Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), born in London to a prosperous wine-merchant family, is universally regarded as the father of English literature. Writing in a period when Latin and French were the prestige literary languages of England, Chaucer demonstrated that the English vernacular could sustain poetry of the highest ambition and sophistication. His Canterbury Tales — unfinished at his death — is the first great work of English literature and one of the masterpieces of the medieval world.

Life and Career

Chaucer’s father, John Chaucer, was a wealthy vintner with court connections, and young Geoffrey entered royal service as a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster. This early immersion in aristocratic culture shaped his life: Chaucer remained a courtier, diplomat, and civil servant throughout his career, writing poetry alongside his official duties rather than as a primary vocation.

He fought in France during the Hundred Years’ War and was captured at the siege of Reims in 1359; Edward III contributed to his ransom. He married Philippa de Roet, whose sister Katherine Swynford became the mistress and eventually the wife of John of Gaunt — a connection that secured Chaucer powerful patronage throughout his life.

Chaucer’s diplomatic missions to Italy in 1372–73 and 1378 were transformative. In Florence and Genoa he encountered the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and the impact on his poetry was immediate and profound. His earlier work had drawn on French models — the Roman de la Rose, which he partially translated — but Italy gave him new ambitions: the philosophical depth of Dante’s Commedia, the narrative sophistication of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Filostrato, and Petrarch’s lyric intensity.

He held various official positions: Controller of Customs for the port of London, Clerk of the King’s Works (overseeing construction at Westminster and the Tower of London), and sub-forester of the king’s park at North Petherton. He died on 25 October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey — the first occupant of what became Poets’ Corner.

Major Works and Themes

The Canterbury Tales (begun c. 1387) is a frame narrative: a group of thirty pilgrims, travelling from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, agree to tell stories to pass the time. The device — borrowed from Boccaccio’s Decameron, though Chaucer transformed it — allows Chaucer to range across every social class, literary genre, and register of language. The pilgrims include a Knight, a Prioress, a Wife of Bath, a Miller, a Pardoner, a Clerk, a Merchant, a Franklin, and many others, and each tale reflects the teller’s character, station, and preoccupations.

The work is unfinished — Chaucer completed only twenty-four of the projected 120 tales — but what survives is astonishing in its variety and depth. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is one of the great comic monologues in any language, a bawdy, learned, self-justifying autobiography that anticipates the dramatic monologue by five centuries. The Pardoner’s Tale is a moral thriller of extraordinary economy. The Knight’s Tale adapts Boccaccio’s Teseida into a philosophical romance on fate and free will.

Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), Chaucer’s other major work, is a narrative poem of over 8,000 lines adapting Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. It is the first great psychological novel in English — a sustained exploration of love, betrayal, and the mutability of fortune that anticipates the modern novel by centuries.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Chaucer was revered by his immediate successors — Lydgate, Hoccleve, and the Scottish Chaucerians — as the supreme English poet. Spenser called him the “well of English undefyled.” Dryden, who modernised several Canterbury Tales in 1700, praised him as the father of English poetry: “here is God’s plenty.”

His reputation has never seriously declined. The Canterbury Tales is the most studied work of medieval English literature, and Chaucer’s influence — on the development of English prosody, on the social range of English fiction, on the English comic tradition — is incalculable.

Key Works

• The Book of the Duchess (c. 1369)
• The House of Fame (c. 1379)
• The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382)
• Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385)
• The Legend of Good Women (c. 1386)
• The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400)
• A Treatise on the Astrolabe (c. 1391)

Collecting Chaucer

Collecting Chaucer means collecting the history of English printing itself. William Caxton printed the first edition of The Canterbury Tales in 1476 or 1477 — it was among the first books printed in England. Caxton’s first edition survives in roughly a dozen copies, nearly all institutional; the few fragments that surface bring staggering prices. Caxton’s second edition (c. 1483), with woodcut illustrations, is only slightly more common.

The great early collected editions — Thynne (1532), Stow (1561), and Speght (1598, 1602) — are the principal targets for private collectors of Chaucer. A Thynne 1532 folio in good condition brings $10,000–$40,000. The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896), designed by William Morris with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, is one of the most beautiful books ever printed and the crown jewel of the private press movement. Printed in an edition of 438 copies on paper and 13 on vellum, paper copies bring $50,000–$150,000 at auction; a vellum copy sold for over $300,000. Fine copies in the original pigskin binding command the highest prices; copies rebound or with foxing are significantly less.

Medieval manuscript fragments containing portions of the Canterbury Tales occasionally appear in the market, typically individual leaves, and are prized by collectors of medieval material.