20 chapter 1
chronolog y. Hundreds of “metrical histories” appeared in the nineteenth cen-
tury. These “metrical histories”were associated with progress in two respects:
first, this somehow more natural “meter” was seen to aid the natural devel-
opment of mental order and discipline; second, the periodicity and seeming
inevitability of the succession of regents aligned meter with the development
of the English nation. The pedagogic use of versification in teaching history
promoted an understanding of English verse form as an emblem of order it-
self, applied to, but also derived from, a progressive and dynastic English past.
English metricality, rather than English poetry or versification, was a popular
vehicle for knowledge that skirted aesthetic questions and raised ideological
questions instead. The “metrical histories” of England, then, can be read as
the union of a particular idea about English meter with a particular idea of
English national culture—orderly and falling into a natural line that should
be easy to remember. At the same time, while this kind of “meter” may be easy
for some to remember, the idea that “meter” could create mental discipline
was derived from the traditions of memorization in classical education. Some
metrical histories included an ironic subtext for more educated readers, em-
ploying subtler metrical systems but marketing their texts to the lay reader,
who may not have any idea of what metrical forms were being employed. In
that way some “metrical histories” spoke to more than one metrical commu-
nity. Others were careful to separate their method of “versification” from a
perceived aesthetic category of higher “poetry” with standards against which
they did not wish to be judged. In all of these texts, however, even those that
promote ease and pleasure in memorizing verses, there is a hint of the inherent
difficulty and artificiality of meter—a meter that is not natural, that is not, in
fact rhythm, which is what these texts mean when they say “metrical” in the
first place. That is, while the ideologies of history pedagog y and mental order-
ing for the masses relied on metrical order, we find, especially toward the end
of the nineteenth century, a suspicion about a form that could control you
without your knowledge, an issue that was central to the teaching of poetry
and the approaches to poetic education promoted by scholars like Matthew
Arnold and Henry Newbolt at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth centuries.
Reading these histories in meter, and the meters of these histories, shows
the tangled metrical and historical genealog y of England’s classical and Anglo-
Saxon pasts. For instance, we find what may be an entirely accidental line of
dactylic hexameter (a meter associated with England’s history only explicitly
through translations) in the subtitle of Seymour Burt’s 1852 Metrical Epitome
of the History of England: “A Metrical List of the Sovereigns of England: //
The Angles and Saxons.” These hexameter lines reveal that English metrical
history is more complicated than even the most straightforward-seeming met-
rical list of the earliest leaders of England. Though Burt writes the text of his
metrical history in the more accepted Anglo-Saxon four-beat line (complete