this dual affiliation. While noting More’s reputation as a man of the new learning, he stressed ‘what was yet alive in him of medieval Communist tradition, the spirit of association’.⁴ Morris’s own utopia, News from Nowhere (), epitomizes this reconciliation of medievalism and futurology.⁵ It depicts a world governed by the seasonal rhythms of the rural economy, where laws are customary, not codified, and where ideals of craftsmanship and community are dominant. In this respect, News from Nowhere can give the impression of harking back to an ideal, and yet conveniently non-specific, past. Morris was undoubtedly concerned to recover elements of the medieval age for use and adaptation in the present; nevertheless, an attention to the ‘built’ elements of his vision reveals a relation to that past that is neither unthinking, nor entirely divorced from the forward trajectory of utopia. By virtue of its concern with growth, and with the practical implementation of an intellectual pattern, architecture has been called ‘the most utopian of arts’.⁶ In common with literary utopias, it is concerned with the new worlds in which we might live. As such, it forges a temporary alliance between fiction and spatial engineering. On the larger scale, More’s island of Utopia is the result not only of authorial fancy, but of terraformed insular conditions, achieved through a massive engineering project to sever a peninsula from the mainland.⁷ Hythloday recounts the layout of buildings and houses in relation to green spaces and gardens, praises a special kind of plaster that resists fire and rain, and reports high standards of upkeep among utopian households.⁸ But there are few literary utopias that celebrate building as part of an ongoing energy of creation, an action of value in itself rather than a means to the end of structures now finished and perfected. Nor are there many writers who linger on the appearance and structure of such buildings. By lavishing descriptive detail on the process and results of building, Morris’s utopia is unusual. It is unusual, too, for the apparent revivalism, or historicism, of its architectural vision. That historicism is complicated, because it applies not only to buildings from the genuine past, such as the remains of the ‘old nunnery’ at Godstow (), but also to structures that are entirely new. Although certain buildings survive from the intervening period, a continuity of style unites medieval and modern contexts in ways that affirm Morris’s aesthetic and political vision. It was a vision based on the belief that the Middle Ages were the last period in which architecture was a social art, capable of reconciling beauty with functional purpose. This interval, between the historic medieval and the utopian medieval, poses questions that escape our attention if we dismiss Morris as a naïve throwback, or accept the affinity between old and new structures at face value.

⁴ Morris, ‘Foreword’, News from Nowhere (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, ), iii viii. ⁵ Morris, News from Nowhere, in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris,  vols (London: Longmans Green & Co.,  ), xvi.  . All quotations from this work are accompanied by bracketed page numbers in the text. ⁶ Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . ⁷ More, Utopia, . ⁸ More, Utopia, .

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The first part of this chapter probes the problematic relation of inherited forms, or inherited buildings, to new horizons. How, in particular, does Morris construct an architecture of the future from the quarry of the past? The second considers the relationship between styles and values, a crucial tenet of Arts and Crafts thinking, which is at once affirmed and complicated by the hybridity of the buildings described in News from Nowhere. In the last part, I examine the function of architecture, and its literary representation, in realizing and channelling utopian desire. At issue is the question of whether buildings in Nowhere are merely symptomatic objects, or evidence of an exploratory process linked to the utopian impulse itself.

G 

.................................................................................................................................. The distinction between the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalist’ is radically complicated by Morris’s terminological preference for ‘Gothic Architecture’,⁹ a phrase he inherited from Ruskin’s influential essay on ‘The Nature of Gothic’.¹⁰ According to Ruskin, ‘the Gothic’ originated as a term of abuse, inspired by unfavourable comparison between the architecture of medieval Europe and the ‘rude’ tribes that threatened Roman civilization. To reclaim it as a positive description entailed a comparative awareness that challenged historical singularity, and the fixity of period. In his lecture on ‘Gothic Architecture’ (), Morris defined the phrase politically, as a ‘freedom of hand and mind subordinated to the co-operative harmony which made the freedom possible’.¹¹ It is first labelled a ‘tendency’, and then a ‘spirit’. Thus the Gothic stands in for the medieval in the sense that it evokes Morris’s preference for the architecture of that period, while refusing to limit its applicability to those times. As a ‘spirit’, it could animate human actions in later centuries. This ahistorical historicism was inherited from Ruskin’s definition of ‘Gothicness’ as consisting of abstract qualities, in potentially differing degrees of concentration, among them ‘savageness’, ‘changefulness’, ‘naturalism’, ‘grotesqueness’, ‘rigidity’, and ‘redundance’.¹² While Morris did not think the conditions were in place for the Gothic spirit to prevail in his own age, he believed fervently that it could be made to return. This introduces the crucial assumption that the Gothic was not exclusively medieval, nor medievalist (however playfully or earnest), but a ‘form’ and a ‘spirit’ of enduring relevance: ‘In the future’, Morris contended, ‘our style of architecture must be Gothic Architecture’.¹³

⁹ William Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, in May Morris (ed.), William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist,  vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), i.  . ¹⁰ The Complete Works of John Ruskin,  vols, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen and Unwin, –), x. –. ¹¹ Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, . ¹² Ruskin, ‘Nature of Gothic’, . ¹³ Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, .

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The implication of this mobile architectural spirit is that a Gothic building, if not a ‘medieval’ one, can be built in the utopian future, combining two normally incompatible attributes: ‘Gothicness’, and ‘newness’. Morris’s protagonist, William Guest, fully understands that he is no longer in the Victorian present when he sees ‘a pretty bridge’ whose date of construction is ‘’ (). In this distant era, the conditions of the present have resettled into sympathy with the social requirements of pleasing structures. Thus, the emphasis is less on the world constructed by a foregoing Utopus or Solon than on a present capacity, as where Guest is shown a ‘house that was a-building’ (), a ‘neat job’, ‘all stone’, that is to replace ‘a starveling of a nineteenth century house’. An attention to ‘newness’ is also apparent in Morris’s earlier romance, A Dream of John Ball ( , ).¹⁴ In that work, a proxy for the author travels back to the time of the Peasants’ Revolt. The experience of historical displacement is rendered not simply through the scene-setting device of medieval built surroundings, nor ‘vaguely or absurdly, as often happens in dreams’, but ‘with all the detail clear and reasonable’.¹⁵ There follows a thorough-going apprehension of what it means to see an ‘ancient’ building at a point in time before it has acquired the patina of age. Morris’s hero prepares us for this experience by relating occasions when he has dreamt of ‘a splendid collegiate church, untouched by restoring parson or architect’, or by the ‘degradation’ of ‘sordid utilitarianism’.¹⁶ These moments are made precious by a belief that the touch of the Victorian present is always actively harmful to the built remains of the medieval past, and that these conditions have somehow been suspended. The significance of these ‘new made’ medieval buildings is drawn out when Morris’s time traveller describes the sight of ‘a tall spire white and brand-new’.¹⁷ The phrase ‘brand-new’ conjures a sense of the pristine, which at first recalls the sense of a commodity fetish, a product of consumer capitalism that renounces signs of human labour and gives the impression of having fallen to earth ready-made.¹⁸ This is the modern sense of the ‘new’ that Ruskin and Morris rejected in their attacks on contemporary manufacturing ‘finish’.¹⁹ It is the effect that Dickens satirized in his portrait of the Veneerings, the ‘bran-new people’ living in a ‘bran-new house’, at the beginning of Our Mutual Friend (); and upon which Nathaniel Hawthorne drew on remarking the ineffective ‘brand-newness’ of Eaton Hall, an entirely ‘renewed house’.²⁰ There remains a sense in which Morris is entranced by the immaculate in material form. In references to the ‘trimness and handiness’ of the surrounding enclosures of garden and orchard he reminds us of an earlier connotation of the ¹⁴ Morris, A Dream of John Ball, in Collected Works of Morris, xvi.  . ¹⁵ Morris, Dream of John Ball, . ¹⁶ Morris, Dream of John Ball, . ¹⁷ Morris, Dream of John Ball, . ¹⁸ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, i, in Marx/Engels Collected Works,  vols (London: Lawrence & Wishart, ), xxxv.  . ¹⁹ Ruskin, Stones of Venice, iii, in Works, xi. . ²⁰ Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Michael Cotsell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home, and English Note-Books,  Vols (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., ), i,  .

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‘brand-new’, that which corresponds to an object ‘fresh and glowing from the furnace’ (OED). Thus while it is haunted by the connotation of a commercial mark or ‘superior brand’ () (OED), Morris’s usage evokes the sense of an object newly delivered from the maker’s hand. The black magic of the commodity fetish is driven out, and we return to a sense of the ‘new’ governed by the alchemy of craftsmanship. The white magic of craft derives not from the erasure of labour, but from its celebration. It also reflects an awareness that this is ‘dream’ or wish-fulfilment, and captures an enduring human delight in the thing ‘seemingly just made’,²¹ the thing brought new into existence, whose apprehension links human creativity to divine creation, and ‘continues it’.²² The radical implication is that a medieval oak bench can rival, and surpass, the glamour otherwise reserved for the factory-fresh products of the commercial age. Several further complications affect the Gothic’s relationship with time. The first arises from its ‘changeful’ quality. This ‘changefulness’ was identified by Ruskin as a form of animation and flexibility resulting from its refusal of strict symmetry and architectural planning.²³ While Morris subscribed to this account of the Gothic as a stylistic system that always ripples internally with new interest, he also explored its capacity for change in the diachronic sense. On one level, this merely reflects Ruskin’s account of the changing form of the arch, in The Stones of Venice ( ).²⁴ In ‘Gothic Architecture’, Morris observes similarly that ‘the huge cylindrical or square piers transformed into clusters of slim, elegant shafts’.²⁵ But beyond this evolutionary change, still acting within the parameters of Gothic, Ruskin reports a decline and a degeneration. Morris shares the judgement, but by the s, his view of stylistic cataclysm is incorporated into his socialism, and his revolutionary view of history. Thereafter, the Gothic gets mixed up with his view of a popular cause that can be submerged, almost extinguished, for a huge tract of time, only to flare up in mutiny, and sweep away the old order.²⁶ It becomes clear, as Guest travels through Nowhere, that the re-emergence of Gothic has entailed the destruction of many structures regarded as inferior. On his journey up the Thames, Guest ‘saw with pleasure that my old enemies the “Gothic” cast-iron bridges had been replaced by handsome oak and stone ones’ (). The combative vocabulary is a reminder that Morris’s utopia is not entirely another place, but a reformed version of London and south-east England. This means that change is often premised on the destruction of structures built during the commercial age, as signalled by the reports of slum clearance, or ‘The Clearing of Misery’ (). The revolutionary clean slate is complicated by Morris’s habit of looking back. This is first acknowledged comically, through an allusion to ‘a queer antiquarian society’

²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁵ ²⁶ (

Morris, Dream of John Ball, . Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (London: Sheed & Ward, ), . Ruskin, ‘Nature of Gothic’, . ²⁴ Ruskin, ‘Nature of Gothic’, . Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, . Morris, ‘Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century’, in Collected Works of Morris, xxii.   ).

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() resembling the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) that Morris founded in . We learn that it rescued the Houses of Parliament, and other structures commonly deemed ‘worthless’ or ‘public nuisances’ (). This reference operates as a self-mocking reminder of the inclusive scope in matters of preservation that Morris observed in order to win support for his ideas.²⁷ Less controlled intrusions of the built past take the form of a perplexed sensation, a kind of architectural uncanny. By locating the Hammersmith Guest House on the site of Guest’s ‘old dwelling’, Morris may have had in mind Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.²⁸ In that work, a sleeper awakes to find a new house built on the site of his old residence, and himself entertained as if ‘at home’. This hospitality is offered with a view to limiting ‘the element of the weird and the uncanny which might so easily have been overpowering’.²⁹ Though conscious of the threat posed by the past, the approach is largely to repress such hauntings: Julian West’s infernal closing vision of the old Boston, with its ‘rookeries’ and ‘gusts of fetid air’ is offered largely as a confirmation of the future’s superior claim.³⁰ Morris finds a more sustained advantage in courting the past’s intrusive influence. The ‘carved and gilded inscription’ in the Hammersmith Guest House reveals that ‘on the site of this Guest-hall once stood the lecture-room of the Hammersmith Socialists’ (). This ensures a physical link with Victorian social dreaming. Elsewhere, Guest recognizes ‘no less old a friend, in fact, than the British Museum’ (). The culture of Nowhere is clearly dependent on an admission of the past. Yet this very receptiveness, this sense of ‘the ghost of London still asserting itself as a centre’ ( ), is problematic. In ‘Gothic Architecture’, Morris remarks on ‘the Victorian Architecture of the brick box and the slate lid, which helps to make us the dullards that we are’.³¹ The danger, clearly, is that structural survivals from the neoclassical commercial age will exert a similarly determining influence on the utopian environment. Morris counters the threat by reassigning the use and function of such survivals: the Houses of Parliament are now a ‘dung market’ () and the National Gallery lends its name to the many local art galleries covering the land, its pretension to centrality neutralized. It is less obvious how Morris filters the ideological freight of the medieval architecture that makes its way into Nowhere. Guest notes that the guest-hall inscription is ‘behind what we should have called the High Table in an Oxford college hall’ (). This information hints inadvertently at the hierarchies encoded in medieval distributions of space, but we are encouraged to believe that the new society can use ancient buildings without accepting all ‘the customs of past times’ (). At Hampton Court, Guest finds ‘everything arranged much as in the Hammersmith Guest-Hall’, while there are ²⁷ Despite their neoclassicism, Morris wrote a spirited letter to The Times as Honorary Secretary for the SPAB, objecting to the destruction of churches by Christopher Wren in the City of London: ‘To the Editor of The Times’,  Apr. , The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin,  vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press,  ), i.  . ²⁸ Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward  , ed. Cecelia Tichi (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ), . ²⁹ Bellamy, Looking Backward, . ³⁰ Bellamy, Looking Backward,  . ³¹ Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, .

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‘pictures and tapestry’ still preserved in the ‘ancient rooms’, and people with ‘an indefinable kind of look of being at home and at ease’ (). His feeling that ‘the beautiful old place was mine in the best sense of the word’ () evokes some sense of repossession and redistribution, combined with the preservation of the ‘home’ and ‘household’ () that Morris wished to rescue from bourgeois exclusiveness. Eton College, he is told, no longer flouts Henry VI’s concern to provide for the education of ‘poor people’s sons’ (). Since ‘ideas about teaching young people are so changed’, they ‘cannot use it quite as the founder intended’ (). All the same, ‘it is used now as a dwelling for people engaged in learning’ (). In both cases, the ‘re-use’ is presented as a reversal of post-medieval depredations, with the addition of a socialist ethic. The implication is that the buildings of the ‘Gothic’ past are able to accommodate the hopes of the future, and that the less palatable features of the medieval past, namely the sense of hierarchy, violence, and curtailed freedom, are not necessary accompaniments. The buildings are, in effect, retrofitted with socialist principles, on the understanding that there is a deep affinity between socialism and medieval conceptions of communal space and idyllic privacy. Even though class distinctions are defunct, the architectural language in this case depends on a hierarchy or grammar based on feudal social structures. The effect is not uniform, however. Just as the ‘ghost’ of London’s centre still asserts itself, the inheritance of style itself, and in particular of the late seventeenth-century ‘court-style’ (), signals the possibility of some politico-stylistic diversity. The mixed register implied by ‘court’ (whether understood as an institution, or a quadrangular ground-plan) is apparent in a description of buildings north of Hammersmith Broadway, ‘a range of buildings and courts, low, but very handsomely built and ornamented, and in that way forming a great contrast to the unpretentiousness of the houses round about’ (). We are asked to believe that these visual ‘contrasts’ have been achieved without importing the social distinctions they once instantiated. Architecture is conceived thereby both as a source of happiness, and as a determining force whose mixed effects can be embraced or redirected as required.

S  

.................................................................................................................................. Morris observed in ‘Gothic Architecture’ that ‘an organic style cannot spring out of an eclectic one, but only from an organic one’.³² This allusion to eclecticism distinguishes the customary and intuitive style of the medieval masons from the pattern book inspiration of speculative builders. But in Nowhere an ‘organic’ style is not necessarily a pure or even a coherent style. Just as Morris and his SPAB associates could accept and approve the record of diverse alterations made to the same building as a kind of composite art, so the streetscape that Guest observes resembles something of a fantasy mélange.³³ This ³² Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, . ³³ See Sidney Colvin, ‘Restoration and Anti-Restoration’, Nineteenth Century,  ():  , .

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synthesis of diverse elements is especially obvious in his report of ‘a great red-brick pile of building, partly of the latest Gothic, partly of the court-style of Dutch William, but so blended together by the bright sun and beautiful surroundings’ ( ). This mix of elements is apparent in many of the buildings observed. The first structure Guest witnesses is the bridge at Hammersmith. He compares it to the twodimensional, unloaded structure of a painted bridge, in ‘an illuminated manuscript’ (), and notes the ‘quaint and fanciful little buildings, which I supposed to be booths or shops, beset with painted and gilded vanes and spirelets’ (). This vision also gives way to certain conditions of the real: although free of soot, we are told, the ‘stone was a little weathered’ (). The immediate parallel might be with old London Bridge, but Guest chooses ‘the Ponte Vecchio at Florence’ () as his point of comparison. This shifts us beyond the generalized realm of the ‘fairy’ to a symbol of the southern Gothic. Another example is an ‘elegant arcade to protect foot-passengers, as in some of the old Italian cities’ (). Elsewhere, the effect is less of diverse and independently present elements, than of a fully fledged hybrid, a new style. At Hammersmith, Guest describes a ‘great hall, of a splendid and exuberant style of architecture, of which one can say little more than that it seemed to me to embrace the best qualities of the Gothic of northern Europe with those of the Saracenic and Byzantine, though there was no copying of any one of these styles’ (). The obvious precedent for this stylistic and cultural amalgam is Venice. Venice testifies to the Gothic’s cultural diversity, its ability to incorporate ‘external’ elements, whether by process of homage or pillage. Guest’s insistence that the hall gave no evidence of ‘copying’ () also differentiates its architecture from mere historicism. The clearest realization of this vital and plural style, and the most evocative of Arts and Crafts ambitions, is the Hammersmith Guest-House. It is described as ‘a longish building with its gable ends turned away from the road, and long traceried windows coming rather low down set in the wall that faced us’ (). This form resembles those secular, and democratic, meeting places conceived as part of Garden Cities, and other similar ventures at the turn of the century.³⁴ Paying homage to the form of the great hall, the guild hall, and the nave, they are at once all these things and none. There is a ‘frieze of figure subjects in baked clay’ (), which Guest sees running ‘high up above the windows’ (). This recalls the work of Benjamin Creswick at Cutler’s Hall in London, and at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art. Creswick often depicted men at work. His own background—a knife grinder who turned sculptor after a visit to Ruskin’s St George’s Museum in Sheffield—conjures much of what Morris had in mind in depicting the evolution of new democratic ‘folk spaces’, and their progressive embellishment.³⁵ Hybrid as it is, this ‘new style’ incorporates several structural and formal elements that express a more coherent set of ethical and functional aims. The attraction to halls, as ³⁴ See Mervyn Miller, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ), ; see also see ch.  of Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ),  . ³⁵ For a virtual reconstruction of St George’s Museum, see Marcus Waithe, Ruskin at Walkley: Reconstructing the St George’s Museum ; see also, Marcus Waithe, Ruskin at Walkley: An Illustrated Guide to the Online Museum, nd edn (York: Guild of St George, ).

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communal and hospitable spaces, expresses an enlarged view of the public sphere, which is nevertheless modified by a medieval conception of the expansive household. Similar principles underlie a preference for the quadrangle, and the Italian arcade or covered walkway. At one point Guest is shown ‘a very large paved quadrangle, with a big sycamore tree in each corner and a plashing fountain in the midst.’ (). A scene is described in which the architecture appears at once to generate and confirm social relations: The ground floor of the building round the quadrangle was occupied by a wide arcade or cloister, whose fanciful but strong architecture I could not enough admire. Here also a few people were sauntering or sitting reading on the benches. ()

As in an architectural drawing, this ‘sauntering or sitting’ suggests that medieval forms have an enduring capacity to challenge atomized or compartmentalised living. Similarly, the effect of the cloister is to focus attention on encounters in the walkway, because all views in the outward direction are blocked. The sycamore and fountain stand as a common spectacle, evoking growth, life, and sustenance. Beyond these points of central interest, the eye is drawn to the walkway on the other side of the quadrangle. It ensures that all views ‘out’ return us ultimately to the encircling round of sociability. The detail of these descriptions reveals the additional importance of decoration as a binding agent. Morris wrote that ‘in the Gothic building . . . every part of it, walls, windows, floor, was all looked on as space for the representation of incidents of the great story of mankind’.³⁶ Guest witnesses a similarly storied interior when he enters the large hall of the Bloomsbury Market. He ‘found it difficult’, he explains, ‘to keep my eyes off the wall-pictures’ (). The mesmerizing effect, and the information that the tales are ‘full of incident’ (), yet ‘not too tragic for a place where people mostly eat and drink’, clarifies their more than merely decorative nature. Like the cloister, they represent a ‘distraction’ from everyday cares, yet return the mind to a consciousness of the common history, as tales that ‘everyone knows’. A sense of belonging is also ensured by shared participation in embellishment. Morris imagined that, in the Middle Ages, ‘every village has its painter, its carvers, its actors even’.³⁷ When Guest’s guide, Dick, reveals that he ‘had a hand’ in the ‘great doors’, ‘of damascened bronze’ () that guard the entrance to a theatre, we gather that the buildings in this world are not delivered to the occupants as external artefacts. Instead, they are structurally and decoratively tuned to their ‘hands’ and to the collective unconscious. Beyond the civic architecture of Italy, and the monastic form of the quadrangle, the architecture of Nowhere is in a sense not ‘architecture’ at all, but vernacular ‘building’. Morris’s inspiration in this respect was Great Coxwell Tithe Barn, a vast structure framed in oak and walled in stone, located close to his country home at Kelmscott Manor. The barn recalls the work of cathedral masons in the homely but no less impressive form of a farmer’s nave. Such architecture implies a democratic creative process, an unprofessionalized approach to building that is nevertheless ‘seemly’ or ‘in ³⁶ Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, .

³⁷ Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, .

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keeping’, as in Guest’s sense of ‘stone-country’, where ‘every house must be either built, walls and roof, of grey stone or be a blot on the landscape.’ (). The blend of built fabric, landscape, and people reflects Romantic ideas about people and nation.³⁸ In this regard, it might strike readers as ‘naïve’ or unexamined. Morris is nevertheless making a case for the potential of the vernacular. The credibility of this position is now easier to defend, with the advent of ‘ecological’ building techniques, and a growing recognition that such ‘breathable’ materials as timber laths, lime mortar, and lime wash have certain advantages over industrial sealants.³⁹ Guest finds houses in Hammersmith that were ‘all pretty in design, and as solid as might be, but countrified in appearance’ (). They are ‘of timber and plaster’ (), and it is this structural character, this emphasis on ‘the same materials’ (), that distinguishes them from mere pastiche and stage set.⁴⁰ The agenda here is familiar from William Cobbett’s campaign in Cottage Economy () for rural ‘competence’. In similar fashion, Morris connects the loss of the ‘small country arts of life’ () to an outbreak of aesthetic failure, whereby ‘the building became inexpressibly mean and hideous’ ().⁴¹ Ultimately, it is Morris’s medievalism that lends credibility to his interest in rural structures, less as a quaint retreat from modernity than as a practical proposition, based on the vernacular’s genius for serving a multitude of human needs in one place. The promise of Great Coxwell Tithe Barn is realized in Hammond’s allusion to communal spaces ‘with the church or mote-house of the neighbours for their chief building’ (). Here, the word ‘neighbours’ signals a functionality and renunciation of ‘tumble-down picturesque’ (). The recurrent insistence on ‘neatness’ is part of this: ‘Like the mediævals’, explains Hammond, ‘we like everything trim and clean, and orderly and bright; as people always do when they have any sense of architectural power’ (). The curious word ‘power’ is glossed as an allusion to a determination on the part of villagers that ‘they won’t stand any nonsense from Nature in their dealings with her’ (). It also happens to be traceable, by etymological means, to the word ‘craft’ (OED), forming an otherwise unlikely link between conceptions of force or magnitude and bygone skill. It is the medievalism, then, that wards off Romantic versions of spectacle and rural decline, evoking an alternative to ‘modern’ Victorian architecture that is nevertheless dynamic and efficient. These implicit defences of the vernacular were not exclusively the stuff of utopian speculation, but were developed into practical schemes by Morris’s followers. The architects Parker and Unwin argued in favour of the village green as a design principle, and in that way abstracted working forms from purely antiquarian circulation.⁴² Similarly, the

³⁸ For more on this subject, see Matthew Campbell and Michael Perraudin (eds), The Voice of the People: Writing the European Folk Revival,   (London: Anthem, ). ³⁹ See, for instance, the discussion of ‘breathable materials’ in Carole Ryan, Traditional Construction for Sustainable New Building (London: Routledge, ), . ⁴⁰ Morris’s vision of the future has little in common with, for instance, with the trompe l’il and fanciful archaism of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s development at Portmeirion in north Wales. ⁴¹ William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (London: C. Clement, ),  . ⁴² Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, The Art of Building a Home: A Collection of Lectures and Illustrations (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ),  .

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founder of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard,⁴³ embraced Morris’s concern to deracinate the vernacular, by marrying it with urban approaches to settlement.⁴⁴ Both examples read a practicality and rationality into folk forms that simultaneously recognizes rootedness and a fugitive capacity to adapt in meeting modern needs.

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.................................................................................................................................. At the opening of A Dream of John Ball, Morris’s protagonist refers to a species of ‘architectural dream’, which he calls a variety of the ‘dreams of the night’.⁴⁵ He contrasts this sleeping kind with the ‘dreams of the day’. They, by comparison, are less clear, even when forced. The implication is that night dreaming is in some respect a spatially developed form of experience, whose parameters are not constrained by physical limit. News from Nowhere shares this emphasis on architecture as wishfulfilment, and some of the comedy of the work dwells in the ‘unasked-for’, or unforced, nature of the presentiment. Guest cannot believe that he is witnessing the realization of so many architectural preferences in one landscape. There is in consequence a tone of acclamation and theatre about the unfolding vision. This is apparent when Guest exclaims the words, ‘Then the bridge!’ (), on seeing the Hammersmith Bridge that resembles Ponte Vecchio. His special interest in these matters is reflected in the proclivities of his host, Dick, who cannot ‘forbear giving me an architectural note’ (). This sense of the gratuitous, and of mounting gratification, extends the tone established in A Dream of John Ball, whose speaker reflects that ‘This dream is as it were a present of an architectural peep-show’.⁴⁶ The notion of a ‘peep-show’ makes apparent the titillation of these intense flashes of architectural detail. At times, Guest appears entirely ravished by all this visual stimulus. In one passage, he describes standing in a ‘hall with a floor of marble mosaic’ (), with side arches that afford a tantalizing ‘glimpse of a garden’ (). The partial view ensures the sense of something simultaneously given and held back. The analogue between physical desire and the visual spectacle of building is openly admitted when Guest observes ‘three young women [who] were flitting to and fro’ (), and confesses that he ‘naturally looked at them very attentively, and found them at least as good as the gardens, the architecture, and the male men’ (). This self-consciously roving eye is a reminder of the distance Morris had yet to travel on the road to feminism; but the inclusive attention that the gaze also devotes, in the curious phrase, to ‘male men’, and to the gardens and buildings, deserves comment for the way it imputes life, feeling, and ⁴³ Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., ). ⁴⁴ For more on this subject, including Parker and Unwin’s vernacular adaptation of Howard’s geometric forms, see ch.  of Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers,  . ⁴⁵ Morris, Dream of John Ball, . ⁴⁶ Morris, Dream of John Ball, .

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attraction to an inanimate sphere. This leads later to the thought that ‘I might have known that people who were so fond of architecture generally, would not be backward in ornamenting themselves’ (), an observation whose effect is to fold the attention given to buildings into a wider economy of human self-respect. The point gathers technical significance as Guest observes that ‘the shape of their raiment, apart from its colour, was both beautiful and reasonable—veiling the form, without either muffling or caricaturing it’ (). It is as if Morris’s preference for the structurally frank Gothic, over the neoclassical façade, has been translated into the physical realm. In the process, it is purged of the ascetic connotations that other contemporary portraits of medieval culture had imputed to it.⁴⁷ Once the distanced mode of connoisseurship has passed, Guest can respond to the social affections—‘the expression of such generosity and abundance of life’ ()—pregnant in the architecture, so that the exhilaration becomes visceral and overbrimming. He admits that ‘I fairly chuckled for pleasure’ (), as if in realization of his earlier allusion to the ‘sense of space and freedom which satisfactory architecture always gives to an unanxious man who is in the habit of using his eyes’ (). The well-being engendered by a generosity in beautiful and solid things, and the political value generated by ‘space’, in the personal as well as the geometric sense, lead in this way to a feeling of exhilaration that challenges the more superficial gratification of the ‘architectural peep-show’, and hints at more abiding forms of satisfaction. Architectural detail also has a narrative function in Morris’s work; at least, it causes us to question our understanding of narrative by querying the conventional distinction between plot and description. The things that ‘happen’ in News from Nowhere belong to what is seen and felt; they do not depend on social competition, or personal crisis, in the manner of those nineteenth-century novels praised by ‘the Old Grumbler’ in chapter . Morris lavishes descriptive attention on buildings for their own sake, as a manner of architectural blazon. What might seem a distraction, or an ornamental flourish, is revealed as central to the book’s manner of simulating happiness. Because of its public nature, architecture provides the best method of indicating the potential for externalities, for human creations that radiate wealth limitlessly beyond the narrow terms of the contract or the private space. The implication is that ‘beauty’, as defined in the absolute terms of the Arts and Crafts movement, is not a luxury. Nor, in the words that Guest sceptically applies on being given a handmade pipe, is it ‘a very elaborate toy’ (). Dick’s answer indicates that architecture comes first in theory, but he also disclaims the need for a hierarchy of artistic value, even questioning the word ‘architecture’ as a source of outdated distinctions: ‘Of course, if carvers were scarce they would all be busy on the architecture, as you call it, and then these “toys” (a good word) would not be made; but . . . as work is somewhat scarce, or we are afraid it may be, folk do not discourage this kind of petty work.’ () ⁴⁷ See Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; see also Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. C. H. Sisson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ), .

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Dick’s liking for ‘toy’, as a ‘good word’, alerts us to its powerfully ambiguous nature. If taken as the diminutive version of a larger thing, and an instrument of childish sport or diversion, it might seem an unfortunate choice. But, as with the complex significance of the phrase ‘brand new’, Morris is coopting the sense of delight upon which commercial fripperies trade, and reassigning it. Thus a ‘toy’ is a term of approval in Dick’s vocabulary, no longer belittling, but a stable token of this society’s reconciliation of work and play. Architectural description in News from Nowhere is similarly toy-like, in the positive sense of the word that emerges from this exchange. The implied reconciliation of pleasure answers the anti-artistic calculus of Bentham with an earlier form of utilitarian, or rather, Epicurean philosophy.⁴⁸ From Ruskin’s conception of workpleasure, this tradition runs back through More’s Utopia, where the serious things are also the pleasurable things.⁴⁹ Thus when Guest replies that the pipe’s elaborate decoration might make it ‘Too valuable for its use’ (), he quickly realizes that his exclusion of craftsmanship or art from the category of the useful is not understood or appreciated.

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.................................................................................................................................. I have restricted myself to an explication of the varieties of Gothic in News from Nowhere, and an account of the role played by architectural detail as a narrative and a descriptive device. The advantage of characterizing the Gothic as a ‘spirit’, and in that respect de-historicizing it, is that it can serve as an architecture of the future, even as a revolutionary value, once Ruskinian ‘changefulness’ is reinterpreted. Within the utopian situation, that changefulness becomes a method of animating human life, and animating the reader’s experience, a substitute for plot that inspires in the manner of ‘dream’, and teases in the manner of a so-called ‘peep-show’. Importantly, it is a ‘peep show’ that avoids trading on frustration, at least for as long as Guest is in utopia. Once he is thrown back into the nineteenth century, the old logic of plot resumes, and we are left with a more Victorian mode of striving. Beyond the explication of this model, are some unanswered questions. Certain of these arise from Morris’s tendency to blur the distinction between genuine buildings from the medieval past, and buildings laid out in the utopian future. Morris was happy to borrow architectural forms that engender sociability, such as the quadrangle and the hall. It is less clear how other, less attractive, kinds of inheritance are excluded, such as monarchical principles and spaces that are encoded with hierarchy, even given the changes of function envisaged. Perhaps the most problematic assumption is that Gothic architecture is uniquely suited to the future. While the attempt to distinguish it from medieval architecture more narrowly is ⁴⁸ Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, ), –, . ⁴⁹ Ruskin, ‘Nature of Gothic’, ; More, Utopia, .

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helpful, the insistence that Gothic is the only organic style suggests that the only real architecture is Gothic. Are we to conclude that Gothic is uniquely wired to generate human happiness? Precisely because Morris’s conception of Gothic is attractively free of purism, in indicating a capacity for change, it is a struggle to understand why other ‘organic’ forms would not develop. Morris’s quarrel, fundamentally, was with unprincipled eclecticism, and the aping of historical styles. He did not envisage the birth of entirely new styles, even if he saw a place for the stylistic diversity of the past in the new society. Morrisian principles are a source for much modern and modernist thinking about architecture and design, in proposing a functional, rational, and universal (yet locally sensitive) style, based on the reconciliation of personal and communal need. The detail of what he advocated, nevertheless, was a kind of historical dead-end, a socialist version of the end of history, whose only manner of stirring into new styles is described darkly by Ellen—the heroine of News from Nowhere—as a ‘ruinous’ ‘impulse towards change’ (). At the level of fictional and descriptive process, Morris’s utopian vision is also effective in disrupting the dominant emphasis of the Victorian novel on events. As a consequence of this narrative check, we are better able to contemplate the storied significance of built objects, and we can begin to glimpse a more powerful legacy for Morris’s manner of architectural dreaming. His late works cast buildings at the centre of things. In so doing, they demonstrate an enduring grip on the ‘new’, transforming plot into altered modes of description, and channelling human desire for change through the built circumstances of everyday life.

S  Colman, Nathaniel, Utopias and Architecture (London: Routledge, ). Campbell, Matthew, and Michael Perraudin (eds), The Voice of the People: Writing the European Folk Revival,   (London: Anthem, ). Kumar, Krishan, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Miller, Mervyn, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ). Waithe, Marcus, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Waithe, Marcus, Ruskin at Walkley: An Illustrated Guide to the Online Museum, nd edn (York: Guild of St George, ).

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        ......................................................................................................................

  -  -    

......................................................................................................................

 . 

A the chapters in this volume testify, Victorian Britain was the site of a major revival of all things medieval as a crucially important cultural process visibly manifested not only in the literature, the visual arts and architecture, and the music of the era, but also in alterations to fundamental cultural values that can be viewed in spheres of activity from politics to religion or the return to ostensibly chivalric social values and gender roles. Given the apparent ubiquity of this cultural process, one might well ask if ordinary educated Victorians actually thought of ‘medievalization’ as a cultural trend or imperative in which they themselves participated—as writers like Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin clearly did—or which they felt (perhaps unwillingly) compelled to accept or tolerate. Or was that process invisible or unimportant to them compared with other issues, events, and historical processes? For instance, did those witnessing as passers-by the construction of Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s new Palace of Westminster and Houses of Parliament in the s—or Harrods in the s, or any number of Pugin’s nearly fifty ecclesiastical buildings or eighteen institutional buildings—think of those projects and their predominantly neo-Gothic architectural style in terms of their significance as an index of changed or changing tastes and values in the culture at large? In this context we can view literary works (especially poems), like those buildings, as indices of cultural negotiation, or, to put it somewhat differently, as both sites and products of ideological struggle and change. Pierre Bourdieu is an especially important theorist in this regard. In The Field of Cultural Production Bourdieu extends his previous efforts as a socio-cultural theorist to demonstrate how a special variety of power relations is inevitably instantiated in the interactions among authors and texts of all kinds that aspire to cultural dominance. Fundamental to Bourdieu’s theory is the premise that ‘the literary and artistic field is contained within the field of power, while

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

 . 

possessing a relative autonomy with respect to it, especially as regards its economic and political principles of hierarchization’.¹ Bourdieu properly observes that ‘the more autonomous the field [of cultural production] becomes, the more favorable the symbolic power balance is to the most autonomous producers’ (). So, almost by definition, artists in all media are well positioned to gain and affect balances of cultural power and authority. Moreover, as Bourdieu contends, ‘because it is a good measure of the degree of autonomy, and therefore of presumed adherence to the disinterested values which constitute the specific law of the field, the degree of [immediate] public success’ () is not always a measure (and indeed may be an inverse measure) of power in the field, in this case a field in which the most advantageous and desirable power is symbolic: that is, cultural capital. My goal with this chapter is to discuss one particular field of cultural production— Victorian poetry, though with glances at other fields—as it relates to the increasing acceptance, power, and, one might argue, dominance of medievalist discourses and values attributed to the medieval world in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Britain, culminating, as Mark Girouard long ago compellingly argued, early in the twentieth century and collapsing with the events of the First World War. To begin such a discussion, the first challenge is to demonstrate, at a basic level, that poetry was in fact a site of power in the nineteenth century. A brief version of this argument goes something like this. The power of Victorian poetry, certainly by mid-century, was demonstrable and continually enhanced not only by mythologies promulgated by and embodied in earlier Romantic poets and poems and their posthumous reception, but also by the institutionalization of particular channels through which poetry circulated. Poetry was ‘consumed’ in more varied forms than was other literature. It was published in volumes, it appeared in periodicals, it was material for public recitation, it was set to music, it was copied into commonplace books, it was memorized and rehearsed at parties and family gatherings, it was illustrated and anthologized and taught in the schools. In short, a typical Victorian might very well be repeatedly exposed to the same poem—say, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or ‘The Blessed Damozel’ or ‘Dover Beach’ to name several medievalist poems—in various settings, both solitary and social, and in each of those settings different aesthetic, moral, intellectual, or spiritual effects of the work might be privileged. The same poem cited authoritatively by a politician, recorded lovingly in a commonplace book or diary, quoted by a priest at a funeral, painted, illustrated in a periodical, memorized as a touchstone of love or faith, declaimed at a social gathering, or read to family and servants on a domestic evening might opportunely intervene in a variety of discursive formations that dominate, or at least exercise significant influence over, the culture in which it circulates. And it is true to say that within the twenty years of the mid-century a great deal of such poetry being published in Britain was medievalist either by virtue of its formal qualities, its settings, its overt topics, its emerging themes, or the architecture of its references and indirect allusions. ¹ Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –.

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--   



As many scholars have previously argued, from the late eighteenth century forward, a strong interest in medieval history and all things medieval generated a multivalent cultural discourse that began to permeate the conceptual life and practical behaviour of English men and women well before the debacle of the Eglinton Tournament in , and increasingly did so until the end of the First World War. By the early Victorian period a reified language of medievalism was current and visible in politics, literature, art, architecture, theology, love-making, and popular entertainments. It was characterized by a specialized vocabulary, a distinctive iconography, the use of particular literary genres (historical novels, ballads, narrative romances, love lyrics, and other lyrical forms), and it involved a network of value-laden associations. This coded discourse was especially attractive to many writers, and their adaptations or appropriations of it can be seen to have generated particular ideological effects. Well before mid-century, medievalist discourse was universally understood and commonly employed by educated individuals, comparable, perhaps, to the discourses of political economy and evangelical Protestantism. Medievalist discourse employed an array of conceptual terms that denoted particular belief systems and modes of conduct wholly integrated into middle- and upper-class culture: chivalry, manliness, selflessness, gallantry, nobility, honour, duty, and fidelity (to the crown as well as to a beloved). This discourse was employed in support of an array of political, social, economic, and even amatory values and cultural institutions, from British imperialism to Christianity to marriage: it promulgated a belief in the spiritual power of love and in the positive moral influence of women. The ideals it served to reify and disseminate were either formulated explicitly or understood implicitly in terms of medieval history (most often rewritten), literature, mythology, and iconography. As Girouard has demonstrated, these ideals are everywhere embedded in Victorian literature, painting, architecture, and religious documents, which frequently employ the language of chivalry, courtly love, and Gothicism, as well as materials from Arthurian mythology and pre-Reformation Catholicism.² Verse that can be viewed as ‘medievalist’ was written and published by nearly every canonical poet of the era (and by many non-canonical figures as well), from Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning, to the central Pre-Raphaelite poets— Dante and Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and A. C. Swinburne—and even to Thomas Hardy (e.g. ‘Copying Architecture in an Old Minster’) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who often nonetheless deprecated the use of archaic settings by contemporary poets). A good deal of medievalist poetry written relatively early in Victoria’s reign—E. Barrett’s ballads ‘The Romaunt of Margaret’ and ‘The Romaunt of the Page’, for

² See Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, ); Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); and Allen Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), esp. ch. , on the ‘chivalry of duty’ in the nineteenth century.

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

 . 

instance, or Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’—can be seen to emerge from the medievalist revival begun during the late eighteenth century and carried into the Romantic period in the fiction of Sir Walter Scott, in popular ballads, and in poems such as Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ or Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. Yet what distinguishes much Victorian medievalist verse (even the early work) from the medievalist poetry that preceded it is the social and political force of its ideological operations. Taking this view, I will examine six well-known Victorian poems: Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’—a poem seldom thought of as ‘medievalist’—along with his Tristram and Iseult, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (small portions of that epic), Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’, Dante Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, and Swinburne’s ‘Laus Veneris’ (the title poem for the American edition of what was published in England as Poems and Ballads, First Series in ). Beginning with the case of ‘Dover Beach’, we see how the ideological effects of such works become institutionalized in the apparatuses that perpetually reinforce and reconstruct cultural values: recall that it is memorized in classrooms (so that ‘Dover Beach’ could, for instance, be recited to save the central characters in Ian McEwan’s  novel, Saturday), anthologized in textbooks, illustrated in display books, discussed in periodical literature, and strategically positioned in sermons or political speeches. Poets who attain this level of cultural visibility are seen, as Thomas Carlyle insisted on seeing them, as heroes and visionaries. Great claims are made for their value in the social world, as W. B. Yeats demonstrates in the case of William Morris (much of whose poetry is dominated by medievalist or quasi-medievalist settings and motifs), and such claims are largely based on the ideological effects of their poetry. In his essay, ‘The Happiest of the Poets’, Yeats insists that Morris’s ‘mind was illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full right sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted to see in their perfect form’.³ In Yeats’s commentary on Morris we also come to understand how the ideological effects of canonized poetry (through its embeddedness in a variety of media) can be practical and immense: in ways rarely applicable to writers of fiction, the ideals poets promulgate are seen to transcend, but also to overtake, the realities those ideals challenge. As Yeats asserts, Morris ‘knew as Shelley knew . . . that the economists should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the vision of men like him’.⁴ Such poetry serves, ultimately, to devalue activity in the socio-political world and open up discursive spaces through which readers might achieve the illusion of transcending that world (as was the case with Yeats’s response to Morris). In Arnold’s body of work, ‘Dover Beach’ and Tristram and Iseult, in displacing the political and other contexts out of which they genuinely emerged onto a distant historical moment, demonstrate a poetic strategy central to his other work as well: these poems suppress

³ William Butler Yeats, ‘The Happiest of the Poets’, in Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, ), . ⁴ Yeats, ‘Happiest of the Poets’, .

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--   



historical particulars in a gesture that reconceptualizes those particulars as abstract universals formulated by a cosmopolitan, intellectually sophisticated, and philosophical speaker. Once these poems are repositioned in their proper historical contexts, however, we realize that the final effect of their operations is ideological: they appropriate, destabilize, and ultimately subvert particular religious, amatory, or political values—such as the democratizing impetus behind mid-century revolutionary activity in Europe invoked in the last stanza of ‘Dover Beach’—by generalizing, mythicizing, and thereby suppressing the poems’ specific historical origins and thereby draining their subtextual political inspirations, amatory desires, or systems of religious belief, of any ‘real’ value and consequence in what is presented as the superior, poetic world of transcendent meanings. In a letter to Herbert Hill written on  November , probably shortly after he had drafted ‘Dover Beach’, Arnold acknowledged that his plan for Tristram and Iseult, written about the same time and published in , had been conceived during one of his two trips to Thun, Switzerland in September  and September . Arnold explains: I read the story . . . some years ago at Thun in an article in a French Review on the romance literature:  had never met with it before, and it fastened upon me: when I got back to England I looked at the Morte d’Arthur and took what I could, but the poem was in the main formed, and I could not well disturb it.⁵

This episode from ‘romance literature’ clearly provided a distraction for Arnold from the explosive political events going on around him. In the months prior to Arnold’s first visit, Europe was politically chaotic: revolutionary activity had broken out in Sicily in January , in Paris on  February, and in Germany and Italy in March. With the fall of Metternich, Austria was in the throes of political disintegration, and the Russians were preparing for war. In April war broke out between Germany and Poland. By the spring of the following year, matters had not improved. In March , Sardinia renewed its war against Austria. By  April, French forces had clashed with Garibaldi’s republican troops. (Although Louis Napoleon’s true intentions remain uncertain, on  May the Roman republic accepted French protection.) In April, as well, Austrian and Hungarian forces became embattled, and in July Russian troops moved to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia to quash the stirrings of a revolutionary movement there. Russia’s actions precipitated the reopening of the Eastern question and resulted in negotiations for an alliance between England and France, which were concluded in October . On  October Britain ordered its Mediterranean fleet to proceed to the neighbourhood of the Dardanelles. For Matthew Arnold, at the time secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who, as Whig elder statesman, was in the thick of English political activity, these events would have been of great moment. From Thun on  September, Arnold wrote a letter to Arthur Hugh ⁵ Cecil Y. Lang, The Letters of Matthew Arnold,  vols (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, –), i, .

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

 . 

Clough expressing a fear that, on his return to England, he would be unable to maintain any distance from the chaotic swirl of political activity surrounding him: ‘When I come to town’, he laments, ‘I tell you beforehand I will have a real effort at managing myself as to news-papers and the talk of the day’.⁶ Arnold’s poetry composed during this period, in fact, became a vehicle for repudiating ‘the talk of the day’ and the sociopolitical issues privileged by such discourse. ‘Dover Beach’⁷ only subtly acknowledges its political subtexts suggested by the famous concluding image of its speaker hearing ‘confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night’ (ll. –) across the English Channel. But this image signals a retreat from the political world, rather than engagement with it, and Arnold appropriates the dramatic monologue form in this poem to assault other frameworks of value dominant in mid-Victorian England. A lament for lost spiritual certainties, ‘Dover Beach’ presents as its central metaphor the medieval ‘Sea of Faith’, which was once ‘at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d’ (ll. –)—a reference to the widespread Victorian belief that spiritual life in medieval Europe was harmonious. (By , when ‘Dover Beach’ was first published, Victorian audiences would be able to recall at least two familiar touchstones for such a belief in Carlyle’s Past and Present and Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’.) The speaker in ‘Dover Beach’ employs the ‘Sea of Faith’ metaphor to decry the intellectual, moral, and spiritual chaos of the modern world mirrored in political conflicts also rendered metaphorically. He does so—cleverly—by idealizing the religious harmony of medieval Europe (‘a land of dreams’, l. ). However, this move serves primarily to explode ideals—‘joy’, ‘love’, ‘light’, ‘certitude’, ‘peace’ (ll. –)—that Victorians like Carlyle and Ruskin ascribed to medieval culture and then attempted to transpose onto their own. According to this poem, whatever spiritually unifying and redemptive effects the medieval Church may have had are long gone, existing in idealized histories only to highlight the modern world’s pervasive insufficiencies. The withdrawal of the Sea of Faith, re-enacted here as the poem exposes illusions among its Victorian audience that medievalist idealities can recur, horribly reveals ‘the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world’ (ll. –). The only ideal that remains for Arnold’s persona turns out to be intellectual commitment: to a realistic view of the world to be mutually held as a bond between himself and his auditor, his ‘love’ (and implicitly, between Arnold and his reader). The monologue’s dramatic situation, with its manipulation of the props of traditional romantic liaisons, is employed strictly in the service of such a worldview: Ah, love, [he says] let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams,

⁶ Lang, Letters of Arnold, i, . ⁷ Unless otherwise stated, citations of Arnold’s poetry (identified by line number) throughout this chapter are from the easily accessible, single-volume Matthew Arnold, ed. Mirriam Allott and Robert H. Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

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--   



So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (ll. –)

‘Dover Beach’ here brings two prominent Victorian discursive formations— medievalist and amatory—into collision so as, ultimately, to oppose both and to affirm a variety of anti-social solipsism embraced by the self-marginalized speaker of the poem. Notably, in ‘Dover Beach’, as in Arnold’s Tristram, self-affirmation in defiance of the illusory optimisms propagated by ‘the world’ (whether under the sign of love or under the sign of faith) is an ideological stance, specifically a reversion to the iconoclastic impetus behind Romanticism, but one that, mystifyingly, disallows the value or helpfulness of any of the compensatory ideologies formulated differently by each of the major English Romantic poets except Byron. Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult is a formally hybrid and more transparently medievalist poem about the fatality of love, but it is also ultimately and more generally about the inevitability of spiritual unfulfilment. Arnold’s central metaphor—the ‘furnace of the world’—locates his critique historically. The experience of spiritual debility he deplores, like ‘this strange disease of modern life’ lamented in his poem, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, is uniquely the effect of the industrial revolution and the political crises it had spawned by the s—the ‘hungry forties’ as they were termed in England. Tristram and Iseult is ideologically oppositional, and in a variety of ways. From its opening, where we find Tristram already on his death bed, the poem formally undercuts traditional versions of the Tristram myth. He is fading in and out of consciousness, taunted by memories and yearning for the irrecoverable past while tenuously hoping for the arrival of Irish Iseult. This ‘peerless hunter, harper, knight’ is no longer heroic but pathetic. The story Arnold narrates is Iseult of Brittany’s tragedy, not Tristram’s, and it is one that altogether challenges the value of romantic love. The ‘spring-time’ of Tristram’s fatal passion Is already gone and past, And instead thereof is seen Its winter, which endureth still.

(ll. .–)

He is tormented by ‘a secret in his breast / Which will never let him rest’—unable even in his dreams of the past ‘to get free / From the clog of misery’ (.–). And in the present, when Irish Iseult arrives, no joy resurges. We find only that ‘both have suffer’d / Both have pass’d a youth consumed and sad’, and ‘both have brought their anxious day to evening, / And have now short space for being glad!’ (.–) Like Tristram, Irish Iseult has been tortured rather than fulfilled by her love, described as a ‘longing’ that ‘dogg’d by fear and fought by shame / Shook her weak bosom day and night,’ devouring ‘her beauty like a flame’ (.–).

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

 . 

Arnold nonetheless does not use this medieval story of victimized lovers to illustrate the evils of erotic indulgence or to advocate self-suppression and chastity, as Tennyson would do some years later in his Idylls of the King. Iseult of Brittany, for all her wholesomeness, fares no better than the lovers united by the fatal draught: ‘Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will’ (.). Her noble and selfless devotion to Tristram has produced a ‘fatigued’ woman ‘dying in a mask of youth’ (.,). Love, variously idealized in medieval and, later, medievalist discourse, is here denounced and repudiated altogether, presumably in favour of emotional detachment from experience, a philosophical approach to life that Arnold promotes everywhere in his major poems and prose works. His narrator is vitriolic in attacking amatory ideals because they exemplify ‘tyrannous single thoughts’ that ruin human lives: And yet, I swear, it angers me to see How this fool passion gulls men potently; Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest, How they are full of languor and distress Not having it; which when they do possess, They straightway are burnt up with fume and care, And spend their lives in posting here and there Where this plague drives them. (.–)

Thus, Arnold’s Tristram exploits a medieval topos and setting to disparage in generalized but absolute terms the ‘furnace’ of a world in which fulfilment is unattainable through the usual channels. The pursuit of love (like Tristram’s) is as fruitless as the pursuit of fame (illustrated by the examples of ‘bald Caesar’ and ‘Alexander, Philip’s peerless son’,[.–]). Religious faith is, similarly, not available as a source of fulfilment. Although described as ‘The sweetest Christian soul alive’ (.), Britannic Iseult remains unrewarded for her devotion. This poem, employing once again Arnold’s signature strategy of self-marginalization, implicitly adopts a stance of secular nihilism, but that stance is patently ideological. Its deep pessimism requires not only a repudiation of the materialist, utilitarian, perfectibilist, amatory, and Christian values embraced by many middle- and upper-class Victorians of the period (including Tennyson), but also of the spiritual illusions proffered by the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, as alternatives to those values. In doing so, it also ultimately suppresses the historical particulars towards which it nonetheless gestures (as does ‘Dover Beach’). This poem in fact propounds a transvalued Byronic ideology of defiant martyrdom, a self-assertive ‘ideology against ideology’ that is also central to Arnold’s other major compositions of the late s and early s, including ‘Dover Beach’. As I have already suggested, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King—one of the greatest (and longest) Arthurian poems of the period—employs medievalist topoi, settings, characters, and other ‘props’ to support more easily definable ideological positions. The first version of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, consisting of ‘Enid’, ‘Vivien’, ‘Elaine’, and ‘Guinevere’, was published by Moxon & Co. in July of . Forty thousand copies of

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--   



the first edition were issued. Ten thousand copies sold within six weeks, and the demand was so great that a second edition was needed within six months. By the time the second series of Idylls came out in , six more editions had been produced.⁸ The extraordinarily wide dissemination of this poem may be explained by the convergence of a popular author and popular subject matter in a cultural project that benefited from the public’s engagement with both. As a thus notable specimen of medievalist discourse in mid-Victorian England, the Idylls provides a text against which we can graph the ideological operations of other poetry that appropriates medieval settings, language, or literary forms over a period of a quarter-century. Tennyson’s work best illustrates what might be described as a traditionalist and conservative engagement with medievalist discourse in mid-Victorian England. Like so many poets who were his contemporaries, including Arnold, Browning, Swinburne, Morris, and the Rossettis, Tennyson discovered the usefulness of medievalist topoi early in his career, having written by  important poems like the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (published in ) and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (, revised ). (In this respect he resembles earlier prose writers as diverse as Sir Walter Scott, Richard Hurd, and Kenelm Digby.) For the next forty years Tennyson continued to deploy the discourse of medievalism. From  to  he wrote Arthurian poems, most of them finally assembled into Idylls of the King, which appeared in its ‘completed’ form in . But back in  Tennyson had dedicated the newest edition of his first four Idylls to the memory of Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert, setting up specific political and ideological contexts for the poem as a whole. In that edition, the laureate resurrects Albert as an incarnation of Arthurian perfection: ‘He seems to me / Scarce other than my [Arthur’s] ideal knight’: . . . modest, kindly, all-accomplish’d, wise, With what sublime repression of himself, And in what limits, and how tenderly; Not swaying to this faction or to that; Not making his high place the lawless perch Of wing’d ambitions, nor a vantage-ground For pleasure; but thro’ all this tract of years Wearing the white flower of a blameless life, Before a thousand peering littlenesses.

This description, with its emphasis on Albert’s selflessness, presents Victoria’s influential consort as a politically neutral ideality. ‘A lovelier life, more unstained than his’, the narrator claims, is unimaginable. Albert, father of England’s future kings, is harbinger of an ‘ampler day’ in Tennyson’s perfectibilist system of beliefs. ‘Laborious

⁸ June Steffensen Hagen, Tennyson and his Publishers (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), –.

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

 . 

for [the land’s] people and her poor’,’ he is seen as the ‘Far-sighted summoner of War and Waste / To fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace’, possessing a ‘Sweet nature gilded by the gracious gleam / Of letters.’ He is therefore ‘dear to Science, dear to Art, / Dear to thy land and ours, a Prince indeed, / Beyond all titles.’ In this dedication and throughout the Idylls Tennyson presents an array of positive values that he associates with Arthur’s Camelot as natural, inevitable, unquestionable and absolute—as non-ideological, in fact. Nonetheless, the sentimental and romantic image of Albert he foregrounds here and the idealizations of Arthur deployed throughout the body of his poem operate as ideology usually does: the systems of value and belief they support are assumed to be valid, generally accepted, and, in the case of this poem, divinely sanctioned. Tennyson could succeed with such an assumption because the ideological formulae that operated as subtexts for medievalist discourse in Victorian England were fundamental to the process of middle- and upper-class socialization. Tennyson directly articulates these formulae in ‘Guinevere’. In this stridently anti-feminist idyll Arthur comes to the nunnery at Glastonbury where Guinevere had retreated after her public exposure as an adulteress. War (between the king and Lancelot, as well as the king and Modred’s forces) is destroying Camelot. Arthur ostensibly makes this journey to affirm his love for Guinevere despite events, but he first upbraids her mercilessly, reminding her that she has ravaged ‘that fair Order of my Table Round, / A glorious company . . . To serve as model for the mighty world.’ Rehearsing the oaths his knights swore, Tennyson through Arthur ventriloquizes a system of values and a code of conduct so prevalent in Victorian England that varied forms of medievalist discourse automatically elicited them. These values and behaviours constituted an essential horizon of expectations for educated readers, and Arthur reinscribes them in a litany of infinitive constructions that point towards the ideal of a perfected (albeit amorphous) sociality. Arthur’s knights promised, as all true, strong, and good Englishmen presumably should: To reverence the King, as if he were Their conscience, and their conscience as their King, To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, To ride abroad redressing human wrongs. To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, To honour his own word as if his God’s, To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And worship her by years of noble deeds, Until they won her; for indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thought, and amiable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame, And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

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--   



This passage is worth quoting at length because it so visibly adapts the discourse of medievalism to advocate an historically particular, that is, mid to late Victorian, network of values widely accepted by the middle and upper classes. Quite obviously, it valorizes Christianity as, implicitly, the exclusive domain of truth and honour. In the political arena it promulgates an alliance between monarchy and religion (conscience) that sanctions imperialism (‘to break the heathen’). By association with Christianity and by means of authoritative testimonial (Arthur’s), it asserts the ultimate value of desexualized love in the service of self-reformation (keeping down ‘the base in man’) and summons a host of abstract, politically manipulable ideals: ‘high thought’, ‘amiable words’, ‘love of truth’, and, most strikingly, ‘all that makes a man’. Here women exist as chaste ciphers to serve the patriarchy in its pursuit of goals (‘courtliness’ and ‘the desire of fame’) that will sustain and reaffirm an elitist power structure in society. In this passage, but also throughout Idylls of the King, Tennyson thus adapts medievalist discourse in the service of what are clearly Tory social, political, and religious values. William Morris’s ‘The Defence of Guenevere’, from The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems published in , provides an apposite contrast to the laureate’s highly popular epic because it is fraught (in both senses of that word) with ideologically emergent elements. ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ manipulates the dramatic monologue form and plays upon typical Victorian expectations of medievalist discourse, including those Tennyson’s poem sanctions, in order to challenge them. The poem is both formally and—by the dominant mid-Victorian standards—morally ‘impure’. Its dramatic monologue form is diluted, as it were, by the insertion, at strategic moments during Guenevere’s speech, of a narrator who serves to clarify and enforce the explosive ideological effects of both her self-presentation and the poet’s presentation of her as a physically, emotionally, and intellectually seductive icon. The elements of Morris’s poem thus constitute a series of irruptions of the dominant values attached to medievalist discourse by mid-Victorian audiences, as these might be measured by the ideological effects of Tennyson’s first four Idylls of the King. ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ draws readers into it through the use of a culturally familiar discourse, only to awaken them to the illusory idealizations purveyed in that discourse. The poem counters Victorian ideals of manliness (derived from medieval codes of chivalry) by making Guenevere a genuine heroine. About to be burned at the stake, she delivers a monologue that sanctions sexual passion rather than chastity. She distracts her audience of knights with blatant sexual displays, denies the authority of kingship, interrogates divine justice, and exposes the self-interested hypocrisy of ‘chivalrous’ behaviour and ‘respectable’ public morality. Unlike Tennyson’s Arthur, Morris’s narrator sees Guenevere as both heroic and victimized. Her monologue displays her bravery, admired at every turn: ‘Though still she stood right up, and never shrunk, / But spoke on bravely, glorious lady fair!’ (ll. –). Guenevere perceives her own performance in chivalric terms, as well: ‘“So, ever must I dress me to the fight,”’ (l. ) she murmurs at one turning point in the poem. As a uniquely female combatant, however, her best weapon is her beauty, which she flaunts, playing upon the traditional medievalist equation of beauty with virtue.

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

 . 

Standing at the stake, wet and apparently naked, she repeatedly taunts her audience (both the knights and Victorian male readers) with the irony of that equation, ‘passionately twisting . . . her body there’ (l. ). Recalling the day of her first meeting with Lancelot, she confides seductively, ‘“I dared not think, as I was wont to do, / Sometimes, upon my beauty”’, which she invites her audience to enjoy. ‘“[I]f I had / Held out my long hand up against the blue”’, she gestures: ‘And, looking on the tenderly darken’d fingers, Thought that by rights one ought to see quite through, There, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers, Round the edges; what should I have done, If this had joined with yellow spotted singers, And startling green drawn upward by the sun? But shouting, loosed out, see now! all my hair.’ (ll. –)

She continues the seduction relentlessly, often interrupting her own argument that she is ‘better than innocent’. Near the conclusion of the poem, she performs onanistically: ‘See my breast rise, Like waves of purple sea, as here I stand; And how my arms are moved in wonderful wise . . . See through my long throat how the words go up In ripples to my mouth.’ (ll. –)

The poem’s explicit challenge to the Victorian equation between virtue and medievalist discourse appears at this crux in her monologue: ‘“will you dare . . . / To say this thing [her body] is vile?”’ (ll. –), she rhetorically asks the mesmerized knights. Not once does Morris’s Guenevere deny her infidelity. Rather she portrays all sexual passion as natural and irresistible, comparing its effect to slipping “‘slowly down some path worn smooth and even, / Down to a cool sea on a summer day’” (ll. –). Reaching that haven, one feels ‘“strange new joy”’ and a sense of purgation. The ‘“worn head lay / Back, with the hair like sea-weed; yea all past / Sweat of the forehead, dryness of the lips, / Washed utterly out by the dear waves o’ercast”’ (ll. –). Through her seductive performance, Guenevere compels her auditors’ awareness of their own irrepressible sexual energies. She makes a special example of her accuser, Gauwaine, whose ‘dear pity’ for her, she observes, ‘“creeps/All through [his] frame, and trembles in [his] mouth”’ (ll. –). Moreover, he is guilty, too, of moral and sexual hypocrisy, she insists, through association with his mother, whose infidelity elicited ‘Agravaine’s fell blow’—‘“her head sever’d in that awful drouth / of pity”’ called revenge (ll. –). Guenevere further deflates the self-righteous behaviour of her accusers and the chivalric code they follow with the example of Mellyagraunce, the ‘”stripper of ladies’” who discovered blood from Lancelot’s tourney wounds on Guenevere’s sheets and publicly denounced the adultery. This timid knight, however, would accept Lancelot’s

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--   



challenge of a trial by arms only when Lancelot agreed to fight “‘half-arm’d’” and with his “‘left side all uncovered’”. But divine justice reduced Mellyagraunce to “‘a spout of blood on the hot sand’”. Guenevere has, nonetheless, already challenged and perplexed accepted notions of such justice. At the beginning of her monologue she compares her choice between Arthur and Lancelot to an arbitrary but forced decision between two deceptively symbolic cloths: trying to be dutiful—choosing the blue cloth of ‘heaven’s colour’, rather than the red one—leads to her damnation. This is in part because of Arthur’s inadequacy as a husband. Unlike Tennyson’s would-be saviour of the world, Morris’s Arthur is a philistine, out of touch with animating and salving natural passions, who ‘bought’ Guenevere with “‘his great name and his little love’”. ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ thus appropriates the dramatic monologue form and transposes the standard materials of medievalist discourse to undercut the conservative, patriarchal ideology typically identified with it. Here Christian values are supplanted by erotic ones, chivalry is a fraud, and Christian ideals of virtue are displaced by ideals of amoral beauty, by sexual indulgence and political subversiveness as these are displayed in the heroic person of Guenevere and in her adulterous relationship with Lancelot, who predictably comes to the rescue in the poem’s final lines. ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ failed as cultural intervention at the time of its publication. Most of those who read the poem and the volume in which it appeared in  found it so radical, both ideologically and formally, that they simply did not know what to make of it. The Saturday Review spoke for such readers in describing Morris’s work as ‘not like anything we ever saw’. Only the reviewer for the Tablet found in it what later readers did: ‘power everywhere’.⁹ As for this reviewer, for subsequent generations in the twentieth century this first poem of Morris’s first volume became his best-known and most influential work. Like Arnold, Dante Rossetti in his most famous medievalist poem, ‘The Blessed Damozel’,¹⁰ is concerned with the relations between love and faith, but he employs his depiction of those relations not to privilege the transcendent value of love but rather to demonstrate the ultimate value of art itself. But unlike Arnold’s work of the late s and early s, ‘The Blessed Damozel’ entirely elides the historical contexts of its composition, focusing its action, image patterns, and emotional field in the discourses of medievalism and romantic love. These interdependent discourses in the poem engage, subsume, and usurp Christianity—implicit in the poem as an alternate discursive formation—and they generate Rossetti’s well-known, literal conceptualization of a Heaven of Love. The poem thus creates an imaginative space that challenges the sociopolitical space in which he (and Arnold and every European of the era) actually lived. During the course of Rossetti’s early career, his fervent interest in international politics gave way to an obsession with art in which struggles for power are nonetheless implicated. The formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its own aesthetic ⁹ Jack Lindsay, William Morris: His Life and Work (London: Constable, ), . ¹⁰ Originally drafted in , when Rossetti was , the poem was not widely read until its publication in his Poems ().

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

 . 

manifesto (espoused in the poems and prose of The Germ, in which Rossetti first published ‘The Blessed Damozel’) for instance, self-consciously challenged the dominant, official schools of art in England, especially the Royal Academy. But increasingly for Rossetti, art became the site of the only variety of power worth having in the world, because it allowed access to and provided mirrors of human psychological and emotional realities that he believed were of ultimate interest to all people, fully engaged in the socio-political world or not. That is, Rossetti as an eminently modern artist appears to have understood the necessity of estrangement from industrial society to survive life in it meaningfully. The ideological effects of his work demonstrate that a kind of social power can be accrued through an art of defamiliarization, and he was able to produce such art by developing highly complex strategies of parody. In ‘The Blessed Damozel’ of  Rossetti appropriates medievalizing language and iconography parodically. The poem interrogates the relations between erotic and religious impulses, using a tone that fluctuates between the serious and the ludicrous. In appropriating specific semiotic features of medievalist discourse the poem destabilizes the language, image patterns, and conceptual frameworks of both conventional courtly love literature and traditional Christianity, especially orthodox concepts of the afterlife, as the half-naked damozel peers down from the gold bar of heaven anxiously awaiting the death of her beloved which will allow their reunion. Medievalist features of the poem include numerological symbolism (the ‘three lilies’ described in the Damozel’s hand as the poem opens, the ‘seven stars’ in her hair, the ‘lady’ Mary’s ‘five handmaidens’); linguistic archaisms (like ‘damozel’ and ‘aureole’); emblematic image patterns (the ‘white rose of Mary’s gift’; the ‘Dove’ whose ‘plumes’ touch ‘every leaf ’ of ‘That living mystic tree’); direct references to medieval musical instruments (citherns and citholes); and mention of ‘God’s choristers’ that recalls medieval concepts of the music of the spheres. But as these elements of the poem become focused exclusively on its erotic drama, rather than on the spiritual values implicit in the language employed to ‘decorate’ that drama, they are drained of traditional Christian meaning. In effect the poem presents a heaven that exists only in the language of physical desire. But even the credibility of amatory impulses that dominate the poem is finally undercut, because their value is so exaggerated that they overtake the religious system of beliefs they normally serve in familiar medieval literature, from the Romance of the Rose to Dante’s Vita Nuova. Rossetti’s parodic procedures in this poem are not primarily iconoclastic, however; they do not serve primarily to subvert serious Christian and Petrarchan values that might be held by his audience. Rather, they draw attention to the conceptual silliness of the poem itself, which must be viewed, ultimately, as a hyper-artificial construct, a seductive and ornate bricolage and conflation of pre-existing ideologies, especially religious, social, and amatory ideologies. In the final analysis, ‘The Blessed Damozel’, like Rossetti’s painting on the subject, presents itself as an aesthetic object that refuses any expected ideological commitment, whether to courtly love values or to medievalizing religious belief. Appropriation of these traditions in the poem instead projects an ideal of artistic activity, in whose

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--   



service other value systems and varied modes of discourse are exploited. I have undertaken lengthier analysis of this important Pre-Raphaelite poem elsewhere,¹¹ but what such analysis reveals is the extent to which Rossetti’s poetry wholly aestheticizes medievalist cultural materials—from medieval Catholicism to archaic linguistic constructions to medieval costumes and musical instruments—in order to present art itself as the site of ultimate and transcendent values. Religious belief, traditional morality, history, even love are marshalled in the service of—or subsumed under the aegis of— this alternate, superior, and supreme value. A sometime disciple of Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne wrote numerous major works, both prose and poetry, which embody a notably different treatment of his medieval subjects than is found in the works of his contemporaries. If Swinburne ‘idealizes’ the period in any way, he does so by consistently depicting it as a golden age—like the Hellenic age— of tragic heroism and tragic love; these appear in a society realistically characterized as disharmonious and corrupt, populated with men and women who are fickle in their emotional attachments, capricious in their loyalties, and misguided in their adherence to Christianity. All such characters are victims of an ostensibly malevolent fate, including even Swinburne’s stoical pantheistic heroes, who are often transiently aware of a sublime and transcendent spiritual world that generates and infuses the material world in which they live. Their lives are dominated by frustrated love and inexorable strife which result usually in suffering rather than fulfilment or harmony. Swinburne produced a considerable body of medievalist works, including his ‘Chronicle of Queen Fredegond’, Rosamond (set during the reign of Henry II), ‘Laus Veneris’, numerous border ballads and translations of Villon, Tristram of Lyonesse, Marino Faliero, and The Tale of Balen, as well as many more minor poems, essays, and prose pieces on medieval subjects. Throughout his career Swinburne conscientiously studied medieval texts, pursuing fidelity to original sources in his own creative efforts and reviving medieval literary forms such as the aubade or alba, the ballad, and the rondel. He thus holds a significant place among Victorian medievalists who extended the ‘discoveries’ begun in the eighteenth century that much of the greatest English literature has its roots in the medieval period. The impact of medieval literature and values upon the poet was enormous. But Swinburne radically diverged from Tennyson, Arnold, and even Morris in his fidelity to Arthurian sources and in the scope of his tragic sensibility when writing on Arthurian themes. Moreover, he went well beyond any of his contemporaries in the breadth and diversity of medieval materials he treated and assimilated. Although Swinburne’s medievalist poems of epic scope did not appear till the second half of his career, it is clear from the evidence of letters, unpublished manuscripts, and his best biographers that Swinburne read most widely and enthusiastically in medieval authors from  to , as an undergraduate at Oxford, and during his first years in London (–). In this period of apprenticeship, he considered himself to be under ¹¹ Antony Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ), –.

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

 . 

the tutelage of Morris and Rossetti, whom he always regarded as expert medievalists. Yet Swinburne appears to have read more extensively in medieval literature, to have studied it more thoughtfully, and to have retained more of what he read than did either Morris or Rossetti. Swinburne’s philosophical and ideological stances also drew him to medieval subjects. Setting his work in the age of faith allowed Swinburne to continue his attacks on the misguided values of Christianity, but in a manner less iconoclastic and in a context more palatable to his Victorian readers than he managed, for example, in the lyrics of Songs before Sunrise. His medieval subjects further enabled him to correct his own era’s unwarranted and contagious idealization of an age that was more socially chaotic than harmonious and that remained more primitive but therefore closer to nature than was the industrial age. Swinburne could thus exploit the greater dangers and brutality of daily life in the Middle Ages to express his relentlessly fatalistic worldview. Finally and most important, for Swinburne, as for his contemporaries, the age of faith was also the age of love literature, and so the poet in his medievalist works could fill out his philosophical vision that held Love—whether erotic, fraternal, or spiritual—to be the presiding albeit fatal impulse in all human lives and the power ultimately governing all activity in the world. ‘Laus Veneris’, first published in , typifies Swinburne’s various appropriations of the medieval literature and culture. Like Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the poem undertakes to present for Swinburne’s historical era the ‘Satanic’ perspective on the Tannhäuser myth and on the historical conflict between pagan erotic values and Christian notions of sin and renunciation. ‘Laus Veneris’ therefore becomes a psychodrama emblematic for Swinburne of the permanent historical conflict between contrary systems of cultural values that—as in Blake’s ‘Argument’ to the Marriage— alternately dominate the world. In Tannhäuser’s meandering monologue the reader can view Swinburne’s medieval poet-lover and knight on a number of different levels simultaneously. A tension between opposed forces in his life, between opposed loyalties, for instance, or contradictory psychological impulses, informs each level of perception. The poem may thus be seen as a dramatization of the battle between contraries within the wracked mind of Tannhäuser. In the course of the poem Swinburne fully exposes the conflicts not only between Tannhäuser’s passion and religion but also between his vocation as poet and his career as a knight: the one depends upon service and devotion to an ideal of love, the other upon service and devotion to Christ. Also at odds yet inextricably entangled in Tannhäuser’s mind, are body and soul, concepts of life and death, virtue and sin (as well as the reward of each), fruitfulness and barrenness, love and happiness, beauty and goodness. In the poem’s concluding stanzas, however, out of Tannhäuser’s convoluted self-analysis, his analysis of love, his retrospection, and his resignation to the eventual torments of hell he is bound to suffer, evolves Blakean ‘progress’: a powerful affirmation of eros that for Tannhäuser constitutes a psychological apocalypse. Addressing the slumbering Venus, who is at once, in the poem, a real woman, an ideal, and a myth, he asserts that there is, ultimately, ‘no better life than . . . / To have known love’.

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--   



How, he asks, shall those ‘that know not . . . have such bliss / High up in barren heaven?’ (Poems, I, ). He determines to cling passionately to Venus, his ideal of erotic love, to ‘seal upon [her] with my might’ until the Last Judgment, ‘until God loosen over sea and land / The thunder of the trumpets of the night.’ On its most fundamental level, ‘Laus Veneris’ is psychogenetic, an exercise in ideological epistemology depicting for Tannhäuser the evolution of true selfknowledge. At the same time, on other overlapping levels of interpretation, it is an affirmation of historical dialectics and of the inevitably aestheticist doctrines of ‘the poet’ generically defined by Swinburne: in the case of this poem including both Tannhäuser and the kindred poet who chooses to ‘record’—that is, project—his monologue. The poem insists in a number of clear ways upon its own literary-historical dimensions. Even at the very beginning of the poem, as a preface to his own fictitious nineteenth-century work, Swinburne creates an illusion he maintains throughout the poem, of three historical stages in the literary development of the Tannhäuser legend: that of Tannhäuser himself, spoken in his monologue; of ‘Maistre Antoine Gaget’, who is quoted in the epigraph; and of the present poet. These are, of course, only three among dozens of well-known and complementary versions of or stages in the myth’s ‘historicization’: innumerable writers have appropriated the Tannhäuser legend. Tannhäuser is for Swinburne a type of all those who are true poets by nature and thus lovers of beauty. As a memorializing poet, he alludes in his monologue to his predecessors’ now mythicized fates, revealing that his value system is ultimately and paradigmatically aestheticist in its preoccupation with the inescapable effects of beauty and sensation upon mankind. Of course, the shaping historical consciousness of the poet ‘external’ to the monologue is aestheticist in complementary ways. By means of this modern poet’s evident concern with the genealogy of literature about Venus and Tannhäuser, but also by means of literary allusions sometimes outside Tannhäuser’s possible frames of reference, Swinburne extends the aestheticist implications of the poem, which are founded upon Tannhäuser’s experiences with love and beauty. The influence of Morris’s Arthurian and Froissartian poems, along with a number of Rossetti’s works with medieval settings, is also visible in superficial ways, though ‘Laus Veneris’ is more overtly erotic, iconoclastic, and ideological than is any medievalist poem by Morris or Rossetti. Like so many of Swinburne’s early poems, this poem is to an extent imitative of their work in its atmosphere, while its form parodies the medieval original. The major medieval elements of ‘Laus Veneris’ are obvious. They include Tannhäuser’s careers as knight and minnesänger, his apparent participation in the Crusades, his unpropitious pilgrimage to the Pope, his Catholic view of sexual morality, and his frequently chivalric language. Still, Swinburne enhances these elements in subtle ways, both formal and substantive, that make the poem organically medievalist. The poem’s form as an inverted and extended alba requires a lyric lament over the imminent parting of lovers at dawn. Yet, just as Tannhauser eventually turns against orthodox Christianity and just as the poem becomes thematically an attack upon the religious tyrannies that victimize Tannhäuser, so Swinburne extends the

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

 . 

contrariousness of his general procedures and turns the form of the poem against its originary conventions. This poem is, until the last four stanzas, a lament that Tannhäuser is unable, finally to abandon his beloved, as he knows he should; and in its concluding lines it becomes a complexly tragic affirmation of his compulsive, eternal, and ‘satanic’ union with Venus. Further, with the lovers underground throughout the poem, cycles of night and day here are parodically replaced by Tannhäuser’s references to the linear progress of mankind’s history that culminates in the apocalypse, the ultimate dawn. But in that ‘dawn’ as envisaged by Tannhäuser, the light of the sun, usually dreaded by the alba’s speaker, is replaced by the more dreadful glow of hell’s flames. Such variations on the alba form draw the reader’s attention to matters of aesthetics that are corollary to Tannhäuser’s personal obsession with beauty and to his artistic vocation. Like the poem’s form, the psychology of its central character appears to be deeply medieval, especially in the conflict between Tannhäuser’s professed orthodox values and his subversive, anti-orthodox affinities. Tannhäuser, in fact, represents microcosmically the opposition between Gnostic Albigensian and orthodox faiths in the thirteenth century, when the historical Tannhäuser lived. Swinburne’s clear perception of this conflict is, of course, skewed in the same directions that are apparent in Denis de Rougement’s reconstruction of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Catharist history.¹² Both writers associate the heretics with the religion of love that dominates troubadour and related strains of European poetry. Thus, Tannhäuser’s psychological bifurcation appears as a mirror of the opposition between poet-lovers and priests, which Swinburne believed prevailed during Tannhäuser’s age. Such a reinterpretation of medieval history is precisely parallel, as a matter of the poem’s thematic substance, to Swinburne’s revisionist use of the alba form. Again, the effect is to draw attention, as Rossetti does ultimately in ‘The Blessed Damozel’, to matters of artistry and artistic license in the present poet’s attempt to reshape historical materials in order to produce a fully integrated poem, one concerned not only with psychology and ideology but, more fundamentally, with the creation of beauty at all levels of representation. As we may see from these brief discussions of representative medievalist poems by Arnold, Tennyson, Morris, Rossetti, and Swinburne, one striking feature of such Victorian poems is the process whereby they appropriate for ideological purposes varied and prominent medievalizing elements of Victorian culture. I have argued that they do so in order to gain power over readers’ values or beliefs, or at the very least to compel a reconsideration of those values or beliefs, whether they have to do with religion, morality, love, with history or mythology construed as history, with politics, or with concepts of the beautiful. Thus, it must be understood that Victorian medievalism was not a decorative veneer atop bedrock Victorian culture but rather a dynamic ‘system’ of interrelated components—linguistic, visual, conceptual, material—deployed by

¹² Denis De Rougement, Love in the Western World, tr. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Panthon, ).

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--   



various thinkers, writers, artists, and artisans to transform that culture in potentially profound ways.

S  Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Frantzen, Alan, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Hagen, June Steffensen, Tennyson and his Publishers (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ). Harrison, Antony, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ). Holloway, Lorretta M., and Jennifer Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ).

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                   

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 ’

T nineteenth century—the era of the great European novel—was at the same time, and perhaps not coincidentally, the period during which, at last, the great naturalistic prose literature of medieval Iceland—the saga—was beginning to appear in English translations.¹ The subject of this chapter will be the interaction between some writers in English and these translations of saga literature. I will not be considering translations themselves, nor another highly popular response to Old Norse literature: ‘Viking tales’, exciting adventure stories in a Viking age setting.² I will focus on the representation or recycling of actual saga material in a new fiction which may or may not attempt some imitation of the style and narrative structures of the original. I will explore Longfellow’s adaptation of Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar as part of ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae as an experiment in saga narrative method, and his representation of part of Eyrbyggja saga as a short ghost story, ‘The Waif Woman’; H. Rider Haggard’s bravura imitation of a saga, Eric Brighteyes; and W. G. Collingwood’s three ‘Lakeland sagas’: Thorstein of the Mere, The Bondwoman, and the short piece The Story of Thurstan of the Thwaite. ¹ See Phelpstead in Chapter  of this volume. The term ‘Old Norse’ generally refers to the language and literature of medieval Iceland and Norway. ‘Old Norse-Icelandic’ is a clumsier term, but gives due prominence to the fact that most of this literature was composed by Icelanders, and the overwhelming majority of it was written down in Iceland. Family sagas are recognized as a distinctively Icelandic development, hence the use of ‘Icelandic saga’. I will use the term ‘English’ almost invariably to designate language rather than nationality or provenance. ² See Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), ch. .

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   



In Old Norse, the term ‘saga’ denotes nothing more specific than a prose narrative; it may be applied to saints’ lives, for example, or fantastic adventure stories most like medieval romance. But the two genres of saga writing I will be concerned with here are nowadays the best known kind of sagas: so-called ‘family sagas’ (Íslendingasögur, or sagas of Icelanders), and ‘kings’ sagas’ (konungasögur), in particular, Snorri Sturluson’s compendium of biographies of Norwegian rulers, Heimskringla. They were mostly written in the thirteenth century, though their oral history (if any) is far from clear. What all these sagas have in common is that they depict an actual historical past, though to an uncertainly fictional degree. Family sagas are set in Iceland, in the period known as the söguöld (saga-age) which stretched from the settlement of Iceland in   to the period just after its conversion to Christianity in . Snorri’s Heimskringla begins with an account of the mythic prehistory of Norway but focuses on its rulers from Haraldr inn hárfagri (Harold Finehair) whose accession to the throne was held by many saga authors to have precipitated the settlement of Iceland, and stretches down to the reign of Magnús Erlingsson at the end of the twelfth century. Within these two similar and actual chronotopes, there is much that we might term fictional, though without corroborating or contradictory evidence for the period it is hard to tell just how much. Both kinds of saga include a great deal of dialogue, which may be assumed to be fictional, but both stick largely to the plausible (and naturalistic) recreation of a possible actuality. The broad outlines of the narrative—the events and the characters— may well be based on historical reality. The characteristic style of the saga author bolsters this ostensible historicity. Family sagas most often begin with a good deal of apparently factual exposition, setting out the various families and individuals in a district of Iceland, locating their farms, and detailing their lineage. The events of the narrative—essentially, the social and domestic lives of these first settlers—proceed in chronological order; there are no flashbacks and very few parallel series of events. There is very little of the narrative manipulation a modern reader might recognize as plot—not least because if we define plot as a literary device for delivering praise or blame, this seems not to be part of the saga author’s selfimposed task. He may report a community’s judgement, good or bad, on a figure or a family, but his narrative will more dispassionately record their deeds and standing without explicit personal intervention. And finally, and least like conventional novels, with which they might otherwise be compared, family sagas are narrated by a voice which very rarely indeed assumes omniscience: saga authors write of their characters with none of the appearance of privileged epistemic access so characteristic of Victorian prose fiction. The focalization is determinedly external. Snorri evidently intended Heimskingla to be valued as a work of history, as his prologues make clear, as does his quotation of skaldic verses—composed to honour or commemorate his biographical subjects—to corroborate his prose. However, like the authors of family sagas, Snorri carefully arranges his events in chronological order, and refrains from passing explicit judgement, or drawing moralizing conclusions. This is especially notable in his biography of King Óláfr Tryggvason, as we shall see. And in spite of the large amount of presumably unhistorical dialogue, events are by and large

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within the bounds of historical plausibility. Like family sagas, Snorri’s narratives are heavy on action, ‘factual’ detail, and dialogue, and very light on description, digression, or comment. Both kinds of saga are strikingly naturalistic. In , Samuel Laing published a translation of Snorri’s Heimskringla; George Webbe Dasent translated Njáls saga in ; and the celebrated series of saga translations by William Morris and his Icelandic collaborator Eiríkr Magnússon began shortly after their first meeting in . These translations offered apparently solid evidence, and appealingly real-seeming human drama, from a thrilling period in northern European history: the Viking age, with its heroes, battles, and pagan gods. These sagas also treated themes perhaps especially congenial to Victorian authors, for example, the conflict and continuity between Old Norse paganism and Christianity.³ And like the poetry and mythology which had been so very popular in the previous century, they were examples of a literature which had been produced by a people regarded as ‘the forefathers of . . . the present English nation’, responsible for its very ‘institutions and character’.⁴ The substance and by extension ethos, then, of family sagas and of Snorri’s Heimskringla, were attractive to Victorian authors for many reasons. Saga style, however, was a different matter, as we shall see. I want to begin with a work which is both the earliest of my selection and the least like an original saga in style: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘The Saga of King Olaf ’ from his Chaucerian assembly, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Erik Ingvar Thurin charts the brief history of how a small group of nineteenthcentury American writers—the majority of them not novelists, in fact—were inspired by Norse literature in the relatively brief time-span of the s, s, and s.⁵ Many Americans felt a special affinity for Old Norse literature because of the Norse voyages of discovery in the North Atlantic. However, Longfellow also came to Old Norse by another route: he had visited Sweden in , and had become passionately interested in Bishop Elias Tegnér’s Frithiof, a verse translation of the Old Icelandic Friðþjófs saga—the first complete saga to have been translated into English, and immensely popular in Victorian England.⁶ Longfellow intended but never finished a complete translation of Tegnér’s poem.⁷ But in , ‘he was struck by the thought that a very good poem might be made out of the life of King Olaf ’; and hence, ‘[d]uring the ³ See Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ch. . ⁴ Samuel Laing( tr.), The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, ), iii. ⁵ Erik Yngvar Thurin, The American Discovery of the Norse (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ). ⁶ See Andrew Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, ),  ff., and Wawn, Vikings, ch. , for an account of the reception of Friðþjófs saga. ⁷ See H. W. Longfellow, Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, for two short passages translated from the poem. All further citations of Longfellow’s poetry will be from this edition. See Erik Kielland-Lund, ‘ “Twilight of the Heroes”: Old Norse Influence in Longfellow’s Poetry’, in IngaStina Ewbank et al., (eds), Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents (Norwich: Norvik, ), –, and O’Donoghue, English Poetry, –, for more on Longfellow’s unfinished Old Norse projects.

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   



month of Lincoln’s election—when his mood was one of almost bellicose elation—he composed a series of ballad-like cantos about the contentious Olaf, one each day, that, with a few later additions, were to make up his own “Saga of King Olaf”’.⁸ Longfellow’s immediate source was Laing’s translation of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar from Heimskringla, but parallels with Tegnér’s romantic poem are very striking. Tegnér too transformed a prose narrative into a long narrative poem, in cantos. Newton Arvin suggests that Longfellow might have felt himself in competition in metrical virtuosity with Tegnér, since both poets used different metres in each canto—and significantly, none of them resembling any original Old Norse metre, neither the loose unrhymed alliteration of eddic verse, nor the highly elaborate syllable-counting alliteration and consonance of skaldic poetry.⁹ But Tegnér also transformed the spirit of Friðþjófs saga. Working not with a family saga, but with an exciting and romantic Viking adventure story, without, as William Craigie tersely put it, ‘the slightest historical value’,¹⁰ Tegnér produced a work particularly attractive to Victorian readers: a lyrical poem with ‘a chivalrous hero and a demure heroine’,¹¹ whose piety towards the god Baldr—presented as a precursor of Christ—provides a wholly new and stirring ending to the original saga. Thurin notes the unexpectedly pacifist agenda in the North American response to Old Norse literature and culture,¹² and this is also lyrically expressed in Longfellow’s extraordinary elegy for Tegnér, ‘Tegnér’s Drapa’, written in , in which Longfellow laments more generally the passing of the old gods, and hails the temper of a new and perhaps surprising kind of Viking poetry, informed not by violence and vengefulness, but exhibiting Tegnér’s characteristic sweetness and piety. What will prevail, concluded Longfellow, is ‘the law of love!’¹³ However, Longfellow made no such transformation of ethos in his ‘Saga of King Olaf ’; instead, ‘violent emotions and violent deeds are the rule in the poem’, and the king himself ‘strides through the poem with . . . fine arrogance and . . . barbaric heroism’. Moreover, the other characters—like many of the figures in family sagas—are ‘proud, quick-tempered, wrangling, vengeful and unforgiving’.¹⁴ Óláfr’s Christianization project was notably brutal, involving violence, trickery, bullying, and inventively unpleasant executions for his opponents. Óláfr’s relations with women were also unattractively confrontational, and this is reflected in Longfellow’s work. For example, wooing ‘Queen Sigrid the Haughty’ (Canto IV), ‘[he] kissed the Queen’s hand, and he whispered of love’ but when he demands that she convert to Christianity, her rather impressive demurral—‘Looking straight at the King with her level brows / She said, “I keep true to my faith and my vows”’—angers him, and he strikes her across the face with his glove, calling her a ‘faded old woman, a heathenish

⁸ Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown, ), . ⁹ Arvin, Longfellow, –. ¹⁰ W. A. Craigie, The Icelandic Sagas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  (quoted in Wawn, Vikings, ). ¹¹ Wawn, Vikings, . ¹² Thurin, Discovery, p.. ¹³ Longfellow, Poetical Works, –. ¹⁴ Arvin, Longfellow, –.

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jade’—closely following Laing (‘an old faded woman, and a heathen jade’).¹⁵ In Canto VII, Olaf forcibly weds Gudrun as a ‘blood atonement’ for the brutal murder, by his own men, of her father ‘Old Iron-Beard’. But on their wedding night, though the moon ‘shines . . . with tender light’, once Olaf falls asleep she tries to kill him with a dagger. Olaf was also a fierce fighter. The battle of Svölðr, at which Óláfr is killed, is related ‘with an energy . . . that has few parallels in modern English verse’.¹⁶ Longfellow’s attachment to the New England sea coast perhaps accounts for the intensity and relish of his depictions of Viking ships and sea battles. But he does not in the least shy away from the violence of his source; indeed, as Kielland-Lund concludes, he is ‘surprisingly true’ to it.¹⁷ Snorri—and hence his translator Laing—remains true to saga convention in not passing judgement on Óláfr’s un-Christian behaviour. And so does Longfellow. Kielland–Lund goes on to speculate that ‘the rough and masculine world of the Viking warriors liberated [Longfellow] from some of his habitual inhibitions’,¹⁸ and Arvin suggests that ‘the austere, sombre and violent world of the Old Norse sagas’ held for him ‘a powerful emotional and imaginative appeal’.¹⁹ Thurin points out that while Longfellow was writing, ‘the family sagas . . . were . . . pretty much unknown’ to English-speaking readers.²⁰ But in the decades following the end of the American Norse renaissance, translations into English of those sagas recognized ever since as amongst the greatest began to appear, so that when Robert Louis Stevenson began work on The Master of Ballantrae in , family sagas in English were both more available and better known. Stevenson gives his readers no clue whatever that The Master of Ballantrae might have been influenced by saga literature. Its subtitle—A Winter’s Tale—gestures rather towards Shakespearean influence, and the novel does not have a Viking age Scandinavian setting, but opens in Scotland, during the time of the Jacobite rebellion, although as Stevenson himself says, it ‘extends over many years and travels into many countries’²¹—including India and America. A strange preface, not always printed along with the novel itself, establishes a traditional frame narrative. Its speaker presents a friend with an old document: ‘all the papers of the Durrisdeers’, the family at the heart of the novel, compiled and written by Ephraim Mackellar, Land Steward and trusted manservant to the family.²² The friend recognizes the documents as the raw material of a novel, responding ‘all you have to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and improve the style’. But the speaker finds ‘nothing so noble’ as the ‘baldness’ of the narrative, concluding ‘I would have all literature bald, and all authors ¹⁵ Longfellow, Poetical Works, , and Laing, Heimskringla, . ¹⁶ Arvin, Longfellow, . ¹⁷ Kielland-Lund, ‘Twilight of the Heroes’, . ¹⁸ Kielland-Lund, ‘Twilight of the Heroes’, . ¹⁹ Arvin, Longfellow, ; also quoted in Kielland-Lund, ‘Twilight of the Heroes’, . ²⁰ Thurin, Discovery, . ²¹ Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae (London: Heinemann, ), Tusitala edn,  vols, vol. x. This edition contains useful extra material of Stevenson’s, including Stevenson’s ‘Preface’ (‘Dedication’, p. xxvii). ²² Stevenson, Master, ‘Preface’, p. xx.

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   

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(if you like) but one’.²³ The fictional text on which The Master purports to be based sounds startlingly like a saga narrative, not least in its status as a pre-existing story not invented, but related. Establishing Mackellar as the ‘one author (if you like)’ of the narrative—that is, focalizing the novel’s narrative wholly through this single character—caused Stevenson considerable technical difficulties: ‘I came near to defeat. Months passed before I could see how to attack the problem’.²⁴ The unsatisfactory sensationalism of the novel’s ending owes a great deal to the textual manoeuvres Stevenson had to resort to in order to maintain his ‘one author’ narrative. To be sure, family saga authors do not focalize the narrative through a character in the story, but maintain external, or zero, focalization and thus the appearance of impartiality (and moreover Mackellar is a very partial narrator!). However, the action described is very often limited to what might have been recorded by an observer, or eye-witness. And Stevenson’s musings on narrative method begin to sound very like saga narratology. He describes his new-found ‘love of the documentary method in narrative’, that is, a kind of ‘realism . . . of method . . . not only that all in a story may have come to pass, but that all might naturally be recorded’.²⁵ In ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’, Stevenson writes that he has been inspired by a book characterized by a ‘summary, elliptic method’ of narration, but bizarrely identifies the book as The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marryat—such a very unlikely model for The Master of Ballantrae that John Sutherland has suggested that Stevenson was deliberately offering up Marryat as ‘a cunning distraction’ from his actual model.²⁶ Could this have been saga narrative? Stevenson’s letter to E. L. Burlinghame of Scribner’s Magazine in the summer of  is revealing: ‘I cannot get enough of Sagas; I wish there were nine thousand; talk about realism!’²⁷ Though this access of enthusiasm is evidently in immediate response to his receipt, from Burlinghame, of the latest volumes of the Saga Library, William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon’s celebrated translations of Old Icelandic sagas, I would argue that these volumes reignited an enthusiasm for a literature which Stevenson already knew. In an unsent letter to William Morris (dated February ) Stevenson takes jocular exception to Morris’s use of the word ‘whereas’ in his translations: this is not the response of a reader to whom the sagas are a completely new form.²⁸ It is not clear why Stevenson might not acknowledge such a debt. But there is a clear acknowledgement of debt in Stevenson’s short story ‘The Waif Woman’, with its

²³ Stevenson, Master, ‘Preface’, p. xxii. ²⁴ Stevenson, Master, ‘Note to The Master of Ballantrae’, . See also E. N. Caldwell, Last Witness for Robert Louis Stevenson (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . ²⁵ Stevenson, Master, ‘Note to The Master of Ballantrae’, . ²⁶ Stevenson, Master, ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’, xxiii. See Sutherland’s introduction to Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae; Weir of Hermiston, (London: David Campbell, ), xii. ²⁷ Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, ed. Sidney Colvin, Tusitala edn (London: Heinemann, ), iv. . ²⁸ Stevenson, Letters, ed. Colvin, –.

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explicit subtitle, ‘A Cue—from a Saga’.²⁹ The title itself is plain enough about Stevenson’s debt to saga literature, even if the word ‘cue’ suggests more a stepping off point than the close rewriting of an episode from a family saga—Eyrbyggja saga— which ‘The Waif Woman’ represents. Eyrbyggja saga—translated by Morris and Magnússon as The Story of the Ere-Dwellers—was one of the two volumes Stevenson had read by the beginning of .³⁰ But as early as , Sir Walter Scott had produced a long ‘Abstract’ of the saga, including a translation of the relevant episode; this piece was included in the several Victorian reissues of Thomas Percy’s translation of Mallet’s hugely influential treatise, Northern Antiquities, and stands out in the abstract because of Scott’s introduction to it: ‘The same year [as that of the conversion of Iceland] is assigned as the date of a very curious legend . . . ’³¹ It is indeed a curious story, and Stevenson might have been attracted to it not only because of Scott’s implicit recommendation, but also because of its Scottish connections. A mysterious Hebridean woman, Thorgunna, sails to Iceland with a cargo of rare and valuable goods. She takes up residence—as a farm-labourer—with a farmer called Thorod, and his wife, Thurid, who ‘was very fain of glitter and show’ ().³² When Thorgunna senses that her death is approaching (a death heralded by a shower of blood over the farm) she tells Thorod that her precious goods, including rich bed linens, must be burnt when she is gone. Thurid refuses to let her husband carry out Thorgunna’s wishes, and all manner of extraordinary hauntings beset the farm, culminating in the death by drowning, and ghostly return, of Thorod himself. Stevenson’s reworking of the material is masterly, and shows off not only his characteristic strengths as a storyteller, but also an exceptionally close and sympathetic engagement with saga narrative. Stevenson changes the name of his characters: Thorod becomes Finnward Keelfarer, a totally inauthentic Icelandic name, but perhaps picking up the ‘keel’ in which Thorgunna and her ‘faring-goods’ arrive (), and his wife is named Aud the LightMinded—a clever twist on the great matriarch mentioned at the beginning of the saga, Auth the Deep-Minded. Stevenson’s Aud is especially dazzled by Thorgunna’s magnificent silver brooch, and in a very Stevensonian moment cries out that she would sell her soul to have such treasures. Stevenson elaborates a sexual undertone only just evident in the original. The saga’s Thorgunna, for example, a woman in her fifties, develops a particular liking for Thorod’s teenage son Kiartan. Stevenson’s Aud is not only vain and avaricious, but also flirtatious: ‘her mind was set on . . . the admiration of men, and the envy of women; and it was thought that she was not always so circumspect in her bearing as she ²⁹ This was first published in Scribner’s Magazine,  (Dec. ): –, but written much earlier, in , the year in which he was reading the latest from the Saga Library. See Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (London: Macmillan, ), . All quotations from the story are from Scribner’s. ³⁰ William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggja saga) (London: Bernard Quaritch, ). All citations of the saga are from this edn. ³¹ Thomas Percy, Northern Antiquities, rev. edn I. A. Blackwell (London: Henry G. Bohn, ), . ³² I use Morris’s forms of the saga’s proper names.

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

might have been, but nothing to hurt’ (). When a group of young men visit her farm, she is ‘sick with envy’ because they pay more attention to Thorgunna (). She caresses and kisses her husband Finnward in her attempts to prevent him from burning Thorgunna’s goods, and in one particularly chilling addition, dresses their marital bed in Thorgunna’s unburnt sheets. Once both Thorgunna and poor Finnward are dead, Aud can indulge in her illgotten finery in her attempts to attract a young second husband at the next winter feast.³³ But her death is imminent, she retires to her bed, and in the small hours of the morning, Thorgunna the Waif Woman makes good her nickname: ‘waif ’ in Scots denotes not only ‘stray’, or ‘alone’, but also ‘ghostly’, or ‘wraith like’.³⁴ As Aud breathes her last, ‘there by her side on the bed the big dead wife Thorgunna squatted on her hams. No sound was heard, but it seemed by the movement of her mouth as if Thorgunna sang, and she waved her arms as if to singing’ (). Stevenson makes little attempt to mimic saga style, and by and large avoids the archaisms of Morris and Magnússon’s translations. It is strange, then, that the objection was raised that ‘The Waif Woman’ was too derivative in style. Isobel Field recalls Stevenson reading a story ‘called The Witch Woman’ [sic] aloud in Samoa, and that ‘none of us cared for it very much’. Field continues: My mother said it showed the influence of a Swedish [sic] author Louis had been reading, and was not in his own clear, individual style. She made no comment when it was sent to his publisher, and nothing more was heard of The Witch Woman . . . [When] we were packing to leave Vailima . . . I found the manuscript . . . the rejection slip still fastened to the pages with a clip—the first, I imagine, he had received in many years.³⁵

This recollection sits oddly with the evidence of Stevenson’s letters. Fanny is represented as being in fact vociferous in her resistance to the story: Stevenson writes to his publisher Sidney Colvin that ‘[m]y wife protests against The Waif-Woman and I am instructed to report the same to you’. Colvin’s own editorial note is ‘This tale was withheld from the volume accordingly’.³⁶ This letter was actually dictated to Isobel

³³ Auðr the Deep-Minded features at greater length in Laxdoela saga (her name there, Unnr, is a variant form of Auðr), and her final hours—hosting a feast, retiring to bed, and dying—are rather like Aud’s here. However, Laxdoela saga as a whole was not translated into English until . Morris and Magnússon had translated the saga in , but the translation was not published. The abstract of the saga in Northern Antiquities does not include the story of Auðr. Perhaps Stevenson knew of her from a partial translation of the saga he had come across; it may be significant that she too was associated with Scotland. ³⁴ See Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, abridged by John Johnston (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, ). A verb ‘to waif ’ (‘to wave’) is also cited. ³⁵ Isobel Field, This Life I’ve Loved (Plymouth: Mayflower Press, ), . ³⁶ Letters, ed. Colvin, iv. .

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Field, acting as Stevenson’s amanuensis. Elsewhere Fanny described at greater length her objections to the story: in sum, ‘I don’t want that Saga in Louis’s book’.³⁷ Fanny herself clearly knew exactly where Louis had got the story from: ‘The real one is more confused, not so well written . . . yet all the same better’, implying that the problem with ‘The Waif Woman’ was derivativeness bordering on plagiarism.³⁸ G. S. Hellman suggests rather that ‘the story . . . is essentially autobiographical’.³⁹ Perhaps Fanny thought she recognized herself in the negative picture of Aud the light-minded with her flirtations and vanities. Hellman claims that Stevenson depicted himself at the mercy of ‘the warpings and mean decisions into which [Fanny] had occasionally tricked Louis’ in his portrait of Finnward.⁴⁰ Furnas dismisses Hellman’s theory, and concludes that Fanny’s adverse judgement on ‘The Waif Woman’ ‘is not ill-justified by the text’.⁴¹ I would argue exactly the opposite—and note further, that Stevenson’s letter to Colvin is very reminiscent of poor Finnward Keelfarer’s compliance with his own wife’s poor judgement and bad advice. Henry Rider Haggard’s novel The Saga of Eric Brighteyes has been described as ‘an Icelandic love story of broad dimensions filled with heroic Vikings and a long succession of bold actions thwarted by witchery and vengeance’.⁴² As such, Eric Brighteyes would fit perfectly well into the category ‘Viking tale’.⁴³ But Haggard also reproduces saga style, in terms of both dialogue and narrative. Unlike ‘The Waif Woman’, Eric Brighteyes is not based on a specific saga narrative, although ‘it seems as if it might have been’.⁴⁴ Rather, Haggard has produced a page-turning miscellany of saga motifs and story patterns. The opening of Eric Brighteyes is strikingly suggestive of authentic saga narrative. Each character is briefly introduced with a note about his or her immediate lineage, and often, a simple nickname, and a brief character description. Haggard even copies the way in which saga authors typically list a number of positive qualities, but conclude with an ominous remark: Eric himself is described as unmatched ‘for strength, beauty and daring, for in all these things he was the first. But he was not the first in good-luck’ ().⁴⁵ The short, direct sentences are also very reminiscent of saga style. The only incongruous element is, unfortunately, Eric’s own nickname: ‘Brighteyes’ is unparalleled in saga literature.

³⁷ See The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew,  vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), vii.  n. . ³⁸ Letters, ed. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vii.  n. . ³⁹ G. S. Hellman, The True Stevenson (Boston: Little, Brown, ), . ⁴⁰ J. S. Furnas, Voyage to Windward (London: Faber & Faber, ), . ⁴¹ Furnas, Voyage. ⁴² Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, ), . ⁴³ See n. . ⁴⁴ Ralph Bergen Allen, Old Icelandic Sources in the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, ), . ⁴⁵ H. Rider Haggard, Eric Brighteyes (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ). All citations from the novel are from this edn.

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Haggard is not so wedded to imitating sagas that he was willing to abandon his own strong narrative style. He notes in his introduction to the saga: ‘the Sagas are undoubtedly difficult reading . . . the multitude of its actors; the Norse sagaman’s habit of interweaving endless side plots, and the persistence with which he introduces the genealogy and adventures of the ancestors of every unimportant character, are none of them to the taste of the modern reader’. Thus, writes Haggard, Eric Brighteyes is ‘clipped of these peculiarities’ (x). Instead, Haggard launches into a dramatic account of the births of the saga’s twin heroines, Gudruda the fair and the wicked Swanhild the Fatherless, including a tense and extended death bed scene—not at all saga-like—and a dream which prefigures the whole tragic narrative to come—which is. Haggard demonstrates a remarkable ability to select features of saga style and substance which enhance or at least do not slow his fast-paced narrative, blending them with narrative episodes of his own invention. Haggard’s skill in mimicry combined with judicious restraint is clear in his incorporation of verses into the narrative. Many Old Icelandic sagas quote skaldic strophes in the narrative—brief, dense nuggets of cryptic poetry often framed as the highlighted dialogue of characters, and spoken at a climactic or significant moment in the narrative. Thus, for instance, at the beginning of Haggard’s novel, Asmund discovers a mysterious female figure by the seashore, sitting over a corpse; he asks the woman who they both are, and she replies, obliquely, in verse.⁴⁶ Skaldic verses halt the pace of saga narrative; their elaborate metre contrasts with the lucid directness of the prose. Haggard does not reproduce this metre, but his authentically unrhymed strophe is full of alliteration, includes several kennings, and the inauthentic ‘Hiawatha’ metre Longfellow made famous allows for each line to end with an unstressed syllable, as skaldic metre does. However, though he catches so well the form and function of skaldic strophes in saga narrative, Haggard is very sparing in his use of them; they do not interfere with the forward thrust of his narrative. Haggard also picks up the saga technique of cagily displacing judgements on characters and events from author to popular opinion: of Swanhild the Fatherless’s uncertain parentage, for instance, Haggard notes—just as a saga author would have—‘It was women’s talk that Asmund the Priest was the father’ (). He also peppers his story with cryptic proverbs, sometimes evident borrowings from actual sagas (‘Ale is another man’ occurs in Morris’s translation of Grettis saga, for example⁴⁷) Eric Brighteyes has been called ‘an essay on the saga style’.⁴⁸ Not everything is authentic. Haggard’s characters are repeatedly shown appealing to, berating, or simply alluding to, the gods of Old Norse mythology, which gives the novel

⁴⁶ In her unexplained arrival, with a ‘purple cloak and . . . great girdle of gold’ this woman is distinctly reminiscent of Thorgunna—although the purple cloak echoes not Morris’s translation of Eyrbyggja saga (and therefore ‘The Waif Woman’) but the ‘purple mantle’ in Scott’s ‘Abstract’ (). ⁴⁷ The Story of Grettir the Strong, tr. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (London: F. S. Ellis, ). There are a number of parallels between Grettir and Eric. ⁴⁸ Allen, Old Icelandic Sources, .

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a thrilling ‘Viking’ ambience, but is not typical of saga narrative. There are also some inauthentic clichés of supposed Viking life which Haggard evidently found irresistible: ‘the golden wings of Eric’s helm all ablaze with the sunlight’ (), for example. But Eric Brighteyes is crammed with motifs taken from actual sagas. Eric and his trusty companion Skallagrim (his name borrowed from the actual saga of Egill Skallagrímsson) see a mysterious vision of fiery women who ‘wove fiercely at [a] loom of blackness, and as they wove they sang’ (). This vision of valkyries weaving originates in Njáls saga, as one of the terrifying portents of the Battle of Clontarf; Thomas Gray’s ‘The Fatal Sisters’ was a highly successfully literary reworking of the episode, which Haggard has here cleverly appropriated (and sensationalized even further).⁴⁹ The episodic structure of the novel is like the chronologically sequential chains of events in saga narrative. And Haggard seems, almost instinctively, to have absorbed what he called the ‘fatefulness’ of saga narrative: ‘As we read, we seem to hear the voice of Doom speaking continually’ (ix). Eric the hero is loved by two women, Gudruda the fair and Swanhild the Fatherless, who schemes throughout the novel to destroy the love between Eric and her rival—even to the very un-saga-like (but significantly Stevensonian) extent of engaging in a Faustian pact to get her way (chapter ). The central, tragic love story echoes the ‘love triangle’ story pattern in Old Icelandic sagas of poets— especially the account of Swanhild’s loveless marriage to the unsuspecting older man, which Haggard could have found in a number of sagas.⁵⁰ However, Haggard describes at length what Swanhild’s secret feelings about this marriage were; saga authors typically leave their readers to infer what characters are thinking. Like Stevenson’s ‘The Waif Woman’, Eric Brighteyes opens by setting the events of the forthcoming narrative in Christian history: ‘There lived a man in the south, before Thangbrand, Wilibald’s son, preached the White Christ in Iceland’ (). And though the events of the saga take place in pre-Christian Iceland, towards the very end of the novel, Eric and Swanhild anticipate the rule of Christianity: in a tender scene, Eric explains to Gudruda that Odin’s day is done, and that there is now another god, ‘A God who loves not slaughter, a God who died that men might live forever in peace with those they love’ (). This god, says Eric, is called the White Christ. Also in keeping with Longfellow and Stevenson, women figure prominently in Haggard’s narrative. Thurin notes what he called the ‘hystericization’ of the women in Longfellow’s Olaf poem, citing Foucault in identifying this process as a typically Victorian impulse.⁵¹ The focus of Eric Brighteyes might be said to be more on the polarity of the pair of female figures—the angelic Gudruda and the demonic Swanhild—whose extreme characterizations are so unlike the much more naturalistic presentation of women in family sagas, though female characters do play a prominent role in many saga narratives. ⁴⁹ See O’Donoghue, English Poetry, –, for an account of Gray’s Norse-derived poetry. ⁵⁰ See Wawn, Vikings, –, for a fuller listing of Haggard’s various saga sources. ⁵¹ Thurin, Discovery, .

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Haggard visited Iceland in , with letters of introduction from Eiríkr Magnússon.⁵² Cohen locates the inspiration for Eric Brighteyes very precisely in Haggard’s visit to the sites of Njáls saga: ‘standing by the remains of what he believed was Gunnar’s tomb, the tale . . . took shape’.⁵³ Haggard himself describes Njáll’s farmstead, and wonders at the fact that it is deserted and unvisited.⁵⁴ His visit also confirmed his belief that in addition to their high literary qualities, sagas also ‘have this merit: in the main they are records of actual facts. Holding them in hand, I have examined the places that they describe, and therefore to this I can testify’,⁵⁵ although he concedes that some features may owe more to the author’s imagination than others. For Haggard, then, the sagas are fundamentally a record of actual facts; they are ‘entrancing’ as literature; they record the beliefs of ‘our Scandinavian ancestors’; and they are ‘the prose epics of our own race’. But he laments that these culturally and racially significant narratives are ‘scarcely known to the English-speaking public’, and declares that he will be ‘gratified’ if his novel excites interest in them. However, describing saga style as ‘too prolix, too crowded with detail’, Haggard calls Eric Brighteyes—in terms which recall Robert Louis Stevenson on The Master of Ballantrae—‘a difficult experiment’ (p. x). Haggard’s evident gifts as a storyteller (Cohen notes that Haggard started King Solomon’s Mines as ‘an adventure story for boys’ specifically in an attempt to outdo Stevenson’s Treasure Island⁵⁶) were to some extent at odds with the sagas which inspired him. The writers considered so far were all established authors who for different reasons were attracted to Old Icelandic sagas and the ways in which such narratives might form the basis for a new addition to their oeuvre. The case is different with the artist, Professor of Fine Art, and scholar W. G. Collingwood, whose three literary works based on saga literature—Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland, The Bondwomen: A Saga of Langdale,⁵⁷ and The Story of Thurstan at the Thwaite— stand outside his core achievements and expertise. These three pieces—two novels and a short tale—arose directly from Collingwood’s experiences and reading as an antiquary, philologist, and historian of the Lake District in the early Middle Ages. As Matthew Townend, in his invaluable and wide-ranging study of Collingwood’s medievalism explains, ‘Thorstein of the Mere . . . began with a map of Old Norse place names’.⁵⁸

⁵² Wawn, Vikings,  (Cohen mentions letters from Morris (Rider Haggard, )). ⁵³ Cohen, Rider Haggard, . ⁵⁴ H. Rider Haggard, The Days of my Life (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), –. ⁵⁵ Rider Haggard, Days. ⁵⁶ Cohen, Rider Haggard, . ⁵⁷ Originally published as The Bondwoman (London: Edward Arnold, ), and reissued as The Bondwomen in . All quotations from the novel are taken from this edn. ⁵⁸ Matthew Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ), .

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In , the year after the publication of Thorstein, Collingwood published a scholarly paper in the recently founded Saga-Book of the Viking Society,⁵⁹ justly described by Townend as ‘a singularly impressive piece of work’.⁶⁰ In it, Collingwood establishes that the Lake District was settled by Norse (by which he means Norwegian) rather than Danish Scandinavians, and that these Norse settlers showed ‘a strong Gaelic infusion’.⁶¹ Collingwood believed that this ethnic origin was still evident in his own day: in place names, dialect, artwork, household objects, social customs (such as local meetings like those described in Old Icelandic sagas), and, perhaps more troublingly, in moral and temperamental qualities. But this was a lost community. For three hundred years, Collingwood explains, they retained their distinctive identity. But they left no account of themselves, for, in Collingwood’s words, ‘the saga was a late growth of Icelandic culture’ and the Norse people of Lakeland had forgotten their ‘alien and heathen origin’ and become assimilated before the impulse to write down sagas—as if creating them were an ethnic trait, rather than the result of particular historical, geographical, and social circumstance—could take hold.⁶² Thorstein of the Mere, therefore, is not so much a Victorian imitation of an Icelandic saga as a late recreation of what might have been—a genuine Lakeland saga. But as Wawn puts it, ‘the real hero of the story is . . . the industrious and thrifty s Dalesman . . . the implied local reader, in whom deep-seated but now metamorphosed Viking virtues—boldness, enterprise, hard work and thrift—find telling modern expression’.⁶³ Clearly, Collingwood’s strategy was to imitate the style of an actual Old Icelandic family saga. For example, Thorstein begins with an account of the Norse emigration from Norway, provoked by the dominance of King Harald Finehair, and sets out the generations before the settlers in the main body of the story. But of course the distinctive Icelandic location of the family saga is replaced by a Lakeland setting,⁶⁴ and Collingwood’s detailed and often lyrical descriptions of the landscape—surely the result of his gifts and training as a painter—go far beyond the rather meagre and utilitarian descriptive passages in sagas, although his profound connection with the environment is suggestive of saga authors’ deep rootedness in the topography of their own native place. Collingwood never purports to be relating an actual saga, always making clear his address to an implied contemporary reader. Describing the home life of Thorstein’s mother, for instance, Collingwood brings his scene to life with details of her dress—‘a long gown of ruddy colour, long sleeved, with a kerchief round her neck’—but ⁵⁹ W. G. Collingwood, ‘The Vikings in Lakeland: Their Place-Names, Remains, History’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society, / (–): –. ⁶⁰ Townend, Victorian Lakeland, . In fact, the paper was chosen as one of the four most significant articles published in the first decade of Saga-Book to be reissued in a volume commemorating the journal’s and the society’s centenary in . ⁶¹ Collingwood, ‘Vikings in Lakeland’, . ⁶² Collingwood, ‘Vikings in Lakeland’, . ⁶³ Wawn, ‘The Spirit of ’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society,  (): –, . ⁶⁴ Though later in the story, the Lakelanders travel to Iceland, giving Collingwood the opportunity to display his knowledge of Icelandic social history.

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   



continues ‘because she was of high birth, she had a gold band like a crown round her head’.⁶⁵ This is picturesque and didactic at the same time. He never misses an opportunity to compare or contrast some detail with present-day circumstances: ‘the house was like one of our barns’ (), and it had a ‘house beam overhead, the “rannal balk” as our folk, the Northmen’s children, call it’ (). The language of the narrative is not overly archaic, but the dialogue exploits the present-day dialect of England’s North-West to reinforce Collingwood’s point about the continuity of culture—in this case, linguistic culture—and mostly to a comprehensible degree. The coming of Christianity and the representation of female characters are also distinctively inflected by Collingwood’s scholarship. His expertise in Viking age AngloScandinavian sculpture in which scenes from Norse myth were depicted on Christian crosses is wonderfully effectively brought to bear on his dramatization of an encounter between paganism and Christianity.⁶⁶ Swein the Scandinavian is watching a Christian stone mason carving a scene from the Garden of Eden: ‘“Nay,” said Swein, “ . . . you have not got it right. This Adam you call him,—Odin, I say as I was taught,—should be hanging in the tree, as the rhyme says . . . ”’ (). Collingwood quotes a stanza from the Old Norse mythological poem Hávamál, in which Odin’s celebrated self-sacrifice, hanging on the World Tree Yggdrasill, is dramatically recounted. A priest responds excitedly ‘Thou art not far from the kingdom of God’. This brief fictional moment conveys very vividly, and perhaps authentically, the distinctive syncretism for which the sculpture is evidence, and the relationship between paganism and Christianity—a relationship much discussed by Victorian scholars.⁶⁷ Collingwood’s female Scandinavians are more like the women of family sagas than the ‘hystericized’ heroines of Longfellow or Haggard, and again his fiction reflects likely historical fact: for example, Raineach, Thorstein’s beloved, is ethnically Celtic, like his mother, Unna. The novel presents a convincing and probably historically authentic picture of the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual population of Lakeland, with its outlying settlements of Picts, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Saxons. and so on, and Scandinavians at its heart. Like the other works considered in this piece, there is a love story at the centre of the narrative. Finally, however, Thorstein, in true saga narrative fashion, ends with Thorstein’s death, but the family lived on, ‘for many a generation, and thereabouts they dwell even to this day’ (). Some story elements in Thorstein seem to have been drawn from Collingwood’s reading of sagas: Thorstein the outlaw is supported by his wife, as in Gísla saga; they take refuge on an island, as Grettir does in Grettis saga.⁶⁸ But this is much more obvious ⁶⁵ W. G. Collingwood, Thorstein of the Mere (London: Edward Arnold, ), . All quotations from the novel are taken from this edn. ⁶⁶ See W. G. Collingwood, Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (London: Faber & Gwyer, ). ⁶⁷ See O’Donoghue, English Poetry, –, and ch.  more generally on the relationship between Norse paganism and Christianity as figured by Victorian writers. ⁶⁸ See The Story of Gisli the Outlaw, tr. George Webbe Dasent (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ), and Morris and Magnússon, Grettir the Strong.

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

  ’ 

in The Bondwomen. The style of this novel is yet more saga-like, with its opening description of the inhabitants of Langdale and their farmsteads and families. Like ‘The Waif Woman’, The Bondwomen is an extended version of one episode from a saga. Here, the story of Oddi, his wife Groa and the bondwoman herself, Deorwyn, follows very closely the story of Höskuldr and Jórunn in Laxdoela saga.⁶⁹ Höskuldr buys a slave woman, Melkorka, whilst away on a trading trip, and brings her home to Iceland, to the understandable resentment of his wife. The Bondwomen caused considerable controversy when it was published.⁷⁰ Collingwood’s characters set up a lasting ménage à trois (while in the saga Höskuldr promises not to sleep with Melkorka once he is back in Iceland) and he extends his narrative to include a genuinely shocking picture of a masochistic and abusive relationship between another Scandinavian man and his bought bondwoman. It may be that their occurrence in Collingwood’s determinedly domestic, even cosy, depiction of the Lakeland setting—rather than in an alien longago narrative from a distant place—highlighted their scandalous nature, as contemporary readers saw it. As Collingwood explains, his characters were ‘Vikings no longer’; they were ‘no longer the riders of the foam, the free-handed ring scatterers, reckless of life and fearless of death’ but much more obviously the believable ancestors of real dalespeople, even if they had not yet become ‘the sturdy squires and canny statesmen of the North’.⁷¹ Collingwood completes his near-trilogy with a short piece, The Story of Thurstan at the Thwaite. Thurstan is the very last of the Lakeland Vikings, and Collingwood’s dramatization in this story is not of saga narrative but of history. The Lakeland Scandinavians are changing. Thurstan’s daughter is dazzled by the material riches of the Christian Church. The old man sees off emissaries from the Abbot of St Mary in Furness, granted ownership of the ancestral Norse lands by Henry II, but his own brother-in-law tries to persuade him to give up the land. Thurstan spits in his face and dies of sheer rage before he can launch a last hopeless attack on the King’s men. He is refused a Christian burial—and thus, one might conclude, effaced from history. Collingwood introduces his narrative as follows: ‘there must have been tales told by the Northmen’s descendants which, had they been written down, would have fallen more or less into saga-form: thus . . .’⁷² To conclude: different authors had different reasons for basing their work on medieval Icelandic saga narrative. And the results of their engagement with saga literature are also very different, as we have seen. But there are certain fixed points. These authors recognized in Old Norse literature something of their own ethnic or national heritage; as we have seen, Stevenson may have recognized his own particular

⁶⁹ See n.  about translations of Laxdoela saga. But the story of Höskuldr and Jórunn is summarized in Northern Antiquities, and in any case Collingwood could have read the saga in the original (see Townend, Victorian Lakeland,  and ). ⁷⁰ See Wawn, Vikings, –. ⁷¹ The Bondwomen, –, and preface. ⁷² W. G. Collingwood, ‘The Story of Thurstan at the Thwaite’, in Coniston Tales (Ulverston: Wm. Holmes, ), .

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   



circumstances. The abiding concerns of saga authors chimed with distinctively Victorian interests: the relationship between paganism and Christianity, social and sexual mores, and that ‘national energy, activity, independence of mind, and value for civil and political freedom’ evident in Old Norse literature, traits, it was believed, shared by Vikings and Victorians.⁷³ The familial and social complexities of sagas chimed well with the preoccupations of Victorian novelists, and ‘Vikings’ have always proved an exciting proposition, not to mention the thrill of the supernatural elements found in sagas. But sagas were strange literary artefacts too. On the positive side, they offered Victorian writers a wholly new model of prose narrative, with a distinctive style and challenging narrative conventions. Less positively, they were not easy to adapt to Victorian readers’ stylistic tastes. It was easy enough to extract and extrapolate the most obviously exciting elements of saga literature to please a less sophisticated readership: as Allen tersely notes, ‘If these hardy warriors preyed upon the English and brought discomfiture in their day, they have now been repaid, for their adventures have been relegated largely to stories for the entertainment of children.’⁷⁴ However, for more ambitious writers, the transformation of Old Icelandic sagas indeed proved ‘a difficult experiment’.

SUGGESTED

READING

Kielland-Lund, Erik, ‘ “Twilight of the Heroes”: Old Norse Influence in Longfellow’s Poetry’, in Inga-Stina Ewbank et al., (eds), Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents (Norwich: Norvik, ), –. O’Donoghue, Heather, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Thurin, Erik Yngvar, The American Discovery of the Norse (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ). Townend, Matthew, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ). Wawn, Andrew, ‘The Spirit of ’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society,  (): –. Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ).

⁷³ Laing, Heimskringla, ; see also Wawn, Vikings, . ⁷⁴ Allen, Old Icelandic Sources, .

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  ......................................................................................................................

     -                          

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 

‘Y hair, a big yellow beard . . . and large grey eyes’.¹ This is the description, in H. Rider Haggard’s  imperial adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines of the most muscularly heroic of the book’s characters, Sir Henry Curtis. Curtis is greatly admired by the notoriously unreliable narrator, Allan Quatermain, who asserts: ‘I never saw a finer-looking man, and somehow he reminded me of an ancient Dane . . . . And by the way it is a curious thing, and just shows how the blood will out, I found out afterwards that Sir Henry Curtis was of Danish blood.’² Quatermain’s views, however, are undermined in a footnote aside by the book’s fictional editor: ‘Mr Quatermain’s ideas about the ancient Danes seem to be rather confused; we have always understood that they were dark-haired people. Probably he was thinking of Saxons.’³ This short, paratextual satire might only have been noticed by Haggard’s more careful readers, yet it casts an interesting light on a novel now sometimes accused of white supremacism—as a work which actually questions notions of racial determinism. Its use of Saxons to do this—in a book set far from medieval Europe in both place and time—also reveals the extent to which Anglo-Saxonism had become a pervasive part of British popular culture (in particular, of debates about national identity) by the late nineteenth century. Today, the nineteenth century’s Anglo-Saxonism is commonly associated with the sort of simplistic racial determinism voiced by Haggard’s Quatermain. This brand of Anglo-Saxonism certainly existed in Victorian Britain—one notable example being the short-lived  periodical The Anglo-Saxon, for whose editors ‘the world is a world for

¹ H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ed. Dennis Butts (Oxford: World’s Classics, ), . ² See Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, . Quatermain’s unreliability is demonstrated, for instance, in his consistent misattribution of quotations to the only two works of literature he knows—the Ingoldsby Legends and the Old Testament. ³ Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, .

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-    



the Saxon race’—all of whom were characterized by ‘courageous will’.⁴ However, contemporary distaste for works like this has also resulted in the neglect of more complex Anglo-Saxonist texts, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s  historical novel Harold or Charles Kingsley’s  Hereward the Wake. Neither of these works has been edited in the last half-century and consequently neither is widely read by the general public, or used as a set text for undergraduates. However, closer reading of these novels (and also many lesser known Anglo-Saxonist novels, including the large number written about King Alfred in the nineteenth century) reveals that in many cases their authors—like Haggard—actually used the medium of the novel not to assert but rather to question and investigate simplistic notions of national identity. This chapter will argue for the interest and importance of Anglo-Saxonist novels when analysing questions of identity in Victorian Britain. It will also argue for the centrality of Anglo-Saxonist novels to nineteenth-century medievalism. In surveys of the nineteenth-century medieval revival, literary Anglo-Saxonism is frequently omitted as though it were somehow a separate and distinct cultural development from, say, the rediscovery of Arthur, or the Gothic Revival in architecture. In Michael Alexander’s recent book-length study of medievalism, to take just one example, neither BulwerLytton’s Harold nor Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (both very lengthy works) is even mentioned. And where works such as these are discussed, they are too often dismissed as of little literary value or as simply poor imitations of the work of Sir Walter Scott.⁵ However, the roots of literary Anglo-Saxonism are complex and lie far earlier than Scott; the works themselves differ importantly from his work in ways that can tell us much about the mid-nineteenth century; they intersect in important ways with other manifestations of Victorian medievalism; and they have had an important legacy in the medievalism of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

T   - A-S

.................................................................................................................................. The literary reception of Anglo-Saxon culture—the act of remembering, romanticizing, lamenting, or celebrating Britain’s Anglo-Saxon past in literature—began long before the publication of Scott’s Ivanhoe. Indeed, it had already begun within half a century of the Norman Conquest. The Latin Gesta Herewardi, or Life of Hereward, for instance, which was produced between  and  was based in part on fragments from an ⁴ The Anglo-Saxon,  (), ix. ⁵ Michael Alexander’s Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ) for instance, derides Edward Bulwer-Lytton for the ‘vice’ of laying on detail ‘with a trowel’ (). See Clare Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in NineteenthCentury British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ),  on other views of Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels as laughably inept.

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

 

earlier Old English text.⁶ However, it is far more than an act of mere translation. The first thirteen chapters have been developed into a formulaic coming-of-age narrative, in which the hero proves his valour against beasts of both the moral and furred variety, while the second part is an amalgam of oral histories (apparently taken from former companions of the hero) with romance motifs—will-o’-the-wisps, an animal guide, and a bawdy scene with a toilet seat.⁷ It is, then, a work which carefully and deliberately set out to memorialize a figure from Britain’s Saxon past. The Vita Haroldi, or Life of King Harold Godwinson was written only a little later— probably sometime around . It too claims to have been compiled with difficulty from the leaves of an earlier manuscript ‘split and torn apart by the studies of earlier authors’.⁸ And in fact its author indicates a prevalent tradition of written and oral storytelling about Harold, asserting that ‘many others have spoken and written on this subject elsewhere . . . not only common story-tellers but also the most renowned scholars’.⁹ The political motivation for the work is evident from its opening sentence: ‘To recount the deeds of Harold, a most famous and lawful king—rightfully and lawfully crowned’. And in particular, it seems to have been written in response to William of Malmesbury’s less favourable portrait of Harold in his early twelfth-century History of the Kings of England, whom the author states ‘introduced into his History what is plainly the opposite of the truth’.¹⁰ From a very early date then, Saxon culture and Saxon figures were enlisted in attempts to legitimate political institutions. They continued to be used in this way at critical intervals over the next seven hundred years. As Graham Parry demonstrates, in Chapter  of this volume, in the s and s, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were drawn on to justify the doctrinal position of the recently established Anglican Church.¹¹ During the Civil War of the s, the royalist John Spelman produced a three-volume history of Alfred, detailing the Saxon king’s ‘wars and troublesome reign’ as a source of comfort to the beleaguered Charles I and his followers. And (as Clare Simmons’s Chapter  reveals) it was also in the s that the notion of the ‘Norman yoke’ was popularized, in the writings of Andrew Horn and the Digger Gerrard Winstanley.¹²

⁶ Michael Swanton (ed.), The Life of Hereward the Wake, in Three Lives of the Last Englishmen (London: Garland, ), . On the probable date of the Latin Life see Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Hereward and Flanders’, Anglo-Saxon England,  (): , and Michael Swanton, ‘Introduction’, in Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, xxvi. ⁷ Michael Swanton, ‘Introduction’, to Hereward the Wake, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, ), . ⁸ Michael Swanton (ed.), The Life of King Harold Godwinson, in Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, . Swanton considers that the confused state of some of the material makes this claim likely to be true. See ‘Introduction’, in Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, xxvi. ⁹ Life of Harold Godwinson, . ¹⁰ Life of Harold Godwinson, . ¹¹ See also Alfred Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), . ¹² On this see also Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, , .

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-    



The eighteenth century saw Alfred the Great used as a means of celebrating both George I but also George’s estranged son Frederick and the dissident political movement known as ‘patriotism’.¹³ It also saw the production of the first Anglo-Saxonist poems, plays, and novels. We see an increasing movement towards historical accuracy in such works. In Richard Blackmore’s  Alfred: An Epic Poem, the hero visits heaven and hell, is menaced by a volcano, and is invited to become king of Libya. Mallet and Thomson’s  Alfred: a Masque, by contrast, restricts its action to the basic outlines of Asser’s Life of Alfred (in the expanded form of the Life, after the interventions of Matthew Parker) though it does also feature singing spirits and a prophetic hermit. And written later still, John Home’s  tragedy of Alfred goes to great lengths in its introduction to justify its fairly minor incorporation of ‘feigned events . . . altogether consistent with the true’—principally a love story. It also, pre-empting Scott, makes a reasonable stab at authentic names (‘Ethelswida’ for Alfred’s loveinterest and ‘Rollo’ and ‘Hinguar’ for his Danish enemies)—perhaps responding to the aesthetics of Thomas Chatterton’s forged ‘translations’ of Saxon poetry that were produced in the late s.¹⁴ Both Chatterton’s poems and Home’s play provide a sense of the growing popularity of Anglo-Saxon subjects by the late eighteenth century. Chatterton’s ‘translations’ were quickly followed by others, such as the serial fiction ‘Hudda and Ethrelinda’ that appeared in The Lady’s Magazine claiming to be ‘translated from the Saxon’.¹⁵ And after Home’s play had been performed at Covent Garden Theatre on  January , lengthy synopses of its plot appeared in The Lady’s Magazine, The London Magazine, and The Town and Country Magazine. Those magazines also featured synopses of another Anglo-Saxonist play which was performed just two days later in London— Richard Cumberland’s Tragedy of the Battle of Hastings, which appeared at Drury Lane on  January. And other Anglo-Saxonist plays appeared over the course of the next two decades—most notably Ann Yearsley’s  Earl Goodwin, which effectively used the medium of the Norman Conquest to discuss the position of women, the merits of the French Revolution, and the errors of Roman Catholicism—prefiguring several important works of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ The marked popularity of Anglo-Saxon subjects in Britain in the last three decades of the eighteenth century belies the claim sometimes made that the origins

¹³ The most famous expression of this was David Mallet and James Thomson’s  Alfred: A Masque, which was commissioned by Frederick and performed at Cliveden on  Aug. —the anniversary of the succession of the Hanoverian line to the British throne. ¹⁴ Chatterton’s two versions of the fragmentary ‘Battle of Hastings’ were written in . ¹⁵ The first part of the story began in the Lady’s Magazine,  (): . ¹⁶ On Yearsley’s play see Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Crushing the Convent and the Dread Bastille: The Anglo-Saxons, Revolution and Gender in Women’s Plays of the s’, in Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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 

of Victorian Anglo-Saxonism should be traced to the  publication of Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons.¹⁷ Turner himself claimed in the introduction to the third edition of his hugely successful text that, when he began work on it, ‘the subject of the Anglo-Saxon antiquities had been nearly forgotten by the British public’.¹⁸ The book was very significant—it had run to six editions by . However, nineteenth-century Britain’s Anglo-Saxonism, as we have seen, had a long heritage. And if it received new impetus from any specific texts, then alongside Turner’s history, we must also consider an earlier publication—Thomas Percy’s  English translation of Paul-Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities. Northern Antiquities outlined for British readers and writers the customs of the ‘Northern nations’, drawing on Tacitus, the sagas, and the Edda as source material. In his editorial footnotes and introduction to the book, Percy grouped together Scandinavians and Saxons, frequently drawing attention to the relevance of Tacitus’s descriptions to British history. Northern Antiquities thus provided writers with sociological detail that could add colour to descriptions of both the Anglo-Saxons themselves and their Scandinavian enemies. The book probably influenced one of the first AngloSaxonist novels to be written: Anne Fuller’s The Son of Ethelwolf, published in . Fuller’s novel makes much of the Danish love of poetry in her account of Alfred’s enemies—a theme discussed at length by Mallet.¹⁹ Like him, she describes at length the importance of oaths to both Saxons and Danes (her Danes, predictably, swear their oaths by Odin, the Valkyries, and Odin’s raven—details which could easily have been drawn from Mallet’s work).²⁰ And the Northern love of feasting—an important theme in Mallet’s account—is also stressed in Fuller’s novel (as an expression of hospitality among the Saxons and an example of excess among her Danes).²¹ The Son of Ethelwolf highlights one particular error in some accounts of Victorian medievalism—the tendency to trace the mid-nineteenth-century association of the medieval with feasting and plentifulness back to Sir Walter Scott. Alice Chandler, for instance, in her early but influential study of Victorian medievalism, A Dream of Order, cites Scott’s bullock-roasting Halbert Glendinning in The Abbot as an example of this association in the author’s work, stating that: ‘later medievalists picked up such passages as this in Scott and used the contrast between medieval plenty and the starvation diets of nineteenth-century workers as part of their indictment of the present in relation to the past’.²² However, even by loose Victorian definitions, The Abbot—set

¹⁷ This claim is made, for instance, in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, ), . ¹⁸ Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest. rd edn (London: Longman, ), p. i. ¹⁹ See Anne Fuller, The Son of Ethelwolf,  vols (London, ), i. ; David Mallet and James Thomson, Alfred: A Masque (London, ), i, –. ²⁰ See Fuller, Son of Ethelwolf, i. , and Mallet and Thomson, Alfred, i, , , . ²¹ See Fuller, Son of Ethelwolf, ii. ; ii. ; i. . See Mallet and Thomson, Alfred, i, . ²² Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, ), .

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during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots—is not a medievalist novel. And in Ivanhoe, feasting is only associated with the most corrupt characters—it is not something to be celebrated or emulated.²³ The wistful image of the joyous medieval feast is common in Victorian novels, as Chandler states. In Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, the Saxons gorge on ‘great cauldrons of good soup; forest salads; red deer and roe roasted on the wood-embers; spits of pheasants and partridges, larks and buntings’. Likewise in Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, ‘four meals a day, nor those sparing, were not deemed too extravagant an interpretation of the daily bread’ for the Anglo-Saxons—in marked contrast to the miserable Normans who prefer ‘sipping rather than drinking, nibbling rather than devouring’.²⁴ However, such nostalgic images of great feasts should not be traced back to Scott, but beyond Fuller to the paraphrases of Tacitus found in Percy’s translation of Mallet.²⁵ Fuller’s novel not only looks forward to the Anglo-Saxonist novels of the midnineteenth century in its celebration of medieval feasting; it also anticipates their interest in the mixed ancestry of the English. Several characters find themselves strategically poised between nations. ‘Ethelbert’ is the page of the Saxon Oddune, but of Danish parentage, while ‘Ethelwold’ travels to Britain with Alfred’s Danish enemies but ends up as a follower of Alfred. This interest in divided identities is a feature of Anglo-Saxonist novels throughout the nineteenth century, setting them importantly apart from the jingoistic Anglo-Saxonism found in political speeches of the period. In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the king’s perfectly true-hearted lover Edith is half Dane, half Saxon, while the narrator asserts: ‘to this day, the gentry, traders, and farmers of more than one-third of England . . . descend from Saxon mothers indeed, but from Viking fathers’.²⁶ In Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, Hereward’s father has ‘a Saxon name’ but ‘a Danish title’, while his mother is claimed to have had ‘Danish ancestors’.²⁷ And many late Victorian Alfred novels similarly have at their centre liminal figures. Charles Whistler’s  King Alfred’s Viking has as its hero a Norwegian, Ranald, who teaches Alfred’s Saxons to establish a ‘Viking’-style naval force, while Paul Creswick’s  novel In Ælfred’s Days is narrated by ‘Saga’ a Viking child who has been adopted by King Alfred.²⁸ Again, this feature of Victorian novels should ultimately be traced back to the work of the late eighteenth-century antiquarians such as Thomas Percy, whose notes to his edition of Mallet, for instance, had identified the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse languages as ‘two not very different dialects of the same language’, beginning a

²³ Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black,  []), . ²⁴ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings (London: Routledge,  []), , . ²⁵ Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake: Last of the English (London: Macmillan,  []), . ²⁶ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, , . ²⁷ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ²⁸ Charles Whistler, King Alfred’s Viking (London: T. Nelson, ), ; Paul Creswick, In Ælfred’s Days (London: Ernest Nister, ), .

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debate that was to run until the late nineteenth century and would move from the ground of linguistics into that of culture and identity.²⁹

T -   A-S 

.................................................................................................................................. The Anglo-Saxon novels of the nineteenth century were not merely the products of a long tradition of Anglo-Saxonism—they were also written in response to specific social and cultural developments. Chronologically first among these were the French Revolutionary Wars (–) and the Napoleonic Wars (–) which generated a widespread British fear of invasion—and as part of that a renewed curiosity in narratives of the Norman Conquest and the Danish incursions of the tenth century.³⁰ Those fears revived again in the s, as a result of the expansionist policies of Napoleon III, and they subsided only gradually through the remainder of the nineteenth century.³¹ The wars also contributed significantly to British interest in identifying the nation’s heritage and that of its institutions as essentially pre-Norman, which encouraged accounts of prominent Anglo-Saxon figures and their achievements, such as Joseph Cottle’s  epic poem Alfred. Such texts proliferated further after the coronation of Queen Victoria who more than any earlier Hanoverian monarch was claimed to represent the return of Saxon blood to England’s throne.³² Indeed, by the end of the century, she was widely accepted as having ‘in her veins the blood of Cerdic of Wessex, the fierce Teutonic chief, out of whose dignity English kingship grew’.³³ It was not just Queen Victoria who became closely associated with the AngloSaxons, however. The English nation as a whole came to be viewed as inherently Anglo-Saxon in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely because of the work of the philologist Max Müller who in  (just five years before the publication of Kingsley’s Hereward) gave a series of lectures at the Royal Institution in London in

²⁹ Paul-Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities: Or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern Nations,  vols, ed. Thomas Percy (London, ), ii, pp. iv, , . For more on this subject, see Joanne Parker, ‘The Victorians, the Dark Ages and English National Identity’, in Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle (eds), The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, ), –. ³⁰ On this subject see Billie Melman, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (July ): –, . ³¹ On fears of invasion in the s see David Brown, ‘Palmerston and Anglo-French Relations, –’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, / (): –. ³² On this see Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, –, and Joanne Parker, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ³³ Wolff, ‘The Early Ancestors of our Queen’, National Review,  (): –; Lilly, ‘British Monarchy and Modern Democracy’, Nineteenth Century,  (): –, .

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which he demonstrated that the English language was essentially Teutonic and Saxon.³⁴ His findings were quickly taken to indicate not just a linguistic but also a racial continuity between the Anglo-Saxons of the ninth century and the English-speaking nations of the nineteenth. This belief was manifested in scholarly use of the terms ‘English’ and ‘Old English’ from the s to describe the inhabitants and language of pre-Norman England, in popular use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a synonym for ‘English’ or ‘English-speaking’ in both Britain and the USA, and also in increased interest in AngloSaxon subjects in literature.³⁵ Like other aspects of popular nineteenth-century medievalism (such as the return of King Arthur) literary Anglo-Saxonism was also a response to the increased availability of source material that resulted from the development of cheaper printing methods and from more serious translation and editing projects. In , the first Latin translation of Beowulf was published (followed by the first complete English translation in ). In  the first English translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles was published.  saw the lives of both Harold and Hereward printed (albeit in incomplete and inaccurate texts).³⁶ And in  the first English translation of Asser’s Life of King Alfred appeared, as well as the first fragmentary translation of The Book of Ely. By the time of Bulwer-Lytton and Kingsley, then, authors could easily access and draw on authentic Old English literature and on early histories written in both Old and Middle English. Kingsley, for instance, refers to Beowulf in Hereward the Wake and draws extensively on The Life of Hereward, as well as on the twelfth-century Book of Ely, while Bulwer-Lytton’s novel draws largely on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the Chronicon ex chronicis (then known as the Chronicle of Florence of Worcester) as well as on the chronicle histories attributed to Henry of Huntingdon, Roger of Hovenden, William of Malmesbury, and others.³⁷ The availability of source material not only affected content, it also influenced style and language. When Kingsley’s Hereward announces: ‘I am Hereward . . . the brain-hewer, the land-thief, the seathief, the feeder of wolf and raven’, his language echoes that of Beowulf and the (muchanthologized in the nineteenth century) ‘Battle of Brunanburh’.³⁸ And when BulwerLytton relates: ‘Then died the faithful Sexwolf. Then died the gallant Godrith. Then died . . . the English-hearted Vebba’, the style recalls that of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.³⁹

³⁴ On this see Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, –; Simmons, ‘Iron-Worded Proof: Victorian Identity and the Old English Language’, Studies in Medievalism,  (): –, . ³⁵ See, for instance, Edward Freeman, Old English History for Children, nd edn (London: Macmillan, ), xiii. On this subject see Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, –; Simmons, ‘Iron-Worded Proof ’, . ³⁶ See Swanton (ed.), Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, xxvii. ³⁷ See Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, , . ³⁸ On The Battle of Brunanburh in the nineteenth century see Joanne Parker, ‘Brunanburh and the Victorian Imagination’, in Michael Livingston (ed.), The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, ), –. ³⁹ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, .

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T   W S

.................................................................................................................................. Finally, of course, Victorian Anglo-Saxonist novels were also influenced by the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels—in particular his medievalist narratives and foremost among them Ivanhoe, set in the twelfth century and the only one of his works to feature Saxon characters. Scott’s importance to the medieval revival generally began to be asserted in the nineteenth century. In his  autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua, the great medievalizing church reformer Cardinal Newman famously asserted that it had been Scott who first ‘turned men’s minds in the direction of the middle ages’.⁴⁰ As we have seen, men’s minds had turned in the direction of the Saxon period well before Scott. Nevertheless, Scott’s presence and influence can certainly be identified in Anglo-Saxonist novels of the Victorian period. Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake positions itself in relation to Scott’s phenomenally popular Waverley novels on its opening page, stating that: ‘The heroic deeds of highlanders . . . have been told in verse and prose . . . But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and the fen’.⁴¹ Later, Hereward is described as like a ‘Highland chieftain’, while the book’s Anglo-Danish lords are compared to modern ‘Scot-Danish’ highland lairds.⁴² More specifically, in the ‘Preface’ to the third edition of Harold, Bulwer-Lytton compared his work with that of ‘the great author of Ivanhoe’, while the influence of Scott’s medievalist novels can be discerned in Kingsley’s depiction of Hereward’s knighting, when he swears to use his sword to protect ‘orphans, and the poor, and the oppressed’.⁴³ As earlier commentators have often noted, for medieval knights, chivalric protectiveness was ‘accorded usually to women, always of the upper class’, while serfs and villeins were ‘ignored or despised’.⁴⁴ It was only in Scott’s influential reimagining of chivalric ideals that a knight’s duties included protection of the weak more broadly, including the poor and the labouring classes.⁴⁵ As we have seen, attempts to use authentic Saxon names for literary characters began in the s with writers such as John Home, well before the naming of Scott’s ‘Wamba’ (the name of a seventh-century Visigothic king) and ‘Cedric’ (the misspelled name of the sixth-century king, Cerdic) in Ivanhoe. However, Scott’s work probably did fuel the interest of Victorian Anglo-Saxonist novelists in providing authentic clothing and accoutrements for their characters. Scott devotes long passages

⁴⁰ John Newman, Apologia pro vita sua (London: Longman,  []), . ⁴¹ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ⁴² Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, , . ⁴³ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, ; Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ⁴⁴ Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ⁴⁵ On this see also Chandler, Dream of Order, .

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of Ivanhoe to describing the clothes and weaponry of his characters, and some authentic names are used—Rowena, for instance, wears a ‘kirtle’ (though Brian de Bois-Gilbert wears a fifteenth-century ‘gorget’).⁴⁶ This move in the direction of historical accuracy should rightly be traced back to the seminal work of Joseph Strutt, whose three-volume, painstakingly researched and lovingly engraved Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People of England was published between  and  and began by covering the Saxon period. Strutt’s work was probably influential on the Anglo-Saxonist plays of the s and s. He also attempted to popularize the research himself, in the romance Queenhoo Hall. When he died in , leaving that work unfinished, Scott was commissioned to complete it.⁴⁷ Scott’s main contribution to Strutt’s legacy, however, was not the cursory ending with which he furnished Queenhoo Hall, but rather his emulation of Strutt’s attention to costume in his own medievalist novels. Following Scott, later novelists strived even harder to describe medieval costume authentically. In Harold, Bulwer-Lytton used the Saxon names ‘gonna’ and ‘ateghar’ repeatedly to describe the clothing and weaponry of his Saxon nobles.⁴⁸ He differed markedly from Scott, however, in praising the quality of these items. Scott was one of the earliest writers to laud the craftsmanship of the Middle Ages as superior to that of the industrialized modern world—anticipating the work of Ruskin, Pugin, Morris, and others.⁴⁹ However, he did not imagine that craftsmanship as having existed in the Saxon period: in Ivanhoe, his Saxons manage only ‘some rude attempt at taste’ and produce tapestries which are merely ‘all the age was capable of ’.⁵⁰ In Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold on the other hand, the Saxon king rides beneath a painstakingly embroidered banner, ‘bedecked in . . . ruby, amethyst, and emerald’, suggesting that the literary Anglo-Saxonism of the s was not simply derivative of Scott’s Ivanhoe but was also drawing on his other medievalist novels, and probably on the medievalist movement as a whole (Pugin’s Contrasts had been published, for instance, in ).⁵¹ Ivanhoe draws on the content of several Robin Hood ballads—for instance in its account of the disguised King Richard.⁵² This use of ballads could have been influential on later Anglo-Saxonist novels, simply in terms of increasing the respectability of such early texts.⁵³ However, although Ivanhoe contains extracts from Shakespeare, Chaucer, and a range of other poets and dramatists, it interestingly does not quote any lines

⁴⁶ Scott, Ivanhoe, , . For a long description of Gurth’s costume, see Ivanhoe, . ⁴⁷ See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. ⁴⁸ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . For another example of this see Eliza Bray, Henry de Pomeroy: Or, The Eve of St John (London: Longman, ), , . ⁴⁹ See for instance The Fair Maid of Perth (set in the fourteenth century). On this subject see Chandler, Dream of Order, . ⁵⁰ Scott, Ivanhoe, . ⁵¹ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁵² Richard disguises himself in The Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, which formed part of Joseph Ritson, Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (London, ). ⁵³ See John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott,  vols (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, ), i, –.

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from the ballads that it plunders for storyline, nor are they acknowledged as sources in the book. By contrast, Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake quotes directly and extensively from ballad material, indicating both the increasing concern of Victorian historical novelists to demonstrate the authenticity of their work, but also the gradual improvement in status that ballads and other early literature enjoyed between  and , as the result of extensive antiquarian research. Kingsley’s novel contains two extracts from the early ballad ‘The Not-browne Mayd’, which was included in volume ii of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.⁵⁴ It also contains several long passages from the mid-fifteenth-century Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode—a text which had been published in Joseph Ritson’s politically radical  collection of Robin Hood texts.⁵⁵ And elsewhere it draws on the language of other early ballads: in the line ‘and now is Hereward to the greenwood gone to be a bold outlaw’ (which echoes the title of the ballad ‘My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone’); and in the oath ‘by oak and ash and thorn’ which Hereward swears (which is taken from the ballad ‘Glasgerion’, which was also included in the Reliques).⁵⁶ While Scott perhaps set a precedent in using some ballad material, therefore, what is far clearer is that later Anglo-Saxonist authors went directly to late eighteenth-century ballad collections themselves for both style and content.⁵⁷ In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman chronicles cited carefully in the notes and introductions to Harold and Hereward, the main primary source that Scott does cite in his dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe is fictional. He writes: ‘Of my materials I have but little to say: They may be chiefly found in the singular Anglo-Norman MS, which Sir Arthur Wardour preserves with such jealous care in the third drawer of his oaken cabinet, scarcely allowing any one to touch it, and being himself not able to read one syllable of its contents.’⁵⁸ As keen readers of Scott would have instantly recognized, Wardour had been a character in Scott’s earlier novel The Antiquary, published four years before Ivanhoe. The only other sources that Scott refers to are the eighteenthcentury historians Joseph Strutt, Robert Henry, and Sharon Turner, and he airily confesses that ‘it is extremely probable that I may have confused the manners of two or three centuries’ (which indeed he does—for instance in having jousting practised in England a century too early).⁵⁹ Such a cavalier attitude to history is far removed from Bulwer-Lytton’s assertion, for instance (in the ‘Preface’ to the third edition of Harold), that he had ‘consulted the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if intending to write, not a fiction but a history’.⁶⁰

⁵⁴ See Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, –. ⁵⁵ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, –. ⁵⁶ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . Interestingly, it may have been Kingsley’s Hereward, rather than Percy’s collection, which was the source of the oath ‘oak, ash and thorn’ in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, since in both Kingsley and Kipling the phrase is emblematic of true Englishness. ⁵⁷ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . The earliest printed score of the ballad is in William Ballet’s Lute Book (c.). ⁵⁸ Scott, Ivanhoe, . ⁵⁹ Scott, Ivanhoe, . ⁶⁰ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, .

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Another major difference between Ivanhoe and the Anglo-Saxonist novels of Kingsley and Bulwer-Lytton is the earlier work’s focus on apocryphal history—on fictional characters who live ‘between the pages’ of the history books, with a tangential relationship to documented figures—whereas the later works focus on historical personages themselves. This difference was clearly self-conscious on the part of the later authors. In the preface to an earlier novel, The Last of the Barons, Bulwer-Lytton had argued that the novelist had the right to bring into close focus ‘the characters of the principal personages of the time—the motives by which they were probably activated’, and in a preface to Harold, he asserted that whereas Scott had ‘employed History to aid Romance’, his own aim was to ‘employ Romance in the aid of History . . . delineating the characters of those who had been the living actors’.⁶¹ Scott also deliberately distanced his readers from the medieval past about which they were reading, through the use of the framing narrative of his ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ (which relates the circumstances of the tale’s composition by the fictional Laurence Templeton) and by the occasional use of authorial asides referring to the reader’s historical present. Introducing the apartment of the Lady Rowena, for instance, the narrator warns his readers, ‘Yet let not modern beauty envy the magnificence of a Saxon princess . . , of comfort there was little’.⁶² This technique was typical of Scott’s period: it is also used, for instance, in Thomas Love Peacock’s novella Maid Marion, composed in  and published in .⁶³ As Clare Simmons has convincingly argued, such distancing is actually a feature of the Gothic rather than of medievalism: ‘Whereas Gothic conventions tend to distinguish between the reader’s present and the narrative’s account of events distanced by time and space, medievalism requires an interested, committed reader.’⁶⁴ For Simmons, the Gothic and medievalism can most usefully be viewed as different modes which can coexist in one work. This is a helpful way of thinking about the relationship of Victorian Anglo-Saxonist novels to the work of Scott. As numerous commentators have identified, Ivanhoe contains many elements of the Gothic: dungeons, brigands, corrupt representatives of the Catholic Church, and a madwoman who starts a fire.⁶⁵ In Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, published twenty-eight years after Ivanhoe, there is no framing narrative and no asides to distance the reader from the medieval past. However, there are numerous uses of the Gothic mode. Edith is in danger of incarceration as a nun.⁶⁶ Harold sees a vision, lit with ‘a pale phosphoric light’ that seems to be ‘the form of a man . . . clad in arms . . . stamped with unutterable and solemn woe’.⁶⁷

⁶¹ Bulwer-Lytton, ‘Preface’, in Harold, ; ‘Preface’ to The Last of the Barons, quoted in Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, . ⁶² Scott, Ivanhoe, . ⁶³ See Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian, ed. Stephen Knight and Joanne Parker (Abingdon: Routledge,  []), –. ⁶⁴ Clare Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), . ⁶⁵ See Scott, Ivanhoe, , , . ⁶⁶ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁶⁷ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, .

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And he also meets a prophesying witch—‘a dark, shapeless thing, at which dogs howled in rage and in fear’.⁶⁸ Such Gothicism is reminiscent of Scott’s. However, the most interesting Gothic passages in Harold occur around the dream-like scene in which the hero is tricked into promising England’s crown to William, while at the French court. Harold becomes feverish, seeming to float ‘between a delirium and a dream’, speaks with ‘automaton lips’, and afterwards is horrified to see the reality of what he has sworn on: ‘from church, from cyst, from shrine . . . there lay, pell mell and huddled, skeleton and mummy—the dry dark skin, the white gleaming bones of the dead’.⁶⁹ The dangerous mental confusion caused by Catholicism here is reminiscent of a very different novel— Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, published just five years later, in which an English traveller similarly finds herself alone and vulnerable in a Catholic country. As with that novel, I would suggest, the use of the Gothic in Harold should be read not simply as the continuation of a long anti-Catholic tradition begun in fiction by Walpole and Lewis in the eighteenth century and continued in Scott, but more specifically as a reaction to the increasing presence of Roman Catholicism in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, following the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in , the publication of the Oxford Movement’s Tracts for the Times in the s, and the high-profile defection of John Henry Newman to the Roman Catholic Church in . This led, as Denis Paz has revealed, to a surge in popular anti-Catholicism in England, which manifested itself in lurid newspaper accounts of forced conversions, coerced death-bed bequests, and sexual scandals.⁷⁰

H: T L   S K

.................................................................................................................................. Bulwer-Lytton’s depiction of Edward the Confessor’s ‘fanatical piety’ in Harold should also probably be read in relation to this anxiety about Catholicism in the s— though Edward had been castigated as excessively pious since the late eighteenth century (in Ann Yearsley’s  Earl Goodwin he is ‘so chill’d by penance and abstemious rule / That his weak spirit dares not look abroad’).⁷¹ In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, similarly, the king is enfeebled by religion. He is surrounded by ‘imposters’ and

⁶⁸ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁶⁹ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, , . ⁷⁰ See Susan Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Diana Peschier, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Brontë (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard (eds), European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, ); Denis G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ). ⁷¹ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, ; Ann Yearsley, Earl Goodwin (London, ), .

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‘relic-venders’ who rejoice about the ‘hold’ they have over him.⁷² He buys relics rather than repairing defences.⁷³ And England’s enemies observe that ‘the martial spirit of the Saxon is half rotted away in the subjugation to a clergy not brave and learned, but timid and ignorant’.⁷⁴ Importantly, the clerics surrounding Edward are not merely Roman Catholic, but also Norman. Whereas in Scott’s novel, the character of the Normanized Saxon Wilfred of Ivanhoe embodies ‘Scott’s Tory belief in the possibility of retaining the best of one society while gradually shifting to another’, we see a very different view of the effects of Norman acculturation in Harold, where it is the contact that the king has with Norman culture which is ultimately responsible for the defeat of the nation.⁷⁵ It has been stated that in Harold the Norman Conquest is presented as ‘in the long run an act of renewal’.⁷⁶ However, Bulwer-Lytton was far more ambivalent in his depiction of  than was Walter Scott. Although he states in the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ that Norman chivalry was ‘the noblest type’ of ‘that spirit of adventure, enterprise, and improvement’, the novel itself often undercuts the Tory image of Norman improvement.⁷⁷ Bulwer-Lytton’s William the Conqueror is made more malicious and less glorious than the figure who appears in the novelist’s source material. Where William of Malmesbury had stated that Duke William allowed Harold an honourable burial, Bulwer-Lytton’s William proclaims that Harold must not be buried.⁷⁸ And where Wace had stated that William cut down Gurth—the last warrior standing by the Saxon standard—Bulwer-Lytton denies the Norman duke this glory, asserting that Gurth was not ‘conquered by the Norman sword, but exhausted by a hundred wounds . . . the falchion vainly pierced him, falling’.⁷⁹ Bulwer-Lytton also chose as the name of his most noble Norman ‘Mallet de Graville’, a figure whom tradition stated was the son of a Saxon mother.⁸⁰ And he dedicated five full pages of the novel’s notes to denouncing Norman chroniclers such as the ‘grossly ignorant’ William of Poitiers, and to arguing that Harold was lawful in rising to the throne.⁸¹ Most suggestive of all, though, is the image of the future ruin of Battle Abbey, which undercuts the descriptions of the Norman victory in the book’s concluding chapter: The sun had set . . . on that spot where now, all forlorn and shattered, amidst stagnant water, stands the altar-stone of Battle Abbey, rose the glittering dragon that surmounted the consecrated banner of the Norman victor.⁸²

⁷² Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, , . ⁷³ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁷⁴ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁷⁵ Chandler, Dream of Order, . See Bulwer-Lytton’s description of the effeminate, Normanized Atheling on p.  of Harold. ⁷⁶ James Watt’s Chapter  in this volume. ⁷⁷ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, , . ⁷⁸ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁷⁹ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁸⁰ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁸¹ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, –;  for the main denouncement of William of Poitiers. ⁸² Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, .

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The rise and fall of Battle Abbey links to the novel’s famous concluding question: ‘eight centuries have rolled away, and where is the Norman now? Or where is not the Saxon?’ As previous critics have observed, the disaster of  is turned into ‘the tragedy . . . of Harold, not of England’.⁸³ But that does not mean that Bulwer-Lytton viewed the Conquest itself in positive terms.⁸⁴ If Bulwer-Lytton was not as convinced as Scott that the fusion of Norman with Saxon had been a positive development in England’s history, he was however interested, as we have already seen, in the amalgam of Danish and Saxon cultures that had contributed to modern English identity. The second chapter of Harold opens by celebrating the Danes as ‘a magnificent race of men’ whose invasion ultimately introduced to Britain ‘the noblest elements of civilisation’.⁸⁵ This, as discussed earlier, was part of a long tradition of interest in Britain’s hybrid Saxon-Danish heritage, which had first been popularized in the eighteenth century. In particular, however, BulwerLytton stresses the Danes’ ‘passion for freedom, individual and civil’, in an interesting development of the more usual argument that the Kentish men, derived from Jutes, were the fiercest lovers of liberty in Britain.⁸⁶ And he asserts that men in modern Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Cumberland are to be ‘noted for their intolerance of all oppression’ as a result of Viking invasion in those areas.⁸⁷ It is tempting to read such association of the Danes with civil liberties in the context of what was happening in European politics at the time of Harold’s publication. It was in January  that King Christian VIII of Denmark died, ending the Danish royal line based on male succession and consequently terminating Denmark’s claim to the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. And it was in March  that ministers in Copenhagen announced to the mixed German and Danish population of Schleswig and Holstein that the duchies were to be united with Denmark under a new constitution. This announcement was to lead to a revolt by the German inhabitants of the area, intervention by the army of the German Confederation, and eventually to the first (and then the second) Schleswig War. That Bulwer-Lytton was interested in these events (which came to dominate the British press in the s) from a pro-Danish position is suggested by the book’s warm praise for the Danes as a people who were ‘wonderfully pliant and malleable in their admixture with the peoples they overran’.⁸⁸ Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold should be read in relation to its historical context in other ways too. The s was when the Chartist movement was at its height, and the decade also saw concerted Whig campaigning for the abolition of the House of Lords. Harold intervenes in such debates about parliamentary roles in its critique of the membership ⁸³ Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, . ⁸⁴ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, ; Martin Farquhar Tupper, ‘Alfred Born at Wantage’, published in Ballads for the Times (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, ), . ⁸⁵ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁸⁶ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . On the Gothic orthodoxy that the Kentish men were the greatest lovers of liberty (because it was on the Kent coast that Hengist and Horsa had first set foot in Britain) see Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ⁸⁷ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁸⁸ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, .

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of the Saxon ‘Witan’ (a proto-Parliament) which includes ‘half a yeoman with just five hydes of land’ and ‘half an ealdorman with forty . . . some could boast the blood of Offa and Egbert; some traced but three generations back to neatherd and ploughman’.⁸⁹ This indiscrimination, Bulwer-Lytton suggests, contributed to the Saxons’ downfall, as did a lack of ‘reverence for ancient lines and hereditary names’ and ‘a vast mass of villeins or slaves that have no interest in the land or its rulers’.⁹⁰ As a response to Chartism, Harold should be considered alongside other medievalist works such as Thomas Carlyle’s  Past and Present, and in light of the s medievalist political movement, Young England. The book should also be read in relation to the mid- Victorian emphasis on the importance of marriage and chastity to the strength of the nation. Bulwer-Lytton was scrupulous in depicting Edith as Harold’s chaste, self-sacrificing, and ideally loyal betrothed, rather than as an (eventually forsaken) lover—as she was later presented in the German poet Heinrich Heine’s  poem, ‘The Battlefield of Hastings’, for instance, in which Edith recognizes Harold’s body by ‘three little scars she’d left there once / Three monuments to her bliss’.⁹¹ By contrast, when Bulwer-Lytton’s Edith sends Harold to the battlefield, ‘No embrace—no farewell kiss—profaned the parting of those pure and noble spirits— parting on the threshold of the grave. It was only the spirit that clasped the spirit.’⁹² Throughout Harold, attitudes to marriage are also used as signifiers of character and forewarnings of trouble. Edward’s weakness and unsuitability as king is introduced through his opinion of his wife as his ‘deadliest foe . . . a snare set on my bed’.⁹³ We realize that the Welsh king Gryffyth is doomed as soon as we witness his dysfunctional, loveless marriage.⁹⁴ And when Harold abandons Edith for a loveless diplomatic marriage, we are told that his fortunes declined, his ‘private life ceased’, and ‘the splendour vanished from Ambition—the glow from the face of Fame’.⁹⁵ In this respect, also, the book contrasts sharply with Ivanhoe. By Scott’s standards, the marriage of the Anglo-Danish Harold to the Anglo-Saxon Aldyth should have been an ideal union, just as Wilfred of Ivanhoe’s marriage to Rowena (decried by many nineteenth-century readers in favour of Rebecca) is ‘a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races’.⁹⁶ In championing marriages of love above social or political considerations, BulwerLytton’s novel sits alongside Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, and other novels of the midnineteenth century. Harold is also interesting as a mid-nineteenth-century novel in its innovative use of tense. At the climax of the Battle of Hastings, the novel shifts into the present tense: Yet, despite all, the English bear up . . . Every Norman who attempts to scale the breastwork is slain on the instant . . . The sun sinks near and nearer towards the

⁸⁹ ⁹¹ ⁹³ ⁹⁵

Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, –. Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, , .

⁹⁰ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, , . ⁹² Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁹⁴ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁹⁶ Scott, Ivanhoe, .

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 

red horizon. ‘Courage!’ cries the voice of Harold, ‘hold but till nightfall, and ye are saved’.⁹⁷

The narrative only switches again to the past tense after two pages of present tense, and in the second of Harold’s death as the arrow hits his eye. Bulwer-Lytton’s use of the present tense in Harold ranks alongside Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s The Wrongs of Women (), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (), and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House () as a remarkably early experiment with that style—yet unlike those other works the effects created by the tense in Harold have attracted little comment. Considering its use may, however, provide an interesting insight into Bulwer-Lytton’s aims in producing the novel. One effect of the present tense, of course, is dramatic or pictorial. Passages related in the present tense, when sandwiched by the past tense, possess heightened levels of realism and ‘stand out against the generality of history’.⁹⁸ However, as Patricia Ingham has persuasively argued, the main function of the present tense is not ‘liveliness’, but rather, ‘the authority it can claim for statements which are being made: an assertion that what is said is true at all times or even “timelessly true”’.⁹⁹ Considered from this perspective, Bulwer-Lytton’s use of the tense in his description of the Battle of Hastings performed the same function as his twenty-two pages of supporting notes. Writing against a mass of conflicting source material, it allowed him to assert to Victorian readers the authority of his version of the fall of Saxon England.

H  W: L   E

.................................................................................................................................. Bulwer-Lytton’s account of the Norman Conquest was influential on another AngloSaxonist novel, which was published eighteen years later. Attempting to divine what William the Conqueror’s reaction might have been on hearing of the recapture of York by Hereward the Wake, Charles Kingsley stated: ‘The genius of a Bulwer, in attempting to draw him, took care with a wise modesty not to draw him in too much detail . . . And still more modest than Bulwer is this chronicler bound to be.’¹⁰⁰ Although it is set in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest, rather than in the years leading ⁹⁷ Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, . ⁹⁸ Jennifer Green-Lewis, ‘Victorian Photography and the Novel’, in Lisa Rodenski (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, . On this see also Caroline Levine, ‘Victorian Realism’, in Deirdre David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁹⁹ Patricia Ingham, ‘Past and Present in The Mill on the Floss’, in Invisible Writing and the Victorian Novel: Reading in Language and Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ¹⁰⁰ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, .

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up to it, Kingsley’s novel has much in common with Bulwer-Lytton’s. The two books share a similarly dim view of the Roman Catholicism of the eleventh century. Kingsley had infamously accused John Henry Newman and the Roman Catholic Church in general of deceit and cunning in Macmillan’s Magazine in  (an exchange which culminated in the publication of Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua that same year).¹⁰¹ In Hereward, published two years later, it is perfidious Roman Catholic monks who betray the hero. We are told that, in dealing with the Normans, ‘the church had provided for herself by sacrificing the children beneath her fostering shadow’.¹⁰² And the Church is also criticized for accepting lands in exchange for indulgences. The narrator protests: ‘When we talk of the piety of our ancestors . . . we should always remember that this was what their piety too often signified.’¹⁰³ Hereward the Wake also shares Harold’s interest in and admiration of England’s Anglo-Danish heritage. The book represents the Danes as ‘the strength of England’.¹⁰⁴ And it makes Hereward as Anglo-Danish as possible, asserting that his mother was descended from Danes, that his father had an earldom which was ‘a Danish, not a Saxon title’, and that his father ‘though bearing a Saxon name, seems to have been the champion of the Danish party’—none of which are claims that are fully substantiated by the novel’s source material.¹⁰⁵ Like Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley was also keen to trace cultural continuity from the Anglo-Danish past to modern England. He asserted that it was Hereward’s ‘old outlaw spirit’ which made, ‘to this day, the life and marrow of an English public school’, and claimed that it was Anglo-Danish ‘local self-government’ which had ‘kept England free unto this day’.¹⁰⁶ Like Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley probably had political motivations for doing so: not only did the second Schleswig-Holstein War end only two years before the novel’s publication, but in  the Danish Princess Alexandra had married the heir to the British throne, Albert Edward, prompting several writers, including Tennyson, to emphasize enthusiastically the Danish component of British heritage.¹⁰⁷ The sanctity of marriage was as topical and important a theme when Kingsley wrote Hereward the Wake as it had been for Bulwer-Lytton writing Harold—this was just one year after John Ruskin’s lecture ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ had been published, extolling the importance of an ideal wife. Indeed, Kingsley’s novel is even more cynical than is Bulwer-Lytton’s about the sort of diplomatically convenient union seen in Ivanhoe. When Hereward’s daughter is married off to a Norman, the result is not a happy blending together of races, but domestic violence ‘as was the fashion in those chivalrous ¹⁰¹ On this see Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, –. ¹⁰² Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹⁰³ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹⁰⁴ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹⁰⁵ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, , . On the source material see Michael Swanton, Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, pp. xxi, . ¹⁰⁶ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹⁰⁷ Tennyson welcomed Alexandra at her coronation as a ‘Sea King’s daughter’, promising: ‘Saxon and Norman and Dane are we, / But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee’. On this see Joanne Parker, ‘Victorians, Dark Ages, and National Identity’, .

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days’.¹⁰⁸ And when Hereward leaves his wife Torfrida for a politically motivated marriage to Alftruda (a bride chosen for him by William the Conqueror), his strength disappears along with his good conscience. We are told that thereafter he ‘was not the man which he had been. His nerve was gone, as well as his conscience.’¹⁰⁹ As his life spirals downwards into a morass of regret and alcoholism, the narrator comments: ‘the grace of God had gone away from Hereward, as it goes away from all men who are unfaithful to their wives’.¹¹⁰ Interestingly, in the early twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi (or Life of Hereward), which was the main source for Kingsley’s novel, ‘many unfortunate things’ happen to Hereward after his separation from Torfrida not as divine justice, but more prosaically because ‘she had been very wise and good with advice in an emergency’.¹¹¹ The punishment endured by Kingsley’s hero is, therefore, not a medieval concept but rather the product of mid-Victorian morality. Hereward the Wake has been dismissed by critics as ‘simply an engrossment of the Gesta material’.¹¹² However, it is not merely over the question of Hereward’s retribution that the nineteenth-century novel differs from its sources in ways that relate to its own historical context. The novel omits the Life’s accounts of how Hereward’s mother was ‘dishonourably abused’ and of how his enemy’s head was thrust through a lavatory seat, making the text better ‘fitted for a modern drawing-room’ (one of Kingsley’s stated concerns in the book’s foreword).¹¹³ It also elaborates at length on the superstitious beliefs of its main characters: Torfrida, standing above the battlefield, is supposed by the Normans to be a witch; both Torfrida and Hereward ‘believe utterly’ that an inherited mail shirt and helmet are magical; and Torfrida has complete faith in the potency of love spells. None of these elements forms part of the twelfth-century life of Hereward: in that text, for instance, Hereward’s armour is simply ‘of great lightness and very fine workmanship’.¹¹⁴ Kingsley’s text, then (published the year after Sabine Baring-Gould’s popular collection of werewolf stories, and in the same year as Henry Charles Lea’s Superstition and Force) combines with its medieval material a typically mid-Victorian interest in irrational beliefs—though the frequent asides of its detached narrator prevent the text itself from becoming Gothic in the style of Scott or even Bulwer-Lytton.¹¹⁵ The depiction of different nationalities and consequently the identity politics of Kingsley’s novel is also a departure from its source material. The book’s celebration of Danes, for instance, is not based on the twelfth-century Life of Hereward the Wake: in that history, Hereward is accompanied only by ‘English’ troops while in hiding on the Isle of Ely, whereas in the novel he is specified to have had around him a company of ¹⁰⁸ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹⁰⁹ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹⁰ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹¹ Swanton (ed.), Life of Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹² Swanton, ‘Introduction’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, . ¹¹³ Swanton (ed.), Life of Hereward the Wake, , , ; Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, p. v. ¹¹⁴ Swanton (ed.), Life of Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹⁵ Kingsley’s narrator comments, for instance, about the story of Queen Elfrida’s magic: ‘Of all which let every man believe as much as he list’, .

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Danes.¹¹⁶ And although many of the Normans who figure in the medieval life of Hereward are treacherous, they do not commit atrocities as arbitrarily and delightedly as they do in Kingsley’s novel, where young girls and their mothers are butchered with careless amusement. Above all, rather than following the ending of the Life of Hereward, Kingsley’s novel works around it. At the conclusion of the eleventh-century text, the hero is ‘received into the favour of the king. And with his father’s land and possessions he lived on for many years faithfully serving King William and devotedly reconciled to his compatriots and friends. And thus in the end rested in peace.’¹¹⁷ By contrast, in Kingsley’s novel, Hereward’s reconciliation with William is temporary and regretted. The former outlaw is swiftly arrested on trumped-up charges and the narrator muses: ‘this was the wages of his sin. This was the faith of Frenchmen . . . . Hatred of William, and worse, hatred of himself, swept all the passions from his soul.’¹¹⁸ Ultimately Hereward escapes prison, but he does so only to be ambushed while asleep and butchered by Norman knights. Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake is not only more anti-Norman than its source material, it is also far more ambivalent about the value of the Norman Conquest than either Scott’s Ivanhoe or Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold. Dealing with the Tory claim that the Normans brought culture to Britain, Kingsley describes Norman civilization as ‘skin deep’ and has Torfrida tell the Normans: ‘There is not a man in this hall who is not a barbarian compared with [Hereward]. Which of you touched the harp with him? . . . Which of you knows all tongues from Lapland to Provence?’¹¹⁹ And tackling the belief that the Normans repaired neglected Roman roads, Kingsley argues that ‘the neglect of new roads, the destruction of the old ones, was a natural evil consequence of local self-government. A cheap price perhaps, after all, to pay for that power of local self-government.’¹²⁰ It has been argued that at the very end of the novel, ‘Old Northernism dissolves into Norman progress’.¹²¹ And the novel does end with the crowning of Henry Plantagenet ‘an English king . . . at last’ and with the happy union of Hereward’s granddaughter Torfrida with Richard de Rulos, ‘the first of the new English’ who drains the fens.¹²² However, this ending is presented less as a positive result of the Conquest and more as the gradual healing that comes inevitably with time. The final chapter of the book begins: ‘But war and disorder, ruin and death, cannot last for ever. They are by their own nature exceptional and suicidal, and spend themselves with what they feed on.’¹²³ And in the ‘Prelude’ to the book, Kingsley explicitly challenges the Scott-derived view that the Conquest was necessary in order for Britain to be united and civilized. He accedes ‘we have gained, doubtless, by that calamity’, but continues: ¹¹⁶ See, for instance, Swanton (ed.), Life of Hereward the Wake, ; Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹⁷ Swanton (ed.), Life of Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹⁸ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹¹⁹ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹²⁰ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹²¹ Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in th-Century Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ), . ¹²² Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, . ¹²³ Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, .

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to say that so it must have been; that by no other method could the result (or some far better result) have been obtained—is it not to say that men’s crimes are not merely over-ruled by, but necessary to, the gracious designs of Providence; and that—to speak plainly—the Deity has made this world so ill, that He is forced at times to do ill that good may come?

This challenging of the Tory myth that the Conquest was a necessary evil exemplifies the way in which literary Anglo-Saxonism developed through the nineteenth century, as the cultural and political contexts in which it was produced also shifted. By the s when Kingsley was writing, the modern English were far more generally and securely identified as non-Norman than they had been when Scott wrote Ivanhoe. To dismiss Victorian Anglo-Saxonist novels as simply derivative of Scott is, therefore, to ignore the important ways in which Britain itself changed during the Victorian period. The Anglo-Saxonist novels of the Victorian medieval revival are not simply interesting, however, for the light that they can shed on changing identity politics in the nineteenth century, or for the insight that they can provide into developing attitudes to issues such as gender, religion, or literary forms. They can also provide a valuable understanding of the roots of our contemporary culture. Of all the varied aspects of Victorian medievalism, literary Anglo-Saxonism was perhaps the one which fell most into disuse in the early decades of the twentieth century. With a few notable exceptions (such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s  radio play on the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon), Anglo-Saxonism became associated with racial supremacy, cultural intolerance, and the rise of fascism—so that between  and , fewer than a hundred AngloSaxonist novels were published, while works on Celtic and Viking themes numbered in the thousands.¹²⁴ In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, Anglo-Saxon subjects have begun to enjoy a renaissance in literature. Since , fourteen novels (including two trilogies) have been published about the life of Hereward the Wake, as well as Paul Kingsnorth’s Man Booker Prize long-listed work The Wake, in which Hereward haunts the life of the eleventh-century hero. Alfred the Great has also enjoyed new interest. In , Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom was published, followed by a further twelve books in The Saxon Stories series, set during and following the reign of Alfred. And in , the first two books in Cornwell’s series were serialized in a £m adaptation for BBC television, followed by an adaptation of books three and four of the series in . Both series aired to critical acclaim and to audiences in excess of one and a half million, and in  and  two further series, covering books five to eight, were produced by Netflix. These works of contemporary Anglo-Saxonism look back to the novels of the midnineteenth century in several important respects: in their suspicion of Roman

¹²⁴ In that period, more than , novels were published which were concerned with some aspect of the Arthurian legend, for instance. On the decline of Anglo-Saxonism in Britain in the early twentieth century see Parker, England’s Darling, –.

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Catholicism, in their depiction of lavish feasting, in their use of Old English (The Wake, notably, is written in a ‘shadow’ version of Old English) and in their interweaving of historical events and figures with apocryphal narratives. Above all, however, they are the progeny of the literary Anglo-Saxonism of the Victorian period in their emphasis (often noted by critics) on the hybridity of English identity and the complex processes of nation-building.¹²⁵ Cornwell’s hero is a Saxon who has been raised by Danes and alternates back and forth between both nations through the course of the series, wondering ‘Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?’¹²⁶ It was a question that was pertinent to Bulwer-Lytton and Kingsley’s readers, writing in a kingdom that had only been politically united for half a century, and at a time when there was keen debate about whether Britain owed allegiance to Denmark or to Germany in the Schleswig-Holstein conflict. And it is a question that continues to have relevance today, in a kingdom debating devolution within its own borders but also its continuing role in Europe. Until those questions are resolved, it seems likely that literary Anglo-Saxonism will remain with us, as one of the most topical and engaging facets of contemporary medievalism.

S  Frantzen, Allen J., and John D. Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, ). Knight, Stephen, and Thomas H. Ohlgren (eds), Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, ). Melman, Billie, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (July ): –. Parker, Joanne, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Parker, Joanne, ‘Brunanburh and the Victorian Imagination’, in Michael Livingston, The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, ), –. Scragg, Donald, and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Simmons, Clare, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Simmons, Clare, ‘Iron-Worded Proof: Victorian Identity and the Old English Language’, Studies in Medievalism,  (): –. Stafford, Fiona, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Swanton, Michael (ed.), Three Lives of the Last Englishmen (London: Garland, ).

¹²⁵ See, for instance, Patrick Smith, ‘The Last Kingdom: “This is the Making of England” ’, Daily Telegraph,  Oct. , ; and Sam Woolaston, ‘The Vikings are Here’, Guardian,  Sept. , . ¹²⁶ Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (London: Harper Collins, ), .

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T chapter focuses on selected objects particularly associated with the Arthurian legends as represented in a range of literary texts produced in the context of the Victorian Arthurian Revival. The ‘return’ of King Arthur to Victorian Britain was itself part of a broader fascination with all things medieval; by the s the legends had a ‘widespread currency’.¹ Arthurian themes were evident in a multiplicity of cultural forms, including the visual arts, interior decoration, memorials, political cartoons, and literature, particularly poetry. In Victorian popular fiction there are frequent Arthurian references and allusions, notably where the contemporary knight-hero is required to demonstrate his (or her) social worth. Within criticism on Victorian medievalism one of the key debates surrounds the relation of the literary artefact to material culture: the visual culture surrounding Alfred Tennyson’s Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, or the importance of physical form in William Morris’s Arthurian poetry. Elizabeth Helsinger, for instance, looks at the strategy of translating Arthurian matter (across media and pasts) used by Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.² Medieval literary devices, such as colour-symbolism to represent inner states, is evident in Morris’s early (Arthurian) poetry and in Pre-Raphaelite painting. What this chapter will contribute to critical debate in this area is a reassessment of the return of King Arthur through the altered cultural meanings of ‘matter’, with particular consideration given to objects, such as Arthur’s sword Excalibur, the Round Table, and the Holy Grail, which popularly define the legends of Arthur. Indeed, the Matter of Britain referred to both the group of stories surrounding Arthur and the ¹ Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, – (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), . ² Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).

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archaeological or physical relics of his supposed existence. In this respect the ‘historical’ evidence presented itself to, and was represented by, the Victorians as a multiplicity of remains. Writers remoulding this matter were often highly aware of the literary, legendary, topographical, and historical traditions already shaping the figure of Arthur. I am suggesting that a ‘way into’ reinvented Arthurian legends and their cultural meanings can be through individual objects and their placing in cultural discourse and literary text. As Thomas Westwood reminded readers of his poem The Sword of Kingship (), the legend of Arthur is also the ‘story of the magic sword’. I am not discussing objects as interrelated structurally or sequentially, or as sharing deep structural elements (for example, drawing on structuralist anthropology and literary theory). Nor am I interpreting objects as an entry point to the symbolic interpretation of myth (comparative mythology). Rather, I am interested in exploring what might be termed an architecture of ‘situated objects’ across Arthurian literary texts, informed by cultural geographers’ particular concern for ‘recuperating the spatial practices’ that may be detected within literary texts.³ This process brings the materiality of the text to the fore. I propose to investigate the extent to which Arthurian objects are exoticized or rendered part of fantastical (and actual) landscapes. In some Arthurian literary reworkings, the Arthurian artefact may not obviously return at all, or is recycled as ‘ordinary’, in a more familiar, domesticized setting. Jeffrey E. Jackson discusses the ‘curiously plural’ Excaliburs and ‘other Tennysonian swords’ which appear in Idylls of the King, particularly the image of swords shattering or breaking.⁴ This suggests that an exclusive focus on Excalibur as one thing might eclipse other usages and meanings and therefore detract from the cultural dynamics of an object integral to the Arthurian legends. Excalibur, although a martial weapon, also ‘functions more as an ornate objet d’art’ and as a cultural artefact.⁵ Moreover, Jackson draws attention to the strain in criticism on the Idylls which draws an analogy between Tennyson’s Arthurian project and the renowned sword. Excalibur—and its renunciation—is at the centre of both Tennyson’s project and Camelot’s (Arthur’s kingdom’s) fortunes. This ambivalence (or rather, fascination and anxiety) towards objects and material culture manifested itself in Victorian Britain in a variety of ways. Amongst a host of words used in the nineteenth century to describe ‘stuff ’ or miscellaneous, unspecified objects, ‘thingamajig’ perhaps encapsulated this confusion, since it refers to a person or thing whose name one does not know or has forgotten. ‘Things’ had properties and were perceived as having value—even, perhaps, agency. Of course the cultural meanings and forms of ‘matter’—the stuff generated by a particular culture—change

³ Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Barcelona: Gustaxo Gili, ), . Heidi Scott, ‘Cultural Turns’, in J. S. Duncan, N. C. Johnson, and R. H. Schein (eds), A Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . ⁴ Jeffrey E. Jackson, ‘The Once and Future Sword: Excalibur and the Poetics of Imperial Heroism in Idylls of the King’, Victorian Poetry, / (): . ⁵ Jackson, ‘Once and Future Sword’, .

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through recontextualization and over time. In contemporary culture a variety of ‘handcrafted’ Excaliburs are available to purchase online as ‘medieval collectibles’. The desire to market an authentic version of the medieval/Arthurian object is evident in the claim that all swords are reproduced ‘to the highest specifications of the original’. Excalibur (or a replica of) is the means by which we can ‘share the experience’ of the past, whether the object is displayed or used in medieval re-enactments. The discussion in this chapter is framed and informed by a broader contemporary cultural interest in object-based study and the semantics of making. Radio programmes such as the collaborations between the BBC and the British Museum (BBC Radio ’s ‘A History of the World in  Objects’ (), ‘Shakespeare’s Restless World’ (), and ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’ ()), for example, have illuminated cultural moments and histories by focusing on objects. Popular cultural interest is also reflected in recent movements in material culture studies and literary critical theory, where both have an interest in reading the world—or telling stories—through objects. For example, the Bloomsbury book series ‘object lessons’ looks at how seemingly innocuous things shape daily life. ‘Object narratives’, such as Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes () and The White Road (), recount journeys through particular landscapes (historical and geographical) via, respectively,  netsuke and porcelain.⁶ How can the materiality of specific objects and sites be transmuted in written text? Bill Brown addressed such a question in his studies of the intersection of material culture and literature.⁷ He was influenced—as he acknowledges—by Susan Stewart’s On Longing (), which investigates the relations of narrative to object, and the metaphors (the miniature, the gigantic) used to discuss these.⁸ In the ‘thing theory’ articulated by Brown, an object becomes a ‘thing’ when it is made to stand out from its world; that is, when we find the subject in and through the object. In other words a thing is an object animated by ideas. Of particular relevance to the discussion here, though, is Brown’s assertion that the place things occupy is also important.⁹ In terms of objects and Victorian culture, there are various interdisciplinary studies which look at the objects of literature and other ‘sites’. The two most popular areas where such studies are evident are, according to Jennifer Sattaur, the ‘social importance of food, and the cultural discourses surrounding interior decoration’.¹⁰ Sattaur provides a useful summary of interdisciplinary criticism where objects are primarily analysed as they appear in literature (especially Victorian realist novels). Suzanne Daly’s The Empire Inside () looks at Indian commodities in domestic novels as implicated, ⁶ Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (London: Chatto & Windus, ) and The White Road (London: Chatto & Windus, ). ⁷ Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Things, special issue, Critical Inquiry, / (): –, and A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). ⁸ Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). ⁹ Brown, Sense of Things, . ¹⁰ Jennifer Sattaur, ‘Thinking Objectively: An Overview of “Thing Theory” in Victorian Studies’, Victorian Literature and Culture, / (): .

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amongst other things, in debates about Britishness.¹¹ In The Ideas in Things () Elaine Freedgood interprets the things scattered in Victorian realist novels as social hieroglyphics, arguing that readers of the time would have been distanced from material culture.¹² Isobel Armstrong (Victorian Glassworlds, ) utilizes literary readings as part of an armoury of approaches to understanding the symbolic, metaphorical, and practical significance of glass as a transitional marker.¹³ In considering Arthurian objects, culturally reinvented, this discussion takes into account questions of scale, form, and aesthetics (Stewart), as well as location, setting, and place (Brown). Phenomenology makes us question whether the object/thing distinction is indeed a simple one. Entities are the result—and parts—of relational (socio-material) networks. In some of the Arthurian texts and contexts discussed here, difference is highlighted between the solidity of the object described and shifts in space and scale. Additionally, the notion of traces developed by cultural geographers (informed by the work of phenomenologists) is useful here. Things and locations are defined in relation to each other, and through movement. Nigel Thrift refers to a kind of ‘aesthetically disposed’ materialism which is different because, through exploring the poetic dimension, it ‘extends the imagination into matter’ rather than seeing the two as distinct. Equally, the ‘new sense of materiality’ challenges divisions between space and time.¹⁴ So rather than interpreting medievalism and its effects (property) as solely part of commodity culture, I am interested in thing theory as it relates to the objects of Victorian Arthurian literature and culture. Material remains, as has been much debated, were a pre-eminent source of knowledge about the past for the Victorians, and new disciplines such as historical archaeology drew on this. As well as the British Archaeological Association and Archaeological Institute, there were forty-one county archaeological societies, half of them established between  and . Membership of these national and local societies spanned classes and this, together with affordable rail travel to locations, facilitated the democratization of ‘stuff ’. It is interesting to note that, of  articles published between  and  in the three national archaeological periodicals (Archaeologica; Archaeological Journal; Journal of the British Archaeological Association), . per cent were concerned with topics from the medieval period onwards.¹⁵ Part of the popular interest in the medieval also concerned the consumption of imitation ‘ancient’ objects, such as jewellery (similar to the online purchase and use of replica merchandise, mentioned previously). The reproduction of the objects of ¹¹ Suzanne Daly, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). ¹² Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). ¹³ Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) ¹⁴ Nigel Thrift, ‘Performance and Performativity: A Geography of Unknown Lands’, in J. S. Duncan, N. C. Johnson, and R. H. Schein (eds), A Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. ¹⁵ Billie Melman, ‘The Power of the Past: History and Modernity in the Victorian World’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, ), .

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medieval culture is directly relevant to discussion of the return (reproduction) of King Arthur in Victorian culture. With this in mind, it is illuminating to dwell on Brown’s discussion, in A Sense of Things, of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (). Twain (author of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ()) meant The Prince and the Pauper to be a realist version of medieval culture. It is, though, a specific cultural object in the text—in this case, the Great Seal—which becomes a totem (or ‘thing’): ‘secular and sacred, mortal and immortal, physical and symbolic, individual and collective’.¹⁶ Brown discusses nineteenth-century American literary texts which ask us to think about how and why we use objects to make meaning and reinvent ourselves. More specifically, how we give manufactured objects a metaphysical dimension. This was particularly pertinent in a context when ‘the invention, production, distribution and consumption of things’ defined a national culture.¹⁷ Manufacturing is, in a sense, a repeated production, and the fascination with the return of Arthur in nineteenth-century Britain can be seen as an extension of this. Megan Morris discusses the preoccupation with the reproduction of Arthur’s body (with its material accoutrements we might add), whatever form this might take.¹⁸ Indeed, in the poem The Epic: Morte d’Arthur (), Tennyson made clear that Arthur and his knights were at the centre of Victorian debate about ‘remodelling models’. Morte d’Arthur was written in – following the death of the poet’s close friend Arthur Hallam (The Epic frame came four years later) and later became ‘The Passing of Arthur’ () in Tennyson’s complete Idylls. In this process itself, as well as in its content, the poem/idyll highlights cultural concerns about transitions and transmutations. Visual spectacles, such as the Eglinton Tournament (held in Ayrshire on  August )—and its material cultural effects—provided examples of how the medieval past could be (however comically) reclothed and bodied forth. The Tournament was already a re-enactment of a fictional tournament, that of Ashby-de-la-Zouche as described in Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (). The opening of Samuel Pratt’s armour showrooms in Lower Grosvenor Street, London, meant that the modern ‘knights’ (or ‘Arthurs’) could be supplied with materials and suitably attired. However, the tournament became renowned for what could be interpreted as an over-literal and impractical remodelling of historical models; when it rained, knights, lords, and ladies struggled simultaneously with leaking armour and umbrellas. In Victorian Britain the figure of the knight with his trappings (such as swords, chain mail, helmets, and armour) became a cultural artefact, reproduced in popular fiction, educational material, paintings, tapestries, ceramics, stained glass, trophies, and as domestic objects. The knight has since been the focus of exhibitions which encourage visitors to appreciate armour for its social and aesthetic purposes as well as its martial one. Knights: Chivalry, Romance, Legend held at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne ( September – February ) included a range of artefacts, whilst the ¹⁶ Brown, Sense of Things, . ¹⁷ Brown, Sense of Things, . ¹⁸ Megan Morris, ‘ “Recalled to Life”: King Arthur’s Return and the Body of the Past in NineteenthCentury England’, Arthuriana, / (): –.

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permanent exhibition Knights! at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, includes pieces from a range of cultures and periods. Cultural forms and events such as these remind us that Arthur was marketed and the Arthurian legend commodified as part of popular culture. In this context, Excalibur and the Round Table stand out: as Elizabeth Sklar has pointed out, these objects in particular ‘have acquired sufficient cultural resonance to qualify as effective marketing vehicles’.¹⁹ Excalibur featured in a television advertisement (which has become a parodic ‘classic’ in its own right) for Carling Black Label lager and been used to promote places (for example, Wales) as ‘legendary’ lands of inspiration. Excaliburgers can be literally consumed around the site of Tintagel in Cornwall—a site, as David Matthews argues, with literary and legendary associations, but where there is almost nothing Arthurian for visitors to see.²⁰ Although Tintagel was played down in Tennyson’s work, it was identified in the mid-nineteenth century as an Arthurian location needing to be preserved. In contemporary communication studies the Round Table is used as a metaphor for successful collaboration (perhaps somewhat ironically, given the prominence of the collapse of Arthur’s ‘team’ in Victorian Arthurian texts). The matter of Britain reinvented and packaged in the twenty-first century as cultural heritage—or as part of gaming culture, mainstream film, or fantasy literature—stems from the renewed interest in the forms of Arthurian legends in nineteenth-century Britain. In the main Arthurian medieval source which the Victorians turned to—Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (c.)—Arthur’s sword is primarily martial and associated with ‘heroic’ killing. The History, a conscious fashioning of a national epic, had been translated into English in  by Aaron Thompson, and a new, revised edition by J. A. Giles was published in . Inspired by Archbishop Dubricius’s rousing speech (the call to arms) Arthur and his men rush to arm themselves before attacking the Saxons. Arthur’s ‘peerless sword . . . Caliburn’ is very much part of a ritual arming involving the donning of a leather jerkin, golden helmet with dragon crest, circular shield (Pridwen), and spear (Ron). Arthur, in this history, dispatches  men with the sword, each killed with a single blow. However, the key moments in the Arthurian legends focused on the sword, and which were recognized by nineteenth-century writers and artists, were the pulling of the sword from the stone (as depicted in Walter Crane’s painting) and Excalibur being received from, or returned to, the Lady of the Lake (as in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration ‘How Sir Bedivere Cast the Sword Excalibur into the Water’ (–)). These ‘actions’ surrounding an Arthurian object were given renewed significance in the cluster of new editions of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur () published in  and . The relatively inexpensive editions were aimed at a ¹⁹ Elizabeth S. Sklar, ‘Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of Arthurian Legend’, in Elizabeth S. Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman (eds), King Arthur in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), . ²⁰ David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ).

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popular audience and helped to expand the readership for Arthurian material. Moreover, the cultural fascination with these pivotal moments in the story of Arthur revealed contradictory social and cultural attitudes towards the idea of kingship, emblematized by Arthur’s sword. Yet the nineteenth-century Arthurian Revival, in keeping with the principles of medievalism, adopted and adapted notions of chivalric behaviour. In this sense Arthur was held up as a model of such behaviour, throughout his journey to kingship. A good illustration of this is Thomas Westwood’s lengthy poem The Sword of Kingship: A Legend of the ‘Mort d’Arthure’ () which develops the story of Arthur’s birth; his upbringing by Sir Ector and Dame Iseult; the drawing of the sword Excalibur from the anvil; his coronation and his founding of the Round Table. The blank verse, as with Westwood’s poem The Quest of the Sancgreall, reveals the influence of Tennyson, and Westwood draws on archaic language and biblical references. Highlighting the fact that the chivalric romance writers established a parallel between King Arthur and Christ, Westwood makes an explicit connection between Excalibur and the Round Table; he is retelling the story of the ‘magic sword’ and of ‘Arthur Builder of the Table Round’. The sword itself—the edges of which bear the legend ‘Whoso plucks me from my place is England’s rightful king. Amen. Amen’—is emblematic of ‘kingly wisdom’. The poem is primarily concerned with Arthur’s rite of passage to being accepted as the rightful king; an apt narrative for any modern-day hero’s initiation into, for example, a particular place in society or the role of defending the empire. Westwood creates a visually dramatic, timeless setting, where solid matter can disappear in a trice: ‘King Arthur, God’s Elect, draw forth the sword!’ And lightly stepp’d he, lightly drew the sword, And having drawn it, lo! a luminous star Rose in the heaven, and brighten’d as it rose, And broaden’d, till the fane was full of light. And in that sudden glory men were ’ware That, from their station by the altar side, Anvil and stone had vanish’d like a dream. ()

The disappearance of solid objects mentioned here draws attention to the magical or fantastical aspects of the Arthurian legends, as well as to nineteenth-century debate about the ‘substance’ of Arthur himself. The rehabilitation of relics (textual or archaeological) as some kind of evidence of Arthur articulated a broader cultural crisis of historicism: how to revive the details of an ‘authentic’ Middle Ages if that history was already mediated through other perspectives and in other forms. The process of historical recovery, whilst satisfying a need for sensuous experiences of the past, was itself a reminder of the impossibility of recreating a cohesive or definitive Arthurian past. In Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Bedivere’s confusion in his attempts to cast Excalibur away, at the request of Arthur, expresses the cultural anxiety around the stability (or otherwise) of historical evidence. Dazzled by the highly wrought beauty of Excalibur as an artefact, Bedivere wishes to preserve rather than discard it, and thus

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retain a record or relic of his lord for future generations. Tennyson has Bedivere refer to keeping Excalibur in ‘some treasure-house’, directly invoking cultural debate about how to display the medieval past in historical museums. Related to representing the past spatially was the question of the positioning of the subject. Perspective on—or how to view—a particular object is explored in a distinctive way in Thomas Miller’s History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (). Here, Excalibur is the only evidence of Arthur’s historical substance and yet it appears in a ghostly vision (which can thus be questioned). Although Miller does not, ultimately, doubt Arthur’s existence, the terms in which he articulates this are unique among nineteenth-century support for an historical Arthur. Miller represents Arthur as an armed phantom, standing at sunset. The sword Arthur points is highlighted as a symbol of leadership and defence of the land against the impending darkness. However, this vision is uncertain and insubstantial; thus, the solidity of the sword is questioned. In common with papers presented to local literary societies—and resultant publications such as J. R. Clarke’s King Arthur ()²¹—Miller’s text places more emphasis on cultural cycles and the reinvention of Arthur, than on historical evidence. An awareness that the matter of Britain, reinvented, provided ample opportunities for reflective commentary on present times coexisted with a persistent desire for materiality to be rendered with historical accuracy. For example, William Dyce conducted extensive research to establish details of armour and costume when he was commissioned to paint Arthurian frescoes (–) for the Queen’s Robing Room in the Palace of Westminster.²² When portraying Guenevere and Iseult for her translation of The Mabinogion (–) Lady Charlotte Guest was keen to get the details of their riding attire right, not least in order to convey that they rode side-saddle, as befitting ladies. Attention to detail in the rendering of Arthurian objects is evidenced in the prominence given to the supposed inscription on Excalibur (and other swords). Interestingly, nineteenth-century writers, historians, and cultural commentators repeated—or invented—written text which marked the sword (either on the blade or around the hilt). Partly this focus provided reflective commentary or narrative impetus. In Algernon Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (), King Mark’s grief at the deaths of Tristram and Iseult is prompted by the discovery of the words written around the hilt of Tristram’s sword; the truth about ‘the sinless source of all their sin / No choice of will, but chance and sorcerous art’ (ll. –). Yet the inscription on Excalibur can be interpreted as having a greater resonance in relation to the Victorian Arthurian Revival as a whole. In Tennyson’s idyll ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (), the words on the sword (huge and cross-hilted) given to Arthur by the mystic Lady of the Lake embody the paradox inherent in dealing with objects of ‘value’ or of cultural and historical significance: whether to hang on to them, or let them go. The bright, bejewelled ²¹ J. R. Clarke, King Arthur: His Relation to History and Fiction (Gloucester: John Bellows, ). ²² Simpson, Camelot Regained, .

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Excalibur—‘bewildering heart and eye’—takes on an agency seemingly beyond the text. Moreover, the sword’s pleas to ‘Take me’ (written on one side of the blade in the world’s oldest language) and to ‘Cast me away!’ (inscribed on the other side, in contemporary vernacular) embody the drive to remake things. As Debra Mancoff comments: ‘Even the charge that Tennyson inscribed on Excalibur indicated that to fulfil the legend was to change it’.²³ The cultural significance afforded Excalibur (an actual sword, said to be of that name and found at Glastonbury Abbey, had been carried by Richard I as he rode to the Third Crusade) was also evident in Victorian efforts to recreate it. A stage sword Excalibur (c.) by Edward Burne-Jones was made for Henry Irving, appearing in the play King Arthur. The centrality of Excalibur to the matter (and Matter) of Britain is apparent in, for example, twentieth-century media reports: Christine Poulson cites the story of the Druid, Arthur Pendragon, being reunited with his ceremonial sword Excalibur, after it was confiscated by police.²⁴ At the same time the objects or relics which structure Arthurian legend had symbolic value for Victorian Britain. In King Arthur: His Relation to History and Fiction (), initially a lecture given to the Gloucester Literary and Scientific Society, J. R. Clarke appropriates Excalibur as a symbol of justice and patriotism as British soldiers prepare for military action. This was in the wake of recent Afghan and Zulu Wars () and preceding the first Anglo-Boer War (). To Clarke, Excalibur, with its ‘jewelencrusted scabbard’ and sharp blade, represents the ‘glorious’ British army. In a wider sense, the Empire was viewed in Britain as both authoritarian and libertarian, and referred to as both ‘sword’ and ‘shield’. The military importance of swords declined during the Victorian period, although they were still used in combat. Rather, swords as physical objects were visible as part of ceremonial uniforms and expected to conform to official patterns (for example, Gothic hilted swords carried by officers). In the context of discourses surrounding the model of the Victorian gentleman as a ‘knight of the Empire’, the quest for the Holy Grail (and the grail as object) took on a particular significance. Additionally, the quest was seen by Victorian Arthurians as being inextricably linked to the fortunes of the Round Table (and all that it represented) formed by Arthur and his knights. Characteristically, Victorian writers (including Tennyson in his final reworking of the grail story in the Idylls) portrayed the quest as destructive to the Round Table and thus to social order. However, the grail itself (in whatever form) was predominantly regarded as unifying, the implication being that the achievement of the ‘object’ of the quest would bring religious fervour and social cohesion to Britain. Social unity was a key aspect of the ideological basis of medievalism and the grail a symbol of medievalism’s desire to mitigate the upheaval of revolutions (industrial, social, and scientific). It can be argued that the grail is the object at the crux ²³ Debra Mancoff, ‘To Take Excalibur: King Arthur and the Construction of Victorian Manhood’, in Edward D. Kennedy (ed.), King Arthur: A Casebook (New York: Garland, ), . ²⁴ Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), .

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of contradictory attitudes in the Arthurian Revival towards the question of materiality. Similarly to Excalibur, the grail is an aesthetically pleasing treasure (bound up with cultural debates about relics, display, and the cult of collecting), yet it brings with it an explicit spiritual dimension. Nineteenth-century writers play on the grail’s dual nature (as object and vision), constructing it as both a treasure to be obtained externally and reclaimed as a national relic, and a way of seeing. The popularity of Tennyson’s early Arthurian poems Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenevere contributed to the predominance of the grail quest (as well as the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere) as themes in Arthurian literature of the s. Indeed, within the cultural discourses of heroism the Arthurian knights Galahad and Lancelot embodied the idealized yet destructive nature of the Arthurian quest for the grail (and for chivalrous love). William Morris’s Sir Galahad, in common with other Arthurian poems published in The Defence of Guenevere (), addresses the relationship between an individual’s quest for self-realization or vindication and a hostile, fragmented society. Similarly, the anonymous author of the blank-verse narrative Arthur’s Knights: An Adventure from the Legend of the Sangrale (revised edition ) views the grail quest as a challenge to the ideology of chivalry. Galahad and the grail legend were also the most popular Arthurian subjects in visual art of the s, notably works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti’s design ‘Sir Galahad at the Ruined Chapel’, produced for the illustrated Moxon edition of Tennyson (), was later carried out in watercolour and illustrated Tennyson’s Sir Galahad. More than ‘illustrate’, though, the image (watercolour and body colour with areas of gum Arabic on paper) evokes the synaesthesia of Tennyson’s poem: the sounds (disembodied voices, ringing bell, chanting), scents (implied incense), and sights (the contrast between gleaming tapers, altar-cloth, and sparkling silver in the ‘secret shrine’ and the dank, dark forest). Spatially, the objects and heads are cramped, jostling on a plane visually divided into three (and reminiscent of the notion of fragmentation). Unusually among nineteenth-century Arthurians, the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker saw the quest for the Holy Grail as reinforcing the greatness of Arthur’s order. In the unfinished poem The Quest of the Sangraal (), published five years before Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’ idyll, the Round Table is represented as the crucial link between heavenly and earthly lives, whilst it is clear that attaining the grail will legitimate Arthur as Prince of Tamar. Crucially, I would suggest, the mystical symbol of the grail is inseparable from a distinct regional identity based on place (Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, north Cornwall). The poem’s opening chant establishes the spiritual robustness necessary for an undertaking of the quest, at the same time ritualizing the landscape and implying that ‘transubstantiation’ of the four knightquesters (an imaginative reworking of Malory) and the land they inhabit is a distinct possibility. Hawker’s Arthur and his knights, whilst represented as military heroes, are clearly modelled on the Victorian muscular Christian (missionaries). Interestingly, a link between the continued cultural and spiritual relevance of the quest for the Holy Grail and the figure of the muscular Christian is later drawn by J. R. Clarke, in King Arthur: His Relation to History and Fiction. Overlooking the more explicitly social

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aspects of muscular Christianity, Clarke nonetheless implies that such gentlemen (and any student of the past) have much to learn from the spiritual symbolism of the Arthurian legend and the grail in particular. Overall, the grail (as object and quest) became increasingly secularized in nineteenth-century fictional reworkings of this aspect of the Arthurian legends. Joseph Henry Shorthouse’s novel, Sir Percival: A Story of the Past and of the Present (), as a late, significant reworking, reveals a complexity of approach to interpreting the grail. Initially, the text appears to privilege the material object—it is Arthurian objects (or fragments of ) which drive the action or provide a parallel narrative (the story of Sir Percival from Le Morte d’Arthur is interwoven with the contemporary story). Significantly, Caxton’s black-letter folio of Le Morte d’Arthur is the treasure which inspires the narrator, Constance Lisle, to reimagine the present. Cultural relativity is complex given that the narrator is, from the modern perspective of some time ‘before ’, already reconstructing a ‘past’ when she stayed in England with a distant, aristocratic relative at the country estate of ‘Kingswood’ and met Percival (who is due to inherit). Whilst Constance is fixated by a fragment of antique glass depicting the knight Parcyvale, the contemporary knight, now Lieutenant Sir Percival Massareen, is awarded the Victoria Cross for rescuing a wounded comrade in Egypt. Yet rather than the modern version of the ‘grail’ as a material thing dominating, far more emphasis seems to be placed in Sir Percival on the landscape, and a rural, nostalgic version of England. Given the social mission of Anglicanism in the s, and the highlighting by social commentators of the need to reform inner-city areas, the imaginative association of the grail quest with a sanitized version of modernity (whereby, for instance, a cluster of new factories is sidelined) becomes even more acute. Instead, the English landscape is imagined as historically and spiritually continuous and is the site, I would suggest, of material and perceptual transformation. Constance and Percival witness the landscape changing and ‘strange forms’ () rising—at the same time as they are described as angels.²⁵ The text suggests that awareness of the spiritual and mystical dimensions of place (an ‘otherness’ juxtaposed against the distanced ‘otherness’ of an African landscape) can be regarded as more culturally valuable than, say, holding the grail as vessel or chalice. The notion that the transfigurative powers of the grail, rather than its status as an object, are more socially significant is evident in other Arthurian texts, such as Westwood’s The Quest of the Sancgreall (). In Westwood’s poem the quest for the grail is seen as alleviating social fragmentation in the present. Moreover, the privileging of the landscape in and through which the quest takes place is seen in a number of nineteenth-century Arthurian texts. For example, in the blank verse poem Sir Lancelot: A Legend of the Middle Ages () Frederick William Faber describes the

²⁵ Joseph Henry Shorthouse, Sir Percival: A Story of the Past and of the Present (London: Macmillan, ), .

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region of the Westmorland mountains (contrasting them with more ‘exotic’ southern European landscapes). In doing this Faber aims to root Christian theology in the details of a natural landscape. In a similar manner, the landscape in Shorthouse’s novel directly links the medieval past to the Victorian present: ‘this forest, this wild, tossing woodland, this dark sky, is what the knights often saw in their quest’.²⁶ As mentioned earlier, the grail was viewed by Victorian commentators as intrinsic to the fortunes of the Round Table (and thus to the brotherhood of knights), an interpretation exemplified in the Idylls. Yet Tennyson makes explicit the gap between human—and social—aspirations and achievement, since Arthur insists that his knights are bound by chivalric vows which they will not be able to keep. In order for chivalry to be widely regarded as relevant to Victorian society, it needed to be remodelled. More specifically, the ideal of chivalry itself—rather than the material objects with which it had traditionally been associated—was reformulated. Thomas Whytehead draws attention to this in the comment on his sonnet ‘Deem not the lack of lance and waving crest’ in Poems (): ‘one should not assume that chivalry has departed / merely because [lances] are no longer visible / for the chivalrous ideal has been transmuted’. The notion of the ‘once and future king’ returning to save Britain in a time of peril was particularly prevalent in the ‘hungry forties’, and by the s the Victorian gentleman-knight had become a cultural icon, appearing in popular fiction, manufacturing (aligned with the figure of the ‘Captain of Industry’), sports activities and clubs, and educational establishments (through the decoration of school buildings, for example). Victorian gentlemen as returned Round Table knights were deemed heroes by virtue of their social and public achievements as well as through self-conduct. In other words, the ethic of service was crucial. In Arthurian texts the metaphor of the Round Table (as a brotherhood of knights) is sometimes adapted for a nineteenthcentury domestic setting, giving the Arthurian legends a more direct appeal and, to an extent, democratizing them. In Christiana Douglas’s novel Arthur (), the gradual disintegration of a bourgeois, domestic idyll (the modern ‘Camelot’) is brought about by the ‘hero’ Arthur (Caldicot) having an affair with an actress. The narrator draws a direct parallel with Round Table knights initially, it seems, to lament the decline of chivalry. Notably, it is the visibility (or not) of material evidence—steel armour in this instance (as Whytehead had cited the lance)—which is taken as a marker of a culture’s chivalric worth. However, in a sentimental twist, the narrator of Arthur remarks that the ‘chivalry of the heart’ can exist without armour and ladies’ favours: Mr Duncan Black, the ‘middle-aged iron-master’, is the new, industrial incarnation of the chivalric spirit. Chrétien de Troyes, writing for the Champagne court between about  and , is understood to have been the first to name Camelot as the site of Arthur’s court and to view the Round Table as the centre of chivalry. The formation of the Order of the Garter in  was influenced by the chivalric brotherhood of the Round Table, and a

²⁶ Shorthouse, Sir Percival, .

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‘Round Table’ pageant became a popular entertainment for nobles during the reign of Edward III. In nineteenth-century Britain, particular interest was taken in the huge wooden disk known as ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ (built in the reign of Edward I) and its setting in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle. The investigations carried out by archaeologist Martin Biddle and his team in  revealed that Edward III had the top hung in the castle hall and that Henry VIII had it painted and used the figure of Arthur to support his dynastic claims. As Biddle makes clear, the ‘perennial vitality’ of the legend of Arthur is partly due to ‘its peculiar richness of powerful structuring images, which are at once brilliantly articulate and open-ended’.²⁷ The Round Table is a key focus in this respect, since it binds together disparate ‘histories’ of the legend. Three years after the publication of Douglas’s Arthur, and in the context of ongoing cultural debate about the restoration of the matter of Britain, T. H. Wyatt ‘took’ the Round Table down from the east wall of the Great Hall in Winchester and rehung it on the west wall. The resituating of the object was seen as crucial to the change of ‘setting’ as part of the restoration of the Great Hall. Wyatt described the restoration process in a paper given to the Royal Institute of British architects on  April .²⁸ I have argued elsewhere that the concept of ‘bodying forth’ the material dimensions of the past was central to medievalism, whereby the ‘wearing’ of historical dress, such as armour (or, we might add, the spatial (re)positioning of an Arthurian object) meant a remodelling of both material form and cultural sensibility.²⁹ Taken collectively, the objects of Arthurian legend as they appear—and are handled—in Victorian culture are thus more than decorative. In the case of Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry, the reinvention of a medieval/Arthurian past was in part perceived as the construction of a vivid, fantastical world, although this was often achieved through a rendering of the ‘actual’: a detailed attention to materials and materiality (in terms of both execution and form). Cultural attitudes towards the status of diverse Arthurian remains are frequently expressed in nineteenth-century Arthurian writing through objects such as a monument, tomb, or tapestry. Such objects can be interpreted as articulating the instability of art’s attempts at representing the past. In Algernon Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (), for example, the lovers’ tomb housed in a chapel built by King Mark as a memorial to Tristram and Iseult is far from a permanent historical record. The chapel, made with an abundance of branching tracery and built so that it should not fall, is eventually swallowed by the sea. The spatial practices revealed in Matthew Arnold’s three-part poem ‘Tristram and Iseult’ () further address the question of historical perspective. In part two of Arnold’s poem the narrator distances the reader from Arthurian characters at the moment of transformation, to the extent that we view the lovers Tristram and Iseult of

²⁷ Martin Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ), . ²⁸ Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table, –. ²⁹ Inga Bryden, ‘All Dressed up: Revivalism and the Fashion for Arthur in Victorian Culture’, Arthuriana, / (): –.

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Ireland as if they are painted icons; art objects framed and lit by moonlight. As Iseult of Ireland dies: She sinks upon the ground;—her hood Had fallen back; her arms outspread Still hold her lover’s hands; her head Is bow’d, half-buried, on the bed. O’er the blanch’d sheet her raven hair Lies in disorder’d streams; and there, Strung like white stars, the pearls still are, And the golden bracelets heavy and rare, Flash on her white arms still. (ll. –)

At the point of hypostasis the lovers become static, lifeless figures. The seeming mutation of matter is emphasized by Arnold having a huntsman, woven into the tapestry in the chamber, look down and comment on the scene: What place is this, and who are they? Who is that kneeling Lady fair? And on his pillows that pale knight Who seems of marble on a tomb? (ll. –)

Through a focus on materiality the text prompts us to reflect on the territory of the ‘object’—whether it ‘stands out’ from or ‘blends into’ the scene/history. This also necessitates a wider consideration of the cultural and social relevance of the ‘medieval’ to the present. For Victorian readers of ‘Tristram and Iseult’ materiality would also have resonated in terms of the materials needed for, and produced by, industrialization. While Tristram and Iseult become the matter of art and legend, Arnold suggests (in part three) that people’s spirits are being transformed: ‘No, ’tis the gradual furnace of the world / In whose hot air our spirits are upcurl’d / Until they crumble, or else grow like steel—’ (ll. –). Parallels between the chivalric/Arthurian and the industrial are also found in Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ () where, as critics have commented, Lancelot is described in terms befitting a steam train, and in Dinah Maria Mulock’s (later Mrs Craik’s) story ‘Avillion, or, The Happy Isles: A Fireside Fancy’ (), where ‘giant-steeds’ breathe smoke and flame. In the context of cultural explorations relating the literary artefact to material culture, the matter (as subject and remains) of Arthur’s death held a particular fascination for Victorians. The broader nineteenth-century perception of this aspect of the Arthurian legends drew on literary, archaeological, and topographical traditions. As such, contradictory cultural attitudes towards dealing with the death (and return) of the ‘once and future king’ are revealed, as represented in Tennyson’s version of Avalon (the distant isle where the dying Arthur is transported to) in Morte d’Arthur. The supposed location and placing of the body (object) become problematic if the place of rest is both specific (geographical) and non-specific (otherworldly). As Simpson notes, the frequent references to the island as ‘Avalon’ in the s can be linked to the

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popularity of Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology ().³⁰ Yet Tennyson’s Avalon is associated with the features, recognizable to contemporary readers, of an idealized, rural, landscape: meadows, orchard-lawns, bowery hollows. Such a place, bound up with national identity as in Shorthouse’s Sir Percival, is both actual and mythical: shaped in earthly terms, it also signifies an already disappearing English landscape. The ‘history’ and stories of Arthur were discussed as archaeological subjects by nineteenth-century county historians, antiquarians, and travel writers (as William Camden had treated the Arthurian legends as artefacts in Remaines of a Greater Work concerning Britaine ()). Thus, they were afforded a status equal (if differently formed) to material fragments unearthed at British archaeological sites. In ‘Avillion’ Craik draws attention to knights’ bones being trodden over by the inhabitants of a commercialized, mid-century Britain, at a time when ‘quests’ were being undertaken to possible locations of Arthur’s grave. Summaries of visits Victorians made to Arthurian sites, together with inventories of the objects found there, are included in the indices to the Journal of the British Archaeological Association (), the Archaeological Journal (), and the Archaeologia (): evidence of the ongoing process of excavating Arthur. The ‘return’ of Arthur can be understood as a continuum also in the sense of matter being (re)claimed as cultural capital, or heritage. The remains of Arthur and Guinevere, supposedly discovered in Glastonbury Abbey cemetery (in about ), under a lead cross inscribed ‘hic iacet sepultus inclitus rex Arturius in insula Avalonia’, were displayed as symbols of a heritage claimed by the Plantagenets. Crucially, the supposed exhumation and display of relics at Glastonbury initiated a series of royal visits to the site and subsequent fictionalized accounts. As acknowledged in Archaeologia,  (): , the ‘timely discovery or invention . . . of the bones’ helped ‘draw a large concourse of pilgrims, and brought much gain of money to the abbey’. Recent print and broadcast media interest in a four-year archaeological project at the Abbey has, similarly, highlighted the way in which Arthurian relics, and the story attached to them, were ‘invented’ by ‘monks on the make’. When we look across Victorian Arthurian texts and cultural practices, it becomes apparent that Camelot (Arthur’s city/court), like Avalon, embodies a variety of attitudes towards materiality and the status of Arthur in contemporary Britain. Camelot was an elusive memorial, as epitomized by Tennyson in the idyll ‘Gareth and Lynette’ () where the city appears and disappears in mist when Gareth first sees it. However, a seer suggests that the city is also ‘real’ and to Tennyson’s urban readers it is likely that Camelot was very much a place of substance. This chapter has focused on an architecture of ‘situated objects’ across a range of Arthurian literary texts, cultural representations, debates, and practices. In a sense the attempt to reclaim the ‘object’ as a way into the Victorian Arthurian Revival reflects the processes which sought to reinvent Arthurian matter and the Matter of Britain. At the

³⁰ Simpson, Camelot Regained, .

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

same time, it is clear that drawing distinctions between the object (or thing) and its context—or place of occupation—is not straightforward. As Brown suggested, an object becomes a ‘thing’ if it stands out from its world. The cultural resonance of objects predominantly associated with the Arthurian legends, such as Excalibur, the grail, and the Round Table, has ensured that those objects articulate contradictory social and cultural attitudes (for example, towards monarchy and empire in the case of the sword) and that they are reproduced in a variety of forms. However, it is interesting to note the extent to which the Arthurian artefact in question does not obviously ‘stand out’ in Victorian literary remodellings of the legends. Instead, the material object is downplayed and transformed, becoming part of a broader place or space (whether the landscape in Shorthouse’s Sir Percival, or the domestic setting in Douglas’s Arthur). Moreover, the seeming ‘disappearance’ of solid objects (for example, the anvil and stone in Westwood’s The Sword of Kingship, Camelot in Tennyson’s ‘Gareth and Lynette’, or the merging of forms in Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult) draws attention to nineteenth-century uncertainty about the ‘substance’ of Arthur himself. It could be argued that Victorian Arthurian texts are an assemblage of codified objects, with those objects referencing and reinterpreting earlier sources of the Arthurian legend, whilst also pointing to complex social change and material cultural encounters. The writers discussed here certainly use ‘little things’ to tell ‘big stories’. Indeed, in some of the Arthurian texts and contexts discussed, the solidity of the object described is contrasted with, and set against, shifts in space and scale. The ‘big story’ in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s twelve-book epic poem King Arthur () is contemporary geology’s transformation of the universe. Informed by Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of Geology () (a popularization of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (–)), Bulwer-Lytton envisages Arthur as a ‘type’ of fame, replicated from age to age. Arthur journeys through a landscape of geophysical relics, formed from the remains of cities and ancient ‘giant’ races, learning from the different races he encounters. The nineteenth-century reader was thus invited to participate in an act of historicalcultural relativism, although any sense of the medieval is rather overshadowed by the cumulative effect of a montage of cultures, races, and empires. Set in the context of a seemingly borderless and elemental landscape and ‘haunting’ the visionary procession of monarchs (book ), Arthur paradoxically attains a solidity through replication and imprint, whilst being diminished in size. Through extending the imagination into matter, Bulwer-Lytton’s epic reflects the work of nineteenth-century geologists who recognized the mind’s ability to recover and reform the vast time-scale of the physical world. I would suggest that this finds a parallel in the ‘aesthetically disposed’ materialism defined by contemporary cultural geographers, whereby spatial practices are recuperated and divisions between space and time challenged. As Arthur ‘passes’ in Tennyson’s idyll ‘The Passing of Arthur’, he returns to a land (Lyonnesse) of fragments of forgotten people and ever-shifting sand: a land which has risen from, but will return to, the abyss, since things and locations are defined in relation to each other, and through movement.

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S  Biddle, Martin, King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ). Brown, Bill, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Bryden, Inga, ‘All Dressed up: Revivalism and the Fashion for Arthur in Victorian Culture’, Arthuriana, / (): –. Jackson, Jeffrey E., ‘The Once and Future Sword: Excalibur and the Poetics of Imperial Heroism in Idylls of the King’, Victorian Poetry, / (): –. Matthews, David, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Melman, Billie, ‘The Power of the Past: History and Modernity in the Victorian World’, in M. Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, ), –. Poulson, Christine, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle – (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ). Sattaur, Jennifer, ‘Thinking Objectively: An Overview of “Thing Theory” in Victorian Studies’, Victorian Literature and Culture, / (): –. Simpson, Roger, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, – (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Sklar, Edward S., ‘Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of Arthurian Legend’, in E. S. Sklar and D. L. Hoffman (eds), King Arthur in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), –. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).

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 Exhibition , 

A A Dream of John Ball, see Morris, William Abelard, Pierre ,  Abbey Mills Pumping Station – Aberystwyth  academic disciplines Archaeology , , , –, ,  fn, , , ,  fn,  Art History , , , ,  Acton, Lord John –, ,  fn Aeneas , ,  Ælfric ,  fn, , , , , ,  Catholic Homilies , ,  fn Grammar and Glossary  Africa , –,  Albrecht Dürer , – Alfred, king of England ,  fn, , , , , , , , , , , , , –,  Ælfredi regis res gestæ, see also Parker, Matthew ,  The Life of King Alfred, see also Spelman, Sir John , ,  allegory  fn, , , , ,  Allen, John Romilly  Allingham, William  anatomy, see dissection The Anatomy Act , ,  fn Ancien Régime , , , ,  Angelico, Fra , , ,  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle –, ,  fn, , ,  The Anglo-Saxon Meteor ,  Anglo-Saxonism , , , , , , –, –, –

Anglo-Saxons Archaeology ,  Art ,  Sculpture , –, – Annals of the Four Masters  antiquarianism , , , , , , , , , , , –, ,  Archaeologia , ,  Architecture, see also Gothic Gothic , , , , , , –, –, , , , –, –, , , , –, , , –,  Neo-classical , –, , ,  vernacular , – Arndt, Ernst Moritz  Arthur, King , –, –, , , –,  Arthuriana  artist , –, , , , , , , ,  Arts and Crafts movement, see also guilds , , , , , , , –, , , –, –,  Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society  Ashbee, Charles Robert , – Ashbee, Janet ,  Asser (Life of King Alfred)  associationism  Atkinson, Robert  Auë, Hartmann von  Aumale, Henri Duc d’  ‘auto-icon’ –, 

B Baillie, Joanna  Bale, John  Ball, John 

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



Ballad, see also poetry , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , ,  Balzac, Honoré de – Bangor (Caerns.)  Barbauld, Anna ,  Baring-Gould, Sabine ,  Barrett Browning, Elizabeth ,  Barthélemy-Hadot, Marie-Adèle (Les Brigands anglais ou la bataille de Hastings)  Bartholin, Thomas – Battle of Balaklava  The Battle of Dun na nGedh and the Battle of Magh Rath  Bazalgette, Sir Joseph  Bayeux Tapestry  Baudelaire, Charles  Beardsley, Aubrey –, –,  Beauvais, see also cathedrals ,  Bede, the Venerable , , , , ,  Ecclesiastical History of the English People  fn, ,  Bédier, Joseph  Bengal –, –,  Benson, Thomas (Vocabularium AngloSaxonicum)  Bentham, Jeremy –, –,  The Bentham Project  Beowulf , , , , , –, , –, , –, , , , ,  Bertram, Charles – Bertrand, Aloysius (Gaspard de la nuit)  Birdwood, George  Bishops’ Bible  Bismarck, Otto von – Blackstone, Sir William  Blake, William , , , , , ,  blending , , , , , , , , , , , ,  ‘Blind Harry’ ,  ‘Blue Books’, see Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales

Boccaccio, see Italian literature: Boccaccio body , , –, , –, , , , –, , , , , , ,  and materialism , – and surveillance – starvation, decay, and death, , , –, –,  and mysticism  saint’s bodies , – Bonaparte, Napoleon (First Consul of France –; Emperor of France –, ) , ,  fn, ,  Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon (President of Second Republic of France –; Emperor of France –)  fn,  Bossan, Pierre  Braddon, Mary Elizabeth  Brazil  Brendan, St  Brentano, Clemens – Brian Boru, King , – Brittany –,  The Church History of Brittany – Brontë, Charlotte  fn, , ,  Browne, George Forrest , –, – Bruce, Robert the  Brut y Tywysogyon  Brutus , , , , ,  Bryant, Sophie  Buchanan, Robert , ,  Burges, William  fn, , –, , , , ,  burial societies – Burne-Jones, Edward –, , –, –, –, –,  fn, –, , , , ,  The Beguiling of Merlin  and Chaucer  King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid  painted wardrobe for William and Jane Morris – The Merciful Knight  Burne-Jones, Georgiana MacDonald –, , ,  fn, 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 Burns, Robert  Burschenschaften, die 

C Calverley, Revd William , – calligraphy ,  Cambrian Archaeological Association  Cambrian societies  Cambridge Apostles ,  Cambridge, University of  fn,  fn, , , – fn Corpus Christi College  fn, , ,  Lectureship in British and Saxon Antiquities  Camden Society , –, , , –,  Camden, William ,  fn, , ,  Britannia ,  Cameron, Julia Margaret  Cange, Charles du Fresne, sieur du  Carcassonne, see Castles Cardiff ,  Carlyle, Thomas , , ,  fn, ,  fn, , , ,  fn, , , , , , , , , , ,  and Bentham –, , – and chivalry , , , and Godwin – and labour  and Samson of Tottington (Abbot of Bury, St Edmunds) , , – Past and Present ,  fn, , , , , –, ,  Cashel, Cormac’s Chapel  castles Alnwick  Carcassonne  Cardiff  Chantilly  Coch  Dover  Goring  Kenilworth , – Lowther  Penkill  Pierrefonds 



Tintagel  Torquilstone , ,  Vincennes  Winchester –, ,  Cathal Crobderg, King  cathedrals , , –, , , , , , , , , , –,  ‘cathedral of sewage’ – in Africa , – in Australia and New Zealand –, – in the British Isles , , , ,  fn, , , , , , , ,  in France , , –, ,  Vézélay, Abbey Church of  Paris, Cathedral of Notre-Dame  Saint-Denis, Basilica of  Rouen, Cathedral of  Beauvais, Cathedral of ,  Sainte-Clotilde, Basilica of (Paris)  Sacré Coeur, Basilica of (Paris)  Fourvière, Basilica of (Lyon) – Saint-Séverin, Church of (Paris)  in Germany (Cologne Cathedral) , , , – in India – in North America , – In Sri Lanka  Catholicism, see also church , , –, , , , , –, , , , , –, , –, , , , ,  fn, , , , , ,  Caxton, William –, , , , , , –, ,  Cecil, Sir William ,  ‘Celtic’ , , , , , , , –, , –, , , ,  fn, , ,  ‘Celtic Church’ , ,  fn, ,  fn,  fn, Celtic revival / ‘Celtic Renascence’ , –, , – Celtic scholarship  fn,  cemeteries –,  Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin  Certeau, Michel de 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi





Cesair, granddaughter of Noah  changefulness , ,  Chadwick, Edwin –,  The Practice of Internment in Towns  Charles X (King of France –)  fn,  Chartism , , , ,  Chateaubriand, Francois-Réné de ,  Le Génie du Christianisme ()  Chatterton, Thomas (‘Rowley’ poems) , , –, , ,  fn, Chaucer, Geoffrey , , , –, , , , , , , , , – fn, , , ,  Book of the Duchess  Chaucer for Children ()  Kipling’s interest in – and nationalism – and painting – scholarship on , , –,  ‘Scottish Chaucerian’  The Canterbury Tales , –, , ,  Troilus and Criseyde  Chile , –,  Chivalry , , , , , –, , , ,  fn, , , , , , ,  ‘age of ’ ,  Anglo-Norman chivalry ,  and Chaucer  and gender , ,  Irish chivalry  and Romance (genre) – Scottish chivalry – Victorian representation of –, , , –, –, –,  Choay, Françoise – Church, see also Catholicism , , , , , , ,  Church of England (Anglican) , , –, –, –, –, , , , –, –, –, –, –, , –,  fn, ,  fn,  disestablishment of  church restoration –, – Churches, see cathedrals Civil Constitution of the Clergy () 

Civil War, English , , , , –, , ,  civilization, Gaelic  Claudel, Paul  Clisset, Philip  Clontarf, battle of , ,  Cath Cluan Tarbh (‘The Battle of Clontarf ’)  Cluny, Abbey of –,  fn Cluny, Musée de, see Museums Cobbett, William –, –, , , , , ,  Codex Amiatinus (Florence: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatianus ) – cognitive process , –,  Coke, Sir Edward  Collège de France  Collingwood, William Gershom –, , –, –,  fn, , , – colonialism, see also Gothic (style): colonial architecture and neocolonialism ,  Columba, St ,  Comité des arts et des monuments ,  Commission des monuments historiques ,  commodity fetish ,  communism ,  conceptual metaphor , –, –,  Conquest, English ,  conservation , , ,  contact zone  Conwy  Conybeare, John J. , , –, –,  Conybeare, William D.  Cook, Thomas  Costello, Louisa Stuart ,  fn, –,  Cottin, Sophie (Mathilde)  Cotton, Sir Robert  fn, ,  courtly love –, , ,  craft , –, –, , –, –, –, , , 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 craftsmanship , , , , , –, , , , ,  Craik, Dinah Mulock , , – Crichton-Stuart, John, rd Marquess of Bute  Crimean War , ,  Croisades, Les Salles des  crosses, stone , – Crossness Pumping Station – Crystal Palace, Sydenham ,  Cú Chulainn , ,  Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste de la , ,  fn Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie  Literary History of the Troubadours  Cymmrodorion, Honourable Society of  fn,  Cymru Fydd, see Young Wales cynghanedd 



Disraeli, Benjamin , , , , , –, –,  Sybil, or The Two Nations , , , –,  fn dissection – Donizetti, Gaetano (La Favorite)  double work of art ,  Douglas, Gavin  Doyle, Arthur Conan  Druids  Dublin , , , , – Trinity College ,  Catholic University  Dumas, Alexandre (La Tour de Nesle)  Dunbar, William ,  Dürer, Albrecht , – Duval, Amaury 

E D Dafydd ab Edmwnd  dance, see music Daniel, Samuel  Dante Alighieri see Italian literature: Dante Dasent, George Webbe –,  fn, , –, , ,  David, Gerard  Davis, Thomas ,  Day, John ,  de Laet, Johannes  de Vere, Aubrey  de Vere, Edward  Death Song of Ragnar Lothbrok ,  Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, The  D’Ewes, Sir Simonds  dialects, Old English, see also language  Diarmait Mac Murchada, king  Dickens, Charles , , –, , ,  Didron, Adolphe  Annales archéologiques  Didron, André  Diggers , , , –, –, ,  Disney Lectures in Art and Archaeology ,  Disney Leith, Mrs , 

Early English Text Society –, , , ,  East India Company , –,  Eco, Umberto , ,  École de chartes, L’ ,  École normale supériere, L’  École Pratique des Hautes Études, L’  Edda, poetic see Snorri Sturluson Edda, prose, see Snorri Sturluson Edward III, king , ,  Egill Skalla-Grímsson  Eglinton, John  Eiríkr Magnússon ,  fn, ,  fn,  fn, ,  fn, , , ,  eisteddfod , , ,  Eliot, George , , , – Elizabeth I, queen of England , ,  Elizabeth Melville  Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries ,  Ellis, George ,  Elskamp, Max  Elstob, Elizabeth  fn,  An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St. Gregory  The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi





Elstob, William  Elton, Oliver  fn Embroidery , , , , ,  Emmerich, Catherine  Essex House Songbook, The  Evans, Theophilus – Exeter Book, The , , ,  fn

F Falconet, Camille  Fane, Violet  fantastic , , , , ,  fn, , , , ,  Fauriel, Claude  Fell, John  femme fatale ,  Fenians ,  Ferguson, Mary  Ferguson, Samuel  Fergusson, Robert  feudalism –, –, , –, , , , , –, , , –, , ,  Fiammetta –, –, ,  Fianna  Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  Finnsburh Fragment, The  Fionn Mac Cumhaill ,  forgery, see also ballads; Bertram, Charles, Chatterton, Thomas; Percy, Thomas , – Foucault, Michel –, ,  Discipline and Punish,  Fourtoul, Hippolyte  Fourvière, see also cathedrals – Foxe, John , –,  fn, ,  fn Francis, Philip – Franco-Prussian War ,  fn,  Fraser’s Magazine  fn, ,  fn,  fn, ,  fn Frederick the Great  Friðþiófs saga hins frækna (Frithiof ’s Saga)  Froissart, Jean , , , , , ,  Froissart’s Chronicles , ,  Furnivall, Frederick –, , , –, –,  fn, ,  fn, –, , , 

G Gaelic League ,  Gaillardet, Frédéric (La Tour de Nesle)  Gaimar, Geoffrey (Estoire des Englais)  garden , –, –, –, , , –, , , , , –, –, , ,  Garden City ,  Gaskell, Elizabeth  Gauls  Gautier, Léon  Gautier, Théophile ,  Gee, Thomas  Génin, François  Geoffrey of Monmouth (Historia regum Britanniae) ,  fn, , , –,  Germ, The  Gesamtkunstwerk ,  Gesta Romanorum  Gibbon, Edward  Gibson, Edmund ,  fn Chronicon Saxonicum  Gilbert, John T.  Gilbertfield, William Hamilton of  Giles, J. A. (Six Old English Chronicles)  Gladstone, William Ewart ,  Glencross, Michael ,  fn Godwin, E. W. ,  Godwin, William , ,  Caleb Williams – Essay on Sepulchres – Life of Geoffrey Chaucer ,  ‘On Religion’  Golden Legend, The –,  Gomer, son of Japhet  Görres, Joseph – gospels, Old English  Gossman, Lionel  Gothic Goths (medieval) –, , , , , ,  Gothic architecture (medieval) , , , ,  Gothic grammar and literature (Old English) , , –, , , –, , , –, – fn, , 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 Gothic literature (Romantic and Victorian) –, , –, , –, , –, , –, , ,  Gothic music  Gothic nationalism and politics –, –, –, , , – Gothic revival architecture (neo-Gothic), see also cathedrals –,  fn, –, –, , –,  fn, , –, , –, –, –, , –, , , , , –,  and aestheticism; Arts and Crafts –, –,  and C. L. Eastlake – domestic – ecclesiastical –, –,  and G. G. Scott – international and global Gothic, see also cathedrals , –, – in America , – religious imperial architecture –, – secular colonial architecture – and Pugin, see also Pugin, A. W. N. – and Ruskin – secular – Gothic (style) , –, –,  fn, , , , , , –, , –,  Colonialism, climate and style – ‘gothicness’ and ‘gothickry’ ,  North and South European – in News from Nowhere – In Harold – Graham, Maria (Lady Maria Calcott) (Journal of a Residence in India, Letters on India, Journal of a Residence in Chile, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil) –,  Great Coxwell Tithe Barn – Great Exhibition (London) , , ,  Great Famine (Ireland)  Gregory I (the Great), pope , 



Pastoral Care, Old English translation of ,  Gregory, Lady Augusta ,  Griffin, Gerald  Grimm, Jakob , –, ,  fn,  fn, , , ,  Guéranger, Dom Prosper  Guest, Lady Charlotte , ,  Guilds Art Worker’s Guild (Society of Designer Craftsmen) , – The Century Guild,  Guild of Handicraft – Guizot, François ,  fn,  Histoire de la civilisation en Europe  Histoire de la civilisation en France  Gurney, Anna  Gurney, Hudson –,  fn,

H Haggard, H. Rider ,  King Solomon’s Mines – The Saga of Eric Bright Eyes –,  Hastings, Warren ,  Hávamál  Hawkshaw, Ann  Hayward, Caroline  Hearne, Thomas ,  Heimskringla, see Snorri Sturluson Hello, Ernest  Héloïse d’ Argenteuil  Hemans, Felicia , , – Hennessy, William  Henry VII, King (Henry Tudor) , , ,  Henry VIII, King of England , , , , , , , ,  Henryson, Robert , ,  Herbert, William (–)  Herder, Johann Gottfried , –,  fn, , , , ,  fn Hereward the Wake, see Kingsley, Charles heritage conservation , , ,  Hervarar, see sagas: Icelandic Hexateuch, Old English , –

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi





Hiberno-Romanesque architecture, see also Gothic architecture – Hickes, George ,  fn,  Antiquæ literaturæ septentrionalis libri duo – Institutiones grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ, et Mso-Gothicæ  Hill, Christopher  historical biography  Höfuðlausn , ,  fn Home Rule Irish , – Welsh , ,  Hopkins, Gerard Manley , – fn, ,  houses , , , , , , , , , –, ,  Ashburnham House  Brantwood  Kelmscott Manor  Red House, , –, , , ,  Sir John Soane’s House  Somerset House  Strawberry Hill ,  Tower House  Howard, Ebenezer  ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ (Christopher Murray Grieve) , ,  Hugo, Victor , , ,  fn,  fn, – ‘La Bande noire’  Guerre aux démolisseurs!  Cromwell  Les Orientales  Hernani  Notre-Dame de Paris , ,  La Légende des siècles  Hull, Eleanor  Hunt, William Holman , , , , ,  The Light of the World  The Lady of Shalott – Hume, David  Hurd, Richard , , ,  Huysmans, J.-K.  Â Rebours () , –

Là-Bas ()  En Route ()  La Cathédrale ()  L’Oblat ()  Hyde, Douglas  Hywel Dda (the Good), King , 

I Ibsen, Henrik  Iceland , , , –, , –, ,  fn, ,  Illustration , , , – fn,  of Anglo-Saxon poetry – by Aubrey Beardsley ,  of Boccaccio  by Charles Eastlake  Chartist – and commodity fetishism  of Chaucer  of Dante  of George Forrest Browne , – Irish and Scottish – neo-medievalist , , ,  by Owen Jones – of paganism ,  of poets ,  by Pugin, see also Pugin –, , ,  by William Blake  by William Richard Lethaby  incunabula ,  India (Indian subcontinent) , , , , , –, , –, ,  internment practices – intersemiotic translation  Iolo Morganwg –,  fn,  Ireland , , , –, , ,  ‘ancient’ or ‘Celtic’ , –, –, , ,  fn,  fn art and architecture – Celtic or Irish revival ,  fn, ,  early Christian ,  fn, , – literature –, ,  and Thorkelin – and Young England –,  Irish Archaeological Society 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 Irish Industrial Exhibition (Dublin)  Irish Texts Society  Italian art and architecture , –, , , , –, , – Italian literature , , , , , , , ,  Boccaccio , –, –,  Dante Alighieri (Vita Nuova) , , , , , , –, , , , –, , –, 

J Jacobitism –,  James, Henry  James I , , , , ,  James V – Jameson, Anna ,  Jamieson, Robert ,  fn jewellery , , ,  Joan of Arc , , , ,  Johnstone, James (d. )  Jones, Owen , , ,  Jónsson, Runólfur (Grammaticæ Islandicæ rudimenta)  Joscelyn, John – Junius, Francis –,  fn Junius Manuscript ,  fn, , –

K Keats, John , , –, ,  Keble, John , , ,  Kells, Book of ,  Kelmscott Press, see William Morris Kemble, John Mitchell , , , , –, –,  fn, ,  fn, –, ,  kennings, in Old English and Old Norse verse ,  Ker, W. P.  Khnopff, Fernand  Kingsley, Charles ,  fn Hereward the Wake: Last of the English , –, , , –, – The Saint’s Tragedy  Westward Ho!  Krákumál 



L Laing, Samuel (–) , ,  Lamartine, Alphonse de  Lambarde, William –, , –,  fn, ,  Archaionomia –,  A Perambulation of Kent  Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (‘L. E. L.’) , – Lane, John  Language, see also translation  architectural and geological language –, , , , , ,  Asian and Dravidian (India) – and Chaucer – and forgery , ,  English and Irish (Gaelic) ,  and Norman French – and politics , , , ,  and Scottish , – and Welsh – of political economy  German , –, , ,  and music  and nationalism , –, , –, , , –, – Norman , ,  Old English (Germanic, Anglo-Saxon), see also Rask, Rasmus and Thorkelin, Grímur Jónsson Oxford Saxonists – poetry , , –, – study of (philology) , , , –, –, – and religion – and politics ,  and ‘Viking tales’ ,  and Victorian novels , ,  Old Norse and Icelandic, see also Rask, Rasmus and Thorkelin, Grímur Jónsson Study of (philology) , , –, –, –, , –, , –

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi





Language (Cont.) poetic language, see also poetry –, , –, , , , , , , , , , , ,  visual language , , , , , ,  Lasino, Carlo  laws, Anglo-Saxon ,  Laxdla saga ,  fn, ,  fn Leigh Smith, Barbara  Leland, John –, , , ,  Lenoir, Alexandre , ,  fn, , ,  Lethaby, William Richard , – Architecture, Mysticism and Myth –,  Architecture, Nature, and Magic  ‘Of Beautiful Cities’ – A History of Gothic Art in England of   Eight Chapters on English Medieval Art: A Study in English Economics  Levellers , –,  fn,  Lévy-Dhurmer, Lucien  Leyden, John – Lilburne, John , – Lilja  Lindisfarne Gospels ,  L’Isle, William  fn, ,  fn Lloyd, John Edward ,  fn Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Llywelyn the Last) , ,  Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great) ,  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth , ,  fn, ,  fn, –,  fn, , , –,  Lorris, Guilliame de  Loti, Pierre  Louis, King of France XIV (–) ,  XV (–)  -Philippe (–) see Louis-Philippe Louvre, The, see Museums Lubbock, John  Luther, Martin , –,  Lutheran Church –

M Mabinogion, The , , , , –,  Macgregor, Helen  MacLaren, James  Maclise, Daniel (The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife)  Madden, Frederick , , , ,  fn Magna Carta –, , ,  Magnússon, Árni ,  Mallarmé, Stéphane – Mallet, Paul-Henri , , – Mallion, Jean ,  fn Malory, Thomas , , ,  fn,  fn, , –, , , , , ,  Mangan, Thomas Clarence  Manners, Lord John – Manuscripts London, British Library, MSS Additional , – (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle transcripts) London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B. iv (Old English Hexateuch) London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A. xviii (Laurence Nowell’s maps of Anglo-Saxon England) London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D. iv (Lindisfarne Gospels) London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho B. xi (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A. xv–A. xvi (John Joscelyn’s Old English dictionary) London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv (Beowulf manuscript) Marie de France  Marshall, Lady Augusta Eliza  Marshall, Thomas ,  fn, – Marx, Karl ,  Mason, William  Massenet, Jules (Esclarmonde; La Princesse lointaine) 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 materialism (and materialists) , –, , , , , ,  McCarthy, Denis Florence  medicine , –, –, – medieval hagiography  Memling, Hans – Mercure de France, Le  Mérimée, Prosper , ,  Merrill, Stuart – metalwork  fn, , –, ,  Metcalfe, Frederick  Meyer, Kuno  Meyer, Paul  Meyerbeer, Giacomo (Robert le Diable)  Michel, Francisque (Les Chroniques AngloNormandes) ,  Michelet, Jules (Histoire de la Révolution Française) , ,  Middleton, John Henry ,  Milesians  Mill, John Stuart  Millais, John Everett , , , –, –, ,  fn modernism , , , –, ,  Mommsen, Theodore  Montalembert, Charles Forbes Réné de (Histoire de sainte Élisabeth de Hongrie; Les Moines d’Occident)  Montesquiou, Robert de ,  fn,  Montfaucon, Bernard de  Montmartre, see Cathedrals: Basilica of Sacré Coeur Mont-Saint-Michel  Monty Python ,  ‘Moorish’ identity , , –,  More, Thomas ,  fn,  fn,  Moreau, Gustave (À Rebours)  Morgan, Richard Williams  Morris, Jane ,  fn, , , –, ,  Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company (also Morris & Co.) , ,  fn, –, ,  Morris, May , ,  Morris, William , –, , , , , , , , , , – fn, –, , –, , –, , 



A Dream of John Ball , , , –,  and Anglo-Saxon language and literature  and Arts and Crafts  and Boccaccio and Italy , –, –,  and Burne-Jones – and Celtic revival  and Chartism –, , ,  and Chaucer  and conservation – and France – and Germany and German literature  ‘How we live and how we might live’  and Iceland and medieval Icelandic literature , , –, , – Kelmscott Press , , , –, – fn, ,  La Belle Iseult  News From Nowhere , , , , , , , – Red House, , –, , , ,  and Rossetti  and Ruskin , ,  Signs of Change  Sigurd the Volsung – socialism and communism , , , – ‘The Blue Closet’ , –,  ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ , , –, , , , , , –,  The Earthly Paradise  ‘Tune of Seven Towers’  Mort d’Arthur, Le , ,  mural decoration  Murray, John ,  fn,  muse , , , ,  Museum , , , , , , , , –, , ,  of Alexandre Lenoir – of Alexandre du Sommerard 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi





Museum (Cont.) British Museum , , , , , , , , ,  Fitzwilliam  Louvre ,  fn,  Musée de Cluny (Musée national du Moyen Âge) –,  fn, , , ,  Musée de Monuments français – Museum of Northern Antiquities, Copenhagen  National Museum of Ireland  National Museum of Wales  Natural History Museum, Oxford ,  Ruskin’s St. George’s Museum, Sheffield  of Sir John Soane  South Kensington Museum/Victoria & Albert , , , , – music , , , , ,  antiquarianism and conservation – in art ,  dance and the music hall – medievalist opera – plain song/plainchant , , , , , , ,  fn, ,  Oxford Plain Song Society  Plainsong and Medieval Music Society ,  in poetry , , , , , ,  Musset, Alfred de  Rolla ()  Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, The 

N Nabis  narrative , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , –, –, –, ,  National Library of Ireland  National Museum of Ireland  National Museum of Wales  national revival ,  National Trust  neocolonialism , , 

neo-medievalism , , , –, , – postmodern  Nerval, Gérard de (‘El Deschicado’)  Newman, John Henry , , , , , , –, , –,  fn, ,  newness  News From Nowhere, see Morris, William Nicolson, William  Nibelungenlied , – Nightingale, Florence – Njáls saga, see also sagas –, , – Nodier, Charles (Voyages pittoresques dans l’ancienne France)  nonconformity , , , , , , –, , , –,  ‘Norman yoke’ , , –, , –, , , , , , , ,  Norse sagas, see also sagas and language and poetry and translations, , , –, , –, –, , , –, , , –,  Norway , , –, –,  fn, ,  Nôtre-Dame, Paris, see cathedrals Novalis ,  Nowell, Laurence –,  fn, , 

O O’Connell, Daniel ,  O’Curry, Eugene , ,  Odin (Woden) –, , ,  O’Donovan, John , ,  ogam alphabet  O’Grady, Standish James ,  Oireachtas  Opie, Amelia  opus anglicanum  Ordnance Survey (Ireland)  Orientalism , , ,  Orkney , ,  Orléans, Charles Duc d’  Orosius, Paulus (Seven Books of History against the Pagans) ,  Ossian , , , , , , , ,  fn

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 Owain Glyndŵr ,  Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The , ,  Oxford English Dictionary ,  Oxford (Tractarian) Movement , ,  fn, , , , , , , ,  Oxford Union , ,  Oxford, University of Lincoln College  Press  Queen’s College  University College 

P Paine, Tom , , , ,  painted furniture  painted glass  Palace(s) , , , , , , , ,  Carlyle’s ‘ice palaces’ – Crystal Palace ,  Versailles, of  Westminster, of , –, , , ,  Pankhurst, Christabel  Panopticon, –,  Paris, Gaston  Paris, Paulin  Paris Psalter , – Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury , , ,  Ælfredi regis res gestæ – The Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes  A Testimonie of Antiquitie , – Parker, Richard Barry Parnassians  Pater, Walter  fn, ,  fn, ,  Patrick, St  fn, –, ,  patriotism , , , , ,  Peasants Revolt –,  Percy, Thomas –, , ,  fn, , , , ,  Five Pieces of Runic Poetry , , ,  Reliques of Ancient English Poetry , , , , ,  Peringskiöld, Johan  Petrie, George , , 



Petropunk Collective, The  Pezron, Paul-Yves  Philological Society , ,  Phoenicians  Pierrefonds, see Castles  Plain song/plainsong/plainchant, see music Plato  pleasure , , , , , , –, –, , –, , –, , , , , –, , , , –,  Plume, La  Poetic Edda, see Snorri Sturluson poetics , –, ,  fn, Old English  Old Norse  Poetry (see also language and translation and sagas) –, , , , ,  Anglo-Saxon – and architecture – Arthurian –, , –, , ,  ancient (Old English, Icelandic, Danish, Old Norse) , , –, , –, , ,  ‘recycling’ Icelandic sagas – ballad revival –, – Blake – Italian –,  Chartist – Chaucer – forgeries , –,  French –, – German gothic –,  Gothic and graveyard poetry –,  Irish and Welsh language poetry/Irish and Welsh poetry – medieval and medievalist , , , , , , –, –, –, –, –, –, , – national and international identity , –, –, ,  of The Pre-Raphaelites, see also poetry: medieval and medievalist – political, see also poetry: Chartist –, , – Romantic , –, –, , – scholarship on , , –

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi





Poetry (Cont.) Scottish – supernatural  Tractarian  Victorian reception of medieval poetry –, , , –, –, –, –, –,  Poor Law, , , , , , , fn, Pope, Alexander  Pound, Ezra  Powel, David  Powell, Yorke F. – Pre-Raphaelites, The (PRB) , , , , , , , , , , –, , ,  Pre-Raphaelitism , –, – Press, Muriel , – Price, Thomas  fn Primitifs, Les  Primitivism  printing , , , , , , , , , – fn, , , –,  fn see also Kelmscott Press; Caxton Pryse, R. J.  Public Record Office (Ireland)  Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore , , , , , , , , –, –, , , –, , , –, –, , ,  Contrasts , , –, , , –, –, , –, , ,  True Principles , –,  Punch , , –, , –, , , – Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 

Q Quicherat, Jules  Quinet, Edgar (Merlin l’enchanteur) 

R Ramsay, Allan –, , – Rask, Rasmus , , –, , 

Rawlinson, Christopher (ed. The Old English Boethius (Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy) – re-writing , , , , –, , ,  Record Commission  Recorde, Robert  Red House, see Morris, William Redon, Odilon  Reenhielm, Jacob  Rees, Rice  Rees, William  Reeves, William  Reformation, Protestant , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , –, –, , , , , , , ,  Reichensperger, August ,  remediation –, – Rene of Anjou ,  Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales ()  Resen, Peder (ed. Old Norse texts)  Revolution Britain (The Glorious Revolution) ,  France (The French Revolution) , –, –, –, , , , , –, –, , ,  fn, , , ,  rhyme, poetic –, , , , –, –, , ,  Richard of Cirencester (De situ Britanniae) – Ridoux, Charles  Ritson, Joseph , –, –, , ,  fn,  Robertson, William – Robin Hood , , , , –, , – Robida, Albert – Rodenbach, Georges  Roland, Song of [Chanson de Roland]  Rolls Series , ,  Roman Catholicism, see Catholicism

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

 Romanesque (style) –, , , , , –, –,  fn, – Romania –,  Romans , , , ,  Rome , , –, , –, , , –, , , ,  fn,  Rose+Croix  Rosencrantz, Palaemon  Rossetti, Christina , ,  fn, ,  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel , , , , , –, –, –, ,  ‘Hand and Soul’ ,  ‘The Blessed Damozel’ , , –,  ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ ,  The Tune of Seven Towers  The Blue Closet – The Early Italian Poets , ,  ‘Songs of the Arts Catholic’  Rossini, Gioachino (Tancrède, Le Comte Ory)  Rostand, Edmond  Rouen, see cathedrals round towers ,  Royal Institution of South Wales  Royal Irish Academy , ,  Rudborne, Thomas  fn Ruddiman, Thomas  runes –,  Ruskin, John , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, ,  fn, , , ,  Bible of Amiens, The  Modern Painters  ‘Notes on the Present State of Engraving in England’  ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’  ‘Pre-Raphaelite Artists, The’  Seven Lamps of Architecture, The , ,  Stones of Venice, The (‘The Nature of Gothic) –, , , –, , , , –, ,  Unto this Last  Ruysbroeck, John van 



S St Pancras – Sæmundr the Learned , ,  Sacré-Coeur, see cathedrals sagas, Icelandic and Norse , , –, , –, –, , , –, , , –,  [Burnt] Njal, saga of / Brennu-Njals –, , – Egil’s saga ,  fn,  Eyrbyggia Saga , ,  Friðþiófs saga hins frækna , , – Gisla saga  Hervarar saga  fn,  King Olafr Haraldsson, saga of , – Laxdla saga , , ,  fn, ,  fn Orkneyinga saga ,  Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, The ,  Völsunga saga – ‘Waking of Angantyr, The’  Ynglinga saga  Saint-Denis, see cathedrals Saint-Sévérin, see cathedrals Sainte-Clothilde, see cathedrals Sainte-Maure, Benoît de (Chronique des ducs de Normandie)  saints, age of ,  Sammes, Aylett (Britannia antiqua illustrate) – Samuels, Maurice ,  fn, Samson of Tottington, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds , , – Sandys, William  Saxo Grammaticus (Gesta Danorum)  Schlegel, Friedrich ,  Schwabe, Carlos  Scotland , , , –, , , , , –,  fn, –, , ,  Scott, Gilbert , , , , –, , , ,  Scott, James Robert Hope  Scott, Sir Walter –, , , , –, –, –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  ‘An Abstract of the Eyrbyggja-Saga’ , 

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



Scott, Sir Walter (Cont.) Goetz of Berlichingen  Ivanhoe , , –, –, , , , , , , , –,  The Lady of the Lake ,  Lay of the Last Minstrel  Marmion , –,  Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border –, , , ,  Quentin Durward , , ,  Translations and Imitations from German Ballads  Scottish Text Society , – Selden, John , ,  Shakespeare, William , , , , , , , , , , , –,  fn, , , ,  Sheringham, Robert (De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio) – short story –, ,  fn, ,  simplicity , , –, , , , , , , ,  Siddall, Elizabeth –,  fn, –, – skalds, skaldic poets –, , , , –,  Smythe, George Sydney – Soane, Sir John  fn,  Solesmes, Abbey of ,  fn Sommerard, Alexandre du –,  fn Sorbonne, La (University of Paris)  Soulié, Frédéric (Le comte de Toulouse)  Social Democratic Federation  Socialism, see also Morris, William , , – Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings , ,  Society of Antiquaries , , , –, –,  Somner, William , , , ,  fn,  Antiques of Canterbury, The ,  fn Dictionarium Saxonico-LatinoAnglicum , ,  sonnet sequence  Southey, Robert , –, ,  fn, –, , ,  fn, ,  fn, , ,  Sir Thomas More –

Spanish empire , ,  Spelman, Sir Henry –, –,  fn, – Concilia ,  Spelman, Sir John (The Life of King Alfred) ,  Spence, Thomas , – Staël, Germaine de (De l’Allemagne)  statues , , ,  Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (Racine et Shakespeare)  Stephanius, Stephan (ed. Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum) – Stephens, George (–)  Stephens, Thomas  Stevenson, Robert Louis ,  The Black Arrow , –,  The Master of Ballantrae , , –,  Stokes, George  Stokes, Margaret McNair – Stokes, Whitley  Strawberry Hill, see Houses Street, George Edmund , ,  Strickland, Agnes – Snorri Sturluson –, –, , , – Heimskringla –, –, –, – Edda, poetic , , , , , –, , –,  Edda, prose , , , , , –, ,  Suffragette, The  suffragists  Swansea  Sweet, Henry , ,  Swift, Jonathan  Swinburne, Algernon , , , , –, –,  fn, –, , ,  fn, –, , – ‘The Swinburne Complex’  Triameron – Tristam of Lyonesse , , ,  Poems and Ballads , ,  Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards , ,  Chastelard  Symbolists  Symons, Arthur –

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

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T Talbot, Robert – tapestry , , , , , – ‘Tara’ brooch  Temple, Sir William  Tennyson, Alfred Lord , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, ,  Idylls of the King , , , , –, , –, –, – The Lady of Shalott –, –, –, , , ,  Teresa of Avila, Saint  Testimonie of Antiquitie, A, see Parker, Matthew Tewdrig, King of Gwent  Thierry, Augustin (Histoire de la Conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands) , ,  fn Tolkein, J. R. ,  The Grave  Thomas, T. H.  Thomson, James (B.V.) , , –,  Thorkelín, Grímur Jónsson (–) , , –, , , ,  Thorpe, Benjamin , –, –, –, ,  fn Thwaites, Edward – Todd, James Henthorn  Tone, Wolf  Translation, see also language , , , , –, –, ,  French ,  German , –,  fn, , Irish and Welsh , , , – Italian , –, –, Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Old Norse (Danish, Icelandic) –, –, –, , , , –, –, , –, –, –, , – of the Oxford Saxonists – Scottish – transubstantiation ,  travel writing , ,  Trench, Richard Chenevix , , 

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Trojans , , , , , – Twain, Mark (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) , ,  Turner, Sharon , , , , 

U udalism  Ulster Cycle  uncanny –,  Union, Acts of (Wales) – University of Wales  Unwin, Raymond  Ussher, James –, ,  utilitarianism (utilitarianists) , , , –, , ,  utopia , , –, –

V Valhalla  Van der Weyden, Rogier  Van Eyck, Jan ,  Venice , , , ,  Vercelli Book , – Verelius, Olaus  Verhaeren, Emile  Verlaine, Paul  Versailles, see Palaces Verstegan, Richard –, –, ,  A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence –,  Vézélay, see cathedrals Victoria, Queen –, , , , ,  Vielé-Griffin, Francis  Vigfússon, Guðbrandur (Gudbrand) ,  Vigny, Alfred de (Cinq-Mars)  Vikings , –, , , – Villon, François , , , ,  Vincennes, see Castles Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel , , –,  fn Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française . . . ,  fn Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français . . . ,  fn Entretiens sur l’architecture ,  fn

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/8/2020, SPi

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Virgil ,  Vitet, Ludovic – Volney, Count of (Les Ruines) ,  Völuspá  Voragine , ,  Victoria and Albert Museum Museum (V&A; South Kensington Museum) see museums

W Wagner, Wilhelm Richard ,  fn,  fn, ,  fn, , ,  Tannhäuser ()  Wales , , –, ,  Wales, Prince of ,  Walker, Obadiah  Wallace, William – Walpole, Horace see also houses: strawberry Hill , –, –, , ,  Wanley, Humfrey (Hickes’s Thesaurus) ,  Wars of Independence ,  Watercolour , –, , –,  Waterford  Waterhouse company (Dublin)  Watson, James ,  fn Webb, Philip , ,  Webster, Augusta ,  Welsh Manuscript Society  Westminster Abbey , , 

Wharton, Thomas  Wheelock, Abraham , , – edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History  Whistler, James Abbot McNeill  Wilde, Oscar –,  Picture of Dorian Gray  Williams, Edward, see Iolo Morganwg Winstanley, Gerrard , – Woden, see Odin Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)  wood-engraving ,  Wordsworth, William –, , –, –, , , , ,  The Excursion , , – ‘Michael’ –, – The Prelude , – World’s Fair  Worm, Ole –,  Danica literatura antiquissima ,  Fasti Danici 

Y Yeats, William Butler –, –, ,  Yellow Book, The – Ynglinga saga  Young England –, ,  Young Ireland –, ,  Young Wales, (Cymru Fydd) ,  Yonge, Charlotte Mary –, , –