G.C. MACAULAY 's GREAT EDITION of The Complete Works of John Gower, published by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1899 and 1902, did not excite much comment when it appeared. It received very few contemporary reviews, either of individual volumes or of the complete work. There is, therefore, some value in reprinting two reviews that, to the best of my knowledge, have never been recorded in the history of Gower's reception.

One particularly interesting aspect of these reviews is their authorship. When Edward Thomas (1878–1917) came down from Oxford in 1900 he already had a wife and child to support. In desperate need of money he was forced into a life dominated by literary hackwork of various kinds to sustain his family, and was often in a state of penury. In November 1900 he succeeded Lionel Johnson as the main reviewer for the London Daily Chronicle. By April 1914, when he wrote his last review for the paper, nearly seven hundred had appeared in its pages from his pen. During that period he also wrote many reviews and articles for other journals as well as various books. The constant pressure to earn sufficient money restricted his ability to write the poetry on which his posthumous reputation largely depends.

The extent of the works he reviewed was as remarkable as their number. Although many dealt with modern literature in both verse and prose, English and foreign, he also wrote on a wider range of topics that reveal his critical sympathy for literature of different periods. An indication of that range of interest can be found in his two reviews, early in his career at the Chronicle, of parts of Macaulay's edition of Gower. He reviewed volumes II and III (Confessio Amantis, published in 1901) on 18 June 1901, and volume IV (Latin Works, published in 1902) on 29 October 1902. As with all his reviews for the Chronicle these were unsigned.

In his first review, “Chaucer's Mate,” Thomas sets Gower's Confessio in direct comparison to Chaucer. Such a comparison initially works predictably to Gower's disadvantage. Gower is placed as his inferior hierarchically and aesthetically: “Chaucer is a scholar; Gower smacks of the school, and is to his contemporary as Cowley is to Milton.” When Thomas moves beyond such categorizing judgements to a consideration of Gower's intrinsic qualities, his tone is consistently appreciative.

This concluding chapter ‘History in Print from Caxton to 1543’ examines the various forms in which historical writing was represented in early print. It begins by considering William Caxton’s various contributions and their places in his larger publishing strategies. It examines those works that he published that reflect earlier, manuscript traditions of historical writing, including the prose Brut and the Polychronicon, and the ways in which these were modified as they developed a new print tradition. The chapter goes on to assess the emergence of new forms of history that began to be developed by print in the early sixteenth century, including the emergence of print as a means for swift response to contemporary events and finally the appearance, in 1543, the first appearance in print of John Hardyng’s fifteenth-century verse chronicle, the publication of which was combined with contemporary prose historical writings.

The Printers: 1476–91

Printing did not begin in England until around 1476, when William Caxton set up a shop in Westminster, within the precincts of the Abbey there. The earliest work he printed there seems to have been John Russell's Propositio (STC 21458) completed before September of that year. But he already had considerable experience of the new technology of moveable type on the Continent before he returned to his native land; in 1472 he had been involved in the printing of several books at Cologne, including an edition of a very large medieval encyclopaedia, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum. Subsequently, he was involved in the printing of a number of books in Bruges and very probably in Ghent, including the earliest book printed in English, his translation of Raoul le Fèvre, The Recuyell of the History of Troy (1473–74, STC 15375), which was printed alongside the French original, Le recueil des histoire de Troie (c.1474), and The Game and Play of Chess (1474, STC 4920). The translations of both texts from the French were Caxton's own work.

England was the first country where printing was introduced by a native. Caxton (c.1420–92) was born in Kent and began a mercantile career in London before spending much of his commercial life in the Low Countries. When he returned to England to set up its first printing press, he brought to the country of his birth the Continental expertise he had acquired, as well as more tangible debts to Europe reflected most directly in his use of type cast from matrices made by his former Cologne collaborator, Johannes Veldener.