William Langland, “Father of English Poetry”: Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s <i>Piers Plowman</i>

In 1813 the Lancashire vicar and silviculturalist Thomas Dunham Whitaker brought out the first new edition of William Langland’s Piers Plowman to have appeared for over 250 years. Bulky and exorbitantly expensive due to its size and the use of two different ink colors during production, Whitaker’s deluxe Piers Plowman failed to find a readership. Rare book collectors and Langlandians should be thankful the edition saw the light of day in the first place. Long since superseded as textual, literary, and metrical scholarship, Whitaker’s edition of Piers Plowman is nonetheless a landmark publication in the history of medieval English studies. This essay poses a basic ontological question about the edition that its flamboyant use of blackletter, red ink, and decorative illustrations in itself cannot answer: why go to the trouble to edit this particular poem at all? The essay turns for evidence first to Whitaker’s very full “Introductory Discourse” and the scholarly interlocutors cited there, then to other published discussions of Piers Plowman and alliterative verse during Whitaker’s lifetime (1759–1821). The essay concludes by restoring the edition to its place in Whitaker’s biography and social trajectory.