Introduction: Popular Medievalism and the Romantic Ethos

Abstract

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1865 sensation novel Sir Jasper’s Tenant, the Sir Jasper of the title is a widowed baronet with an especial fondness for the art of the early Victorian artist William Etty. Etty, a Royal Academician, who attended the Academy’s life classes his entire career, is best remembered for his sensuous classically inspired studies of nudes, both women and men. True to his idol’s tastes, Sir Jasper has an eye for the voluptuous charms of a lady visitor who happens to be an evil twin in disguise, but he also likes the brooding manliness of his equally disguised tenant, George Pauncefort. Attempting to persuade George to spend Christmas with him, Sir Jasper promises: “No country families, no would-be medievalism,—boars’ heads with lemons in their mouths, rejoicing retainers, fiddlers in the music gallery, and so on; none of your Christmas-in-the-olden-time absurdities” (1:69).

[T]hese turbulent times were little calculated for the cultivation of literary talents, and after the Goths and Vandals had overrun the empire, a night of mental darkness followed, from the tenth to the middle of the fifteenth century.

—Richmal Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People (86–87)