“Lessons Fairer than Flowers”: Mary Eliza Haweis’s Chaucer for Children and Models of Friendship

Summary

Victorian medievalism constructed the Middle Ages as a simpler time in contrast to the increasingly industrial society of nineteenth-century England, a period often characterized by social and economic disorder. “Simpler,” however, held ambivalent meanings, indicating not only an idealization of the Middle Ages as “a period of faith, order, joy, munificence, and creativity” but also condemnation of its crude, unrefined culture. Literary discourses reflected this construction, as writers and critics spoke of the Middle Ages as the infancy of the English nation and their present as its maturity. These discourses are evident in the lengthy history of Geoffrey Chaucer’s reception and particularly in the adaptation of his work for children, the subject of this article. Much of the credit for Chaucer’s association with this theoretical schema can be given to a tradition of scholarship popularized by John Dryden (1631–1700). In the preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer (1700), Dryden asserts that Chaucer lived during the English nation’s childhood: “We can only say, that he liv’d in the Infancy of our Poetry, and that nothing is brought to Perfection at the first. We must be Children before we grow Men.” Yet within the same text, Dryden points to Chaucer’s keen description of early English people as evidence for giving Chaucer the title of “the Father of English Poetry.”

Although these discourses of concurrent paternity and infancy may appear to be incompatible, they do not compete. In fact, they converge in adaptations of medieval literature for Victorian children. As this article will discuss further, the unpolished literature of the English Middle Ages was seen as ideal subject matter for children, the people in Victorian society whose abilities were considered to most closely correspond to the supposedly infantile and linguistically deficient people of medieval England. Mary Eliza Joy Haweis’s Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key (1876) reflects this attitude toward the Middle Ages in its discussion of Chaucer’s language. However, Haweis also draws upon Chaucer’s ethos as the “Father of English Poetry” to prove Chaucer’s texts to be not only appropriate reading material but also edifying moral lessons for children.

Her instructional aims are evident immediately upon examination of the text. The front cover displays her own artwork, consisting of five arches depicting scenes from The Canterbury Tales and daisies strewn across the remaining space.