The Asylum Poems

Abstract

Clare spent five months at Northborough after his flight from High Beech. But on 29 December 1841 he left home for the confines of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he was to spend the rest of his long life. We know all too little of the circumstances which led to his removal from home. The Reverend Charles Mossop had visited the Clare household and found the situation rather strained: he recommended the asylum at Northampton, if it were decided that Clare should require treatment.¹ Clare was accordingly certified insane by Dr William Page and Dr Fenwick Skrimshire. The question of his insanity is a vexed one, and there does not seem to be sufficient evidence to say categorically what form his illness took; the evidence of visitors, and of the poems, is not conclusive.² For the period when he was at home before certification there is considerable evidence of sanity: the neatly copied versions of Don Juan and Child Harold, Biblical paraphrases, the account of his escape from High Beech. His last surviving letter from this period is characteristically direct, with little hint of the troubled undercurrent.³ But less than two months later, Clare had seen the last of his home and his wife.