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.

Chaucer’s literary imagination is fuelled by a highly mediated and contextualised access to his classical sources, almost always supported by, filtered through, or read against the vernacular works of European contemporaries. He is a cultural synapse between Latin literature and the vernaculars of medieval Europe. Chaucer’s classical knowledge was a bricolage made up of direct knowledge of some Latin works (especially those of Ovid and Virgil); some knowledge of Latin works supported by translations or commentaries in the European vernaculars in which he was comfortable, especially French and Italian; and some knowledge of vernacular reworkings of earlier Latin materials which he was able to finesse and nuance by referring back to the Latin originals. Throughout the House of Fame, a key text for his literary self-awareness, Chaucer imaginatively explores his own understanding of, and relationship to, antecedent literature, and particularly to the literature of Latin antiquity as it had survived into his lifetime.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.