History and Community

Essays in Victorian Medievalism

Florence S. Boos, Florence S. Boos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317299523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this volume, originally published in 1992, examine some of the pervasive implications of Victorian medievalism, and assess its creative manifestations and dual capacities for expression of reformist anger and escapist retreat. Some of the emotional and intllectual reasons for the strong Victorian attraction to 'medieval' history and litereature are discussed and emblematic responses to this attraction are examined.

Mark Girouard, An Enthusiast for Chivalry: The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Debra Mancoff

During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth century, the code of chivalry underwent a transformation. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1771, defined chivalry as a hierarchy of obligation: “A tenure of service, whereby the tenant is bound to perform some noble or military office to his lord.”¹ Five decades later, the protagonist of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819) could speak of chivalry in terms of an ideal:

Chivalry!… she is the nurse of pure and high affection, the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant. Nobility were but an empty name without her.²

This definition, although voiced by a hero of fiction, had gained acceptance, supplanting the dry Encyclopedia definition. Scott, in fact, was the author of the new, lengthy essay on chivalry for the fifth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1814, and Ivanhoe exemplified in literature what Scott defined in scholarly discourse.

As the century progressed, enthusiasm for chivalry escalated, touching most aspects of British culture, from the visual arts to the concept of manhood. By the end of the century, the chivalric knight was the symbol for the nation. Frescoes of medieval champions graced the walls at the new Palace of Westminster, the late Prince Consort was commemorated as an ideal knight, and the Poet Laureate Tennyson had produced an Arthurian epic as his life’s work.

To the nineteenth-century gentleman, the chivalric revival was more than a nostalgic glorification of his ancestors. Although sparked by the new regard for romance literature that arose during the Gothic Revival, interest in matters of chivalry became a manifest reality. Young men of Britain were urged to emulate their ancestors, and the knight became the paradigm for the gentleman. By the end of the century, a new form of chivalry had run full course, created for and rooted in contemporary idealism. This metamorphosis of an arcane code of behavior into an integral part of modern society is the subject of Mark Girouard’s recent book The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

Mark Girouard has made an estimable contribution to the literature of architectural history in Britain. His writings address diverse topics, including a monograph on the Elizabethan master Robert Smythson, an analysis of Queen Anne eclecticism, and a picture book of Victorian pubs. Girouard’s major contribution has been in his observation of the symbiotic relationship of the English country house and the society that produced it. The Victorian Country House (1971; revised and enlarged, 1979) and Life in the English Country House (1978) are without parallel on the subject.

In his writings on country house life, Girouard betrays a persistent attraction to the monuments of chivalry. His fascination for castles, medieval and modern, has been constant. Readers of The Victorian Country House will also recall the ironic delight implicit in his description of the gentleman at mid-century:

The early Victorian knight galloped into the field, his bible The Broadstone of Honor, his political expression the Young England party, his escapade the Eglinton tournament. He was faithful to God, reverent to women, courteous in language, modest in demeanour, lacking in arrogance to his inferiors, and a shield and support to his tenantry…. He endeavoured to combine the most credible aspects of the Arthurian knight and the feudal baron.³

It is with sympathetic enthusiasm that Girouard regards this gentleman in The Return to Camelot. His position as an enthusiast is both the strength and the weakness of the book. Girouard assembled a wealth of evidence in his argument for nineteenth-century chivalry, and that wealth is astonishing in variety. The observation he makes in his preface, however, that “Once one starts looking for the influence of chivalry in this period, one finds it in almost embarrassingly large quantities,” is equally true for his book. Girouard groups everyone, from Scott to Henry Newbolt, and everything, from the Empire to the Boy Scouts, under his chivalric umbrella. He has done a fine job uncovering the trappings of the new chivalry; a lucid documentary history of this movement will have to await the attentions of a scholar with a little more objectivity.

In the nineteenth century, the development of the new chivalry travelled a meandering course, shifting from sober scholarly interest to the arena of popular culture. The latter half of the eighteenth century saw increased attention to the material trappings of the medieval era, as well as attempts to recover the “lost” literature of the Middle Ages. Differentiation between the history of chivalry and its counterpart in literature was rarely made.⁴ Increased familiarity with the medieval world led to the success of Scott’s novels. His readers felt a real sympathy for his very human characters, and, as a consequence, they imagined that the world of chivalry was not an alien one.

In the 1820s and the 1830s, chivalry was transformed from a romantic into a practical concept. Kenelm Digby, in The Broad Stone of Honour (1822–23), challenged modern man to accept his position as heir to a chivalric heritage. It was a phase of mock heroics and pretense, culminating with the ill-fated Eglinton Tournament (1839), in which modern champions were prepared for fierce, armed adversaries, but not a Highland downpour.

In the 1840s, mock heroism was reformed into moralism, as evidenced in the politics of Young England and the novels of Benjamin Disraeli. The revival began to have an effect on the monarchy, and Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, was presented to the xenophobic British populace as an ideal knight of the nation. He, in turn, directed the grandest program of government-sponsored history painting in the new palace of Westminster, and a new chivalric iconography was born. By the end of the 1850s, the new Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, published the first segment of his Arthurian epic The Idylls of the King.

The widespread popularity of chivalry led, by mid-century, to novels and paintings featuring virtuous knights, both in medieval and modern dress. During the 1870s, the new aesthetic poets and painters chipped away at the moral pedestal built for the modern knight. At the end of the century, the new chivalry was a popular vernacular, with an audience that included aesthetes who read the Arthurian poetry of Algernon Swinburne, to the public school boys who thrilled to The Boy’s King Arthur.

Girouard’s account, which he cautions is neither an art historical nor a literary study, occurs within this time period and is restricted to Great Britain. These are plausible limitations, but there is an air of contrivance to his study. The chivalric revival is presented by Girouard as a lengthy prologue to the Great War.

Girouard has organized his material to substantiate his thesis that the ultimate challenge to the nineteenth-century knight was World War I. His first chapter “1912,” contrasts a play, Where the Rainbow Ends (Girouard informs us that this tale of little Rosamund and Crispian Carey’s adventures at the side of St. George was as popular as Peter Pan), the South Pole expedition of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, and the sinking of the Titanic, complete with stories illustrative of the motto Women and Children First! The discourse that follows explains why each member of this anomalous group was, in its way, an example of chivalry, and how the chivalrous gentleman came into being.

In turning to the sources of chivalry, Girouard declines to provide a firm definition for the concept itself, referring the reader to Richard Barber’s The Knight and Chivalry.⁵ Discussion of the literature of the Gothic Revival is thorough, but flawed in organization. By sorting his sources into two categories, literary and historical, he has rent the seamless unity that existed at mid-eighteenth century. He presents, for example, the contribution of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), before his discussion of Richard Hurd’s Essay on Chivalry (1762). Percy acknowledged his debt to Hurd in his own text. Subsequent chapters focus upon the popularizers of chivalry, including Sir Walter Scott and Kenelm Digby, and trace the material results of that popularity, including armor collecting and castle building.

To give order to the years of full-scale revival (1830–1880), Girouard divides the anachronistic trends of chivalry into small, seemingly manageable topics. As a consequence, the story becomes more complex than it need be. The reader must travel over the same decades repeatedly, chasing every form of chivalry imaginable. In addition to mock tournaments and monarchical interpretation, there is the political “Radical Chivalry” and the cult of manhood in “Muscular Chivalry.” Acquisitive imperialists are dubbed “Knights of the Empire,” and, in the chapter “Chivalry for the People,” Christian Socialists, the Jewish Lads’ Brigade and the Boy Scouts are all shown to be chivalric in intent. The nineteenth century looms as one great paean to chivalry, a dazzling display...