In today’s blog post, Keele University MA student Amy Louise Blaney shares her research, including the surprising link between Johnson and the revival of Arthurian romance literature.
As part of my MA dissertation research, I have been looking at the work of eighteenth-century antiquarians and considering the ways in which the correspondence that flowed between members of eighteenth-century literary coteries recovered Arthurian romance from the gulf of oblivion and repurposed it into a new literary tradition, one integral to the development of English nationalism and identity.
In particular, I have been studying the antiquarian Thomas Percy (1729 – 1811), a close friend of Johnson. Percy’s collection of medieval bardic poetry, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (published 1765) features a number of Arthurian fragments and offers a rediscovery of the English literary past that is motivated by contemporary concerns about the development of national identity.
Strange as it may seem to us now, the thought of using native medieval sources as a foundation for a national literary canon was a new, possibly unwelcome, idea in the eighteenth century. There was a perception of the medieval as barbaric, with philosopher David Hume saying (in his History of England (1754 – 61)) that the period was, “a great trough or depression, in which humanity wallowed for more than a thousand years a prey to ignorance, barbarism and superstition.”
However, with the founding of the Society for Antiquaries in 1707, this perception began to gradually change. Expanding on the remit of the Royal Society (founded 1662), the Society became a space in which members could share knowledge about the past, and debate their ideas about the interpretation of this knowledge.
As Rosemary Sweet illustrates in her book Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Palgrave, 2004), antiquarians ‘wrote to each other endlessly, exchanging information, making extracts, describing local antiquities, debating points of etymology or history. They carried their debates into the coffee houses and literary societies of provincial and metropolitan society; they published their findings and their opinions in periodicals, pamphlets and weighty tomes.”
The rise of the Society of Antiquaries mirrored newly formed networks in the world of the London print professionals. Throughout the 1740s and 1750s, the world of letters took over from traditional forms of patronage, resulting in the emergence of a system in which professional authors, printers and booksellers increasingly took on the role of patron, or patronage broker, themselves.
These networks saw literary figures and antiquarians compose and exchange letters, poetry and literary prose pieces, with certain key individuals (such as Johnson) serving as bridges within these networks.
We can see evidence of these networks in the letters of antiquarians, such as this one from Percy to Cambridge don and fellow antiquary Richard Farmer, dated 09 September 1762, in which they discuss Percy’s Reliques project:
“I am glad to find a taste for Old Romances begins to revive (not amongst common Readers, where it would do hurt, but) amongst our Critics and Poets. Mr Hurd’s [Richard Hurd published his Letters on Chivalry and Romance in 1762] Letters place them in a very respectable light: and our Poetry Professor at Oxford [Thomas Warton, later author of The History of English Poetry (1774 – 81)] has shewn what use may be made of them for clearing up passages in our old Poets […] The favourable light in which Mr Hurd and he set the old Romances, I think will be an excellent preparative for such a collection of the old ones in metre as I think sometime or other to publish. – He seems disposed to assist me, in several attempts of this kind.”
Farmer later helped to proof Percy’s Reliques. We also have evidence that Johnson assisted with the project, as this letter from 10 November 1764 shows:
“I send you a Proof-sheet of my Preface &c (the Dedication you will observe is reprinted in a larger type: – I have made on alteration in it yet, because I shall reserve your remarks and those of many other friends, till I consult my oracle, Johnson.) – Read over my Preface with care, and send me any Remarks that occur”
Johnson, Percy’s ‘oracle’ had encouraged him in the writing of the Reliques and, in a letter dated 4 October 1760, advised him that the offer of publication Percy had received from booksellers Robert and James Dodsley was ‘moderately good, that is, not so good as might be hoped nor so bad as might be feared.’
In a further letter, dated 29 November 1760, Johnson also appears to have approached rival bookseller Andrew Millar about the project, writing ‘I told him of the price of 3 vols. Was an hundred guineas, to which he made no objection.’
A subsequent letter from Percy to his friend William Shenstone (dated 22 May 1761) showed both booksellers were interested, although Dodsley eventually provided the better offer and the Reliques was published on 14 February 1765.
Percy’s Reliques establishes Arthur as a worthy subject for attention by focusing upon the chivalric subject matter, with his opening essay to the third volume providing a brief history of chivalry and explaining how it becomes a subject for romance.
By publishing collections such as this Percy and his literary contemporaries, aided by men of letters such as Johnson, were determined to transform perceptions of the medieval British past, encouraging contemporary readers to look beyond the apparent barbarism of the middle ages and to consider the period as a source of romantic and chivalric potential.
Contributor: Amy Louise Blaney is studying for an MA English Literature at Keele University. Her current research examines the impact of Arthurian Literature upon masculinity across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As part of her course, she has been working with the Birthplace Museum to establish this blog and to introduce a wider range of resources for visiting researchers.