The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 (review)

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910, by David Matthews; pp. xxxviii + 231. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, $39.95.

"Books are not socially and ideologically inert, and they cannot simply be taken out of their time," writes David Matthews in his excellent history of the emergence of Middle English studies in Britain (188). The enterprise begins with Thomas Percy who published his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765) as a way of ingratiating himself with the aristocratic Percy family of Northumberland and gaining their patronage. (In this effort, he was entirely successful, gaining a bishopric in the process.) Then ensued an era of upper-class dilettantism with the formation of such organizations as the Roxburghe Club and the Camden Society where the gentlemen amateurs (or sometimes their hirelings) produced limited "editions" of ancient authors. Thereafter the educated parsons and literary-minded burghers had their day, as F. J. Furnivall founded one text-producing society after another on more democratic principles. Finally, at the end of Victoria's reign, the academics seized control of medieval studies and provided both the apparatus and the audience for the seldom-read literature brought forth from obscurity to dim light over the prior century and a half.

Even if much of what was published had few readers, those readers made consequential use of it. Thomas Chatterton's "gothick" poems were strongly influenced by Percy's Reliques, and the revival of the ballad stanza from that publication fueled John Keats's poetic creations. A rage for romances among the exclusive clubs gave rise to Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Alfred Tennyson's Arthurian poems. William Morris drew upon the ethos of Furnivall's societies for his own versions of medievalism, both in poetry and in the decorative arts. And J. R. R. Tolkien absorbed academic medievalism at Oxford to put hobbits into the imagination of English-speaking children.

Matthews explores the backgrounds and achievements of the persons who invented Middle English as a field of endeavor. Nearly all of them were somehow estranged from the main currents of intellectual life. A key figure in the late-eighteenth- century flowering of curiosity was Joseph Ritson, described by Matthews somewhat opaquely as "an atheist and an aggressive vegetarian" (28). Ritson excoriated critics of his work as "a base and prostitute band of lurking assassins" (46), and died (in 1803) in a madhouse. Scott's helper, Henry Weber, was among the earliest able to read Middle English with perspicuity, but he too was unhinged and, at Christmas 1813, challenged Scott to a duel with pistols and was then committed to a lunatic asylum where he eventually died of "a dementia supposedly brought on by too much study of texts" (83).

J. G. Lockhart, Scott's biographer, described Weber as a "drudging German" (83), and the success of Germans and Danes in unraveling the philological mysteries of the history of English was galling to British scholars, especially those concerned with the earliest stages of the language. According to Matthews, "English nationalism is not much in evidence in the study of Middle English before the 1850s, because there was little to be gained from claiming such evidently barbarous material as the national heritage" (146).

Perhaps the situation is somewhat more complex than Matthews alleges since the Germanic part of English had been the focus of distinctly nationalist ardor since early in the nineteenth century. Middle English presented a more complex picture because of the massive importation of loan words from Latin and French and for some--for instance, William Barnes--English in that era had become a "mongrel speech" inferior to "German and other purer tongues" (101). Consequently, it is germane to the story of Middle English that the first dictionary of it was produced by a German and included only words of Germanic origin. (This work was compiled and issued in parts by F. H. Stratmann; after Stratmann's death, Henry Bradley enlarged it to include...