The eighteenth century is sometimes known as “the golden age of historical forgery”, featuring the famous works of Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson. However, without the great achievements in actual historical texts like David Hume’s “History of England” and Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the
How do Chatterton and Macpherson draw on this collective desire? What similarities do you see between these fake histories and those presented in Rule Britannia and Ruins of Rome? How does a text’s authenticity affect our understanding of it? The idea of the “found manuscript” spawned a whole new genre in the eighteenth century. Surely, the readers must have seen something intriguing in this concept.
Or is the issue simply that these texts were presented as truths? In more recent times, there was an uproar when James Frey presented "A Million Little Pieces" as a memoir instead of the work of fiction it turned out to be. Some readers argued that we could still draw meaning and inspiration from its pages, it just needed a more accurate label.
5 comments:
Folklore and Fakery.
The texts don't give much background in themselves. From what I gather from the post, these texts are pretending to be historical documents, but they're actually not. They're just works of fiction made up to sound historical. I can believe that.
I can believe that because nothing we've read so far was written in middle/olde English. The language of BRISTOWE is just brutally archaic. We've read some challenging texts, but this? It's practically in another league.
I can believe "Colna-Dona" is trying to be historical because the subject material feels, well, old. Nothing we've read in our time period has been about hunting parties or courtly love. And, like BRISTOWE, this poem is disguised in archaic language that makes it seem authentically old,
OLD OLD OLD OLD OLD,
OLD OLD OLD OLD,
OLD OLD OLD,
But it's not?
James Macpherson actually claimed he was translating a Scottish text that he discovered. It was supposedly written by someone named Ossian. "Colna-Dona" is only one of the shorter poems in the collection.
Imagine how devoted to this story Macpherson had to be in order to create such elaborate texts. It is precisely that feeling of "old" that intrigued 18th century readers. They wanted to believe that accurate depictions of the past were still waiting to be discovered, that these discoveries would somehow reveal the missing pieces in their own national identities.
Thomas Chatterton created the "Bristowe Tragedie" as a way to honor his hometown of Bristol by providing it with its own rich texts and histories.
Chatterton's Bristowe Tragedie embodies the idea of the brave, heroic ancestor every Brit would be proud to claim. I think it ties very well into ideas in Rule Britannia, that Britons rule by divine right. In the poem, Sir Charles trusts in God and the plan laid out for him, refusing to betray God or country. It's a very patriotic idea.
The use of an older form of English is very interesting. The entire time I was reading the poem, I was trying to figure out all its purposes. Besides serving as a context that places the poem in another time in British history, I think it draws on a nostalgia of the language of our ancestors, which also helps tie in the idea that Sir Charles could be anyone's ancestor.
The MacPherson work feels more pagan and pulling on themes of ancient Rome as in the Ruins of Rome. It refers to emblems--shields, daggers, some sort of monument of stone--that are meant to serve as signs of treaty and peace. Like in the Ruins of Rome, these things are fleeting. Even by the end of the story, Toscar seems to have forgotten the peace recently made.
I'm not sure I'd agree 100% with the claim that "without... 'History of England' and ... 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', these attempts at fakery would not have been nearly as successful." While it may be a sort of chicken/egg scenario, I'd argue that the same forces that made those works popular made these hoax works possible. They all filled this yearning to see the beauty of the past. Butler described the need filled by such works as "a clean reduction to essentials." While some authors sought to evoke a sense of the classics in their work, we see these examples of fakery trying to almost inject these classic ideals into a more modern literary culture.
I think that both Chatterton and Macpherson saw a desire within the public as you all mentioned for a collective sense of identity. Just as Rule Brittania uses this as the catalyst for this burst of British pride. So, Chatterton and Macpherson use this desire as a reason for writing these texts. I think that they can be read as historical even if they are made up simply because they authors did do some research into the time periods they were discussing. Furthermore, both Chatteron and Macpherson go to great lengths to use the dialect of that time period and references to rulers from that time in the case of Chatterton and extensive footnotes and geographic location in the case of Macpherson. Both authors are trying to make their works feel as real to the reader as possible. I think a text's authenticity can affect our reading, I think that in contemporary times we are more concerned with authenticity and knowing that something is factual. I am not sure in the late 18th century how much emphasis people put in authenticity especially considering that the Bard, William Shakespeare borrowed many of his sources from others. I think regardless you can never really trust the authenticity of any document.History is in the eye of the beholder,a victor and the victim are going to have two separate versions of the same story, everyone has their biases and chooses to embellish certain things. Therefore, I don't think that Macpherson and Chatteron's work should be ruled out simply because it is partially false.
I agree with ccrisp2, Chatteron's work definitely has a Manifest Destiny feeling that is also present in Rule Brittania and Ruins of Rome. This idea that Britain is the paragon of democracy and honor and chivalry and all of this is apparent in all three poems. Also all three poems illicit a sense of national pride and religious and moral honor or chivalry as seen in Chatterton's work. As Samuel Johnson mentioned a literary work should include a moral theme and enrich the reader and one can argue that both texts do that.
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