Velma Bourgeois Richmond: Chaucer as Children’s Literature. Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras.

• Ruth Morse

Matthew Arnold famously excluded Chaucer from the Pantheon of national literary touchstones because he failed the test of ‘high seriousness’. Yet Arnold’s contemporaries celebrated Chaucer as the father of English poetry, and retold his stories – rewrote them – for children as if his were tales which also celebrated the Englishness, and Protestant Englishness, of its medieval past. The Merrie England of rewritten Chaucer was not so merry that it included the bawdy for which – among other things – Arnold excluded him, and this is a story about censorship and suppression.