"Penny Poet" Chaucer, or Chaucer and the "Penny Dreadfuls"

Even if the 1870 Elementary Education Act did not create new readerships, it surely extended incipient ones.¹ Helped by new technologies, the Act also boosted the production of inexpensive reading matter.² This included increased numbers of the penny novelettes and crime and horror fiction known at least since 1861 as "Penny Dreadfuls" or "Bloods."³ Such fiction was frequently described as a waste of time: as a leading article put it in the Leeds Mercury, "The servant-girl who weeps over the loves of Lord Adolphus and the Lady Corisande is wasting her time just as badly as the schoolboy who gets up a breathless excitement over the doings of Deadwood Dick."⁴ But fiction deemed edifying and therefore not a waste of time also appeared at the new rock-bottom prices. This included simplified, moralized, and sanitized versions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Chaucerians, believing they were about to retrieve Chaucer's own authoritative text, were long dismissive of these rewritten versions. Now they are taking them more seriously.⁵ Particularly helpful to me here has been David Matthews's 2000 argument associating the "infantilization" of such texts with upper- and middle-class assumptions concerning the working classes.⁶ Matthews strikingly demonstrates how condescending—and politicized— these assumptions could be, from the Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis's General Editor's Preface to "Routledge's World Library."⁷ As Matthews observes, any concern about the lower classes that Haweis might here convey "does not extend to questioning existing conceptions of class and hierarchy":⁸

When I think of the long, gossiping, yawning, gambling hours of grooms, valets, coachmen, and cabmen; the railway stations, conveniently provided with bookstalls, and crowded morning and evening with workmen's trains—the winter evenings in thousands of villages, wayside cottages, and scattered hamlets—the brief, but not always well-spent leisure of Factory hands in the north—the armies of commercial and uncommercial travellers with spare half hours—the shop assistants—the city offices with their hangers-on—the Board Schools—the village libraries—the Army and Navy—the barrack or the dockyard—again the vision of "Routledge's World Library" rises before me, and I say, "This, if not a complete cure for indolence and vice, may at least prove a powerful counter-charm."⁹

Matthews then illustrates the effect of such class-inflected assumptions on the Canterbury Tales from no. 36 in the Routledge Library. This was Tales from Chaucer (1887), prepared by Haweis's wife, Mary Eliza, an accomplished Chaucerian already responsible for Chaucer for Children (1877) and Chaucer for Schools (1881).¹⁰ Although she pitched Tales at a rather older audience than she had these earlier works, it was still not specifically at adults; it was, as Matthews puts it, "as if the workers were simply large children."¹¹

At some level, Matthews's argument surely holds; I fear I have known something of the same assumptions while growing up in colonial Africa. What Matthews does not comment on, though, is how conflicted these assumptions tend to be. In the present case, even Hugh Haweis did not favor "writing down" to adults (again I quote his Preface): "There is no greater mistake than to try to write and publish down to the people. Give the people something to work up to."¹² And his wife very definitely questioned existing conceptions of class and hierarchy. Granted, she would do this mainly in relation to women's issues, and in the 1890s.¹³ But by no means did she confine her questioning to her own gender and class: already in Tales she was referring approvingly to Chaucer as "instinctively what we should now call an advanced Radical" (16), with "a great sympathy for the working man" (18); he had, she believed, himself let fly "the vigorous seed of democracy":

The seed planted itself, and has borne ample fruit in the heart of this free country and of its mighty offspring, America, though many who might then have stemmed the stream failed to hear in the mingled murmur the distant roar...