Introduction

In 1892, when Thomas Lounsbury published in his Studies in Chaucer a chapter, “The Chaucer Legend,” systematically debunking the spurious elements that had accreted in the Chaucer biography from Leland to Godwin and beyond, the scholarly evidence he marshaled had been available, in some cases, for more than fifty years; and the de-accession of inauthentic works from the Chaucer canon, upon which many of these narratives were founded, was by that time rapidly accelerated. Nonetheless, Lounsbury notes, “no fictitious story connected with Chaucer’s career has ever been wholly abandoned. It may be modified, but it is never contemptuously cast aside.” This resistance to biographical scholarship suggests that what Stephanie Trigg has called the “cultural formation and institutional force of Chaucer” in the nineteenth century – that is, the Chaucer represented, for instance, in Arthur Burrell’s 1908 modernized Everyman edition, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for the Modern Reader – was significantly different from that of the twentieth-century Chaucer embodied in the Riverside edition: he is a nineteenth-century Chaucer whose biography and poetic oeuvre say much about how the medieval revival intersected with popular and literary conceptions of the fourteenth century and its foremost poet.

Ironically, Chaucer’s cultural formation in the nineteenth century may well be indebted less to his poetry, which almost everyone agrees was not widely read, than it is to the Chaucer biography and its ancillary materials – Prefaces, Books of Days, Birthday Books, and so on – that made up the popular body of Chaucer representations.

In 1841, a volume of Chaucer selections began its introduction with the issue of Chaucer’s unfamiliarity:

Works like Charles Cowden Clarke’s The Riches of Chaucercreate the nineteenth-century “Dream of Chaucer,” and continue to exert influence on twentieth-century cultural constructions of Chaucer.