New Essays On John Clare

NEW ESSAYS ON JOHN CLARE
John Clare (17931864) has long been recognized as one of Englands

foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and
general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a
testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare
amalgam a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished
background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who
yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote
himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a
determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural
history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten
scholars, this collection shows how Clares many angles of critical
vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics,
aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature
of work.
simon kvesi is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes

University.
scott mceathron is Associate Professor of English at Southern
Illinois University.
NEW ESSAYS ON JOHN CLARE
Poetry, Culture and Community
Edited By
SIMON KVESI
Oxford Brookes University
and
SCOTT M C EATHRON
Southern Illinois University
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
New essays on John Clare : poetry, culture and community / edited by Simon Kvesi
and Scott McEathron.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-03111-1 (hardback)
1. Clare, John, 17931864 Criticism and interpretation. I. Kvesi, Simon,
editor. II. McEathron, Scott,
1962 editor.
pr4453.c6z84 2015
821.7dc23
2015008281
isbn 978-1-107-03111-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Notes on contributors page vii

Acknowledgements x
List of abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Simon Kvesi and Scott McEathron
part i: poetry 15
1 John Clares colours 17
Fiona Stafford
2 John Clare, William Cowper and the eighteenth century 38
Adam Rounce
3 John Clares conspiracy 57
Sarah M. Zimmerman
part ii: culture 77

4 John Clare and the new varieties of enclosure: a polemic 79
John Burnside
5 Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare 97
Emma Mason
6 The lives of Frederick Martin and the rst Life of John Clare 118
Scott McEathron
7 John Clares deaths: poverty, education and poetry 146
Simon Kvesi
v
vi Contents
part iii: community 167
8 John Clares natural history 169
Robert Heyes
9 This is radical slang: John Clare, Admiral Lord
Radstock and the Queen Caroline affair 189
Sam Ward
10 John Clare and the London Magazine 209
Richard Cronin
Select bibliography 228

Index 239
Notes on contributors
John Burnside teaches at the University of St Andrews. His poetry

collections include Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber
Memorial Prize; The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread
Poetry Award; and Black Cat Bone, (2011) which won both the Forward
and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2011, he received the Petrarca Preis for
poetry. His novels include The Devils Footprints (2007), Glister (2008)
and A Summer of Drowning (2011). He is also the author of two collec-
tions of short stories Burning Elvis (2000) and Something Like Happy
(2013), which was the Saltire Societys Scottish Book of the Year, as well
as the winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His memoirs to date
include A Lie About My Father (2006), also a Saltire Book of the Year,
and Waking Up in Toytown (2010). John Burnsides latest poetry collec-
tion is All One Breath (2014). A new prose book, I Put A Spell On You:
Several Digressions On Love and Glamour, was recently published. He
was writer in residence at the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst), Berlin, for 201415.
Richard Cronin is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes
University. He began his career as a Shelley scholar but has subsequently
written widely on nineteenth-century literature. His most recent books
are Romantic Victorians: English Literature 18241840; Paper Pellets:
British Literary Culture after Waterloo; and Reading Victorian Poetry.
With Dorothy McMillan he has edited Robert Browning for Twenty-
First Century Authors, and Emma for Cambridge University Presss new
edition of Austens work; he also co-edited a Companion to Victorian
Poetry. He is currently working on a biography provisionally entitled
George Meredith: A Life in Writing.
Robert Heyes was born and grew up in Lincolnshire, initially in
Grantham and later in the villages of Metheringham and Scopwick.
His rst degrees were in Chemistry. His professional life was spent as a
vii
viii Notes on contributors
schoolteacher, mainly at a village primary school in Kent. Forty years
ago he began to collect books and manuscripts by, and about, John
Clare; eventually this resulted in what was probably the nest Clare
collection in private hands. After taking early retirement, he began to
disperse his collection, and the emphasis shifted from collecting to
research. This resulted in the award of a PhD from the English depart-
ment at Birkbeck College, for a thesis entitled Looking to Futurity: John
Clare and Provincial Culture. He contributed an essay to John Clare:
New Approaches (2000) and has published essays and book reviews in the
John Clare Society Journal, English and Romanticism. For many years he
was the book review editor of the John Clare Society Journal.
Simon Kvesi is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes
University. He edited two prefatory collections of Clares poetry
Love Poems (1999) and Flower Poems (2001) and, with John
Goodridge, co-edited John Clare: New Approaches (2000). His study of
the contemporary Glaswegian writer, James Kelman (2007), was short-
listed for the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award in 2008. He is
editor of the John Clare Society Journal and has published essays on
Clare, ecology, copyright, editing and Romantic literary culture.
Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at
the University of Warwick. Her publications include Elizabeth Jennings:
The Collected Poems (2012); The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth
(Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Women Poets of the Nineteenth
Century (2006). She is the editor of Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Re-
thinking Religion and Literature (2014), and a new perspectives issue of
La Questione Romantica on William Wordsworth (with Elena Spandri;
2014). Her book Christina Rossetti: Poet of Grace is forthcoming.
Scott Mceathron is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois
University. He has written extensively on the relationship between
labouring-class poetry and canonical Romanticism, and, more recently,
has published a series of essays on Romantic-era painters and paintings
with links to Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats. He is the editor of English
Labouring-Class Poetry, 18001830 (2006) and Thomas Hardys Tess of
the dUrbervilles: A Sourcebook (2005). His current projects include work
on the nineteenth-century labouring-class elegy and on the treatment of
labouring-class poets by the Royal Literary Fund.
Adam Rounce lectures at the University of Nottingham. He has written
extensively on various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers,
Notes on contributors ix
including Dryden, Pope, Churchill, Joseph Warton and Johnson. He is
co-editing two volumes of the ongoing Cambridge edition of the writ-
ings of Jonathan Swift, as well as writing a separate Chronology. He has
recently published a monograph on literary culture and lack of success in
the long eighteenth century: Fame and Failure, 17201800: the Unfullled
Literary Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Fiona Stafford is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a
Fellow of Somerville College. Her recent books include Reading
Romantic Poetry (2012) and Local Attachments (2010). She edited
Lyrical Ballads and Pride and Prejudice and a collection of essays on
Burns and Other Poets (2012). She has also written and delivered two
series of The Essay for BBC Radio 3 on The Meaning of Trees. She is
currently working on The Oxford History of English Literature: Volume
Seven, The Romantic Period and on a book about trees.
Sam Ward is an Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Regional
Literature and Culture at the University of Nottingham and teaches at
Nottingham Trent University. He worked as an associate editor on The
Letters of Robert Bloomeld and His Circle (2009) and parts 14 of The
Collected Letters of Robert Southey (200913), and has recently edited
Bloomelds nal volume of poetry, May-Day with the Muses. He is
Archivist of the John Clare Society and is currently working on a book-
length study entitled John Clare, Ownership and Appropriation.
Sarah M. Zimmerman is Professor of English at Fordham University. Her
work on the Romantic lyric includes Romanticism, Lyricism, and History
(1999), which focused on Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth,
Dorothy Wordsworth and John Clare. She has also published essays on
the lyric poetry of Smith, Clare and Keats. Her work on performance
includes essays on Percy Bysshe Shelleys The Cenci, Samuel Taylor
Coleridges public lectures, and women writers in the Romantic lecture
room. She has completed a study of the Romantic literary lecture that
features Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, William Hazlitt
and their women auditors, including Mary Russell Mitford, Catherine
Maria Fanshawe and Lady Charlotte Bury.
Acknowledgements
For access and help with archival materials, the authors are grateful to the
British Library; the New York Public Library; the National Archives, Kew;
the Bryn Mawr College Library; the Central Library, Peterborough; and
the John Clare Collection of the Northamptonshire Central Library,
Northamptonshire Libraries and Information Service.
We thank the Trustees of the British Museum for the reproduction of
August, after Peter DeWint, 1827, which appears on p. 26, and is copy-
right The Trustees of the British Museum. The front cover image is
Samuel Palmers The White Cloud, c. 18334 (detail), reproduced by kind
permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Ashmolean Museum,
University of Oxford.
x
Abbreviations
Bate Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography

(London: Picador, 2003)
By Himself John Clare By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and
David Powell (Ashington and Manchester:
MidNAG/Carcanet, 1996)
Critical Heritage Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973)
Early Poems (III) The Early Poems of John Clare 18041822, ed. Eric
Robinson and David Powell, assoc. ed. Margaret
Grainger, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989)
Eg. British Library, Egerton Manuscript
Haughton John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton,
Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summereld
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
JCSJ The John Clare Society Journal, vols. 133 (2014),
continuing series
Later Poems (III) The Later Poems of John Clare 18371864, ed. Eric
Robinson and David Powell, assoc. ed. Margaret
Grainger, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
Letters The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
LM London Magazine, various editors and publishers
(London: 18209)
Major Works John Clare: Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and
David Powell, with an Introduction by Tom
Paulin (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2004)
Middle Period (IV) John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period 1822
1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and
xi
xii List of abbreviations
P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press.
vols. III: 1996; vols. IIIIV: 1998; vol. V:
2003)
Natural History The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare,
ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983)
New Approaches John Clare: New Approaches, ed. John Goodridge
and Simon Kvesi (Helpston: John Clare
Society, 2000)
Nor. Northampton Manuscript, John Clare
Collection, Northamptonshire Libraries and
Information Service, as listed in [David Powell],
Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the
Northampton Public Library (Northampton:
County Borough of Northampton Public
Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery Committee,
1964)
Pet. Peterborough Manuscript, Central Library,
Peterborough, as listed in Margaret Grainger,
A Descriptive Catalogue of the John Clare
Collection in Peterborough Museum and Art
Gallery ([Peterborough]: [Peterborough
Museum Society], 1973)
Sales Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)
Tibbles (1972) J. W. and Anne Tibble, John Clare: A Life
(London: Michael Joseph, 1972)
Introduction
Simon Kvesi and Scott McEathron
In his biography of Charles Dickens, John Forster quotes from a now

lost letter which contains Dickens only known reference to John Clare.
It is not the kind of response we might have expected from a novelist so
well regarded for sympathetic, nuanced portrayals of the effects and
dimensions of poverty. Forster defends his subject:
A dislike of display was rooted in [Dickens] . . . His aversion to every form
of what is called patronage of literature was part of the same feeling . . .
These views about patronage did not make him more indulgent to the
clamour which with which it is so often invoked for the ridiculously
small. You read that life of Clare? he wrote (15th of August 1865). Did
you ever see such preposterous exaggeration of small claims? And isnt it
expressive, the perpetual prating of him in the book as the Poet? So another
Incompetent used to write to the Literary Fund when I was on the
committee: This leaves the poet at his divine mission in a corner of a
single room. The Poets father is wiping his spectacles. The Poets mother
is weaving. Yah! He was equally intolerant of every magnicent
proposal that should render the literary man independent of the
bookseller, and he sharply criticized even a compromise to replace the
half-prot system by one of royalties on copies sold.1
Dickens scorn is really aimed at Frederick Martins 1865 biography of the
poet, the single most signicant Victorian-period Clare publication.2
Nevertheless, that Dickens should have been so sweepingly dismissive of
Clares small claims while taking umbrage at the perceived excesses of a
biographer he regards as a mere hagiographer comes as a disappointment.
As with John Keats, Robert Bloomeld, William Wordsworth and Alfred
Tennyson all of whom Clare might readily have met in person but did
not Dickens failure to appreciate Clare feels like yet another missed
opportunity for a fruitful meeting of minds, albeit at a distance.3 Yet his
remarks can help us unpack a dominant problem in the history of Clares
critical reception. At the heart of the matter as always in English life, it
1
2 S I M O N K V E S I A N D S C O T T M CE A T H R O N
seems lies class; and for Clare in particular, class seems to render
problematic almost every relationship he and his work might forge to the
polite world of letters. By the time Dickens issued his sarcastic attack on
Martins extravagances, while swatting away, as one might an irritating
midge, the very notion that Clare could be a writer of enduring interest, the
eighteenth-century model of patronage had all but disappeared with the
hardest-working exemplar of the newly professionalized writer being
Dickens himself. A Times editorial of 1964 memorably cut to the quick
in explaining why excessive acclaim of Clare tended to come off as
demeaning: Praise of his verses had about it a ring of the Johnsonian
reaction to a dog walking on his hinder legs it is not done well, but you
are surprised to nd it done at all.4
Whereas the mid-Victorian Dickens could bid a blithe good riddance
both to literary patronage and to those he felt had never deserved it, the
Romantic era in which Clare was born, and into which his poetry rst
emerged in public, was a transitional period wherein a deferential,
partisan mode of sponsored authorship was gradually replaced by one
in which writers could independently exploit the newly capitalized
economy of the book trade. Clare was both beneciary and victim of
this change. His income from a rather old-fashioned trust fund set up for
him by a collaboration of publishers and patrons (of varying political
hues) could theoretically have been substantial enough to cover his living
expenses, yet in practice never quite did so. The publishing of collections
of his own verse, and of individual poems in magazines, periodicals,
annuals and anthologies, would seem to have augured nancial health,
but in fact did not appreciably boost his income. Any great expectations
Clare had to be free of reliance on benefactors were persistently and
repeatedly dashed; any monies he might have expected from his early
successes never proved sufcient to stop feverish worries over the sub-
sistence of his home and family. To his long-term correspondent and
London helpmeet, the lonely middle-class Eliza Louisa Emmerson,
Clare wrote in 1832: all I wish now is to stand upon my own bottom
as a poet without any apology as to want of education or any thing else &
I say it not in the feeling of either ambition or vanity but in the spirit of
common sense.5 Commonsensical and reasonable such a wish may have
been; realistic or realizable it was not.
In 1837 it was clear to Matthew Allen, the doctor who ran the asylum in
Essex, that a root cause of Clares psychological problems was that he
simply did not eat enough.6 As with many of his peers, it is likely that Clare
was persistently malnourished. It is both no surprise and a sharp irony that
Introduction 3
Clare never ate as well or as regularly as he did in the asylums in the nal
third of his life, so that by the time the only known photograph of Clare
was taken in 1862 in Northampton, he looks healthily bulky.7 But this
stature was an accident of his being a private patient in both institutions
the fees for which were covered by his trust fund. No amount of effort of
the historical imagination can help us grasp what protracted hunger must
have meant to Clare to his body, his mind and so to his writing. For us
this also stands as a critical problem, not least because he does not write
about it much at all. There is always a fraught relationship between a
critical subject-position of relative privilege (verging, some might say, on
academic decadence) and a working-class object of study. This gulf of
material experience can itself bring about the sort of over-praise that
Dickens found so distasteful; indeed, the hagiography still informing
some responses to Clare is no less a classist phenomenon than now-
obsolete dismissals of his value. As Alan Porter observed as early as 1928,8
neither Dickens nor the 1920s editor of the new edition of Forsters
biography dealt fairly with Clare; but it remains true that Dickenss
scorn could be redirected at many puff pieces in favour of Clare written
in the century and a half since his death.
Hugh Haughton and Adam Phillips lamented in 1994 that Clare is
mainly famous for being neglected,9 neatly summarizing a predominant
critical noise about Clare: that somehow the sort of misfortunes he suffered
in life continue to beset his literary legacy due to a lingering snobbery and
elitism towards his class and education; his rural, humble subject matter;
and his language. Of course, those who locate their criticism solely in
relationship to this neglect risk putting themselves in the dubiously heroic
position of chastising others class prejudices. Indeed, in twentieth-century
reshapings of Clares reputation it has sometimes been this protectionist
posture, more than excessive praise, that has slowed the development of
critical, creative and editorial work. But while rage over the unjust neglect
of Clare still ares up occasionally, the rst decades of the twenty-rst
century have stabilized most critics sense to the extent that we can now put
those past injuries to rest.
Still, it is worth reviewing here the steps that have brought us to this
point, not least because the history of the reception of Clare offers insights
into the effects class has on the diverse agendas of criticism. No special
pleading is necessary: the critical reception of working-class writers is
always beset with such problems, from Stephen Ducks and Mary
Colliers era through to our own. In Clares case, being presented to the
world as an uneducated peasant meant that his work suffered the type of
sweeping dismissal that Charles Mackay included in his anonymous 1869

All the Year Round essay An English Peasant, ve years after Clares death
and a year before the death of Dickens:
If there be any class of the English people that is pre-eminently unknown to
itself and to all other classes, it is that of the farm labourer. The squire or
other great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood knows them after a
certain fashion, as he knows his cattle; but of the labourers mind he has as
little idea as he has of that of the animal which he bestrides in the hunting-
eld. He knows the peasant to be a useful drudge, like the horse that draws
the plough, but unlike the horse, to be a burden upon the poor-rates, either
present or prospective . . . In the southern shires, the condition of the
peasant is virtually that of the slave. He is tied to his parish by circumstances
too formidable to be overcome by any such small and weak agencies as he
can employ . . . Why the English peasantry, the border men excepted,
should be inferior in energy, or in the art of bettering themselves, to their
compeers in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, has never yet been satisfactorily
explained . . . Whatever may be the cause, there is a lack of imagination
among them that leads to lack of enterprise, and that seems somehow or
other to run in the blood of those portions of the British people that are not
of Celtic origin or intermixture. The peasantry of Saxon England have
among them but two poets, Robert Bloomeld, the author of the
Farmers Boy, and John Clare, author of the Village Minstrel; neither of
them a poet with any claims to the rst or even to the second rank, while
Scotlands poets, sprung from the agricultural and labouring classes, are to
be numbered by scores, including Robert Burns, a greater than fty
Bloomelds and Clares rolled into one, and a long bead roll of genuine
bards and minstrels, of whom it is sufcient to name Allan Ramsay, the
barber, William Ferguson, the sailor, James Hogg, the shepherd, Robert
Tannahill, the weaver, Hugh Miller, the stonemason, and Jean Glover, the
strolling tinker.10
Here the Scottish poet, journalist and editor Mackay does condemn the
hopeless trap of peasant life lumping together the reputations of two quite
different English labouring-class poets as he does so but he is as condem-
natory of the innate sluggishness of blood of the southern English peasant
as he is of rural poverty. He castigates peasants for making serfs of them-
selves by their ignorance and limpet-like tenacity in sticking to the parish in
which they were born more than he does an economic system which allows
a farmer to regard the peasant on a par with the concern he has for his
inanimate tools.11 For Mackay, as it seems was the case for his editor
Dickens, small Clare, like all English peasants, is eminently forgettable.
Mackays essay can stand as a low point in Clares critical reception
though in truth it is actually one among many examples we might have
Introduction 5
chosen to focus upon, as Victorian writers such as Mackay wrestled
with the political and cultural presence, and growing inuence, of an
increasingly unied, and unionized, working class. It is instructive that
in his vituperative 1867 essay The Working Classes, Mackay trumpets his
opposition to the Trades Union movement, the campaign for universal
manhood suffrage, and the organisation of labour Communism,
Socialism, Fourierism, Proudhonism or whatever else it may be or has
been called.12 Thus, Clare is just a baby thrown out with the dirty
working-class bathwater. Nevertheless, for every Mackay there was a
counteracting Edwin Paxton Hood or Samuel Smiles, Victorian gentlemen
prominently praising Clare as a prime example of just what an educated
labourer might become even in the toughest of circumstances: both a
model of industry and an example of the power of literacy. For Hood in
1851, Clare was the Wordsworth of Labour, while Smiles in 1861 thought
the poet was entitled to a high place, if not to the highest, among the
uneducated poets of England.13 Writers and commentators of all stripes
returned again and again to Clare throughout the late nineteenth century
though Roger Sales rightly notes that Clare appears most often as just one
name among many in litanies of humble geniuses.14 Clare was a low-key
yet persistent presence in late nineteenth-century assessments of the literary
landscape, and this fact accounts for a small but signicant crop of editions
after the turn of the twentieth century. The rst of these, a 1901 collection
edited by the poet Norman Gale,15 met with a brutal dismissal in the Tory
Spectator:
Clare had just the amount of ability which is most dangerous to a mans
character. It was enough to lift him out of his place; it did not lift him high
enough. His verse was remarkable as written by a farm-labourer; it was never
really good. Mr. Gale thinks that the public which refused to praise, or even
to read, him were blind bats. It may be so; we must own to the same
blindness. The verse has the common fatal fault of not being interesting. It is
not thoughtful; it is not even sonorous; one never feels disposed to read it
aloud. It is not even minutely true to Nature.16
After this violent knock-back which was probably as much a coded
rejection of the then deeply unfashionable Bodley Head 1890s poet
Gale17 as it was of Clare the twentieth century would prove far friendlier
to Clares work. The story of the emergence of biographies and editions has
been told many times, starting with the groundwork laid by Frederick
Martin and J. L. Cherry18 in the nineteenth century, and proceeding
through collections of increasing breadth and editorial quality by a succes-
sion of poets Arthur Symons, Alan Porter with Edmund Blunden and
then Blunden on his own.19 The editorial baton was next picked up by
the educationalist academic J. W. Tibble and his remarkably prolic
partner Anne Tibble, who also co-edited Clare with Leonard Clark and
Kelsey Thornton.20 The Tibbles substantial efforts were complemented
by two editions from the inuential all-round man of letters and
notoriously scathing reviewer Geoffrey Grigson.21 Such charismatic
gures, with their increasingly solid scholarship, built a platform for a
series of committed academic editors from the 1960s onwards. Initiated by
Geoffrey Summereld, an editing project which was joined by Eric
Robinson in the early 1960s produced new editions and marked a
sea-change in the way Clare was presented.22 Textual primitivism that
is, transcription of original handwritten manuscripts into published type,
yet with an ostensibly minimalist level of editorial intervention (no gram-
matical correction, no indentation, no additional punctuation, no ortho-
graphic regularization) had starkly arrived. Summereld and Robinsons
early partnership led in turn to Robinsons forty-year-long editing project
with David Powell, Margaret Grainger and Paul Dawson that by 2003 had
produced the monumental nine-volume Oxford Clarendon edition of the
complete poems, to which we will return below.23
The corrective we offer to this well-rehearsed history is that while Clares
work certainly suffered its share of academic marginalization and neglect,
there was no dramatic opening of Tutankhamuns tomb, as it were, in
which Clare was gloriously rediscovered after having been buried and
locked away. To imagine any single watershed moment of this kind is to
deny Clares commonality with many writers whose fortunes have risen
and fallen with uctuations in literary-critical taste and curatorial practice.
As we have said above, since his death in 1864 Clare has received quiet yet
constant attention, both despite and because of his uneasy periodicity.
Never quite accepted as one of the great male Romantic poets, he has also
been perceived (mistakenly) as having been out of contact with the swift
changes of Victorian literary culture, by virtue of having been institutio-
nalized in the same year that the young Queen was crowned. There are of
course other literary categories and typologies we might use to frame our
understanding of Clare but, as David Simpson pointed out in 1999, they
never seem to t him very well:
Economic hardship, sexual and emotional deprivation, physical discomfort,
geographical displacement, a sense of place made no-place by enclosure and
by just growing up these are the coordinates of Clares poetry. Many of the
compensatory gestures the patriotism, the conformity to convention, the
nods to other poets and poems so evident in the 1820 Poems Descriptive of
Introduction 7
Rural Life and Scenery either register as hollow or unfelt or require for their
elucidation a deep literary historical knowledge that is seldom to be found
and is therefore seldom taught. The sheer complexity of the mix makes it
very hard to reduce Clare to the historical generalisations identied in a
ne essay by Nicholas Birns as the stuff of most historical criticism. Too
literate for a primitive, not just a dialect poet, too patriotic for a radical, too
psychologically complex for a passive victim of repression, and too nostalgic
for a realist, Clare makes a difculty for any of the obviously contending
categories by which we might make him familiar . . . The love of books and
writing that takes Clare out of the laboring class does not comfortably
insert him into any other group, least of all that of guild of professional
writers.24
Yet, owing in part to the critical reexivity his situation has always
demanded, Clares ongoing status as an uncategorizable literary and social
mist might in the end have served him well. Clares work is now more
highly regarded, more widely considered and his name more broadly
recognized and referred to, than at any time since the mostly warm
reception his rst book received in 1820. Perhaps we no longer need be
concerned about Clares place in the canon. The inclusion in Romantic
and Victorian period study of writers of similar social class to Clare along
with the serious study of the work of women, servants and slaves, and of
texts couched in regional or dialect languages and eschewing polite
forms has done much to expose the baldly ideological nature of academic
literary canon formation in general. The cultural processes of valuation
that once excluded Clare do not now form a valid or settled model of
literary or academic taste. By the same token, Clare scholars have tended of
late to extend their scepticism of a xed Romantic canon towards any xed
listing of Clares best poems ttingly, perhaps, given Clares many
lurching stops and starts in the making of his own career. It might not
be so much that Clare is no longer on the margins, but rather that any
centrally agreed ground has been dissolved.
Clare has become a central part of and a leading inspiration for the
ongoing recovery of many other working-class, labouring-class, regional,
dialect or otherwise socially marginalized writers of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. We now appreciate that contemporary tastes, social
mores, fashions and historically determined prejudices inuence which
texts are read and which forgotten, rather than any council-of-elders
agreement over eternal verities of literary value. Access to Clare is now
guided by a plurality of scholarly and popular editions and by Jonathan
Bates critical biography, as well as by a range of interpretive approaches
taking in psychology, music, creative writing, dialect and language, literary
genre and form, folklore, cultural materialism, botany, ornithology, eco-

criticism and environmentalism, geography and local history. It is no
surprise, then, that his work has enjoyed a surge of rich, diversifying and
popularizing attention.
Given the shift in the quality and range of interest in Clare across the
past twenty years or so, we felt it was high time for a newly commissioned
set of critical essays on the poet. It is now more than two decades since the
rst major critical essay collection focused on the poet the Cambridge
University Press collection of 1994.25 Since that collection, critical work has
expanded exponentially,26 while access to the poetry has been dramatically
improved by the completion of the Oxford Clarendon edition of the
poetry, which amounts nally to nine weighty volumes published between
1984 and 2003. Other collections from the same team and latterly
from editors sometimes with contrasting editorial and interpretative
regimes have given the study of Clare a rm if, at times, contested textual
foundation for further critical advances. The monumental impact of the
Oxford edition is beyond doubt: it is an extraordinary achievement of
determined, committed scholarly labour. Editing Clare is hard work
indeed. His manuscripts are notoriously and riotously ungovernable, and
often unreadable. Some are even disintegrating due to the corrosiveness
of Clares homemade ink his written words have become looping,
sometimes indecipherable, holes in paper. Yet the unsettled nature of
Clares textual life remains a dominant and idiosyncratic feature of the
study of this poet. Presentations of his work include the textually primiti-
vist extreme of the Oxford edition of the poetry; Margaret Graingers
edition of the Natural History Prose Writings and Mark Storeys edition
of the letters,27 both textually primitivist in their own ways; and the
Mid-Northumberland Arts Group (MidNAG) and Carcanet editions of
poetry and prose28 (similarly primitivist though with some variance). More
editorially liberal agendas are seen in the parallel texts of Tim Chilcotts
Carcanet edition of The Shepherds Calendar (showing transcriptions in
tandem of both manuscript and 1827 published versions), and in the lightly
polished selections such as those edited by Kelsey Thornton (the selection
used to teach Clare in English secondary schools) and Jonathan Bate29
(who argues there and elsewhere for a polished text30). An altogether
different realm of textual reproduction is found online, where one may
nd complete facsimiles and transcriptions of the original lifetime pub-
lications; though of varying quality and reliability, these online versions of
the poems comprise as important an entry point to Clare as any other
today. This textual and editorial complexity which is politicized,
Introduction 9
sometimes heatedly, and even fought over via lawyers letters means that
still more critical and theoretical attention will have to be paid by future
Clare scholars to the ways in which his texts might best be presented to an
ever-widening readership. There remains a lot of work to do. The more
plural the audience becomes for Clare and the more varied its demands at
different points and levels of access to his world and work the more
multifarious the editions and presentations of his work will necessarily
become. This is beginning to happen, and the prospect of this next stage in
the developing history of Clares life and texts is an exciting one indeed.
This is a good time to be interested in Clare.
This collection of new work charts some of the breadth of Clares
diversity, featuring essays which range from Clares engagement with
poetic tradition to his contemporary presence as a beacon for environ-
mental thinking. In Adam Rounces hands, Clares encounter with his
eighteenth-century poetic forebears Thomson and Cowper has benets
and limitations, yet remains foundationally signicant. Sam Ward
grapples with the complex, subtle politics of Clares relationships with
patrons and promoters especially with the sometimes toxic, yet hugely
supportive, presence of Lord Radstock in Clares early writing life. Richard
Cronin newly assesses Clares place in the vibrant London and London
Magazine scene, which Clare was both a part of and apart from. Fiona
Stafford on colour, and Sarah Zimmerman on birds nests, distinctively
pursue the poetic complexity of Clares delicate, artful presentations of
nature, while John Burnside looks to Clare as an insightful commentator
on his own times, and on our contemporary ecological and social issues.
Emma Mason is the rst critic to consider how Clares celebrated green
politics might be informed by his understanding of divinity and faith,
while Robert Heyes seeks to dispel some green myths with a detailed
account of Clares natural history prose, and the rich social contexts out
of which such knowledge emerged. Scott McEathron and Simon Kvesi
consider the reception and presentation of Clare, through the career of his
rst biographer Frederick Martin, and the framing imprint of death,
respectively. One hundred and fty years after Clares death, the literary
riches he left to us all are proving far from small.
This inventory conrms the current consensus that critical responses to
Clare need no longer be framed by justications of his works value, or even
by preliminary discussions of the phenomenon of labouring-class poetry.
Instead, we nd at this moment a sense of interpretive capaciousness that
Clare himself, who told the Northampton physician Dr P. R. Nesbitt that
his poetry came to him whilst walking in the elds that he kicked it out
of the clods, might have found appealing. Indeed, if there is one principle
uniting the essays collected here, it is that all proceed from the conviction
that, as Nesbitt noted, Clare possessed traits we are in the habit of associating
with . . . the highest order of intellect.31 This is a position that frees us from
the false dichotomy of Clare as either importunate peasant or martyred
genius, and that helps us recognize the striking variety of topics and issues
to which Clare responded as a thinking artist. The spirit of this collection is
to look directly at these interests, and to confront their inevitable remaking
and appropriation in still-emerging contexts of reception.
Notes
1. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London: Cecil
Palmer, 1928), pp. 8202. Forsters biography was rst published 18724.
2. For an overview of the reception of Frederick Martins 1865 biography, and
then J. L. Cherrys Life and Remains of 1873, see Critical Heritage, pp. 1516.
For an account of Martins career, see the essay by Scott McEathron in this
volume, pp. 11845.
3. John Lucas draws some interesting parallels between Dickens ction and
Clares life in his John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), pp. 2 and 7.
4. The Times, 20 May 1964, p. 13. This leader would most likely have been
written by the papers editor at the time, William Haley. The Samuel Johnson
witticism was originally aimed at women, so Haleys redirection suggests there
are parallels between the status of women and working-class people with
intellectual aspirations. James Boswell recollects: I told him I had been that
morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a
woman preach. Johnson. Sir, a womans preaching is like a dogs walking on
his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to nd it done at all.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, 9th edn, 4 vols. (London: T. Cadell et al., 1822),
vol. 1, p. 408. For a feminist assessment, see Alan Richardson, Romanticism
and the Colonization of the Feminine, in Anne K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism
and Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1988), pp. 1325 (p. 14).
5. Letters, p. 604.
6. The authoritative account of Allens asylum, and his care for Clare, is by
Pamela Faithfull, An Evaluation of an Eccentric: Matthew Allen MD, Chemical
Philosopher, Phrenologist, Pedagogue and Mad-Doctor, 17831845 (University of
Shefeld: PhD Thesis, 2001), especially pp. 17388. For further discussion see
Chapter 7 by Simon Kvesi in this volume, pp. 14666.
7. 1862 is the date ascribed by the National Portrait Gallery, London, to
W. W. Laws photograph. National Portrait Gallery number: P1101.
8. In his review of Leys new edition of the Forster biography of Dickens, poet
and editor Alan Porter writes that a concentration upon one literary gure
Introduction 11
seems often to forbid knowledge of others; editors become too obvious
partisans. It is to be hoped that, if a new edition of the book is called
for, Mr. Ley will see his way to alter his note on John Clare; it is both
unsympathetic and inaccurate. Spectator, 30 June 1928, p. 27. Leys only
note reads John Clare, the peasant poet. Born, a labourers son, 1793;
died in Northampton lunatic asylum, 1864. His book, Poems, Descriptive of
Rural Life, was published in 1821, and had a good reception. Despite the aid
of many friends (including the Marquess of Exeter), he never prospered.
Life of Charles Dickens, p. 843, n. 492a. Other than its inaccuracy (it should
be 1820 not 1821), it is hard to see quite what upset Porter so much. Porter had
co-edited a groundbreaking edition of Clares poetry with Edmund Blunden,
Poems, Chiey from Manuscript (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1920), which
was reissued in 1934.
9. Hugh Haughton and Adam Phillips, Introduction: Relocating John Clare,
in Haughton, pp. 127 (p. 13).
10. An English Peasant, All the Year Round, I.6 (9 January 1869), 1326 (1324).
Published anonymously, as were all items in this publication, and attributed
to Charles Mackay by Ella Ann Oppelander, Dickens All the Year Round:
Descriptive Index and Contributor List (Troy, New York: Whitston
Publishing, 1984), p. 213.
11. Mackay, An English Peasant, pp. 133, 132.
12. Charles Mackay, The Working Classes, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine,
February 1867, pp. 2209 (p. 229).
13. Edwin Paxton Hood, John Clare, The Peasant Poet, in The Literature of
Labour: Illustrious Instances of the Education of Poetry in Poverty (London:
Partridge and Oakey, 1851), pp. 12864 (p. 155). Extracted in Critical Heritage,
pp. 25766. Samuel Smiles, John Clare, in Brief Biographies (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1861), pp. 4329 (p. 438).
14. Sales, p. 99.
15. Poems by John Clare, ed. Norman Gale (Rugby: George E. Over, 1901).
16. Anonymous reviewer, Spectator, 25 January 1902, p. 40.
17. The pastoral poems of Norman Gale (18621942) were always on the
remotest fringes of the more decadent and fashionable Bodley Head
publishing coterie of London a n-de-sicle group which included the
inuential poet and critic Arthur Symons, who went on to edit Clare
himself a few years later (see note 19 below). By the time Gale turned to
edit Clare, he was a thoroughly ignored poet, a situation that continues to
this day, with the exception of Michael Seeney, A Six Foot Three
Nightingale: Norman Gale, 18621942: A Biographical Essay and Check-
List, Occasional Series 7 (Oxford: Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998).
Seeney lists, but does not discuss, the Clare edition.
18. J. L. Cherry, Life and Remains of John Clare (London: F. Warne, 1873).
19. Poems by John Clare, ed. Arthur Symons (London: H. Frowde, 1908); Poems,
Chiey from Manuscript, ed. Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter (London:
Cobden-Sanderson, 1920); Madrigals and Chronicles: Being Newly Found
Poems Written by John Clare, ed. Edmund Blunden (London: Beaumont

Press, 1924); Sketches in the life of John Clare, ed. Edmund Blunden
(London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931).
20. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble, John Clare: A Life (London: Cobden-Sanderson,
1932); The Poems of John Clare, ed. J.W. Tibble (London: J. M. Dent, 1935); The
Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1951); The Letters of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951); J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble, John
Clare: His Life and Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1956); Selected Poems of John
Clare, ed. Leonard Clark and Anne Tibble (Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son, 1964);
John Clare, The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibble and R. K. R. Thornton
(Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1979); John Clare, The
Journal; Essays; The Journey From Essex, ed. Anne Tibble (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1980). Even this list does not capture all of
the Tibbles Clare publications.
21. Poems of John Clares Madness, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1949); Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. Geoffrey Grigson
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950).
22. The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summereld
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964); John Clare, Selected Poems and
Prose, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summereld (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966); John Clare, The Shepherds Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and
Geoffrey Summereld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
23. For full bibliographic details of these volumes see Abbreviations, pp. xixii.
24. David Simpson, Is the Academy Ready for John Clare?, JCSJ, 18 (1999), 708
(74). The essay by Nicholas Birns that Simpson refers to is in Haughton,
pp. 189220.
25. John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and
Geoffrey Summereld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
The same year saw the publication of another excellent collection of papers,
edited by John Goodridge, entitled The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the
Self-Taught Tradition (Helpston: John Clare Society and Margaret Grainger
Memorial Trust, 1994).
26. Since 1994, book-length highlights in the critical study of Clare include
Ronald Blythe, Talking About John Clare (Nottingham: Trent Books, 1999);
John Goodridge and Simon Kvesi (eds.), John Clare: New Approaches
(Helpston: John Clare Society, 2000); Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary
Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paul Chirico, John Clare and the
Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
Mina Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2008); Sarah Houghton-Walker, John Clares Religion
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); John Goodridge, John Clare and Community
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Many more academic stu-
dies feature chapters on, or considerations of, Clare, and his work is a much
Introduction 13
more frequent presence in academic journals, reviews and the press and
indeed in English education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, and in
creative work than it has ever been. For an overview of how Clare studies has
developed across thirty years in the John Clare Society Journal, since its rst
issue in 1982, see Greg Crossan, Thirty Years of the John Clare Society Journal:
A Retrospective Survey, JCSJ, 31 (2012), 522.
27. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
28. John Clare, The Rural Muse, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1982); John Clare, The Midsummer
Cushion, ed. R. K. R. Thornton and Anne Tibble (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1990); John Clare, Cottage Tales, ed.
Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1993); John Clare, Northborough Sonnets,
ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1995); John Clare, By Himself, ed.
Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/
Carcanet, 1996); John Clare, A Champion for the Poor: Political Verse and
Prose, ed. P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 2000).
29. John Clare, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (London: J. M. Dent, 1997); John Clare,
The Shepherds Calendar: Manuscript and Published Version, ed. Tim Chilcott
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2006); I Am: the Selected Poetry of John Clare,
ed. Jonathan Bate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). See also
Chilcotts experimental calendrical edition John Clare: The Living Year 1841
(Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1999).
30. See, for example, Jonathan Bate, Review of John Clare: Poems of the Middle
Period 18221837, vols. 3 and 4, JCSJ, 18 (1999), 7983, and Bate, Appendix:
Clares Text, Biography, pp. 56375. For further consideration of editorial
policies, see the introductions to any of the Oxford Clarendon editions listed
above, and Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 20661; R. K. R. Thornton, What
John Clare Do We Read?, PN Review, 31.4 (MarchApril, 2005), 5456,
and The Raw and the Cooked, JCSJ, 24 (2005), 7886; and Simon Kvesi,
Beyond the Language Wars: Towards a Green Edition of John Clare, JCSJ,
26 (2007), 6175.
31. P. R. Nesbitt to Frederick Martin, 15 April 1865, Nor. 58.
part i
Poetry
chapter 1
John Clares colours

Fiona Stafford
In his third Natural History Letter, John Clare remarked that I love to
look on nature with a poetic feeling which magnifys the pleasure.1 Clare
not only looked frequently and directly at the natural world, but loved
what he saw and was not afraid to say so. If the precise details of the external
world were of prime importance to his poetry, his perception was never-
theless highly individual and emotional. The same letter expresses both
intellectual frustration over the ignorance of nature in large Citys
(prompted by the failure of a London gentleman and lady to recognize
a song thrush) and also pained dismay at the practices of naturalists and
botanists, who dry the plant or torture the Butterye by sticking it on a
cork board with a pin.2 Clare was well aware that not everyone sees things
in the same way and his poetry, accordingly, combines convincing obser-
vation of a known world with deeply personal responses. For him, seeing
meant feeling and both were part of an experiential wholeness that was, at
the same time, open to fresh possibility.
Unlike the scientists whose pursuit of truth seemed at odds with life
itself or those who failed to notice the natural world at all, Clares was an
essentially creative response and the feeling that magnied his pleasure was
more akin to that of a certain kind of visual artist. Clare admired the
modern landscape painters who not only looked with clear eyes at the real
world, but also seemed to share his delight in what they saw, transforming
quite ordinary stretches of countryside into glowing elds of light. In his
own endeavour to recreate the world in words, Clares powerful, subjective
response to his immediate environment found expression in the language
of colour, which he used just as adventurously as did his artistic contem-
poraries. Here was a means to express the dynamic reciprocation between
the imaginative impulse and objective reality, without the deadening tones
of philosophical analysis. In Clares hands, the use of colour seems natural
and intuitive: a deceptively simple means to express a living world. Once
seen in the context of Romantic painting, however, Clares highly
17
18 FIONA STAFFORD
distinctive use of colour emphasizes the experimental qualities of his

art and its afnities with the modern, progressive aesthetic movements of
his day.
For Clare, the fullness of the natural world demanded an equivalent
response and so, in many of his poems, visual detail is inseparable from
verbal delight. The second stanza of the relatively late lyric beginning The
wind blows happily on everything conveys a passion for natural phenom-
ena through the simple recurrence of the word green, which gradually
seems to ood the monochrome, two-dimensional printed page with fresh
colour. The power of the poets impulse to magnify what he sees compels
the repetitions with increasing force:
I love the luscious green before the bloom
The leaves & grass & even beds of moss
When leaves gin bud & spring prepares to come
The Ivys evergreen the brown green gorse
Plots of green weeds that barest roads engross
In fact I love the youth of each green thing
The grass the trees the bushes & the moss
That pleases little birds & makes them sing
I love the green before the blooms of spring
(lines 1018; Later Poems, I, 205)3
Not every poet would risk the same, simple word six times in a nine-line
stanza, but here green seems to grow in intensity with every new instance,
linking the lines acoustically, visually and imaginatively. The nal line
returns to the tenth, but now transforming what had seemed a spontaneous
response to natural surroundings into a fully justied statement. This is
the culmination of a poem full of disparate details, which yet are made
all of a piece. The dominant colour of the stanza, the luscious green
before the bloom, seems to spread unstoppably through the alliterative
lines leaves & grass, leaves gin bud, brown green gorse, barest roads
engross as the sounds of the repeating consonants herald the inexorable
arrival of spring.
The absence of punctuation adds to the sense of interconnection, for the
leaves in line 12 seem to be springing up as well as budding, until the rest of
the line suggests that a new subject spring has appeared. Similarly, the
Ivys evergreen (line 13) may be the object of the speakers love, but if
evergreen is also working as a verb, it can convey the effects of ivy plants
on brown trunks and dead leaves. So much depends on where the reader
places the pauses in the long, unbroken passage, and whether any pauses
are really needed in a stanza in which everything is green. Despite this
John Clares colours 19
pervasive colouration, each detail is still distinguished: the evergreen of
the Ivy is not the same as the brown green of the gorse (if brown is
qualifying green) or the luscious green of the leaf buds, blades of grass
and beds of moss. The very consciousness of difference only adds to the
overall sense of the season, stemming as it does from carefully observed, but
also habitual experience. These are not the words of someone who is seeing
the spring for the rst time the reassurance of the lines, the foundation of
the love that is being expressed so emphatically, lies in their repetition. The
passionate delight in immediate physical experience is magnied by the
familiarity arising from seeing the same elds, bushes and trees day after
day and week after week. This is the annual renewal of tender feeling all
the more marvellous for being instantly recognizable. Green is not a
symbol for spring, but a pledge that spring is about to arrive, afrmed
and reafrmed with every bud. In another poem from the same period,
beginning How beautiful is Spring!, fresh shoots appear in promise to the
sun (Spring, line 11; Later Poems, I, 378). Recurrent greenery suggests the
rising sap of the new growing season: gradually, the natural world is waking
up, visible, tangible, and still preliminary, about to burst into a multitude
of soft, fresh colours.
In Clares poetry, green has many meanings, ranging from the numer-
ous subtle shades of leaves on different trees, owers or mosses to the varied
moods that the word seems to carry. The deader green of The Flitting
(line 54; Middle Period, III, 481) offers a very different emotional charge
from that of the sunny air right green & young in Old Poesy (line 19;
Middle Period, IV, 197) or the green/In some warm nook in The Gipsies
Evening Blaze (lines 34; Early Poems, I, 33). In Out of Door Pleasures,
Clare focuses on the special quality of the summer green, the colour
seemingly intensied by its association with new-mown grass:
The meadows are mown, what a beautiful hue
There is in green closes as I wander through
A green of all colors, yellow, brown and dark grey
While the footpaths all darkly goes winding away
(lines 58; Later Poems, I, 342)
We can almost smell the beautiful hue. And yet, the knowledge that the
long grass has been cut also reminds us of the perpetual changes in the rural
world: green may be recurrent in Clares poetry, but it is not constant.
Meadow grass turns rapidly to hay. Again, the syntax in this passage adds to
the ambiguity of its greenness, because it is difcult to determine whether
the green of all colours includes tints of yellow, brown and dark grey or
20 FIONA STAFFORD
whether green is, of all colours, the most beautiful. Since the adjective turns
almost imperceptibly into a noun, it is equally unclear whether A green
(line 7) still refers to the hue, or whether it has now become a grassy space
or greensward. In a later summer sonnet, Clare describes how The silver
mist more lowly swims/And each green bosomed valley dims making
Green trees look grey, bright waters black (Sonnet, lines 12, 5; Later
Poems, I, 350). In The Shepherds Calendar, too, August begins with direct
reference to the changing year, as registered in the colour of the elds:
Harvest approaches with its busy day/The wheat tans brown & barley
bleaches grey (lines 12; Middle Period, I, 118). Given Clares acute sensi-
tivity to the transitory qualities of natural colour, the run of yellow, brown
and dark grey in Out of Door Pleasures may well anticipate a similar
fading of bright spring greens as the year grows older. On the other hand,
in that poem and many others thoughts of future decay also accentuate
the beauty of the present. Whether the other colours are immediate tints
or hints of whats to come, Clares lines invite multiple simultaneous
possibilities.
Since the evocation of colour is especially challenging for the artist
whose medium is language, such ambiguities are only too appropriate.
As soon as we begin to visualize a particular green, as these lines encourage
us to do, we realize that whatever we are imagining must be highly
subjective. Again and again, Clares poetry teases us with its vivid sense
of objective physical reality and simultaneous emphasis on the personal
nature of perception, memory and interpretation. From an early age, Clare
had been conscious that his responses to the world were somewhat unu-
sual, as he recalled in the autobiographical Sketches, composed in 1821: I
thought somtimes that I surely had a taste peculialy by myself and that
nobody else thought or saw things as I did.4 Of all the aspects of daily
experience, few are more subjective than colour; although everyone
possesses an idea of green, who can be sure that his particular shade
corresponds exactly to what others might think of as green? What appears
to be commonsensical may in fact be highly individual but this is what
makes Clares use of colour so effective. Red, yellow, blue and green
are among the earliest adjectives learned by children to make sense of the
world, and yet colour remains mysteriously elusive, exercising the powers
of physicists, philosophers and psychologists in the struggle to determine
its nature and meaning.5
Clares own interest in childrens natural attraction to brightly coloured
phenomena emerges in his letter on Pooty shells the brilliant yellow, red
and black shells of landsnails, which he had loved to collect since his
schooldays. For Clare the adult observer, the pleasure in pooty shells was
deepened by memories of happy hours spent hunting for them in youth.6
They were in a way Clares equivalent of Wordsworths rainbow remind-
ing him that the child was father of the man: fresh discovery of shells as
colourful as those gathered years before meant recovery of an earlier self
that often seemed in danger of slipping away. The long description of
bright pooty shells thus helps to illuminate the colours in Clares poetry,
not least the recurrent green, which frequently trails clouds of childhood
glory. Adult awareness of the ever-turning seasons, however, meant that
the joy of childhood memories was rarely undiluted. A green summers
day was not only tinged with recollections of paler, sharper, spring greens,
but also with the deeper fullness of deciduous trees in harvest months. The
natural details are at once vividly present and reassuringly habitual, but
they are also capable of delivering pangs of wistfulness for remembered
greens, irretrievable as childhood. Clares colours have the capacity to
convey the passage of time, even as they capture a fully realized moment.
In Out of Door Pleasures, the spontaneous response to a ne day in June
is magnied by the simple names of colours, carrying thoughts of cooler
months and earlier years.
Clare and painting

Colour is a vital but uid element in Clares art acting in some respects as
a visual counterpart to the unpunctuated poetry of his manuscripts. Just as
the successive phrases in his poems run on, unhindered by full stops and
semi-colons, so the recurrent images of colour mingle imperceptibly.
Greens can blend into yellows, browns, greys and blues, lighting up
under a pervasive sun or fading through silver mists. Everything is vividly
realized and yet slipping away from hard lines and limits. In Pleasant
Places Clare celebrates the absence of clear denitions in the Old stone
pits with veined ivy overhung (line 1), or the Old narrow lanes where trees
meet overhead (line 4), concluding with his praise of the wind:
While painting winds to make compleat the scene
In rich confusion mingles every green
Waving the sketchy pencil in their hands
Shading the living scenes to fairey lands
(lines 1114; Middle Period, IV, 225)
The wind is a natural artist, setting everything in motion and defying xed
distinctions. Clares lines, too, complete the scene conjured in the sonnet,
22 FIONA STAFFORD
with a syntactical confusion over whether it is the mingled green or the

sketchy pencil that is shading the rest. The scene is moving not only
because of the physical force of the wind, but also because of the poets
delight in what he sees and recreates for others. Clares poem draws
parallels between the arts of the poet, the visual artist and Nature an
imaginative celebration of creative forces, fused together in the word
scene. This suggests a visual depiction of landscape and a dramatic
piece, as well as the natural creation. Though rather less emphatic than
Coleridges references to the mighty Poet in Dejection: An Ode, Clare is
employing the wind, a common Romantic metaphor for divine inspira-
tion, to suggest connections between the creative impulses of human
beings and God. The play on scene also reiterates the importance of
what is being seen, overwhelming the visual distinctions with acoustic
unity just as the wild wind so often does.
The resistance to boundaries, evident in Pleasant Places, is couched
in the language of the Picturesque, with its well-established opposition
to classical lines and regularity. Uvedale Price, for example, had rejected
the old aesthetic rules separating the sublime from the beautiful, in
favour of the principles of harmony, and connection, arguing for the
superiority of more natural unimproved landscapes because symmetry
and regularity are particularly adverse to the picturesque.7 Clares
own attraction to visual analogies and the language of painting derived
partly from their power to unsettle clear divisions and challenge the
limitations of convention. In a fragmentary Essay on Landscape, for
example, he wrote admiringly of the paintings of his contemporary,
Peter DeWint:
there is the simplest touches possible giving the most natural possible effects
the eye is led over the Landscape as far as a sunbeam can reach & the sky &
earth blends into a humanity of greetings & beautiful harmony & symetry
of pleasant imaginings There is no harsh stoppage no bounds to space or
any outline further then there is in nature if we could possibly walk into
the picture we fancy we might pursue the landscape beyond those mysterys
(not bounds) assigned it so as we can in the elds so natural & harmonious
are his perceptions & tints & lights & shadows8
Clares response to DeWint sheds helpful light on his own aesthetic ideals
and the deployment of highly visual images especially colour in his
poetry. The way in which DeWints landscape is seen to blend into a
humanity of greetings is strongly reminiscent of Clares sense of the poets
feeling, which magnifys the pleasure of looking at the natural world.
Crucial to DeWints effects are both his natural & harmonious
perceptions and his tints & lights & shadows. The painters reliance on
the simplest touches also recalls Clares unabashed use of the plain
vocabulary of colour. In that apparent simplicity, however, a whole
world opens up. DeWints scene is without any harsh stoppage, or
bounds, or any outline further than there is in nature and because he
achieves such a sense of boundlessness in a small, two-dimensional space,
the viewer is welcomed into his art, as if into a series of endless elds. In her
pioneering essay on John Clare and DeWint, Lynn Baneld Pearce
suggests that Clares admiration for the boundlessness of DeWints art
was related to his anxieties about enclosure, and his attraction to wilder
spaces, such as those evoked in The Mores9. However, we might also
fruitfully explore his remarks on DeWints landscapes in relation to his
own artistic endeavour his own desire to create natural & harmonious
poems, in which there were no stoppages or bounds, and into which the
viewer might be encouraged to enter imaginatively, discovering a new,
hidden world.
Early reviewers of Clares poetry were struck by the resemblance
between his approach to the rural world and its portrayal by the contem-
porary artist George Morland. Josiah Conder, writing in the Eclectic
Review in 1822, thought that Clares poems breathe of Nature in every
line, going on to suggest that they were like Morlands inimitable draw-
ings, not studies from nature, but transcripts of her works.10 The poet
himself, however, was much more taken with DeWint: The only artist
that produces real English scenery in which British landscapes are seen and
felt upon paper with all their poetry and exillerating expression of beauty
about them is Dewint.11 This praise of DeWints art can be read in tandem
with Clares substantial poem Shadows of Taste, which dwells on the
process whereby the natural world is transcribed onto the page to become a
fully embodied imaginative landscape:
In poesys vision more rened & fair
Taste reads oerjoyed & greets her image there
Dashes of sunshine & a page of may
Live there a whole life long one summers day
A blossom in its witchery of bloom
There gathered dwells in beauty & perfume
The singing bird the brook that laughs along
There ceasless sing & never thirsts for song
A pleasing image to its page conferred
In living character & breathing word
Becomes a landscape heard & felt & seen
24 FIONA STAFFORD
Sunshine & shade one harmonizing green

Where meads & brooks & forrests basking lie
Lasting as truth & the eternal sky
(lines 6376; Middle Period, III, 3056)12
The ideal of the true artist, whether working with words or watercolour,
was the creation of a landscape heard and felt and seen (line 73). And if the
image on paper seemed to live and breathe, it offered a truth as eternal as
natures own. If spring was the Poesy of seasons! Scripture of the year!
(Spring, line 10), DeWint could be lauded as a fellow scribe, transferring
the creations of nature to virtual life on paper. Unlike the classically trained
artists of the Royal Academy, who were taught to follow nature through
studying the perfect statuary of ancient Greece, DeWint seemed to be
responding directly to the English countryside, creating paintings with a
new kind of truth: admirers of nature will admire his paintings for they
are her autographs & not a painters studys from the antique.13 DeWint
seemed to make painting an out of door pleasure and his clear-sighted
observation of natural phenomena, under the constantly shifting light of
the sun, offered very different possibilities from the lamp-lit gures and
drapery of the formal studio. In fact, DeWint had taken classes at the Royal
Academy and originally trained as an engraver and portrait painter, but
what Clare recognized in his mature landscapes was a kindred delight in
the natural world for its own sake.14 The feeling in the painting depended
not just on an accurate reproduction of a pleasing view, but also on the
passionate response of the artist. Creation of a painted landscape that could
be heard and felt and seen required the combined effort of eye, ear, hand,
heart and mind.
What Clare loved about DeWint is articulated most clearly in a letter he
wrote in 1829, requesting from the artist
one of those rough sketches taken in the elds that breathes with the living
freshness of open air & sunshine where the blending & harmony of earth
air & sky are in such a happy unison of greens & greys that a at bit of
scenery on a few inches of paper appear so many miles15
Although the letter does not seem to have had the desired effect on
DeWint, it demonstrates again Clares admiration for a kind of art that
ourishes in the open air, responsive to natural harmonies and capable of
enlarging what is being perceived through the brilliantly blended colours
of living freshness. As his sonnet To Dewint would subsequently
emphasize, these were paintings marked by the sunny truth/Of nature
(lines 78, Middle Period, IV, 198). Far from imprisoning the landscape
in a xed frame, or turning it into a series of separate parts, DeWints
paintings encouraged the discovery of imaginative immensity in the most
ordinary places. Even the attest fenland seemed brimming with life and
possibility, when the greens & greys were in happy unison. Clare knew
only too well that the ordinary observer of Lincolnshires level pastures
saw nothing deemed divine, but in DeWint the unlikely county found
a worshipper who
worked such rich surprise
That rushy ats befringed with willow tree
Rivald the beauties of italian skies (lines 1214)
When it came to creating a frontispiece for The Shepherds Calendar, with

its direct descriptions of rural life and celebrations of the inexhaustible
pleasures of the turning months, DeWint was the obvious choice (see
Figure 1). In 1827, the technology for mass colour printing had yet to be
developed, however, so the image gracing Clares collection was a black and
white engraving. Though grateful for the illustration, which he described
as a very beautiful thing, Clares letter still betrays a lurking disappoint-
ment as he judges the cask-like drinking vessel in the reapers hands too big
for the company in fact and too big for a bottle at all.16 The oversized
stout hooped bottle (line 102) is certainly very visible in the small group of
gures, completely obscuring the face of the reaper who is drinking from it.
Clares comments express unease over its clear predominance a predo-
minance DeWint ensures by directing slanting beams of light from distant
clouds to the drinking labourer. Unlike many of DeWints beautiful
landscapes, this is not a scene free from outlines and stoppages, in which
everything is boundless and harmonious. Indeed, it is a scene depicting
stoppage itself, as the farm workers are shown seated and refreshing
themselves, reclining against hay in an idyllic harvest eld. Yet in The
Shepherds Calendar, the harvest month of August is portrayed as the most
action-packed and strenuous of the entire year, so for the frontispiece to
foreground a rare pause in the back-breaking work was hardly
representative.
The lines that relate most closely to the image are also far less peaceful
than DeWints drawing suggests, coming immediately after a disturbing
cameo in which a rude boy or churlish hearted swain chases terried mice
from the fresh straw, spreading an instant murder all around (line 82).
After a scene so cruel that the young female labourer forgets her song
(line 86), the cessation of work seems more like the aftermath of a massacre
than a pastoral idyll:
26 FIONA STAFFORD
Figure 1 August, 1827, a group of gures resting beside a pile of corn in a eld,
including a young woman facing to front, dog and a man drinking from a barrel,
workers in the elds beyond at right; after Peter DeWint, frontispiece to John Clares
The Shepherds Calendar. The Trustees of the British Museum
They seek an awthorn bush or willow tree
For resting places that the coolest be
Where baskets heapd & unbroached bottles lye
Which dogs in absence watchd with wary eye
To catch their breath awhile & share the boon
Which beavering time alows their toil at noon
All gathering sit on stubbs or sheaves the hour
Where scarlet poppys linger still in ower
Next to her favoured swain the maiden steals
Blushing at kindness which his love reveals
Who makes a seat for her of things around
& drops beside her on the naked ground
Then from its cool retreat the beer they bring
& hand the stout hooped bottle round the ring
Each swain soaks hard the maiden ere she sips
Shreaks at the bold whasp settling on her lips
That seems determined only hers to greet
As if it fancied they were cherrys sweet
(lines 89106; Middle Period, I, 1224)
Far from being carefree and content, the workers are parched, exhausted and
beset by wasps. Whether the swain is the same man who had been
murdering the mice a few lines earlier is unclear, but the rapid turn from
unnecessary slaughter to soaking beer unsettles any sense of peace. The
movement of the lines, running from moment to moment and shifting
from dogs to owers to humans, suggests a wholeness of experience and
multiple perspectives. The harvest scene is also splashed with red scarlet
poppies, blushing cheeks and cherry lips all recall the destruction of the mice
and highlight energies that still seem to be surging throughout. Clares scene
is moving, three-dimensional and internally connected readers can feel the
blood coursing through, even at a moment of apparent rest. Indeed, his
disappointment with the illustrated title page may also have had something
to do with the hardening of DeWints art into clear lines and the draining
of colour necessitated by the impersonality of print.
Colour in art
The primacy of colour in the visual arts may now seem obvious enough,
after a century of experimentation with non-representational chromatic
painting and photography. In the early nineteenth century, however, the
old aesthetic question of whether line or colour was the foundation of great
art was still being hotly contested. In sixteenth-century Italy, Titians
28 FIONA STAFFORD
revolutionary creation of form through colour had reignited a classical

debate over disegno versus colore, with Michelangelos skill in drawing
increasingly coming to be seen as the dening quality of his genius.17
During the eighteenth century, admiration for the luminous colours of
Titian and Rubens had to compete with the inuence of Winckelmann
and Flaxman, whose elevation of classical lines and ideal forms gained
materially from the fashion for collecting the white marble statuary of
ancient Greece and Rome.18 French Romantic art, too, divided between
the neoclassical emphasis on line advocated by Ingres and Delacroixs
radical experimentation with colour. During the Romantic period, col-
our in painting started to be associated primarily with personal emotion
and with the direct representation of real life. Although artists inherited a
set of religious and cultural meanings for particular colours, they were
increasingly nding ways of representing individual moods and feelings
through combinations of shade and hue. The twentieth-century artist
Bridget Riley, whose own abstract paintings show a deep, practical
understanding of colour, has explained that it is the absence of guiding
principles and rm theories relating to colour that allows each individual
artistic sensibility . . . a chance to discover a unique means of expres-
sion.19 In the early nineteenth century, debates were still raging over the
very nature of colour, as Newtons spectrum was tested and questioned
by German philosophers and artists, including Goethe and Runge, who
developed their own alternative theories and increasingly emphasized the
relationship between the perception of colour and the individual mind.
For Goethe, art was an effusion of genius and colour was as much part of
inner experience as a quality of the external world.20 Uncertainty about
the very nature of colour militated against xed aesthetic rules, freeing
artists to use colour for expressing personal feeling, just as contemporary
poets were developing their own new expressive aesthetic. As John Gage
has commented, it is precisely the uncertainties and instabilities in the
interpretation of colours that t them especially for the expression of
unstable emotions.21
When he lectured to students at the Royal Academy in 1769, Sir Joshua
Reynolds had avoided the old debates over colour and line by announcing
that The power of drawing, modelling and using colours, is very properly
called the Language of Art in other words, all were equally necessary to
equip the budding artist for whatever he might wish to accomplish.22 His
later praise of Titian reveals a deep pleasure in colour, but is still qualied
by a sense of the artists one deciency, in failing to correct the form of the
model by any general idea of beauty in his own mind.23 Those who made
colour their fundamental principle were those whose art did not aspire
fully to the world of ideal forms, remaining too close to the real world of
esh and blood. Six years later, however, in 1788, Reynolds paid tribute to
the genius of his recently deceased colleague, Thomas Gainsborough,
whose chief strength lay in colour: Gainsborough having truly a painters
eye for colouring, cultivated those effects of the art which proceed from
colours.24 Though in Reynoldss eyes Gainsboroughs failure to strive for
the grand style of Michelangelo meant relegation to the lower ranks of
genius, his ability to nd subjects every where about him . . . in the
streets and in the elds and his skilful use of colour to recreate his new
and higher perception of what is great and beautiful in Nature still gave
him sufcient stature to merit an entire discourse unlike any other
modern artist.25 Reynoldss ideas about art were rooted in European
traditions, but the sympathetic turn to Gainsborough in his late
Discourse is indicative of the new aesthetic trends that would gradually
turn landscape painting into a genre worthy of the most talented artists of
the nineteenth century.
The new movement of landscape painting, with its aspiration towards
accurate representation of the natural world, meant that colour began to
gain ascendancy as the crucial medium for the artist. As Gage observes, it
was in landscape, from Rubens to Constable, the Pre-Raphaelites and
Monet, that delity to the colours of the outdoor scene became a central
aesthetic objective.26 The great enthusiasm for landscape painting sent
artists out among the Cumbrian Lakes, the Scottish glens, the Welsh
mountains, the East Anglian rivers and the elds of the Midlands, often
equipped with watercolours to capture the shifting effects of the light most
rapidly. Traditionally, watercolour paintings had tended to rely on line as
much as colour, the sepia washes being largely subordinate to pen-and-ink
drawings of buildings, churches or tree-lined riverbanks. With the new
emphasis on accurate representation of nature in all her moods and the
concurrent movement to allow paintings to express the personal feelings of
the artist in the scene colour began to dominate and watercolour painting
took on a much more varied spectrum. Where for eighteenth-century
artists such as Paul Sandby, drawing had remained fundamental to topo-
graphical art, a new generation of watercolourists, including John Cozens,
Thomas Girtin, J. M. W. Turner, Cornelius and John Varley, John
Constable and John Sell Cotman, began to paint in such a way that
their landscapes depended primarily on colour.27 By the time the Society
of Painters in Water-Colours was founded in 1804, their exhibitions
displayed luminous skies, navy seashores, yellow waterways and hillsides
30 FIONA STAFFORD
formed from subtle greens and greys. Colour, not line, seemed best suited
to recreating the British landscape in all her variety.
In some of Peter DeWints watercolours the shapes of the landscape are
created entirely by the application of darker washes over a lighter base. The
Staith, Lincoln, for example, presents an entirely convincing image of the
River Witham, winding away towards the horizon through banks that
consist only of layers of amber and burnt-umber washes.28 The river itself
shines luminously in the foreground, reecting the great expanse of pale
sky above, which is all of the same creamy base colour. In paintings such as
this there are no stoppages or hard outlines, and the entire scene is
conveyed through subtle banks of colour, contours raised or levelled by
the skilful stroke of another brush. Indeed, Pearce has suggested that the
sense of boundlessness in DeWints painting, so admired by Clare, owed
much to his skills as a watercolourist.29
At rst, the idea of a connection between landscape painting and the
poetry of John Clare might lead to thoughts of pastoral escapism,
especially since landscape art is often regarded as a largely elegiac genre,
symptomatic of modern humanitys sense of alienation from its original
habitat.30 To equate early nineteenth-century landscape art, whether
verbal or visual, with nostalgia is, however, to neglect both the forward-
looking and self-renewing qualities of the pastoral mode and the radical
novelty of landscape art in the early nineteenth century. When Clare
began to publish, landscape painting was regarded as a quintessentially
modern art popular with the public, but at odds with the artistic
establishment. Constables well-known difculty over having paintings
accepted for Royal Academy exhibitions is indicative of the uncertain
status of landscape art and its unsettling novelty. The foundation of the
Society of Watercolourists, too, was prompted by frustration over the
Academys resistance to recognizing the importance of contemporary
watercolour landscapes. Far from pointing backwards, the parallel
between contemporary landscape painting and Clares poetry therefore
underlines the innovative character of each.
Clares Essay on Landscape reveals a serious interest in modern art and
the new kind of painting that eschewed traditional lines and rules to
achieve a truthful, personal expression of the feelings inspired by natural
beauty. The essential role of colour in landscape art, with its attendant
power to express personal feelings, meant that while such paintings were
direct responses to the living world of nature, their vitality derived as much
from the artist as from the elds or streams. As John Lord has observed, the
directness of a watercolour sketch had a sense of spontaneity which evoked
the artists emotional engagement with his subject.31 Clares own distinctive
use of colour in his poetry can fruitfully be seen not merely as a sign of his
unquenchable yearning for childhood, but rather of an adventurous, experi-
mental artistic ambition. Landscape art was modern and forward-looking
it conjured ideas of distant, imperceptible horizons, of elds beyond what
was immediately visible. And while this may seem unlikely to appeal to a
poet whose own sense of space was so rmly centred on a relatively small
local area, once Clare is credited with the sophistication of a viewer who
sees in paintings not just a real world, but rather a representation of a real
world, perceived and reimagined by the creative artist, then the attraction
of such views becomes much easier to understand.
It is evident from remarks on DeWints paintings in the Essay on
Landscape that what Clare admired was the sense of enormous possibility
embodied in a small, unassuming space: the invitation to walk in and
pursue the landscape beyond what was immediately visible. Here was an art
that spoke to the imagination as much as to the eye offering a chance to
enter a world beyond the surface and encouraging the celebration of
mental freedom. When considering the visual dimensions of Clares poetic
art, then, it is fruitful to focus not just on poems that recreate landscapes or
employ the language of the picturesque, but also those most laden with
hidden possibility, with worlds within worlds. The poems that come
closest to the aesthetic ideals set out in the Essay on Landscape are
probably the bird poems, because they so often include a world within,
suggested and yet hidden, promising something evermore about to be. And
crucial to their success as a series is Clares innovative use of colour.
Bird poems
As quickly becomes apparent to any reader of the bird poems, among their
many striking features is a fascination with eggs and nests. Not content
with describing the birds appearance, habits or distinctive call, Clare
frequently includes the discovery of a nestful of eggs in his poems. And it
is often at this revelatory point that the poem magnies and ushes with
colour, as in Hedge Sparrow:
It makes a nest of moss & hair & lays
When een the snow is lurking on the ground
Its eggs in number ve of greenish blue
Bright beautiful & glossy shining shells
Much like the re tails but of brighter hue
32 FIONA STAFFORD
Hidden at the centre of the poem, as if in a nest of lines and words, lie those
Bright beautiful and glossy shining shells. In the cold dregs of winter, in
the midst of dead moss and discarded hair, lies the astonishing surprise of
the season, arresting the eye with unexpected colour. It is almost like a
nativity scene, especially as there are ve eggs the strange, mystical
number, regarded by Clare as the sign of natures wonder & her makers
will in The Eternity of Nature (line 99; Middle Period, III, 531). In The
Thrushes Nest, the nest is formed gradually by the mother birds
secret toils from day to day
How true she warped the moss to form her nest
& modelled it within with wood & clay
& bye & bye like heath bells gilt with dew
There lay her shining eggs as bright as owers
Ink spotted over shells of greeny blue
The thrush is made something like a natural alchemist, toiling with

mundane materials until suddenly the eggs, like heath bells gilt with
dew, appear to dazzle the observer. In sonnets such as this the bird takes
on the role of the artist, while the poet apparently gazes in admiration,
witness to natures minstrels (line 13) and their ink-spotted creations. We
now know that the distinctive markings on birds eggs are part of the
process of laying the lines and spots are not inscriptions, but traces of
pigment secreted by the hen bird.32 The markings on some birds eggs
readily suggest the appearance of writing or pen-and-ink drawing, so
Clares description of the ink-spotted thrushs eggs is visually accurate
as well as reective of personal preoccupations. In The Yellow Hammers
Nest, the connection between bird and poet is even more explicit, and it is
the eggs that provide the site of connection:
Five eggs pen-scribbled over lilac shells
Resembling writing scrawls which fancy reads
As natures poesy & pastoral spells
They are the yellow hammers & she dwells
A poet-like (lines 137; Middle Period, III, 516)
The passage suggests both direct, spontaneous response to the natural
world, and the expression of a poet whose deep feeling for what he sees
is inseparable from his own inner life. The sense of connection with the
pen-scribbling bird-poet overcomes conventional boundaries to create a
moment of deep joy at the heart of the poem. Even the sharp observation of
markings that appear as scribbles and scrawls suggests kinship with a fellow
labourer, whose creations may be involuntary, but nevertheless require
great effort. If parallels between poets and birds had become commonplace
in the Romantic period, Clares special attention to the visual rather than
purely aural dimensions of avian life made his work highly individual and
innovative.33
That the yellowhammer is characterized primarily by colour is obvious
from its popular name, but, as Clares description of the pen-scribbled
lilac shells makes plain, recognition of the eggs is even more colour-
dependent. Though there is considerable variety in size and some varia-
tion in the shape of birds eggs, the basic oval of hedge or tree-nesting
species makes it difcult to tell one from another: mere outline is
insufcient to distinguish the chafnch egg from the thrush. So too for
the poet, the word egg offers only a general image for the reader, but as
soon as colour is introduced it becomes a real, textured object, shining on
the page and in the imagination. Clares descriptions of eggs, accordingly,
need colour in order to afrm the individuality of the particular kind of
bird. Both the hedge sparrow and the thrush lay eggs of greenish blue,
but the wrynecks are white as snow (The Wry Necks Nest, line 6;
Middle Period, IV, 290). The pettichap or chiffchaff has a tiny clutch,
covered in spots as small/As dust & of a faint & pinky red (The
Pettichaps Nest, lines 256; Middle Period, III, 518), while the yellow
wagtails are sprinkled oer with spots of grey (The Yellow Wagtails
Nest, line 19; Middle Period, III, 474). Birds are the only creatures whose
eggs are coloured, and so Clares remarkable poems like the notes in his
extensive Bird List celebrate a natural wonder of the world, hidden
within a tiny compass.34
Not all of Clares eggs are as visually captivating as those of the thrush or
yellowhammer. Rather less eye-catching, for example, are the robins
brun-coloured eggs (The Robins Nest, line 99; Middle Period, III, 536)
or the deep blotched clutch of The Land Rail (line 56; Middle Period, III,
554). But of all the birds, it is the nightingale that seems to produce the
least showy eggs, characterized by deadened green or rather olive brown
(The Nightingales Nest, line 90; Middle Period, III, 461). Yet it is these
muted tones that make the nightingales eggs so remarkable. The distinc-
tive colour of eggshells is not merely a sign of natures immense variety or
the individuality of a particular kind: it also serves the practical function of
providing camouage. The nightingales eggs are especially elusive, often
located in obscure and unlikely places like the old thorn bush in Clares
poem, a spot he discovers only after several hours of searching. Instead of
revealing a sudden treasure-like cluster of shining shells, the nest, when
34 FIONA STAFFORD
nally exposed, contains dull eggs that are barely distinguishable from the
surrounding dead oaken leaves (line 78) and velvet moss (line 79). When
the nightingales hidden home is uncovered, both nest and eggs seem as
much a part of the woodland clump as the prickly thorn bush that guards
them. The colour of the shell is therefore its glory and its protection.
Clares portrayal of the poet in pursuit of the secretive nightingale
includes uneasy references to the birds choaking fear (line 60), as the
impatient observer nally closes in (there put that bramble bye/Nay
trample on its branches & get near [lines 556]). Here, the deadened
green reminds us not only of the birds instinct for survival, but also of the
probable consequences of being discovered. A search for birds eggs in the
nineteenth century did not generally end with a poem, but with a raid
whether the eggs were destined for the kitchen or the collectors case.
Clares bird poems frequently acknowledge the threat from human beings,
whether intentional or indirect. In The Fern Owls Nest, the weary,
homeward-bound woodman doesnt care whether he tramples near its
nest (line 8; Middle Period, IV, 300), while the woodlark is given to
inadvertently betraying her home by uttering out just when someone
happens to be passing. In many of the poems, however, the threat is overt.
Snakes, cats, foxes and birds of prey lurk in these poems, ready to snap or
pounce or swoop; but the greatest and most consistent predator is man.
The boys in The Land Rail search in every tuft of grass and every bush
they pass (lines 257), those in The Reed Bird throw a jelted stone at the
nestlings (line 10; Middle Period, IV, 321), while others take away eggs
every day (Birds in Alarm, line 5), unmoved by the agitation of the
parent birds. Any idea that Clare idealizes childhood must be complicated
by the frequent encouragement to imagine a birds eye view of these
terrifying boys. In the later birds nest poems, written at Northborough,
the fate of the eggs is even more disturbing, with the Nuthatch being prey to
both jays and boys (The Nuthatch) and the rook succumbing to the
reaching poles (The Rooks Nest, line 13), while the partridge is witness
to children who throw the eggs abroad/And stay and play at blind egg on
the road (The Partridges Nest, lines 910). The fragility of birds eggs is
brought home again and again.
Clares ability to offer different perspectives on a particular scene was
not readily available to the contemporary landscape painter, who had to
select a single viewpoint and particular moment in time for his image.
Nevertheless, DeWints creation of a sense of boundlessness that invites
viewers into his painted landscapes can still illuminate Clares poetic
technique, for in exposing the birds fears so sympathetically, Clare was
also emphasizing the desirability of their eggs, and thus suggesting
uncomfortable parallels between the predators within the poem and its
readers. As we share the poets delight in the bright shining eggs, we
become aware of their preciousness and their vulnerability. The
description of the wrynecks eggs as curious (The Wry Necks Nest,
line 6) not only appeals to the readers imagination, but also recalls
contemporary cabinets of curiosities, those strange collections of
manmade and natural phenomena often featuring items seized from
creatures homes and habitats to be sold or put on display. By aligning
the boys on their bird-nesting expeditions with natural predators such as
snakes or jays, Clare also reminds us of a natural world in which living
things survive by preying on one another. The remaining partridge eggs
that are carried home in hats will probably provide a much-needed meal
for the boys who found them. Clares poems are therefore encouraging
awareness of the many different ways of looking at the same small objects,
of the essentially subjective nature of human perception. As in DeWints
inviting landscapes, readers are being taken inside the scene, where things
can be viewed from another side and then another. Colour is key to
Clares technique because it catches the readers attention and then
encourages awareness of both the beauty of the sharply visualized exterior
and the less immediately obvious possibilities within.
In his natural history letter on pooty shells, snails are celebrated for their
glorious colour but in one of Clares natural history notes, the sight of
pooty shells thickly litterd round a stone is taken as evidence of their
irresistible appeal to hungry blackbirds and thrushes.35 Eggshells can be
signs of fragmentation and transience, just as much as fullness and hope.
And yet, it is this sense of multi-dimensional experience that gives Clares
poetry such power. There is nothing sentimental about the descriptions of
shining eggs, because their discovery is always attended by an awareness of
its own unlikelihood and the fragility of the future. Birds eggs are poised
between two births the moment of being laid and the moment when the
chicks hatch. They lie, quiet and mysterious, promising new life from
within their smooth forms. Their perfect colour is spotted and scrawled as
the egg emerges into the world, and remains as a shield until destroyed by
the young bird bursting into independent life. Clare was fascinated by the
egg in the nest the moment of promise. Like the luscious green before
the bloom, the glistening shells were pledges of endless renewal, defying the
ravages of late frosts, hungry jays and even schoolboys. Birds eggs were not
such obvious heralds of the spring as budding twigs and blossoms, but their
colour was all the more precious for being hidden, their inaccessibility
36 FIONA STAFFORD
more stimulating to active, imaginative observation. Two years before

Clares death, Delacroix noted that Colour gives the appearance of life,
but Clare had long since realized that it was evidence of life itself.36
Notes
1. Natural History, p. 38.
2. Ibid., p. 39. Hugh Haughton has discussed Clares role as a poetic naturalist
in relation to this letter in Progress and Rhyme; see Haughton, pp. 5186
(p. 58). See also Douglas Chambers, A love for every simple weed: Clare,
botany and the poetic language of lost Eden, Ibid., pp. 23858.
3. All internal references to Clares poetry are from the Oxford edition of The
Poems of John Clare, gen. ed. Eric Robinson, with line numbers included in
the body of the chapter.
4. By Himself, p. 17.
5. For a wide-ranging introduction to the issues and approaches of different
disciplines, see Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau, Colour: Art and Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and John Gages excellent
Colour in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006). For the philosophical
meaning of colour, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810),
translated by Charles Lock Eastlake (London, 1840); Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, translated by Linda McAlister and
Magarete Schttle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); Joseph Westphal, Colour: Some
Philosophical Problems from Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
6. Natural History Letter X, Natural History, p. 64. See also The Crab Tree,
Middle Period, IV, p. 189.
7. Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque (London, 1810), pp. 62, 169.
8. Essay on Landscape, The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and
Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 21115 (p. 211).
9. Lynn Baneld Pearce, John Clare and Peter DeWint, JCSJ, 3 (1984),
409 (41).
10. Review of The Village Minstrel; Eclectic Review, ns. xvii (January 1822), 3145;
in Critical Heritage, p. 169.
11. Essay on Landscape, Prose, p. 212.
12. For a reading of this poem in relation to natural history, see Sarah Weiger,
Shadows of Taste: John Clares Tasteful Natural History, JCSJ, 27 (2008),
5971.
13. Essay on Landscape, Prose, p. 212.
14. Harriet DeWint, A Short Memoir of the Life of Peter DeWint and William Hilton
RA, in John Lord, Peter DeWint 17841849: For the Common Observer of Life
and Nature (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007), pp. 7889 (pp. 789).
15. Letters, p. 488: Clare to DeWint, 19 December 1829.
16. Ibid., p. 399: Clare to DeWint, 14 October 1827.
17. John Gage, Disegno versus Colore, in Colour and Culture (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1993), pp. 11738.
18. For the long running history of the drawing/colour debate, see Mosche Barasch,
Theories of Art, 3 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), I, pp. 35572;
II, pp. 26578, pp. 34861.
19. Bridget Riley, Colour for the Painter, in Lamb and Bourriau, pp. 3165
(p. 63).
20. Barasch, vol. II, p. 274; Gage, Colour and Culture, pp. 2014.
21. Gage, Colour in Art, p. 83.
22. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R. Wark, 2nd edn (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 26.
23. Ibid., p. 196.
24. Ibid., p. 259.
25. Ibid., pp. 253, 251.
26. Gage, Colour in Art, pp. 1656.
27. Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, ed. John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels
(London: Royal Academy, 2009); Lord, Peter DeWint, pp. 1115; David
Blayney Brown, Nationalising Norwich, in Brown, Andrew Hemingway
and Anne Lyles, Romantic Landscape: The Norwich School of Painters
(London: Tate Gallery, 2000), pp. 2435.
28. The Staith, pre 1829, is part of the DeWint collection at the Usher Art
Gallery, Lincoln. It is reproduced in Lord, Peter DeWint, p. 113.
29. Pearce, p. 44.
30. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 212.
31. Lord, Peter DeWint, p. 12. For the parallels with poetry, see Richard Sha, The
Verbal and the Visual Sketch in British Romanticism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
32. Rosamund Purcell, Linnea Hall and Ren Corado, Egg and Nest (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 123.
33. See Haughton, p. 70; John Goodridge, John Clare and Community
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 13842.
34. Bird List in Natural History, pp. 11864 (see especially Quail, p. 153;
Heron, p. 154; Peewit, p. 158; Water hen, p. 159; Coot, p. 160).
36. Delacroix, notebook entry, 1852, Barasch, vol. II, p. 360.
chapter 2
John Clare, William Cowper

and the eighteenth century
Adam Rounce
When Francis Palgrave included William Cowpers The Poplar-Field

(1785), in his 1861 anthology the Golden Treasury, he had Tennysons
approval: according to Palgraves manuscript notes the Laureate especially
admired its sweet ow said he did not know why, but it seemed as if
no such verses could be written now.1 This suggestive sentiment an
expression of nostalgic regret for the lost possibilities of a poetry of
nostalgia serves to remind the reader of how English poetry had changed
during the lifetime of John Clare. Clare, who would die three years later,
was born less than ten years after Cowper had lamented the loss of the
eponymous poplars, where the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade, in
the sort of poem wistful, full of generalized sentiments and euphony
which would help make Palgraves enterprise so successful. It is the sort of
lament that seems to connect intimately to Clares own poetry and his
aesthetic, with its melancholy detailing of rural despoliation and its con-
sequences. Clares reverence for Cowper is well documented, yet this
connection is also marked by a disjunction: Tennyson sagely noted that
the sweet ow of Cowpers lines seems to make them belong immutably
to the past, and would simply not be possible to write in the world of the
mid-nineteenth century. Much of Clares poetry follows the same pattern
as that of Cowper and other eighteenth-century forebears (such as James
Beattie and Oliver Goldsmith), but then veers off into its own very specic
territory. It is the point of the present chapter to describe this movement
by Clare from sympathetic identication with, and near emulation of,
Cowper, to a clearly dened, sometimes apparently slight but always
precise distinction from him. The general premise will be to indicate the
degree of empathy between Clare and eighteenth-century poetry, to show
how much he absorbs from this poetic tradition, and what he adds to it.
It is useful to start with a brief consideration of the general inuence
of eighteenth-century poetry upon Clare, with specic reference to the
example of James Thomson.
38
John Clare, William Cowper and the eighteenth century 39
I
The relationship between Clare and the poetry of the eighteenth century
has become, in some ways, an established part of the narrative of his career,
from the sentimental anecdote (the inspirational discovery of Thomsons
Seasons) to more recent critical attention to the connection with and
dissonance between Clare and his forebears in the poetry of pastoral land-
scape (in the work of John Barrell and others). It is inevitable, of course,
that the large-scale recovery of Clares poetry in the last half-century has
created various conicting readings of his place in any poetic narrative of
the eighteenth century and Romanticism. This is, doubtless, partly the
result of narratives of literary history and their often procrustean needs, but
also a reection of some cogent qualities in Clares large poetic canon:
specically, his fecundity, and his mode of composition in a variety of
forms and genres. In a related vein, Clare often composed poetry close
to his forebears in a spirit of pastiche, or homage, or a mixture of the two
(the use of Beattie in the Spenserian Village Minstrel and the much later
asylum parodies of Don Juan and Childe Harolde are notable examples).
The result is a poetry that manages to borrow from, imitate, acknowledge
the weight of and also transcend its eighteenth-century inuences. Or, to
use Bridget Keegans summary, the
heteroglossic nature of Clares poetry both invites and precludes his
comparison with and assimilation into a variety of literary idioms, ranging
from that of the late eighteenth century loco-descriptive poets, to that of
his Romantic contemporaries (in particular, Wordsworth), to that of the
natural historians.2
Clare is thus impossible to pin down, as he shows so many inuences as to
resist identication with any one poetic movement or moment, defying
any easy placing of him within a tradition.
What can be shown, though, are the ways in which Clare borrows
elements from the literary past, including Thomsons Miltonic recreations
of landscape and Cowpers meditative poems and lyrics of the later eight-
eenth century, in order to encompass a mindset that is increasingly belea-
guered in its relations with the world. Clare especially shares with Cowper an
interest in the revaluation and reshaping of traditional lyric forms.
Clares relation to the eighteenth century has been a matter of some
critical dispute, partly because it has been assumed to be part of a literary
historiographic model whereby Romanticism frees itself from poetic pre-
decessors; alternately, Clare has been held up as an example of veneration
of the past at the expense of the present. A leading gure in this dispute is
40 ADAM ROUNCE
Clares rst poetic idol, James Thomson. As has often been discussed,
Thomsons inuence on Clare was always obvious, and John Taylor
broadcast it in the Introduction to his rst published volume: He was
thirteen years of age when another boy shewed him Thomsons Seasons.
They were out in the elds together, and during the day Clare had a good
opportunity of looking at the book. It called forth all the passion of his
soul for poetry.3 This discovery is repeatedly seen as an epiphany albeit
one that was as much a marketing device as a statement of poetic
inspiration in its representation of Clare as follower of an established
model.
John Barrells reading of Clare and Thomson sees the latter as a model
from which Clare had to extricate himself. Barrell emphasizes the difcul-
ties of what landscape Clare as a subject could freely visualize and explore
imaginatively. For Barrell, Thomson was therefore an inuence that had to
be shaken off: Clares mature poems were
written as a deliberate and a considered alternative to the style of landscape
description he had encountered in Thomson and other eighteenth-century
descriptive poems. In his earliest books of poetry, Clare had made a number
of more or less successful attempts to write in the mode of Thomson, but
had turned away from these attempts, because he decided that Thomsons
descriptive procedures could not be used to represent his own sense of place,
his own consciousness, and the mutually constitutive relations of the two.4
The problem with this line of argument is that, retrospectively, Clares
departure from Thomsons style can be more of a natural lessening of
inuence in proportion to Clares own poetic development and needs: it is
possible to argue that Thomsons descriptive procedures did not suit
Clare for a number of reasons (particularity versus the general, for one).
The counter-argument to claims of Clare writing himself away from the
eighteenth century suggesting instead a poetics of veneration is offered
by James McKusick, in accounting for the lack of congruence between
Clare and his most famous contemporary:
Far more important than the Wordsworthian inuence on Clare, espe-
cially in his early career, was his affectionate imitation of the poets of
Sensibility: Thomson (whose The Seasons was the rst book of poetry that
Clare ever possessed), Cowper (whose fondness for small defenceless
creatures especially appealed to Clare), Gray and Collins. Clare admired
these poets not because they were (or once had been) fashionable, but
because for him they constituted an alternative poetic tradition, one that
exalted the rural landscape and the rural sense of community over the
anomie of urban existence.5
This genial model of inuence, in turn, does not question the extent of
Clares affection. It risks over-determining the poetry of urban anomie
(which would hardly be recognized by Clare as a distinct body of work),
and simplifying the diversity of Gray, Collins and the rest: after all,
Collinss highly allegorical and obscure odes do not replicate Grays Elegy
in exalting the rural landscape and community (if, indeed, that is what
Grays famous poem does).
It is possible to see both sides, and accommodate Clares poetic require-
ments within the benets and limitations of past inuences. In a practical
sense, Clare did follow Thomson, like most other writers of topographical
poetry, whilst moving away from his example in tangible and almost tactile
ways. As a reminder of what Clare was responding to, it is worth looking
back at a passage from Winter (1726), in which Thomsons description of
the arrival of snow suggests earthly uncertainty:
Earths universal Face, deep-hid, and chill,
Is one wild dazzling Waste, that buries wide
The Works of Man. The Labourer-Ox
Stands coverd oer with Snow, and then demands
The Fruit of all his Toil. The Fowls of Heaven,
Tamd by the cruel Season, croud around
The winnowing Store, and claim the little Boon,
Which Providence allows.6
Thomsons verse is built around following the strikingly universal impulse
with the particular; the obvious qualities that mark this passage as being
of the rst part of the eighteenth century are both the diction and
constructions the descriptive register that includes the Labourer-Ox
and the King James Versions Fowls of Heaven though the winnowing
Store, ostensibly an example of the sort of ornate diction that would
become notorious for its superuity, is simply describing the process of
sorting the wheat. Clares poetic perspective is often described as inherently
more localized, and therefore naturally less abstract and removed than such
a landscape tradition; his writings in this vein do not seem ostensibly
different, but in the level of their detail the change becomes apparent, as
in an 1820s piece such as Snow Storm:
What a night the wind howls hisses & but stops
To howl more loud while the snow volly keeps
Insessant batter at the window pane
Making our comfort feel as sweet again
& in the morning when the tempest drops
At every cottage door mountanious heaps
42 ADAM ROUNCE
Of snow lies drifted that all entrance stops

Untill the beesom & the shovel gains
The path& leave a wall on either side
The shepherd rambling valleys white & wide
With new sensations his old memorys lls
When hedges left at night no more descried
Are turned to one white sweep of curving hills
& trees turned bushes half their bodys hide
(lines 114; Middle Period, V, 213)
The onrushing of sensory impression here and the concomitant accumula-
tion of effects and sensations are, alongside the enjambed, unpunctuated
lines, the most signicant alteration from Thomsons method of descrip-
tion. Paul Chirico captures the feeling of these lines in referring to their
visual intensity and method of description which is defamiliarising, even
uncanny, part of his larger argument that Although Clare is usually
described as a poet of place, of precise, localized natural description, his
landscapes are in fact repeatedly transformed, their familiarity undermined
by disorientation or by an excess of detail. The problem, in some ways, is
the troubled and unresolved relationship between precise, yet diverse and
constantly changing, natural observations and their xed and limited
representation in poetry and memory.7 There is also, in this example,
alongside Clares customary reluctance towards blank verse, the anthro-
pomorphic feel in the trees at the end, which leads to a sense of intimacy
and informality, and a perspective that is both generalized and local in
its range.
To say as much is to point out that Clares uniquely off-kilter descrip-
tion, combined with the diction and tone that reects his closeness to
his subject-matter, means that he follows eighteenth-century poetic
landscapes in outline, but makes them seem more familiar, domestic,
intimate and therefore empathetic in their details. He is not at odds with
Thomson, but the latter was generally aiming for a poetic decorum that
Clare found unsuitable, and not entirely reective of the impression that
he was trying to make. In this sense, there is a distance between them, in
that the ingenuous informality and intimacy that Clare creates was not
generically open to Thomson and it was also not surprising that
Thomsons mode of address in most of his poetry reected the manners
of a bygone age, and therefore was not available to Clare, even had he
wished to avail himself of it. Thomson was not a shadow from which
Clare had to extricate himself, but part of a tradition that was open to
him to a certain extent.
What is needed, perhaps, is a via media between general perceptions of
Clares recent poetic past as ultimately either oppressive or sympathetic.
John Goodridge has recently challenged the common critical view
which holds the eighteenth-century inuence on Clare to be a slightly
embarrassing literary adolescence through which he must pass to nd his
own authentic voice, offering instead more positive aspects of such
inuence, and viewing Clares relations with the past as not a restraining
or intimidating presence upon him, but rather a new door to open.8
Goodridge disputes the bald idea that Clare moved from hackneyed and
commonplace copying of the eighteenth century to nd simplicity and the
natural in his own environment and style. He instead offers inuential
texts and paratexts as examples of where the eighteenth century made a
direct, detailed contribution towards Clares poetic apprenticeship. John
Pomfrets The Choice (1700) that hugely popular Horatian message of
desired retirement and ease lies behind Clares early wish poems. Along
with the debts to Goldsmith and Beattie,9 Goodridge also identies the
once-widely read pastorals of John Cunningham as a positive source for
Clares own writing, helping him to absorb the octosyllabic line (as did
John Dyers Grongar Hill, 1756). Goodridge also presents Grays Elegy as
a sort of ur-text for Clares attempts throughout his career to understand
the fate of the labouring-class writer.10 For Goodridge, a key challenge in
Clares literary development was that of accommodating in his style both
the high literary culture to which he aspired, and the rich narratives and
songs of folk and popular culture with which he had grown up.11
Goodridges laudable general aim is to represent, where possible, the
specic details of comparison and contrast between Clare and his high
predecessors. The following readings of Clares interactions with Cowper
(and by implication, as least some of the eighteenth-century poetic past)
will try to emulate this spirit of detailed enquiry.
II
For all Thomsons general inuence, especially early in Clares career, there
are fewer shared factors between the two poets than are common in Clare
and the later William Cowper, a poet whose range of styles and character-
istic themes reect Clares own restless generic and formal invention. The
closeness of Clare and Cowper has been touched upon many times: Clare
himself addressed lines to Cowper the Poet of the eld, and while the
more genteel Cowper had a slightly different experience of a eld, the
biographical points of similarity between the two are hard to gainsay: apart
44 ADAM ROUNCE
from their mental difculties, both fell back upon and wrote about
solitude, retirement and isolation from a community. Cowpers was cho-
sen, a result of mental difculties and a near-paranoid sense of religious
guilt; Clares was enforced, given his repeated levels of conict with and
antipathy towards many in his community, at certain stages of his life.12
Clares attitude towards Cowper was always plain. On his trip to
Huntington in March 1820 en route to his rst visit to London, he was
shown Cromwells house, as well as the parsonage with its mellancholy
looking garden, Cowpers former residence, which was far the most
interesting remembrance to me tho both were great men in the annals of
fame.13 In terms of poetry, the appeal of Cowper to Clare as a model would
encompass rather darker and more troubled areas, but it could well have
originated in the (relative) informality of The Task, that long meditation
on everything and anything that, like so much of Clares work, is rooted in
the associations, values and feelings of landscape, and the relaxed mood of
the conversation poem. In this respect, one cogent area of comparison
between the two poets is the shared sense of the pleasures of sometimes
necessary retirement from the noise and follies of the world: in the asylum
period, in the Lines on Cowper, Clare refers to the reading of books ve
and six of The Task: The Winters walk and Summers Noon/We meet
together by the re (lines 1718; Later Poems, II, 871). This joy in retire-
ment is also shown in the poets respective descriptions of winter, where
the pleasure of reading is a compensation for necessary connement.
Cowper apostrophizes the season thus:
I crown thee King of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturbd retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening know.14
It is this sense of intimacy that retirement gives which Clare also captures in
another late piece, The Winters Come, when describing the relish and
passion for reading, and the implicit release from the cares of the world that
the season enables:
Tis Winter! and I love to read in-doors,
When the moon hangs her crescent upon high:
While on the window shutters the wind roars,
And storms like furies pass remorseless by,
How pleasant on a feather bed to lie,
Or sitting by the re, in fancy soar,
With Milton, or with Dante to regions high,
Or read fresh volumes weve not seen before,
Or oer old Bartons melancholy pore.
(lines 1927; Later Poems, II, 929)
The register is slightly more informal, and the bookish delight a childish
pleasure at the familiarity of the well-worn and the new. It is also a
reminder of Clares relish of the world of the bookish retreat: as Richard
Cronin has suggested, Clare, more often than his contemporaries, presents
himself in his poems as a reader, as a man who when he returns home from
a walk picks a book from the shelves.15 The idiomatic spelling of Robert
Burton aside (like Samuel Johnson, Clare apparently appreciated The
Anatomy of Melancholy as one of the great books to dip into), the sublimity
of Milton is accompanied by Dante, whose reception in English was in its
relative infancy.16 The jarring metre of the line, however, is odd given
Clares perfect ear for scansion, and it is possible he did not intend Dante
to be pronounced with more than one syllable. Yet the passage shares with
Cowper a paramount sense of the joy of the solitary experience of the
season as a fortunate excuse for the natural retreat towards books and the
re by certain temperaments.
Such temperaments are drawn to the meditative, and this is why
Cowper, a poet of profound levels of introspection (albeit leading him to
estrangement and alienation), is a helpful prism through which to view
Clare, not least in considering how close Clare is to Cowpers style, and
how clearly he moves away from it. To stay with the descriptive powers of
both on the subject of winter, Cowper is appropriately more grounded in
an eighteenth-century blank verse tradition:
Forth goes the woodman leaving unconcerned
The cheerfull haunts of man, to wield the axe
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.
Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail croppd short, half lurcher and half cur
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk
Wide-scampering snatches up the drifted snow
With ivry teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powderd coat and barks for joy.17
What is so marked here is the level of detail that Cowper is striving
towards, expressed, inevitably, through the Latinate syntax that he would
pursue in most of his mature blank verse, as a conscious homage to Milton,
46 ADAM ROUNCE
and which would lead to his Homer translations. Here, this explains the
allusion to the fall of Mulciber, the architect of Pandemonium in Paradise
Lost, in from morn to eve.18 Although this is thirty-ve years before
Clares rst publications, despite the syntactic constructions and the some-
what ornate diction (frisk, ivory and powderd coat) Cowper is after the
sort of detail that Clare would later delineate. Clares own descriptions are
in a similar if somewhat less formal register. Take the asylum sonnet from
the Epping forest period (mainly, and rarely for Clare in this period, in
blank verse), The Gipsy Camp:
THE snow falls deep; the Forest lies alone:
The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,
Then thinks upon the re and hurries back;
The Gipsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
Beneath the oak, which breaks away the wind,
And bushes close, with snow like hovel warm:
There stinking mutton roasts upon the coals,
And the half-roasted dog squats close and rubs,
Then feels the heat too strong and goes aloof;
He watches well, but none a bit can spare,
And vainly waits the morsel thrown away:
Tis thus they live a picture to the place;
A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race. (Later Poems, I, 29)19
The nal unprotected, with its support for the underdog and compassio-
nate reaching for the margins of society, could come from few, if any other
poets of the period, or the preceding century. It is the only point of
judgment; hence, it stands apart from the near-documentary realism of
the poem. Alan Vardy has described the poem as a realistic delineation of a
series of moments that nonetheless acts as a profound kind of imaginative
sympathy with its marginalized subjects. Vardy continues:
Not only is Clare not interested in judging the gypsies, the only language of
judgment is directed back at the reader as a challenge to his or her habitual
notions about gypsies. The fact of their pilfering is not denied, but rather is
presented in the context of the description of the camp, and the other
descriptive adjectives that surround it.20
The apparent neutrality of landscape description (more honoured in the
breach anyway) is reframed as a test of the readers prejudices; the three
adjectives of the nal line can act as a goad, a gently provocative defence of
the downtrodden, and a sharply impressionistic and repeated focus on the
gritty detail of the sort of lifestyles dismissed by sweeping judgment. It is in
small, radical details such as this that Clare dened his own poetic space,
akin to, but slightly at a remove from, Cowper: both poets are willing to
represent and sympathize with the outcast and the marginal, but Clares
perspective on such gures tends to challenge the readers preconceptions.
III
For all that the naturalism of Clares gipsy-camp is more visceral than
any realistic external landscape described by Cowper, the comparison
between the two poets remains fruitful. Both identied with the destruc-
tion of the solidity of natural scenes, places and objects as a metonym of
wider attacks upon the communal and the individual by specic parts of
modernity. For each poet, this resulted in an upheaval both of the
quotidian and more profoundly for the individual of the existential
surety that such venerated places represented. Here, too, Clare diverges
from Cowper in important ways.
Cowpers attitude towards rural despoliation is summarized by Tim
Fulford, recounting Cowpers response to one such action, the removal of
what he called the Spinney:
In July 1785 a local landowner felled trees, removed scrub, and re-organized
as an orderly plantation a wood near Olney through which had run one of
Cowpers favourite walks. He mourned for its loss in terms that make of the
picturesque glade a sanctuary of spiritual community shared between
Cowper and his domestic circle:
I have promised myself that I will never enter it again. We have both
prayd in it. You for me, and I for you, but it is desecrated from this time
forth, and the voice of prayr will be heard in it no more.
Fulford concludes that, as the quoted letter implies, for Cowper, Rural
beauty . . . is sacramental, an earthly form in which spiritual presence can
be encountered. Despoliation of nature is made to seem sacrilegious. And
despoliation also threatens the self.21 These threats would never be
negated, and would be expressed through the spiritually tortured poems
that Cowper wrote, especially in the 1790s, from On the Receipt of my
Mothers Picture out of Norfolk to The Castaway. Yet, for all the
genuine torment of these works, the automatic link between the destruc-
tion of the trees as a blasphemy and act of sacrilege in Cowpers letter here
seems on one level a melodramatic, almost self-parodic expression of a
particular kind of dissenting excess. The destruction of the solace of the
walk for Cowper and his spiritual community may have been disappoint-
ing, but such a violation does not, arguably, possess the wider symbolic
48 ADAM ROUNCE
consequences that he suggests; he elevates an act of vandalism to a desecra-

tion perpetuated by the heathen.
This strange perspective is muted and transformed, beautifully, in The
Poplar-Field, written late in 1783 and published in 1785, in response to the
felling of the trees in a familiar eld next to the river Ouse in nearby
Lavendon. The musicality of the anapaests may derive from its being
designed as a setting for the favourite tunes of Cowpers friend Lady
Austen.22 The content is formed around the conventional themes of the
vanity of human wishes, and vitae summa brevis:
The black-bird has ed to another retreat

Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charmd me before,
Resounds with his sweet-owing ditty no more.
My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must eer long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
Eer another such grove shall arise in its stead.
Tis a sight to engage me, if any thing can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Short-lived as we are, yet our pleasures, we see,
Have a still shorter date, and die sooner than we.23
The deance and outrage of Cowpers letter is here replaced by a fatalistic
sensibility, rendered in a very subdued poetic key, whereby meditation and
melancholy use the loss of the stability of the locale to conclude in
sententiae, which crucially seems divorced from the putative loss of the
poplars. The result is a sentimental nostalgia that is always universal (which
is indeed the source of its strength and appeal) but is wistfully separated
from the object of its original protest. Moreover, it appears to accept its
premise that life and its pleasures are as transitory and fallible as any
natural site threatened by improvement without hope of any alterna-
tive, in a manner which could be described as complacent, or solipsistic.
To say as much is not to expect a poet as constitutionally melancholy (and
for such deep-seated reasons) as Cowper to add a happy ending, but it brings
into light the most important contrast between him and Clare. For Clare, the
destruction of an almost spiritual sanctuary leads not to resignation, but to a
more complex blend of loss and recompense. Clare conveys a quietly deant
sense of a natural order that cannot be obliterated and that offers connections
even amidst seemingly alien milieux, as in the closing lines of The Flitting:
& whythis shepherds purse that grows
In this strange spotIn days gone bye
Grew in the little garden rows
Of my old home now leftAnd I
Feel what I never felt before
This weed an ancient neighbour here
& though I own the spot no more
Its every trie makes it dear
The Ivy at the parlour end
The wood bine at the garden gate
Are all & each affections friend
That rendered parting desolate
But times will change & friends must part
& nature still can make amends
Their memory lingers round the heart
Like life whose essence is its friends
Time looks on pomp with careless moods
Or killing apathys disdain
So where old marble citys stood
Poor persecuted weeds remain
She feels a love for little things
That very few can feel beside
& still the grass eternal springs
Where castles stood & grandeur died
(lines 193216; Middle Period, III, 4889)
The workings of time and nature, and their genial contempt for the
pretensions of civilization, act as a corrective to nascent despair, binding
the poet to the solace of the imagination and its empathetic understanding
of the underlying natural order. Much of Cowpers later work is a spiritual
autobiography with nature repeatedly visualized as the symbol of his guilt
and perceived damnation, and even in the gentle rhythms of The Poplar-
Field he is denied consolation. Clare is never so bereft. The sweep of time
and nature, vast though they are, still nurture the little things/That very
few can feel.
It is, in one sense, Clares refusal to accept the limiting terms of
alienation and persecution that moves him away from Cowper and
makes him a poet of localized, individual protest, not content to simply
bemoan his fate, or to generalize around and thereby mystify the
conditions under which he has been alienated from his environment.
With Cowper, whether or not this reects his more detached relation-
ship to the process of labour and the land, it is possible to nd in his
50 ADAM ROUNCE
poetry meditations upon change, the ravages of time and the short-
comings of human attempts to alter and control his environment; yet
these usually lead to a symbolic debate, whereby it is Cowpers lasting
lack of spiritual nourishment, and his perceived alienation from Gods
mercy, which is the latent source and the end of his writing. The result,
often, is that the details of the landscape, object or vista of his subject
are individualized, or latently act out parts of his lasting spiritual
dilemma.
An example of this is Yardley Oak (1791), the unnished blank-verse
meditation on history and the understanding of the past that is one of
Cowpers most profound explorations of his place within the world of time
and nature. The old tree of the title, a survivor, like the poet, of many past
struggles, has lost much in the transition from youth to age. Yet the
potentially uplifting pastoral salute to its endurance does not last. The
very aspects of the tree that so fascinate the poet its longevity in the face of
adversity, its symbolic place in a transitory world lead him to ruminate on
questions that undermine such surety: mention of the oracle of the sacred
oak tree at Dodona leads him to consider that, given such a chance to
discover such truths,
I would not curious ask
The future, best unknown, but at thy mouth
Inquisitive, the less ambiguous past.
By thee I might correct, erroneous oft,
The clock of history (lines 426)
This indicates a desire to live outside of the temporal world, and its harmful
effects, and to confront only the certainties of the past. The conventional
reection on time and its workings becomes in Cowpers hands a graver
deliberation on the mutability that has brought the tree to its ruined state:
The rottenness which Time is charged to inict/On other mighty ones
found also thee. Change is portrayed as natural, but destructive, and
hardly reassuring:
Change is the diet on which all subsist
Created changeable, and change at last
Destroys them. Skies uncertain, now the heat
Transmitting cloudless, and the solar beam
Now quenching in a boundless sea of clouds,
Calm and alternate storm, moisture and drought,
Invigorate by turns the springs of life
In all that live, plant, animal, and man,
And in conclusion mar them.24
This depiction of the cycles of nature is not unusual in the movement of a
meditative poem, yet the mood created the stressing, through the
syntax of the sentences ending in destruction and marring is one of
sublime but disturbing grandeur: the fragment of the tree elegized so
magnicently, but with such clear emphasis on the inevitability of its
being ruined, almost gives the impression of a world without rationale, or
controlling force. Some readers, such as Fulford, have found that the
poem is a Burkean living monument to a shared sense of common
ancestry,25 but it is also a witness to Cowpers far less communal fears
about the changes wrought by history and time, and his inability to
exercise any control over them.
A comparison with Clares The Fallen Elm is suggestive, yet slightly
awkward: Cowpers poem was a source, but an extensive parallel between
the two founders a little.26 Clare bases his poem upon an opposition
between the neutral workings of time and the proportionate placing of
blame for the trees destruction upon awed human motives. Time alters
the tree, but does not destroy it:
Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower
Though change till now did never injure thee
For time beheld thee as her sacred dower
& nature claimed thee her domestic tree
Storms came & shook thee many a weary hour
Yet stedfast to thy home thy roots hath been
This description may not be as literally accurate as Cowpers delineation of

the changes wrought on the oak, but the distinction drawn is clear: it is the
arbitrary hand of the owner of the land of the tree who is at fault, not the
workings of nature itself. As Clare explained, The savage who owns them
thinks [the trees] have done their best, and now he wants to make use of the
benets he can get from selling them.27 Nature stands outside of (and is
implicitly opposed to) greed and self-interest, whereas in Cowpers vision
of the old oak change is fused into the workings of worldly forces, so that
blame is unspecied. Clare clearly identies the chopping down of the tree
as unnatural, to the point where the poem becomes what Goodridge calls a
kind of honed political rant:28
Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred
Deeper then by a feeling cloathed in words
& speakest now whats known of every tongue
Language of pity & the force of wrong
52 ADAM ROUNCE
The tree is a vessel of protest, rather than a passive repository and record of
the necessary evils of change; its symbolic enunciation of what should be
felt by all recalls Clares description in his Autobiography of the unworldly
innocence of his friend John Billings: he had never read Thomson or
Cowper or Wordsworth or perhaps heard of their names yet nature gives
everyone a natural simplicity of heart to read her language & the gross
interferences of the world adulterate them.29
The relationship between Clare and Cowper is a microcosm of Clares
use of earlier inuence: it is enabling and inspiring, rather than anxious.
Clare redenes the terms of the poetic relation to the world and nature in
signicant ways, particularly in his refusal to accept his marginalization
from the social mainstream with the sort of sentimental fatalism that could
be fetishized in Cowper. Tim Fulford has recently written sensitively of the
detailed ways in which Clares asylum manuscripts use quotations from
him as a lead-in to his own poetry, and thus build upon the Cowperian
need for refuge into the disclosure of a hidden path, shielded by nature
from all but the observant, shared by poet and reader.30 The general aim is
the same, but Clares hidden path is different in degree from Cowpers, in
his vision of unalienated pastoral.
This vision is often beleaguered, and represents hidden scenes of inspira-
tion found amidst the apparent mundanity, or even ugliness, of the
quotidian in nature, rather than the apparently sublime or overwhelming.
To the Snipe, one of the most important poems of the Northborough
upheaval of spring 1832, is as far from being a conventional descriptive
nature lyric as is possible, choosing a drab, ungainly bird to underscore the
spiritual value of the Snipes marshy environment as an untameable place
apart from humanity:
In these thy haunts
Ive gleaned habitual love
From the vague world where pride & folly taunts
I muse & look above
Thy solitudes
The unbounded heaven esteems
& here my heart warms into higher moods
& dignifying dreams
I see the sky
Smile on the meanest spot
Giving to all that creep or walk or ye
A calm & cordial lot
Thine teaches me
Right feelings to employ
That in the dreariest places peace will be
A dweller & a joy (lines 7388; Middle Period, IV, 5767)
This sense of the divine in nature precisely where it is not expected, in the
apparently desolate meanest spot, and the related communal feeling of
peace as a lasting feeling is meant to convey both the unnatural route of
modernity, and its psychic damage to the vague world; here, the speci-
city of feeling and genuine spiritual replenishment of nature is founded
upon an austere Biblical diction: as well as the allusion to Leviticus, there is
Clares debt to the Psalms, traced by Mina Gorji:
the swamp is not portrayed in terms of Bible pictures, but it is nonetheless
haunted by echoes from the Psalms which transform the landscape beyond
the literal. Clares recognition of a divine order beyond the temporal,
natural world and his sense that the snipe could be an emblem of divine
protection was a legacy of the Protestant imagination. Clare shared with
Cowper and Bunyan, and with Daniel Defoe, a way of seeing visions on the
roadside, and of domesticating the visionary into ordinary forms.31
This notion of domesticating the visionary, and concomitantly of nd-
ing imaginative release and reassurance in a sort of spiritual ecology, is
the dening mark of Clares unique aesthetic. The Protestant imagina-
tion too found the impression of divine wonder and purpose in nature
and the everyday, but Clare did not just deify that nature, instead setting
it apart and against the bourgeois encroachments of modernity,
improvement, enclosure and other imaginatively and spiritually barren
modes of thought. This sort of deance is very different from Cowpers
polite complaints, or even Goldsmiths paternalistic vision of pastoral in
The Deserted Village, though Clare needed to draw upon such works to
create his own ways of dening the signicance of place and landscape in
an increasingly unsympathetic environment.
Ultimately, it is Clares sense of renewal and equality in nature, and of
the need to place his hope in such renewal, that sets him apart from poets
of a Cowperian sensibility. Like many of Clares late asylum manuscript
lyrics, O could I be as I have been seeks to redress intolerance and moral
ambiguity especially as interfering with his understanding of nature
through syntactic clarity. It opens with a beseeching, Blakean appeal to
childlike simplicity:
O could I be as I have been
And neer can be no more
54 ADAM ROUNCE
A harmless thing in meadows green

Or on the wild sea shore
It ends, though, after a list of former pleasures, on a more visionary note:
To gaze upon the starry sky
And higher fancies build
And make in solitary joy
Loves temple in the eld
There is an echo here of Byrons elegiac Stanzas for Music (written in 1815)
which starts Theres not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
and concludes:
Oh could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, oer many a vanished scene:
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, midst the witherd waste of life, those tears would ow to me.32
Byrons heartfelt, world-weary elegy may be one source behind Clares
sparse yearning, in plain language, for an uncomplicated return to a world
of childish innocence, and instinctive, joyful interaction with nature. It can
be noted, though, that even in this he moves away, slightly, from his
predecessors: Cowpers last English poem famously concluded with the
poet forsaken of all hope, and fearing a worse punishment: But I, beneath
a rougher sea,/And whelmd in deeper gulphs than he.33 Even at his most
isolated, in poetry that seems to will almost an extinction of personality,
Clare falls back on the imagination, and higher fancies, as well as the
spiritual regeneration of nature, with the eld as loves temple. It is these
sorts of differences in attitude that position him so uniquely within
Romanticism, dene his relationship with the poetry of the eighteenth-
century, and make him both a natural inheritor of the poetic modes and
styles of poets like Thomson and Cowper and immutably different from
them, in practice and effect.
Notes
1. Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, ed.
Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 492.
2. Bridget Keegan, Broadsides, Ballads and Books: The Landscape of Cultural
Literacy in The Village Minstrel, JCSJ, 15 (1996), 1119 (11).
3. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London: Taylor and Hessey,
1820), p. xi. For a suggestive reading of Clares epiphanic purchase and furtive
reading of Thomson, see John Goodridge and Kelsey Thornton, John Clare
the Trespasser, in Haughton, pp. 87129.
4. John Barrell, Poetry, Language, and Politics (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), pp. 10036 (p. 134).
5. James McKusick, Beyond the Visionary Company: John Clares Resistance
to Romanticism, in Haughton, 22137, p. 224.
6. James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), p. 214.
7. Paul Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2007), pp. 159, 20. Writing Misreading: Clare and the Real
World, in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition,
ed. John Goodridge (Helpston: John Clare Society and Margaret Grainger
Memorial Trust, 1994), pp. 12538 (p. 126).
8. John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), pp. 36, 37, 58. For his overview of Clare and the
eighteenth century, see pp. 3658.
9. Ibid., pp. 445.
10. For Goodridges discussion of Pomfret, see pp. 3640; for Cunningham,
pp. 3746; for Gray, pp. 4758. Goodridge counters the negative inuence
of Cunningham perceived by Mark Storey, The Poetry of John Clare (New
York: St Martins, 1974), pp. 379. For Clares reading, see also Greg Crossan,
Clares Debt to the Poets in his Library, JCSJ, 10 (1991), 2741.
11. Goodridge, p. 40.
12. In a more secular age, it is easy to forget that Cowper did not view himself
as in any way a professional writer, and that, for various reasons, he lived
off other people for most of his adult life. See the useful discussion of
Cowper from the innovative perspective of work (or its absence) by
Sarah Jordan, in The Anxieties of Idleness (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 2003), pp. 177216. See James King, William Cowper
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 4351 and 8694, for
outlines of his mental breakdowns.
14. The Winter Evening in The Task, Book IV. Poems of William Cowper, ed.
John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
II, p. 190.
15. Richard Cronin, In Place and Out of Place: Clare in the Midsummer
Cushion, in New Approaches, pp. 13348 (p. 136).
16. Clare owned a copy of the Divine Comedy in Henry Carys hugely inuential
1819 translation, and had met Cary in 1820 through mutual London literary
connections, and corresponded with him thereafter. See David Powell,
Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library
(Northampton: Northampton Public Library Collection, 1964), p. 25,
no. 151. Bate, pp. 169, 241.
56 ADAM ROUNCE
17. The Task, Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, The Poems of William
Cowper, II, p. 212.
18. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn. (London: Longman,
1998), p. 105. The relevant passage is in Book I, lines 73943:
and in Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer over the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
19. Dated around 1840, The Gipsy Camp was one of the poems Clare gave to
Cyrus Redding. These twenty poems were published with a supporting essay
by Redding in his English Journal, 1.20 (15 May 1841), 3059 and 1.22 (29 May
1841), 3403.
20. Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003),
pp. 27, 26.
21. Tim Fulford, Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees, JCSJ, 14
(1995), 4759 (523), quoting from a letter to John Newton, 9 July 1785, The
Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and
Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 197986), II, pp. 3623.
22. See Poems of William Cowper, II, pp. 317, 316.
23. Ibid., pp. 267. I have followed the text of the poem rst published in the
Gentlemans Magazine in January 1785, and printed in the footnotes by Baird
and Ryskamp, rather than their text based on the manuscript, as the former
was the version familiar to readers such as Tennyson, Palgrave and Clare.
24. Ibid., III, pp. 78, 7980.
25. Fulford, Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees, p. 55.
26. As well as Fulfords mapping of its connections, John Goodridge notes an
obvious echo, in passing. John Clare and Community, pp. 11617.
27. The Village Minstrel and other Poems (London, 1821), Introduction, p. xx.
28. John Clare and Community, p. 118. On Taylors printing of this letter, and
Clares modifying his view somewhat as the letter progresses (was People all
to feel & think as I do the world coud not be carried on), see Sarah
M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1999), p. 166.
29. The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London, 1970), p. 39.
30. Tim Fulford, Personating Poets on the Page: John Clare in his Asylum
Notebooks, JCSJ, 32 (2013), 2648 (32).
31. Mina Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2008), p. 114. For the psalmic in the poem more generally,
see pp. 10314.
32. George Gordon Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann,
7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), III, pp. 284, 286.
33. The Castaway, The Poems of William Cowper, III, p. 216.
chapter 3
John Clares conspiracy

Sarah M. Zimmerman
In a group of poems about birds and their nests, John Clare plots to protect
the creatures homes from predators: The Pettichaps Nest, The Yellow
Hammers Nest, The Yellow Wagtails Nest, and The Nightingales Nest
share a conspiratorial poetics. In the fullest version of their common
narrative, a speaker and a companion embark on a search for birds nests,
nd them, and then pause to describe these vulnerable sites before walking
away agreeing to keep schtum and implicitly enlisting the readers silence.
Carefully crafted and laced with descriptive language, these poems have
been praised as some of Clares best work. They are dramatic poems birds
scared out of hiding, nests spotted, eggs discovered and they are also
playful, recalling the childhood game of birds-nesting in which nests are
sought and eggs stolen. These works nevertheless convey serious concerns
about the birds ability to raise their young and sing in peace, living what in
human terms translates as private life. As is often the case with Clares
poetry, his solicitude for the well-being of animals, plants and places also
reects concerns closer to home. In chronicling the birds continual
struggle to protect their nests, the locus of family and of song, these
poems simultaneously address the consequences of the periods converging
pressures on privacy for poetry and the poet.
Scholars have long recognized Clares attraction to natural refuges,
hiddenness and obscurity. That impulse has been interpreted as a
response to particular historical circumstances, including the transforma-
tion of Clares local environment by parliamentary enclosure. I argue that
this drive towards seclusion should also be read in light of two signicant
pressures on privacy that intensied in the period of Clares successful
literary debut. First, renewed agitation for parliamentary reform in the
post-war era prompted heightened governmental repression of political
dissent, including what John Barrell has described as the politicization of
private space.1 Second, the early nineteenth century witnessed the de-
nitive emergence of a modern celebrity culture, in which Clare was
57
58 SARAH M. ZIMMERMAN
caught up after the appearance of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and

Scenery (1820).2 With his successful introduction by his publishers as a
Northamptonshire peasant in that volume, Clare became exposed to a
celebrity culture that was, as Tom Mole puts it, expanding with the
growth of a modern industry of production, promotion and distribution,
and a modern audience massive, anonymous, socially diverse and
geographically distributed.3 The surfeit of attention that Clare received
included curious readers who appeared at his door, eager to view the poet
in his domestic circumstances. It also included patrons alert to any
Radical and ungrateful sentiments in his verse, a surveilling impulse
that carried ominous overtones in the fraught political climate of the
post-war period.4
The convergence of these two very different pressures in early
nineteenth-century England marks an important chapter in the history
of private life.5 As Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, Most scholars believe,
at the very least . . . that the concepts of public and private bear historical
signicance and that their nexus in the eighteenth century warrants special
investigation. I follow Spackss lead in attending to privacy as a term
that has received much less historicized attention than scholars have given
the public in the aftermath of Jrgen Habermass theorization of an
eighteenth-century public sphere. I also share Spackss desire to treat
private experience beyond the terms set by that paradigm.6 Her denition
of privacy, drawn in part from the debates of legal scholars and philoso-
phers, as freedom from from watchers, judges, gossips, sensation-seekers
and freedom to: to explore possibilities without fear of external censure,
suits Clares concerns especially well.7 His beleaguered birds are similarly
impacted by these concerns. They aim to evade a variety of threats since, as
John Goodridge observes, their nests are constantly vulnerable to being
robbed or trampled, exposed or betrayed, and they seek the time and space
necessary to build nests, raise their young and sing.8
Clare doesnt use the word privacy in the birds-nesting poems, but their
vocabulary makes clear the proximity of avian and human concerns. For
instance, Birds Nests (composed c.1832), conjures an hermitage/For
secresy & shelter rightly made, and in The Wood Larks Nest (also com-
posed c.1832), the birds seek hidden homes that are as safe as secrecy. Birds
dont keep secrets, but Clare recognized in their plight a need that they share
with humans to nd the time and space for private life. When eggs are stolen
or nests destroyed in these poems, the birds fall into stricken silence or utter
cries of distress that end their songs. Those songs are the poems clearest
link to the preoccupations of the poet, given the conventional and,
John Clares conspiracy 59
for Clare, intuitive association of poetry and birdsong. In his birds-nesting
poems, birdsong and thus poetry are closely related to two kinds of private
experience: domestic intimacy and solitude.9
After sketching the historical circumstances that put increasing pressure
on privacy in Clares day, I turn to poems on the snipe, the sand martin
and the nightingale. These three poems comprise a study in contrasts
between a fantasy of masculine autonomy and a dread of feminized
exposure. Clares conspiratorial paradigm is gendered: while the birds
plight is feminized, both the threats to the birds and the speakers protec-
tive responses are masculinized. His speakers draw on their own experience
as birds-nesting boys, former predators who turn their expertise to their
one-time victims protection. After considering the snipe, sand martin, and
nightingale as inhabitants of opposite ends of the spectrum of privacy, and
glancing along the way at other birds who live between those poles, I turn
to three poems whose conspiratorial plots lead to three different endings.
Each of these turns on the movements of chance, which can spell oppor-
tunity or disaster for the birds and the conspirators who seek and protect
them. In The Pettichaps Nest, Clare considers the necessity of handling,
and the potential for exploiting, the unexpected; in The Yellow Hammers
Nest, the element of risk leads to a vision of disaster; in The Yellow
Wagtails Nest, the plot unravels into reverie. Once the metaphorical
association between birds nests and an endangered privacy was forged in
these poems, it became indelible in Clares work, and thus I conclude with
two very late poems in which it persists as a gure for safe seclusion: To
John Clare and Birds Nests.
Invasions of privacy: celebrity culture and political pressure

By 1824, when Clare began writing the bulk of his birds-nesting poems, he
had been in the public eye for several years and would remain there, despite
the diminishing sales of the three volumes that followed Poems Descriptive.
While the history of celebrity begins before Clares lifetime, he and his
contemporaries witnessed what Jason Goldsmith terms the twinned
phenomena of an expanding readership and the rise of mass media
technologies, both of which reached unprecedented scale during the
post-Revolutionary years.10 A desire to know the poet on the part of the
reading public was spurred by a sense of increasing estrangement in an
expanding cultural marketplace. This perceived distancing was partly
countered by an accompanying phenomenon that Mole describes as a
hermeneutic of intimacy: an impression of unmediated contact that
made it seem as if the celebritys private self was hidden from the view of
the undiscerning, but was also continually making itself legible, expressing
itself in poems where its secrets could be read by the discerning few.11 This
effect encouraged attention to celebrities private lives and encouraged
readerly intrusiveness. The consequences of these developments for Clare
have been addressed by Goldsmith, who situates the poet within an
important cultural shift in the terms of renown in the Romantic period.
Whereas in the eighteenth century celebrity was a quality one might
possess, by the middle of the next it was something you were, a person-
ality.12 Once Clare had been introduced as a Northamptonshire peasant
in Poems Descriptive, this branded identity generated signicant interest
in how his humble circumstances could produce such appealing poetry.13
Clare describes how celebrity arrived at his cottage door, in carriages
bearing literary tourists who interrupted his agricultural labour, costing
him time and income. Some visitors posed intrusive questions, even
subjecting him to scrutiny about his relationship with his wife. One man
asked to take Clares walking stick as a souvenir, and then asked me some
insulting liberties respecting my rst acquaintance with Patty and said he
understood that in this country the lower orders made their courtships in
barns and pigsties and asked whether I did.14 Thus Clare became acutely
aware of the consequences of celebrity. In September 1821 he told his
publisher John Taylor,
I am sought after very much agen now 3 days scarcly pass off but sombody
calls some rather entertaining people & some d d knowing fools
surely the vanity woud have killd me 4 years ago if I had known then how
I shoud have been hunted up and extolld by personal attery but let me
wait another year or two & t[he] peep show will be over 15
He felt like quarried prey, hunted and then put on display. Clare sounds
thoroughly modern decrying his loss of privacy, Goldsmith notes, in an
era in which the individual has become the object of an anonymous,
voyeuristic gaze.16 The experience may have played a role in undermining
his physical and mental health. Jonathan Bate speculates that Clare suf-
fered from bipolar disorder accompanied by delusions, but the sustained
stress of his literary career may have contributed to his deterioration.17
Matthew Allen, his doctor at the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum,
where Clare was admitted in 1837, observed three years later that his mind
did not appear so much lost and deranged as suspended in its movements
by the oppressive and permanent state of anxiety, and fear, and vexation,
produced by the excitement of excessive attery at one time, and neglect at
another, his extreme poverty and over-exertion of body and mind.18 Allen
corroborates his patients sense that the inconstancy of attery destabi-
lized both Clares nances and his equanimity.
Clares domestic life might have served as emotional ballast amidst the
vagaries of literary fame, but his home became a site of contest over how to
manage his public prole.19 By summer 1820, his publishers and patrons
had established a trust fund to supplement his income, and talk had begun
of nding a suitable home for the poet and his new family.20 It wasnt until
1832, however, that Clare gained the rental of a well-furbished cottage and
a substantial plot of land in the village of Northborough, a little more than
three miles from Helpston.21 Clares domestic life was to become a tableau
of contentment that would counter any threat of upward mobility posed
by his commercial success as a peasant poet. The land included an orchard
and a grazing pasture, and Taylor and his patron and friend Eliza
Emmerson started a modest subscription to purchase a cow, two pigs
and a few useful tools for husbandry. Emmerson contributed money for
the cow on the condition that it be named Rose, Blossom or May, a
nishing touch in a pastoral scene featuring the grateful labourer poet.22
The cow, however, turned out to be a poor milker, the pigs never arrived
and the domestic experiment failed as Clares psychological health
declined. When details of Clares new domestic circumstances were pub-
lished in accounts that emphasized his status as the object of charity, he
drafted annoyed responses, including one lamenting that I wish to live in
quietness but they will not let me.23
The monitoring of Clares home life by his patrons and the reading
public was in part a reection of the heightened scrutiny of the private lives
of the rural poor in a period of renewed anxiety about domestic unrest. In
his account of the consequences for privacy of a governmental crackdown
on political dissent in the 1790s, Barrell describes how, in the wake of the
French Revolution, [a]ctivities and spaces which had previously been
thought to be private, in the sense not just that they were outside politics
but were, by general agreement, positively insulated from it, suddenly no
longer enjoyed that protection.24 Those spaces included the rural cottage.
In popular eighteenth-century visual and poetic representations, it had
provided a fantasy of retirement from the world, from the rituals and
routines of public and social life, into an unattainable privacy. By the
middle of the 1790s, however, the image of the cottage had become
thoroughly politicized, suspected of housing political disaffection or
even conspiratorial plots.25 Thus, Clares new cottage uneasily represented
both the safe, protected space of nostalgia and a potential nest of
radicalism. Although Barrells account of the periods intense pressures on

privacy addresses an acute moment of counter-revolutionary repression, it
also speaks to the post-war resurgence of the movement for parliamentary
reform, a period that included the suspension of Habeas Corpus for almost
a year in 181718, the 1819 Peterloo massacre, and the Six Acts legislation,
also of 1819, which limited freedoms of assembly, speech and the press.
Once Clare came to public attention, his life and his poetry were
scrutinized for signs of what his patron Lord Radstock described as
ingratitude. Although Clare was no Radical, Radstock objected to lines
in Helpstone and The Village Minstrel, including a damning apostrophe
(in Helpstone) to Accursed wealth: oerbounding human laws,/Of every
evil thou remainst the cause.26 Demands from Radstock were relayed and
seconded by Emmerson to expunge certain highly objectionable passages
that accuse the very persons, by whose truly generous and noble exertions
[you have] been raised from misery and despondency of pride, cruelty,
vices, and ill-directed passions. These demands carried weight in a period
marked by several high prole trials of publishers for works deemed
libellous or seditious. Clares publishers, Taylor and James Hessey,
defended Clares authorial independence, but they could protect him
from neither the consequences of celebrity nor his patrons alertness to
signs of rebellion. Both Clares verse and his domestic life were to reect
one theme of Gratitude, as Emmerson told him.27
The metaphorical possibilities of birds nests for addressing these threats
to privacy and autonomy may have been suggested to Clare by a poem he
loved, William Cowpers The Task (1785). Timothy Fulford observes that
Clare strongly felt a Cowperian need for refuge in natural environs, and in
his birds-nesting poems Clare follows Cowpers lead in seeking a place of
rural seclusion and peace.28 The Task makes the connection between the
rural cottage and the birds nest explicit. In Book I, the speaker discovers a
cottage . . . perchd upon the green-hill top and explains that it is so thick
beset/With foliage of such dark redundant growth,/I calld the low-roofd
lodge the peasants nest.29 Although he eventually rejects the sites solitude
as making scant the means of life, which for him include Society, the
place also inspires a fantasy of poetry-nurturing seclusion: Oft have I
wishd the peaceful covert mine, Cowpers speaker muses, so that he
would possess/The poets treasure, silence, and indulge/The dreams of
fancy, tranquil and secure.30 Clare was under no illusion that cottages like
his own were ideal havens, but The Task may have suggested the birds
nest as a gure for his own dream of private life. Cowpers vignette of
the peasants nest closely follows a passage describing birdsong,
including Ten thousand warblers, cawing rooks, and kites that swim
sublime/In still repeated circles, screaming loud,/The jay, the pie, and evn
the boding owl.31 Clare develops Cowpers metaphorical association in
poems that elaborate the fate of what Hugh Haughton describes as Clares
nesting instinct.32
Birds were one of Clares perennial subjects, but they gained a heigh-
tened signicance in the mid-1820s. Margaret Grainger ventures that
[h]e probably wrote more about birds than about any other subject and
probably more bird poems than any other British writer.33 We can
nevertheless pinpoint when his treatment of birds intensies to the
point of becoming a subject in its own right, deserving of its own volume.
Johanne Clare notes that although Clare wrote poems focusing on birds
before 1824, in that year Clare began to take the subject of birds seriously
enough to commit his energies to writing extended groups one is
tempted to say sequences of bird poems.34 Although a proposed
collection on Birds Nesting never materialized, some of these poems
were published in The Rural Muse.35
In a number of poems that detail their nesting behaviours, Clare
studies the creatures continual efforts to protect their homes, using
what Michel de Certeau would call tactics, the only manoeuvres avail-
able to the vulnerable. In de Certeaus vocabulary, those who possess
established power a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientic
institution are able to exert their strength in full-blown strategies,
while the weak are always on the watch for opportunities that must be
seized on the wing. In elaborating his natural metaphor for the
tactics of the disenfranchised, de Certeau speculates that the models
for these everyday practices may go as far back as the age-old ruses of
shes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to
survive.36 A number of Clares poems on birds constitute a catalogue
of their defensive moves. Some manage to scare predators away. Clare
may admire most the tactics of the skylark, the object of a strong human
impulse to anthropomorphize nature. In The Sky Lark (composed
c.18256), boys ush the bird out in hunting butter cups and are
enraptured with her ight: from their hurry up the skylark ies . . . till
in the clouds she sings (lines 9, 1214; Middle Period, III, 524).37 Led
astray by their own imaginations neer dreaming then/That birds
which ew so high would drop agen/To nests upon the ground the
boys fail to notice when she drops & drops till in her nest she lies again
(lines 1719, 16). Clares speaker relishes the skylarks escape, and these
poems celebrate the birds varied tactics of evasion, but the creatures
remain fundamentally defensive, and defenceless. In many of his bird

poems, Clares speakers simply observe these efforts, but in the few that
are my central focus they are instigators who conspire to protect the birds
homes. Combining elements of planning, action and secrecy, conspiracy
represents a third way for those who do not possess the institutional power
to deploy strategies but do not wish to be limited to the spontaneous
tactics of the forever vulnerable.
Scholars have traced the roots of a Romanticism steeped in conspiracy
to the French Revolution the embodiment of the conspiracy
hermeneutic noting that in this period conservatives fear of invasion
and enemies abroad was matched by an equal atmosphere of mistrust
and suspicion [by] those on the English left.38 Those fears were revived in
an economically and politically volatile post-war era punctuated by
Peterloo and, in the year that followed, the event that became known as
the Cato Street Conspiracy, when a plot (which included an agent
provocateur) to murder the entire British Cabinet, along with the Prime
Minister, Lord Liverpool, was intercepted and the accused were either
hung or transported. In the very highly charged political environment in
which Clare wrote, conspiracy theories ourished.39 Orrin Wang makes
the case that grasping the pervasiveness of conspiracy during the
Romantic era . . . means retrieving local instances of conspiratorial logic
both at the material level of institutions, policies, and events and at the
gural level of writings, including poetry.40
Conspiracy is a Keatsian word, and thus Nicholas Roe reads To
Autumn, where the Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness actively
plots with the maturing sun, as a call for justice after Peterloo.41
Without using the word, Clares birds-nesting poems also reect the
periods heavy conspiratorial weather, as his speakers abandon his habi-
tual stance of watchful interest to intervene in the birds continual state of
emergency and, indirectly, in their own. These speakers walk the line
between passive observation and an intervention that is potentially pre-
datory. Their tone is by turns intimate and urgent, suggesting that they
are responding to a fear they share and a vulnerability they want to
alleviate. Their plots risk discovery, but that danger is outweighed by
another perceived to be greater and by the promise of what may be
gained in this case, the private time and space for family and song. In
the game of birds-nesting in which Clare had participated, he found an
apt gure for the threats to privacy that he himself experienced and a
ready-made plot to protect it.
At the poles of privacy: snipes and nightingales
In two poems composed around 1832, Clare thinks through what it is like
to live at the extremes of sociability, either completely alone or continually
pursued. 1832 is the year in which Clare and his family moved to their new
cottage in Northborough, and both texts speak to his acute concerns with
privacy under pressure. By this point, Clare had written many birds-
nesting poems, but To the Snipe and The Nightingales Nest form an
illustrative pair because they map Clares poles of privacy in gendered terms
and thereby make clear the costs of both real isolation and an attention-
drawing fame.
In To the Snipe, Clare asks what it would be like to enjoy a solitude
free from predators, and concludes that the terrain is barely habitable.
The poem envisions a reprieve from the continual need for vigilance
through a fantasy of masculine autonomy. The snipe is an unpoetic
bird, with his bill Of rude unseemly length made for searching the
swamps gelid mass for food (lines 1920; Middle Period, IV, 574). The
poem is an ode to an unlikely gure of serenity: alone & mute, he
Sitteth at rest/In safety (lines 810). A fortress of time and space is
required to foster his mystic nest: Lover of swamps/The quagmire
over grown, he lives where Security pervades/From year to year (lines
24, 12, 323). Bridget Keegan lucidly explains how the snipes envir-
onment, both land and water, open and secure, unbounded and
protected, is appropriate for Clares theme of private experience: the
fens in their extreme openness are a paradoxical place of secrecy and
seclusion.42 The cost of the snipes solitudes proves high, however
(line 77). He has no mate, no eggs to protect, and does not sing. The
silent snipe goes it alone, seemingly the only way to secure his calm &
cordial lot (line 84). Few birds possess such fortitude: the snipe must
possess a power divine to brave/The roughest tempest, but even his
bravery affords only a limited range, a habitat too watery to withstand
the press of human feet (lines 4951). His instinct knows/Not safetys
bounds to shun, and indeed danger is nearby: beyond tepid springs/
Scarcely one stride across roams the staulking fowler with searching
dogs & gun (lines 538). Clares speaker relishes the snipes remove
from the vague world where pride & folly taunts, but implicitly
acknowledges that the birds untouchable status renders him almost
antediluvian (line 75). The snipes still & quiet home is available only
in a watery world untrodden by humans (lines 72, 34). Thus, the snipe
gures as a fantasy at the heart of modernity a kind of privacy that is
intensely wished for, and that may even be envisioned, even if it never
actually existed, Mystic indeed (line 25).
Although the snipes autonomy is unavailable to the poems speaker,
the bird provides Clare with a vital sense of what an increasingly endan-
gered privacy feels like, and thus enables his search for sites where it may
still be found. Another poem from the same period that imagines that
kind of freedom, Sand Martin (composed c.1832), makes it clear that
even though it is out of reach, airborne like the bird, it may briey be
vicariously experienced by tracking the birds ight. The speaker watches
the bird ying far away from all thy tribe in the lonely glen and
unfrequented sky, and is strongly affected by a feeling that I cant
describe/Of lone seclusion & a hermit joy (lines 9, 1, 102; Middle
Period, IV, 30910).43 He cant describe it because it is not within his
realm of experience, but he can feel it in the sand martins Flirting ight
(line 10). Like the snipe, however, the sand martin pays a price for being
seldom by the nesting boy descried: it must labour undeterred/Drilling
small holes along the quarrys side/More like the haunts of vermin than a
bird (lines 8, 57). Thus, the sand martin seems almost estranged from
its own nature. As in To the Snipe, such extreme solitude seems silent,
and although Clare doesnt explicitly gender the sand martin, it too has
no eggs to protect.
The speakers in To the Snipe and Sand Martin assume a stance
familiar in Clares poems that of the reective observer. But in the cluster
of birds-nesting poems to which I now turn, Clares speakers become
action gures, walking into the narrative frame to assume a direct, and
even aggressive role in the birds lives, doing for the creatures what they
are unable to do for themselves: conspiring to protect their homes. In
The Nightingales Nest (1832; Middle Period, III, 45661), Clare treats a
sought-after bird and imagines existence at the other end of the spectrum
of privacy from the reclusive snipe and hermit sand martin (line 1). While
their nearly perfect solitude is apparently too lonely for song (Sand
Martin, line 1), the nightingale has a home of love that inspires a luscious
strain (lines 4, 33). That songs renown, in turn, threatens the domes-
ticated solitude that seems necessary to it (line 19). In so famed a bird
(line 20), Clare nds a feathered gure for what Goldsmith calls the sense
of spectacle by which modern celebrity has come to be characterized.44 In
the course of the poem, one of solitudes deciples who aim to spend their
lives/Unseen inspires a conspiratorial poetics to protect her home and her
song (lines 856). Among a handful of birds-nesting poems that share a
conspiratorial plot, The Nightingales Nest most directly addresses the
threat to poetry brought about by the loss of privacy and also provides the
happiest resolution of that crisis.
The Nightingales Nest is one of Clares most studied poems for its
reections on poetry, fostered by the birds association with the myth of
Philomela. Clares contemporaries readily spotted the poet in the poem.
Emmerson penned her own verse in response to his. In On reading the
Nightingales Nest by John Clare, she exclaims Clare and the
Nightingale are one!45 Modern scholars have recognized that the poem
addresses Clares own literary career. Hugh Haughton suggests that it
reects Clares awareness of his own problems as a writer, including his
difculties with his audience with publishers, readers, critical interlocu-
tors, social superiors and intellectual inferiors.46 One of those difculties
was the invasion of privacy he experienced: Simon Kvesi explains that the
nightingales world is the embodiment of an ideal for Clare in that it is
solitary, hidden, cut off from society with no path to encourage the
encroachment of that private space by public others.47 Kvesi describes
how Clare genders the invasion of privacy by feminizing the nightingales
vulnerability and, further, by sexualizing it, thereby heightening the sense
of violated intimacy: Her wings would tremble in her extacy/& feathers
stand on end as twere with joy/& mouth wide open to release her heart/
Of its out sobbing songs (lines 225).48 Clare understood the experience of
being objectied and thereby feminized, having been subjected to intrusive
questions about his sexual life by at least one prurient reader-tourist. Clare
draws on the birds ancient association with Philomela turned into a
nightingale by the gods after her rape and forcible silencing, her tongue cut
out by her brother-in-law, the king in order to emphasize the threat of a
voyeuristic, masculinized aggression.
Clares treatment of masculinity in the poem is complex, because both
the threats to the nightingales home (the rude boys) and its defenders
(the speaker and his companion) are masculinized (line 52). Clare dissoci-
ates his speaker from the exploitation of the famed bird by projecting the
most destructive aspects of his predatory impulse onto the birds-nesting
boys while preserving a measure of masculinized aggression for his
autobiographical speaker as the nightingales protector (line 20). It is the
speaker who initiates the search, invades the birds privacy, and plots to
keep the nests location secret. He is still a voyeur who watches the night-
ingale unawares, even though he knows that her song depends on privacy:
if I touched a bush or scarcely stirred/All in a moment stopt (lines 289).
He nevertheless wishes to distinguish his behaviour on the birds behalf
from the destructiveness of those who would steal eggs and destroy nests.
He differentiates between these two kinds of aggression in an autobiogra-

phical narrative that distances temporally his childhood exploits of hunting
the birds eggs from his mature activity of protecting them. In The
Nightingales Nest, the speaker claims that his history as a predator has
in fact given him the experience necessary to locate and defend the bird:
There have I hunted like a very boy/Creeping on hands & knees through
matted thorns/To nd her nest & see her feed her young (lines 1214).49
The poem begins with Clares speaker, at once carpe diem lover and
ringleader, leading the way, having invited a companion and, by implica-
tion, the reader on another search today, entreating, Up this green
wood land ride lets softly rove/& list the nightingale (lines 47, 12). He
knows where to nd her and, as he is relaying the backstory that establishes
his credentials as a hunter, catches the notes of the nightingale. The poem
immediately shifts back into present tense to capture the moment of
discovery: Hark there she is as usual lets be hush/For in this black
thorn clump if rightly guest/Her curious house is hidden (lines 424).
This a work of suspense in which the forward momentum of the hunt is
abruptly suspended for a sustained exploration of a private world: Aye as
I live her secret nest is here the speaker declares, as the bird issues a
plaintive note of danger before falling Mute in her fears so that she wont
betray her home (lines 53, 58, 65, 61). Then, while the bird remains frozen
in terror, the speaker undertakes a meticulous inventory of her nest.
The poem denes privacy by rst invading it and then meticulously
documenting its spatial and temporal dimensions. The speaker arrests his
storys progress to describe a nest made of dead oaken leaves, velvet moss
and little scraps of grass, containing curious eggs in number ve/Of
deadened green or rather olive brown (lines 7880, 8990). Although
Clares nightingale inhabits a pastoral site melody seems hid in every
ower it is dened by these homely details (line 71). Haughton notes that
as the examination commences, the poems tone shifts from a high lyricism
to an almost prosaic description of the nests loose materials and its
location in a black thorn clump (lines 77, 43). This extended passage of
natural historical description is crucial to making the experience of a
poetry-producing privacy seem tangible to the search party the speaker,
his companion and the reader who spend time exploring the site
together. When they, and the poem, start moving again, the speaker and
his companion are motivated by this intimate knowledge of her home to
protect the bird. Well leave it as we found it, the speaker declares,
promising We will not plunder music of its dower/Nor turn this spot of
happiness to thrall (lines 62, 6970). Having demonstrated the birds
vulnerability by violating her privacy himself, he recognizes that all he can
do to ensure her safety is utter a blessing and hope for the best: Sing on
sweet bird may no worse hap befall/Thy visions then the fear that now
deceives (lines 678). The poems nal image is the pair walking away
from a refuge that they know cannot be secured.
The nightingale perfectly gures the plight of the famed poet, and,
more broadly, the fate of privacy in Clares day: it may be located in time
and space, but it remains provisional, always subject to invasion. The
nightingale nevertheless gets a happy, if tenuous, ending, with her eggs
safe at the poems close: & here well leave them still unknown to wrong/
As the old wood lands legacy of song (lines 923). In very different ways,
then, To the Snipe and The Nightingales Nest are poems of sheer wish
fullment, fantasies of privacy preserved, if never entirely secure. Clare
develops the conspiratorial plot that he employs to protect the nightingale
in several birds-nesting poems composed in the mid-1820s. In The
Pettichaps Nest, The Yellowhammers Nest and The Yellow Wagtails
Nest, Clare plays out that narratives various possibilities, emphasizing the
role that contingency plays in both the nding of nests and their fates once
discovered.
Hatching plots: a conspiratorial poetics

Clares conspiratorial poetics draws upon two distinctive impulses in his
verse while avoiding their potential pitfalls: he employs both a richly
detailed description that identies beings and places, and a protective
celebration of obscurity that protects himself and his familiar world
[from] certain forms of scrutiny.50 Scholars have assessed the costs and
benets of each mode. Adam Phillips notes that description may be
redemptive provide a voice for otherwise marginalized people and
experiences but it may also be predatory and encourage other predators.
Nicholas Birns explains how these competing impulses towards identica-
tion and evasion are at work in a crucial context for Clare the transfor-
mation of his local environment by parliamentary enclosure between 1809
and 1820. In response to the rhetoric of efciency and productivity that
dened the eras enthusiasm for agricultural improvement, Clare cele-
brated natures elusiveness.51 The conspiratorial poetics that he develops
shrewdly combines his habitual modes of evasion and lush empirical
description. While the coordinates of the birds private haunts are kept
secret, those privy to the conspiracy and this includes the reader are
treated to a full accounting of richly detailed natural spaces.
The speakers of The Pettichaps Nest, The Yellow Hammers Nest

and The Yellow Wagtails Nest use inclusive pronouns we, us and
you and I to form an intimate circle of those in the know. Each of
these poems seeks to draw us into a transient experience of privacy, a here
and now dened by Clares detailed imagery (the here) and temporal
shifts (the now). These are action poems that seem to begin in medias
res, both mid-stride and mid-utterance: Well in my many walks I rarely
found/A place less likely for a bird to form/Its nest (The Pettichaps
Nest, lines 13; Middle Period, III, 517). Thus The Pettichaps Nest
begins with an accidental sighting and goes on to examine the role of
chance in the plot of birds-nesting, as both unexpected danger and
unforeseen opportunity. The speaker and his companion nearly trample
a nest that lies close by the rut gulled waggon road, directly in harms
way (lines 3, 7). But the speaker embraces this contingency: he marvels
that you & I/Had surely passed it in our walk today/Had chance not led
us by it and had not the old bird . . . uttered out (lines 913). Both the
bird and the human pair are on the right side of chance today, although
the birds luck is limited. Having discovered the nest, the wanderers
pause to conduct an extended examination of its construction and
contents. We move from the backstory of almost overlooking it to a
sustained invasion of the birds privacy. The speaker describes outward
walls, made of small bits of hay and withered leaves, before exploring
the interior manually: lined with feathers, it is Built like a oven with a
little hole and full of eggs scarce bigger een then peas. The speaker then
extracts a single egg by inserting two ngers into its snug entrance
(lines 1424). The moment is extraordinarily uncomfortable, both
because of the gendered, sexualized violence of the imagery and because
the terms of the implied conspiracy suddenly place the reader, along with
the speaker, in the predatory role. This is what privacy is like for Clare
we all too frequently know it by its violation.
Viewed another way, the poems ending could be said to stress the
provisional nature of the birds privacy. After the pair agree, Well let
them be, the poem shifts temporally again, to hopes for the future, by
uttering a blessing. Before leaving the eggs in safetys lap (line 35),
however, another unexpected event occurs, and the pair and the poem
are once again halted in mid-stride: Stop heres the bird (line 37) the
speaker exclaims, a response to a surprise (Well I declare it is the
pettichaps [line 39]) that solves a mystery (lines 27, 359). The speaker
admits that although he had often found their nests in chances way . . .
never did I dream untill today/A spot like this would be her chosen
home (lines 41, 434). The poems nal lines thereby underscore the way
in which conspirators must, like the birds whose domain they invade,
take the opportunities they nd on the wing (as de Certeau puts it).
Clares conspiracy is full-blown in this poem: a suspenseful atmosphere,
twists and turns, and a mystery solved.
In The Yellow Hammers Nest and The Yellow Wagtails Nest, Clares
conspiratorial plot unravels in two different, telling ways one emphasiz-
ing the fragility of any efforts to safeguard privacy, and the other insisting
on the lasting benets for the poet of fully experiencing that state, if only
briey. The Yellow Hammers Nest (composed c. 18256) opens charac-
teristically, in mid-stride and with a surprise: Just by the wooden brig a
bird ew up. Realizing that the birds home must be nearby, the speaker
suggests, let us stoop/& seek its nest (lines 1, 34; Middle Period, III, 515).
It is no sooner found than examined: Aye here it is (line 7), the speaker
declares. He then offers one of these poems most beautiful descriptions,
underscoring the inseparability of a domesticated privacy and poetry: Five
eggs pen-scribbled over lilac shells/Resembling writing scrawls which fancy
reads/As natures poesy & pastoral spells (lines 1315). The eggs loveliness
heightens the horror of the poems ending. Once again, the speaker begins
to walk away from the nest and out of the poem, urging an agreement
upon his companion: so leave it still/A happy home of sunshine
owers & streams (lines 212). This attempt at protective closure is
thwarted, however, by the speakers own inability to banish thoughts of
the nests vulnerability. Yet in the sweetest places cometh ill, he worries,
For snakes are known with chill & deadly coil/To watch such nests &
seize the helpless young (lines 236). The poem ends with a vision of a
devastated world, as though the plague became a guest and the
housless-home a ruined nest. The nal image is an avian portrait of
inconsolability: the mournful yellowhammer once woes hath rent its
little breast (lines 2730). Thus, the speaker cannot prevent his own
postlapsarian knowledge of a modernity in which privacy is under con-
tinual pressure a state of exposure and vulnerability appropriately
represented here by the menace of snakes from spoiling an Edenic
scene of seclusion.
In The Yellow Wagtails Nest, the speaker manages to linger in paradise
lost, as the plot spirals into a recollection of having found the privacy
necessary for poetry. The poem opens with a familiar pair pausing to
document their progress: Upon an edding in a quiet nook/We double
down choice places in a book (lines 12). The speaker again begins with
background, identifying the nook as one he had noted as a pleasant scene
when he once discovered A broken plough . . . nestled like a thought

forgot by toil in clover grass (lines 3, 4, 10, 5; Middle Period, III, 474).
Instead of returning to a present moment of discovery, however, this poem
dwells on what happened while he was sitting on the nestled plough, a
temporary place for rest (line 11). He recalls reaching for a ower, a
gesture that sets off a series of events before action stops altogether. A little
bird cheeped loud & uttered up, and in turning towards it the speaker
spies a snug nest deep & dry a nest within a nest (lines 1317). The bird
had chosen her site carefully, From rain & wind & tempest comfort proof
(line 24). The glimpse of her six eggs sprinkled oer with spots of grey
launches a fantasy of being snug as comforts wishes ever lay (lines 1920).
The speaker lingers in the recollection of a blissful, impermanent, solitude:
& I so happy then/Felt life still eden from the haunts of men (lines 312).
The reveries prompted by Such safety-places are short-lived, but in the
moment, he stresses, I almost felt the poets fables true (lines 25, 36). Clare
insists that the gure of what Haughton describes as inherently private,
hidden nests, can have a lasting effect that is almost tangible, since We feel
such pleasures after many days (line 44).52 So, if the recollection of having
briey Felt life still eden is all we have of such retreats, that visceral
memory has a valuable afterlife for the poet.
Poets have repeatedly turned to birds as fellow singers in asking how to
respond to moments of historical crisis and disruption. In Of Modern
Poetry (1940), Wallace Stevens describes the poets task of nding/
What will sufce (line 2). He explains that It has to be living, to learn
the speech of the place, and in his day that means It has to think about
war (lines 68).53 For Clares contemporaries, one of the measures of
modernity was increasing encroachments on privacy. In these birds-
nesting poems, Clare answers his own version of a question that Robert
Frost would pose in another wartime poem, The Oven Bird (1916), of
what to make of a diminished thing (line 14).54 In framing a song for
mid-summer, once the early petal-fall is past and the highway dust is
over all (lines 2, 6, 10), Frosts bird invokes that other fall we name the
fall (line 9). In his birds-nesting poems, Clare seeks a poetics suitable for
the ruined aftermath of an idyllic time when he Felt life still eden from
the haunts of men (The Yellow Wagtails Nest, line 32).
Two of Clares very late poems offer his own view of what will sufce in
an era in which privacy seemed increasingly diminished. These verses were
composed long after the close of Clares active life on the public stage, once
the historical pressures that threatened the birds nest have seemingly fallen
away, leaving only these undisturbed vignettes of poetry and privacy.55
These are poems with no need for conspiracy, because there is no longer an
awareness of danger. To John Clare creates a sonic microcosm of child-
hood experience in a sonnet of thickly woven rhymes and near rhymes. It
begins with the same intimate address that opens the birds-nesting poems
that Ive been discussing: Well honest John how fare you now at home
(line 1; Later Poems, II, 1,102). Bate points out that John may be the poet
himself or his son. In either case, Johns home is a world in which birds
are building nests and a boy engages in three activities that are intimately
related: birds-nesting, playing (with tops & tawes, line 11) and reading. In
this sonnet, the literary consists only of lots of pictures & good stories too,
and the only kind of fame is harmless: Jack the jiant killers high renown
(lines 1314). In Birds Nests, possibly Clares last poem, only the nest itself
remains, its construction accompanied by birdsong that charms the poet
(line 4; Later Poems, II, 1,106). Poet and bird are suspended in the here-and-
now of a moment of private experience: Tis Spring warm grows the South
(line 1). In that continuous present the Chafnchs carry the moss in his
mouth/To the lbert hedges all day long while the poet listens to the
beautifull song as wind blows, warm the sunshines and the old Cow at
her leisure chews her cud (lines 27). In these late lines, Clare has nally
edited his poetic world down to a composite gure the poet and a nest
complete with singing bird forged in the res of political unrest and the
public glare of celebrity, and surviving both in the long aftermath of his
writing life.
Notes
1. John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 8.
2. Tom Mole, Byrons Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic
of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 4.
3. Ibid., p. 10.
4. Eliza Emmerson is quoting Lord Radstock in a letter she wrote to Clare dated
11 May 1820; Critical Heritage, p. 61.
5. I borrow the phrase from Philippe Aris, who nevertheless wonders whether it
is possible to write a history of private life since an understanding of privacy
may refer in different periods to such different states and values that relations
of continuity and difference among them cannot be established. I address this
legitimate concern by adopting the same approach taken by the multi-volume
series by that name, of grounding accounts of private life as specically as
possible in particular times and places. Philippe Aris, Introduction, A History
of Private Life, vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989), p. 1.
6. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 34.
7. Ibid., p. 14.
8. Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), p. 135.
9. Aris usefully locates privacy on a continuum of sociability that includes the
intimacy of domesticity and a more complete solitude. Introduction, p. 9.
10. Jason N. Goldsmith, The Promiscuity of Print: John Clares Don Juan and
the Culture of Romantic Celebrity, Studies in English Literature 15001900, 46
(2006), 80332 (821).
11. Mole, Byrons Romantic Celebrity, pp. 22, 25.
12. Goldsmith, Promiscuity of Print, p. 822.
13. Mole, Byrons Romantic Celebrity, p. 18.
14. Quoted in Bate, pp. 1789.
15. Clare to Taylor, 6 September 1821, Letters, p. 215.
17. I share Bates view that [p]osthumous psychiatric diagnosis of any kind is a
dubious activity (p. 412); see also Bate, pp. 21314, 51819.
18. Allens assessment is offered in his letter To The Editor of The Times
(London), published on 23 June 1840. Quoted in Goldsmith, Promiscuity
of Print, p. 804.
19. Ibid., p. 804.
20. Bate, pp. 163, 175.
21. Ibid., p. 362.
22. Ibid., p. 393.
23. Letters, p. 590.
24. Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, p. 4.
25. Ibid., pp. 21213, 220.
26. Radstock also objected to two love poems for their frankness about physicality,
including sexuality. For accounts of these objections, see Bate, pp. 1645,
197203, 21819.
27. Critical Heritage, p. 62.
28. Fulford, Personating Poets on the Page: John Clare in his Asylum
Notebooks, JCSJ, 32 (2013), 2648 (32).
29. The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), II, lines 2212, 2257. See Barrell,
Spirit of Despotism, pp. 21213.
30. Ibid., lines 248, 249, 2336.
31. Ibid., lines 100, 2035.
32. Haughton, p. 64.
34. Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Canada: McGill-
Queens University Press, 1987), p. 205 n.
35. Of the poems discussed in this chapter, the following (with titles as printed)
appeared in The Rural Muse (1835):The Nightingales Nest, The Pettichaps
Nest, The Yellow Hammers Nest, The Skylark, The Thrushs Nest and
The Wrynecks Nest. Eric Robinson and David Powell report that Clare
intended a separate volume in which birds and their nests would be described
in short poems of varying stanzas, the whole collection being called Birds
Nesting. See Major Works, p. 492 n.
36. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: California University Press, 1984), pp. xix, xi.
37. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson suggest that a number of
the poems I discuss The Sky Lark, The Yellow Wagtails Nest, The
Yellow Hammers Nest and The Pettichaps Nest may be connected with
the birds list he compiled in 18256. I have suggested composition dates
accordingly. See Middle Period, III, pp. 615, 618. I have used the (manuscript)
versions of the titles instead of the titles of the printed volumes except when
referring to those volumes.
38. Orrin N. C. Wang, Introduction: Romanticism and Conspiracy, Romantic
Circles Praxis Series (August 1997). www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/conspiracy/wang/
owint2.html. Accessed 26 October 2014.
39. Nicholas Roe describes this as the environment in which Keats composed
To Autumn. See John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. 254. Using a related metaphor to describe the 1790s,
Barrell describes the pervasive inuence of an atmosphere of suspicion. See
Spirit of Despotism, p. 5.
40. Jerome Christensen proposes a conspiratorial theory of Romantic poetry
that understands the Romantic poets as conspirators against the order of
things and Romanticism [a]s a conspiracy against the given. See
Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2000), pp. 23.
41. Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, p. 261.
42. Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), p. 167.
43. Mina Gorji notes that the placement of Sand Martin and To the Snipe
alongside religious lyrics in the manuscript Pet. A57 highlights shared pre-
occupations, which include a desire for the peace and comfort that can be
found in solitary desolate places. See John Clare and the Place of Poetry,
pp. 1002.
45. Quoted in Bate, p. 368.
46. Haughton, p. 52.
47. Simon Kvesi, Her Curious House Is Hidden: Secrecy and Femininity in
Clares Nest Poems, JCSJ, 18 (July 1999), 5163 (59).
48. Ibid., pp. 589.
49. As an adult, Clare continued the hunt as an amateur natural historian. The
companions addressed in several birds-nesting poems are probably modelled
on the household steward at Milton Hall (until 1826), Edmund Tyrell Artis,
an antiquarian and archaeologist, and Joseph Henderson, the head gardener
for whom Clare collected birds eggs. He also fullled other such requests,
including Taylors desire for a Nightingales nest & eggs. After leaving
Helpston in 1832, Clare also promised himself that he would return yearly
to hunt the nightingales nest in royce wood. Natural History, pp. 67, 318.
50. Adam Phillips, The Exposure of John Clare, in Haughton, pp. 17888
(pp. 1801).
51. Nicholas Birns, The Riddle Nature Could Not Prove, in Haughton, pp. 202,
206.
52. Haughton, p. 64
53. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954. Reprinted New
York: Vintage, 1990).
54. Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
55. Eric Robinson and David Powell include them among The Last Six Poems
that Clare wrote; Later Poems, II, pp. 1,098106.
part ii
Culture
chapter 4
John Clare and the new varieties

of enclosure: a polemic
John Burnside
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper1
July, 2013. I am walking with a friend on the trail that leads upwards from
the Swiss village of Brntschen to the Nivenalp. All week, the weather has
been changeable; but for now the air is clear and slightly damp and the
ground underfoot is teeming with insect life so much so that, with each
step I take, I struggle to plant my foot and do no harm. All around us, in
the diverse grasses, meadow owers abound, and an astonishing range and
abundance of butteries and other insects it from blossom to blossom in
the late morning sun. I can scarcely contain my pleasure at witnessing
so much vivid confusion; and yet, at the back of my mind or perhaps
I should say, off to the side somewhere, like a bedraggled sailor at a
wedding party a hint of sorrow lingers. Sorrow, because it is a long
time since I have encountered a meadow anywhere near as rich and diverse
as this in Britain, and I cannot imagine seeing so many different buttery
species, in anything like these numbers, on agricultural land at home. Even
the range of grasses is cause for delight. My friend, a Swiss doctor from
further down the valley, walks here all the time, and she is accustomed to all
this teeming life, even if she does not take it for granted, but I have to stop
and be still for a moment, because I live in a land where agribusiness and
development has rendered such scenes defunct a fond memory or a
clichd grandmother-story about the good old days when the garden
was full of butteries a degraded state best described by E. J. Mishan,
in The Costs of Economic Growth:
Other disagreeable features may be mentioned in passing, many of them
the result of either wide-eyed enterprise or of myopic municipalities, such as
the post-war development blight, the erosion of the countryside, the
uglication of coastal towns, the pollution of the air and of rivers with
79
80 JOHN BURNSIDE
chemical wastes, the accumulation of thick oils on our coastal waters, the
sewage poisoning our beaches, the destruction of wildlife by indiscriminate
use of pesticides, the change-over from animal farming to animal factories,
and, visible to all who have eyes to see, a rich heritage of natural beauty being
wantonly and systematically destroyed a heritage that cannot be restored
in our lifetime.2
Mishan wrote these lines in 1967 but, in spite of some (mostly cosmetic)
greening in areas where landowners interests are not threatened, the
condition of the British landscape, and the ora and fauna that live
there, has worsened and when I mention this to my friend, she assures
me that the upper Valais, where we are now standing, is a special case, and
that Britain is probably no more culpable than any other European nation.
It is a dispiriting thought and, in an effort to avoid lingering over it, I look
around again, my wonder increasing, if anything, the more I take it all in.
For me, living where I live, and all too accustomed to the costs of economic
growth, it is like looking into some remnant of an otherwise lost world
like the world John Clare knew, or had told to him, before his native
ground was nally enclosed.
*
When I began writing this chapter, I was preoccupied with events that, in
Mishans terms, involved the wanton and systematic destruction of a wild
bird habitat close to my home a fact that I feel the need to mention here
because it provoked in me a dismay somewhat akin (if less thoroughly
tragic) to the dismay Clare must have felt at the height of enclosures. This
is important, to my mind, because poets have to write, not only out of a
sense of celebration of the land, but also in response to events that drive us
to genuine despair. In reworking that rst draft, I hope to have put aside
my personal issues, but I have to confess that my main concern here
remains polemical. Even when so great an authority as Auden declares it
so, I nd it impossible to accept that poetry makes nothing happen and
I read Clare not only for pleasure or for his keen observations of rural life,
but also in the hope that his political concerns may still make a difference,
one hundred and fty years or so after his death.
So the question I want to ask in this chapter is both simple to state and
impossible to answer, but, at its briefest, it is this: what kind of person (and
writer) would John Clare be, if he were alive today? To my mind, it seems
likely that he would also be engaged in some kind of polemic: as a poet
whose life and work were deeply marked by the continuing agricultural
enclosures visited upon his social class and home terrain, a resurrected
John Clare and the new varieties of enclosure: a polemic 81
Clare would surely be a trenchant critic of the myriad new enclosures to
which we are presently being subjected: enclosures, not only of land and
property, but also of the sky, the horizon, our means of communication,
knowledge and ideas, the imagination and even our very senses. The
enclosure of pleasure. The colonization of the Internet for motives of
commerce and state security. The continuing enclosure of culture.
In school, I was taught that the gradual enclosure of the British Isles was
a series of specic historical events, marked by Acts of Parliament and the
occasional riot; I was even led to believe that, in its later, nineteenth-
century manifestations, it represented a kind of progress, in which land
was more efciently and productively farmed and it took some time,
and a good deal of off-curriculum reading, to understand that to enclose
is capitalisms central intention. My rst alternative source was Marx
(extremely non-curricular in my working-class, Catholic comprehensive
school), who, having outlined the course of land enclosure from the late
Middle Ages, through the Reformation and into the increasingly rapacious
modern era, pointed out that, by the nineteenth century,
the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and
communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent
times have the agricultural population received a farthings compensation
for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were
stolen from them and presented to the landlords by the landlords through
the agency of Parliament?
He went on to conclude that,
[t]he spoliation of the Churchs property, the fraudulent alienation of the
state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and
clan property and its transformation into modern private property under
circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic
methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the eld for capitalis-
tic agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban
industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians.3
Marxs analysis was slightly after the fact (Capital appeared three years
after Clares death), but Clare recorded what was being done to his class
and his land as it happened, in a poetry that is not only nely attuned to the
life-world he saw being degraded all around him, but is also instinctively
dissident:
On paths to freedom & to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice no road here
& on the tree with ivy over hung
82 JOHN BURNSIDE
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung

As tho the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus with the poor scared freedom bade good bye
& much the[y] feel it in the smothered sigh
& birds & trees & owers without a name
All sighed when lawless laws enclosure came
(The Mores, lines 6978; Middle Period, II, 34950)
Yet, though these lines foreshadow Capital s denunciation of enclosure,
it would be simplistic to see Clare as some kind of proto-Marxist. Indeed,
it is not difcult to nd unsettlingly conservative and patriotic sentiments
in his verse. I would argue, however, that these arose as a result of the
socialization he underwent a result, that is, of his place, class, and
education and I would venture to suggest that, given changes in the
cultural climate and education system, our hypothetical twenty-rst-
century Clare would be highly critical not only of such predictable targets
as agribusiness, chemical companies and the Common Agricultural
Policy, but also of those who prot from, or collude with, todays less
obvious and more controversial forms of enclosure. The most interesting
question here, perhaps, is what form his poetry would take under present
circumstances which, for a politically and ecocritically motivated poet
working now, is not just a fanciful way of asking what, if anything, one
might learn from Clares oeuvre, in the continuing project of critiquing and
attempting to combat new instances of lawless law. In short, my question
here is: what can a contemporary poet learn from a predecessor who lived
and worked before it was publicly pronounced that poetry makes nothing
happen?
*
Whatever actual forms they take, enclosures are always presented as
improvements and, at times, they may even originate in ideas that are
(at least theoretically) either benecial or harmless. However, as the
American painter Thomas Cole noted, what is sometimes called improve-
ment in its march makes us fear that the bright and tender owers of the
imagination shall all be crushed beneath its iron tramp.4 Clare, arguably
the only major Romantic to witness at rst hand the human and environ-
mental ravages of agricultural improvements, was more direct:
By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange & chill
& spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler & self interest fell a prey
& cross berry way & old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again
Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush & tree & levelled every hill
& hung the moles for traitorsthough the brook is running still
It runs a naker brook cold & chill
(Remembrances, lines 6170; Middle Period, IV, 1334)
The likening of enclosure to Buonaparte here is both provocative and
courageous, in the light of Clares social position and his dependency on
patronage. Even today, anyone dwelling in the British countryside is soon
made keenly aware of the power, and the wilfulness, of his or her more
prosperous, and politely ruthless, neighbours. Yet what is most noticeable
in this poem and what works so well as a countering value system to
power is the use of (and the assumed familiarity with) specic place
names. Clares system of imaginatively mapping the poems terrain by
reference to individual trees and geographical features recalls a near-
magical intimacy with the land that was already being undermined by
the agribusiness practices of his time. It actualizes specic phenomena as
distinct, creaturely entities: they are no longer simply objects in the eld of
vision; they dwell in that eld with us.
When such mental maps and place names are destroyed, however, spaces
that were once dwelling grounds become what some aboriginal peoples call
dead land, and this elimination of home terrain constantly nds new
manifestations. Recently, for example, under the headline Ambitious
renewable energy plan aims to provide power for the entire city, a
Peterborough Today report described a new kind of enclosure in Clares
own backyard, claiming that:
An energy self-sufcient [sic] Peterborough creating and delivering all the
power needed by homes and businesses could be a reality in 20 years. This is
the vision of civic leaders who want to create three renewable energy parks
harnessing wind and solar power on farmland owned by Peterborough
City Council at Newborough Farm, America Farm and Morris Fen. But
standing in their way are some 22 farmers who have built their livelihoods on
the same land for generations.5
Even in this short passage, several discrepancies stand out. First, it is
deceptive for Peterborough City Council to claim energy self-sufciency
when its energy parks are to be sited well outside the city limits on what are,
effectively, absentee landlord holdings. Notice, too, how the piece speaks
of power needed by homes and businesses (my emphasis), as if this need
84 JOHN BURNSIDE
were urgent and real and could be satised by an intermittent energy source
such as wind.6 The correspondent Paul Grinnell unfairly elevates the civic
leaders vision over the perspective of the farmers, who are depicted as
merely standing in the way of that vision; then, having run through the
usual wind industry annel about the potential benets of the plan, he
nally gets to the key information: Funding would come from sources
such as government grants and the private sector . . . the scheme would
generate a long-term net income to the council over 20 years of between
90 million and 137 million.7
Yet, on reection, it would not have taken much effort on Peterborough
Todays part to recognize this subsidy-grab project as one of the new forms
of enclosure. When it comes to wind turbine planning issues, the powers-
that-be have developed an ugly habit of trotting out lawless laws to suit
themselves (or, as in Scotland, of simply wading in and overruling local
decisions), not to mention misleading the public about costs and benets,
in order to allow larger landowners and developers to draw millions of
pounds from tariffs and energy bills. That the illegality of this policy has
now been exposed by the Christine Metcalfe UNECE ruling8 is probably
neither here nor there: too many rich people will get even richer from
turbine installations for the process to be halted now9. Money, however, is
only part of the problem. Even if the tariffs were operated on a fairer basis,
and proper consultation were to be carried out, the impact of horizontal
axis wind turbines on bird and bat life is nally beginning to be indepen-
dently reported, after a long campaign (by government bodies, the power
companies, and even certain media outlets) of deliberate misinformation
and deceit and the results are a matter for deep concern on the part of
some environmentalists (though apparently only some). A 2012 study by
the Spanish Ornithological Society, for example, points to bird and bat
mortality estimates in the millions that, for some reason, have been
persistently ignored, just as much by many mainstream greens as by
governments and the energy industry.10 Perhaps the situation is best
summed up by Clive Hambler, an Oxford University-based zoologist
who specializes in species extinction:
I think wind farms are potentially the biggest disaster for birds of prey since
the days of persecution by gamekeepers, and I think wind farms are one of
the biggest threats to European and North American bats since large-scale
deforestation. The impacts are already becoming serious for white-tailed
eagles in Europe, as is abundantly clear in Norway. A wind farm built
despite opposition from ornithologists has decimated an important popu-
lation, killing 40 white-tailed eagles in about 5 years and 11 of them in 2010.
The last great bustard in the Spanish province of Cadiz was killed by a wind
development. In my experience, some greens are in complete denial of
these impacts, or hopefully imagine that these bats and birds can take big
losses: they cant because they breed very slowly.
Birds of prey often soar where wind farms are best sited, and may be
attracted to their deaths by the vegetation and prey around the turbines.
A similar deadly ecological trap has been proposed for bats, with some
species attracted by insect prey or noise around the turbines.
There are very serious suggestions of a cover-up of the scale of the
problem, by some operatives hiding the corpses of birds, but you only
have to look at the Save the Eagles website to see the evidence accumulating
despite scavengers or deception.
To my mind one of the worst problems is that wind farms will prevent
the recovery of birds of prey, other threatened birds, and bats denying
them great swathes of the European and North American continent
where they once dwelt. This ies in the face of the legally binding
Convention on Biological Diversity, which encourages restoration of
habitat and species whenever practicable. It makes a nonsense of the
idea that wind is sustainable energy except in that it sustains and
renews ecological damage.11
Yet, as much as these threats to the creaturely life of his home ground
would horrify Clare, I think he would also appreciate a subtler point about
the impact of turbines on the land or, rather, on our sense of a horizon
that Frieda Hughes has pointed out:
Knowing nothing about wind turbines, I used to imagine that they were a
good idea. But while staying with relatives on the outskirts of Halifax a few
years ago, I was dismayed to discover that the enormous picture window in
their attic bedroom no longer framed the view over the unblemished
Yorkshire hills that I was accustomed to, but a wind farm.
It industrialised the horizon and was instantly depressing. No creative
thought could wander that previously scenic vista; instead the turbines acted
as anchors, preventing cognitive reasoning.12
This is a response with which Clare would surely have sympathized; few
poets have his sense of the living space between land and sky, and the
beauty of the horizons that are found in fen country. To return to The
Mores:
Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush & one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed springs blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown & grey
86 JOHN BURNSIDE
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty at undwarfed by bush & tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
& lost itself which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the orisons edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds & wild as summer owers
Is faded all (The Mores, lines 117; Middle Period, II, 3478)
This passage, with its invocation of the circling sky and the horizons edge,
echoes the sense of the sky and the air as a source of imaginative freedom
that Bachelard has in mind when he says:
Dans le rgne de limagination, lair nous libre des rveries substantielles,
intimes, digestives. Il nous libre de notre attachement aux matires: il est
donc la matire de notre libert 13
[In the realm of the imagination, the air frees us from substantial, internal,
digestive reveries. It frees us from our attachment to matter: it is therefore
the matter of freedom.]
It would be easy to make further points about the deployment of wind
turbines as a process of enclosure, whether in terms of deliberate misinfor-
mation by government and developers, or in terms of the environmental
damage done, or, in this subtler sense, as violations of the circling sky. Yet
just as the sky and the horizon are being enclosed,14 further inroads are
being made elsewhere, undermining or polluting the ways in which we
imagine, the ways in which we dream and the things we think we know.
Before moving on to consider these new forms of enclosure, it might be
worth reecting a little on the poets role and his or her limitations
when faced with such attacks on space, human and environmental values,
and the imaginative life.
*
In his Marxist approach to the work of the artist and his or her place in
society, The Necessity of Art, Ernst Fischer notes that:
In a class society the classes try to recruit art that powerful voice of the
collective into serving their particular purposes . . . On the one hand, we
nd the Apollonian glorication of power and the status quo of kings,
princes, and aristocratic families and the social order established by them
and reected in their ideology as a supposedly universal order. On the other
hand there was the Dionysian revolt from below, the voice of the ancient,
broken collective which took refuge in secret associations and secret cults,
protesting against the violation and fragmentation of society, against the
hubris of private property and the wickedness of class rule, prophesying the
return of the old order and the old gods, a coming age of commonwealth
and justice. Contradictory elements were often combined within a single
artist, particularly in those periods when the old collectivism was not yet too
remote and still continued to exist in the consciousness of the people.15
That much of Clares poetry emerges from the ancient, broken collec-
tive is not surprising and, in his own time, the emotional and spiritual
damage inicted by private property and class rule cost him dear,
arguably just as much as any physical privations. Even if we determine
to avoid the old poet-madman-lover clichs, there is no doubt that, in a
predatory capitalist system now, as then those who value the land
will suffer psychologically from what is done to its ora and fauna, its
skies and waters, and its imaginative weather. Bearing in mind that
aboriginal description of exploited terrain as dead land land that, in a
meaningful sense, can no longer be intimately named and the demor-
alization of so many indigenous and rural peoples when that exploita-
tion lays waste to their homes, we might choose to see what at rst looks
like madness as a natural response to unchecked external power. As
Fischer points out:
As human beings separated themselves more and more from nature, as the
original tribal unity was gradually destroyed by division of labour and
property ownership, so the equilibrium between the individual and the
outside world became more and more disturbed. Lack of harmony with
the outside world leads to hysteria, trances, ts of insanity.16
George Monbiot echoes this notion, with specic reference to Clare:
What Clare suffered was the fate of indigenous peoples torn from their land
and belonging everywhere. His identity crisis, descent into mental agony
and alcohol abuse, are familiar blights in reservations and outback shanties
the world over. His loss was surely enough to drive almost anyone mad; our
loss surely enough to drive us all a little mad.17
However, we should be careful not to oversimplify Clares madness. There
are good reasons for seeing certain forms of insanity as performance which
is to say, as works of desperate art in which the supposed madman
creatively (though often obliquely) enacts a rejection of those social forces
(accepted by others as rational or, at the very least, inevitable) that work to
destroy his original sense of, and belonging with, the collective.18 We are
88 JOHN BURNSIDE
familiar with the notion of magical thinking as fantasy, as a kind of

superstitious rejection of reality in favour of long-nurtured wishes; per-
haps we also need to think of it, in relation to crazy, as a radical spiritual
alternative to a denatured socio-political environment. In a real sense, this
performed madness is an attempt to live according to some improvised, but
meaningful, law in a social milieu where even the most fundamental laws
have become corrupt, or lawless:
Accursed wealth oer bounding human laws
Of every evil thou remains the cause
Victims of want those wretches such as me
Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee
Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed
& thine our loss of labour & of bread
Thou art the cause that levels every tree
& woods bow down to clear a way for thee
(Helpstone, lines 12734; Early Poems, I, 161)
By likening humankind to the natural world, and equating the damage

done to human laws with the despoliation of nature, Clare is making the
point, familiar in contemporary ecocritical thinking, that social and envir-
onmental justice are not only linked, but continuous. As this is one of the
key pillars of the green movement that is most often compromised by
political parties, it is worth recalling Edward Abbeys forceful expression of
the continuity between humans and other life forms:
The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination,
the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth . . . Progress in our nation has for
too long been confused with Growth; I see the two as different, almost
incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better
toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and
afrmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely
the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote,
the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here
as we do.19
Clares critique of a wealth that becomes accursed by oer bounding
human laws and Abbeys attack on greed should be familiar from the
Biblical saying, gone into folk wisdom, that the love of money is the root of
all evil.20 Yet both writers go further and equate social injustice with
environmental destruction in each case, with a careful and cunning
attention to the mores of his particular time. As Clare extends the indignity
of bowing and scraping to the very trees themselves, so Abbey calls for an
extension of afrmative action normally associated with human victims
of prejudice to wolves and snakes and coyotes. Thus, for both, the
continuity of social and environmental justice is not simply a maxim or a
slogan, but an essential element of all morality. At the most fundamental
level, their work takes as read the spirit of Ecclesiastes, in which the
continuity of the human and other living things is set out in the starkest
possible form:
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing
befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one
breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.21
It comes as no surprise, then, that Clare extends his respect for other
animals (and plants) to the land itself, a precursor of the land ethic best
expressed in The Lament of Swordy Well:
I am no man to whine & beg
But fond of freedom still
I hang no lies on pitys peg
To bring a gris[t] to mill
On pitys back I neednt jump
My looks speak loud alone
My only tree theyve left a stump
& nought remains my own
(lines 1218; Middle Period, V, 109)
The spoiling of Swordy Well parallels the destruction of the human
collective: it is a piece of land that has fell upon the town (lines 1218;
Middle Period, V, 111), like the men, women and children who, having
been worked till they could not stand, were rapidly consigned, rst to the
poor house, and then to a paupers grave. Swordy Well falls into parish
hands and suffers the same degradation before losing the last vestiges of a
specic identity: Of all the elds I am the last/That my own face can tell
(lines 2512; Middle Period, V, 113). Yet both the success of the entire
collective, and the sanity of every individual, depend upon, and are con-
tinuous with, an original tribal unity that constantly emerges out of
intimate connection with the land and with the other creatures (living
and dead) that dwell, or have dwelt, upon it. All life arises in the mixing of
water with loam; spirit is breathed through the nascent clay by the wind;
the origin, the continuing support and the nal resting place of all living
things is the earth. For this reason, as Fischer notes:
The totemistic clan represented a totality. The clan totem was the symbol of
the immortal clan itself, the ever-living collective from which the individual
emerged and to which he returned. The uniform social structure was a
90 JOHN BURNSIDE
model of the surrounding world. The world order corresponded to the

social order.22
This is a two-way exchange, of course: the perfect unity of man, animal,
plant, stone, and source, of life and death, collective and individual is a
premise, not only of totemic magic, but of meaningful social existence.
Harm the land, or the trees, or the totem spirits, and the social order
collapses; but, by the same token, injustice within the social order leads to
natural disaster in the outside world, thus threatening harm, in the longer
term, to all members of the collective. Clares description of Swordy Well,
as it falls into the condition of dead land, both laments environmental
destruction and, at the same time, cries out for the kind of land ethic that
Aldo Leopold made explicit in the 1940s:
There is as yet no ethic dealing with mans relation to land and to the
animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus slave-girls, is
still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges
but no obligations.
The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if
I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological
necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The rst two have already been
taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted
that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society,
however, has not yet afrmed their belief. I regard the present conservation
movement as the embryo of such an afrmation.23
And he continues:
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a
member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt
him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt
him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to
compete for).
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to
include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.24
I do not think it is too much of a stretch to see in The Lament of Swordy
Well the outline of just such a land ethic in the making (or, at least, in a
negative direction). When Clare speaks of the bees that ye round in
feeble rings/& nd no blossom bye/Then thrum their almost weary
wings/Upon the moss & die (lines 8188; Middle Period, V, 107), we
who live with the threat of honey bee colony collapse cannot help
experiencing a chill; when we hear of the loss of the butteries, and
the beetles and of the dead tussocks (line 112; Middle Period, V, 108), we
are all too aware of the parallels between prot-driven enclosure and the
image E. J. Mishan paints of a rich heritage of natural beauty being
wantonly and systematically destroyed. Nobody reading Clare today
would deny that he is a precursor of our best ecocritical writers; however,
the question a concerned contemporary still feels compelled to ask is:
aside from the beauty and poignancy of the work, what difference does
this actually make? How can the re-reading of a dead Northamptonshire
peasant poet have any impact in a world where the greed and hypocrisy
he identied not only continue, but multiply and mutate into new, ever
more inventive and callous forms? How, in societies that still measure
success by economic growth, can poetry of any kind help to provoke
the necessary changes?
The answer, if there is one, lies in the reference to re-reading. Over the
last several years, Clare has come to enjoy unexpected public recognition;
now, the time is right to reconsider his vision and his warning, to point
out the universal and ancient connection to the collective that his
work embodies a connection to folkways and values from which we
can learn to recognize the subtle and varied nature of all of our present
day enclosures, and the motives of those who would impose them.
Re-reading Clare, we see the urgency of an ecocentric revaluation of
how we use one another and the land we share, not just for environ-
mental reasons, but also because our sanity, individual and collective,
depends on right dwelling. For some years it was taken for granted in
many circles that the Romantic project was over that poetry about
nature was secondary and necessarily slight, if aesthetically pleasing.
That this position has been reversed has as much to do with the
re-assessment of Clares writing and his importance as a naturalist over
the last couple of decades as anything else. Now, the essential Romantic
enterprise, the search for an informed dwelling, continues with ecocriti-
cism, a discipline that begins with the recognition of our mutual crea-
tureliness with all life and with the salvaging of a sense of wildness and
spontaneity in ourselves and without a doubt, one necessary forebear of
this development is John Clare.
*
I have tried, as I said, to avoid portraying Clare as a proto-Marxist. It is
tempting, however, to think of him as a forerunner of some of todays
dissidents (some elements of the Occupy movement, and of zero-growth
theorists, for example), and I cannot help reading a poem like The Tramp
(as this poem is popularly known), for example, as a kind of thought
92 JOHN BURNSIDE
experiment in ways of countering the capitalist states ruthless terrorism,

as Marx labels it:
He eats a moments stoppage to his song
The stolen turnip as he goes along
& hops along & heeds with careless eye
The passing crowded stage coach reeling bye
He talks to none but wends his silent way
& nds a hovel at the close of day
Or under any hedge his house is made
He has no calling & he owns no trade
An old smoaked blanket arches oer his head
A whisp of straw or stubble makes his bed
He knows a lawless clan that claim no kin
But meet & plunder on & feel no sin
No matter where they go or where they dwell
They dally with the winds & laugh at hell
(Middle Period, V, 270)
The tramps poverty is neither denied nor glamorized, but Clare also
recognizes his vitality, his connection to the natural world through song
(surely Dionysian in nature), and his dalliance with the winds and the
lawless clan that guides him (notice that Clare uses the term lawless
law for enclosure in The Mores but, here, what the tramp knows runs
counter to that law: his lawless clan is dissident, deant and potentially
insurgent). One immediately recognizes this gure as a member of
Marxs proletariat, created by the forcible expropriation of the people
from the soil . . . turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers
and vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of
circumstances . . . chastised for their enforced transformation into vaga-
bonds and paupers.25 That the tramp is not only poor and homeless, but
also disenfranchised cannot be denied, but he also carries in his body the
lineaments of an older knowledge of the world, a connection with song
and the wind, and an ability to dwell in his own esh and nervous system
that the adherents of capitalism have sacriced. His law disdains to
locate all experience in the head: unlike the worthies in the passing
crowded stage coach, he does not think in order to be, but experiences
his environment with his entire body, for better or worse, out in the open
and with no xed abode or predetermined destination. For the time
being, it is clear that he lacks a means by which to unite this soulful
existence at the individual level with a collective, socio-political aware-
ness, but there are hints, nevertheless, of meaningful dissidence.
This man owns nothing, but his ingenuity allows him, for the moment
at least, to have the use of everything; because capitalism has taken away
from him everything that it values, he is obliged to follow his silent way
and discover new, and potentially revolutionary, values of his own. In
this, at the very least, he is exemplary for those currently faced with the
new forms of enclosure and the latest fashions in cynical dispossession.
A true child of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, he reminds us that the limits
and constraints of property outweigh its apparent benets.
Naturally, it would be wrong to claim that Clares tramp is a revolu-
tionary, as such. What he provides, however, is a reminder of a now almost
outmoded condition of openness to the world that is wholly consonant
with what we have, in our tradition, sometimes called the soul a
condition, one might say, that is entirely continuous with all being. As
vulnerable as he is to contingency, the tramp no longer carries within him
the garrison of a colonial force: he has, to some extent, overthrown the
government in his head. His lawless clan, being true to nature and
exigency, directly opposes the lawless law of enclosure: for the moment,
he is as free as it is possible to be under capitalisms aegis. Outlawed, he
nds new allegiances. Talking to none, he enters into a silence that is full of
potential for new and inventive ways of saying. With no calling, no trade
and no kin, he is able to laugh at hell and, in spite of his poverty and
disenfranchised condition, he really does become a living exemplar of
imaginative (if reactive) self-liberation. What makes him so is the quality
of his refusal. His outsider status may not have been voluntarily adopted,
but now that he is where he is, it seems unlikely that he would choose to
return to a system that encloses the world and, so, denatures it. That refusal
is the rst step in constructing an alternative order, one that counters
enclosure in all its forms with a truly inventive disdain.
The notion that poetry makes nothing happen, that it stands apart in its
own privileged, and suspiciously ethereal-sounding, valley is one that I nd
deeply troubling. Such wise detachment may suit certain weathers, but in
the current climate, the post-romantic, ecocritical project calls out for
engagement. Looking around today, a contemporary Clare would quickly
see that we live in an era of novel and insidious enclosures at every level:
contemporary agribusiness, as Marx noted, is a progress in the art, not only
of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the
fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more
long-lasting sources of that fertility;26 for many, a worldwide programme
of enforced privatization, displacement and appropriation has placed the
basics of life water, fuel, medical care in the hands of private companies
94 JOHN BURNSIDE
whose rst and overriding duty is to make money for their shareholders;
concerted efforts are being made to control and commercialize the internet
and rob the population as a whole of the benecial changes it could offer;27
gentrication is robbing the poor in many cities of what little of the built
environment remains theirs; the horizon has been enclosed by tower
blocks, pylons and wind turbines, the earth by monoculture and the frantic
application of toxic chemicals; the entire biosphere is being genetically
mapped and patented; imagination is enclosed by an endless tide of muzak,
counterfeit history, product fetishization and infotainment the list con-
tinues and, if we are not careful, despair can lead to the very quietism we
most need to avoid. Considering his sensitivity to the enclosures of his own
time, Clare would not only be aware of these dangers, but would also attack
them with courage and wit, while lyrically celebrating the real, using his
gift for precise yet tender observation to celebrate what endures a
meadow in the upper Valais, for example as well as to lament what is
endangered or lost.
Notes
1. W.H. Auden: In Memory of W.B. Yeats, in Another Time (New York:
Random House, 1940), p. 108.
2. E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth (London: Staples Press, 1967),
pp. 67.
3. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London Pelican Books, 1976), p. 895.
4. Thomas Cole: Essay on American Scenery, in John Conron (ed.), The American
Landscape: A Critical Anthology of Prose and Poetry (New York, Oxford
University Press, 1973), pp. 5778.
5. Paul Grinnell, Ambitious renewable energy plan aims to provide power for
the entire city, Peterborough Today, 28 September 2013. Accessed 17 June
2014: www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/latest-news/ambitious-renew
able-energy-plan-aims-to-provide-power-for-the-entire-city-1-4312844.
6. To speak of need here seems misleading, considering the fact that reports
produced by DECC make clear that, on a climate-corrected basis the UK is a
higher consumer of energy per dwelling than the EU27 average with two-thirds
of countries having lower consumption per household in 2008. Since 2000 the
UK has reduced energy consumption per dwelling by 4 per cent which places it
in the top half of EU27 Member States but below neighbouring countries
including France, Netherlands and Sweden where consumption reduced by at
least 10 per cent over that period. Anna Nikiel and Stephen Oxley, European
Energy Efciency trends Household energy consumption, March 2011.
Accessed 17 June 2014: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/atta
chment_data/le/65964/1524-eu-energy-efciency-household-trends-art.pdf.
7. Grinnell, Ambitious renewable energy plan . . . .
8. In August 2013, as reported by The Independent, the UNs Economic
Commission Europe ruled that the UK Government acted illegally by
denying the public decision-making powers over their approval and the
necessary information over their benets or adverse effects. The new ruling,
agreed by a United Nations committee in Geneva, calls into question the legal
validity of any further planning consent for all future wind-farm develop-
ments based on current policy, both onshore and offshore. The United
Nations Economic Commission Europe has declared that the UK outed
Article 7 of the Aarhus Convention, which requires full and effective public
participation on all environmental issues and demands that citizens are given
the right to participate in the process. Margaret Pagano, UN ruling puts
future of UK wind farms in jeopardy, The Independent, 27 August 2013.
Accessed 17 June 2014: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive
-un-ruling-puts-future-of-uk-wind-farms-in-jeopardy-8786831.html.
9. According to Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson, it is estimated that a
dozen or more of Scotlands wealthiest private landowners will pocket around
1bn in [turbine] rental fees over the next eight years. See Struan Stevenson,
So Much Wind (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2013), p. 43.
10. When I asked a spokesperson for FoE Scotland why his organization was not
concerned about bird and bat mortality rates in relation to turbines, he stated
that the number of birds and bats killed was negligible. When I asked where
he got his gures, he said, with no apparent irony, that they came from the
American Wind Energy Association.
11. Clive Hambler, quoted in Mark Lynas, Bats, birds and blades: wind
turbines and biodiversity. Mark Lynas (blog), 10 June 2011. Accessed 17
June 2014: www.marklynas.org/2011/06/bats-birds-and-blades-wind-turbi
nes-and-biodiversity/. See also Clive Hambler, Wind farms vs wildlife:
The shocking environmental cost of renewable energy, The Spectator,
5 January 2013. Accessed 17 June, 2014: www.spectator.co.uk/features/880
7761/wind-farms-vs-wildlife/.
12. Frieda Hughes, Blowing ruin across the land, Sunday Times, 15 May
2011, p. 6.
13. Gaston Bachelard, Lair et les songes (Paris: Jos Corti, 1943), p. 195.
14. In spite of developer rhetoric, I believe the underlying reasons are commercial,
just as they were with the enclosure of the land. It will be some time before the
whole truth emerges, but I have come to this conclusion, partly from studying
subsidy systems in other areas, partly because I have listened to engineers,
ecologists, and economists who have studied the impacts of turbines in their
own elds, and also, in no small measure, because such prodigious efforts have
been made by developers and governments to deny the public the information
it needs to make informed judgements about wind turbine planning issues.
15. Ernst Fischer, Von der Notwendigheit der Kunst (orig. Dresden: Verlag der
Kunst, 1959; this edition, trans. Anna Bostock, London: Penguin Books,
1963), pp. 401.
96 JOHN BURNSIDE
16. Ibid., pp. 401.

17. George Monbiot, John Clare, the poet of the environmental crisis 200 years
ago, The Guardian, 10 July 2012, p. 26. Accessed 17 June 2014: www.theguar
dian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/09/john-clare-poetry.
18. One thinks here of Robert Walser who, when a visitor to the asylum asked
what he was working on during his connement, replied, I didnt come here
to write, I came here to be crazy.
19. Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American
Iconoclast, ed. David Petersen (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2007),
p. 257.
20. 1 Timothy 6:10.
21. Ecclesiastes 3:19.
22. Fischer, p. 389.
23. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford
University Press, New York, 1949), p. 203.
24. Ibid., p. 2034.
25. Karl Marx: Capital (Pelican Books, London, 1976), vol. I, p. 897.
26. Ibid., vol. I, p. 638. To be blunt, we now have, and have for a long time
endured, what a latter-day Eisenhower might call an agricultural-industrial
complex.
27. R. U. Sirius interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Living in the Present is a
Disorder:
The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our
work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks.
Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asyn-
chronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives. Instead of working
for someone as we had been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Age we
would be freed from the time-is-money rat race and get to be makers. Then
business and marketing caught wind of this, and it shifted from a bottom-up
peoples renaissance to a top-down nance revolution.
So instead of using digital technology to create more time and creative space for
people, we used it to take more time from people. The technologies we developed
became much more about retaining the attention of consumers, monitoring
employees, and keeping people engaged 24/7.
Wired (8 April 2013). Accessed 20 June 2014: www.wired.com/2013/04/
present-shock-rushkoff-r-u-sirius/.
chapter 5
Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare

Emma Mason
the elds!
our church
Stephen Collis, The Commons (2008)1
we heard the bells chime but the elds was our church
John Clare, Autobiographical Fragments2
In his essay Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred, the acoustic ecologist
David Dunn argues that attentive listening to the sounds around us is one
of the most venerable forms of meditative practice. For Dunn, what we
hear from other forms of life and the environment they reside in make
patterns of relationship of which humans and nonhumans are part, and
which in turn creates an experiential basis from which to understand the
sacred.3 The interconnectedness of all things spiritual, material, divine
and earthly is key to John Clares process of listening to the world, a
venture that, this chapter argues, necessitates a religious response to eco-
logical crisis. For Clare, the religious allows for a deep listening that
counters empirical modes of knowing and classifying the world. Such
empiricism engenders habits of mind that result in an overlooking of the
poor, the isolation of species from one another, and a materially and
emotionally destructive hierarchizing of the world. Deep listening, how-
ever, a sensual engagement that registers the presence of all beings, has the
potential to occasion a state of thinking and acting that brings such beings
into an intimate kinship rooted in religion.4 By all beings I mean both the
natural and material as well as the supernatural and divine, the latter
pertaining to that which Clare senses but which remains hidden and
obscured, from gods to will-o-the-wisps. Critics have addressed both the
natural and supernatural in Clare, but the connections between religion
and ecology within his poetry invite further attention.5 I am not concerned
here to align Clare with specic religious ideas and doctrines, nor do I wish
to sentimentalize his nature writing through ecological theory. I do
97
98 EMMA MASON
suggest, however, that through an aural imagining of nature and the divine
as cognate, Clare accesses, and is keen to communicate, a cosmic and non-
dualist reading of kinship inclusive of all things. Clare nds himself as
much within the imagined consciousness of a native animal, plant or
waterway as within a birds song or the chime of a church bell.6 Both of
these sounds call Clare into a close listening and prayerful consciousness
that merge his senses (he synaesthetically hears the eld become the
church and the trees its spires) and also close the gap between himself,
the landscape and the church. This poetic congruence is summed up in my
epigraph from Stephen Colliss The Commons (2008) the elds!/our
church a part of his Clear as Clare sequence and one that opens with
Clares familiar description of setting off to seek the end of the horizon at
the edge of the world:7
I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a
days journey was able to nd it so I went on with my heart full of hopes
pleasures and discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that
I coud look down like looking into a large pit and see into its secrets the
same as I believd I coud see heaven by looking into the water8
Rather than imagining a brink over which he might fall into nothing-
ness, Clare hopes that the edge of the orison will provide a threshold
into what is hidden there, and associates these secrets with a heaven
reected in water. As with his midnight walks over Baron parks, an
ancient ruin where he kept a strict eye out for ghosts and goblings,
Clare here looks to secrets as a way into the immaterial and myster-
ious.9 It is this openness to beliefs, both orthodox and alternative, that
some readers of Clare miss in their tendency to collapse categories like
religion, Romanticism and nature into an undifferentiated affective
mush. By taking seriously Clares receptivity to a specically religious
form of mindfulness, I suggest that his writing materializes as a lived
politics of religious ecology constitutive of care, interconnectivity and
inclusivity.10
My discussion is in ve parts. I begin with the strong relationship
between ecocriticism and sound studies (specically, whale song) and
suggest that the eld, aspiring to an objective and scientic status, has
become increasingly uncomfortable with the subjective, seeking to prise
any spiritual dimensions away from sensory experience. Part two follows
with a reading of Timothy Mortons explicit ambition to replace reli-
gion with a more scientic account of interconnectedness that, in his
work on ecology without nature, he calls the mesh. I argue that Clares
Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare 99
religious ecology moves us beyond Mortons dualisms to embrace a
cosmic experience of the world that reads and listens to it as a compa-
nionable space of sacred relations. Clare achieves this by reimagining
Christianity, the religion with which he is most familiar, through
the natural world so that church spires become trees and church bells
call believers into the elds. Clare is not a pagan or a pantheist: rather,
he engages an ecological consciousness in which being appears as an
integrated fabric of companionship and care.11 Drawing on Donna
Haraways companion species theory of how to think of harmony
between beings, part three also works with Heideggers poetic thinking
of care as a counter to an instrumental and scientized thinking of the
planet as a consumable resource. Heidegger is not popular with Morton,
who calls his environmentalism a sad, fascist, stunted bonsai version,
forced to grow in a tiny iron owerpot by a cottage in the German Black
Forest.12 Heideggers essays on poetry, with their attentive focus on
universal compassion and care, do nothing to redress the implicit con-
nection between Nazism and anti-Semitism in the philosophers ques-
tioning of being, home, language and history. And yet Heideggers
thinking on poetry does enable literary critics to step past readings of
art as either aesthetics or ideology through an approach that nds in
poetry a language of relationism and affection. Heideggers notion of
care (Sorge) and caring-for (Frsorge) constitute the basic mode of the
being of existence, and as such determine every kind of being: care is
the ground on which we understand ourselves and relate to others.13 Care
is threatened, Heidegger argues, by a binarizing metaphysical thinking
that dehumanizes us through a logic of production and manipulation
inherent to a modernity that is conict-, violence- and war-bound.
Poetic thinking reinstates care by sheltering it within a meditative
saying that guides us back to a feeling of home and peacefulness that
Heidegger calls dwelling a praxis of careful reading and listening.14
Compassion and peace between beings happens in poetry because it is a
language that does not describe or register the world, but rather
projects it as a coming together of the things that dwell within it. As
I argue in parts four and ve of this discussion, such thinking helps us to
explore Clares own relationship to the act of dwelling, with nature and
with gods, and also to reect on his poetic prose and verse as a way of
vitalizing our being through habitual listening. By synthesizing his
church and its panoply of bells with his natural landscape, Clare forges
a space in which care might ourish as the foundation for kinship and
communion.
100 EMMA MASON
All species are created equal

In 1967, the environmentalists Roger Payne and Scott McVay were among
the rst scientists to acknowledge that whales sing in rhythmic, complex
and distinct repeated sequences, and in a style specic to context and place.
All humpbacks in each area sing only the local song, Payne announced in
Humpbacks: Their Mysterious Songs (1979), written for the National
Geographic: We have learned that all men are created equal, but the whales
remind us that all species are created equal that every organism on earth,
whether large or small, has an inalienable right to life.15 Paynes 1970
recording, Songs of the Humpback Whale, spurred such renewed interest
in the Save the Whales movement that the International Whaling
Commission nally banned commercial whaling in 1986. Whale song has
been extraordinarily signicant as a context for the current study of
ecocriticsm, as well as that of literature and the environment, associated
with a political moment that produced many of the most inuential
founders of both elds.16 As Harold Fromm argues, the literary movement
known as ecocriticism emerged in the early 1970s and was shaped at its
inception by poets as well as environmentalists. Fromm also notes that the
ecocritical language we now work with (deep ecology, eco-Marxism, eco-
feminism and so on) is indebted to the poetic and musical traditions of
pastoralism and Romanticism, as well as to literary critics and poets from
Raymond Williams to Cecilia Vicua, who have long made the connection
between poetry and environmentalism.17 He has less time, however, for the
philosopher contemporaries of his 1970s history: Heidegger is dismissed
(his philosophy is, apparently, desperately on life support18), and thinkers
such as Donna Haraway are excised from the account. Fromm briey
mentions Haraway in his earlier book, The Nature of Being Human: From
Environmentalism to Consciousness (2009), but steers away from philoso-
phers willing to countenance the immaterial to embrace instead Daniel
Dennett and Richard Dawkins as his personal champions of earths inher-
ent wonder and fantastic realism.19
The use of whale songs and the development of ecocriticism provide two
examples of how the immaterial is either ignored or violently translated into
the material by many critics currently concerned with the environment.
Despite the fact that humans eventually decided to save the whales because
of their song, and that the ecological movement owes so much to the
political environmentalism of poets, ecocritics are now keen to excise the
subjective in favour of scientism and objectivity. Bioacoustics, for example,
has turned the listening experience of birdsong into a gadget-lovers guide to
recording techniques and homemade microphones that becomes more
complex (and expensive) within the realms of the nature documentary
industry.20 The fashion for measuring organic experience of animals
and plants (with blimps and hydrophones) as well as human being (with
magnetic resonance imaging) avoids ways of thinking that value what
cannot be measured (religion and Romanticism). Here are two agents
provocateur in their controversial critiques of religion (Lynn White) and
Romanticism (Timothy Morton). First, White on the huge burden of
guilt Christianity bears for validating an anthropocentric thinking in
which science and technology ourish and we nd ourselves superior in
the world:
Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and
destiny that is, by religion . . . The victory of Christianity over paganism
was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture . . .
Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen . . . Our
science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward mans
relation to nature which are almost universally held . . . We are superior to
nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.21
Christianity is akin to fascism here, towering over other traditions and being
allowed to do so because it elevates us, human beings, to power and
predominance. Nothing of what Clare calls Christianitys beautiful instruc-
tion of peace on earth & good will towards men is acknowledged or even
gestured towards, perhaps because such meaning is carried affectively rather
than materially.22 Morton takes a different route to a similarly reductive
conclusion, arguing in Ecology without Nature that we are barred from true
ecological thought by a dependence on a fetishized idea of Nature as
external landscape to be preserved and put on a pedestal (as we used to
do, he says, with the gure of Woman).23 In reality, he asserts, Nature is a
transcendental term in a material mask, wavering
in between the divine and the material. Far from being something natural
itself, nature hovers over things like a ghost. It slides over the innite list of
things that evoke it. Nature is thus not unlike the subject, a being who searches
through the entire universe for its reection, only to nd none. If it is just
another word for supreme authority, then why not just call it God? But if this
God is nothing outside the material world, then why not just call it matter?24
In other words, whereas White locates the problem in a Christian
anthropocentrism that denigrates nature, Morton sees us as prone to
sanctify nature in vague, contradictory ways. For Morton, nding what
exists between polarized terms such as God and matter, this and that,
102 EMMA MASON
subject and object opens us into an interconnected way of being that,

paraphrasing Heidegger, reveals that were part of the world we claim to
look on and sustain. Like White, Morton wants a connection to some-
thing, but its not God: God evokes conservatism, fascism, extremism,
ego and so cannot be thought of in an interconnected universe. And
though he positions himself as being against binary paradigms, like so
many critics of Christianity Morton dualistically rejects a cartoonish God
of orthodoxy for his own exoticized reading of eastern spirituality as a
philosophy of oneness he strips of its religion to make commensurate with
a Dawkinsian wonder.
Frozen religion
In his prequel to Ecology without Nature The Ecological Thought
Morton stages his discovery of Buddhism. Readers are treated to a holiday
report from Mortons two-week trip to Tibet, where he camps under the
Milky Way and realizes how much Tibetan culture and religion is all
about space:
The tantric teachings say there are 6,400,000 Tantras of Dzogchen (texts of
a form of Tibetan Buddhism). On Earth we have seventeen. Up there, in the
highly visible night sky, perhaps in other universes, there exist the remaining
6,399,983. Up there, someone is meditating.25
Dreaming under shooting stars, Morton considers Buddhisms ecological
thought, one wherein our Universe, along with one billion universes
like it, oats within a single pollen grain inside an anther on a lotus
ower. No wonder Tibetans think big, Morton proclaims: Tibetans
would arrive at the edge of the Solar System and declare, Wow, what a
great opportunity to learn more about emptiness. Discounting the possi-
bility that someone like Clare would understand the orison the edge of
his own solar system as a gateway to the secrets of heaven, Morton is
determined to oppose Tibetans (outer space wouldnt undermine their
beliefs) and Christians, who cower before science and the discovery of
galaxies.26 Good Buddhism, presentist and peaceful, welcomes the
beyond as part of its commitment to compassion, nonviolence and
restorative justice; bad Christian apocalypticism looks only towards the
end of times, knowing that, since the end of the world is nigh, there isnt
much point in caring.27 Mortons limited reading of both Christianity and
Buddhism continues through to the conclusion of The Ecological
Thought, where he admits that There might be seeds of future ways of
being together in religion, as there are in art, but stipulates that these
hypothetical modes would require a new term.28 Morton votes for the
word mesh. Not only is mesh said to describe the interconnectedness
of all living and non-living things, it also scores highly for him because
it sounds scientic (it has uses in biology, mathematics, and engineer-
ing).29 He also likes mesh because it gets him around using holistic
or sacred language, rejected because they connote warmth, fuzziness,
brightness and optimism, and thus a nave meaninglessness. Christianity is
now condemned not simply for its cruel apocalypticism, but for its
strongly afrmative, extraverted, and masculine emphasis on health,
heartiness and cosiness.30 Only negativity is truly ecological, Morton
argues, because it includes sickness, darkness, irony, fragmentation
and the feminine, and also because it asserts our melancholic attachment
to a mother earth wherein we experience loneliness as a sign of deep
connection.31
If negativity is more ecological than positivity, and the negative con-
notes the feminine and the dark, then it might be argued that Morton
contravenes the assessment of his earlier book by putting a feminized and
introverted ecology on a pedestal over a positive and healthy one.32 If we
agree with Mortons initial statement in Ecology without Nature that such a
move is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration, then it follows that
Mortons own project is itself potentially quasi-sadistic in its fetishizing
of negativity, sickness and loneliness, and his cultural ignorance regarding
both Christianity and Buddhism extraordinary (not to mention his
self-appointed role as advisor to the Tibetans). And yet it is not atypical
within ecocriticism to parody Christianity while elevating a faux
Buddhism, sneering at any idea associated with either transcendence or
immanence. Thus, Morton denounces Romanticism, but excepts John
Clare and William Blake as outsiders to mainstream Romanticism
without discussing why they were outsiders, or reviewing their unassailably
canonical position within current literary studies, or thinking about
their relationship to other non-mainstream writers (Morton does not,
for example, reference any Romantic women writers, possibly because, as
already noted, he believes the gure of Woman is no longer a problem).33
At the same time, he hounds Heidegger out of the debate while simulta-
neously poaching from his work, and then condemns the inuential
phenomenologist, David Abram, for generating in his book The Spell of
the Sensuous a fantasy-environment dependent on silent reading.34
Morton especially dislikes Abrams book because it presents an image of
being embedded within a horizon, which establishes the ersatz primitivism
104 EMMA MASON
of ecological writing in general . . . the more embedded the narrator

becomes, the less convincing he or she is as a spokesperson for the totality
that he or she is trying to evoke.35 But Morton can only think of Abrams
horizon as illusory because of the dualistic approach in which his own
thinking is caught: despite experiencing a joined-up sense of wonder
while star-gazing in the desert, he is left to bemoan his dependence on
religious language and sacred joy to explain such an experience. Morton
needs religion to evoke and describe his own sensitivity to ecological
disaster, even though hes locked into thinking of it as merely ideological.
All he can do is empty religion of its belief, replace its wonder and
hospitable inclusiveness with secular words like mesh, and then admit to
his readers that his own thinking might just be too profound for them and
that it might be better to freeze the mesh back into religion anyway.36
We are rescued from T. E. Hulmes spilt, treacly religion and given frozen
religion instead.37
Cosmic companions
Clares religious ecology is neither treacly nor frozen, but rather cosmic.
Like Romanticism and religion, the word cosmic has a poor reputation
in literary criticism as denoting abstract experience. But its signication as
kosmikos, meaning at once belonging to the world and relating to the
universe, breaks the dualism between us (the earth) and out there
(the universe). Clares cosmos is inclusive and communal, and is only
threatened by a human will to stand outside of the world as if it is a scene
from which we stand apart, the drama of which we grasp through our
imposed reading of it in relation to ourselves.38 Like Morton, I invoke
Heideggers essay on the world picture here, but, unlike Morton, nd its
language useful for conjuring Clares vision of the human as part of that
which is, in company with itself and open to both oppositions and
discord.39 In Heideggers reading, the Greeks are exemplary achievers of
such openness to being, apprehending themselves as part of what is in
contrast with us moderns, obsessed as we are with standing over and
against being as that which needs to be represented. Modern man thus
makes himself into an object in his own picture, and loses the ability to
recognize what is beyond stockpiled resources on which we can call for
either consumption or production. For Heidegger, the truth (a-letheia) of
being is withdrawn or hidden (unconcealed) from the moderns, not as
mystery or enigma, but as a way of indicating that entities are always more
than our experience of them.40 What we can know is that earth remains
the ground from which and into which living things emerge and with-
draw. Humans override this by visualizing the world instrumentally as a
resource we can exploit: we seek to systematize and classify the world into
usable assets (trees make furniture) or aesthetic experiences (trees have
intrinsic beauty).41 All things, all presences, become nothing more than
a standing reserve to be used up and discarded. Against this, Heidegger
asks us to engage with the interconnectedness (the gatheredness) of
humans, earth, gods and sky, a simple oneness of four Heidegger calls
the fourfold. There is nothing cryptic or abstruse about this notion;
rather, Heidegger points to an affective state of feeling with rather than
of the earth, stating that we are in the fourfold by dwelling and that
dwelling means to spare, to preserve . . . Mortals dwell in that they save
the earth.42 We dwell poetically, Heidegger writes, because we belong
through listening, a process that causes us to embrace all persons and
things, to love them, to favour them.43 Poetry teaches us to listen and
attend to the world in words that opens to light that which safekeeps
and cares for us and then invites us into relation with it in a bond of
intimate kinship.44 While productive and capitalizing thinking hems in
(enframes) the world as a utility to expend and consume, poetry reveals,
lights up and opens. Poetic thinking, then, should not depict a world
that readers aesthetically devour, but instead open into a questioning
and care that brings us into kinship with all elements of the cosmos to
which we belong.
That Clare is a poet who attends to even the smallest of these elements as
part of the interconnectedness of things has been critically acknowledged.
With his John Clare: Flower Poems (2001), Simon Kvesi drew readers to
Clare by pointing out the poets attention to natural detail and pattern as
evidence of divinity, of a maker that oversees a world of micro-cosmic
ecosystems, and humanitys relationship with and effect upon them.45
Similarly, Tim Chilcott notes Clares imaginative leaps from cosmos to
cowslip in his edition of Clares 1841 poems; and Nicholas Birns records
a chant of personal and even cosmic discovery throughout his well-
anthologized The Flitting.46 Jonathan Bate also invokes the cosmic
situation Clares poetry captures by reecting on Gaston Bachelards
reading of the cosmic implications of bird nests.47 For Bate, Bachelards
identication of the nave wonder we used to feel when we found a nest
helps explain Clares experience of it as an entire universe, its cosmic
implications producing at once child-like amazement and vulnerability.48
Clares nests are mystic (To the Snipe, lines 24, 25; Middle Period, IV,
575) spaces Of care (The Robins Nest, line 30; Middle Period, III, 533)
106 EMMA MASON
that enable a secret joy (Sand Martin, line 12; Middle Period, IV, 310)
held in place by modelled moss, wood and clay (The Thrushes Nest,
lines 78; Middle Period, IV, 187).49 Clares poetic revealing of the
kinship he feels for birds and their nests really does shine forth in the
form of shining eggs as bright as owers, like heath bells gilt with dew
(The Thrushes Nest, lines 910). Yet these nest poems evoke more than
an idealized world of shelter and care. They extend into what Haraway,
predating Mortons mesh, calls a knot in motion, in which beings
constitute each other and themselves through their reaching into each
other as companion species.50 For Haraway, companion species are
symbiotically interrelated, not just biologically or organically, but in
terms of their signicant otherness: the fact that we are different from
other things in the world, human and animal, makes the partial
connections we have with them even more signicant.51 An ethics
that feels and intuits the nonhuman, Haraway argues, realizes difference
with grace, joining creation in a kind of Real Presence that exposes
being as emotional experience. In Clares case, again, the salient exam-
ple is his being in company with (or a companion species alongside)
birds and their nests.52 He protects that experience by calling on reli-
gious language to forge bonds of intimate kinship, not only between
himself, birds and nests, but also between the living and the spiritual, the
material and the immaterial. Even in the brief examples so far quoted,
mystical nests bear golden eggs that synaesthetically shine like bells, objects
Clare and his readers would have seen only inside church. As generic
religious symbols bells are found in churches of all denominations
Clares heath bells elucidate the crossover between the religious and the
ecological. Gilt with dew, the ower bells appear spotlit within the mist,
shimmering like gilt cups, but rooted in an uncultivated heath. Moreover, as
similes they are like the eggs sheltered in the thrushs nest they forge an
ideally interconnected image for Clare, gathering together the church,
owers, birds, heath and mist, as well as Clare as onlooker.
We heard the bells chime

The reach and euphony of church bells for Clare goes beyond their
material status as ecclesiastical measures of everyday rhythm. Chiming
out to indicate the beginning and end of workdays, births, weddings,
deaths, funerals, as well as liturgical and ceremonial duties, bells called
specically to their local communities, their pealed content encoded from
town to town. The church at Helpston, as historian Daniel Crowson tells us,
rang a curfew bell in the morning and evening, while its tower housed three
mass bells together with the bell that sounded the start of different village
functions: the gleaners bell and the pancake bell, the bell for the statice
and the bullock fair and the carriers bell.53 Making clear the distinct tone of
local bells, Clare notes hearing the Ufford bells chimeing for a funeral while
on a walk in the elds; and bells were regularly sounded to guide lost
travellers and shepherds through bad weather or kept noticeably silent during
periods of mourning or reection.54 For Clare, however, the sound and
rhythm of the bell accords with that of the poem, since both are living
acoustic markers of the reection and the remembrance of what has been.55
As Clare writes in Evening Bells (Early Poems, II, 2545), bells not only ring
out the sweetest (line 3) sound he can aurally imagine, but they also swell
into the music of the skies (lines 78), breathing across the landscapes lonly
dells (line 12). Clares synaesthetic world is transgured by the rise (line 6)
of bells on this earthly ball, a phrase that exposes the vulnerability of the
planet as much as the blue marble, the title of Apollo 17s famous 1972
photograph of the earth from space. The gentle pulse of Clares evening bells
is held buoyant in this poem by Zephers breathing (line 16), as the wind
carries the bells ringing around the landscape like an invisible and permeable
boundary. This ringing round (line 48) is repeated in Sabbath Bells
(Middle Period, III, 5735), where the range of the chimes establishes the
security of borderlines without any of the malevolence of enclosure, while
engendering at once a listening experience and trigger for verse. Here are the
rst and fth stanzas:
Ive often on a sabbath day
Where pastoral quiet dwells
Lay down among the new mown hay
To listen distant bells
That beautifully ung the sound
Upon the quiet wind
While beans in blossom breathed around
A fragrance oer the mind . . .
The ear it lost and caught the sound
Swelled beautifully on
A tful melody around
Of sweetness heard and gone
I felt such thoughts I yearned to sing
The humming airs delight
That seemed to move the swallows wing
Into a wilder ight (lines 18; 3340)
108 EMMA MASON
As in Evening Bells and the later The Chiming Bells (Later Poems, II,
1,036), Clare sensualizes sound as something we can touch on the wind,
smell in the blossom and echo through song: there is no break between the
sonority of the bells within the landscape and those who listen to its knell.
As R. Murray Schafer argues, the audile inclusivity of the church bell
renders it an acoustic calendar, the most salient sound signal in the
Christian community and one that denes the parish as an acoustic
space.56 Schafer also notes, recalling line 4 of Clares Sabbath Bells, that
church bells are most powerfully evocative when listened to from afar:
Perhaps no sound benets more from distance and atmosphere. Church
bells form a sound complement to distant hills, wrapped in blue-gray
mist.57 Their hushed, far-off sounds open us into the world of which we
are already part, rather than separating us from it by calling us elsewhere.
Church bells ring out again in Clares Autobiographical Fragments,
where they echo through the qu[i]et of nature[s] presence and into
Clares fellowship with shepherds and herd boys. In the following extract,
Clare conjures his loving feelings towards the natural world as a space of
gentle leisure (a place to throw marbles or go strawberry picking) and one
that is signicantly deepened by the chiming of church bells calling his
community to prayer:
I grew so much into the qu[i]et love of nature[s] presence that I was
never easy but when I was in the elds passing my sabbaths and leisures
with the shepherds and herd boys as fancys prompted somtimes playing
at marbles on the smooth beaten sheep tracks or leap frog among the
thimey molehills somtimes ranging among the corn to get the red and
blue owers for cockades to play at soldiers or runing into the woods to
hunt strawberrys or stealing peas in church time when the owners was
safe to boil at the gipseys re who went half shares at our stolen luxury
we heard the bells chime but the elds was our church and we seemd to
feel a religious feeling in our haunts on the sabbath while some old
shepherd sat on a mole hill reading aloud some favour[i]te chapter from
an old fragment of a Bible which he carried in his pocket for the day a
family relic58
The things that populate Clares world here people, plants, animals,
books are presented as part of one interconnected space: moles and sheep
are signied through their impact on the earth (molehills and sheep tracks),
and owers and berries become an unrestricted luxury available to every-
one once the landowners are in attendance at church. The bells signal safe
time for all that are called to God: Clare conveys a feeling of ease in the
passage both because the landowners have temporarily disappeared into
their church, and also because he is liberated into the sacred space of the
elds with his friends. Resonating from the church but moving far
beyond it, the bells call Clare and company not to the orthodoxy and
doctrine of church ritual, but into a religious feeling enhanced by the
phonic power of an old shepherd reading from his battered family copy of
the Bible.59 For Clare, his sound perception of the bells, the Bible reading
and the spiritual emotion each evoke is a psychoacoustic route into a
profound religious feeling that is rooted in the haunts of a eld and
experienced on the sabbath. The natural world is not external to the
church: Clare speaks against John Wesleys all the world my parish
world picture, in which glad tidings of salvation were universally
painted, absorbed and instilled.60 Rather, Clare experiences the elds
as our church (the elds!/our church, writes Stephen Collis in his
creative reading of Clare61), summoned by bells and materialized by
everything he sees around him, from the Bible-reading shepherd to the
raw stuff of a mole hill.
This non-dualist embrace of kinship holds that all things are related and
equivalent, a communion that extends even to spirits and ghosts. In
Autobiographical Fragments, Clare associates bells in churches ringing
in the middle of the night with spirits warning men when they was to
dye, exposing his wider interest in superstitions, community rituals, com-
munal tale-telling and folkloric festivals.62 In her study of Clares religion,
Sarah Houghton-Walker devotes time to both Clares alternative beliefs
and his orthodox religious reading, dispelling a secularist critical tendency
to strip Clare of spiritual convictions. For Houghton-Walker, Clares
religious awareness is intellectual and experiential, inclusive of both spirits
and orthodoxy, and informed as much by Anglicanism, Methodism and
the Quakers as by religious freethinking and ghost stories.63 At the same
time, Houghton-Walker reveals that Clares profound familiarity with
theological literature and his commitment to the Mystery of religious
truth makes sense within a Christian frame. As Clare himself states: No
religion upon earth deserves the epithet of divine so well as the Christian;
it has nothing to record but prayers for mercy; its beautiful instruction
was peace on earth & good will towards men; its founder professed what
he pratised; Religion properly dened is the grand aspiration to live
well & die happy Do unto others as ye would others should do unto
you was the creed of the divine founder of christianity.64 While none of
this identies Clare as a Christian, it does afrm his deep affective con-
nection with Christianity as an ecumenical and cosmic divinity founded
by a man who was, like Clare, on the side of poverty.65 That Christ was
110 EMMA MASON
poor is a key driver behind Clares anger at those who reduce religion
to little more then cant/A cloak to hide what godliness may want
(The Parish, lines 4556; Early Period, II, 697779), its churches popu-
lated by hypocrites who pa[y] religions once a week respects (line 490).
Clare recounts how such weekly church goers attack him for forsaking
the church going bell for the religion of the elds, when in fact those
very bells have called him into a profound religious feeling based on
reection over time. As a poet who professes to have thought seriosly of
religion, he loathes those who have not: if every mans bosom had a glass
in it so that its secret might be seen what a blotted page of christian
profession and false pretentions woud the best of them display.66
Indeed, his commitment to the sacred design and benecial power
of an almighty is continually plagued by an anxiety that the desird
end outlined in the New Testament will be permanently obstructed
while cant and hypocrisy is blasphemously allowd to make a mask of
religion.67 Caught within the walls of the church and paralysed by the
anechoic theology within them, the bells become a tocsin against the
danger of institutionalized irreverence. Only when freed, as it were, to
carillon out over the elds does Clare experience the religious feeling the
bells orate, indicating that God is not only present in nature, but also
heard through it: The voice of nature as the voice of God/Appeals to me
in every tree & ower (This leaning tree with ivy overhung, lines 345;
Middle Period, II, 212). The sound of God appeals to Clare in a
verbal echo of a peal of bells, their peaceful sound Calmly reaching
the ears of shepherds in an aural equivalent of the sweet scent of the
beanelds (The Chiming Bells, lines 1, 5, 9). Sound once more
synaesthetically gathers Clares other senses into a consonant experience
of peace and joy.
All our kin

Like the sound of the bells, religious ideas ourish outside of the church for
Clare. It is as if he wishes to return those New Testament ideas he most
values peace, good will towards men, care and kindness to the natural
desert world in which they were rst preached. As David Jasper notes,
Christs ministry begins and ends in the desert, and that wilderness is a
space we see Clare collapse into his local environment.68 He envisions
nature as a desert in The Request (the elds a desert grown, line 5; Early
Period, I, 321), but, more ominously, invokes the desert as a space
overridden by articial Edens in the name of empty fashions of style in
Shadows of Taste (lines 56, 171; Middle Period, III, 30310). In
Remembrances (Middle Period, IV, 1304) this logic is reversed, the
cushion-like hills of silken grass leveled like a desert by the never
weary plough (lines 468) leaving particular locales, cowper green, for
example, stark and barren like a desert strange and chill (line 62). It is as if
deserts are natures endoskeleton for Clare, raw sacred ground protected
and preserved by trees and foliage without which it stands defenceless,
calling back to God for repair. In Prayer in the Desert (Later Poems, I,
5423), Clare calls on God as a non-denominational power that might
revive the damage humans have effected:
Almighty, ominpotent dweller on high
Protector of earth and its dwellers thine eye
Can look on this desert and bid it appear
As green as fresh pastures at spring of the year
And bid the earths fatness bring food at command
And rell the cruise that is dry as the sand
Almighty omnipotent dweller in bliss
Thy will has the power and thy power can do this (lines 18)
We are in Heideggers fourfold here, gods in the sky (Clares god is
at once the Almighty and Alla God of Mahomet, lines 18, 17),
mortals on the ground, and all connected in a shared dwelling that
gathers everything into one. By the end of the poem, earths desert
of sand is also Gods dwelling place (line 22), suggesting that despite
our depletion of the earths resources (Our food is exhausted the
cruises are dry; line 9), Gods charity might send/Supply to our wants
(lines 234) in return for a defended faith (line 21). Dwelling, for
Heidegger as for Clare, means being at home through a thinking and
attending to the place where we are, one that embodies things living and
spiritual.69 Such faith in being where we are is free of fear (line 19)
and instead, he writes in Stanzas, inheres within endless joy, bliss
and kin (lines 12, 8; Later Poems, I, 5745). That all our kin means
Jews christian turks and gentle kind (lines 89) leads Clare to imagine a
place above/Redeemed by Gods unbiased mind/And everlasting love
(lines 102), a radically inclusive vision that hints at peace beyond earth.
And yet Clare insists that this joy is at once of spirits and a material
green place (lines 21, 5): no wonder he conceives of trees as churches
and churches as trees.
Despite Clares reservations about the hypocrisy of church goers, he was
not averse to attending worship on Sundays:
112 EMMA MASON
like many more I have been to church [more] often then I have been
seriously inclined to recieve benet or put its wholsome and reasonable
admonitions to practice still I reverence the church and do from my soul as
much as any one curse the hand thats lifted to undermine its constitution70
At the same time, he lists a string of characters in his prose whom he
perceives to be religious because they refuse to attend church the
Bible-reading shepherd, for example, as well as the father of his rst love,
Elizabeth Newbon, who read the Bible in search of interesting stories and
thought him self a religious man tho he never went to church and he was
so for he was happy and harmless.71 Revering the church while nding its
members and espousals oppressive, Clare imagines physical church struc-
tures spread across the landscape and made of trees. Trees allow Clare to
map the landscape, not just spatially, but phenomenologically; they are
points of reference by which he can locate his physical position and
emotional being.72 He associates trees directly with churches, either
using them as substitutes for places of worship (On sundays I usd to
feel a pleasure to hide in the woods instead of going to church to nestle
among the leaves and lye upon a mossy bank were the r like fern its
under forest keeps), or as analogies for them (The arching groves of
ancient lime/That into roofs like churches climb).73 In his short piece,
Autumn, Clare intimately describes the copses of reeds and oziers,
willows and apple trees as a way of imagining the church and the tree as
equally elevated, deliberately assimilating the jiant overtopping trees
with the church spire:
and now the church spire looking rather large dimensions catches the eye
like a jiant overtopping trees and houses and showing us his magnitude from
half way up the tower to weathercock and looks noble above his willow
woods nothing looks so noble among country landscapes as church steeples
and castle towers74
Steeples, spires, towers, trees coalesce here in a cosmic union that threatens
to collapse once any aspect of it is abused:
there is the beautifull Spire of Glinton Church towering high over the grey
willows and dark wallnuts still lingering in the church yard like the remains
of a wreck telling where their fellows foundered on the ocean of time75
As we follow Clares line of sight, we are moved from a thinking of kinship
(the trees and churches as one) to a broken world picture (the trees a
shipwreck and their kin drowned), and then back into a compensatory
series of correspondences that engages all our senses: men cutting the
weeds from the drains to make a water course for the autumn rains; larks
and redcaps ying in and out of hedges and grass; stone walls engraved
with the names of lovers, houses churches and owers and sheep hooks
and some times names cut in full; crows nesting in willow trees; and tools
that care for, rather than instrumentalize, an earth that is gathered into the
local landscape as rustic implements and appendages of husbandry blend
with nature and look pleasing in the elds.76
Here is a poetic that invites us into a revealed world of shelter and
care, where labour safekeeps and stones gladly bear our impress in time.
It is a dream-like conjuring of connectedness, immediacy and relation in
which all things are condensed into a scene of dependency. To close this
discussion, I turn to Clares feminizing of his model of religio-ecological
kinship through his allusion to a female Guardian spirit in A
Remarkable Dream.77 The essay chronicles a series of dreams in
which Clare describes being led through elds and crowds, rst to a
book sellers displaying three vols lettered with his name, and then on
to a church where he is met by a loud humming as of the undertones of
an organ and felt so affraid. Only when Clare is led out of the church by
his guardian lady-divinity does he nd a way to calm himself through a
deep listening to the sounds of soft music that ll the open air. He is at
once lulled by the sounds of nature and his spirit conductress, who
uttered something as prophet of happiness I knew all was right.78
Through a listening to all the world natural, spiritual, human, nonhu-
man Clare is granted a way of conceptualizing and thinking about
the world that he carries from his dream into his waking world, writing
it down to prolong the happiness of my faith.79 Moreover, Clares
reveries are compassed by a musical diminuendo, the eerie blasts of the
organ at the church door softening into the sound of soft music to
herald Clares entry into a now spiritualized natural world. His reorient-
ing of our attention from trees to churches, kinship to shipwrecks, pipe
organs to open air music enacts a synaesthetic gathering of dualisms
into an ontology of universal kinship. As he writes in the fragment,
Essay on Political Religion, our being is a revelation of a providence
who works by unknown means for the advancement of the earthly
welfare & eternal happiness of mankind giving to every human
being an instinct of faith & a tallisman of futurity.80 When Clare is
called into the elds by church bells and feels before him an intercon-
nected world, he is ecologizing through religion, freed to envision a
mode of companionship and care that eclipses both denominational
afliation and secular pastoralism.
114 EMMA MASON
Notes
1. Stephen Collis, The Commons (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2008), p. 32.
3. David Dunn, Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred, in The Book of Music and
Nature, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2001), pp. 95107 (p. 98).
4. Sam Ward notes Clares fascination with sounds in To List the Song & Not
to Start the Thrush: John Clares Acoustic Ecologies, JCSJ, 29 (2010), 1532.
5. On Clares religion see Sarah Houghton-Walker, John Clares Religion
(Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). On his ecology, see, for example, Jonathan Bate,
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and
New York: Routledge, 1991) and The Song of the Earth (London: Picador,
2000); and Simon Kvesi, John Clares I and eye: Egotism and
Ecologism, in Green and Pleasant Land: English Culture and the Romantic
Countryside, ed. Amanda Gilroy (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2004), pp. 7388.
6. James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St.
Martins Press. 2000), p. 78.
7. The Commons is part two of Colliss The Barricades Project, in which he aims
to poetically obstruct the ow of capital in language by walking through the
the unownable space of the commons with Clare. See p. 139.
8. Collis, The Commons, p. 29; By Himself, p. 40.
10. For a brilliant reading of interconnectivity in Clare through Deleuze and
Guattaris rhizome, see Simon Kvesi, John Clare & . . . & . . . & . . .
Deleuze and Guattaris rhizome, in Ecology and the Literature of the British
Left: The Red and the Green, ed. Valentine Cunningham, H. Gustav Klaus
and John Rignall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 7588.
11. Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an
Epistemology of the Sacred (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 200.
12. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010), p. 27; on the current controversy surrounding Heidegger, see
Peter Trawnys publication of Heideggers Schwarzen Hefte (the black note-
books), in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, IV: Abteilung: Hinweise und
Aufzeichnungen, Band 94: berlegungen IIVI, Schwarze Hefte 19311938
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014); and Emmanuel Fayes The
Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of
19331935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
13. Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 185.
14. See Martin Heidegger, introduction to Philosophy: Thinking and Poetizing,
trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2011), p. 5; and . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . ., in Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (London: HarperPerennial,
1971), pp. 20927.
15. Roger Payne, Humpbacks: Their Mysterious Songs, National Geographic,
155 (January 1979), p. 24.
16. See, for example, Greg Gatenby, Whale Sound: An Anthology of Poems about
Whales and Dolphins (Toronto: Dreadnaught, 1977).
17. Harold Fromm, Ecocriticism at Twenty-Five, Hudson Review, 66.1 (2013),
196208 (207).
18. Ibid., p. 206.
19. Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism and
Consciousness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 229.
20. See, for example, Wildlife Acoustics 3rd Generation Song Meter Platform.
Accessed 15 March 2014. www.wildlifeacoustics.com/products/song-meter-sm3.
21. Lynn White, Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, Science,
155.3767 (10 March 1967), 1,2037 (1,2056).
22. Quoted in Houghton-Walker, John Clares Religion, p. 204, from Pet. A46,
vol. 2, p. 75; for a more thoughtful reconsideration of christofascism, see
Dorothee Slle, Beyond Mere Obedience: Reections on a Christian Ethic for the
Future (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970).
23. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 5.
24. Ibid., p. 15.
25. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010), p. 26.
26. Ibid., p. 27.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 134.
29. Ibid., p. 28.
30. Ibid., p. 16.
31. Ibid.
32. Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 5.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 129; see also David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and
Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
35. Ibid., p. 133.
36. Ibid., p. 135.
37. Hulme writes, You dont believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is
a god. You dont believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on
earth. In other words, you get romanticism . . . It is like pouring a pot of
treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best denition
I can give of it, is spilt religion, in Romanticism and Classicism, in
T. E. Hulme: Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (London: Routledge,
2008), pp. 6883 (p. 71).
38. Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York:
Harper Row, 1977), pp. 11554 (p. 129).
39. Heidegger, Age of the World Picture, p. 131.
116 EMMA MASON
40. Bruce V. Foltz, Heidegger, Ethics and Animals, Between the Species, 9.2
(Spring 1993), 849 (85).
41. See, for example, Michael Jordan, The Beauty of Trees (London: Quercus,
2012), p. 6.
42. Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry, Language, Thought,
pp. 14160 (p. 148).
43. Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Pathmarks, trans. Frank
A. Capuzzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 23976
(p. 241); I note that Heideggers listening means an attending to rhythm
that goes beyond the aural, and so embraces those who can, as well as cannot,
hear; see David N. Smith, Sounding/Silence (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2013), and Jennifer Esmail, Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds
in Victorian Literature and Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).
44. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, in The Question
Concerning Technology, pp. 335 (pp. 25, 345).
45. Simon Kvesi, Introduction, John Clare: Flower Poems (Bangkok: M&C
Services, 2001), pp. ixxxii (pp. xviii, xxi).
46. Tim Chilcott (ed.), John Clare: The Living Year 1841 (Nottingham: Trent
Editions, 1999), p. xv; Nicholas Birns, The Riddle Nature Could not
Prove: Hidden Landscapes in Clares Poetry, in Haughton, pp. 189220
(p. 199).
47. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964), pp. 23739.
48. Bate, Song of the Earth, p. 158.
49. For further discussion of these interrelated depictions, see Simon Kvesi,
Her Curious House is Hidden: Secrecy and Femininity in John Clares
Nest Poems, JCSJ, 18 (1999), 5163.
50. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Signicant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press), p. 6.
51. Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, p. 25; Donna Haraway, Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York and Abingdon:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 1512.
52. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), p. 15; Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, p. 15.
53. Daniel Crowson, Helpston in the Time of the Poet John Clare, printed by The
Peterborough Standard, May 1964, pp. 67; my warm thanks to Guy Franks
for generously giving me this reference.
54. By Himself, p. 210; see also John Steeple, About Bells, The Aldine, 9.4 (1878),
1401; H. B. Walters, Church Bells of England (London: Oxford University
Press, 1912); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-
Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
Shirley MacWilliam, The Sound of Bells and Bellies: Acoustic Authority and
Sound Effects, Circa, 85 (1998), 227.
56. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of
the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977), pp. 53, 55.
57. Murray Schafer, Soundscape, p. 54.
58. By Himself, pp. 3940.
59. Clare writes that the best poems on religion are those found in the Scriptures;
By Himself, p. 180.
60. John Wesley, The Heart of John Wesleys Journal, ed. Percy Livingstone Parker
(New York: Fleming H Revelll, 1903), pp. 54, 56.
61. Collis, The Commons, p. 32.
63. Houghton-Walker, John Clares Religion, p. 1; while Clare was denomination-
ally open, he shared his cultures prejudice against Roman Catholicism: The
Catholics have lost their bill once more and its nothing but right they shoud
when one beholds the following Sacred humbugs which their religion hurds
up and sanctifys; By Himself, pp. 22930.
64. Quoted in Houghton-Walker, John Clares Religion, pp. 204, 208, from Pet.
A46, vol. 2, pp. 75, 68.
65. Ibid., p. 75.
66. By Himself, pp. 78, 133.
67. Ibid., p. 178.
68. David Jasper, The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 15.
69. See Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 3; and Building Dwelling
Thinking.
71. Ibid., p. 89.
72. See, for example, Clare Autobiographical Fragments, in By Himself, p. 69.
73. By Himself, p. 73; The Progress of Ryhme, lines 1734.
74. By Himself, pp. 2725 (p. 272).
75. Ibid., p. 273.
76. Ibid., pp. 273, 274, 275.
77. Ibid., pp. 2535 (p. 253).
78. Ibid., p. 254.
79. Ibid., p. 255.
80. John Clare, Essay on Political Religion, in A Champion for the Poor: Political
Verse and Prose, ed. P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell
(Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 2000), pp. 2812 (p. 282).
chapter 6
The lives of Frederick Martin and the rst

Life of John Clare
Scott McEathron
This chapter examines the career of Frederick Martin, author of the rst
biography of the poet, The Life of John Clare (1865). It puts the biographys
rhetorical emphases and polemical tendencies into context as extensions of
Martins unusual, and unusually conicted, professional life. A German
immigrant and self-made writer whose vocational journey was, in its way,
every bit as remarkable as Clares, Martin was virtually unknown at the
time The Life of John Clare was published. Yet even as he was composing
the Life in the months following Clares death, Martin was also preparing
the second edition of an ambitious new statistical annual, The Statesmans
Year-Book, that sought to codify Victorian ideals of knowledge as a
complete depository of facts bearing upon the political and social condi-
tion of the States of the civilized world, and the ever-varying forms which
exhibit either the progress or the decline of nations.1 Martins supervision
of the Year-Book, continuing almost until his death in 1883, would gradu-
ally move him from the outermost periphery of Victorian print culture
into the central orbit of Londons political and cultural elite. In reviewing
both The Life of John Clare and his broader career, I will show that even as
Martin became a cultural authority in his own right, he manifested a
continuing set of ambivalences towards literary authority and success
that expressed themselves on a wide spectrum, from acute personal anxiety
and resentment, to a more abstract, class-oriented scepticism towards
hierarchy and bureaucracy. This chapter thus offers several perspectives
on the ways in which Martins evolving relationship to the eld of litera-
ture, and the business of literary publishing, help us understand the
dynamics underwriting The Life of John Clare.
Until recently there has been little discussion of the Life; the consensus has
been that Martin was at once an opportunistic seeker of rm facts about
Clare, and a willing fantasist guilty of misrepresenting or even fabricating
elements of Clares story for aesthetic and rhetorical effect. Modern com-
mentary begins with Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerelds brief
118
The lives of Frederick Martin and the rst Life of John Clare 119
Introduction to their 1965 edition, in which they commend Martins
lack of condescension in representing Clares many difculties, praise the
frankness with which he treats matters of morality, especially those
involving sex and drink, and argue that the biographys errors are
probably no more than might be expected in any popular life written
so soon after the death of its subject.2 Jonathan Bate defends Martin on
somewhat different grounds, arguing that his tendency to inven[t] with
all the gusto of a novelist often leads to insights that more cautious later
biographers, notably the Tibbles, failed to grasp: There is a structural,
almost a mythic, truth to Martins narrative that gives it value despite its
factual inventions.3
Juliette Atkinsons recent Victorian Biography Reconsidered offers the
fullest critique to date of Martins Life. Describing it as an examination
of the publics relationship with, and responsibility towards, the nations
poets, Atkinson identies an historical trend by which mid-century writers
recongur[e] poetry as an extension of contemporary productivity, and
says Clare is portrayed as benetting from a healthy counterbalanc[ing] of
physical labour and poetry.4 Atkinson underscores Martins boiling indig-
nation towards Clares patrons, but also argues that even as Martin levels
various assaults on John Taylor, Octavius Gilchrist and others who denied
Clare his full artistic due, he fails to perceive the many parallels between
patronage and biography and ignores the complicity of his own biography
in perpetuating the interest in Clare as a man rather than a poet.5
On the question of Martins identication with Clare, Atkinson is
cautious: Like many of the biographers who took up obscure or neglected
subjects, Frederick Martin expressed personal frustrations about his own
career. But while Atkinson hurries away from such tempting specula-
tion,6 it is impossible to read the Life without perceiving that Martin
appears to have had some powerful personal motivation to take Clares
battles as his own.
In this chapter, I suggest that several of these themes Martins
populism; his personal identication with Clare; his status as a Victorian
writer; the national disgrace7 that is Englands treatment of its poets can
be enriched by a more comprehensive discussion of Martins career. After
establishing his ongoing labour on the Statesmans Year-Book as a necessary
backdrop, I turn to Martins early employment as an amanuensis for
Thomas Carlyle; then to the Clare biography; and then to his 1869 novel
Alec Drummond, whose motifs and social commentaries may be viewed as
illustrative outgrowths of those in the Life. Finally, I turn to Martins late
correspondence and his crisis-ridden nal years with the Year-Book in an
120 S C O T T M CE A T H R O N
attempt to understand his persistently conicted attitudes towards bureau-

cracy, hierarchy, class and the individual talent.
Martins career trajectory

The brief extant accounts of Martins life (183083) imply a smooth arc
from early struggle to later success, culminating in his receipt of a Civil List
pension, a dening marker of achievement and cultural entrenchment.
The outlines of this narrative cast Martin as a type of Victorian indus-
triousness and earnestness, who, la Matthew Arnold, began adulthood
with a strong literary focus but later moved into professional realms
associated with educational, material and commercial productivity.
Martins early years are shrouded in mystery, and we do not know for
certain whether he was born in Geneva or in Berlin.8 He resided in
Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands of England, in the mid-1850s,
where he was employed at a boarding school, and in 1856 moved to
London to serve as the famulus and factotum of Thomas Carlyle.9 The
relationship quickly grew strained, however, and Carlyle banished him
after only ve months. For the next several years Martin struggled to
support his wife and young family while cultivating contacts in publishing,
literature and journalism. In 1862 he contracted with Alexander Macmillan
to compile the Statesmans Year-Book, envisioned as a yearly compilation of
vital global statistics. This arrangement brought a decisive shift in Martins
professional standing, and he exploited his emergent authority as a statis-
tical maven by publishing a remarkable array of books. In just a dozen years
he produced Stories of Banks and Bankers (1865); Commercial Handbook of
France (1867); Handbook of Contemporary Biography (1870); The National
History of England (vol. 2; 1873); The History of Lloyds and of Marine
Insurance in Great Britain (1876); and The Property and Revenues of the
English Church Establishment (1877).10 Meanwhile Martin continued,
single-handedly, to publish the Year-Book.
A review of the Year-Book in the Standard is telling for the terms by
which it declares the centrality of Martins endeavours to the business of
the nation:
Everybody who knows this work is aware that it is a book that is indis-
pensable to writers, nanciers, politicians, statesmen, and all who are
directly or indirectly interested in the political, social, industrial, commer-
cial, and nancial condition of their fellow-creatures at home and abroad.
Mr. Martin deserves warm commendation for the care he takes in making
The Statesmans Year Book complete and correct.11
New editions of the Year-Book were regularly reviewed in the national
press throughout the 1870s,12 and the perceived importance of Martins
unique contribution to national development was recognized in 1879 by
Disraeli with a Civil List pension in the amount of 100 per annum.
Thus, Martins journey from struggling immigrant to cultural insider
was complete.
In this narrative Martin appears to embody the Victorian ideals of
industriousness and progress, almost stereotypically. The titles of his
published books glory in the structures of civil society and in the organiza-
tional mania that lies behind it in the enabling systems of nance and
commerce, committees and associations. Together they express the
conviction most Victorians shared that knowledge, despite its modular
character, should and would be united.13 Within this view the humanizing
virtues of literature were granted a legitimate, even fundamental role so
that it was not an absurd paradox, after Martins death, for one of his
obituaries to note that Amongst his most permanent work was a History
of Lloyds and a life of John Clare, the poet.14
Martins literary publications the biography of Clare (1865), an
edition of Chattertons poetry (1865), and the novel Alec Drummond
(1869) are clustered at an early point along this arc. Alec Drummond, it
should be noted, features a rst-person narrator who also has a dual-life
in Victorian print culture, working under remorseless journalistic dead-
lines by day and nurturing his manuscript of Burnsian poems by night.
The main action of the novel begins when the protagonist exchanges the
corrupt commercial world of London newspaper publishing for a life of
military adventure, eventually becoming a soldier in the Crimean War.
For Martin, publication of Alec Drummond marked a similar if less
dramatic transition: this was to be his last foray into belles lettres, as he
increasingly devoted his professional energies to his statistical work. The
gradual receding of Martins literary ambitions appears to have been a
necessary corollary to his increasing worldly success not a formal
abandonment, perhaps, but an inevitable impact of his expanding
franchise of statistical volumes.
For all its seeming coherence, this story of a career conceals a wellspring
of angst and existential frustration. It is this sense of conict, more than
Martins apparent successes, that should steer our understanding of his life
relative to the Life of Clare. Martins career is not quite representable as a
gradual rebalancing of literature relative to utility, or art relative to prot.
Even within a culture that encouraged ambitious career building, Martin
was peculiarly swept up in the drama of trying to make a respectable living
while nding a suitable outlet for his abilities and, in a broader sense, his
sensibility. Clearly he wished to make money, and in quantities he felt
commensurate with his talents: as he put it to Macmillan, he hoped the
Year-Book would not only provide him a small return in money, but
[would] lead to my name becoming more known that it is at present, so
as to lift me from that dreary sphere of labour, paid by the day or week, in
which literature is a mere trade.15 Yet these seemingly mild, conven-
tionally Victorian aspirations existed as a kind of overlay, or uncertain
counterpart, to a persistent strain of populist radicalism and advocacy
that drives both the Life of Clare and Alec Drummond. For years we see
Martin aggressively seeking insider status even as he denounces the
dulling amorality of bureaucracy. And there is a further complication.
As the Life makes clear, Martin was especially consumed with the
torments of class liminality, of the oppressiveness of social rank for
persons whose abilities were unconventional and multi-valent. In his
own life, these same torments led Martin towards crises of humiliation
and desperate action that were as fully and unsettlingly dramatic as those
he imagined for John Clare.
Martin and Carlyle

In 1856, unhappily employed in Wolverhampton, Martin accepted the post
of research assistant for Carlyles Life of Frederick the Great. The record
surrounding Martins dismissal, just ve months later, does credit to
neither party but Carlyles behavior, by his own account, was harassing
if not abusive. Even before meeting Martin, Carlyle tested his tolerance for
servitude by proffering the example of a previous assistant, a scholar like
yourself . . . who had been cheated out of his money in this big City, and
who served Carlyle assiduously for a pittance. One sovereign a week was all
I could afford him, Carlyle declares, yet somehow this thrifty and wise
paragon supported a wife and child for two years and was gradually
looking towards better prospects, had longer life been granted him. But
he died, to my sorrow in more ways than one.
The terms of this introductory letter are hardly enticing, yet Carlyle
seems certain that Martin, likewise supporting a wife and child, is in no
position to refuse:
If you now like to try a similar function with me on the same terms, as
I take it for granted you will . . . the experiment can begin as soon as
you please . . . Judging that you will certainly accept . . . I inclose you a
Post-Ofce Order for 1 (your name is Frederick Martin, not Friedrich);
if you wish to stay a week or two longer in Wn, you can do it: but I rather
expect to see you in few days.16
In the event, the high-handed Carlyle and the fastidious, doleful Martin
did not mix; Carlyle delighted in baiting Martin with nicknames and
diagnostic labels, including Peesweep, a reference to the shrill-voiced
bird. The account Carlyle gives his brother of terminating Martin is
positively gleeful:
I have put away Peesweep, such was the title of unfortunate Wagner-
Martin in late weeks; title rather descriptive of him. He was unhappy, and
the cause of more unhappiness. Like to drive me distracted, sometimes, with
his hysterical futilities, poor soul. The whistling thro the nose (in
breathing in cold weather) made me send him home to work; at home
or at the Museum, he was futile, chaotic not cosmic: too weak for the
place. I got on perceptibly better since his unbeautiful face was veiled from
me. Poor soul, we shall have a bout still before there can be some new outlet
found for him. But his help I will have no more of, whatever come.17
Even after Martins departure, it was more of the same. When Martin
sought Carlyles support for a proposed translation of the Memoirs of
Wilhelmina, Carlyle instead reiterated an earlier offer to try to secure him
something In the direction of [a British] Museum Clerkship, and ridic-
uled Martins aspirations to scholarly work: for annotating, rectifying and
elucidating . . . you appear to me to be (rather eminently) destitute of the
indispensable qualications.18
In citing these letters, I might seem to be making the case that the rage
against literary snobbery that permeates The Life of John Clare was
incubated in the poisonous environment that Carlyle fostered at
Cheyne Row that Martin chafed against Carlyles hierarchical, Great-
Man theory of history, and became bent on proving that neither he nor
Clare were destitute of the indispensable qualications for literary
achievement. But the full truth appears more complicated. There is
evidence from early and late that Martin existed in a perpetual state of
grievance vis--vis all of his employers and that he contributed to the
tensions that inevitably arose. The strange brew of exaggerated humility
and aggressive ambition marking Martins professional behaviour sug-
gests that he was a psychologically complex and contradictory gure
whose resentments towards authority never vanished, even as his social
status improved.
Still, Martins resentments towards Carlyle did take a shocking form:
nothing less than criminal theft. It is now accepted by Carlyle scholars that
during his brief period of employ, Martin systematically stole from

Cheyne Row a group of Carlyles private papers and manuscripts. The
precise scope of this activity is unknown. Fred Kaplan names only the
unpublished draft of [the novel] Wotton Reinfred, which Carlyle
thought he had thrown into the re, but Alexander Carlyle asserted in
1914 that the sneak-thief probably also stuff[ed] into his satchel . . . the
Tour in Ireland, the Excursion to Paris, The Guises, as well as many of
Carlyles Letters to his wife, mother, etc., many of Emersons Letters to
Carlyle and nally some Love Letters from Miss Welsh.19 There is no
sense that Carlyle ever knew of the thefts, and neither can we know
whether Martin was driven most by opportunism, revenge or a twisted
sort of admiration. Events from the last few months of Martins life,
twenty-ve years after the theft, suggest that Martin may indeed have had
a very uid conception of his own motives. I describe these events below;
it is important rst to recount how Martin transitioned from the Carlyle
residency to The Life of Clare.
The Statesmans Year-Book and The Life of John Clare

By the early 1860s Martin had begun working with Alexander Macmillan
to produce a new kind of statistical almanac, having been introduced
either by Gladstone or by Joseph Whitaker, the founder of Whitakers
Almanac and the sponsor of Martins 1864 application for British citizen-
ship.20 A letter from Martin to Macmillan dated 17 February 1862
suggests that preliminary work on the Year-Book had been underway
for some time:
I beg to ensure you that I work as hard at the year book as I [possibly]
can; so hard, in fact, as to have fallen ill lately from sheer over-work. The
task, I confess, is a much more laborious one than I supposed in the rst
place . . . but as accuracy, in a work of this kind, is of even greater moment
than time of publication, I think you ought not to blame me in this
matter.21
The letter is notable both for its indication of the difculties involved in
developing the project and for its defensiveness of tone a rhetorical
posture of self-justication that would permeate Martins correspondence
with Macmillan for the following two decades.
It was not until December 1862 that a contract was formalized, and not
until the beginning of 1864 that the rst edition of the Year-Book nally
appeared. There was clearly a great deal of anxiety associated with getting
it to press: I have been ghting the battle of life in rather a rough
manner, Martin wrote to Macmillan, and, often, wounded and trod
under foot, am sore all over.22 Awareness of this overhanging burden is
important in contextualizing Martins commitment in taking on the
Clare biography. Clare died in May 1864, and within twelve months
The Life of John Clare had been written and published, even as Martin
had also prepared, and seen to press, the second volume of the Year-Book.
His edition of Chattertons poems was immediately to follow. How did
Martin manage this?
An intuitive explanation is that, having striven for years to secure a
quasi-professional position, Martin was simply determined to exploit all
opportunities. His ability to rebound from the Carlyle disaster and the
impoverishment that must have followed is suggestive at once of self-
discipline, ambition and a remorseless drive to labour. The schedule
required to get work to market became a career-long habit that would
make possible Martins avalanche of statistical volumes, but there was an
inevitable tension between the behind-the-scenes frenzy of his research life
and the aura of sober reliability with which he sought to imbue these
volumes, especially the Year-Book.
Relatedly, the most striking feature of Martins professional correspon-
dence is its extraordinary tonal bipolarity. At rst glance, Martin appears
effortlessly to play the educated Victorian gentleman, employing genteel
deference and polished charm. Many of his letters betray not the slightest
sense of anxiety neither the immediate pressure of an impending dead-
line, nor broader impatience with the requisite forms of polite professional
discourse. Yet there are individual letters in which Martin positively
explodes with rage and frustration, and in ways that suggest that the
physical toll of his literary labours, when combined with the psychological
toll of always writing as the beggar approaching his correspondents
hat-in-hand, seeking information or an opportunity was just about
killing him. Here is an illuminating description of Martins Year-Book
correspondence with Macmillan.
The incoherence, contradictions, vagueness and rudeness of his letters, his
alternation between black despair and assertive optimism, his forgetful-
ness of vital statements written 24 hours earlier, his constant threats of
bringing Macmillans into court immediately followed by abject protesta-
tions of his devotion (and requests for further advance payments)all
these are suggestive of an instability of mind which may be either the cause
or the effect of his chronic but undened ailments.23
The commentator here, writing on the occasion of the Year-Books centenary

in 1965, is Sigfrid Henry Steinberg, who served as the Year-Books fourth
editor from 1946 to 1969. Steinbergs reading of Martin is caustic; he
focuses on Martins manic reversals of tone, and, even more, on what he
sees as Martins absurd misjudgement of his expertise.
His amazing navet in money matters and his complete ignorance of every
aspect of publishing, contrasting with his undoubted efciency as an editor,
were at the route of his incessant quarrels with the Macmillans . . . He never
ceased to tell the Macmillans how to run their business more protably,
what discounts to give to wholesalers and retailers, how to make the
Statesmans Year-Book pay (by stopping altogether the American sale!).24
Acknowledging the elements of truth in Steinbergs summary and also
noting that Martins pace of work truly was endangering his health
I think it important to understand that at least some of Martins frustra-
tion emerged from a kind of existential confusion he was able to diagnose
but not quell. The question was one of social location. Did Martin
fundamentally understand himself as an insider or an outsider and,
relatedly, did he understand his own special competencies as primarily
entrepreneurial or primarily aesthetic? In the Macmillan correspondence,
Martin alternates, painfully, between self-assertion and obsequiousness,
seemingly unable to project a self-image that satises himself, or that
enables his progress in the world. This grounding tension informs
Martins rhetoric in the Life of Clare, especially in two competing refrains:
one decrying patrons failure to nurture an impoverished and chronically
ill man, and the other working to combat booksellers characterization of
Clare as a nave rustic and victim of circumstance. To put the question in
the kind of language Martin favoured: was Clare constitutionally weak or
nobly virile? A sacricial lamb or a caged lion?
It is both partially accurate and too simple to say that Martin expressed
his personal sense of professional neglect through his portrayal of Clare as
victim. It is more useful to think of the Lifes account of Clares profes-
sional suffering as voicing Martins own half-conscious confusion about
the relative worth of individual artistic merit and professional literary
competency about the value of spontaneity and instinctual genius
relative to that of hard work and pragmatism. In choosing an epigraph for
the front matter of the Year-Book, Martin confronted this dilemma and
seemed to come down on one side of this debate, via a memorable Goethe
quotation: It is often said: Figures rule the world. But this is certain,
gures show how it is governed.25
But The Life of Clare plays it differently. For the most part in the Life
commerce is pitted directly against art, and the publishing establishment is
portrayed as a soul-deadening force; the machinery of literary London
cannot support the talents of a provincial singularity like Clare. One
example of this machinery is the mass production of gift-books and
annuals, which Martin ridicules as a debasing, modern quicksand Clare
keeps getting pushed towards. Annuals represent, for Martin, the kitschy
commodication of writers and writing gold-edged toy books soliciting
poetry by the yard, but with capricious editorial and payment policies, as
Clare discovers on at least two occasions.26 Fighting for attention with the
ashy annuals, Clares Shepherds Calendar, Martin argues, was doomed to
failure by its cheap, even clownish binding and even more so through
the negligent manner in which it was published, by which he means John
Taylors failure to control distribution:
Books, like all other earthly objects requiring to be bought and sold, must
undergo certain preparations, and run through prescribed channels of trade
in their way from the producer to the consumer, and it is well known that
the regulation and management of this process may either greatly retard or
accelerate the sale of a work . . . [R]eally valuable works have met with very
little success, owing to want of energy or thought on the part of the
publishers; while, on the other hand, not a few bad or paltry books, utterly
unworthy of public patronage, have, through active commercial manage-
ment, met with a considerable demand, and brought both prot and fame
to the writers.27
Even in this short space, we can see dramatic uctuations in Martins
tone. His cynically despairing description of books as commodities
requiring to be bought and sold quickly gives way to the sort of earnest
marketing lecture that prompted Steinberg to offer a scofng account of
Martins business dealings with Macmillan. Such tonal vacillation per-
vades the Life, but is especially evident when art and commerce are facing
off, as in Martins account of Clares compositional practices. In one such
sequence, Martin rst rhapsodizes over Clares insular process of poetic
invention:
There were some favourite places where he delighted to sit, and where the
hallowed vein of poetry seemed to him to ow more freely than at any
others. The chief of these spots was the hollow of an old oak, on the borders
of Helpston Heath, called Lea Close Oak now ruthlessly cut down by
enclosure progress where he had formed himself something like a table in
front. Few human beings ever came near this place, except now and then
some wandering gypsies, the sight of whom was not unpleasing to the poet.
Inside this old oak Clare used to sit in silent meditation, for many hours
together, forgetting everything about him, and unmindful even of the
waning day and mantle of darkness falling over the earth.28
A monastic purity of poetic composition makes Clare Clare. Yet in going
on to describe the transfer of the manuscript poems to John Taylor and
Clares accompanying determination not to allow any change, save ortho-
graphical and grammatical corrections, Martins attitude changes radi-
cally. For all Clares genius, Martin ruefully suggests, he made a solipsistic
mistake in viewing all copy-editing of his work as a violation of his poetic
vision:
There was at this time an impression on Clares mind that the songs came
oating from his lips and pen as music from the throat of birds. So he held
his own orthodoxy more orthodox than that of the schools. In which view
poor John Clare was decidedly wrong, seeing that his music was not offered
gratis like that of the skylark and nightingale, but was looking out for the
pounds, shillings, and pence of a most discerning public.29
Martins sarcasm towards the culture-industry comes ringing through,
but so does his wish that Clare had recognized his nancial dependency
on consumer demand. Later, when discussing Clares decision to buy
Taylors unsold copies of The Shepherds Calendar for independent resale,
Martin is similarly torn. He understands both Clares panicked commit-
ment (in the heat of which, Martin says, Clare forgot to pursue Allan
Cunninghams advice of demanding a full reckoning from Taylor) and
the tantalizing idea of direct-marketing of his own goods, even at the
personal cost of becoming a pedlar or hawker.30 But he is frustrated by
Clares ineptitude in enlisting others help: Mrs Marsh of Peterborough,
for instance, the socializing wife of the bishop, was a well-meaning
if eccentric resource, and Martin rues Clares failure to understand
that Mrs. Marsh would have assisted him in selling ten times as many
books as he could ever hope to do in his whole life.31 All in all, the
episode causes Martin to reect that It was strange how little John Clare
understood the world in which he lived.32
This nal phrase crystallizes the ambiguity of Martins editorial per-
spective. Though he does present Clare as a victim of circumstances and
cultural attitudes beyond his control, it is surprising how often Martin
criticizes Clares lack of social and business acumen. Such modulations
permeate Martins account of Clares failed 1823 plan to acquire the
property known as Bachelors Hall, an episode that he describes as
the turning period of the poets life. Seeking outside nancing in the
amount of two hundred pounds, Clare nds all doors resolutely closed
against him:
The explanation was that Lord Radstock, like most of Clares other patrons,
was entirely ignorant of the poets character, regarding him in the light of a
genial infant, full of intellect, but without strength of character. What
chiey produced this impression on his lordship, otherwise decidedly the
truest friend of the poet, was that Clare, notwithstanding repeated advice to
that effect, had neglected to make a good arrangement, or, in fact, any
arrangement at all, with his publishers, so that he stood to them in the
position of a helpless client.33
Clares fantasies of land ownership are nave in one sense, justiable in
another; Radstocks rejection is similarly layered at once a product of
class bias and an understandable response to Clares stumbling. Martin
presents the whole episode as the sorry revelation of a great truth: Clare
grasps that class is indeed destiny, and that his fate is to be that of a hack-
poet for elites something better than a clown, and something less than a
lackey in uniform.34
These competing emphases are perhaps resolvable along the following
lines: in a better, more egalitarian world, Martin implies, Clares basic
human failings would not have brought him so much pain. For all Martins
fury against the shoddy treatment and neglect that Clare faced the failure
of even his supporters to perceive the noble and manly, nay lofty heart that
beat under the ragged lime-burners dress35 one could argue that his
grand theme is the conict between the individual personality and the
institutional apparatus, a conict that is merely focused through the story
of John Clare and the historical world of London publishing. This may
explain why Martins embedded mini-biography of Octavius Gilchrist,
whose 1820 London Magazine piece rst brought Clare to public attention,
is so complex. Martin is unsure where to place Gilchrist along the class and
educational axis, and whether to make his provinciality register humility or
self-delusion. His initial sketch of Gilchrist, which establishes his Oxford
education and his clear preference for poetry over and against his inherited
Stamford grocery business, ends by condemning Gilchrists London piece
for employing a tone in which a parvenu might speak of a pauper, and for
its fawning account of the business risk Taylor had undertaken on Clares
behalf. Though perhaps well-meant in the rst instance, Martin argues,
[Gilchrists] patronizing manner in speaking of Clare, and attracting
public attention to him, less as a poetical genius, but as happening to be
a poor man, did innite mischief in the end. It did more than this it killed
John Clare.36
Seemingly disregarding his opening account of Gilchrists literary sensi-

tivity, Martin drifts into portraying him as a puffed-up Stamford burgher.
Martin later claims that it was William Gifford of the Quarterly Review,
not Gilchrist, who produced a clear-eyed, class-conscious appreciation of
Clare in that magazine and who later gave Clare a wise warning against
booksellers and publishers, which Gilchrist immediately and somewhat
maliciously outed.37
More confusingly, though, Gilchrist is given the nal word in a lengthy
anecdote recalling how a misguided attempt to gain the favour of Walter
Scott resulted in Clares mortication.38 Offering Clare a consoling para-
ble after Scott has snubbed him, Gilchrist wryly recalls that simple Mr.
Walter Scott, before becoming famous, had thanked him profusely for a
brief magazine review, and he tells Clare that, with hard work, he too may
expect that the great baronet in his high path will be the rst to shake
hands. Martin closes the anecdote with a ourish: Thus spoke Octavius
Gilchrist, grocer of Stamford, and contributor to the Quarterly Review.
And his speech set John Clare musing for some time to come.39 Martin
clearly intends his penultimate grocer and contributor line as a satiric coup
de grce, but what, precisely, does it mean? To make the anecdote cogent
requires an elaborate interpretation that Gilchrist is somehow a vessel of
wisdom despite himself, and that his words give Clare an even clearer
insight into the vagaries of fame than he consciously intends. Martin is
always poised to spring at the slightest hint of self-importance, but his
scorn is so instinctive, and so directly tied to his sense of his authorial voice,
that it leads him to forced reversals.
Thus, when Martin rehabilitates Gilchrist he makes him the agent of
the biographys crucial claims about Clares relationship to charity, rst
explaining to the reader the nature of Clares reluctance to accept gifts
(The high manliness of Clare now struck [Gilchrist] for the rst time, and
he deeply admired it) and then having Gilchrist explain to Clare why this
reluctance was sometimes misplaced (He even remonstrated [to Clare]
about his . . . coldness in receiving gifts offered by real lovers and admirers
of his genius).40 Further, in his account of Gilchrists decline Martin
establishes a series of parallels between the two men, as each hides from
the other the extent of his physical and emotional suffering. Clares
seeking-out of Gilchrist after the crushing failure of the land scheme is
effectively staged twice once after the ailing Gilchrist has beat his last
retreat from London and journalistic controversy, and again after Clares
own health has suddenly improved. Walking to Stamford along the sunny
path . . . reveling in golden day-dreams, in none of which the image of his
dear friend Gilchrist was wanting, Clare arrives at the peak of renewed
hope and happiness, only to nd that Gilchrist has died an hour before.41
Martin tacitly equates the two men as pummelled and discarded by the
literary establishment. The point seems nally to emerge with some clarity:
that class was destiny for Gilchrist as surely as it was for Clare and, Martin
implies, as it was for countless, nameless others.
The Story of Alec Drummond

The wishing-away of this bitter truth is one of the central motives behind
Martins next major work and sole venture into ction, the 1869 novel The
Story of Alec Drummond, of the 17th Lancers. Here Martins canvas is bigger:
the national disgrace of Englands failure to support its poets is expanded
into an expos of the failings of British imperial warfare. Martin gives
his protagonist Alec Drummond all the attributes that John Clare lacked:
self-condence, physical strength, clarity of mind, and an instinctive,
unpretentious savoir-faire that allows him to move effectively across class
boundaries. In the harsh social milieu of the Life, Clares weaknesses always
lead to privation and humiliation; in the harsh social milieu of Alec
Drummond, Alecs strengths are always enough to overcome physical
threats and bureaucratic bungling.
In this regard, and in the romance plot that is ladled onto the narrative,
the fantasy elements of the novel could hardly be plainer. Even so, the
social protest of Alec Drummond, grounded in close renderings of military
mismanagement, is even more clamorous than that of the Life.
Contemporary reviewers were confounded by its juxtapositions: [A]
more curious combination of minute realism in detail, and violent
romanticism in the outline of the story, can scarcely be found than in
Mr. Martins account of the adventures of his imaginary private, wrote
the Spectator, while the Westminster Review wondered what could have
induced Mr. Martin to throw his admirable pictures of a war . . . into the
form of a three volume novel? As a novel the book is poor, but as a
descriptive history of the Crimean war excellent.42 If Alec Drummonds
satiric warrant mainly offers depictions of Britons abroad, it shares with
The Life of Clare Martins Victorian treatment of poverty, illness and the
failure of social safety nets: we again see the plight of the subsistence
wage-earner, whether agrarian, military, or, as in his own case, clerical.
Alec Drummond claries that Martins animus was aimed not just at a
callous gentry, but also at an ideological blindness to workers both their
welfare and their distinctive talents.
We rst see Alec as a young Scot in London, seeking a literary career but
working as an assistant sub-editor for a nancial weekly. Shocked to learn
that the papers proprietor is a tyrant who extorts bribes in exchange for
favourable coverage, Alec quickly loses his job and residence, taking refuge
in the army. Almost instantly on his absorption into the Scottish Lancers,
Alec is reconstituted as a skilled equestrian and urbane social observer, his
own class stock slowly rising even as he sleeps in the mud and faces
perpetual dangers. In effect, Martin has exchanged a single workers view
of localized graft for a global view of disgrace relative to whole popula-
tions of workers.
The pattern thenceforward, once the regiment arrives in Turkey for an
amphibious journey to the Crimea, is that at each stage Martin shows Alec
befriending locals on both sides of the conict, learning enough of their
language and colonial history to mediate between these people and his
colleagues in the Lancers. At the same time, Martin shows the abject
squalor and suffering inicted upon common soldiers by a logistically
incompetent British army, whose leaders seem surprised but unmoved by
recurring waves of cholera. The back-and-forth between travelogue and
muckraking modes gives unexpected depth to statements such as that of
Alecs friend Brown, who calls one sortie a wild-goose chase, planned for
some mystic object by our political rulers at home, or like that of Alec
himself, who views a grotesque blend of goods and chattels, live and dead
things on a beachhead and wonders at the sufferings of his fellow soldiers,
children of the so-called richest nation on earth.43 Indeed, Martin seems
more concerned with ofcers general class chauvinism than with close
tactical analysis, to the extent that when he arrives at the novels grand
set-piece the suicidal mission at Balaclava that Tennyson had memor-
ialized fteen years earlier in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854) he
muddies the account of a benighted chain-of-command with an alternate
theory of multinational espionage.
We might be tempted to downplay the class-protest connection between
this novel and The Life of John Clare, because Alec Drummond seems in
many ways a wish-fullling antidote to all that Martin found haunting in
Clares story. Alecs social and professional liminality is constantly fore-
grounded, but represented as a virtue rather than an unshakeable albatross.
As a Scot, Alec feels like a foreigner among Englishmen, but in ways that
reinforce his self-esteem and social ease. His literary, professional and
equestrian education is vaguely outlined yet clearly sufcient. His fascina-
tion with a nameless blue-eyed woman he rescues from the sea at Dover
takes on a Petrarchan fervour, but unlike for Clare (the Petrarchanism of
whose obsession with Mary Joyce is stressed by Martin), the vision proves
real, and the lady nally rejects a Russian count in favour of Alec. By no
means hostile to all aristocrats, Alec enjoys the protection of some, while
noting the frivolity of others. Then, too, Alec forms bonds with working
men, smiling occasionally at their rusticity but valuing their mettle and
good sense. Knocked about a good deal concussed, wounded, ambushed
and abducted he always recovers quickly, aided by the medicinal liquor
that he accepts in strict, self-imposed moderation.
Yet Alecs heroic equipoise throws into relief Martins larger rhetorical
project of describing the failed logistics of British military transport,
billeting and supply lines. [A]s for the physical incidents of the Varna
encampment, and the rst month of the Crimean expedition, wrote the
Spectator, no description of them so telling and graphic and effective in
every way has yet appeared . . . [since] Russells Crimean letters to the
Times.44 Alec and his peers are repeatedly made to start or stop to break
or make camp to prepare needlessly for a battle that doesnt come with a
randomness that bewilders, alienates and infuriates them. They are privy to
no larger view or understanding of the ostensible purpose behind
their movements. Martin opens volume II with an extended account of
the bleak aftermath of the Battle of Alma, from 20 September 1854,
traditionally understood as the rst major battle of the Crimean War.
The disorganization of the British side is contrasted, pitifully, with the
relative orderliness of their French allies:
While the French had removed the whole of their wounded and dead from
the eld the day before, not leaving the former even a night to their
sufferings, both ofcers and men going forth to assist them immediately
after the ght, our troops, on the other hand, had not completed one-half of
the same sad duty at the end of thirty-six hours, and on the morning of
Friday, the 22nd September, the hill-side was still strewn with corpses in
British uniforms, and men groaning in the agonies of death.
There seemed to be with us an utter want of organisation for relieving and
remedying, as far as lay in human power, the casualties of the battle, just as if
a combat with the Russians, and the possibility of our soldiers being killed
and wounded, was something unnatural, and altogether out of the common
order of things, and as such had never been thought of by our generals . . .
Thus our poor soldiers, hit by Russian bullets or swords, but, to their
misfortune, not fatally, were laid down on the cold earth, to perish like
dogs, with a mere mockery of medical care and attention.45
In contrast to such horrid visions are tantalizing glimpses of health and
pastoral wholesomeness, suggesting the possibility of restoration through
contact with an Edenic nature. Indeed, Martin makes it clear that for Alec,
as it had been for Clare, a life out of doors is preferable to an indoors one,
even in such circumstances.46
In both books, Martin takes pains to associate the outdoor life with a
paradoxical blend of native wit and worldly perspective in the novel, the
associations are advanced through depictions of Alecs horsemanship and
Scottishness and it becomes clear that for Martin healthy manliness
emerges from the connection with the genius loci. The related idea of
homesickness furthers the argument: recall that Martin supplies for Clare
the dying words I want to go home, and insinuates that Clare was
unmanned as much by his removals from Helpston as by his illness.47
Homesickness in the two books is again a sign of right-thinking. At
Balaclava, the last shout of a charging Lancer Scotland for ever! is at
rst readable as one more example of useless glory-seeking navet: He
repeated it thrice; but the cry had no sooner escaped his lips for the third
time when he was struck by a cannon-ball through the head, and fell from
his steed as if lifted off by invisible hands.48 But one realizes that his battle
cry is actually an expression of personal autonomy and a reproach to the
general disorganization that has been described at length over the pre-
vious hundred pages.
Alec is always both resolutely Scottish and a citizen of the world, and
Martin is eager to connect this duality with successful self-fashioning.
Alecs superhuman linguistic facility by novels end he is uent in
Turkish, French, German and Russian places him rst among several
expatriates with similar talents, and Martin habitually uses Scotland as a
metonym for demographic uidity and social mobility through lan-
guage.49 One cannot but help think here of Martins own personal and
cultural transition in coming to England but also, from the other side, of
Clares difculty in negotiating the relationship between Helpston and
London, and also of his struggle to exploit his poetic voice, and his
experiments with genre, in ways that would move him beyond the periph-
eral literary category to which he had been assigned.
Five years earlier, in the rst volume of the Statesmans Year-Book An
Account of the Existing Sovereigns, Governments, Armaments, Education,
Population, Religion, &c., of every Nation in the World50 Martin had
invoked a metaphor of nations-as-individuals, and claimed that his new
publication would provide an accurate guide to these biographies of states:
France, Italy, Russia, Australia, Germany, are constantly referred to as
living entities, possessed of a certain amount of force, strength, and volition,
the quality and quantity of which is supposed to be generally known. But . . .
the subject is far from being generally known, and . . . is at least environed
with a large amount of complexity.51
Martin had here embraced the basic validity of the metaphor, but suggested it
was often employed in ignorance. If in Alec Drummond Martin also some-
times hedges on the question of a readily discernible national character, he is
nonetheless intent on using the novel to parade his own burgeoning knowl-
edge of world geographies, economies and languages. With the growing
authority of the Year-Book behind him, Martin is determined to expose the
novel-reading public to a less Anglocentric world, and to advance, through a
popular literary genre, his authority regarding international affairs.
If Martin reads darkly the operations of Sovereigns, Governments,
[and] Armaments, the novels most interesting expression of worldliness
may well lie in its unreconciled chasm between realism and romance. For
the Spectator reviewer, the novels startling display of romance elements
was so excessive that we suspect our author intended to make something of
a satire on English novel-readers tastes and, similarly, the review argued
that, through his presentation of Alecs physical strength and powers of
recovery, Mr. Martin is laughing in his sleeve at his reader, whom he is
determined to sate with the wonderful achievements of his hero.52 This
toying manipulation of novelistic form, evidently designed with sales in
mind, can thus be registered as a meta-critical display of sophistication on
Martins part: the calculating exploitation of the same awed marketplace
that had so badly victimized Clare.
The nal decade

The urbanity Martin projected in Alec Drummond was not, in practice,
something he could maintain in his own working life. Despite the
continued appearance of new book volumes and the regular issuance of
the Year-Book, the last decade of Martins life was marked by worry and a
growing sense of failure. Even as he appeared steadily to consolidate the
brand of Frederick Martin the repository of all information, the man who
knew it all he remained haunted by his self-image as an outsider and a
disrespected underdog. Even the conferral of the Civil List pension in 1879,
a vital source of nancial relief and an unquestionable mark of prestige, did
not fully repair his nances or his self-esteem.
Our best window into these strains is Martins ongoing Year-Book
correspondence with Alexander Macmillan. As indicated earlier, this
correspondence is characterized by violent swings between proud self-

assertion and apologetic self-abasement. While Martins emotional crises
were often catalyzed by nancial anxiety, they seem to have been rooted
in his sense that, despite his unceasing efforts, he remained, like Clare, a
subaltern within an elitist literary establishment. I focus below on a single,
six-month sequence of letters as illustrative of Martins conicting self-
conceptions as underling and one-man franchise.
In April 1870, Martin threatened to quit the Year-Book. Seeking a new
written contract that would formalize a longstanding verbal agreement
under which he had been operating, Martin was shocked when Macmillan
instead referred him back to their initial document of 1862. The terms of
that contract were entirely unfavourable, wrote Martin, and he noted that
even the more generous verbal contract which had set his annual salary at
100, established that he was to receive half the Year-Books prots, and
instituted a set price for the volume was barely sufcient. Though what I
have received under these verbal arrangements has not by any means paid
me, he wrote, yet without it I must have broken down years ago, and the
undertaking would have dropped.53
Martins negotiation was not merely a matter of long-term prudence: an
unpleasant dispute concerning his responsibilities on the forthcoming
Handbook of Contemporary Biography had brought to a head enveloping
feelings of persecution:
I expected thanks from you, and not abuse, and when, last Friday, you
addressed me in a way I consider utterly cruel and unjust, it came upon me
like thunder from a blue sky. In all my dealings with you, I have been the
very opposite from mercenary, and it is on this account mainly that I deeply
feel the injustice of your reproaches.54
There were more details as well, including claims of deteriorating health
and fears for his familys nancial future. (Martins worry was doubtless
increased by the fact that, though he did not say so, his wife was three
months pregnant with their seventh child.)55
Rather than engaging the details of either protest, however, Macmillan
simply refused to answer. This is a telling insight into his understanding of
Martins volatility and, indeed, when Martin wrote again in two weeks
time, his self-justication was wrapped in a mantle of apology:
Are you displeased with my previous letter, asking for a written agreement
concerning the Statesmans Year-book? If anything in my note has given
offense to you, I am sincerely sorry for it, though, at the same time, I cannot
regret having made the demand I did . . . It is an old story, and a sad story,
that there are few things that do so much mischief, as verbal agreements in
separating men, and destroying mutual condence . . . Please let me have a
line to tell me whether you are angry with me, or merely prevented answer-
ing my former note. I am truly anxious to be on the old friendly terms with
you, and it is anxiety which dictates these lines.56
Macmillans patient silence seemed justied, for within three months we
nd Martin excitedly discussing a plan for a new, nationally focused,
publication to be called The Parliamentary Year-Book. Describing it as an
independent undertaking for which he will not ask Macmillans support
(I was thinking of a venture on my own hook), he ends by implying that
he would welcome another agreement with Macmillan and that, impli-
citly, all is forgiven: Now for my great question. Do you agree with what
Mr. Walters said at the Statistical dinner that the publication of such a
book cannot fail to be commercially successful?57
But just as Martins upset had not lasted, neither did this renewal of
optimism. When Macmillan wrote in November to say that there were no
prots to be shared from the 1870 Year-Book, Martin plunged into despair:
My dear Sir
Your note, which I received late last night, has made me feel utterly
wretched. I hoped the tide of ill-success of my Year-book had turned last
year, and hearing that there is again nothing to divide, I feel more miserable
then I can tell you. It is now ten years since I commenced the Statesmans
Year-book, and ever since I have toiled at it as few literary men toil. Now it
has ruined me in income, and ruined me in health, and I can go no further.
Sitting up night after night to add together, correct and correct again, long
rows of gures has made my eyes so weak that I am at times almost blind.
And when I think of my wife and seven children, who have to suffer, and
are suffering already, from the ill-success of this most wretched of all
undertakings I ever began and carried on, I feel as if my life is lost.
Yours in sorrow
Fred Martin58
This remarkable cry of futility seems as if it must be totalizing and
permanent. Yet by the very next day Martin had recovered considerably,
offering a detailed proposal to Macmillans partner George Craik that
would allow him to continue with an endeavour that only a few hours
earlier he had described as this most wretched of all undertakings.
So the Year-Book went on,59 and so did Martin, playing out his char-
acteristic pendulum-swings of ambition and desolation. Between these
poles were sour expressions of truculence. A letter to Macmillan of

November 1874 begins:
Your question as to whether I am taking any steps about the New Year-
Book I cannot understand. By New Year Book you mean, I suppose,
the issue for 1875; but I am doing nothing special as regards it. The course
followed by me in all the issues, eleven in number, that have appeared, has
been to begin working at the new issue from the moment of publication of
the preceding one in fact all the year round.60
Two of Martins new schemes were for periodicals; the failure of the rst of
these, The Brighton Magazine, resulted in a net loss of 150 and led him to
promise Never more shall I venture upon publishing, though he also
explained, The speculation would have been a safe one, had I not, ignorant
of commercial undertakings, been compelled to lean upon others, who
proved rogues.61 The second, The Biographical Magazine, met a similar
fate.62 Opening its inaugural issue in 1877 with the rst of a promised
multi-issue account of the life of Carlyle, the whole enterprise was scrapped
after the family objected to its continuation and Carlyle printed a note in
the Athenaeum reading Mr. Frederick Martin has no authority to concern
himself with my life, of which he knows nothing.63
It is difcult to ascertain Martins precise nancial situation in the
1870s.64 Steinberg is profoundly sceptical his unsympathetic reading is
that, in effect, Martin was a bounder, unhappy not because he was truly
needy but because he misconstrued his social standing. Summarizing
Martins correspondence following the 1879 pension award, Steinberg
writes:
[P]hrases such as I am literally penniless occur with monotonous regular-
ity, andthe depth of Victorian penuryhis daughters, brought up as
ladies, had to do all the housework as the servant had to be discharged.
Martins creditors were pressing himhe assessed his debts at over 2,000;
he himself and his wife were ailing . . . In fact, Martins will, proved on 10th
February, 1883, reveals a less disconsolate state of affairs: his widow Susan,
ne Styles, received his personal estate of 1,962 3s. 1d.65
Steinberg is surely cherry-picking the evidence here, as will become clear
below but in any case Martins sense of injury was never reducible
to a number in his account book. It seemed to him that his incisive
understanding of social condescension and establishment politics, ably
demonstrated in the Life of Clare and Alec Drummond, had gotten him
nowhere. Even with a raft of publications, a public name, and a Civil List
pension that Alexander Macmillan and other prominent gures had
secured for him,66 he was convinced he couldnt outank a system that
still classed him as a drudge and a gloried clerk.
This tangle of resentment, wounded pride, real nancial worry and
perceived literary marginality had its expression in a nal, incredible
sequence. In January 1882 Martin wrote to Macmillan that he was hard
pressed by creditors, and pleaded for an immediate advance of 100, which
he received that day.67 Even so, the walls continued to close in. Perceiving
Martins snowballing distraction, Macmillan suggested in June that he
receive help in preparing the 1883 Year-Book. Though Martin strenuously
resisted, at the beginning of July he admitted that he was overwhelmed
with debts now and scarcely know how to extricate myself.68 By early
October his threatened bankruptcy had become a legal matter: by orders
of my creditors I must go into liquidation.69 And then that same month,
in kind of a closing, tragicomic ourish, Martin left the Year-Book proofs
in a railway carriage, jeopardizing its publication. The volumes rescue
mission was handed over to John Scott-Keltie who the next year would
assume full-time editorship of the Year-Book and Martins tenure with
the Year-Book was over.
A month later, frantic for money, Martin determined that he would
sell his Carlyle manuscripts on the black market the manuscripts
stolen twenty-ve years earlier. Our knowledge of this turn of events
derives mainly from the 1904 Autobiography of the American-born
religious reformer Moncure Daniel Conway, who in 1882 was living in
London and working for the publisher Harper. While in America
Conway had been a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and had recently
been informed by the family that Emersons letters to Carlyle had gone
missing. Thus, he was immediately suspicious on being introduced to a
small middle-aged man who was trying to sell an important manuscript
of Carlyle. Following the mans instructions, Conway went to a mis-
erable house in Kentish Town where, he says, I was met at the door by
the same man . . . He began saying he admired and loved me, thereby
placing me on my guard. He then brought out the manuscript he wished
to sell to the Harpers, Carlyles autograph journal of his tour in
Ireland.70
Conway knew something was very wrong, especially because at about
the same time the Athenaeum published four of the missing Emerson
letters. Conway set about making inquiries his full account, too long to
recapitulate here, provides many important details and soon enough
discovered that the man who offered me the manuscript had been for a
time an amanuensis for Carlyle. (The seller used an alias, and Conway
suppress[es] Martins name because I believe he has children, but his

identity is made clear.) Eventually learning that the letters had passed to a
dealer, Conway visited the shop, and the next day (20 November 1882)
Martins wife appeared at Conways residence in Bedford Park.
The woman was middle-aged, crafty, and very timorous, writes
Conway:
As she had come all the way from Kentish Town . . . my wife hastened to
refresh her with tea, and treated her like a lady. Finding that she had brought
only four of the letters, I agreed to her price, ten pounds for the four, on
condition that next day I might bring them to her and examine others, until
I could select the four preferred.
By gradual extension of this contrivance, Conway and his wife were
able, over a series of days, surreptitiously to copy the entire cache of
twenty-seven letters before unfold[ing] the whole matter to Sir James
Stephen, coexecutor with Froude of Carlyles papers.71
If there is still detective work to be done to track the dispersal of these
papers and the full extent of Martins involvement, the general contours
are clear enough: Martin had quietly held them for a quarter-century,
and then under the cover of a mysterious German pseudonym
(Beckerwaise)72 attempted to sell them covertly. Perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, given the utter desperation implied by this context, only two
months later Martin was dead, aged fty-three.
Granting the harsh realities of Martins nancial plight and failing
health, the symbolic dimensions of this last act are nonetheless extraordin-
ary. If not precisely the public slaying of a literary father, it certainly reads
as the assumption of power and control, a retributory claim of lasting
authority. But there is a bloodless aspect to it as well Martin system-
atically jobbing a literary marketplace that had failed to adequately reward
him. His use of the pseudonym Beckerwaise not a common German
name, but an improvised compound that amalgamates the family name
Becker with the word for orphan is perhaps the clearest indication that
Martin himself viewed the activity in richly gurative terms. We can
imagine Martin implying that the papers themselves are somehow orphans,
and then declaring, cynically, that he is seeking only to nd them a proper
home. The more obvious interpretation, however, is the better one: that
Martin sees himself as a literary orphan or refugee someone who remains,
after all these years, a man without a place.
While we cannot know if John Clares poverty led directly to his
madness, as Martin had hypothesized in the Life, so much of Martins
own troubled behaviour seems to have been driven by his internalizing a
series of pressures that, in the Life, he had identied as damaging to Clare.
There was more to this than reective self-pity. In the Life he had written
about the mainly just but in Clares case hurtful idea that genius
and talent are self-supporting, and that he who cannot live by the exercise
of his own hand or brain, does not altogether deserve success.73 Martins
success in speaking in several cultural registers indicates a uency a
blend of genius and talent that he was never able fully to leverage, just
as he was unable to embrace his own belief, as stated in the Life, that real
happiness is found distributed with tolerable equality among all ranks
and classes.74 If Martins nal unwindings seem sadly to undercut the
literary stature he sought for so long, they remind us of the real power of
those cultural expectations that, in his presentation, had governed the life
of John Clare.
Notes
1. The Statesmans Year-Book, II (1865), p. viii.
2. Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and
Geoffrey Summereld, 2nd edn. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964),
pp. xvii, xvi. All further references to the Life are to this edition.
3. Jonathan Bate, John Clare: Prologue to a New Life, in John Goodridge
and Simon Kvesi (eds.), John Clare: New Approaches (Helpston: John
Clare Society, 2000), pp. 116 (pp. 7, 9). Bate is thinking here of Martins
account of Clares grandfather, John Parker Clare. Later, however,
recounting Martins description of an episode from 1823 to 1824 when
Clare sank for the rst time into a deep and prolonged depression (p. 11),
Bate suggests that Martin may have been working from a documentary
record and not just his own lively imagination, such that one of the most
romantic, ctionalised-sounding images of Clare which we possess might
actually have a basis in fact (p. 15). In two essays in the JCSJ, Bate corrects a
series of errors made by earlier biographers, including Martin. See New
Light on the Life of Clare, JCSJ, 20 (2001), 4154; and New Clare
Documents, JCSJ, 21 (2002), 518.
4. Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-
Century Hidden Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 205,
208, 210.
5. Ibid., p. 211.
6. Ibid., p. 206.
7. Life, p. 263.
8. According to both the original and updated entries in the Dictionary of
National Biography, Martin was born in Geneva in 1830 and subsequently
educated in Heidelberg. Atkinson follows this account, but Robinson and

Summereld say straightforwardly that Martin was German. S. H. Steinberg,
a twentieth-century editor of the Statesmans Year-Book, calls the DNB
account completely bogus and cites Martins 1864 application for British
citizenship as stating that he was born in Berlin and had come to England in
1855 at around age thirty. Steinberg adds, however, that these claims were
vouchsafed only by Martin himself and not substantiated by any ofcial
documents. S. H. Steinberg, Statesmans Year-Book: Martin to Epstein,
Journal of Library History, 1.3 (1966), 15366 (158).
9. Francis Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1893), p. 260.
10. Stories of Banks and Bankers (London: Macmillan, 1865); Commercial
Handbook of France (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1867); Handbook
of Contemporary Biography (London: Macmillan, 1870); The National History
of England, vol. 2 (London: William Collins, 1873); The History of Lloyds and
of Marine Insurance in Great Britain (London: Macmillan, 1876); and The
Property and Revenues of the English Church Establishment (London: Society
for the liberation of religion from State-patronage and control, 1877).
11. Quoted in Athenaeum, 2472 (13 March 1875), 347.
12. See, for example, the following numbers of the Times: 26663 (2 February
1870), p. 7; 29195 (6 March 1878), p. 4; 30143 (16 March 1881), p. 4.
13. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire
(London: Verso, 1993). p. 7.
14. Death of Frederick Martin, Royal Gazette 56.12 (Hamilton, Bermuda;
20 March 1883), p. 1.
15. Martin to Alexander Macmillan, 25 February 1865. The British Library
Board, Add MS 55042. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to
Martins letters are The British Library Board.
16. Thomas Carlyle to Frederick Martin, 15 October 1856. The Collected
Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, vol. 32, ed. Ian Campbell,
Aileen Christianson, Sheila McIntosh, David Sorenson, and Kenneth
J. Fielding (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1213.
17. Ibid., p. 106. Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, 21 March 1857.
18. Ibid., p. 161. Carlyle to Frederick Martin, 7 June 1857.
19. Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983), p. 545; Alexander Carlyle, Eight new love letters of Jane Welsh, The
Nineteenth Century and After, 75 (1914), 86113 (87).
20. Steinberg, p. 159.
21. Martin to Alexander Macmillan. 17 February 1862. Berg Collection of English
and American Literature, New York Public Library. I thank Elizabeth James,
former curator of the nineteenth-century British Collection at the British
Library, for alerting me to this letter and for additional help on the Macmillan
papers.
22. Martin to Alexander Macmillan, 27 February 1864. BL Add MS 55042.
24. Ibid., p. 159.
25. The Statesmans Year-Book, II (1865), p. iv, prints the Goethe in the original
German: Man sagt oft: Zahlen regieren die Welt. Das aber ist gewiss, Zahlen
zeigen wie sie regiert wird.
26. Life, pp. 202, 2323.
27. Ibid., p. 205.
28. Ibid., p. 133.
29. Ibid., p. 134. This is a dramatically reductive account of Clares feelings about
editorial intervention. See Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 20661.
30. Ibid., pp. 221, 227.
31. Ibid., p. 226.
32. Ibid., p. 231.
33. Ibid., pp. 1645.
34. Ibid., p. 167.
35. Ibid., p. 87.
36. Ibid., p. 88.
37. Ibid., pp. 103, 1578.
38. Ibid., p. 129.
39. Ibid., p. 131.
40. Ibid., p. 127.
41. Ibid., pp. 168, 171.
42. Alec Drummond, Spectator, 42 (23 January 1869), 11112 (111); Belles Lettres,
Westminster Review, 91 (1869), 5702 (571).
43. Frederick Martin, The Story of Alec Drummond, of the 17th Lancers, 3 vols.
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), I, pp. 185, 242, 244; hereafter Alec
Drummond.
44. Spectator, 42, p. 112.
45. Alec Drummond, II, pp. 13.
46. See, for example, Life, p. 8 and Martins account of Granny Bains.
47. Life, p. 295.
48. Alec Drummond, II, pp. 1223.
49. An example of the elaborate synthesis of these ideals is conveyed in a
courtship episode involving Alecs hard-drinking friend Mike. Alec awa-
kens from several days illness to nd his abrasive friend an altered being,
earnestly helping a German girl in the elds and supplementing her English
with a Sir Walter Scott novel (III, pp. 17981). Alec helps Mike acquire
some German in ensuing weeks, yet Mike remains too awestruck to propose
marriage; the solution is to have Mike memorize a German translation of
one of Burnss ballads (III, p. 187). Readers know from Martins chapter
epigraph that this will be My luves like a red, red rose. Accordingly, a
Christmas party is capped by the singing of old German ballads, Mikes
recitation of the Burns poem (provided for us in German), and the long-
awaited marriage proposal. Mikes rehabilitation from rowdy soldier to
pastoral homebody is thus certied by the Scottish acid-test of cross-

cultural and cross-class literacy.
50. Bookseller, 72 (31 December 1863), p. 993.
51. Preface to the First Edition, Statesmans Year-Book, II (1865), p. v.
52. Spectator, 42, p. 112.
53. Martin to Macmillan, 6 April 1870. BL Add MS 55042. Implicit here and
elsewhere is that Martin had to shoulder various clerical and administrative
costs in exchange for a share of Year-Book prots.
54. Ibid., Martin to Macmillan, 6 April 1870.
55. Ibid., Martin to Macmillan, 11 October 1870.
56. Ibid., Martin to Macmillan, 20 April 1870.
57. Ibid., Martin to Macmillan, 11 July 1870.
58. Ibid., Martin to Macmillan, 26 November 1870.
59. Surviving letters indicate that Martin eventually signed a new contract,
probably in early 1872. This guaranteed him 150, rather than 100, but by
1874 he was again questioning its terms in argumentative letters with Craik
and claiming that he was being denied large amounts of salary due him.
See Martin to Craik, 19 November 1874. BL Add MS 55042.
60. Martin to Macmillan, 2 November 1874. BL Add MS 55042.
62. Information on the Brighton Magazine is scarce; for possible bibliographic
detail see Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum,
vol. 38, pt. 1 (London: British Museum, 1885). The single issue of The
Biographical Magazine was published in June 1877 by Trbner and Co.,
London.
63. Quoted in Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle, p. 546. Kaplan notes that Carlyles niece
Mary admitted that she could see that the article . . . is written in no
malicious spirit (p. 545).
64. For discussion of Martins attempt to raise cash in the 1870s by selling William
Hiltons portrait of Clare, which he had bought at auction in 1865, see my
John Clare, William Hilton, and the National Portrait Gallery, JCSJ, 32
(2013), 525.
66. The evidence indicates that Macmillan had directly enlisted William Henry
Smith, then rst Lord of the Admiralty, to lobby Disraeli on the pension.
Smith is famously remembered as the founder of the W. H. Smith bookseller
business. See the Macmillan letters of 31 January and 10 April, 1879 in BL Add
MS 55042.
67. Martin to Macmillan, 12 January 1882. BL Add MS 55042. The transcription
here and in the two references immediately following have been generously
provided by Alysoun Sanders, archivist of Palgrave Macmillan, and are taken
from the notes of S. H. Steinberg housed in the Macmillan archive.
68. Ibid., Martin to Macmillan, 4 July 1882.
70. Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway, 2 vols.
(Boston: Houghton, Mifin and Co., 1904), II, pp. 4078. Martin lived at 22
Lady Margaret Road, Kentish Town.
71. Ibid., pp. 4089.
72. Conway, II, p. 408.
73. Life, p. 137.
74. Ibid., p. 160.
chapter 7
John Clares deaths: poverty, education

and poetry
Simon Kvesi
John Clares access to education was dependent on the death of two of his
siblings. By his own account, that his parents had a small family of four
children meant that Clares mother could sustain her hopfull ambition . . .
of being able to make me a good scholar.1 From birth, Clare was marked
out as the child most likely to die:
in my early years I was of a waukly constitution, so much so that my mother
often told me she never coud have dreamed I shoud live to make a man,
while the sister that was born with me being a twin was as much to the
contrary a ne livley bonny wench whose turn it was to die rst for she livd
but a few weeks2
It is no surprise that two of Clares siblings died in infancy; Clare grew up
in a period when up to two out of every ve infants died before they
reached their fth year, as Roy Porter surmises.3 If the death of a twin sister
and another sibling freed the Clare family enough to support the boys
learning, poverty stymied such plans and meant that Clare repeatedly had
to work alongside his father in the elds. Yet Clare would have it that the
persistence of his mother to invest in her boys education won out even if,
paradoxically, she is described by her son as having beleved the higher
parts of learning was the blackest arts of witchcraft and that no other means
coud attain them.4 Suspicion of education is characteristic of inhabitants
of Helpston, Clare implies. Many thought Clares learning a folly, and
his scholarly habits crazd or even criminal.5 In his Sketches, Clare
reinforces the precariousness of his educations existence, in the context
of rural poverty, with its perennial threats of deprivation, destitution and
death. Clares health is a constant problem too:
I my self was of a week const[i]tution and a severe indisposition keeping me
from work for a twelvemonthe ran us in debt we had back rents to make
up, shoe bills, and Bakers etc etc my fathers asistance was now disabled
and the whole weight fell upon myself . . . my indisposition, (for I cannot
146
John Clares deaths: poverty, education and poetry 147
call it illness) origionated in fainting ts, the cause of which I always
imagined came from seeing when I was younger a man name Thomas
Drake after he had fell off a load of hay and broke his neck the gastly
palness of death struck such a terror on me that I coud not forget it for years
and my dreams was constantly wanderings in church yards, digging graves,
seeing spirits in charnel houses etc etc in my ts I swooned away without
a struggle and felt nothing more then if Id been in a dreamless sleep after I
came to my self but I was always warnd of their coming by a chillness and
dithering that seemd to creep from ones toe ends till it got up to ones head,
when I turnd sensless and fell; sparks as if re often ashd from my eyes or
seemd to do so when I dropt, which I layd to the fall these ts was stopt by
a Mr Arnold M.D. of Stamford . . . tho every spring and autum since the
accident happend my fears are agitated to an extreem degree and the dread
of death involves me in a stupor of chilling indisposition as usual6
This gothic tale provides dramatic origins for Clares psychological
problems, compounded by ongoing physiological issues and their
impact on his ability to earn money. Jonathan Bate considers this a
fanciful passage,7 yet its manner of presentation is central to Clares
understanding of his own psychological development: it is as if his
subsequent mental life was blighted by post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is the birth story of a prophetpoet, re ashing from his eyes; he is
a wild visionary, a super-sensitized madman whose gift of perception is
born of trauma, and the macabre. Clare formulates a similar transforma-
tion in the poem First Love. At a deathly moment, when the natural
world is inverted as love overwhelms, poetry pours out: I could not see a
single thing/Words from my eyes did start (Later Poems, II, 677). The
speaker is never the same again: shocked and transgured. Clare extra-
polates this experience beyond himself in an early poem, Lines Written
While Viewing Some Remains of an Human Body in Lolham Lane
(Early Poems, I, 1718), which speculates that the mangled remains to
which the poem bears witness might have been those of a genius poet,
whom Clare worries might be forgotten. Fanciful indeed, visionary
certainly, gothic perhaps this is nevertheless a poetic journey founded
in a gruesome, upsetting spectacle. In his Sketches Clare says that being
witness to this death at a formative age precipitated thoughts of
monetising his secret poetic scribblings. Even at his most prophetic
moments, even when thrown or disturbed, Clare exhibits a practicality,
born of sheer material need.
Adulthood brings with it another bodily threat to Clares existence, in
which death is corporeally bound up with sexual desire. Displaying the
impetuous honesty of a latter-day Rousseau, the Sketches confess:
148 SIMON KVESI
temptations were things that I rarely resisted when the partiallity of the
moment gave no time for reection I was sure to seize it what ever might be
the consequence . . . my easy nature, either in drinking or any thing else, was
always ready to submit to persuasions of proigate companions who often
led me into snares and laughd at me in the bargain when they had
done so. such times as at fairs, coaxed about to bad houses, those painted
pills of poison, by whom many ungarded youths are hurried to destruction,
like the ox to the slaughter house without knowing the danger that awaits them
in the end here not only my health but my life has often been on the eve of its
sacrace by an illness too well known, and to[o] disgusting to mention.8
Socialized into venereal disease, a holy fool led astray by the corruptions of
male desire, Clare is brought close to death because of straightforward
carnality. Whether Clares self-diagnosis was right, or whether this story of
brothel visits is the exaggerated product of a guilt-ridden hypochondriac,
we might never know. Either way, Clare evidently considered such sexual
experiences pivotal in determining his development.
To summarize, this prose autobiography locates two deathly contexts as
being the catalysts for the poetic career of Clare both of them traumatic:
rst, a reduced number of siblings frees up the money and the parental
attention to provide him with foundational learning. Second, being wit-
ness to a corpse which had suffered a violent end leads to a dread of death
that stimulates a visionary capacity. The impairment of the fainting ts
that follow in turn give practicable impetus to his desire to be a published
poet, while uncontrolled sexual desire threatens to mortally and morally
wound all of his plans for a public life. The poets efforts are impelled by a
desire to relieve the poverty of all around him, not least his parents, for
whom his literary money (as he happily estimated it in 1821 at least) would
act as recompense for the rough beginnings of life bid their tottering steps
decline in peaceful tranquillity to their long home, the grave.9 Graves
bookend this presentation of a edgling literary life: from birth of a womb
shared with a soon-dead twin, to poetry providing solace to the nal
destination of his parents. This frame of morbidity stuck with Clare; in
the 1840s, for example, he wrote Infants are but cradles for the grave/&
death the nurse as soon as life begins.10
The Sketches were sent to his publisher, John Taylor, on 3 April 1821
though possibly not for publication.11 At this time Clare anticipated that
publishing would provide relief from the poverty he and his family had
always endured. As it turned out, he was nave in the extreme about how
much money could be made from poetry. He could not know then that
having peaked in 1820 his rst year on the London literary scene poetry
publishing was about to suffer a precipitous decline in fortunes.12 It was the
wrong time to start out as a poor poet.
Partly because none of his subsequent works sold better than the rst
of 1820, Clares dread of death would have good cause to stick with him
for the rest of his life, leading to restless night fears13 and, possibly, to
more serious debilitations in later years. As I have suggested, some of
these deathly hauntings seem to be extensions of Clares intense, even
violent, apprehension of the world around him. But other manifestations
of the threat of death are impersonal, imposed on Clare by a literary
culture that whether for commercial positioning or moralistic instruc-
tion makes death the overriding context for the labouring-class poet.
The desire to be a poet was meant to be fatal for someone like Clare, and
so his story was readily and variously deployed as warning or rallying call
for those who might follow him. This chapter will consider such
responses to Clare from the beginnings of his career, through the stages
of his impoverished obscurity, on to his presumed death, and, nally, to
his actual death.
Clares position as a poetic phenomenon became so overcast by the
shadow of death that it seemed to negate the possibility of a literary estate
or posthumous legacy. Indeed, if Romantic poetry is characterized by
writers who gnaw away at their future reputations, at their posthumous
remains, and at the transitory nature of fame, then, in this regard at least,
Clare is quite typical.14 But there are specic social and economic dimen-
sions to Clares situation which marked him out as being part of a distinct
tradition. With hindsight, it is as if the doomed morbidity which grips the
speaker of Resolution and Independence leads directly to the social
poetic position of Clare, via the wobbly stepping stones of Chatterton,
Burns, and, now, a trepidatious Wordsworth:
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perishd in its pride;
Of Him who walkd in glory and in joy
Behind his plough, upon the mountain side:
By our own spirits are we deied;
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.15
Clare was deliberately pitched at this succession of poets which serves as a
route map pre-determining how his work was to be received. From before
Clares time through to our own, poets and critics have loved a tale or
backdrop of doom and death, of disparagement, failure and neglect,16 as do
150 SIMON KVESI
publishers promoting their charges. And so it was for the way Clare was
presented at the outset of his career. Here Taylor introduces Clares rst
collection in 1820:
[T]hough Poets in this country have seldom been fortunate men, yet he is,
perhaps, the least favoured by circumstances, and the most destitute of
friends, of any that ever existed . . . One of our poets has gained great credit
by his exterior delineations of what the poor man suffers; but in the reality of
wretchedness, when the iron enters into the soul, there is a tone which
cannot be imitated. Clare has here an unhappy advantage over other poets.
The most miserable of them were not always wretched. Penury and disease
were not constantly at their heels, nor was pauperism their only prospect.
But he has no other, for the lot which has befallen his father, may, with too
much reason, be looked forward to as his own portion.17
The poet who has been successful in his exterior delineations of what the
poor man suffers is Wordsworth. Poverty poetry is en vogue, and Taylor
hopes this book will latch on to it. Yet even at this early stage, Clare is
contradistinguished from the forerunner of rurally situated poetry about
the poor: Clare is someone who lived the sort of impoverished life of the
elds that other poets could describe only through exterior, if sympa-
thetic, observations. Clare is said to live in depths and qualities of impov-
erishment that Wordsworth and his ilk including Taylors anticipated
readership simply could not fathom. It is almost as if Clare writes out of a
different species of deprivation. He is a superman of poverty, being least
favoured by circumstances, and the most destitute of friends, of any that ever
existed (my italicized emphasis). Clare is the human abject, the ur-pauper,
the poorest poet that ever did exist, sui generis. If other poets follow
Thomas Gray to churchyards touristically to meditate on mortality and
death, but then head off for a good dinner and a warm bath, here a paupers
grave is already dug for Clare. It is only a matter of time. The type of
isolating threat that Taylor builds here will frame Clares career, from the
cradle of this rst publication in 1820 to the graveyard of newspaper notices
in 1864.
It would be a mistake to see this as a mere imposition as Taylor
tailoring Clare to t a perceived market hunger for the rural original, for a
genuine voice of poverty. Taylors sensitized sympathy for Clares lot is a
motivation which Taylor seems desperate to have replicated in the reader-
ship. Taylors superlatives suggest that he is overwhelmed by Clares
circumstances not that he is cold to them, or exploitative of them, as
other critics and editors have variously implied.18 If ravaging poverty and
looming death together form a marketing construction Taylor deliberately
intended, it is not without a rich source in Clares own verse. Clare was
fully aware that poverty threatened to shorten life brutally, abruptly. He
frequently drew on the threat of death in his verse, in poems ranging from
the paradoxical (Invite to Eternity), to the strangely celebratory (The
Soldiers Grave), to the purely apocalyptic (Song Last Day).
Even when he is idealizing his dream home in his youth, the ever-
present pains of labour mean that Clare cannot entirely shake off dire
portents.19 The Wish (Early Poems, I, 4350) is structured around a
conditional fantasy where the speaker considers the ideal dwelling that
would free him from all labouring strife (line 3). Salivating over full
cupboards, beneath a roof framed by british oak (line 15), and topped
with stone rather than thatch, [b]ecause slate roofs will not so easily re
(line 18), the speaker builds for himself a safe, warm, snug cottage, with
books in eightvo size or more (line 48), shelves to sit them on, shiny
kitchenware, good views and an expansive garden described luxuriously
here. Years later Clare would reduce woman to an emotional thing and
exclude her from his posthumous green garden, imagining a heavenly
world, where woman never smiled or wept (Later Poems, I, 397, line 14)
in the ever-prominent poem I Am. Similarly, the young Clare cannot
imagine a peaceful, labour-free home with a wife:
With triing in the garden now and then
Which nds employment for the greatest men
Each coming day the labour should renew
And this is all the labour I would do,
The other hours Id spend in letterd ease
To read or study just as that might please,
This is the way my plan of life should be
Unmaried Happy in Contentment free.
For he thats pesterd with a noisey wife
Can neer enjoy that quietnes of life
That does to life belongTherefore Id neer
Let Hymens torch within my cot appear.
For all domestic needs that did require
Womans assistanceId a servant hire
(Early Poems, I, 49, lines 20821)
This is a poem all about a desire to avoid labour: even the effort of a
domestic relationship seems a ludicrous and irrational burden for someone
with serious writerly aspirations. But this is no monks cell, no ascetic
hermits retreat. He knows well that literary pursuits depend upon a
writers domestic security so he furnishes his home with a female servant.
152 SIMON KVESI
Before we laugh, lets remember that the fantasy is not idle. This is a boy
looking at his most likely future: a life of rural labour. The Wish is driven
by a desperate desire to escape the seeming doom, the certain pains, of a
labourers life which, other than poetry, is all he can see before him:
My eyes shall wander oer
A Pleasent prospect, Acres just threescore,
And this the measure of my whole domains
Should be divided into woods and plains,
Oer the fair plains should roam a single cow
For not one foot should ever want the plough
This would be toiling so Id never crave
One single thing where labour makes a slave.
Tho health from exercise is said to spring
Foolhardy toil that health will never bring.
But stead of healthdire ills a numerous train
Will shed their torments with afictive pain.
Be as it will I hold in spite of strife
That health neer rises from a labouring life . . .
(Early Poems, I, 48, lines 189202)
This is as close as Clare gets to adopting the mantle of estate ownership
in his work, to easing himself into the cosy position of a middle-class
gentleman, albeit of modest means. And though modest, this dream was
completely unrealizable. The capitalized Pleasant prospect has the ring of
a phrase lifted straight out of popular travel writing, or theorizations of the
picturesque. The view afforded by the position of his domains is to be a
controlling one. But this project is explicit that its ambition is not aesthetic,
but pragmatic: to secure his existence against the blunt realities of a
labouring life a future that intrudes suddenly here and throws the speaker
back to a leaden mortality. In an early untitled stanza Clare talks of taking
his corpse to work, and continues:
Deuce take a labourers life thought I
They talk o slaves els where
I sees much choice in foreighn parts
As I do in Slavery here (Early Poems, I, 352, lines 58)
Similarly, a labouring life for the speaker of The Wish means a miserable
and painful route to an early death. He hopes instead for a single cow and
a female servant to milk it, while he watches from his perfectly positioned
chamber window (line 79). The jarring combination of poetry with
labour is too painfully paradoxical to contemplate. There will be no
ploughing here, and no plough-boy poets either.
We now move two decades forward, to a less hopeful time for Clare. In
1840, Clare died, in the press at least.20 His public career had begun dying
long before, from 1827s sales failure of The Shepherds Calendar through to
the reduced appearance of The Rural Muse in 1835, his nal book. With few
facts to hand, the press took Clares absence from the public scene to its
next natural stage. Starting in the Halifax Express, and repeated in The
Times, news of the poets death rapidly spread across the nation in June of
1840. The curt line in The Times ran The poet Clare died some months ago
at the Lunatic Asylum at York Halifax Express. This was repeated, often
verbatim, in papers such as The Morning Post, The Standard, The Northern
Star and Leeds General Advertiser, the Hampshire Advertiser and Salisbury
Guardian, The Examiner, The Belfast News-Letter, The Derby Mercury and
Trewmans Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser.21 Clares
name still had enough currency to be reported across Britain.
Matthew Allen corrected the error in The Times and again, news spread
nationally and rapidly.22 Clare was alive, though poverty remained a threat,
as Allens letter attests:
The Northamptonshire peasant poet, John Clare, is a patient in my
establishment at Highbeach, and has been so since July, 1837. He is at
present in excellent health, and looks very well, and is in mind, though
full of very strange delusions, in a much more comfortable and happy
state than he was when he rst came. He was then exceedingly miserable,
every instant bemoaning his poverty, and his mind did not appear so
much lost and deranged as suspended in its movements by the oppressive
and permanent state of anxiety, and fear, and vexation, produced by
the excitement of excessive attery at one time, and neglect at another,
his extreme poverty and over exertion of body and mind, and no wonder
that his feeble bodily frame, with his wonderful native powers of mind,
was overcome.
I had then not the slightest hesitation in saying that if a small pension
could be obtained for him, he would have recovered instantly, and most
probably remained well for life. I did all I could to obtain it for him, but
without the slightest success. Indeed, some noblemen have withdrawn the
pittance they allowed him, his wife, and family, and most are in arrears.
Allen grasped the opportunity to bring Clare back to the public conscious-
ness, and at the end of the letter asks readers to donate to the poets cause.
Either we can think kindly, that Allen did this to help Clare nd the
nancial stability that he thought was undermining the poets mental
health and that, previous to his admittance, had led to an incapacitating
malnourishment; or we can think cynically, that Allen did this to help pay
Clares trustees outstanding residential fees.23 Clares time with Allen has
154 SIMON KVESI
been considered widely,24 so for our current purposes we will focus upon
the manner in which the doctor repeatedly ties Clares health to his dire
poverty. What Allen wants to see is bills paid, and Clare in that same
worry-free position he fantasized about when young in The Wish, albeit
with the addition of a wife and seven children.
Allens corrective note garnered widespread attention and led to the rst
substantial publication of Clares work since 1835. An essay about Clare,
including twenty new poems, appeared across two issues of the English
Journal in May 1841.25 The author Cyrus Redding, owner and editor of this
Saturday weekly, set out his stall on the opening page of his rst issue in
January of the same year:
Our object now is to mount a step higher, still catering for rich and poor
alike, for all who desire to store their minds with facts, and awaken the
imagination to agreeable associations . . . As the empire of letters under
which the mind is cultivated constitutes a republic, so should its benets
belong to all and its fruits be equally and universally attainable. Knowledge
is no heritage of a condition, but the certain reward of those who seriously
labour in its pursuit . . . It remains now that we become an intellectual and a
thinking people, and that can only happen through the general cultivation
of the intellect . . . Those who are born to toil, may still nd time to exercise
thought, if their pursuits are merely mechanical, by employing the mind
upon agreeable and useful subjects during the time of labour. Bloomeld
was a remarkable instance of this, for he composed his Farmers Boy while
working at his trade with six or seven others.26
With social inclusiveness foremost of his aspirations, the rst writer
Redding mentions in his new publication is the shoemaker poet
Bloomeld the most signicant English gure in shaping Clares
sense of a labouring-class poetic tradition.27 The moderate yet progres-
sive Redding leapt at the chance to interview a living Bloomeld in John
Clare. It is not the aim here to consider Reddings account of his visit to
High Beach, as this story has been told many times, and has even been
novelized and dramatized.28 Instead, working towards the theme of
death, I will focus on a writer who knew Redding, who wrote to
Bloomeld, whose work appears in the English Journal, and who might
well have visited Epping Forest to see Clare, but who has mostly slipped
under the radar of Clare scholars, receiving just a brief mention in the
Tibbles biography.29
Inspired by Reddings call to readers to donate generously to Clare,
James Dacres Devlin published a poem in the English Journal in June 1841,
which I reproduce with its footnote in full:
A REFLECTION
on reading the appeal in behalf of the poet clare
in the english journal, may 15.
by james devlin.
Alas, poor Clare! and so it still hath been;
And thou seemst but another with the rest
A Burns, a Bloomfield, and the Boy unblessed,
Who sought in Redcliffes aisles his fears to screen,
Doubtful to let the clever truth be seen,
So played the fame-prank of a ghostly guest!
And they, the spell-cursed of the Island Green;
And he, with life and love alike oppressed:*
Theseaye, theseand others, through all times,
And every place, have felt the trying doom
The want of solacebread! the tear that grimes,
The cruel fate, denying living room!
We build the palace gaol to hold our crimes;
At best, we give to Genius but a tomb!
* The cases of Burns, Bloomfield, and Chatterton, are of the
familiar misfortunes of our knowledge. The world has already rung of
the Inspired ploughman, and of Wordsworths Sleepless Boy, and
may yet hear more of the Gentle Giles. Boyce was of Ireland, and fell a
victim to the bad taste of the age, when the ashes of intellect were
constrained to administer to the destructive applause of the midnight
wine-bibber: and Dermody, also of Irelandeven in his childhood a
prodigywas thrown into the same desperate fascination. He lies buried
at Lewisham, near Deptford, a plaintive verse, of his own composition,
being scratched over the stone slab that covers the remains of the Poet.
The story of Tannahill, a native of Cumberland, is more isolated. The
conjoined sweetness and earnest power of many of his lyrics have great
interest. He was one of those, who, too sensitive and fervent for the many
cares which gathered around him, felt the madness of the mind batter
down his hopes; and, in a moment of melancholy desperation, drowned
himself. The immediate cause, it is said, was love-disappointment.
However gratifying it was to be sung of, as he sang of his charmer, still it
was perilous to unite herself, inextricably, with the unsevering curse of
poetry and poverty. She refused her hand, and that broke his heart. But
Clare! he still lives; and, what is more, there are those in his divided home,
who alone live for him! and, if money can help, shall it not be given? Aye,
even to the penny of the poor! At least, he shall have mine.30
Devlin the shoemaker reaches out to a fellow traveller, another hand-
producer as he labels himself,31 in much the same way that Bloomeld did
to Clare, and as Clare did to Allan Cunningham in turn.32 Devlin follows
156 SIMON KVESI
Wordsworth in building a succession of famous poets who have suffered

for their art. In his footnote, Devlin extends Wordsworths tradition
with a number of other case studies of impoverished poets and details
their neglect and deaths. Along with other poems, Devlin published a
startling two-part essay on the poor in the English Journal, which is rare
in its moving detail about how the poor lived, and in its quiet rage.33
Under his pseudonym The Trialist Devlin published a collection of
poetry and prose in the late 1830s, while publications under his own
name made him the foremost reformist voice in shoemaking.34 Eric
Hobsbawm and Joan Wallach Scott consider Devlin to have been the
best craftsman in the London trade.35 Shoemaking was the most politi-
cally active of all trades in the nineteenth century and Devlin was a
substantial gure at a crucial moment in Chartism.36 Clare would have
read Devlins co-authored letter and poem to Bloomeld as it was
included in an appendix of correspondence in the posthumously pub-
lished Remains of 1824.37
Devlin wrote the rst and only book-length poem dedicated to Clare
published during his lifetime.38 His imperatively entitled Go to Epping! was
produced by the pre-eminent radical publisher in London, Efngham
Wilson, a determined champion of a free press, leading publisher of the
reformists, and pillar of the popular education movement.39 For the title,
Devlin plays on the notoriety of the Epping Hunt as having been an
attractive 1820s pursuit for all manner of riff-raff from London famous in
the annals of cockneyism, as Pierce Egan puts it.40 Indeed, so snootily
downgraded did the Epping Hunt become, that in 1829 Thomas Hood
published a popular, teasing account of it, his comic verse illustrated by
George Cruikshank.41 Hood had been central in the London Magazine
scene, and Clare met him at Taylors dinners.42 Epping Forest had also
been a location for boxing matches, a fact that cannot have been lost on
Clare, who was reaching for masculine empowerment in 1841 through
fantasies of prize-ghting as a Regency-period champion, Jack Randall,
and through writing as one of the Fancys most famous followers, Byron.43
Randall served in the corner for a ght in Epping Forest during the Fancys
heyday.44 By 1841, both hunting and boxing had long departed, leaving
Devlin to play with cultural traces of Epping Forests signicance as a
socially inclusive entertainment destination.
No longer extant in full, Devlins poem surfaces only as fragments
quoted in a review in the Chartist weekly Cleaves Penny Gazette in June
1841.45 The reviewer feels sympathy for Clare, and, while charmed by the
poem overall, is perturbed by Devlins politicization of poverty:
It is of no great length, but there are many passages very far above average
merit, possessing strength with sweetness, thought with melody, within its
compass. Yet, as an exponent of the worldliness that pervades society, we
would fain not wholly accord with its truthfulness in some particulars. We
hopetrust earnestly, that the light of Poesy has yet power amid the
reckless money rout, and the thronged battle-eld of Politics. We will
quote lines, that for their own sakes, as poetry, are to us pleasing and forcible.
Go to Epping! will you go?
Are you deaf, or blind, or lame?
There the forest trophies grow,
There abides the son of Fame!
Would you hear the blithe birds gladness,
Would you see the Poets sadness
Fallingfallen into madness!
GoI bid you go!
The reviewer quotes only this stanza and the following two which,
together, at least give a sense of Devlins political rage at what Clares
suffering symbolizes:
Tis a feeling coarse, as cold
That nor worth nor beauty sees,
But as the hand may actual hold,
And never in these reveries.
Most mistakenmost deceiving,
Is this protless believing;
There are truths of Fancys weaving,
Firm as eer was told!
Oh! If ever thou hast dwelt
On the wrong the Poet grieves;
Oh! If thou hast ever felt
What it is that so deceives;
If, like him, thou hast hope-striven,
Dreamt the dream that seemd of Heaven,
Be the holy fault forgiven,
And in kindness melt!
This might not amount to memorable poetry in itself, though to give
Devlin the benet of the doubt, it is possible that the reviewer given the
gestures towards issues of taste omits the most intriguing stanzas. I quote
Devlin at length to illustrate just what Clare could mean to a fellow hand-
producer poet. Devlin wants the son of Fame, surrounded by forest
trophies (echoing the departed sports, perhaps?), to be a celebrated living
tourist attraction; not a grave or sepulchre to visit, or literary curio, but
158 SIMON KVESI
instead a gure at the centre of a call for socio-economic change. Devlin

uses his example and the tradition of labouring-class poets suffering for
a wider cause of improving the lot of the poor, though Clare never became
an icon for the Chartists.46 Pressingly, and more personally, Devlin is
desperate to ensure that Clare does not succumb to the weight of poverty
and deprivation, as had so many poor poets.
There is no record of Devlin visiting Clare at High Beach, nor of Clare
reading the shoemakers pamphlet poem. This was an especially compli-
cated time for Clare, as he had Byron, Mary Joyce, Randall and escape on
his mind. If anyone had followed up on Devlins call, and had visited
Epping Forest to meet Clare, they probably would have missed him. The
pamphlet was published just a few weeks before Clare took leave of Allens
asylum, and left Epping for good, on his Journey Out of Essex, in July of
that summer.47
From December 1841 until his death in 1864, Clare was committed to
the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The successful writing
partnership of husband and wife William and Mary Howitt visited
him twice in the early 1840s.48 While neither appears to have written
about these visits, William did talk of it with dramatist, rural writer, and
poet Mary Russell Mitford.49 In 1850 she published her second-hand
version of the visit:
A few years ago he was visited by a friend of mine, himself a poet of the
people, who gave me a most interesting account of the then state of his
intellect. His delusions were at that time very singular in their character.
Whatever he read, whatever recurred to him from his former reading, or
happened to be mentioned in conversation, became impressed on his mind
as a thing that he had witnessed and acted in. My friend was struck with a
narrative of the execution of Charles the First, recounted by Clare, as a
transaction that occurred yesterday, and of which he was an eye-witness, a
narrative the most graphic and minute, with an accuracy as to costume and
manners far exceeding what would probably have been at his command if
sane . . . Or he would relate the battle of the Nile, and the death of Lord
Nelson with the same perfect keeping, especially as to seamanship, fancying
himself one of the sailors who had been in the action, and dealing out
nautical phrases with admirable exactness and accuracy, although it is
doubtful if he ever saw the sea in his life.50
Mitfords version of William Howitts July 1844 visit constructs a Clare
who is out of time, and dislocated. His madness is modelled on a collapsing
of fact with ction, past with present; the sad life of the enclosed asylum in
which the stories are related, contrasted with the exciting lives of the
historically magnicent and unbounded. His poetic sensibility is evoked in
the remnants of an ability to tell stories with an apparently insanity-
proving amount of accuracy. History and fantasy spill into each other,
and we are to believe that Clare as a controlling subject is lost. It is
instructive that Clares stories are about glorious deaths. He plucks two
male gures from distant ends of English history: meritocratic and mon-
archic, long distant and relatively recent yet both gureheads, and
gurations, of a nation in dire trouble. The end of these two lives were
to become state-quaking moments, no matter what side of the Napoleonic
or Civil wars was adopted by the teller. These popular, heroic stories of
geographic extensiveness are contrasted by Mitford with observations of
the tellers supposedly limited horizons. Whether Clare appreciated that
his own death was likely to be less monumental than a Kings or a Vice
Admirals, some twenty years before he was to die in that same asylum, is
unknowable. The overall effect is pathetic: lives lost in the eye of historical
storms, aped by a life lived as if plucked out of history altogether; the
remembered, heroic dead, contrasted with the forgotten poet, presumed by
many to be long dead, but who clings onto these tales of monumental men
with an eye-witnesss breathlessness. The disenfranchised, de-historicized,
parochialized poet reaches desperately for security in stories of masculine
power, of international consequence. The Romantic poets concerns about
fame and their longevity in the memories of future generations runs wildly,
excitedly in Clare, and latches onto characters whose fame is certain to be
everlasting.
Mitford asserts that Clare is the lucky beneciary of the triumph of
humanity and of science in the present day that is the liberal asylum.51 She
uses Clares example to mount an impassioned warning to peasants and
their putative patrons:
We cannot, I repeat, do too much for John Clare; he has a claim to it as a
man of genius suffering under the severest visitation of Providence. But let
us beware of indulging ourselves by encouraging the class of pseudo-peasant
poets who spring up on every side, and are amongst the most pitiable objects
in creation. One knows them by sight upon the pathway, from their
appearance of vagrant misery, an appearance arising from the sense of
injustice and of oppression under which they suffer, the powerless feeling
that they have claims which the whole world refuses to acknowledge, a
perpetual and growing sense of injury. It is a worse insanity than John
Clares, and one for which there is no asylum. Victims to their own day-
dreams, are they! They have heard of Burns and of Chatterton; they have a
certain knack of rhyming, although even that is by no means necessary to
such a delusion; they nd an audience whom their intense faith in their own
160 SIMON KVESI
power conspires to delude; and their quiet, their content, their every pro-
spect is ruined for ever. It is this honest and unconquerable persuasion of
their own genius that makes it impossible to reason with or convince them.
Their faith in their own powers their racking sense of the injustice of all
about them, makes ones heart ache. It is impossible for the sternest or the
sturdiest teller of painful truths to disenchant them, and the consequence is
as obvious as it is miserable . . . They believe poetry to be their work, and
they will do no other. Then comes utter poverty. They haunt the ale-house,
they drink, they sicken, they starve. I have known many such.
Happily there is one cure, not for individual cases, but for the entire class;
a slow but a sure remedy . . . Education, wide and general, not mere learning
to read, but making discreet and wise use of the power, and the nuisance will
be abated at once and for ever. Let our peasants become as intelligent as our
artisans, and we shall have no more prodigies, no more martyrs.52
The deluded peasant poet is doomed from the outset, and is disabled by the
social and educational over-reach of his self-displacement. Aggrandized by
himself and the fawning of others into a permanent state of embittered
social awkwardness and inherent humiliation, the peasant poet is the
product not of intermittent oases of literacy, but of a piecemeal, threadbare
approach to the democracy of education. Presumably if her readers were as
roundly educated as Mitford herself, they too would recognize these
vagrant interlopers not just by their destitution and hunger, but also
by their air of benighted grievance.
Mitfords logic takes her to a principled role for educational reform,
which would have a levelling effect in raising the peasant onto a utilizable
platform of pragmatic, empowering and fecund literacy and understand-
ing, which is opposed to the barren plains of inappropriate poetic aspira-
tion. The end result of such reform, inspired negatively by Clares example,
would be that the newly level-headed working-classes would forego poetic
musings altogether.
For our conclusion, we now turn to a posthumous assessment of Clare,
published in October 1864, by which time the news of Clares actual death
on 20 May had circulated nationally.53 Clares story is again deployed as a
warning, but here is steered to say something about English society. The
obituary in the Saturday supplement to the Manchester Weekly Times
celebrates the life of a French poet called Jacques Jasmin, an Occitan or
langue dOc poet who died that same month. Jasmin was Clares junior by
ve years, and for the anonymous writer, of comparable social stock:
The life of the last of the Troubadours certainly forms a remarkable story,
and the more remarkable if we contrast it with a similar life in our own
country which came to an end not many months ago, John Clare, the
peasant-poet of Northamptonshire, who died last spring, was a trouba-
dour fully as inspired by the divine gift of song as Jacques Jasmin. Like
the latter, too, he was born in abject poverty; and like him he sang of trees
and owers and green elds, and the simple life of labourers and peasants,
the lowliest of mankind. John Clare was born in 1793, and Jacques Jasmin
in 1798; and the English minstrel came out with his rst volume, Rural
Life, in 1818, while his French brother followed, in 1825, with Mi cal
mouri. So for the career of both poets alike, with the additional likeness
that the success and fame of both came at once upon the rst publication
of their works. At this point, however, the lives of the English and of the
French poet begin to differ widely, ending with the one in a madhouse
and an obscure grave, and the other in a public funeral and proposed
marble statue. There is something singularly characteristic of the two
nations in the career of these two poets. John Clare, drawn overnight
from utter obscurity, by an article in the Quarterly Review, feted and
praised by noble lords and ladies, and made a nine days lion in the
metropolis, found himself, after his sudden access of fame, never more
at home behind the plough. While, on the other hand, his proud heart
revolted against living upon what seemed to him charity, and, like a true
poet, hating to exhibit his poetry and himself before gaping multitudes,
he at the same time found the hard labours of the eld too uncongenial for
his mind and his delicate physical organisation, and before long fell a
victim to these antagonistic elements. But see how Jacques Jasmin, the
French Clare, gets out of this fatal struggle.54
What follows for the French Clare is a story of state honours, money,
parties and gifts, the full patronage of aristocracy and royalty, and a
solidly decent professional life following Jasmins literary success as the
coiffeur poet (the author gets some details of Jasmins life factually
wrong;55 Gilchrists Quarterly essay on Clare appeared in May 1820;56
while Clares rst book was in fact published in 1820). This poet-barber
did well nancially and lived a long, healthy life and the fervour of his
poetry lost nothing from his daily unromantic avocation. In Jasmins
example and expressly not in Clares the author nds that there is
nothing to show . . . that true poetry will suffer from association with any
trade or handicraft. The author makes a rm point that in contrast to
other countries, England neglects its poets, and always allows them to
die in penury, no matter the riches they bestow upon society through the
gift of their verse (John Wilson made exactly the same point when
discussing Clares lot in 183557). The author is clear that England sees
and allows indeed, expects a damaging disjuncture between social
position, occupation and poetic writing. The French Clare illustrates
that this need not be so.
162 SIMON KVESI
Clare was always the model of the fatally doomed poor poet, a warning
to any who might follow, and a nationally-dening marker of how
England treats its poets, and its poor. The hand-producer tradition that
enabled Clare to get a foothold in the literary world could be modelled in a
noble fashion in the hands of a craftsman such as Devlin, who implores us
to build a community of support and sympathy for Clare. But, far more
commonly, the labouring-class poet was thought to be doomed and iso-
lated at the outset. Certainly, a sense of inevitable tragedy dominated
Clares critical reception in life, while the assumption that he would always
struggle with the jarring combination of poverty and poetry of labour
and literary culture continued to inform his literary legacy and reputation
following his death.
Notes
1. Sketches in the Life of John Clare, By Himself, p. 3.
2. Ibid., pp. 23.
3. Roy Porter, Medicine, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British
Culture 17761832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 1707 (p. 171).
5. Ibid., pp. 60, 78.
6. Ibid., pp. 1819.
7. Bate, pp. 2523.
9. Ibid., p. 5.
10. My transcription of the rst two lines of an untitled short-form Spenserian
stanza, Nor. 19, p. 6. The Oxford editors date the poem to 1845 (Later Poems,
I, 165), which year is part of the notebooks opening inscription. The note-
book also contains two doodled references to the year 49 (Nor. 19, pp. 52,
115). No other possible year dating appears. Other references to Eliza Cook
(whose poems were published in 1845 and 1848) and Dowager Queen Adelaide
(who died in 1849), for example might situate at least some of the contents
towards the end of the 1840s (pp. 24, 63).
11. See Bate, p. 222.
12. See Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 17891832 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 13942.
14. For excellent considerations of death and Romanticism, see Andrew Bennett,
Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), and Paul Westover, Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead,
17501860 (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2012).
15. William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence, Poems in Two
Volumes, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807), 1, p. 92
(no line numbers).
16. Critics constantly complain about the neglect of Clare. For the latest con-
tribution see John Dugdale, Week in Books, Guardian, Review section,
17 May 2014, p. 5.
17. John Taylor, Introduction, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
(London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820), pp. 7, 9.
18. Correctives to versions of Taylors supposed bad faith are offered by:
Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), pp. 20661; Sales, especially pp. 6675; Bate, especially pp. 56375;
Tim Chilcott, A Publisher and His Circle: The Life and Work of John Taylor,
Keatss Publisher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), and The Shepherds
Calendar: Manuscript and Published Version, ed. Tim Chilcott (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2006), pp. viixxviii.
19. See the headnote to The Wish, Early Poems, I, p. 43, and Letters, p. 431.
20. A brief account of this death notice is used as the springboard for a ne
analysis of fame by Jason N. Goldsmith in The Promiscuity of Print: John
Clares Don Juan and the Culture of Romantic Celebrity, Studies in English
Literature, 15001900, Nineteenth Century, 46.4 (Autumn, 2006), 80332
(8034).
21. The Times, 17 June 1840, p. 5. News of Clares death appeared in Morning Post,
16 June 1840, p. 5, and 17 June 1840, p. 3; Standard, 16 June 1840, p. 2;
Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 20 June 1840, p. 8; Hampshire
Advertiser and Salisbury Guardian, 20 June 1840, p. 4; Londons Examiner, 21
June 1840, p. 398; Belfast News-Letter, 23 June 1840, p. 4; Derby Mercury, 24
June 1840, p. 1; Trewmans Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish
Advertiser, 25 June 1840, p. 4.
22. Allens letter was published in The Times, 23 June 1840, p. 5. Corrective
notes, some quoting Allens letter at length, were published in papers like
the Leeds Mercury, 27 June 1840, p. 7; Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury
Guardian, 27 June 1840, p. 4; Londons Morning Post, 24 June 1840, p. 1;
Bradford Observer, 25 June 1840, p. 3; Glamorgan, Monmouth and Brecon
Gazette and Merthyr Guardian, 4 July 1840, p. 4; Edinburghs Caledonian
Mercury, 4 July 1840, p. 2.
23. From rst admittance in 1837, Allen thought Clare was suffering from mal-
nourishment brought on by poverty, and that hunger combined with anxiety
over poverty were the root causes of his debilitation. See Pamela Faithfull, An
Evaluation of An Eccentric: Matthew Allen MD, Chemical Philosopher,
Phrenologist, Pedagogue and Mad-Doctor, 17831845 (University of Shefeld:
PhD Thesis, 2001), pp. 17388.
24. On Allen, see Faithfull, op. cit.; Tibbles (1972), pp. 33740; Valerie Pedlar,
No place like home: Reconsidering Matthew Allen and his Mild System
of Treatment, JCSJ, 13 (1994), 4157; Sales, pp. 1269; Bate, pp. 42150.
25. English Journal, 1.20 (15 May 1841), 3059 and 1.22 (29 May 1841), 3403.
164 SIMON KVESI
26. Cyrus Redding, A Word or Two with the Readers, English Journal, 1.1
(2 January 1841), 13 (12).
27. For an analysis of the signicance of Bloomeld to Clare, see John Goodridge,
John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
pp. 83101, and Mina Gorji, Burying Bloomeld: Poetical Remains and the
Unlettered Muse, in Robert Bloomeld: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon,
ed. Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 23252. For the tradition of labouring-
class poetry in relation to Clare, see Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class
Nature Poetry, 17301837 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), pp. 14871.
28. Patrick Stewart played Redding in a BBC1 programme broadcast on 8
February 1970, starring Freddie Jones as Clare. An account of Redding
appears in Bate, pp. 43841, while High Beach is central to Adam Foulds
novel The Quickening Maze (London: Random House, 2009).
29. The Tibbles write: The Appeal was commended to the public by Cyrus
Redding in two articles in the English Journal . . . by James Devlin in the
same, and by an unknown in a collection of verse entitled Poetry, 1841.
Tibbles (1972), p. 342. This could be Go to Epping!.
30. This is the second of two Devlin sonnets in this issue. English Journal, 1.23
(5 June 1841), 368.
31. The rst part of Devlins essay in the English Journal carries the title and
authorship of The Trialist; or, Head-Attempts. By a Hand-Producer. A New
Beginning with an Old Name, English Journal, 1.13 (27 March 1841), 2045.
33. The Condition of the Poor, and their Claims, English Journal, 1.19 (8 May
1841), 2946. This continues on from the 27 March essay. Devlins brilliant
work forms a consciousness-raising platform for the reception of part one of
Reddings Clare coverage the following week. It was an expanded version of
Considerations in Behalf of the Poor, The Trialist: A Series of Attempts at
Prose Composition, by One of the Operative Class (Dover: printed for the
author, 1836), pp. 97102. This collection, on diverse matters, is interspersed
with Devlins poetry.
34. Devlins trade-based books include The Guide to Trade: The Shoemaker,
2 vols. (London, 1839), The Shoemaker, Part II (London, 1841), Critica
Crispiana: Or, The Boots and Shoes, British and Foreign, of the Great
Exhibition (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1852). He became increasingly
reformist, as shown by the long titles of Strangers Homes; or, the Model lodging
houses of London described and recommended, as an example of what ought to be
done . . . for the stranger work-seeker in general; but especially as regards the
humbler class of emigrants (London: Trelawney W. Saunders, 1853) and
Contract Reform: Its Necessity Shewn in Respect to the Shoemaker, Soldier,
Sailor (London: E. Stanford, 1856).
35. E. J. Hobsbawm and Joan Wallach Scott, Political Shoemakers, Past and
Present, 89 (November 1980), 86114 (107, n. 98).
36. See David Goodway, London Chartism: 18381848 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 15969.
37. The Remains of Robert Bloomeld, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy,
1824), I, pp. 1646. A letter and poem of 12 June 1820 are included, addressed
to Bloomeld by shoemakers Devlin and John ONeill, and announcing their
forthcoming poetry collection (untraced). Another recorded letter was sent to
Lady Morgan in 1828. Morgan records an occupation-based response to
Devlins aspirations: What a contrast between the humble condence that
he can make good boots and shoes for gentlemen and the fortitude from
despair with which he wrote his bad poetry! Oh! why will not every one nd
out his last and stick to it. Lady Morgans Memoirs, ed. W. H. Dixon,
2 vols., 2nd edn. (London: Wm. Allen, 1863), 2, pp. 2645 (264).
38. A collection of poems to Clare was edited by John Lucas: For John Clare: An
Anthology of Verse (Helpston: John Clare Society, 1997). Devlin is not
included.
39. Laurence Worms, Wilson, Efngham (17851868), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): www.oxforddnb
.com.oxfordbrookes.idm.oclc.org/view/article/38136. Accessed 27 September
2014.
40. Pierce Egans Anecdotes of the Turf, the Chase, the Ring, and the Stage (London:
Knight and Lacey, 1827), p. 3.
41. Thomas Hood, The Epping Hunt (London: Charles Tilt, 1829).
42. See Bate, p. 240, and Simon Kvesi, John Hamilton Reynolds, John Clare
and The London Magazine, Wordsworth Circle, 42.3 (Summer 2011), 22635.
43. See Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books,
2008), especially pp. 4975, Tom Bates, John Clare and Boximania,
JCSJ, 13 (1994), 517, and Bate, p. 438.
44. Epping Forest was revived as a boxing venue in 1816. The Sporting Magazine
reports a succession of second rate bouts in 1808 (XXXI.185, p. 265), while
Egan recounts two ghts near Ilford on 5 December 1816, including The Bow
Boy Jem Bunn who fought a sailor seconded by Randall. Boxiana; or Sketches
of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, 5 vols. (London: Sherwood, Neely, and
Jones, 1829), II, pp. 3801 and 479. Londons Morning Chronicle reports on
these ghts too: the occasion was a renewal of the sports in the pugilistic ring
at this location (6 December 1816, p. 3). Ilford is eight miles from High Beach.
45. Anonymous, Sights of Books, Cleaves Penny Gazette of Variety and
Amusement, 26 June 1841, p. 3. The publication itself is currently lost:
J. Devlin, Go to Epping! (London: Efngham Wilson, 1841). Go to Epping! is
also noted as having been received by The Spectator, 5 June 1841, p. 547.
46. Sales is the only scholar to consider Clare in a Chartist context: the movement
led to a general suspicion of working-class poetry, following Thomas Carlyles
lead especially. Sales, pp. 76101.
47. See Tim Chilcotts John Clare: The Living Year 1841 (Nottingham: Trent
Editions, 1999).
48. Letters, p. 659 and n. 2.
166 SIMON KVESI
49. See Tibbles (1972), p. 375. Both Howitts are mentioned by Devlin at the start
of each part of his essay on the poor in the English Journal (op. cit.), while a
country story by Mitford is the rst piece (after Reddings introduction) in
the rst issue, 1.1 (2 January 1841), 36. In the same year as his rst visit to
Clare, William Howitt jokingly claims that Clare was driven insane by the
proliferation of police (which Howitt is against): it is the day of the rural
police. John Clare got a glimpse of them, and it operated, as it must do on all
poetsit drove him mad, and he took to an asylum. German Experiences:
Addressed to the English; Both Stayers at Home and Goers Abroad (London:
Longman, 1844), p. 113.
50. Mary Russell Mitford, Readings of Poetry Old and New: Peasant Poets
John Clare, The Ladies Companion, V.38 (7 September 1850), 1636 (165).
This essay was included in Mitfords Recollections of a Literary Life; Or, Books,
Places, and People, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), vol. 2,
pp. 14762 (rst published 1852).
51. Mitford, Readings . . . , 165.
52. Ibid., 1656.
53. The Cambridge Independent and Northampton Mercury are often credited as
original sources for the story of Clares death, announced in papers such as:
Birmingham Daily Post, 30 May 1864, p. 3; Leeds Mercury, 30 May 1864, p. 4;
Londons Daily News, 30 May 1864, p. 5; Londons Standard, 30 May 1864,
p. 3; Dundee Courier & Argus, 31 May 1864, p. 3; Shefeld & Rotherham
Independent, 31 May 1864, p. 3; Essex Standard and General Advertiser for the
Eastern Counties, 3 June 1864, p. 4; Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 3 June
1864, p. 5; Newcastle Courant, 3 June 1864, p. 3; Hudderseld Chronicle and
West Yorkshire Advertiser, 4 June 1864, p. 9; London Examiner, 4 June 1864,
p. 366; Leicester Chronicle, 4 June 1864, p. 6; Manchester Weekly Times:
Supplement, 11 June 1864, p. 8.
54. Manchester Weekly Times: Supplement, 22 October 1864, p. 339.
55. For correctives, see Samuel Smiles biography, Jasmin: Barber, Poet,
Philanthropist (London: John Murray, 1891).
56. Critical Heritage, pp. 94100.
57. Taylor thought Wilsons (Christopher Norths) 1835 Blackwoods Edinburgh
Magazine review of The Rural Muse a very poor one when he sent it to Clare
(Letters, p. 628, n. 2). Wilson defended Scotlands supposed neglect of Burns
by pointing to Englands neglect of Bloomeld with Clare caught unhappily
in Wilsons cross-re. England, Wilson writes, never had a Burns. We
cannot know how she would have treated him had he walked in glory
and in joy upon her mountain-sides. But we do know how she treated her
Bloomeld. She let him starve (Critical Heritage, p. 237).
part iii
Community
chapter 8
John Clares natural history

Robert Heyes
John Clare had a distinctive vision of the natural world and it is, at
some level, impossible wholly to account for it. Some of the contrib-
utory factors can, however, be identied. One was his early training as
a gardener, rst in the gardens at Burghley House, then working at
Newark, a centre of the horticultural trade in the early nineteenth
century. The education of a gardener was thorough and far-reaching,
and included botany and other branches of agricultural science. Clares
education was greatly furthered by those in his locality who shared his
interests, perhaps most importantly two of the staff at nearby Milton
Hall: the house steward Edmund Artis, and the head gardener Joseph
Henderson. Both men were skilled all-round naturalists, although
they had their particular areas of expertise. One suspects, however,
that their greatest service to Clare was in showing him that study of
the natural world was a legitimate area of intellectual activity, not
something of which he need feel ashamed, or carry out furtively.
It is never difcult, in an English village, to become labelled as odd,
something which Clare would have wanted to avoid. As well as
furthering his education, his friendships involved him in much pains-
taking searching of the neighbourhood for specimens. He was not a
collector himself conditions in his little cottage would hardly have
permitted that but he collected enthusiastically for various friends;
fossils, archaeological specimens, plants and birds nests and eggs were
gathered, and he learned how to capture and kill butteries and moths
and pin them out on cork.
In the years between 1823 and 1825, a series of events prompted Clare to
consider publishing a natural history of his own. This chapter offers a new
and fuller account of this project than has been produced before, employ-
ing manuscript evidence and correspondence in order to trace Clares
overlapping, shifting plans for possible publication. Scholarly understand-
ing of Clares work towards a natural history has largely been based on
169
170 ROBERT HEYES
Margaret Graingers The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare

(1983). As important and original as Graingers book was, its editorial
presentation of Clares writings on this topic including his so-called
Natural History Letters gives a formal gloss to his efforts that
often misrepresents the context in which they were produced. A
reconstruction of the circumstances under which Clare began drafting
prose on natural history gives us a revealing glimpse into his struggles
to move forward professionally after the initial successes of Poems
Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel
(1821). These events also suggest that, in parallel, Clares publishers,
Taylor and Hessey, were themselves wondering about how Clare
might be best utilized as a marketable author with expertise on
rural subjects.
Clares ambition to produce some sort of natural history work had its
beginnings in July 1823 when Taylor and Hessey sent him a copy of an
anonymous work they had just published, Flora Domestica, or the Portable
Flower-Garden; with Directions for the Treatment of Plants in Pots; and
Illustrations from the Works of the Poets. James Hesseys accompanying
letter, dated 14 July 1823, began:
My dear Clare
I have waited till to day that I might send you a Copy of a pretty
volume just published, (on a subject that will be interesting to you) in
which your Name is honourably mentioned You must add it to your
Collection for our sakes if it is not worthy a place on your Shelves for
its own. You have done as much as most poets towards the investing
of Flowers with Interest and Sentiment & Imagination, and our friend
has endeavoured to bring into one view the pleasant labours of your
poetical Bretheren and to raise the owers of the Field to a rank
which they deserve to hold Should a second edition of it ever be
required many additions might be made with advantage, and I dare
say you could help us to many If you should nd any little beautiful
passages in the course of your poetical reading you may as well mark
them for us.1
Clare had not been to London for a year and, because the publishers had
not previously mentioned the book in their correspondence, its appearance
was a surprise. It will be noted that Hesseys letter had not revealed the
identity of the author, so when Clare replied, as he did immediately,
on 17 July 1823, he assumed the book was the work of a man; it was in
fact written by Elizabeth Kent (17901861), a Brighton-born writer and
botanist.2 A work combining gardening and poetry had an obvious appeal
John Clares natural history 171
for someone like Clare, with a horticultural training and a love of verse; he
expressed pride and pleasure at being mentioned by the author, and offered
some reections on the volume.
My dear Hessey
I am so pleasd with the distinction of your making a present of the Flora
Domestica to me that I have sat down to thank you for it directly . . . I am
pleasd with the mention the author has made of me & not only pleasd but
gratifyd & proud of it I will make a few remarks while I am hot for I shall be
soon cold perhaps how pretty is the allusion to poor Keats grave I like the
plan of the thing uncommonly & I think a 2nd Edit: is certain when some
improvements may as certainly be made . . . I will somewhere or other mark
what I read of owers.
Clare made a number of detailed comments on the contents of the book,
and in a postscript added: I had a deal more to say but my sheet is too
short I shall read the book seriously over & give you my remarks
shortly.3 Taylor and Hessey seized the opportunity to reprint part of this
letter in the London Magazine for August 1823, following a lengthy
extract from Flora Domestica which was clearly intended to advertise
the work.4 Clare repeated his sentiments in a letter to Taylor of 31 July
1823, saying he was uncommonly pleasd with the book,5 then, in the
postscript to an August letter to James Hessey, he indicated that he had
kept his promise: I have offerd some remarks about the Flora &c but
they are for you & not the author unless any hint would furnish him
with improvement if so he is welcome.6 These remarks were published
by Margaret Grainger as Natural History Letter I in the Natural History
Prose of John Clare.7
There is no direct evidence that, at this time, the Flora Domestica
was leading either Clare or his publishers to consider the idea that he
might construct something in a similar vein. However, when Clare
visited London a year later, between 20 May and 6 August 1824, a
fairly denite idea emerged in discussions with Hessey. The outlines of
this initial plan can best be grasped in retrospect, through a letter from
Hessey to Clare written on 2 March 1825 that accompanied a copy of
Elizabeth Kents second book, Sylvan Sketches. By this time, of course,
Clare had been made aware of the identity of the author. Hessey
wrote:
The Volume is a new one by the author of the Book on Flowers which you
liked so much and I think it is even a pleasanter book than its predecessor.
The author is now at a loss for a further subject. I mentioned to her the one
172 ROBERT HEYES
we were talking of, The Birds, under a Promise that she should not
mention it nor take advantage of it, so long as you entertain any Idea of
doing it yourself. I told her that you had thought of it and that I should
immediately write to you on the subject. I think she would make a very
pretty volume if she knows any thing about it already. But the Poets have
not been quite so familiar with the Birds as with the Trees & Flowers. Let
me hear from you soon & say whether you think you have materials enough
at your Command to make up such a work, or if not, whether you would
like to furnish your stock of Information to the lady author. and tell me how
you like her Book of Trees.8
It is clear, then, that Clare had discussed with Hessey some sort of project
on birds, evidently a work based on the plan which Miss Kent had
adopted for Flora Domestica, and continued in Sylvan Sketches: prose
description interspersed with verse chosen from the works of other poets.
Given Clares later fame as a poet of birds and their nests, it may seem
curious that the men were contemplating a Clare-authored work that
would feature his prose alongside the poetry of others. The immediate
inference to draw is that Clare evidently perceived such a work as
artistically respectable,9 even as Hessey saw it as commercially viable.
After the summer 1824 visit, Hessey was determined to capture whatever
momentum he and Clare had generated. Writing on 20 August 1824, a
fortnight after Clare had left London, he followed up their conversation
by asking:
Have you many swallows in your part of the Country, and do they
leave you early? I should suppose a at country like yours must be
full of Insects and that the Birds which feed on them must be very
numerous Flies are I believe the chief food of the Swallow the Swift
the Martin &c.10
Clare seems to have responded promptly; his reply is lost, but writing on 7
September 1824 Hessey began:
My dear Clare
I am much pleased with your Letter, and thank you for the infor-
mation you have given me about the Swallows the observations you
have made agree in the main with my favorite White of Selborne who
was a very minute observer of the various branches of the Swallow
Tribe. Your Devil Martin is what we called the Swift what a
beautiful provision is that which you mention & which I have not
seen elsewhere noted, the tuft of feathers for the protection of the eye
of this rapid bird.11
These were not merely pleasant exchanges regarding a shared interest,
but the beginnings of a cache of material. And though it seems that
Hessey was actively working to urge Clare forward with writing, there
is manuscript evidence that Clare too was thinking about the project
in concrete terms. In Peterborough manuscript A46 there is a brief
memorandum which has not, apparently, been noticed before, prob-
ably because Clare subsequently wrote over the top of it, largely
obscuring it:
Index to the Letters on Natural History
1 Letter On Swallows Martins &c _________________________ Sent
2 D On the Cuckoo & nightingale ____________________ Sent
3 D [Further on] the song of the Nightingale the pleasure
of studying nature with a poetical feeling &c12
The lost letter which Hessey is acknowledging is 1 Letter in this index

(not to be confused with Graingers printed Natural History Letter I).
Later in his response Hessey wrote: I shall be very glad to hear your
Accounts of the nightingale,13 so Clare had evidently promised him such
an account. Hessey repeated his request in another letter four days later, on
11 September, saying:
I shall be very glad to see your Account of the nightingale Some man is
making a Collection of all the Poems that have been written about it, and
another is puzzling himself with doubts about the nightingales singing by
day, and about the expression of his Notes whether they are grave or gay
what solemn triing!14
Clares response seems to have crossed in the post with Hesseys most
recent letter, and must be the one listed as 2 Letter in Clares index; again,
the letter is lost.
The item listed as 3 Letter is clearly the one whose draft is printed as
Natural History Letter III by Grainger.15 This is a reply to Hesseys letter
of 11 September, and is obviously a follow-up to an earlier letter on the
cuckoo and nightingale, because Clare begins by saying: I forgot to say in
my last that the Nightingale sung as common by day as night & as often.
Later in the draft he continues his previous comments on the cuckoo: As
to the cuckoo I can give you no further tidings that what I have given in my
last. He then goes on to talk about how he loves to look on nature with a
poetic feeling which magnifys the pleasure. He lists favourite Poems &
Poets who went to nature for their images, and discusses these. Finally, in a
postscript, he says:
174 ROBERT HEYES
P.S. I can scarcly believe the account which you mention at the end of
your letter respecting the mans puzzling himself with doubts about the
Nightingales singing by day & about the expression of his notes wether
they are grave or gay you may well exclaim what solemn triing it
betrays such ignorance that I can scarcely believe it if the man does but
go into any village solitude a few miles from London next may their varied
music will soon put away his doubts of its singing by day nay he may get
rid of them now by asking any country clown the question for its such a
common fact that all know of it & as to the expression of its notes if he
has any knowledge of nature let him ask himself wether nature is in the
habit of making such happy seeming songs for sorrow as that of the
Nightingales the poets indulgd in fancys but they did not wish that
those matter of fact men the Naturalists shoud take them for facts upon
their credit What absurditys for a world that is said to get wiser & wiser
every day
yours &c
J. Clare
In Clares Index the word Sent is conspicuous by its absence after 3
Letter, and it is probable that this vehement, and rather lengthy, letter
remained in draft form and was never sent. Certainly, there is nothing in
Hesseys correspondence which would suggest he had received it, and he
usually responded to Clares letters. It is obvious from Clares Journal, and
from Hesseys letters, that Clare was very ill for a long time in the autumn
of 1824; Hessey was passing on advice from Dr Darling of Russell Square, as
well as Darlings prescriptions for assorted powders, pills and blisters.
Writing to Edmund Artis around this time Clare said, in a postscript: I
will look out some MS for Mrs Artis as promisd when I get more settld in
health & temper for I can do nothing now excuse a short letter.16 Perhaps,
then, the thought of copying out a long letter for Hessey was too much,
and it was never sent, in spite of the warm reception the two earlier letters
had received.
But there is also the possibility that Clares commitment to the Birds
plan was waning. The emphasis of Clares project seems to have changed
and broadened at this time, as indicated by his Journal entry of 11
September 1824:
Written an Essay today on the sexual system of plants & began one on
the Fungus tribe & on Mildew Blight &c intended for A Natural
History of Helpstone in a Series of Letters to Hessey who will publish
it when nishd I did not think it woud cause me such trouble or I should
not have began it.17
Despite the very denite statements here a new title with a rather
different focus, and the claim of Hesseys commitment there is no
indication that Hessey was aware of this arrangement. By 24 October
1824, little more than a month later, yet another plan was taking shape,
as Clare recorded in his Journal:
lookd into Maddox on the culture of owers & the Flora Domestica
which with a few improvments & additions woud be one of the most
entertaining books ever written If I live I will write one on the same
plan & call it a garden of wild Flowers as it shall contain nothing else with
quotations from poets & others18
On 25 November 1824 Clare noted in his Journal that he had received a
letter from Hessey, who asked for further information about birds in
Clares locality, saying he was anxious to know more about the snipes
and the kingshers and the lapwings, and the wild fowl of the fens &
meres.19 Clare recorded in his Journal, on 20 January 1825, that he had
written to Hessey; this letter, once more lost, must have contained further
information on local birds because when Hessey replied, on 29 January, he
said: I have asked many persons about your black pheasant-tailed Duck
but cannot meet with any one who knows what it may be.20 A draft of this
part of Clares letter, entitled by him Ducks, and mentioning a beautiful
black bird of the duck or diver kind . . . with a long pheasant like tail, is to
be found in Peterborough manuscript A46.21
It was on 2 March 1825 that Hessey wrote the letter quoted earlier, in
which he spoke of The Birds, and of Miss Kents thoughts of producing a
volume on the same subject. At this point Clare seems to have approached
his natural history project with renewed interest and vigour. Just over a
week later, on 11 March, he recorded in his Journal: Intend to call my
Natural History of Helpstone Biographys of Birds & Flowers with an
Appendix on Animals & Insects.22 This new formulation was evidently
conceived as a way to combine the disparate but related topics he had been
thinking about. Moreover, he seems to have realized the need for assistance
if he was ever going to get anywhere, because on the same day Joseph
Henderson wrote a letter that shows that the two men had had discussions
about a joint project:
With respect to the Flora of this neighbourhood I cannot satisfy myself as to
any plan, except the old one of Notes on the plants mentioned in your
works, a mere catalogue of the plants found in the neighbourhood might
easily be made out, but that would neither meet your views nor mine. I have
been thinking that if you were to take as the subject & title of a poem
176 ROBERT HEYES
The Poets Flower Garden you would lay the best foundation for the
Scheme. The woods & the elds, where Nature is Gardener, would furnish
your materials & in it you might embody all the local names you are
acquainted with & when we make our long talked of excursion I shall
perhaps be able to help you to others, I would even go so far as to coin a few,
for there are many of our most beautiful wild owers that have no familiar
English name. On these & the plants mentioned in your works generally I
would write Notes, giving the Botanical name & any other remark that
might be thought interesting, which with your own observations might
follow on as an appendix to your works. Let me know what you think of the
plan in your nixt, & when you intend to come over & se us.23
The plan for a collaborative venture between Clare and Henderson to
produce a ora of the neighbourhood is something that is not mentioned
anywhere else, either in Hendersons letters or in Clares letters and other
manuscripts, yet it was obviously something the two men had discussed in
detail. When Henderson says that he has been unable to satisfy himself as
to any plan, except the old one he implies that this was something they had
talked about over a considerable period of time. Shortly afterwards a letter,
dated 22 March 1825, arrived from Elizabeth Gilchrist in London, saying: I
am sure it will do you good to be employed with Mr Artis in a History of
your favorite Birds, & Flowers.24 This shows that Clare had also tried,
perhaps separately from his discussions with Henderson, to enlist the help
of Edmund Artis in his project. Again this is the only evidence of Clares
proposal, and no more is heard of the projected collaborations with either
of his friends.
A month later, on 18 April 1825, Clare wrote in his Journal: Resumed my
letters on Natural History in good earnest & intend to get them nished
with this year if I can get out into the elds for I will insert nothing but
what comes or has come under my notice.25 Clares resolve was short-lived,
however. Less than three weeks later, on 5 May, writing to John Taylor, he
said: I told Hessey that I was ready to join the Young Lady in writing the
History of Birds.26
Much has been written about the Natural History Letters over the
years, a great deal of it, one suspects, by people who have never had the
opportunity of looking at them and who rely on the misleading accounts
of them given by Grainger and others. In her edition of The Natural
History Prose Writings of John Clare Grainger prints fourteen of these
letters. The rst, which I have already mentioned, is in the Berg
Collection and gives Clares publishers his rst reaction to Flora
Domestica. What Grainger describes as Letter Ia is an incomplete draft
letter to Taylor and Hessey giving his second thoughts; it is to be found
in Northampton manuscript 34.27 The twelve remaining Natural
History Letters are part of Peterborough manuscript A49.28
The rst thing to be said about these letters is that they are not letters at
all, but draft letters. There are many such among Clares manuscripts,
some more or less complete draft letters, others drafts of a part of a letter,
sometimes only a few lines; on occasion, drafts of different parts of a letter
can be found in different manuscripts. Some of these draft fragments were
published by Mark Storey in The Letters of John Clare, but by no means all
of them. This is hardly surprising because it is often unclear whether a
particular piece of prose is a draft of part of a letter or was written for some
other purpose. The piece on Ducks referred to earlier is a case in point: if
we did not have Hesseys reply, mentioning the black pheasant-tailed
Duck, we would not know that this fragment was part of a letter. The
so-called Natural History Letters are simply drafts, mostly partial drafts,
of various length. Each is written on a bifolium and it is clear that they are
mainly drafts of letters, or at least of the beginnings of letters, because they
have a gap of around an inch at the top of the rst page to leave room for
the place, date and greeting. The exception here is what Grainger calls
Letter XIII, which is merely a collection of notes of various lengths.
The note that she refers to as a letter is not even the rst item on the
bifolium, merely the longest; the other notes she prints separately as Notes
N to AA.29
Since their conservation these manuscripts have been mounted in a
guard book, but originally they were sewn together with other scraps, as
was Clares practice. Grainger suggests that Clare stitched the leaves
together to form a book before, rather than after, writing.30 This cannot
be so, however; most of them are folded in the manner of letters of the day,
and the folds are soiled, suggesting they have been carried around in
someones pocket. It would be perverse to fold, and carry around, blank
sheets until they were grubby, and then open them out, stitch them
together and start writing on them. In her catalogue of the Peterborough
Collection Margaret Grainger describes these letters as being addressed
to his publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, at 93 Fleet Street, London.31
In fact, only four of the letters are so addressed; it has always been
assumed that the remaining letters were intended for Taylor and
Hessey,32 but consideration of their contents shows that this is very
unlikely.
None of the Natural History Letters in A49 begins with a greeting of
any sort, and so it is impossible to know who the intended reader was.
178 ROBERT HEYES
Letter III is obviously intended for James Hessey; the postscript of this
letter is a clear response to Hesseys letter of 11 September 1824, as discussed
earlier. Letters II and III are the only ones which are complete drafts, signed
by Clare, and addressed to Taylor and Hessey; Letters VI and VIII are also
addressed to them.
When we turn to Letter X, however, Clare says, near the beginning:
I have been seriously & busily employd this last 3 weeks hunting Pooty
shells & if you are not above them I must get you to assist me in the
arangment or classication of them I have been making some drawings
of them for you but they are so miserable that I must send the shells
with them33
Taylor and Hessey were men of wide interests, but conchology was not,
I think, among them, and it is doubtful whether they would have felt equal
to the task of arranging and classifying Clares snail shells for him. The
obvious recipient of this letter would be Joseph Henderson, a collector of
shells. The letter is headed simply Feby; it was on 11 March 1825 that
Henderson told Clare: I am very glad to nd that you have taken up the
Land-Shells in good earnest.34 On 7 May 1825 Clare recorded in his
Journal: Sent some Pootys & Ferns to Henderson yesterday,35 and on 14
May 1825 Henderson wrote thanking Clare for the shells and saying: I have
begun to clean & arrange them & I hope to present them to you under a
new face when you come over, I have found out a new habitat of them,
where I expect to nd a number of new varieties.36
Similarly, if we look at Natural History Letter XI, we nd, near the
beginning, Clare saying: you asked me a long while back to procure you a
Nightingales nest & eggs & I have tryd every season since to nd if the
birdnesting boys have ever taken one out but I have not been able to
procure one.37 It is difcult to imagine that either James Hessey or John
Taylor had a burning desire to possess a nightingales nest; nor, had he been
able to nd a nest, is it easy to picture Clare parcelling it up, carrying it to
Market Deeping and putting it on the London coach. However, Joseph
Henderson had asked Clare to collect eggs and nests for him, and he is a
much more likely recipient of the letter.
Letter IX, which is dated unambiguously March 25th 1825, also has
features which cast doubt on Taylor or Hessey as the intended reader. At
one point Clare writes: I think I had the good luck today to hear the bird
which you spoke of last March as singing early in spring & which you so
apropriatly named the mock nightingale.38 Hessey did not ask Clare this in
person because, although Clare was in London in 1824, he did not arrive
until late May; nor is such an enquiry to be found in Hesseys letters. It is,
in fact, very difcult to imagine someone like Hessey, who by his own
admission had little knowledge of natural history, saying anything of the
sort. Later in the letter Clare writes: you enquired last summer wether we
had any plants indegenious to our neighbourhood,39 again a query that is
not in any of Hesseys letters.
Another possible recipient of some of these draft letters is Elizabeth
Kent, who Clare tried variously to ignore, assist and collaborate with over a
period of about a year between early 1825 and 1826. As we have seen, the
original proposal for some sort of natural history project, as discussed
between Clare and Hessey in 1824, was The Birds. Clare was very active
in 1824 and 1825 in seeking information on birds and recording his
observations, well before any collaboration with Miss Kent was mooted.
On 25 May 1825 Eliza Emmerson wrote to Clare saying: I am happy to nd
you are amusing yourself with writing a history of English Birds.40 This
was when he compiled his most extensive bird list,41 an enormously
interesting list based on the anonymously authored Natural History of
Birds, published in two volumes at Bungay in 1815;42 all of Clares page
references in his list are to these two volumes. Clares own copy of this work
is dated 1831, so he must have borrowed a copy.43
A clue to another book which he seems to have borrowed is found in
his Journal entry for 5 October 1824: In the Times Telescope they
rechristend me Robert Clare there went the left wing of my fame.44
The issue of Times Telescope to which Clare is referring, with its
account of Robert Clare, is that for 1821.45 There is no evidence
that Clare ever owned this or any other issue of Times Telescope; the
book was probably borrowed, and the most likely reason is that it
contains a long introduction on The Elements of British Ornithology
(pp. xilxxxviii), accompanied by a handsome hand-coloured frontis-
piece showing seven species of British birds. Another work which Clare
tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to borrow at this time was Thomas
Bewicks History of British Birds; this is clear from Hendersons letter of
11 May 1825: I do not know any person who has got Bewicks Birds,
there is a copy of it at the Book Societys liberary at Peterboro, but it
could only be obtained through a member & I beleive even they are
not allowed to lend them.46
Clares collaboration with Elizabeth Kent was sporadic but energetic.
The letter indicating to Hessey that he was willing to work with Miss
Kent has not survived, but Hessey replied on 10 May 1825, saying: I told
Miss Kent, the author of Flora Domestica, of your readiness to
180 ROBERT HEYES
communicate any of your knowledge to her and she has in consequence

availed herself of your Permission to write to you I enclose her letter in
the Parcel.47
On 14 May 1825, after receiving the parcel from his publishers
containing the rst letter from Elizabeth Kent, Clare wrote in his
Journal: a Note also from Miss Kent accompanied the parcel to
request my assistance to give her information for her intended
History of Birds but if my assistance is not worth more then 12
lines it is worth nothing & I shall not interfere.48 Happily Clare
relented, and recorded in his Journal on 13 August 1825: Went to
Milton wrote a Letter to Miss Kent.49 On 19 September 1825 she
replied with a long and friendly letter from Southampton which
concluded: P.S. I shall enquire for the letters you mention, as soon
as I return to town.50 These were, presumably, the handful of letters
which Clare had written to James Hessey about birds.
Unfortunately, due to an oversight, Elizabeth Kent did not send this
letter for four months. It was nally posted, with an accompanying note,
on 19 January 1826:
My Dear Sir
Upon the receipt of your last letter, I answered it, as I think, immediately
. . . Judge of my vexation in nding it among a numb[er of] letters, which
had hastily been cleared out of my desk. [If] you have had leisure to think of
me at all, you must think [that] I make a poor return for your kind offers of
assistance. Pray accept my apology.
As I did not well remember what I had said in my letter, I opened it,
thinking I might wish to add something. I have only this to add, a
request that you will give me any information that may have fallen in
your way, with regard to the situation in which the different species of
Wren in this country, nestle. I feel convinced that I have seen one, which
I take to be the Willow-Wren, visit its nest in a hole very high in the
trunk of a tree; but this is contrary to the accounts given by
the naturalists. If you can enlighten me on this subject, you will oblige,
My Dear Sir,
Yrs Truly, E Kent.51
What is clearly a draft of Clares reply to this request is the note on the
willow wren (denoted Note T by Grainger) in Peterborough MS A46.52
Much of the other natural history prose in that manuscript was probably
intended for Elizabeth Kent; for example, a fragment headed Remark on
Birds of Passage begins: I have often observed that many birds that are
reckoned birds of passage are very bad yers.53 In one of her letters to Clare
she had written: The fact you mention, of the weak ight of birds of
passage, has excited similar conjectures in the minds of many.54
Clare told Taylor, in a letter written on 24 January 1826:
I have recieved a very pleasing letter from Miss Kent & I shall answer it as
quickly as possible & give her all the information about birds that I know
of for I have abandoned my own intentions of writing about them myself
as I think she will be able to make a much better work of them then
I shoud . . . I am just going to Milton for a few days were I shall write to
Miss Kent55
It is probable that Natural History Letter V is a draft used by Clare in
composing his reply; this draft is dated Feb 7, which would be consistent
with the date of the letter to Taylor, and it is almost entirely concerned
with birds familiar to Clare.56 In the draft Clare says: The long taild
Titmouse calld with us Bumbarrel & in yorkshire pudding bags & feather
pokes is an early builder of its nest.57 Elizabeth Kent, replying on 16
February 1826, asked: Is Pudding-bags a name given to the bird, or to its
nest? Mrs C. Smith says she has heard the nest called Long-pokes.58
This very long letter from Miss Kent is of great interest and charm.59
Her letters show Elizabeth Kent to have been someone who had immersed
herself thoroughly in the ornithological literature, but who had little rst-
hand knowledge of the subject; for example, she told Clare that I never saw
the inside of but three birds nests, in my life; and never of one in its proper
situation.60 Clares observations were, therefore, of great assistance to her.
I would tentatively suggest that Natural History Letter VII might be the
partial draft of Clares next letter to her; it is headed March and internal
evidence shows that it was written in 1826.61
Clare took his promise of help seriously, telling John Taylor on 11 April
1826: I have been very busy these la[st] few days in watching the habits &
coming of spring birds so as to [be] able to give Miss Kent an account of
such as are not very well known in books do you publish her Vol: of
Birds.62 Miss Kent wrote her last letter to Clare, again lengthy and
detailed, in early May 1826, telling him she had nished her book, apart
from the preface, but it was not too late to incorporate additional informa-
tion.63 In his reply to Clare of 20 May 1826 Taylor explained:
I have the MS. of her Birds in hand but have not yet formed a Judgment of
it, though I think from what I have seen it is as interesting as the Flora at
least, & much better than the Sylvan Sketches: this last Work has not yet
paid its Exp[enses] 64
182 ROBERT HEYES
Taylor enlarged upon this on 7 August 1826: Miss Kent has sent her Work,
I think, to some other Publisher. I told her I would take it in the Autumn,
but she wanted to sell it immediately, & I suppose has parted with it, as I
have heard no more of it.65
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Miss Kent was pushing
her luck here; Taylor and Hessey, a relatively small rm of publishers
for whom literature was only a sideline, had published two of her books
in 1825: the second edition of Flora Domestica, and Sylvan Sketches.
Expecting them to publish a third so soon afterwards was rather ambi-
tious, particularly at a time of crisis in the publishing trade which was
soon to lead to Taylor and Hessey dissolving their partnership. No more
is ever heard of Miss Kents book, which did not nd a publisher due,
Kent told the Royal Literary Fund, to the widespread collapse of
London booksellers in 1826.66 Her manuscript, together with Clares
letters to her, and his letters to Hessey which she used, have disappeared
from view.67
The Natural History Letters are, then, no more than draft letters, for
the most part partial and fragmentary draft letters, to several correspon-
dents, among whom we can identify Taylor and Hessey certainly, and
Elizabeth Kent and Joseph Henderson probably, although some of the
letters may, of course, have been intended for other correspondents.
The only thing they have in common is that they are all about natural
history topics; Clare preserved them for future use and reference by
sewing them together with other rough drafts of poetry and prose. The
most important thing to be said about these letters is that they have no
connection with The Natural History of Helpstone. The two projects
have traditionally been treated as identical, but the evidence shows that
they were distinct, even as their imagined structures and scopes changed
in Clares mind.
A related piece of mythology is that The Natural History of Helpstone
foundered because of the lack of interest of Clares publishers; there is, in
fact, no evidence that they ever heard of this project. We have all of the
letters which they wrote to Clare at this period, and many (perhaps most)
of his letters to them, and it is never mentioned.
Another piece of lore that might usefully be challenged is that Clare was
imitating Gilbert Whites The Natural History of Selborne when he planned
his Natural History of Helpstone. It is doubtful whether, in 1824, Clare
had read Whites book; indeed, it is not certain that he had heard of it
although, given that James Hessey admired the work, he had probably
been shown a copy. He did not own the book until mid-March 1828, when
Hessey gave him the two-volume edition published in 1825.68 Clare seems
to have started reading it at once, since he quoted White in a letter to John
Taylor written on 3 April 1828;69 the alacrity with which he began the book
suggests that it was new to him, but unfortunately he never tells us what he
thought of it. Whites Selborne was not a well-known book in the 1820s
although it already had its enthusiasts, such as Hessey. It was regarded as
archaic even when it was published in 1788, partly because of its epistolary
style, already outmoded, but also because it was, as Stuart Piggott has
written, a legacy of the seventeenth century approach of Aubrey or Plot.70
To have attempted to imitate such a book two generations later would have
been to invite ridicule, and there is not a shred of evidence that Clare was
doing anything of the sort. The book which provided the impetus and the
inspiration for Clares natural history prose was not The Natural History of
Selborne but Elizabeth Kents Flora Domestica.
What, then, is left of The Natural History of Helpstone? As a formal
collection of writings, virtually nothing, since the project existed only as a
vague and constantly shifting idea in Clares mind. That idea was an
extension of The Birds, or, put another way, both an expansion and a
contraction. It would reach beyond Clares knowledge of his local birds to
include other fauna and ora, but would limit the need for the kind of
country-wide, encyclopaedic knowledge that the Birds project threatened
to demand. As soon as Clare actually began, however, he had had enough,
as he said in his Journal after his rst attempt at writing essays for A
Natural History of Helpstone: I did not think it woud cause me such
trouble or I shoud not have began it.71 While he occasionally thought of
resurrecting the project in some form, as far as we can tell that was the
beginning and the end of it.
If the elements of this story are sometimes confusing, this fact reects the
partial and sketchy information on which we must rely. It also, however,
reects the confusion in Clares own mind at this time, in the affairs of his
publishers, and in the book trade and the literary world generally. Clare
was aware that something more was expected of him, something different;
as early as December 1820 he was telling John Taylor that always dinging
at rural things wornt do.72 In the early 1820s Clare was deprived of literary
direction. Edward Drury, who had played such an important role in
Clares development as a poet, had left Stamford and returned to
Lincoln to take a role in the family business. His other literary friend in
Stamford, Octavius Gilchrist, a man with a vast knowledge of English
literature and a shrewd understanding of the literary world, died in 1823.
John Taylor, another source of help and direction, was increasingly
184 ROBERT HEYES
preoccupied with his editorial role on the London Magazine after his rm
took it over in 1821, and was able to devote little time to Clare; at this period
almost all of the letters Clare received from his publishers were written by
James Hessey. Hessey was a wholly admirable man but he lacked Taylors
capacity to inspire. Clare had many friends, both close to home and further
aeld, but at this period there were none able to give him the sort of
guidance and advice which he needed if he was to make the most of his
gifts. Clare knew that he had to develop as a writer, but was unsure which
direction to pursue.
In the circumstances it is not surprising that Clare embarked on several
disparate projects in the mid-1820s, particularly in prose, which ranged
from the rather unlikely to the wildly improbable. His manuscripts contain
many fragmentary and abandoned prose works from this period and the
natural history prose writings, which overwhelmingly date from this time,
are part of this succession of false starts. To summarize, Clare wrote a few
(probably two or three) letters to Hessey on the subject of birds, although
on the evidence of the one draft we have, and Hesseys replies, these letters
did not incorporate verse as Miss Kents work did; they were perhaps
intended as raw material, to be edited later when the poetry could be
added. However, Clare obviously realized that his knowledge of birds,
impressive as it was, was limited to those species with which he was
familiar, making it difcult for him to produce any sort of comprehensive
work. As he wrote to John Taylor on 5 May 1825:
I have such a fear of my own inability to do any thing for such a matter that
I cannot enter into it with any spirit as I nd that I dont know half the
Swimmers & Waders that inhabit the fens & I understand that there are a
many of them strangers to the Natural History bookmakers themselves that
have hithertoo written about it73
Little wonder, then, that, when the opportunity offered, Clare was happy
to throw in his lot with Elizabeth Kent and content himself with assisting
her with her own book on birds.
At the time we are considering, in the mid-1820s when Clare was in his
early thirties, he was an accomplished writer possessing great technical
virtuosity in addition to his imaginative gifts. However, he had his limita-
tions, and an intended prose work such as I have been discussing highlights
two of these. First, whether in verse or prose, Clare frequently foundered
when writing towards a preconceived plan or on a pre-selected subject.
Clare wrote best when he wrote spontaneously, compelled by the spirit.
But when the spirit didnt move, he was often painfully blocked.
His other problem was, more narrowly, frustration with the activity of
prose composition itself. In marked contrast to his facility with verse, a
facility developed over a long apprenticeship, Clare always found prose
difcult, despite some notable successes with it. He had a capacious
memory, and could hold even a long poem in his head; he was able to
rene his verse while going about his daily business, walking the elds or
digging in his garden. By the time a poem was written down the correcting
had been done it had been polished and elaborated in his mind, hence the
rarity of revisions or alterations in his manuscript poetry. This method
didnt work with prose, and this is perhaps the reason why we nd so many
fragments of prose, particularly letters, in his manuscripts: he liked to try
things out on paper in a way which was rarely necessary with his poems. He
would often take himself off to Milton to work on a letter or other prose
work, or take his piece of paper into the elds anywhere, in fact, where he
could have peace and quiet. This is why some drafts, including most of the
natural history letters, have been folded and look as though they have
been carried around in somebodys pocket: they have been. On both
counts, then, the writing of any sort of systematic prose work on natural
history was always going to be difcult, and it is not surprising that, as with
other prose works he started, Clare soon abandoned it.
If Clare nished no natural history prose work, however, his close
studies and notes, particularly regarding bird life, produced a rich harvest
in his poems. This episode brought Clare up against the limits of his
knowledge, but if it showed him what he did not know he also discovered
a great deal about what he did know, and, further, that he had a fund of
knowledge about the natural world which few people could approach. This
realization fed into The Shepherds Calendar, on which he was working at
this time, and that poem served to conrm and emphasize the fact that
natural history observation, which gures little in his early work, could be a
t subject for poetry. I would not like to give the impression that Clares
poems are merely versied natural history. There is no doubt, however,
that over many years he trained himself in what Constable called the close
observation of nature.74 This watchfulness introduced not merely new
subject matter into Clares writing, but a new dynamic as well, which
resulted in some of his most original and distinctive poetry.
Notes
I am, as always, grateful to Professor Eric Robinson for permission to quote from
John Clares unpublished writings, and to the Manuscript Department of the
186 ROBERT HEYES
British Library for allowing me to quote from the letters to John Clare. I am also
most grateful to Professor Molly Mahood for reading a draft of this chapter and
saving me from more than one error.
1. Eg. 2246, fols 220rv, The British Library Board. All further references in
this chapter to Egerton Manuscripts materials are The British Library
Board.
2. For accounts of Elizabeth Kent, see Ann Shteir, A Romantic Flora: Elizabeth
Kent in her Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Floras Daughters and
Botany in England, 17601860 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), pp. 13545; Molly Tatchell, Elizabeth Kent and Flora
Domestica, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 27 (1976), 1518; and Daisy Hay,
Elizabeth Kents Collaborators, Romanticism, 14 (2008), 27281. Though
Elizabeth Kent is often remembered in literary histories as the sister-in-law of
Leigh Hunt, Clare seems to have considered her work entirely on its own
merits; there is no evidence, for example, that he viewed her books in
association with the suburban aesthetic sometimes associated with Hunt.
3. This unpublished letter is in the Seymour Adelman Collection, Bryn Mawr
College Library, to whom I am grateful for permission to quote from it. I am
also grateful to Dr Emma Trehane for nding the letter and sharing the text of
it with me.
4. LM, 8 (August 1823), 148, reprinted in Letters, pp. 27980.
5. Letters, p. 278.
6. Ibid., p. 281.
7. Natural History Prose, pp. 1323.
8. E.g. 2246, fols 456r57r.
9. Referring to the plants described in Miss Kents rst book he had said: the
account of them is poetry (Letters, p. 279).
10. E.g. 2246, fol. 370r.
11. Ibid., fol. 377r.
12. Pet. A46, p. R160. This fragment is difcult to decipher because of the
overwriting; however, I am fairly condent in my reading apart from the
two words in square brackets, which are subject to revision.
13. E.g. 2246, fol. 377v.
14. Ibid., fol. 384r.
17. Natural History Prose, p. 175.
18. Natural History Prose, p. 195; Maddox on the culture of owers is the 1822
edition of James Maddocks The Florists Directory, item 293 in the catalogue
of the Northampton Collection.
19. E.g. 2246, fol. 407v. The letter is dated and postmarked 22 November 1824.
20. Ibid., fol. 433v.
22. Ibid., p. 228.
23. E.g. 2246, fols. 468rv.
24. Ibid., fol. 480v.
28. Throughout my discussion of these letters it must be borne in mind that
Letter IX has disappeared and I have no information about it other than the
text printed by Margaret Grainger from a transcript supplied by Professor Eric
Robinson.
29. Natural History Prose, pp. 701, for Letter XIII, and pp. 7680 for the
remainder of the notes.
30. Ibid., p. 28.
31. Margaret Grainger, A Descriptive Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in
Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery ([Peterborough]: [Peterborough
Museum Society], 1973), p. 8.
32. For example, in Natural History Prose, p. 26.
33. Ibid., p. 63.
34. E.g. 2246, fol. 468v.
36. E.g. 2247, fol. 25v.
38. Ibid., p. 60.
39. Ibid., p. 61.
40. E.g. 2247, fol. 30v.
42. The Natural History of Birds, from the Works of the Best Authors, Antient &
Modern: Embellished With Numerous Plates Accurately Coloured from Nature
(Bungay: Printed and Published by Brightly & Childs. Published also by
T. Kinnersly); Clares copy is item 316 in the Northampton Collection.
43. Although Clares bird list is undated, internal evidence shows that he must
have been working on it in the Spring of 1825 (Natural History Prose, p. 234
n. 2(2)).
45. Times Telescope for 1821; A Complete Guide to the Almanack (London:
Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1821); the piece on Robert Clare is on pp.
1957.
46. E.g. 2247, fol. 25v.
47. Ibid., fol. 24r.
48. Natural History Prose, p. 239. Miss Kents letter is Eg. 2250, fol. 242r. It is
indeed 12 lines long.
50. E.g. 2250, fol. 245v.
51. E.g. 2247, fol. 128r.
53. Ibid., p. 108.
54. E.g. 2247, fol. 169v.
188 ROBERT HEYES
55. Letters, pp. 3556.

57. Ibid., p. 48.
58. E.g. 2247, fol. 144v.
59. Ibid., fols. 144r45v.
60. Ibid., fol. 145v.
61. Natural History Prose, pp. 514; for the dating of the letter see p. 54, n. 9.
63. E.g. 2247, fols. 169r70v. The letter is undated but postmarked 4 May 1826.
64. Ibid., fol. 177r.
65. Ibid., fol. 202v. Margaret Grainger was wrong in saying that the scheme
foundered for some reason not communicated to Clare (Natural History
Prose, p. 120).
66. Hay, Elizabeth Kents Collaborators, 279.
67. Mark Storey is surely in error in suggesting that a draft fragment which he
prints (Letters, pp. 2834) was intended for Miss Kent. The letter was written
to the author of a botanical work which had made a very favourable impres-
sion on Clare, but the picture which emerges of the book in question does not
correspond with Miss Kents Flora Domestica; in particular, it seems to have
been an illustrated work, and Taylor and Hesseys editions of Flora Domestica
have no illustrations. The contents of the letter also indicate a later date than
the 1823 which Storey suggests. A more probable recipient would be John
Claudius Loudon, to the monthly parts of whose Encyclopaedia of Plants Clare
subscribed from 1829.
68. This is item 395 in the catalogue of the Northampton Collection. On the
half-title of the rst volume it is inscribed John Clare from his sincere
friend J.A.Hessey, and on the front free endpaper is written: Given me
March 19. 1828.
70. Stuart Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape: Essays in Antiquarianism (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1976), p. 121. See also P. G. M. Foster,
Introduction to Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne: a facsimile
of the 1813 edition (London: The Ray Society, 1993), pp. viiiix.
73. Ibid., p. 331.
74. John Constables Discourses, compiled and annotated by R. B. Beckett
(Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), p. 40.
chapter 9
This is radical slang: John Clare, Admiral

Lord Radstock and the Queen
Caroline affair
Sam Ward
Reading through a manuscript of The Village Minstrel, Clares self-

appointed patron Admiral Lord Radstock paused at stanzas 107 and 108,
before scrawling angrily in the margin: This is radical slang.1 Radstocks
remark has emerged, for Clare scholars, as one of the dening moments of
Clares career, yet that remark has been all too often stripped of its context,
its important inections ignored or misunderstood. This chapter aims to
establish clearly the contexts and meanings of Radstocks comment, some
of which are directly tied to political positioning, and some of which are
not (at least in the way a simple binary between Conservative and Radical
would imply). In so doing, it lays the foundations for a more thorough
exploration of Clares relationships with his patrons and publishers, and
opens new perspectives on Clares experience of politics at both national
and local levels.
A campaigning Christian, Radstock saw it as his moral duty to offer
Clare his guidance, sending him both lengthy letters and select publica-
tions, ranging from religious tracts and sermons to works of poetry and a
grammar. As a prime mover in the Society for the Suppression of Vice,
Radstock was naturally keen to ensure that Clares poetry did not offend,
and he used his inuence as leverage to get his way. In an account of
Radstocks career published shortly after his death from apoplexy in 1825, it
was noted that he was of an active disposition, which would not allow him
to be unemployed, and so was constantly engaged either in patriotically
contributing to the public welfare, or in benevolently promoting the
welfare of his fellow-creatures.2 M. J. D. Roberts has calculated that the
Society for the Suppression of Vice probably gained the most fashionable
third of its early membership through Radstocks efforts alone, and he was
similarly diligent in seeking supporters for Clare.3
189
190 SAM WARD
Masterminded by Radstock, a series of letters praising Clares poetry

duly appeared in the morning papers throughout the early part of 1820.
Clare soon tired of this attention, complaining to Taylor about silly
beggerly atterys, and claiming: I think Ive gaind as much harm as
good by it& am nothing in debt on that quarter.4 Taylor also protested,
writing to his brother James shortly after the publication of the third
edition of Poems Descriptive: I am much annoyed by Lord R.s pufng
in the Post and New Times and am determined to put an end to it, for I
cannot but think it is disgraceful to me and injurious to Clares Fame as
well as Feelings.5
Puffs and reviews were one thing; calls to alter the contents of the
volume quite another. For the most part Clare resisted attempts to alter
his poems, yet Taylor was more pragmatic, recognizing the need to appeal
to a genteel audience, as well as the detrimental effect which alienating
such readers might have on sales. A letter from A Well-Wisher to Merit,
printed in the Morning Post on 11 February, welcomed the prospect of a
second edition of Poems Descriptive on the grounds that it would provide
some substantial pecuniary relief to Clare, but also recommended that
some two or three poems . . . be expunged, in order to make room for
others of riper and purer growth.6 The pieces deemed indelicate were
quick to go. The Country Girl was omitted from the second edition,
while, in My Mary, the word unt was substituted, as Clares Stamford
friend Octavius Gilchrist put it, for the one which shocked the delicate
sensibilities of Portland Place.7 By the third, published at the end of June
1820, My Mary was gone altogether, as was Dollys Mistake.
While Taylor was prepared to give ground over the more bawdy mate-
rial, he at rst stood rm on the question of political censorship. Early in
May 1820, Clare had received letters evidently sent at Radstocks bid-
ding asking that he do his civic and moral duty by removing ten lines
from Helpstone and altering one in Dawnings of Genius.8 In the face of
sustained opposition from Radstock and his allies, Clare felt trapped, and
wrote Taylor a grudging request that he implement an approximation of
the Radstock directive:
Being very much botherd latley I must trouble you to leave out the 8 lines
in helpstone beginning Accursed wealth & two under When
ease & plenty& one in Dawnings of Genius That nessesary tool leave
it out & put ***** to ll up the blank this will let em see I do it as negligent
as possible dn that canting way of being forcd to please I sayI cant
abide it & one day or other I will show my Independance more stron[g]ly
then ever you know whos the promoter of the scheme I dare sayI have
John Clare, Admiral Lord Radstock and the Queen Caroline affair 191
told you to order & therefore the fault rests not with me while you are left to
act as you please9
The sense of frustration here is palpable, yet as Alan Vardy has observed, by
refusing to rewrite the lines in question, Clare continued to assert his
independence while also absolving himself of the responsibility of making
the proposed changes.10 This strategy had only limited success. Shortly
afterwards, Markham E. Sherwill wrote to him to advise that while he
agreed Mr Taylor is a very sensible man, & very equal to changing the
line, I do not think he ought to do it Whatever is done must be done by
yr.self, or the poems cease to be your own. To add insult to injury, Sherwill
added: I wish you would endeavour to write an address to Gratitude &
have it inserted in yr. next Volume, as the rst article It wd. please all
those kind & liberal patrons you have.11
If Taylor initially felt able to ignore Radstocks demands, by the autumn
this was no longer possible. Writing at the end of September he gloomily
informed Clare: Lord R. has expressed his Intention of disowning you in
such strong Terms, unless the radical Lines as he called them were left out,
that I conceived it would be deemed improper in me as your Friend to hold
out any longer.12 What prompted Radstock to threaten such a drastic
course of action? The answer, I would suggest, lies less with Clares conduct
than with the course of political events, the most signicant of which was
the so-called Queen Caroline affair.
On the accession of George IV in January 1820, the status of his
estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, took on a new importance.
Although the royal couple had formally separated back in 1797, they had
never divorced, meaning Carolines position was uncertain and, from the
point of view of George and his ministers, potentially dangerous. Relations
between the pair, which were already tense at best, now grew toxic when
George announced his intention to remove Carolines name from the
Liturgy. This move prompted an incensed Caroline to return to England
from the continent, where she had lived for the past six years, to claim her
rights and privileges as queen.
The Queen of England is at present every thing with every body,
declared The Times on 7 June, and from then until the end of the year the
affair dominated the national consciousness.13 Writing in 1823, William
Hazlitt recalled that it was the only question I ever knew that excited a
thorough popular feeling. It struck its roots into the heart of the nation,
took possession of every house or cottage in the kingdom; man, woman,
and child took part in it, as if it had been their own concern.14 As these
192 SAM WARD
comments indicate, Carolines fate was widely discussed and the extent
of her support was of particular concern to conservatives such as
Radstock, many of whom, Thomas Laqueur notes, recognized that it
was the power of public opinion and the entry of new groups into the
political arena which constituted the real threat in the queens
business.15
Radstocks increasing determination to purge Clares work of anything
which smacked of discontent, then, occurred against a backdrop of rapidly
escalating political tension. London was the epicentre of the disturbances.
The day after Caroline landed at Dover, an informant wrote to the Home
Ofce to warn that: The disaffected are all in motion to raise the popula-
tion of the Metropolis to receive her in a triumphant manner, adding that a
number of well-known radicals were also endeavouring to raise a popular
commotion on the occasion.16
In his inuential counter-revolutionary tract of 1814, The Cottagers
Friend, Radstock had reminded the poor of their duty to Fear God and
Honour the King.17 Keep me from all self-conceit and petulance, from
discontent and murmuring, and give me a meek and humble spirit, ran
one of the prayers included by Radstock.18 Vardy contends that The
Cottagers Friend must be one of the most anxious documents of an
anxious age, suggesting further that: Perhaps only in London, playing
the part of the powerful rural landlord, could Radstock have produced
such a pamphlet.19 As the Queen Caroline affair exploded into life in the
summer of 1820, it must have seemed to Radstock that most of the goals
he had been ghting for throughout his long career were threatened as
never before. In the capital, ultra-radical ideas which had been bubbling
near to the surface for a number of years burst forth to be given far wider
exposure than they had ever previously received. Worse, as we shall see,
such views were dispersed into the countryside, threatening the content-
ment and loyalty of the rustic audience addressed by him in The
Cottagers Friend.
There is a suggestive parallel between Radstocks increasing need to
exert an inuence over the contents of Clares work and the growing
unrest among the labouring-classes: control of the one compensating in
some measure for the failure to adequately contain the other. This is only
part of the story, however, as a more detailed consideration of both the
Caroline controversy and Radstocks politicized reading of Clares
poetry will make clear. At stake was the legitimacy of labouring-class
discourse, an issue which was inextricably linked to ongoing debates
about education, public opinion and Parliamentary reform, and which
brought to the fore questions surrounding the ownership and appro-
priation of literary and landed property.
Anxieties about where the Queen Caroline affair might end were widely
shared, and were increased by the situation on the continent, which saw
popular uprisings in Spain, Portugal and Italy. We shall see, if we live, a
Jacobin Revolution more bloody than that of France, predicted Lord
Grey, the leader of the Whigs, in a letter to a friend.20 Robert Southey,
meanwhile, suggested:
There is every probability of a more tremendous explosion than that which
Lord George Gordon brought about in our childhood; and no reliance can
be placed upon the soldiers. For they are not only duped by the devilish
newspapers to believe that the Queen is an innocent and injured woman,
but they are infected by the moral pestilence of the age, since the armies in
Spain and Naples have chosen to interfere in state affairs. Before this letter
can reach you the crisis will, in all likelihood, have come on. It will be a trial
between the Government, supported by the civil power alone, and the mob,
with the traitorous Whigs and the Press on their side,the troops being
worse than doubtful.21
As these examples reveal, in the period leading up to Radstocks threat to
publicly disown Clare, the dangers posed by the queens case appeared ever
more serious. On 5 July the government introduced a Bill of Pains and
Penalties in the House of Lords, in order to deprive Caroline of the title of
Queen, and of all the prerogatives, rights, privileges, and exemptions
appertaining to her as Queen Consort of this Realm, and to render her
marriage to George IV wholly dissolved, annulled and made void on the
grounds of adultery.22 The second reading of the Bill began on 17 August,
at which stage, R. A. Melikan notes, the process assumed a judicial
character.23 The ensuing trial caught the public imagination, but the
kings actions were widely condemned, especially in view of his own
personal conduct.24
Southeys summary is particularly useful, since it brings together a
number of factors which preoccupied conservative-minded contempor-
aries at the moment the trial began. Concerns over the loyalty of the troops
became particularly acute after the mutiny of the 3rd Regiment of Guards
on 15 June, especially in view of the crucial role played by armed forces in
revolts on the continent.25
If the future looked alarming to the authorities, for radicals and others
with grievances against the established order it appeared to offer real hopes
of social and political change. The year 1820 will be a new era in history,
Richard Carlile assured readers of The Republican: When there is a union
194 SAM WARD
between the soldier and the citizen in defence of their common right and
liberties, all is sure to proceed well without bloodshed, and even without
confusion.26 In spite of Southeys identication of Carolines allies as
the mob, a pejorative with specic class connotations, her cause in fact
created what Rohan McWilliam calls communities of moral outrage.27
Dror Wahrman suggests that the most striking aspect of the Queen
Caroline agitation was its lack of class specicity.28 Public expressions
of solidarity with the queen took many forms, including meetings,
processions and addresses (sent to her by groups from across the coun-
try).29 Many of the addresses were printed, together with the queens
replies some of the most radically inected of which were written for
her by William Cobbett and widely distributed.30 The mixed nature of
support for Caroline meant that she quickly became, in John Belchems
phrase, a multivocal symbol of opposition.31
Having outlined the way in which widely felt anxieties about the Queen
Caroline affair may have given a new urgency to Radstocks concern about
Radical and ungrateful sentiments, I want to turn to the poems themselves
in order to explore what it was that made certain lines so problematic.32 I
start with Dawnings of Genius, since this piece has received very little
attention in comparison with Helpstone.33
In spite of its relative neglect today, Dawnings of Genius was fre-
quently singled out for praise by Clares contemporaries, including,
somewhat paradoxically perhaps, members of the Radstock circle. To a
degree, this may be a consequence of Taylors reference to it in his
introduction to Poems Descriptive, where it is said to describe the con-
dition of a man, whose education has been too contracted to utter the
thoughts of which he is conscious. That this would have been Clares
fate, unless he had been taught to write, Taylor continued, cannot be
doubted; and a perusal of his Poems will convince any one, that some-
thing of this kind he still feels, from his inability to nd those words
which can fully declare his meaning.34 As Vardy argues, many readers
followed Taylors lead in noting the special circumstances of the poets
life, placing enormous pressure on Clares identication as a peasant
poet, a class-based label which duly shifted its meaning to meet pre-
conceived political and cultural assumptions and expectations.35 The
New Monthly Magazine which condemned Dollys Mistake and My
Mary as by far the worst pieces in the volume named Dawnings of
Genius as one of those which please us best; while the Gentlemans
Magazine listed it as one of the poems which may, for the ne tone of
their sentiment, the dignity, and, withal, the warmth, tenderness, and
simplicity of their style, vie with the admired productions of many,
who have long ranked deservedly high in the annals of Poetic fame.36
Letters to the Morning Post from Q (Sherwill) and Cantabrigiensis
(Chauncey Hare Townshend) also called attention to the poem, the
latter describing it as unquestionably the most beautiful and extraor-
dinary in the book.37
Sherwills response to Dawnings of Genius is particularly interesting,
since he was one of those who had acted on Radstocks behalf to recom-
mend to Clare that a line in it be altered; indeed, Qs letter which stated
that it was the general opinion that there was great originality of idea in
the poem was published a mere four days after he had written to Clare in
propria persona advising him to make the change. Furthermore, both he
and Mrs Emmerson praised Dawnings of Genius when they wrote saying
it had to be amended the former calling it the best thing almost that you
have written, Mrs Emmerson, your beautiful poem on Genius.38 Such
admiration seems heartfelt, and, while it is tempting to speculate that they
may not have entirely agreed with Radstocks reservations, instead I would
suggest that their ambivalence is typical of a more common response to
Clares poetry, one shared by many of his earliest readers. The popularity of
Poems Descriptive owed much to the publics hunger for a voice ostensibly
unsullied by party politics, metropolitan corruption or pretensions to
grandeur. However, the rapid commodication of Clares life and
work by no means exceptional in an age which cherished literary
celebrity meant that their perceived value in the literary marketplace
was very much dependent on a readers attitude to the labouring-classes
and on Clares continued good conduct.39 Consequently, an anxiety about
where to place Clare can be detected almost everywhere in his contempor-
ary reception.
As reported by Mrs Emmerson, Radstock attributed Clares bitter
expressions in Helpstone and Dawnings of Genius to his depressed
state at the time these pieces were written, an idea echoed by Emmerson
herself, who reassured Clare that severe privation . . . alone induced you to
exclaim against the higher classes of society.40 The passages were deemed
objectionable however, not only because they risked making Clare appear
ungrateful, but because they seemed to echo the language of popular
radicalism.41 In Dawnings of Genius he had described the rough, rude
ploughman as That necessary tool of wealth and pride (line 15), but, as
Sherwill cautioned: In your present situation, I wd. not advise you to make
what some persons might term such an attack on the aristocracy It was
well enough in former days, but is now illtimed.42
196 SAM WARD
Considering how best to accommodate the various changes insisted

upon by Radstock, Taylor told Clare that he intended to cut out the
couplet containing the line referring to wealth and pride. It now reads
very well, he claimed, in fact better than ever. By this amendment, he
went on, I avoid, what I am desirous to do, the Insertion of any Lines not
absolutely yours.43 (Mrs Emmerson had proposed as an alternative With
Nature! simple Nature for his guide!, a suggestion equally out of keeping
with the spirit of Clares original and with the image of wearisome toil
introduced in the following line: While moild and sweating by some
pastures side.)44 Taylors willingness to amend Dawnings of Genius
suggests that he recognized that the text was open to the kind of politicized
reading which Radstock had given it. One of the recommended alterations
to Helpstone, on the other hand, was a different matter. According to
Clare, Radstock wanted the following lines omitted:
Accursed Wealth! oer-bounding human laws,
Of every evil thou remainst the cause.
Victims of want, those wretches such as me,
Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee:
Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed,
And thine our loss of labour and of bread;
Thou art the cause that levels every tree,
And woods bow down to clear a way for thee . . .
When ease and plenty, known but now to few,
Were known to all, and labour had its due45
Though I am willing to leave out the Lines beginning Accursed wealth
which it still grieves me to do, Taylor admitted, I can see no Reason
so imperative for complying with Lord Rs further Demand that the 3rd
and 4th Lines of the following Paragraph should also be omitted, viz
Where Ease and Plenty &c for I am convinced this is at least no
exaggeration.46
Having drawn attention to the passages identied by Radstock as
radical, I want to follow a little in Taylors footsteps, and consider what
made them so, and, in particular, what relationship they bore to the radical
politics of the day. According to J. C. D. Clark, though it was established
by 1802, the noun radical, as shorthand for a proponent of radical
reform, seems to have gone into abeyance until after 1810, and was not
common until 1819.47 Putting a stop to the dissemination of radical ideas
was a major aim of conservatives in the period, and, since the 1790s, a series
of so-called gagging acts had been introduced in an attempt to control both
printed materials and public meetings. Following a resurgence of popular
radicalism after the Napoleonic Wars, a fresh set of repressive measures
culminating in the Six Acts of 1819 had been enacted. The dissemination of
radical texts was frequently identied as dangerous, not only because it
allowed subversive ideas to circulate freely, but because it made it impos-
sible to control how such works were read and by whom. Though Radstock
is highly unlikely to have suspected Clare of harbouring radical sympa-
thies of being a radical, in other words he nevertheless clearly detected
close thematic and tonal parallels between Clares protests about inequal-
ities in the countryside and the discourse of contemporary radicalism. As
we have seen, Radstock did not altogether blame Clare for voicing com-
plaints, but felt that these could easily be misinterpreted by readers, who
might also presume that he and Clares other post-publication patrons
consented to the sentiments expressed. Jon Klanchers observations about
radical discourse are useful here. This, he suggests,
was not as much expressed by a nascent working class as it formed the
latters ideological and interpretive map. Yet, like an atlas in which one map
overlaps another, tting its gural territory within another frame, the
boundaries between middle-class and working-class discourses were not
immobile lines but strategic shifting latitudes of force.48
Commenting on the effect which Radstocks cuts had on the meaning of
Helpstone, Sarah M. Zimmerman notes that the devastation lamented by
the poet in the preceding lines (Now all is laid waste by desolations hand,/
Whose cursed weapon levels half the land) is rendered more existential than
political when the agent behind it is no longer identied. Moreover, she
insists, the weapons deplored may be found in times arsenal, rather than
among the implements of agricultural improvement.49 In this way, the
poems radical components its sharp condemnation of Wealth and the
disproportionate impact of enclosure on the poor are lost. Before moving
on to look at some additional reasons why Radstocks anxiety over radical
elements peaked in the latter part of 1820, it is instructive to look at some
material by self-confessed radicals. The two examples Ive chosen touch
directly on the topic of enclosure and do so in language closely resembling
that used by Clare.
Just over a year before Poems Descriptive made its appearance, the rst
article in T. J. Woolers The Black Dwarf for 6 January 1819 was entitled
The Right of the Poor to the Cultivation of Waste Lands.50 This piece is
headed by a quotation from Goldsmiths The Deserted Village, a key
inuence on Helpstone, which cleverly sets up the argument within:
198 SAM WARD
A time there was ere Englands griefs began,/When every rood of ground
maintained its man.51 Let us endeavour to obtain the soil, the article
commands, some place whereon to stand, and to tell tyranny it is our own.
If any real wish had ever existed, to render the poor as comfortable as they
ought to be, half of our miseries would have been removed . . . Every thing
that is done in the way of improvement, leaves them out of its operation.
Look at the common enclosure acts, in which the most barefaced pillage of
their rights is exhibited . . . The poor may well wish to be legislators for
themselves, when such legislation disgraces the statute book.52
In his deceptively titled Christian Policy, The Salvation of the Empire of
1816, the veteran Spencean campaigner Thomas Evans, meanwhile,
claimed that: Landlords . . . and Landlords only, are the oppressors of
the people. I have lived long enough to witness the effect of enclosure
after enclosure, and tax after tax, he complained, expelling the cottager
from gleaning the open elds, from his right of the common, from his
cottage, his hovel, once his own; robbing him of his little store, his pig,
his fowls, his fuel; thereby reducing him to a pauper, a slave.53 David
Worrall has recently reminded us of the agrarianist, redistributist,
ecological sentiments which motivated much of the organized radical
activism which survived Spa Fields, the Pentrich Rising, Peterloo and
Cato Street, and it is this strand of radicalism, taking its lead from
Thomas Spence, which Radstock most likely associated with Clares
Radical lines.54 As Worrall remarks elsewhere: The Spencean ideology
is a counter-culture rmly based upon the political and economic
importance of land.55
Among the written placards circulated at Spa Fields in 1816 was one of
the most dangerous and inammatory nature, pledging: no rise of
bread; no Regent; no Castlereagh, off with their heads; no placemen,
tythes, or enclosures; no taxes; no bishops, only useless lumber! stand
true, or be slaves forever!56 With the onset of the Queen Caroline affair,
the legislation which had been introduced in an attempt to hold back the
tide of radical material momentarily failed. As early as the second week
in July 1820, the Home Ofce was notied that men and boys had been
employed
to circulate in the Metropolis, & for 50 Miles around it, vast quantities of
Bills, Placards, and Publications of a Seditious and inamatory nature, with
a view to iname the passions of the Lower orders into acts of Violence
ag[ain]st the Constituted authorities, & to interrupt the course of Justice
and to stop the investigation in the House of Lords respecting the Queen.57
By autumn, the radicals had grown increasingly bold. On 16 October, the
same informant reported that they were getting ags and standards made-
up bearing various mottos, but particularly the following The Queens
rights, the Peoples Liberty.58 The previous month, Mr Simmons, editor
of The Boston Gazette, had been forced to leave his home after there was a
riot in the town . . . in consequence of what appeared in the paper.59
Writing to Lord Sidmouth, he warned that a very bad spirit prevails in this
town among the class of politicians who have Reform in their mouths but
Revolution in their hearts, and who inuence a large portion of the
Labouring and working classes.60
Direct activity by radicals, whether real or anticipated, was not the only
issue of concern to conservatives worried by public interest in the Queen
Caroline affair. The blasphemous pages of Carlisle [sic], whose convic-
tion towards the close of the preceding year had given general satisfaction
were conned to comparatively few readers, thundered the Christian
Observer, but this contaminating topic has polluted every newspaper,
and found its way to every hamlet in the kingdom.61 As Laqueur
remarks: Week after week, the Courier or the New Times, staunchly
reactionary though they were, carried the queens assurances that she
would overthrow the power of faction and deliver the people from
oppression, and [e]ven the most conservative of papers printed her
claims to be what the Loyalist called the French Revolutionary
Leader.62 Reecting on the power of the press, the New Times sub-
mitted that it tends to give unity to public sentiment to a degree that has
never existed before in any country in the world.63 In Laqueurs view,
discourse about the meaning of various manifestations of support for
Caroline was in fact a discourse about the power of the press and the
legitimacy of a greatly expanded public opinion. The queens cause could
be, in a literal sense, popular as no previous political movement had
been.64 Above all, it was this extraordinary diffusion of radical senti-
ment, I would contend, that provoked Radstock to threaten to disown
Clare.
A further piece of evidence which demonstrates that current events lay
behind Radstocks insistence that what he regarded as politically sensitive
material be omitted is provided by Taylors reassurance that: When the
Follies of the Day are past with all the Fears they have engendered we can
restore the Poems according to the earlier Editions.65 Also highly signi-
cant is Radstocks choice of the phrase radical slang to describe the two
stanzas he objected to in The Village Minstrel.
200 SAM WARD
In September 1820, The Anti-Jacobin Review attacked the answers

Caroline had publicly issued in response to the addresses she had received
from her supporters. What motive, it asked, could ever induce the Queen
of England to lend her name to such contemptible effusions of calumny,
radical slang, self-adulation, bombast and nonsense, as are contained in
these answers, we are at a loss to guess. If our readers are not disgusted
with what they have read, it went on, we will quote a few instances of the
radical slang, in which the Queen at times indulges:
My sympathies all harmonize with those of the people, we have one
common interest; and that interest is one and indivisible. I should have
no heart, if I did not participate in their sorrows, and condole with their
wrongs.[](Answer to Bolton.) The rights of the nation will be only a
scattered wreck, and this once free people, like the meanest of slaves, must
submit to the lash of an insolent domination.(Answer to Wakeeld.) The
improved spirit of the age is seen in the intellectual advancement through all
the gradations of the social scheme.(Answer to Middlesex.) When my
rights are attacked, a fatal blow is aimed at the rights of the people. (Answer
to Kinnoul.)66
In the eyes of the Boston Gazette her Majestys Answers promulgate
Revolutionary principles . . . more worthy of King Cobbett than Queen
Caroline! Indeed, it is quite easy to see a connection between the
language used in the answers and radical discourse, for as Gareth
Stedman Jones suggests: [i]n radical discourse the dividing line between
classes was not that between employer and employed, but that between
the represented and the unrepresented.67 In a debate in the House of
Commons on the restoration of the queens name to the Liturgy,
Thomas Denman, Carolines Solicitor General, reportedly used a telling
phrase when he stated that: If Her Majesty was included in any general
prayer, it was in the prayer for all that are desolate and oppressed.68
National identity, notes Rohan McWilliam, was a crucial component
of the radical movement at this time with the queen representing the
people.69
Keeping these contexts in mind, it is worth looking afresh at the two
radical stanzas in The Village Minstrel:
107
There once was lanes in natures freedom dropt
There once was paths that every valley wound
Inclosure came & every path was stopt
Each tyrant xt his sign were pads was found
To hint a trespass now who crossd the ground
Justice is made to speak as they command
The high road now must be each stinted bound
Inclosure thourt a curse upon the land
& tastless was the wretch who thy existance pland
108
O england boasted land of liberty
Wi strangers still thou mayst thy title own
But thy poor slaves the alteration see
Wi many a loss to them the truth is known
Like emigrating bird thy freedoms own
While mongrel clowns low as their rooting plough
Disdain thy laws to put in force their own
& every village owns its tyrants now
& parish slaves must live as parish kings alow
(lines 1084101; Early Poems, II, 169)
It is noteworthy that Radstock singled out these two stanzas for criticism.
The four before and two after, while also lamenting enclosure, seem not to
have troubled him unduly.70 Stephen Colclough aptly observes that the
stanzas in question are particularly effective in indicating that the local
incidents of enclosure are examples of national corruption, and as he
points out, the poem succeeds by moving from the local to the national,
enclosure is described as a curse upon the land suggesting both its power
to alter topography and its adverse effect on the nation, and the poem goes
on to argue that every village owns its tyrants now.71 Clares decision to
criticize enclosure in this fashion, his choice of language (at times reminis-
cent of both the queens answers and the Spencean sentiments of Wooler
and Evans), and, above all, his class identity as a peasant poet, must have
greatly alarmed Radstock.
David Worrall writes that Carolines replies reveal her awareness of the
artisan or plebeian public sphere.72 Her appeal to members of the
labouring-classes was singled out for criticism by the Morning Post, a
paper with which Radstock had close connections:
The regal pomp and dignity of the Crown of England were never so
degraded, were never so debased, as by the rabble throng who have been
ushered into the presence of Royalty at Brandenburgh House, and by the
Radical Slang which has issued from that house in the shape of answers to
addresses. It is within our own personal knowledge, that journeymen
bakers, the landladies of low ale houses, and the daughters of the lowest
orders, have had the honour (if such it can be called) of kissing her
Majestys hand.73
202 SAM WARD
Here again, the phrase radical slang is used specically to refer to

Carolines answers, suggesting that Radstock saw clear parallels between
the queens defence of her peoples liberties and the language used by Clare
to protest against what he saw as the unjust and often oppressive nature of
rural society. Slang in this context appears to mean both cant, i.e., the
jargon of criminals and illiterate, low language, neither of which, from
a conservative perspective, was deemed an appropriate vehicle for the
expression of political ideas.74 More than that, however, as Olivia Smith
has written: To speak the vulgar language demonstrated that one belonged
to the vulgar class; that is, that one was morally and intellectually unt to
participate in the culture.75
Roger Sales has proposed that Radstock came to regard Clares poetry
as a vital battleground, since, if it could be shown that this particular
cottager was peaceable in his station, then it could be asserted that all the
others either were, or ought to be.76 As Colclough insightfully suggests,
Clares lines were considered radical not only because they attacked the
aristocracy, who now made up a signicant proportion of his patrons,
but because they spoke from the perspective of the labourer, and made
signicant demands about his material existence.77 The danger was that
such sentiments not only described or represented politicized spaces,
they also produced them, providing the labouring-classes with a sense of
agency.
As I draw to a conclusion, I am conscious that Clares agency has barely
gured in my account. My aim here, however, has been to consider some of
the key issues relating to Clare and politics in the early 1820s and not
Clares politics as such.78 Having said that, I think it is important to
acknowledge that Clares few surviving comments on Caroline are critical
and that he regarded the whole affair with barely concealed contempt.
When Caroline died in August 1821, Taylor sent him a black waistcoat to
mark the occasion. Thanking him, Clares feelings spilled out to the extent
that he backtracked with an attempted excision:
I have put on the black waiscoat you gave me for this last week & shoud have
done so with the coat but it is too dandyish for this countrybut it is not to
mourn for the injurd queanI hated her while living & have no inclination
to regret her deathI hated her not as a woman or as a queen but as vilest
hypocrite that ever existedcommon sense gives me her spectacles to look
upon every thing Im of no party but I never saw such farcical humbug
carried on in my life before & I never wish to see it agen for its lanched me
head over ears in politics for this last twelvemonth & made me very violent
when John Barleycorn inspird mewho made me side for the King & a
little true subject tho I was formerly as I was touchd with a stain of
radicalism every one has his share of humbug & I have mine.79
Although Clare pregures E. P. Thompsons hasty dismissal of the Queen
Caroline affair as humbug in The Making of the English Working Class,
and echoes his contemporaries by describing it with a theatrical image as a
farce, it is the heavily deleted passage which is perhaps the most striking
thing here, acknowledging as it does both the limited scope of Clares
previous loyalty to George IV (a little true subject tho I formerly was) and
an association with potentially seditious ideas (I was touchd with a stain of
radicalism).80
As this example plainly illustrates, political allegiances in this period
were seldom as clearly dened as ideologues such as Radstock desired them
to be. In December 1820, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon recorded a
meeting he had had in Kendal with a little Whig hater, loyal but a Queens
mana picture of English healthy independence. According to Haydon,
this man loved the King, thought the Queen a whorebut he would be
damned if any woman should [be] ill used, whore or no whore.81
Somewhat similarly, Clares letter to Taylor indicates his independence
of mind a characteristic also apparent in his blunt refusal to do as he was
told, whether that involved putting a light in his window to honour Queen
Caroline or cutting lines from his poetry at the request of Radstock and his
friends.82 It further suggests that even if Clares most anti-aristocratic
seeming verse might have been viewed as contiguous with the wider radical
discourse centred around Caroline, it did so because of the implicit
challenge his writing posed to contemporary denitions of legitimate
plebeian discourse and not because he was in any direct sense an active
proponent of radical reform.
Notes
1. Nor. 3, p. 186b.
2. The Annual Biography and Obituary for the Year 1826 (London, 1826),
pp. 214 (p. 9).
3. M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral
Reform in England, 17871886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), p. 79.
4. Clare to Taylor, 3 April 1821, Letters, p. 173.
5. John Taylor to James Taylor, 22 May 1820, quoted in Olive M. Taylor, John
Taylor: Author and Publisher, 17811864, London Mercury, 12 (July 1925),
25867 (261).
204 SAM WARD
6. Morning Post, 11 February 1820.

7. Gilchrist to Clare, 21 March 1820, Critical Heritage, p. 61; Radstock lived at 10
Portland Place. Early Poems, I, p. 80, indicates that the word was written as
best or besht (as applied to a dirty baby) in manuscript, as a dash only in
the rst edition of Poems Descriptive, and as unt in the second edition.
8. As discussed below, these letters were written by Eliza Emmerson and
Markham E. Sherwill.
9. Clare to Taylor, 16 May 1820, Letters, pp. 6870.
10. Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003),
pp. 945.
11. Sherwill to Clare, 25 May 1820, Pet. F1.
12. Taylor to Clare, 2729 September 1820, Eg. 2245, f. 225, The British
Library Board. All further references in this chapter to Egerton Manuscripts
materials are The British Library Board.
13. The Times, 7 June 1820. J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in
London 17691821 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 307.
14. William Hazlitt, Common Places, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt,
ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 19304), 20, p. 136.
15. Thomas W. Laqueur, The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of
George IV, Journal of Modern History, 54 (September 1992), 41766 (427).
16. J. S. to Sir Robert Baker, 6 June 1820, Home Ofce Papers, HO 40/15, f. 22.
They did so from a Spirit of Hostility to his Majesty, and not from any Loyalty
or real good will to her Majesty.
17. Radstock is quoting here from 1 Peter 2:17 Honour all men. Love the
brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the King. The contents of The Cottagers
Friend are summarized in Vardy, pp. 8891. Most commentators, including
Vardy, have suggested that the pamphlet dates from 1816, but it had rst
appeared at least two years earlier.
18. Quoted in Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry, p. 91.
19. Vardy, p. 91.
20. E. Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists: A Study in Political Disaffection (London:
Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 118.
21. Southey to W. S. Landor, 14 August 1820, Selections from the Letters of Robert
Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green,
and Longmans, 1856), 3, p. 206.
22. T. C. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, n.s., vol. 2 (27 June27 September
1820), cols. 213, 214.
23. R. A. Melikan, Pain and Penalties Procedure: How the House of Lords
Tried Queen Caroline, in Domestic and International Trials, 1700
2000, ed. R. A. Melikan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003),
pp. 5475 (p. 57).
24. For modern accounts of the trial, see E. A. Smith, A Queen on Trial: The Affair
of Queen Caroline (Stroud: Allen Sutton, 1993) and Jane Robins, Rebel
Queen: The Trial of Caroline (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006). A discus-
sion of literary responses is provided by John Gardner in Poetry and Popular
Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2011), pp. 157217.
25. See Smith, A Queen on Trial, pp. 401.
26. The Progress of Revolution Cheering to the Lover of Liberty, The
Republican, 4.1 (1 September 1820), 67 (7).
27. Rohan McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (London:
Routledge, 1998), p. 9.
28. Dror Wahrman, Middle-Class Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class,
and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria, Journal of British
Studies, 32.4 (October 1993), 396432 (402).
29. The queen enjoyed strong support among women, on which topic see Susan
Kingley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain: 16401990 (London: Routledge,
1999), pp. 15964, and Anna Clark, Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics
of Popular Culture in London, 1820, Representations, 31 (Summer, 1990),
4768.
30. For examples of the addresses to the Queen and her replies, see Smith,
A Queen on Trial, pp. 1067, 1123, 1489, and, with a highly critical
commentary, Selections from the Queens Answers to Various Addresses
Presented to Her: Together with Her Majestys Extraordinary Letter to the
King; and an Introduction and Observations Illustrative of their Tendency
(London, 1821). On Cobbetts role, see Robins, The Trial of Queen
Caroline, pp. 15860, 1624.
31. John Belchem, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 50.
32. Emmerson to Clare, 11 May 1820, Eg. 2245, ff. 11820.
33. A notable exception is Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds
of Circumstance (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987),
pp. 11315.
34. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London: Taylor and Hessey,
1820), pp. xiiixiv.
35. Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry, pp. 42, 44.
36. New Monthly Magazine, 13.74 (1 March 1820), 32630 (329), rpt. Critical
Heritage, pp. 6873; Display of Native Genius. No. II, The Gentlemans
Magazine, 91 (April 1821), 30812 (309).
37. Morning Post, 15 May 1820 and 12 June 1820.
38. Sherwill to Clare, 11 May 1820, Pet. F1; Emmerson to Clare, 11 May 1820 Eg.
2245, ff. 11820.
39. On literary celebrity, see the essays collected in Romanticism and Celebrity
Culture, 17501850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
40. Radstock to Emmerson (copy) in Emmerson to Clare, 11 May 1820; and
Emmerson to Clare, 11 May 1820, Eg. 2245, ff. 11820.
41. John Lucas suggests that several of Clares early poems use exactly the
language of popular radicalism that can be found in radical newspapers of
the time; Clares Politics, in Haughton, pp. 14877 (p. 155).
206 SAM WARD
42. Poems Descriptive, p. 148; Sherwill to Clare, 11 May 1820.

43. Taylor to Clare, 2729 September 1820, Eg. 2245, f. 225.
44. Emmerson to Clare, 24 May 1820, quoted in Critical Heritage, p. 62. Poems
Descriptive, p. 148. Moiled means hot and weary with work; tired out,
exhausted, Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols. (London:
Henry Frowde, 18981905), 4: MQ, p. 143.
45. Poems Descriptive, p. 9.
46. Taylor to Clare, 2729 September 1820, Eg. 2245, f. 225. Taylor was still
unsure how to proceed in January the following year, enquiring of Clare:
what are we to do with those 8 lines LR marked out of Helpstone?; Taylor to
Clare, 6 January 1821, quoted in Letters, p.135. In the fourth edition, the
Accursed wealth passage was nally cut, but the other lines survived.
47. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 16601832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During
the Ancien Rgime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 8.
48. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 17981832 (Madison,
WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1987), p. 103.
49. Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany, NY:
State University Press of New York, 1999), pp. 1589.
50. The Right of the Poor to the Cultivation of Waste Lands, The Black Dwarf, 6
January 1819, 15.
51. Lines 578 of the poem. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver
Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 678.
52. The Black Dwarf, 6 January 1819, 45.
53. Thomas Evans, Christian Policy, the Salvation of the Empire, 2nd edn.
(London, 1820), pp. 15, 17. The description deceptively titled is taken from
David Worralls Mab and Mob: The Radical Press Community in Regency
London, in Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press, ed. Stephen Behrendt
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 13756 (p. 143).
54. David Worrall, Review Essay: Reassessing the Romantic Scene, on
John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street, and the
Queen Caroline Controversy, JCSJ, 33 (2014), 8791 (89). Despite the leads
provided by John Lucas (Clares Politics, p. 155) and Anne Janowitz in
her Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), a detailed comparison between Clares work and
what Worrall calls the radical poetic counterculture of Spencean poets
such as E. J. Blandford, Allen Davenport, and Thomas Hazard is urgently
needed. P. M. S. Dawson, on the contrary, argues that: Of all the various
strands of radicalism at the time Clare would have had least sympathy
for the physical force Spenceans who belonged to what even the
government distinguished under the term Ultra (or Fighting) Radicals
as opposed to the constitutional radicals. See Common Sense or
Radicalism? Some Reections on Clares Politics, Romanticism, 2.1
(1996), 8197 (85).
55. David Worrall, Agrarians against the Picturesque: Ultra-Radicalism and the
Revolutionary Politics of Land, in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature,
Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 24060 (p. 257).
56. The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the
Year 1817 (London, 1818), pp. 1314.
57. J.S. to Sir Robert Baker, 10 July 1820, Home Ofce Papers, HO 40/15, f. 33.
58. J.S. to the Home Ofce, 16 October 1820, Home Ofce Papers, HO 40/15, f. 38.
59. Mr Simmons to Lord Sidmouth, 6 September 1820, Home Ofce Papers,
HO 40/14, f. 254.
60. Mr Simmons to Lord Sidmouth, 7 September 1820, Home Ofce Papers, HO
40/14, f. 258.
61. Christian Observer, vol. 19 (London, 1820), p. iii.
62. Laqueur, The Queen Caroline Affair, 429.
63. New Times, 12 November 1820, quoted in Laqueur, The Queen Caroline
Affair, 431.
64. Laqueur, The Queen Caroline Affair, 429.
65. Taylor to Clare, 2729 September 1820, Eg. 2245, f. 225. As Simon Kvesi
reminds us, by 1893, the very lines identied by Radstock as radical slang
could be used to explicitly bolster a conservative reading of Clare. See John
Clare & . . . & . . . & . . . Deleuze and Guattaris Rhizome, in Ecology and the
British Left: The Red and the Green, ed. John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus, in
association with Valentine Cunningham (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 7588
(pp. 76, 78).
66. Review of The Moral and Political Crisis of England: Most Respectfully Inscribed
to the Higher and Middle Classes by the Reverend Melville Horne and A Letter
from an Englishman at St. Omers to a Member of Parliament, Anti-Jacobin
Review, 268.59 (September, 1820), 6676 (70, 72).
67. The Boston Gazette, and Lincolnshire Advertiser, 5 September 1820; Gareth
Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History
18321982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 106.
68. The Creevey Papers: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of the Late
Thomas Creevey, M.P., ed. Herbert Maxwell, 2 vols. (London: John Murray,
1904), 1, p. 304.
69. McWilliam, Popular Politics, p. 11.
70. In spite of two references to oppressions power in stanzas 105 (line 1071) and
110 (line 1119).
71. Stephen Colclough, Voicing Loss, Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of John
Clare, 18171832, (University of Keele: PhD thesis, 1996), p. 85.
72. David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period
Subcultures 17731832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 199200.
73. Morning Post, 17 November 1820. On the conservative reaction to events, see
Jonathan Fulcher, The Loyalist Response to the Queen Caroline Agitations,
Journal of British Studies, 34.4 (October, 1995), 481502. Brandenburgh House
was the queens residence in London during this period.
74. Denitions 3 and 5 in Greens Dictionary of Slang, ed. Jonathan Green, 3 vols.
(London: Chambers, 2010), 3: PZ, pp. 101213.
208 SAM WARD
75. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 17911819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), p. 2.
76. Roger Sales, English Literature in History 17801830: Pastoral and Politics
(London: Longman, 1983), p. 92.
77. Stephen Colclough, Labour and Luxury: Clares Lost Pastoral and
the Importance of Voice in the Early Poems, in New Approaches, pp. 7791
(p. 87).
78. For the debate about the nature of Clares politics, see, in particular, Lucas,
Clares Politics and Dawson, Common Sense or Radicalism. See also
P. M. S. Dawson, John ClareRadical?, JCSJ, 11 (1992), 1727; Alan Vardy,
Clare and Political Equivocation, JCSJ, 18 (1999), 3748; Eric Robinsons
introduction to John Clare: A Champion for the Poor, Political Verse and Prose,
ed. P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 2000), pp. xivxv; and Vardys review of
the same in JCSJ, 20 (2001), 815.
79. Adapted from Clare to Taylor, 18 August 1821, Letters, pp. 2089 and
Champion for the Poor, pp. 31213. The deleted passage, speculatively restored
in Champion for the Poor, is not included in Letters.
80. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rpt.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 778. See also Thompsons review of
Iowerth Protheros Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London:
John Gast and His Times (1978), in which he acknowledged that the affair had
more importance than he had previously allowed, but still called it a glorious
ebullition of that peculiar English genre: humbug; The Very Type of the
Respectable Artisan, New Society 48 (May 3, 1979), 2757 (276). For
descriptions of the affair as a farce, see Laqueur, The Queen Caroline
Affair, 441.
81. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. William Bissell Pope, 5 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19603), 2, pp. 2967.
82. On Clares reluctance to illuminate his house to celebrate the abandonment
of the Bill of Pains and Penalties, see Clare to Hessey, 1 December 1820,
Letters, pp. 10910.
chapter 10
John Clare and the London Magazine

Richard Cronin
The London Magazine was addressed to a metropolitan readership. As

he explains in his prospectus, John Scott, its rst editor, chose to revive
the title of a defunct magazine as a way of calling attention to a gap in the
market: while secondary towns of the Kingdom (the town uppermost in
his mind is Edinburgh) give name and distinction to popular Journals, the
METROPOLIS remains unrepresented in the now strenuous competition
of Periodical Literature.1 Given this, it seems odd that the rst issue of the
magazine should feature in its opening pages Octavius Gilchrists Account
of John Clare, an Agricultural Labourer and Poet.2 Clares obscurity he
is, as Gilchrist acknowledges, as yet altogether unknown to literature is
underlined by the paper that immediately follows in which John Scott
offers his tribute to the most celebrated writer of the age, the Author of the
Scotch Novels. Walter Scott takes second place to a provincial poet who
lived in the neighbourhood of Stamford, the Lincolnshire market town.
But Stamford, seven miles from Clares village of Helpston, was an
important provincial centre and the hub of an extensive literary network.
John Scott, the Londons editor, had edited Drakards Stamford News, a
newspaper that had been launched in 1809 as a radical alternative to the
long-established Stamford Mercury. Gilchrist had been his principal coad-
jutor and succeeded to the editorship of the newspaper in 1813 when Scott
returned to London to edit Drakards Paper, retitled in the following year
as The Champion. Gilchrists paper in the London was clearly intended to
advertise Clares rst volume, Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery,
about to be published by the London rm of Taylor and Hessey. Taylor
was an old friend of Gilchrists and had rst met Clare at Gilchrists house
in Stamford. He had already been introduced to Clares poems by another
Stamford resident, the young bookseller Edward Drury, who was Taylors
cousin. Taylor and Hessey were also intimates of John Scott. In 1817 they
had published The House of Mourning, Scotts elegy for his dead son. After
Scotts death on 27 February 1821, Taylor and Hessey bought the magazine
209
210 RICHARD CRONIN
from its founder, Robert Baldwin, and Taylor succeeded Scott as editor.
These circumstances may explain the inclusion of Gilchrists paper in the
Londons rst number, but they offer no explanation of why it was that
Clare went on to become so important a contributor to the magazine, by
some reckonings the most prolic of all the contributors of original
poetry.3
Roger Sales argues that the London Magazine made space for John
Clare and Allan Cunningham, the Scottish stone mason and neighbour
of Burns, in recognition of the importance of James Hogg to Blackwoods
Edinburgh Magazine. Blackwoods was, after all, the magazine on which
the London most closely modelled itself. The employment of Clare and
Cunningham was a manifestation of the rivalry between the two jour-
nals.4 But this answers one question only to prompt another. Why
did Blackwoods, a product of the most culturally sophisticated city in
Britain its principal writers, John Wilson and J. G. Lockhart, Oxford-
educated Edinburgh lawyers value so highly the contributions of the
scarcely educated James Hogg? The success of the new literary maga-
zines, the single most remarkable publishing phenomenon in the second
and third decades of the nineteenth century, was gained because they
catered for a new urban middle class, not often university-educated,
employed most typically as clerks in trading companies, in government
ofces, or the ofces of lawyers. The magazines supplied the new read-
ership with the cultural baggage that it lacked.5 When Thomas Campbell
accepted Henry Colburns generous offer to edit the New Monthly
Magazine his own principal contribution was a series of papers of
remarkable dullness on Greek poetry, but Colburn recognized their
value. They reinforced the decision to appoint as editor a recognized
British poet by offering a further demonstration of the magazines
cultural seriousness. The new magazines set themselves somewhat
self-consciously to repair the narrowness of their readerships cultural
experience hence the inclusion of papers that surveyed the classical
heritage, the older literature of Britain, and European cultural develop-
ments. The new readership was characteristically urban, and unfamiliar
with the traditional culture that still survived, if precariously, in rural
areas. Contributions were also needed to supply this lack. So it was that
even before Wilson and Lockhart were associated with Blackwoods,
James Hogg furnished the magazine with a series of papers under the
title Tales and Anecdotes of the Pastoral Life, which introduced readers
to old songs, strange stories of witches and apparitions and anecdotes
of the pastoral life. Hogg recommended his material as extremely
John Clare and the London Magazine 211
curious, and wholly unknown to the literary part of the community.6 As
James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin point out, the very act of laying
claim to a rural sensibility was itself a product of the metropolitan
moment.7 John Scott already knew as much. While Hogg lives, he
wrote, the great and nal gulph of division is not yet interposed between
the simplicity and elevated imagination of an innocent, religious, and
patriarchal people, and the artice and pretention of what is called
rened civilization.8 Clares role was to offer a similar bridge between
the two cultures in Scotts own magazine. The London, like Leigh Hunts
Examiner, was a Cockney publication Hazlitt was a leading contributor
and it championed the poetry of Keats but in Clare, Scott seems to have
recognized, it had found an antidote to its own Cockneyism. Clares
poetry, as his reviewer in the Monthly Review put it, precisely because it
was artless and unsophisticated, offered a salutary corrective to the
effusions of a poet writing pastorals as he wanders through the elds to
the north-east of London.9
Allan Cunningham makes the point in the rst of a series of papers for
the London on Traditional Literature.10 In the provinces a species of
rustic, or national oral literature still survives that has been long since
obliterated in the city. It is, Cunningham insists, a more truly national
literature than the urbane literary tradition, and a more authentic litera-
ture: The character of the city is not of that genuine original kind, which
would incline its society to receive and retain those simple compositions
that dwell in the minds and hearts of a pastoral and a rural people.11 The
metropolitan citizen, like the typefaces in which literature was reproduced
on the citys printing presses, is unindividualized, so smoothed down and
polished, in the outward and inner man, that the original English stamp is
more than half effaced.12 Cunningham supplied the magazine with papers
designed to meet a taste that had been created principally by Walter Scott:
in his collection of border ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in the
poems that followed, and more recently in the Scotch novels. But, as
Hazlitt noted, the taste for all things Scottish was itself a reaction against
an England in which every foot of soil had been worked up and nearly
every movement of the social machine had become calculable. England
had once been properly represented by the strongly individual, by the
idiosyncratic and the eccentric. There was a Parson Adams not quite a
hundred years ago a Sir Roger de Coverley rather more than a hundred,
but now individuality has been erased by the level, the littleness, the
frippery of modern civilization.13 It was not just character that had been
lost. In a culture that was now regulated by the use of dictionaries and the
212 RICHARD CRONIN
operation of printers conventions, language itself had been attened.

Cunningham offered the more varied and original cast14 of rural language
as an antidote to the smoothed down and polished language of the
metropolis. John Taylor makes a similar point in the paper for the
London in which he describes his visit to John Clare.15 Taylor is at rst
defensive about Clares provincial language, recommending the philo-
sophic mind to read his thoughts, rather than catch at the manner of their
utterance.16 But when he calls to mind those who would prefer corn to be
threshed rather than thumped he registers an objection to all attempts to
impose on literature a standardized diction, a policy that, as he points out,
would dictate that Spenser and Shakespeare ought to be proscribed, since
both wrote before the time at which a single group, socially and geogra-
phically dened, had succeeded in establishing its own linguistic habits as
the true and entire world of words for all Englishmen.17 He ends by
nding in Clares diction the most decisive proof of the originality of his
genius. It is through his diction that Clare rescues his reader from the
mass-produced language that characterized the print industry of the early
nineteenth century. As Taylor puts it, Clare saves the reader from a cluster-
language framed and cast into set forms, in the most approved models, and
adapted for all occasions.18
Clares poetry, Taylor suggests, has the value that attaches to a handi-
craft in an age of mass production. The poetry embodies an individuality
and an authenticity that have been lost in a print industry that now
manufactures goods for consumption by a mass public. The paradox in
making such a claim in the London Magazine is evident, because the new
magazines were themselves amongst the most striking symptoms of the
industrialization of literature of which Taylor complains, and from which
Clares poems are represented as offering relief. It is a paradox central to the
literary culture of the early nineteenth century. The most striking symp-
tom of the industrialization of print was the entirely unprecedented sale of
Walter Scotts novels, the fth of which, Rob Roy, might, according to
Peter Garside, fairly claim to be the rst example of the phenomenon that
most dramatically signalled the transformation in the character of the print
industry the best seller.19 Scott secured his phenomenal sales in part,
surely, because the Scots that his best-loved characters spoke offered
precisely what Taylor discovered in Clares poems: direct access to an
oral culture that was in danger of being extirpated by a literary culture
issuing from the metropolitan centres of London and Edinburgh. The
literary language of the metropolis was not reproduced in speech but
typographically, by means of letter press. The new magazines employed
writers such as James Hogg, Allan Cunningham and John Clare because
they offered magazine readers, as Scott offered novel readers, the chance to
rediscover an older, more authentic, and more truly national oral culture.
But such promises could only be illusory. Scotts novels, for example, could
not offer direct access to the oral culture of Scotland because the Scots
language, as the novels reproduced it, was itself a typographical phenom-
enon. The novels, claims Hazlitt, are not so much admired in Scotland as
in England:20 they are most admired, then, by those for whom Scots is not
a spoken language so much as a system of orthography. The novels, just as
much as Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, could preserve oral culture
only by translating modes of speech into typographical conventions, which
is to say that they could not preserve them at all, an uncomfortable
perception not lost on James Hoggs mother, one of the principal sources
for the ballads that Scott preserved in the Minstrelsy. Scott, she complains,
had broken the charm of poems that were made for singing and no for
reading. Hogg adds that his mother had been proved right, for from that
day to this, these songs, which were the amusement of every winter
evening, have never been sung more.21
Scotts achievement is inherently paradoxical. Hazlitt properly prefers
the novels to the poems, which can claim only the status of a modern-
antique: the smooth, glossy texture of his verse contrasts happily with
the quaint, uncouth, rugged materials of which it is composed.22 But
there is surely a very similar contrast between the quaint, uncouth,
rugged speech of characters such as Rob Roy and Bailie Nicol Jarvie
and the elegant pages set by James Ballantyne in which that speech was
encountered. I suspect that the paradox secured rather than threatened
Scotts overwhelming popularity. It is certainly a paradox that writers
such as Hogg and Cunningham who were building on Scotts success
seem anxious to reproduce. Cunningham, for example, regrets in the
rst paper in his series Traditional Literature that the poet has been
degraded so far that he has become a kind of auxiliary to the city
bookseller,23 which is an odd complaint to make in a contribution to
a periodical such as the London Magazine. In the papers themselves
Cunningham offers examples of the rustic, or national oral literature
that he prizes, but the verse specimens are enclosed within a prose
narrative of a very different character. In the second paper in the series24
Cunningham chooses as an epigraph a vigorous old ballad, Richard
Faulder of Allanbay Its sweet to go with hound and hawk, / Oer
moor and mountain roamin but the paper proper opens with a
sentence of a polished urbanity so emphatic that it can only have been
214 RICHARD CRONIN
designed to point a contrast with the verse that precedes it: On a harvest
afternoon, when the ripe grain, which clothed the western slope of the
Cumberland hills, had partly submitted to the sickle, a party of reapers
were seated on a small green knoll, enjoying the brief luxury of the
dinner hour. This is prose as smoothed down and polished, in the
outward and inner man as any of the city dwellers whose lack of the
original English stamp Cunningham bemoans in the paper introducing
the series. It is as if he is not content to allow his old ballads to stand out
by contrast with the other contributions to John Scotts metropolitan
magazine he insists on rehearsing the contrast within his own con-
tribution. But Cunninghams magazine identity is still more ambivalent
than this suggests, for Cunningham, even more emphatically than
Walter Scott, is an exponent of the modern-antique. The ballads offered
as specimens of the unwritten reliques of our poetry25 were written by
Cunningham himself.
Cunninghams practice seemed reprehensible to serious scholars
of popular literature. To William Motherwell he was one of the manu-
facturers of antique gems who poison the sources of history.26
Cunningham had notoriously submitted some of his own compositions
to R. H. Cromek, who had published them in 1810 in his Remains of
Nithsdale and Galloway Song. But in the London such subterfuges were
viewed more indulgently. For Thomas Hood, who joined the London
Magazine in 1821 as a sort of sub-editor, Cunningham was a purveyor of
rare old-new or new-old ballads.27 In John Hamilton Reynoldss squib,
The Literary Police Ofce, Bow Street,28 the charge becomes merely
facetious: ALLAN CUNNINGHAM, a dwarf (because Cunningham
was remarkably tall) is brought up before the magistrate charged with a
fraud upon a Mr. Cromek. Being young and little, he was handed
over to the Philanthropic, as a t place for such a heart as his29 (the
Philanthropic Society of Mile End had been established in 1803 for the
Relief and Discharge of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts). When
Taylor visited Clare he noted a copy of Cromeks volume on Clares
shelves, and the success of Cunninghams deception seemed to both men
simply a matter for congratulation: he thought, as I did, that only Auld
Lang Syne could have produced poems such as The Lords Marie,
Bonnie Lady Anne, and the Mermaid of Gallowa. Clare, who was so
great an admirer of Chatterton, could scarcely be expected to have
thought otherwise.30
Cunningham had been born and raised in Dumfriesshire, where he had
served his apprenticeship as a stonemason, but since 1810 he had worked in
London, employed by the most fashionable sculptor of the day, Francis
Chantrey, as superintendent of his studio. The papers on Traditional
Literature are directed from Lammerlea, Cumberland only by a polite
ction: in fact, Cunningham lived in Pimlico. The wide difference
between the two addresses usefully offers a clue to the complexity of
Cunninghams place within the literary economy of the London
Magazine. He was a prominent member of a tight circle of London writers,
and also a writer whose special function was to act as a conduit through
which a popular, oral, rustic literature might enliven a magazine otherwise
remarkable for the metropolitan character of its materials. Cunningham
was asked, in other words, at once to take his place as one of a group of
London writers, and to function as their antidote.
The dening mark of the London writers was the ease with which they
were able to move between identities. Metropolitan identity was dened by
its uidity. Its most popular representative in the period was Corinthian
Tom in Pierce Egans Life In London, who earns his Corinthian status
because he is a citizen of the whole city, equally happy whether he was
animatedly engaged in squeezing the hand of some lovely countess of St
Jamess, or passing an hour with a poor custard-monger in the back
settlements of St Giless. For Tom and his country cousin Jerry all the
sights of London are equally available; taking a turn in the evening to listen
to Coleridge, Flaxman, and Soane, a visit to Newgate on the morning of
an execution, a trip to the dog-pit to watch the famous monkey Jacco take
on the dogs, or an evening at the Royal Academy exhibition at Somerset
House, a visit to which, as Bob Logic, Toms Oxonian friend, insists, is
always a bob well laid out.31 In the course of their adventures Tom and
Jerry traverse the whole of the city, and Jerry, fresh from the country, learns
under Toms tutelage to be equally at home wherever he goes. As Gregory
Dart points out, the new readership that the London Magazine addressed, a
heterogeneous group of semi-professionals, clerks, trainee lawyers, shop-
keepers and craftsmen, had in common only that their place in the social
hierarchy was unxed. Life in London achieved its extraordinary success
because it was able to throw itself into this experience of social indetermi-
nacy and to turn it into a source of pleasure.32 Allan Cunninghams
subscription from Lammerlea Cumberland worked by contrast to root
the series of papers in a xed place governed by a stable social hierarchy in
which identities were fully determined.
Contributions to magazines were, for the most part, anonymous. But a
still more amboyant magazine expression of the uid identity that dened
the metropolitan personality was the practice of pseudonymity. In an
216 RICHARD CRONIN
attack on Blackwoods in the London, John Scott suggests that it was a

practice that the Blackwoods men borrowed from Walter Scott, who
presented his own ction under a rich variety of pseudonyms.33 In a
typically impudent gesture Blackwoods offered the names of Odoherty,
Kempferhausen, Wastle, Timothy Tickler, and Lauerwinckel, pseudo-
nyms used in the magazine often enough to have developed into house
characters, as proof that its writers scorned anonymity.34 John Scott
condemns the irresponsibility that the practice encourages. It made it
possible, he complains, for Wordsworth to be outrageously vilied, and
zealously defended in papers written by the same individual (he seems
mistakenly to have believed that the pieces in question were written by
Lockhart rather than John Wilson). But in the very same edition of the
London Scott had included the paper Christs Hospital Five and Thirty
Years Ago, in which Elia refutes the magnicent eulogy of his old
school that Mr. Lamb had reprinted in his Works, published a year
or two since.35 Pseudonymity was one of the games that the new
magazines played,36 no contributor more amboyantly than the
Londons T. G. Wainewright. His papers might appear under the signa-
ture of Janus Weathercock, or Egomet Bonmot, or Cornelius van
Vinkbooms, and it was Wainewright, Lamb believed, who, more than
any other contributor, gave the London its character. In 1822, he asked
Hessey:
What is gone of the Opium Eater, where is Barry Cornwall, & above all
what is become of Janus Weathercock or by his worse name of Vink-
something? He is much wanted. He was the genius of the Lond. Mag. The
rest of us are single Essayists.37
John Taylor secured the collegiality of the magazine by offering monthly
dinners rst at his premises in Fleet Street and later at Waterloo Place.38
Clare, who attended when visiting London, remembers them fondly as
presided over by John Hamilton Reynolds, the soul of these dinner
partys. The fellow guests included Hazlitt, a silent picture of severity,
Charles Lamb, a good sort of a fellow and if he offends it is innosently
done, and Henry Cary, the translator of Dante.39 The dinners were
remembered too by Thomas Hood. Hood remembers Clare sitting next
to Hazlitt, distinguished from the other guests by his bright green coat:
shining verdantly out from the grave-coloured suits of the literati, like a
patch of turnips amidst stubble and fallow, behold our Jack i the Green
John Clare (the Jack i the Green is the gure swathed in foliage who
gures in rustic Mayday celebrations). After the dinner Clare walked along
the Strand arm-in-arm with Charles Lamb, while passers-by shouted after
them, there goes Tom and Jerry (in the Cruikshanks illustrations to Life
in London and in all the stage adaptations a green coat identies Toms
country cousin, Jerry Hawthorn). Hood recalls how, on an occasion when
the dinner was hosted by T. G. Wainewright, Wainewrights valet tried to
exclude Clare from the gathering, taking him for an interloper. The
anecdote establishes Clare as at once an accepted member of the group
and as an outsider. The brightness of the green coat, such a very countried
suit, set against the editorial sables favoured by the other guests, is, as
Hood intimates, emblematic: it signals Clares failure to blend in with his
fellow contributors. The green coat makes it predictable that Hood should
end his account of Clare by regretting his presence: Poor Clare! It would
greatly please me to hear that he was happy and well, and thriving;
but the transplanting of Peasants and Farmers Boys from the natural
into an articial soil, does not always conduce to their happiness, or health,
or ultimate well doing.40 Hoods misgivings were widely shared.
Wainewright claimed Clares friendship in one of his Weathercock papers:
Thy hand, friend Clare! others may speak thee fairer, but none wish thee
solider welfare than Janus. But his concern for Clares welfare issues in a
piece of advice that, even Janus admits, seems strange coming from a
friend, visit London seldom.41 The same thought moved the classicist
C. A. Elton to verse. In his Idlers Epistle to John Clare42 he urges the poet
to quit the town: The paven at of endless street / Is all unsuited to thy
feet, by which he means the feet of Clares verse as much as the feet on
which he treads the London pavements.
Eltons point is that Clares value to the magazine depends on his
maintaining his difference from the metropolitan contributors. He under-
stands as well as Hood that Clare could only be struck by the disparity
between the society that London affords him and the society available to
him in Helpston. He will be left sadly contrasting the unlettered country
company of Clod, and Hodge and Podge, with the delights of London
society Elia, and Barry [Cornwall, the pen-name of Bryan Waller
Proctor], and Herbert [J. H. Reynolds wrote for the London under the
pseudonym, Edward Herbert], and Mr Table Talk [Hazlitt], cum multis
aliis.43 But his proper place is with Clod, Hodge and Podge. Hoods
recourse to the pseudonyms so characteristic of metropolitan magazine
writing is revealing. Lamb and Reynolds appear under their pseudonyms
because they have assumed the unstable, shifting identity of the metropolis.
The value of Clare, by contrast, depends upon his maintaining a simple,
xed identity.
218 RICHARD CRONIN
The verbal gure most closely associated with metropolitan magazine

identity was the pun. It is entirely appropriate that as a young man of
twenty-two Thomas Hood, the most celebrated punster of the century,
should have been introduced to Authorship in earnest when he was
appointed by Taylor and Hessey to a position at the London.44 Hood
took over the Lions Head, the column that acknowledged unsolicited
contributions, and immediately put his own stamp upon it: The Essay on
Agricultural Distress would only increase it.45 The magazine dinners were
also remembered for their puns. For Hood it was Lamb who was sure to
stammer out the best pun of the evening.46 Clare too recalls how Lamb
stammers at a joke or pun, but gives the palm to Reynolds, who is a wit
and punster and very happy and entertaining in both pretentions . . . there
is nothing studied about them.47 But, as Charles Lamb explains in one of
his Elia papers, punning did not simply refer to wordplay. Lamb thought
of all non-serious subjects; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated
after my fashion, non-seriously as puns (Distant Correspondents48). The
pun came to gure the principle of mobility that was so characteristic of the
Londons writers.49 Clare notes that one of those present at the dinners,
Allan Cunningham, felt excluded from this community of punsters: when
the companys talk is of poetry he is ready to talk 2 ways at once but when
puns are up his head is down over his glass musing and silent and nothing
but poetry is the game to start him into hillarity again.50 It is a discomfort
that Wainewright believed Clare himself felt. When, in one of the Londons
more elaborate practical jokes, the death of Elia was announced,
Wainewright suggested that Clare would be relieved: never again will his
sweetly-simple Doric phrase and accent beget the odious pun.
Wainewright, like Clare himself, takes punning to be inconsistent with
the language of poetry, for love and perfect trust, no doubt, is the germ of
true poetry.51
John Scott accused Blackwoods of including Hoggs contributions with-
out according him collegial status: in Blackwoods Magazine Hogg is
made to gure as an absolute Zany: he is made the Fool of the Show-cart:
that is to say, he is abused, belied, disgured and all under the guise of
friendship and affection.52 Hogg, Scott believed, was less like John Wilson
and J. G. Lockhart, the other principal contributors to the magazine, than
one of the magazines characters. His proper place was not with Wilson and
Lockhart but with Morgan Odoherty, Timothy Tickler, Kempferhausen
and so on. It was a suspicion that was conrmed, it might be thought, in
March 1823, when Hogg made his rst appearance in the Noctes
Ambrosianae, the most celebrated of all the Blackwoods series, supposedly
offering transcripts of the regular meetings of the Blackwoods editorial
team at Ambroses, a tavern in Gabriel Road, Edinburgh. In March 1823,
Hogg was impersonated by Lockhart, but later the column became the
exclusive property of John Wilson, and Hogg, usually dubbed by Wilson
the Shepherd, became his most famous character. It was a position that
Hogg did not nd quite comfortable. It was not simply that Hoggs
identity was being appropriated by another contributor to the magazine:
in becoming a character he was attened, reduced to a type, an embodi-
ment of rustic horse sense or of the bodily importunities that his
more intellectual collocutors are apt to overlook.53 It remains a question
whether John Clare escaped a similar fate at the hands of the London
Magazine.
The test case is the squib by John Hamilton Reynolds that appeared in
the issue for February 1823, The Literary Police Ofce.54 The paper
reports on a sitting at Bow Street of the metropolitan magistrates court
before which a wide selection of contemporary literary gures appear to
answer a variety of charges. The fun is harmless enough Wordsworth is
charged with stealing a pony from Mrs Foy and a spade from Mr
Wilkinson, Coleridge of spending his days asleep in Highgate. Reynolds,
who published the piece under his regular pseudonym, Edward Herbert,
seems most taken with the opportunities for punning that the scenario
affords him: Byron is committed to Coldbath Fields for want of Bayle
(which he had lent to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to assist him in his philosophical
pursuits), Southey admits that he lived upon the lives of others. But the
treatment of John Clare seems altogether rougher. He is accused of
fathering a child upon one of the Muses, and ordered to pay maintenance
of half-a-crown which he is somehow to save out of his sixpence-a-day
even though he has a wife, and ten little children to support. Clare might
not have welcomed references so direct to his poverty and his domestic
responsibilities, no matter how well-intentioned, but it is hard not to
suspect that Reynolds is in addition hinting at some sexual misdemeanour
of Clares, well-known within his London circle, that Clare could not
possibly have been happy to see rehearsed in print under so imsy a
disguise.55 It is surely possible to argue that Clare in a piece such as this,
just as much as Hogg in various of his appearances in Blackwoods, is
abused, belied, disgured and all under the guise of friendship and
affection.
Responses to Reynoldss paper necessarily depend on the view taken of
Clares status within the magazine. Up to a point he was clearly accepted as
an equal, included within the mobile, punning literary community of the
220 RICHARD CRONIN
magazine. As Hood recalls, to Lamb he was Clarissimus, Princely Clare,

at his most exalted he was C in alt.56 Most of his poems in the magazine
appeared anonymously, or under his own name, or his initials, J. C., but in
what may have been his very last contributions he wrote, as his colleagues
in the magazine so often did, under a pseudonym. He becomes Percy
Green green for his garish London coat, and to mark his role in offering
readers who saw the world dulled by London smoke access through his
poems to the fresh greens of the English countryside.57 But it was two years
earlier, in June 1821, that Clare made his most ingenious attempt to
assimilate with the culture of the magazine. He wrote a letter to its editor,
John Taylor, introducing himself as Stephen Timms, a countryman in a
very humble way anxious to rise by trying [his] tallents at poetry. He
enclosed a specimen of his work, Some account of my Kin, my Tallents &
myself. a Poem, and promised halfacrown to the editor if the poem
should be printed. By masquerading as a cod version of himself, Clare
claims the right to join in the self-mocking, self-referential game-playing so
typical of the magazines. This, for example, is his response to those who
mock his father as a timber merchant, by which he means, he confesses, a
maker and seller of matches (George Packwood, who manufactured razor
strops and paste, was celebrated for the rhymed advertisements for his
products):
is the prime strops of Packwood
A pin the worse cause he has humbler been
Then why but hold I quake at Mr B
Hell rap my knuckles in his magazine
It is revealing that Clare borrows the Packwood/Blackwood rhyme from
a poem by Lockhart in Blackwoods.58 In response Hessey reported that
he and Taylor did not think it one of your happiest efforts The best
thing you can do is to write in your own natural Style, in which no one
can excel you. Clares letter was not printed.59 Instead, it was Horace
Smith, the exemplary metropolitan man of letters, who took up the joke
in his Auto-Biography of John Huggins, in which he presents
Huggins, the Oxfordshire Toll-boy as the worthy successor to the
Bristol Milkmaid (Ann Yearsley), the Farmers Boy (Bloomeld), the
Ettrick Shepherd (Hogg), and Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant.
Huggins becomes a poet when he comes across two odd volumes of
Hayleys poems, which had been given to one of [his] school-fellows
by his godmother.60 Magazine insiders would have caught the reference
to Clares acquisition of a copy of Thomsons Seasons. Denied the
opportunity to practice self-mockery, Clare found himself the object of
the more urbane mockery of Horace Smith.
Taylor and Hessey did not want Clare to contribute playful articles of
the kind contributed by the Smith brothers, Reynolds and Wainewright,
but pieces written in his own natural style, by which they seemed to mean
pieces written in the rustic dialect that was for Taylor decisive proof of the
originality of Clares genius. Except that none of the poems printed in the
London Magazine is quite of that character. Childish Recollections,
quoted in full by Taylor in his paper recalling his Visit to John Clare, is
a representative London poem. It contains only one expression that Taylor
needed to gloss, the reference to a snail shell as a pooty-shell.61 Clare omits
the epigraph from Henry Mackenzie that, when the poem appeared in The
Village Minstrel, places it within the sentimental tradition, but the tradition
to which the poem belongs is clear enough without it. Clare describes a
landscape of checquerd elds populated by shepherd boy, and neatherd.
Other passages in the poem are more distinctive, the rendering, for
example, of the gurgling sounds of the running brook that Clare watches
till bursting off it plopt / In rushing gushes of wild murmuring groans.
Several of the poems published in the London recall childhood experience,
which is, I think, signicant. Clares childhood experience revives as it is
recalled, and yet it remains an experience from which the adult observer
knows himself to be excluded. As Clare puts it in Childish Recollections,
Sad manhood marks me an intruder now. Clare occupies a position in
between childhood and adulthood, and just as importantly in between
languages, in between the language of pastoral poetry and the language of
his native Helpston. Hood was sensitive to Clares in-betweenness: it is
why Clares green coat, that very countried suit, seemed to him less like a
peasants costume than a species of fancy dress, the garb of some eccentric
notable of the Corinthian order, disguised in rustic.62 In his Idlers Epistle
to John Clare, Elton proves equally sensitive to the way in which the in-
betweenness was registered in the diction of Clares poems. He advises
Clare to drive from his head all the poets alive or dead, but that is
because he recognizes the language in which Clares London Magazine
poems are written as heavily contaminated by the literary: Some in thy
lines a Goldsmith see, / Or Dyers tone.63 It is not just his residence in
London but the cast of the poems that leads Elton to stigmatize him as
Thou cockney Clare!. It was, after all, the Cockney poets who were the
exemplary in-betweeners, the poets who, as Marjorie Levinson puts it,
characteristically wrote from the neither/nor position, dened only by
their difference from the class above them and the class below.64
222 RICHARD CRONIN
Clares importance to the London was as an antidote to the Cockneyism

of much of the magazines content, but, looked at another way, Clare
might be thought of as the Cockneys mirror image. It is the point that
Charles Lamb makes in his one surviving letter to Clare when he complains
that Clare is too profuse in his use of slang, by which he seems to mean any
language that is narrowly localized: There is a rustic Cockneyism as little
pleasing as ours of London.65 Horace Smith too associated peasant poets
and Cockneys. He was reminded of Huggins, he claims, when he read in
the last number of the magazine the very affecting account of Perrinson.
Edward Perrinson, another ctitious poet, had been apprenticed to a
grocer of Exeter where, after raisin-hours, he buried himself in the classic
poets before abandoning his apprenticeship to devote himself to love and
literature.66 Despite the west-country setting the parody of Keats is as
evident as the parody of Clare as John Huggins. The Cockney and the
peasant poet performed similar functions for the magazine. Clares poems
offered a passage out of the urban landscape in which the magazine was
read to a rural England of which the magazines readership had only a
limited experience. Cockney poets offered access to high literary traditions
from which readers without a university education might have felt them-
selves similarly excluded. So, when Reynolds introduces the magazines
readers to Warwick Castle, he approaches the aristocratic site through
Keats. The Warwick Vase puts him in mind of Ode on a Grecian Urn,
and the solemn silence of the great hall, prompts lines from Hyperion: As
when, upon a tranced summer night.67 Cockney poets and peasant poets
are close kin, both cultivating an impure language that allowed them to
mediate between the magazines readers and kinds of experience with
which those readers were unfamiliar. The London street urchins who saw
Clare and Lamb walking arm-in-arm and called after them Tom and Jerry
were more perceptive than they knew.
Hazlitts great essay on Cockneyism, On Londoners and Country
People, rst appeared in the New Monthly rather than the London,68 but
it is crucial to my argument because the contrast that Hazlitt sets out to
point between urban and rustic experience so often collapses. Even the
denition of the Cockney with which Hazlitt begins I mean by it a
person who has never lived out of London, and who has got all his ideas
from it contrives to transfer to Londoners the narrowness of experience
more conventionally ascribed to the provincial. Hazlitt represents the
Cockney as astounded by the rural: The country has a strange blank
appearance. It is not lined with houses all the way, like London.69 It is
an astonishment exactly mirrored in Clares accounts of his own responses
not to leaving London but to entering it: as we approached it the road
was lind wi lamps that diminishd in the distance to stars this is London
I exclaimd he laughed at my ignorance and only increasd my wonder by
saying we were still several miles from it.70 The Cockney and the rustic
Clare are alike not just in their astonishment, but in the manner in which
they inspect their astonishment, taking up a position at a distance from
themselves. The effect is still more pronounced in a London paper by the
dramatist John Poole, A Cockneys Rural Sports:
The country, then, is a place where, instead of thousands of houses rising
about us at every turn, only one is to be seen within a considerable space;
where the sky is presented in a large, broad, boundless expanse, instead of
being retailed out, as it were, in long strips of a yard and a half wide.71
This is a Cockney whose Cockneyism seems aberrant even to himself, and
Clare can represent his own rusticity in much the same way. In the poem
thanking Gilchrist for inviting him to his house, Clare represents himself as
blinking, dazzled by a room too ne for clowns to bide in, and grateful
that his host should put clowns language on his tongue, / As suited well
the Rustics hearing.72 It is not just that Clare so clearly playacts his
befuddlement he assumes a posture in which he sees himself from the
outside, as a clown, a rustic, as Hodge or Podge. As he travelled in
Gilchrists coach towards London for the rst time, he records feeling
that he was not the same John Clare but that some stranger soul had
jumpd into [his] skin.73 In that feeling of separation from the self,
Cockney and rustic writers merge. The Cockney and the rustic are both
dened by their relationship to place, but for both placement and dis-
placement are all but inseparable. A real Cockney, writes Hazlitt, is the
most literal of creatures and yet he also lives in a world of romance a
fairy-land of his own.74 The same thought struck John Taylor as Clare
conducted him round the sites that he had commemorated in his poems,
Lolham Brigs and so on: the scenes as rendered in the poems seemed, when
Taylor compared them with the scenes before him, as if transformed by
the wand of a necromancer.75 There is a slight but suggestive indication
that Clare himself recognized his kinship with the Cockneys. When he
invented a peasant poet who might act as his alter ego he named him
Stephen Timms. It seems at least possible that he chose the name as a sly
echo of the character in Blackwoods known as Tims, a small pale dapper
young man who makes his rst appearance as an absurdly out of place
guest at a Highland shooting party, where he complains that his gun
has carried away [his] little nger and with it a ring that was a real
224 RICHARD CRONIN
diamond.76 Thereafter Tims became an established Blackwoods character,

always the archetypal Cockney, and often identied with P. G. Patmore, a
frequent contributor to the London Magazine and John Scotts second in
the duel in which he was fatally wounded.
The brief period of Clares literary celebrity coincided almost exactly
with the life of the London Magazine, which ran from January 1820 to June
1829. This is not, I would argue, a coincidence. Clares fame was a product
of what Gregory Dart has called the Cockney Moment.77 Like the
magazine itself, Clares success was a symptom of the rapid increase in
the London population, and the development within it of a new class,
aspirant and literate, but as yet unstable in its social identity. The devel-
opment of that class was both cause and effect of the industrialization of
literature that made the new magazines of the early nineteenth century
possible. But just as urban expansion increased the value attached to the
rural, the development of a print industry produced a nostalgia for an
earlier time when literature was not produced by professional men of
letters, a nostalgia for a literature that seemed more authentic, more
English, closer to the oral literature of times gone by than literature set
in smart modern type. It was a nostalgia to which the Northamptonshire
peasant appealed, however factitious the appeal may have been. Clares
poems shared with the magazine that rst published so many of them a
mediatory function. The London offered its readers material that would at
once entertain them and broaden their experience. Papers on London
itself, papers such as Lambs South-Sea House, enriched their imaginative
apprehension of their own city. Papers on classical and European literature
widened their cultural experience. In a paper such as Warwick Castle
Reynolds acted as a tourist guide to one of the great English seats but also to
the version of Englishness that the building embodied. Clares poems
offered those same readers access to another version of Englishness that
might otherwise have seemed to them as impenetrable as the fortied walls
of the castle. Clares poems answered to the needs of the magazine readers
of the 1820s in a variety of ways, but that appeal, like the Cockney Moment
itself, proved sadly short-lived.
Notes
1. London Magazine, 1 (January 1820), iv, henceforward LM.
2. LM, 1 (January 1820), 711.
3. There are already two studies of Clares relations with the London Magazine,
and in particular of his relations with the magazines most celebrated
contributor: Scott McEathron, John Clare and Charles Lamb: Friends in the
Past, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 95 (July 1996), 98109, and Simon Kvesi, John
Clare, Charles Lamb and the London Magazine, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 135
(July 2006), 8293. I am indebted to both, but my focus is not on the role of
the magazine and its contributors in Clares literary life but on Clares role
within the literary economy of the magazine.
4. Sales, p. 34.
5. On this, see Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences,
17901832 (Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press, 1987), especially
pp. 4775.
6. Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (April 1827), 25. It is entirely characteristic
that Hoggs paper should be immediately followed by a paper entitled
Remarks on Greek Tragedy.
7. Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 17801840, ed.
James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), p. 15.
8. LM, 2 (December 1820), 578.
9. Monthly Review, 91 (March 1820), 296.
10. LM, 2 (December 1820), 6417.
11. Ibid., 641.
12. Ibid.
13. New Monthly Magazine, 10 (January 1824), 297304.
14. LM, 2 (December 1820), 641.
15. LM, 4 (November 1821), 5408.
16. Ibid., 542.
17. Ibid., 544. Taylor, as he indicated by pressing Clare to entitle his third volume
The Shepherds Calendar, thought Spenser an especially valuable precedent for
Clare, presumably because of Spensers self-conscious adoption in his own
Shepherds Calendar of rustic dialect words.
18. Ibid.
19. The English Novel 17701829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction
Published in the British Isles, ed. P. Garside, J. Raven and R. Schweling,
2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2, p. 45.
21. James Hogg, Anecdotes of Scott, ed. Jill Rubinstein (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), p. 38.
23. LM, 2 (December 1820), 642.
24. LM, 3 (January 1821), pp. 2632.
25. LM, 2 (December 1820), 641.
26. William Motherwell, Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern, with an Historical
Introduction and Notes (Glasgow: John Wylie, 1827), p. v.
27. Walter Jerrold, Thomas Hood and Charles Lamb (London: Ernest Benn Ltd.,
1930), subsequently Jerrold, pp. 99 and 116.
28. LM, 7 (February 1823), 15761.
226 RICHARD CRONIN
29. Ibid., 161.

30. LM, 4 (November 1821), 546. On Clare and Chatterton, see John Goodridge,
John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
pp. 1235. John Scott accepted the charge made in Blackwoods that Hogg is
himself the author of some of the songs given as Jacobite Relics, but found that
the allegation served only to prove the genius of the writer, LM, 2 (December
1820), 578. As Simon Kvesi notes, it was a ruse that Clare himself practised,
successfully imposing on William Hone one of his own pastiches as an
authentic poem of Andrew Marvells. See John Clare, Charles Lamb, and
the London Magazine, 91.
31. Pierce Egan, Life in London; or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq.
and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian,
in their rambles and sprees through the metropolis (London: Sherwood and
Jones, 1823), pp. 44, 29, 339.
32. Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 18101830 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 113.
33. LM, 2 (November 1820), 5167.
34. Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 10 (August 1821), 104.
35. LM, 2 (November 1820), 512 and 483.
36. For a brilliant discussion of the practice, see Peter Murphy, Impersonation and
Authorship in Romantic Britain, English Literary History, 59 (1992), 62549.
37. The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his sister Mary Lamb,
ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), 2, p. 323. Wainewright had
not yet been exposed as one of the centurys more outrageous murderers.
38. The dinners were monthly in the years 18212, but became more sporadic
thereafter. By 1824 they had become few and far between. See Tim Chilcott,
A Publisher and His Circle: The Life and Work of John Taylor, Keatss Publisher
(London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 153.
39. John Clares Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 1367.
40. Jerrold, pp. 1125.
41. LM, 7 (January 1823), 48.
42. LM, 10 (August 1824), 1435.
43. Jerrold, p. 113.
44. Walter Jerrold, Thomas Hood: His Life and Times (New York: Haskell House
Publishers, 1968, rst published 1907), p. 93.
45. LM, 5 (June 1822), 500.
47. John Clares Autobiographical Writings, pp. 1345.
48. LM, 5 (March 1822), 282.
49. On punning in the London Magazine, see Simon Kvesi, John Clare, Charles
Lamb and the London Magazine, 845.
50. John Clares Autobiographical Writings, p. 137.
51. LM, 7 (January 1823), 73.
52. LM, 2 (December 1820), 578.
53. On Hoggs emblematic status, see Ian Duncan, Hoggs Body, Studies in
Hogg and His World, 9 (1998), 115.
54. LM, 7 (February 1823), 15761.
55. For a contrasting account of the relationship between Clare and Reynolds that
includes a discussion of The Literary Police Ofce, see Simon Kvesi, John
Hamilton Reynolds, John Clare and the London Magazine, Wordsworth
Circle, 42.3 (Summer, 2011), 22635. On Clares London adventures, see
Bate, pp. 2612.
56. Jerrold, pp. 11314.
57. See the ne sonnet, Sweet brook! Ive met thee many a summers day, LM,
8 (July 1823), 46, and the following month Two Sonnets to Mary, LM,
8 (August 1823), 148.
58. Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 7 (July 1820), 3.
59. For Clares letter and Hesseys response, see Letters, pp. 1968.
60. LM, 3 (April 1821), 3758.
61. LM, 4 (November 1821), 5423. I quote the poem in this text, in which lines
are not numbered.
63. LM, 10 (August 1824), 143.
64. Marjorie Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 5
65. Letters of Charles Lamb, 2, p. 328. On Lambs one surviving letter to Clare, see
Scott McEathron, John Clare and Charles Lamb: Friends in the Past, 102.
66. LM, 3 (March 1821), 3229. Frank P. Riga and Claude A. Prance, Index to the
London Magazine (London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), p. 31,
suggest on internal evidence that the paper is by Reynolds. I think it more
likely that it too is by Horace Smith.
67. Warwick Castle, LM, 4 (July 1821), 513 (7, 11).
69. Ibid., 173.
71. LM, 6 (December 1822), 498.
72. LM, 1 (January 1820), 711.
75. LM, 4 (November 1821), 540.
76. Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 5 (August 1820), 605.
77. Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 18101840: Cockney Adventures,
pp. 14. I would argue that the Cockney moment was briefer than Dart
supposes, beginning as the Napoleonic wars drew to a close, and ending with
the 1820s.
Select bibliography
Works by John Clare

A Champion for the Poor: Political Verse and Prose, ed. P. M. S. Dawson,
Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/
Carcanet, 2000)
Cottage Tales, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Ashington
and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1993)
The Early Poems of John Clare 18041822, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell,
assoc. ed. Margaret Grainger, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
I Am: the Selected Poetry of John Clare, ed. Jonathan Bate (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2003)
John Clare, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (London: J. M. Dent, 1997)
John Clare By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1996)
John Clare: Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell with an
Introduction by Tom Paulin (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2004)
John Clares Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983)
John Clare: The Living Year 1841, ed. Tim Chilcott (Nottingham: Trent Editions,
1999)
The Journal; Essays; the Journey from Essex, ed. Anne Tibble (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1980)
The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summereld
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964)
The Later Poems of John Clare 18371864, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell,
assoc. ed. Margaret Grainger, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
The Letters of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1951)
The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
Madrigals and Chronicles: Being Newly Found Poems Written by John Clare, ed.
Edmund Blunden (London: Beaumont Press, 1924)
The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibble and R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1979; paperback reissue 1990)
228
The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983)
Northborough Sonnets, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson
(Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1995)
Poems by John Clare, ed. Arthur Symons (London: H. Frowde, 1908)
Poems by John Clare, ed. Norman Gale (Rugby: George E. Over, 1901)
Poems, Chiey from Manuscript, ed. Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter (London:
Cobden-Sanderson, 1920)
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820)
The Poems of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble (London: J. M. Dent, 1935)
Poems of John Clares Madness, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1949)
Poems of the Middle Period 18221837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and
P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vols. III: 1996; vols. IIIIV:
1998; vol. V: 2003).
The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1951)
The Rural Muse (London: Whittaker & Co., 1835)
The Rural Muse, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/
Carcanet, 1982)
Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summereld (Oxford:
Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1950)
Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. Leonard Clark and Anne Tibble (Leeds: E.
J. Arnold & Son, 1964)
The Shepherds Calendar (London: John Taylor, 1827)
The Shepherds Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summereld (Oxford:
The Shepherds Calendar: Manuscript and Published Version, ed. Tim Chilcott
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2006)
Sketches in the life of John Clare, ed. Edmund Blunden (London: Cobden-
Sanderson, 1931)
The Village Minstrel and other Poems (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1821)
Select critical bibliography

Abbey, Edward, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American
Iconoclast, ed. David Petersen (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2007)
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-
Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)
Andrews, Malcolm, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999)
230 Select bibliography
Aris, Philippe, Introduction, in Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life,
vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1989)
Atkinson, Juliette, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century
Hidden Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Bachelard, Gaston, Lair et les songes (Paris: Jos Corti, 1943)
The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964)
Barasch, Mosche, Theories of Art, 3 vols. (London and New York: Routledge,
2000)
Barrell, John, Poetry, Language, and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988)
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 17301840: An Approach to the Poetry
of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)
The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006)
Bate, Jonathan, John Clare: Prologue to a New Life, in John Goodridge and
Simon Kvesi (eds.), John Clare: New Approaches (Helpston, Peterborough:
John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 116
New Clare Documents, John Clare Society Journal, 21 (2002), 518
New Light on the Life of Clare, John Clare Society Journal, 20 (2001), 4154
John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003)
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and
New York: Routledge, 1991)
The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000)
Bates, Tom, John Clare and Boximania, John Clare Society Journal, 13 (1994), 517
Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an
Epistemology of the Sacred (New York: Macmillan, 1987)
Belchem, Jon, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996)
Bennett, Andrew, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Birns, Nicholas, The riddle nature could not prove: Hidden Landscapes in Clares
poetry, in Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips, and Geoffrey Summereld
(eds.), John Clare in Context (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. 189220
Blythe, Ronald, Talking About John Clare (Nottingham: Trent Books, 1999)
Boddy, Kasia, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)
Bonehill, John and Stephen Daniels (eds.), Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain
(London: Royal Academy, 2009)
Brown, David Blayney, Nationalising Norwich, in David Blayney Brown,
Andrew Hemingway and Anne Lyles (eds.), Romantic Landscape: The
Norwich School of Painters (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), pp. 2435
Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
California University Press, 1984)
Chambers, Douglas, A love for every simple weed: Clare, botany and the poetic
language of lost Eden, in Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and
Geoffrey Summereld (eds.), John Clare in Context (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 23858
Chandler, James and Kevin Gilmartin (eds.), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban
Scene of British Culture, 17801840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005)
Chase, Malcolm, The Peoples Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 17751840
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
Cherry, J. L., The Life and Remains of John Clare (London: F. Warne, 1873)
Chilcott, Tim, A Publisher and His Circle: The Life and Work of John Taylor, Keatss
Publisher (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)
Chirico, Paul, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007)
Writing Misreading: Clare and the Real World, in John Goodridge (ed.), The
Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition (Helpston: John
Clare Society and Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994), pp. 12538
Christensen, Jerome, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Clare, Johanne, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston: McGill-
Queens University Press, 1987)
Clark, Anna, Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in
London, 1820, Representations, 31 (Summer, 1990), 4668
Clark, J. C. D., English Society16601832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the
Ancien Rgime (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Colclough, Stephen, Labour and Luxury: Clares Lost Pastoral and the
Importance of Voice in the Early Poems, in John Goodridge and
Simon Kvesi (eds.), John Clare, New Approaches (Helpston: John Clare
Society, 2000), pp. 7791
Voicing Loss, Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of John Clare, 18171832 (University
of Keele: PhD thesis, 1996)
Collis, Stephen, The Commons (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2008)
Constable, John, John Constables Discourses, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk
Records Society, 1970)
Corbin, Alain, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French
Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)
Cronin, Richard, In Place and Out of Place: Clare in the Midsummer Cushion, in
John Goodridge and Simon Kvesi (eds.), John Clare: New Approaches
(Helpston: John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 13348.
Crossan, Greg, Clares Debt to the Poets in his Library, John Clare Society
Journal, 10 (1991) 2741
Thirty Years of the John Clare Society Journal: A Retrospective Survey, John
Clare Society Journal, 31 (2012), 522
Dart, Gregory, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 18101830 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Dawson, P. M. S., Common Sense or Radicalism? Some Reections on Clares
Politics, Romanticism 2.1 (1996), 8197
John ClareRadical?, John Clare Society Journal, 11 (1992), 1727
DeWint, Harriet, A Short Memoir of the Life of Peter DeWint and William Hilton
RA, in John Lord (ed.), Peter DeWint 17841849: For the Common Observer of
Life and Nature (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007), pp. 7889
Duncan, Ian, Hoggs Body, Studies in Hogg and His World, 9 (1998), 115
Dunn, David, Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred, in David Rothenberg and
Marta Ulvaeus (eds.), The Book of Music and Nature (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2001), pp. 95107
Dyer, Gary, British Satire and The Politics of Style, 17891832 (Cambridge:
Esmail, Jennifer, Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian
Literature and Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013)
Espinasse, Francis, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1893)
Faithfull, Pamela An Evaluation of An Eccentric: Matthew Allen MD, Chemical
Philosopher, Phrenologist, Pedagogue and Mad-Doctor, 17831845 (University
of Shefeld: PhD Thesis, 2001)
Faye, Emmanuel, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the
Unpublished Seminars of 19331935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009)
Fischer, Ernst, Von der Notwendigheit der Kunst, trans. Anna Bostock (London:
Penguin Books, 1963)
Foltz, Bruce V., Heidegger, Ethics and Animals, Between the Species, 9.2 (Spring
1993), 849
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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
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Journal of British Studies, 34.2 (1995), 481502
Fulford, Tim, Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees, John Clare
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Gage, John, Colour and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993)
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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Theory of Colours (1810), trans. Charles
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Culture of Romantic Celebrity, Studies in English Literature 15001900,
46 (2006), 80332
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Tradition (Helpston: John Clare Society and Margaret Grainger Memorial
Trust, 1994)
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Clare, Critical Survey, 11.3 (1999), 1120
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in Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan (eds.), Robert
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Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery ([Peterborough]: [Peterborough
Museum Society], 1973)
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Index
Abbey, Edward, 889 Burton, Robert, 45

Abram, David, 1034 Byron, George Gordon, 39, 54, 156, 158, 219
Allen, Matthew, 2, 10n6, 60, 1534, 163n23 Stanzas for Music, 54
Anti-Jacobin Review, 200
Aris, Phillippe, 73n5, 74n9 Cambridge Independent, 166n53
Artis, Edmund, 756n49, 169, 174, 176 Campbell, Thomas, 210
Athenaeum, 138, 139 Carcanet, 8
Atkinson, Juliette, 119, 142n8 Carlile, Richard, 193
Auden, W. H., 80 Carlyle, Thomas, 119, 120, 1225, 138, 139, 140,
165n46
Bachelard, Gaston, 86, 105 Caroline of Brunswick, see Queen Caroline
Baldwin, Robert, 210 Cary, H. F., 55n16, 216
balladry, 143n49, 211, 21314 Castlereagh, Lord (Robert Stewart), 198
Barrell, John, 40, 57, 61, 62, 75n39 Catholicism, 117n63
Bate, Jonathan, 7, 8, 13n30, 60, 105, 119, 141n3, 147 Cato Street Conspiracy, 64, 198
Beattie, James, 38, 39, 43 Certeau, Michel de, 63, 71
Belchem, John, 194 Champion, 209
Bewick, Thomas, 179 Chandler, James, 211
Bible, 41, 53, 88, 89, 1089, 110, 112 Chantrey, Francis, 215
Ecclesiastes, 89 Chartism, 156, 158, 165n46
Psalms, 53 Chatterton, Thomas, 121, 125, 149, 155, 159, 214
Biographical Magazine, 138 Cherry, J. L., 5
Birns, Nicholas, 7, 69, 105 Chilcott, Tim, 8, 105
Black Dwarf, 197 Chirico, Paul, 42
Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 166n57, 210, Christensen, Jerome, 75n40
216, 21820, 2234, 226n30 Christian Observer, 199
Blake, William, 53, 103 Christianity, 99, 101, 1023, 10811, 189
Bloomeld, Robert, 1, 4, 154, 155, 156, 220 Clare, Johanne, 63, 205n33
Blunden, Edmund, 56 Clare, John
Boston Gazette, 199, 200 and alcohol, 87, 119, 148
Boswell, James, 10n4 and charity, 61, 111, 130, 161
Boyce, see Boyse, Samuel and enclosure, 6, 23, 53, 57, 69, 7996 passim,
Boyse, Samuel, 155 107, 127, 1978, 200, 201
Brighton Magazine, 138 and punctuation, 6, 18, 21, 42
Buddhism, 1023 and radicalism, 7, 58, 62, 156, 189208 passim,
Bunyan, John, 53 205n41, 206n54, 207n65
Buonaparte, Napoleon, 83 and religion, 97117 passim
Burghley House, 169 as biographical subject, 12, 56, 7, 434,
Burke, Edmund, 51 118145 passim, 154
Burns, Robert, 4, 143n49, 149, 155, 159, bird poems, 316, 5776 passim, 75n35, 1056
166n57, 210 editions, 56, 7, 89, 11n9, 190, 199
239
240 Index
death, 118, 119, 147, 1489, 158, 160, 166n53 The Rural Muse, 63, 153
death, erroneous reports of, 153 Sabbath Bells, 1078
institutionalization and mental health, 23, 44, Sand Martin, 66, 106, 75n43
46, 52, 53, 60, 878, 134, 140, 153, 1589, Shadows of Taste, 234, 11011
166n49 The Shepherds Calendar, 8, 20, 257, 1278,
malnourishment and weakness, 23, 1467, 153 153, 185, 225n17
patronage, 12, 9, 18991, 197, 202 The Sky Lark, 63
poetry Snow Storm, 412
August, 257 Soldiers Grave, 151
Birds in Alarm, 34 Song Last Day, 151
Birds Nests, 589, 73 Sonnet (The silver mist more lowly
Childish Recollections, 221 swims), 20
The Chiming Bells, 108, 110 Spring, 19, 24
The Country Girl, 190 Stanzas (There is a land of endless joy), 111
Dawnings of Genius, 190, 1946 The wind blows happily on everything,
Dollys Mistake, 190, 194 1819
The Eternity of Nature, 32 The Thrushes Nest, 32, 106
Evening Bells, 1078 This leaning tree with ivy overhung, 110
The Fallen Elm, 51 To Dewint, 245
The Fern Owls Nest, 34 To John Clare, 59, 73
First Love, 147 To the Snipe, 523, 656, 69, 75n43, 105
The Flitting, 19, 489, 105 The Tramp (He eats a moments stoppage
Gipsy Camp, 467, 56n19 to his song), 912
The Gypsies Evening Blaze, 19 The Village Minstrel, 189, 199, 2001
Hedge Sparrow, 313 The Village Minstrel, 4, 62, 170, 221
Helpstone, 62, 88, 190, 194, 1957, 206n46 The Winters Come, 445
Infants are but cradles for the grave, 148 The Wish, 1512, 154
Invite to Eternity, 151 The Wood Larks Nest, 58
The Lament of Swordy Well, 8990 The Wry Necks Nest, 33, 35
The Land Rail, 33, 34 The Yellow Hammers Nest, 32, 57, 59, 69,
Lines on Cowper, 44 70, 71
Lines Written While Viewing Some The Yellow Wagtails Nest, 33, 57, 59, 69,
Remains of an Human Body in Lolham 70, 712
Lane, 147 poverty, 14666 passim
The Mores, 23, 812, 856, 92 prose
My Mary, 190, 194, 204n7 Autobiographical Fragments, 1089
The Nightingales Nest, 334, 57, 65, 669 Autobiography, 52
The Nuthatch, 34 Autumn, 11213
The Parish, 110 Bird List, 33, 75n37, 179, 187n43
The Partridges Nest, 34 Essay on Landscape, 22, 301
The Pettichaps Nest, 33, 57, 59, 69, 701 Essay on Political Religion, 113
Pleasant Places, 212 Natural History Letters, 17, 35, 16988
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, passim
67, 58, 59, 60, 150, 170, 190, 194, 195, Natural History of Helpstone, 17483
197, 209 A Remarkable Dream, 113
Prayer in the Desert, 111 Sketches in the Life of John Clare, 20,
O could I be as I have been, 53 1468
Old Poesy, 19 reception and reputation, 1, 37, 14960
One monday morning sour & loath, 152 use of colour, 1737 passim
Out of Door Pleasures, 19, 20, 21 Clare, John Parker, 141n3
The Reed Bird, 34 Clare, Patty, 60
Remembrances, 823, 111 Clark, Leonard, 6
The Request, 110 Cleaves Penny Gazette, 156
The Robins Nest, 33, 105 Cobbett, William, 194
The Rooks Nest, 34
Index 241
Cockneyism and Cockney School of Poetry, 156, Idlers Epistle to John Clare, 217, 221
2214, 227n77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 124, 139
Colburn, Henry, 210 Emmerson, Eliza Louisa, 2, 61, 62, 67, 179,
Colclough, Stephen, 201, 202 195, 196
Cole, Thomas, 82 On Reading The Nightingales Nest by John
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 22, 215 Clare, 67
Collier, Mary, 3 Encyclopaedia of Plants, 188n67
Collins, William, 40 English Journal, 56n19, 1546
Collis, Stephen, 97, 98, 109, 114n7 Epping Forest, 46, 154, 1568, 165n44
Conder, Josiah, 23 and boxing, 156, 165n44
Constable, John, 29, 30, 185 Evans, Thomas, 198, 201
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 13940
Cotman, John Sell, 29 Faithfull, Pamela, 10n6, 163n23
Courier, 199 Ferguson, William, 4
Cowper, William, 3856 passim Fischer, Ernst, 867, 8990
The Poplar-Field, 38, 48, 49 Flaxman, John, 28, 215
The Task, 44, 45, 623 Forster, John, 1, 3, 10n8
Yardley Oak, 501 Foulds, Adam, 164n28
Craik, George, 137, 144n59 French Revolution, 59, 61, 64, 193, 199
Crimean War, 121, 1314 Fromm, Harold, 100
Cromek, R. H., 214 Frost, Robert, 72
Cromwell, Oliver, 44 Froude, James Anthony, 140
Cronin, Richard, 45 Fulford, Tim, 47, 51, 52, 62
Crowson, Daniel, 1067
Cruikshank, George, 156, 217 Gage, John, 28, 29
Cumberland, 21415 Gainsborough, Thomas, 29
Cunningham, Allan, 128, 155, 21016, Gale, Norman, 5, 11n17
218 Garside, Peter, 212
Cunningham, John, 43 Gentlemans Magazine, 1945
George IV, 191, 193, 198, 203
Dante, 45, 55n16, 216 Gifford, William, 130
Dart, Gregory, 215, 224, 227n77 Gilchrist, Elizabeth, 176
Dawkins, Richard, 100 Gilchrist, Octavius, 119, 12931, 161, 183, 190,
Dawson, Paul, 6, 75n37, 206n54 20910, 223
Defoe, Daniel, 53 Gilmartin, Kevin, 211
Delacroix, Eugne, 28, 36 Girtin, Thomas, 29
Denman, Thomas, 200 Glover, Jean, 4
Dennett, Daniel, 100 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 28, 126
Dermody, Thomas, 155 Goldsmith, Jason, 59, 60, 66
Devlin, James Dacres, 1548, 162, 164n29, 164n33, Goldsmith, Oliver, 38, 43, 53, 1978, 221
164n34, 165n37 The Deserted Village, 53, 1978
DeWint, Peter, 227, 30, 31, 345 Goodridge, John, 12n26 , 43, 51, 55n3, 55n10, 58
August, 257 Gorji, Mina, 53, 75n43
The Staith, Lincoln, 30 Grainger, Margaret, 6, 8, 63, 1701, 173, 1767,
Dickens, Charles, 14, 10n3 180, 187n28, 188n65
Disraeli, Benjamin, 121, 144n66 Gray, Thomas, 401, 43, 150
Drury, Edward, 183, 209 Grey, Charles, (Earl Grey), 193
Duck, Stephen, 3 Grigson, Geoffrey, 6
Dunn, David, 97 Grinnell, Paul, 84
Dyer, John, 43, 221
Habermas, Jrgen, 58
Edinburgh, 209, 210, 212, 219 Haley, William, 10n4
Egan, Pierce, 156, 165n44, 215 Hambler, Clive, 845
Elton, C. A., 217, 221 Haraway, Donna, 99, 100, 106
242 Index
Haughton, Hugh, 3, 36n2, 63, 67, 68, 72 Lord, John, 301
Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 203 Loudon, John Claudius, 188n67
Hazlitt, William, 191, 211, 213, 216, 217, 2223 Loyalist, 199
On Londoners and Country People, 2223 Lucas, John, 10n3, 165n38, 205n41, 206n54
Heidegger, Martin, 99, 100, 102, 1035, 111,
114n12, 116n43 Mackay, Charles, 45, 11n10
Helpston (village), 61, 756n49, 106, 127, 134, Macmillan, Alexander, 120, 122, 1247, 1359,
146, 1745, 182, 209, 217, 221 144n66
Helpstone, see Helpston (village) Manchester Weekly Times, 160
Henderson, Joseph, 756n49, 169, 1756, Martin, Frederick, 1, 2, 5, 11845 passim
1789, 182 nationality, 118, 120, 1412n8
Hessey, James, 62, 17080, 1824, 209, 216, 218, Alec Drummond, 121, 122, 13135
220, 221 Life of John Clare, 118, 122, 12431, 138
High Beach (asylum), 153, 154, 158, 164n28, 165n44 Statesmans Year-Book, 118, 1201, 1246,
Hobsbawm, Eric, 156 1359
Hogg, James, 4, 2101, 213, 21819, 220, 226n30 Marx, Karl, 812, 92, 93
Homer, 46 McKusick, James, 40
Hood, Edwin Paxton, 5 McVay, Scott, 100
Hood, Thomas, 156, 214, 21618, 220, 221 McWilliam, Rohan, 194, 200
Houghton-Walker, Sarah, 109 Melikan, R. A., 193
Howitt, William and Mary, 158, 166n49 Michelangelo, 28, 29
Hughes, Frieda, 85 Mid-Northumberland Arts Group (MidNAG), 8
Hulme, T. E., 104, 115n37 Miller, Hugh, 4
Hunt, Leigh, 186n2, 211, 219 Milton (village), 180, 181, 185
Milton Hall, 756n49, 169
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 28 Milton, John, 39, 45
Paradise Lost, 46
Jasmin, Jacques, 1601 Mishan, E. J., 7980, 91
Johnson, Samuel, 2, 10n4, 45 Mitford, Mary Russell, 15860, 166n49
Jones, Freddie, 164n28 Mole, Tom, 58, 5960
Joyce, Mary, 133, 158 Monbiot, George, 87
Monet, Claude, 29
Kaplan, Fred, 124 Monthly Review, 211
Keats, John, 1, 171, 211, 222 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 165n37
To Autumn, 64 Morland, George, 23
Keegan, Bridget, 39, 65 Morning Post, 153, 190, 195, 201
Kent, Elizabeth, 1702, 1756, 17984, 186n2, Morton, Timothy, 989, 1014, 106
188n67 Motherwell, William, 214
Kvesi, Simon, 67, 105, 207n65, 226n30, 227n55
Nesbitt, Dr P. R., 910
Lamb, Charles, 21618, 220, 222, 224, 2245n3 New Monthly Magazine, 194, 210, 222
Distant Correspondents, 218 New Times, 199
South-Sea House, 224 Newark (village), 169
landscape aesthetics, 18, 225, 2731 Newton, Isaac, 28
landscape painters and painting, 17, 22, 25, 2731, Northampton Mercury, 166n53
345, 37n18 Northborough 34, 52, 61, 65
Laqueur, Thomas, 192, 199
Leopold, Aldo, 90 Packwood, George, 220
Levinson, Marjorie, 221 Palgrave, Francis, 38
Lincolnshire, 25, 209 Patmore, P. G., 224
Lockhart, J. G., 210, 216, 21819, 220 Payne, Roger, 100
London, 17, 44, 118, 120, 121, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134, Peterborough, 834, 128, 177
139, 148, 156, 1702, 174, 1769, 182, 192, Peterborough Today, 834
198, 209, 21124 Peterloo Massacre, 62, 64, 198
London Magazine, 9, 129, 156, 171, 184, 20927 Petrarch, 132
passim Phillips, Adam, 3, 69
Index 243
the picturesque, 22, 31, 152 Seeney, Michael, 11n17
Pomfret, John, 43 Shakespeare, William, 212
Poole, John, 223 Sherwill, Markham, 191, 195
A Cockneys Rural Sports, 223 Sidmouth, Viscount (Henry Addington), 199
Porter, Alan, 3, 5, 1011n8 Simpson, David, 67
Porter, Roy, 146 Six Acts, 62, 197
Powell, David, 6, 75n35, 75n37 Smiles, Samuel, 5, 166n54
Pre-Raphaelites, 29 Smith, Horace, 2201, 222, 227n66
Price, Uvedale, 22 Smith, Olivia, 202
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 5, 93 Smith, William Henry, 144n66
Soane, John, 215
Quarterly Review, 130, 161 Society for Suppression of Vice, 189
Queen Caroline, 1914, 198203 Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 2930
Southey, Robert, 193, 194, 219
Radstock, Admiral Lord John, 62, 74n26, 129, Spa Fields, 198
189208 passim Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 58
The Cottagers Friend, 192 Spanish Ornithological Society, 84
Ramsay, Allan, 4 Spectator, 5, 131, 133, 145
Randall, Jack, 156, 158, 165n44 Spence, Thomas, 198
Redding, Cyrus, 56n19, 154, 164n28 Spencean poets, 206n54
Reform and Reform Movement, 57, 62, 156, Spenser, Edmund, 212, 225n17
164n34, 192, 196, 199, 203 Spenserian verse, 39, 162n10
Regency era, 156, 198, 206n53, 212 Stamford (village), 129, 130, 147, 183, 190,
Republican, 193 209
Reynolds, John Hamilton, 214, 21622, 224, Stamford Mercury, 209
227n66 Stamford News, 209
The Literary Police Ofce, 214, 219 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 200
Warwick Castle, 222, 224 Steinberg, Sigfrid Henry, 126, 127, 138,
Reynolds, Joshua, 289 1412n8
Richards, Thomas, 121 Stephen, Sir James, 140
Richardson, Alan, 10n4 Stevenson, Struan, 95n9
Riley, Bridget, 28 Stewart, Patrick, 164n28
Roberts, M. J. D., 189 Storey, Mark, 8, 177, 188n67
Robinson, Eric, 6, 75n35, 75n37, 11819, 142n8, Summereld, Geoffrey, 6, 11819, 1412n8
185, 187n28 the supernatural, 97, 98, 146, 210
Roe, Nicholas, 64 Switzerland, 7980
Romanticism, 2, 67, 39, 54, 64, 82, 91, Symons, Arthur, 5, 11n17
98, 101, 103, 104, 1067, 149,
159, 212 Tannahill, Robert, 4, 155
Royal Academy, 24, 28, 30, 215 Taylor, John, 40, 42, 60, 61, 62, 119, 1279,
Royal Literary Fund, 1, 182 148, 150, 156, 163n18, 166n57, 170, 171,
Rubens, Peter Paul, 28, 29 1768, 1812, 1834, 1901, 194, 196,
Runge, Philipp Otto, 28 199, 202, 203, 206n46, 20910, 212, 214,
216, 218, 220, 221, 223
Sales, Roger, 5, 165n46, 202, 210 Tennyson, Alfred, 1, 38, 132
Sandby, Paul, 29 Thompson, E. P., 203, 208n80
Schafer, R. Murray, 108 Thomson, James, 38, 39, 403, 52, 54, 220
Scotland and Scots identity, 4, 29, 84, 95n9, Winter, 41
95n10, 132, 134, 1434n49, 166n57, 209, Thornton, Kelsey, 6, 8
210, 21113 Tibble, Anne and J. W., 6, 119, 154
Scott, Joan Wallach, 156 Times, 2, 153, 191
Scott, John, 20911, 212, 214, 216, 218, 224 Titian, 27, 28
House of Mourning, 209 Townshend, Chauncey Hare, 195
Scott, Walter, 130, 143n49, 209, 211, 21214, 216, 218 Trades Union Movement, 5
Scott-Keltie, John, 139 Turner, J. M. W., 29
244 Index
Ufford (village), 107 White, Gilbert, 172, 1823
White, Lynn, 101, 102
Vardy, Alan, 46, 191, 192, 194 Wilson, Efngham, 156
Varley, Cornelius and John, 29 Wilson, John (a.k.a. Christopher North),
Victorian culture, 12, 46, 7, 118, 119, 120, 121, 161, 166n57, 210, 216,
125, 158161 2189
Victorian era, 2067 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 28
Wooler, T. J., 197, 201
Wahrman, Dror, 194 Wordsworth, William, 1, 5, 21, 39, 40, 52, 14950,
Wainewright, Thomas Grifths, 2168, 221, 1556, 216, 219
226n37 Worrall, David, 198, 201, 206n54
Wang, Orrin, 64
Wesley, John, 109 Yearsley, Ann, 220
Westminster Review, 131
Whitaker, Joseph, 124 Zimmerman, Sarah, 197

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NEW ESSAYS ON JOHN CLARE

John Clare (17931864) has long been recognized as one of Englands

simon kvesi is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Notes on contributors page vii

part ii: culture 77

Select bibliography 228

John Burnside teaches at the University of St Andrews. His poetry

Bate Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography

In his biography of Charles Dickens, John Forster quotes from a now

sweeping dismissal that Charles Mackay included in his anonymous 1869

genre and form, folklore, cultural materialism, botany, ornithology, eco-

Poems Written by John Clare, ed. Edmund Blunden (London: Beaumont

John Clares colours

distinctive use of colour emphasizes the experimental qualities of his

Clare and painting

with a syntactical confusion over whether it is the mingled green or the

Sunshine & shade one harmonizing green

When it came to creating a frontispiece for The Shepherds Calendar, with

revolutionary creation of form through colour had reignited a classical

The thrush is made something like a natural alchemist, toiling with

more stimulating to active, imaginative observation. Two years before

John Clare, William Cowper

When Francis Palgrave included William Cowpers The Poplar-Field

Of snow lies drifted that all entrance stops

consequences that he suggests; he elevates an act of vandalism to a desecra-

The black-bird has ed to another retreat

This description may not be as literally accurate as Cowpers delineation of

A harmless thing in meadows green

John Clares conspiracy

caught up after the appearance of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and

Invasions of privacy: celebrity culture and political pressure

radicalism. Although Barrells account of the periods intense pressures on

remain fundamentally defensive, and defenceless. In many of his bird

He differentiates between these two kinds of aggression in an autobiogra-

Hatching plots: a conspiratorial poetics

The speakers of The Pettichaps Nest, The Yellow Hammers Nest

when he once discovered A broken plough . . . nestled like a thought

John Clare and the new varieties

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

familiar with the notion of magical thinking as fantasy, as a kind of

By likening humankind to the natural world, and equating the damage

model of the surrounding world. The world order corresponded to the

experiment in ways of countering the capitalist states ruthless terrorism,

16. Ibid., pp. 401.

Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare

All species are created equal

subject and object opens us into an interconnected way of being that,

of ecological writing in general . . . the more embedded the narrator

We heard the bells chime

All our kin

The lives of Frederick Martin and the rst

attempt to understand his persistently conicted attitudes towards bureau-