This essay looks at Chaucer’s fortunes from the early Victorian period to modernity, beginning with the relatively stagnant state of Chaucer studies at the beginning of Victoria’s reign and going on to the renewed scholarly interest of the second half of the century, which led to the first modern scholarly edition in the 1890s. The essay pauses with the Edwardian period, where versions of Chaucer in both scholarly and popular domains are considered, and then concludes with a summary of Chaucer reception between World War I and the present day, with a particular emphasis on criticism and editing. In the 1840s, there was hardly any Chaucer scholarship as currently understood, and very little popular reception of the poet. In this essay I examine the burgeoning of the poet’s reputation since then. But I also consider the limitations of that reputation and the contrast with, for example, the popular understanding of Shakespeare.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.