‘I’d been Chaucer for a week!’: Forging the Medieval in Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’

ABSTRACT Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ describes the creation of a Chaucerian forgery in immense detail. The short story, first published in 1928, revolves around two men: one, in an act of revenge, uses the other’s expertise as a Chaucerian scholar to forge a ‘new’ fragment of The Canterbury Tales with the intention of planting the fragment and ruining the scholar’s career. Much of the narrative is given over to the details of the fake, from the minutiae of a medieval ink recipe to the text’s fraudulent transmission history and ‘discovery’. In this essay I propose that Kipling’s medieval details are not authentic, but rather authenticating: they approximate the medieval rather than representing the ‘real’ medieval world as we or Kipling knew it. The essay first introduces ‘Dayspring’ and Kipling’s particular method of authenticating, while the second section investigates several aspects of the central Chaucerian forgery, including features of materiality, transmission, book history, and Middle English language as they are presented in the text. This ‘fact-checking’ approach is reassessed in the third section, which explores Kipling’s idea of ‘verified references’, as well as the relationship between ‘Dayspring’, forgery theory, and medievalism. While ‘Dayspring’ might not represent a ‘true’ Middle Ages, then, it is highly revealing of Kipling’s attitudes to the medieval period, ideas of authenticity, and his conception of himself as a writer.