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John Clare and Place

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Abstract

This chapter tackles issues of place in the self-presentation and critical reception of John Clare, and pursues it across a number of axes. The argument centres on the placing of Clare both socio-economically and ‘naturally’, and limitations exerted upon perceptions of his work. Interrogating criticism this chapter finds a pervasive awkwardness especially in relation to issues of class and labour. It assesses the contemporary ‘placing’ of Clare, and seemingly unavoidable insensitivities to labour and poverty in the history industry, place-naming, and polemical ecocriticism. It assesses the ways Clare represents place – in poverty, in buildings, in nature – and, drawing on Michel de Certeau, considers the tactics Clare uses to negotiate his place. It pursues trajectories to ‘un-place’ Clare: the flight of fame in Clare’s response to Byron; and the flight of an early poem in songbooks and beyond, across the nineteenth century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ronald Blythe, ‘A Message from the President’, JCSJ, 1 (1982), 5 (5).

  2. 2.

    There are numerous studies of place in relation to these writers. Exemplary responses can be found in Fiona Stafford, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry of Place’, in Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 309–24; Sally Bushell’s short film Wordsworth’s Sense of Place: Home at Grasmere (Lancaster: Lancaster University, Wordsworth Centre for the Study of Poetry, n.d.); and Lawrence Buell and Richard J. Schneider (eds), Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing (Lowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), which contains a comparative essay by Greg Garrard, ‘Wordsworth and Thoreau: Two Versions of Pastoral’, pp. 194–206.

  3. 3.

    In the most textually detailed account of the ways in which Clare drew on these and many more such poets, Paul Chirico says that Clare forges ‘sociable texts’. See John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007) and for example, Chirico’s account of Clare’s engagement with Yearsley, pp. 24 and 33–4.

  4. 4.

    For an ever-growing annotated bibliography of labouring-class poets before and beyond Clare’s time, see John Goodridge et al. (eds), Database of British and Irish Labouring-Class Poets and Poetry, 1700–1900 https://lcpoets.wordpress.com [accessed 31 July 2016]. For selections from, and discussions of, a wide variety of labouring-class poets writing immediately before and contemporary with Clare, see Tim Burke (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, vol. III: 1780–1800 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) and Scott McEathron (ed.), Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, vol. I: 1800–1830 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

  5. 5.

    Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet’, Critical Inquiry, 13.3 (Spring, 1987), 509–31 (509).

  6. 6.

    ‘Prospectus’ (Market Deeping: J. B. Henson, 1818), Critical Heritage, p. 30. The quotation from Clare is in a letter written to Henson in 1818, Critical Heritage, p. 31.

  7. 7.

    Octavius Gilchrist, ‘Some Account of John Clare, an Agricultural Labourer and Poet’, London Magazine, January 1820, Critical Heritage, pp. 35–42 (40).

  8. 8.

    Tom Paulin, ‘John Clare: A Bicentennial Celebration’, in Richard Foulkes (ed.), John Clare: A Bicentenary Celebration (Northampton: University of Leicester, Department of Adult Education, 1994), pp. 69–78 (p. 74), and Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet’, Critical Inquiry, 13.3 (Spring, 1987), 509–31. For a recent consideration of Clare’s ‘displacement’, see Sara Guyer, Reading With John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 78–100. For an extended account of loss (of place and other things) in Clare’s later poems, see Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 86–121.

  9. 9.

    The letter in Nor. 44 is transcribed by Margaret A. Powell, in ‘Clare and his Patrons in 1820: Some Unpublished Papers’, JCSJ, 6 (1987) 4–9 (4).

  10. 10.

    An example of this trait in Clare criticism, as symptomatic in its own way as Lord Milton’s letter to Taylor, can be found in Eric Robinson’s article, ‘John Clare’s Learning’, JCSJ, 7 (1988), 10–25: ‘The stereotype of John Clare today, even in academic circles, or perhaps I ought to say, more particularly in some academic circles, is that of a naif, a peasant poet, a natural genius with all the limitations that the world “natural” implies. Just like the reviewers of 1820, many readers of today cannot get over their surprise that Clare’s poems should have been written by an agricultural labourer’ (10). Robinson was writing at a time when Clare’s critical acceptance and profile were limited.

  11. 11.

    Mina Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 7 and 122.

  12. 12.

    Richard Cronin’s essay centres on Clare’s bookish and literary stylisations of situation, and on the according critical ‘placing’ of his work. See ‘In Place and Out of Place: Clare in The Midsummer Cushion’, in John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi (eds), John Clare: New Approaches (Helpston: John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 133–48.

  13. 13.

    Nicholas Birns, ‘“The riddle nature could not prove”: hidden landscapes in Clare’s poetry’, in John Clare in Context, pp. 189–220 (p. 189).

  14. 14.

    Natural History, pp. xlix and 11.

  15. 15.

    EPI, pp. x–xi.

  16. 16.

    Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), p. 144.

  17. 17.

    Theresa M. Kelley, ‘Postmodernism, Romanticism, and John Clare’, in Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (eds), Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 157–70 (p. 161).

  18. 18.

    Ian D. Whyte, Landscape and History Since 1500 (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 8.

  19. 19.

    Michael O’Neill, ‘The Romantic Sonnet’, in A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 185–203.

  20. 20.

    Bate, Biography, p. 208.

  21. 21.

    Bate, Biography, p. 331.

  22. 22.

    Bate, Biography, p. 445.

  23. 23.

    See for example Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) and his The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), both of which contain pioneering environmental discussions of Clare and other Romantics.

  24. 24.

    J. L. Cherry, The Life and Remains of John Clare (London: F. Warne, 1873), p. 28.

  25. 25.

    Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 55. See also Mark Storey, criticising Edmund Gosse for seeing Clare ‘as little more than a camera’, in ‘Clare and the Critics’, John Clare in Context, pp. 28–50 (p. 47).

  26. 26.

    Though there are many ‘naturalising’ models of Romantic creation, which sometimes tend towards a degree of organicising passivity in the subject position of the poet. Specifically here I am thinking of the model of the Aeolian lyre or wind harp, pace M. H. Abrams: ‘[t]he Aeolian lyre is the poet, and the poem is the chord of music which results from the reciprocation of external and internal elements, of both the changing wind and the constitution and tension of the strings’, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 48–53 (p. 51). For an excellent account of the poetry and the science of the harp, see Shelley Trower, ‘Nerves, Vibration and the Aeolian Harp’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 54 (2009), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n54/038761ar.html [accessed 4 December 2016].

  27. 27.

    See Juliet Schyrava’s insightful application of Schiller to unpick Clare’s critical reception, in Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 80–110, esp. pp. 82–3.

  28. 28.

    Wendy Mulford, ‘John Clare’s Mountain’, in Denise Riley (ed.), Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970–1991 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 114–20 (p. 115).

  29. 29.

    See Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader, especially chapter 6, ‘Imagination and Artifice’, pp. 138–66; and By Himself, p. 101.

  30. 30.

    I am drawing here (and throughout this book) on two leading essays analysing the ‘problem’ of natural (and naturalised) genius: Bridget Keegan, ‘Boys, Marvellous Boys: John Clare’s “Natural Genius”’, in John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi (eds), John Clare: New Approaches (Helpston: John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 65–76; and Simon J. White, ‘Otaheite, Natural Genius and Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy’, Romanticism, 17.2 (July 2011), 160–74.

  31. 31.

    Kim Taplin, Tongues in Trees: Studies in Literature and Ecology (Bideford: Green Books, 1989), pp. 49–50.

  32. 32.

    John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

  33. 33.

    Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2007), especially pp. 35–64. Excited though he is about Barrell’s mapping of Helpston, Moretti does not mention Clare once, skipping from Barrell straight to Mary Mitford.

  34. 34.

    A moving and self-reflective account of tracing Clare’s footsteps in this manner can be found in James Canton, Out of Essex: Re-imagining a Literary Landscape (Oxford: Signal Books, 2013), pp. 18–45. For a parallel project, if on a larger psychogeographical scale, see Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: in the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ (London: Penguin Books, 2005), discussed in the final chapter of this book.

  35. 35.

    Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubon, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 175–85 (pp. 175 and 177), first delivered as a lecture in 1967. Foucault does not cite it explicitly, but the Bachelard text he draws on in general would be The Poetics of Space (1958).

  36. 36.

    Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). First published in French in 1974. For an incisive account of Foucault, Bachelard and Lefebvre – and every other major contributor to theorisations of space, for that matter – see Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

  37. 37.

    Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).

  38. 38.

    Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117. First published in French in 1980.

  39. 39.

    Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 154–80 (pp. 154 and 156).

  40. 40.

    Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 331–9 (p. 339).

  41. 41.

    J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 27.

  42. 42.

    For a recent summary of developments in Clare criticism since the 1990s, see New Essays on John Clare, pp. 7–9. For an overview of how Clare studies has developed in the John Clare Society Journal, see Greg Crossan, ‘Thirty Years of the John Clare Society Journal: A Retrospective Survey’, JCSJ, 31 (2012), 5–22.

  43. 43.

    Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 21.

  44. 44.

    Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 149.

  45. 45.

    For a salient discussion of the problematic relationship (and relatability) of local and global frames for environmentalist criticism (and action), see the ‘Introduction’ to Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (eds), The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 1–29.

  46. 46.

    Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004), pp. 60–1. The Edward S. Casey text referred to is The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, cited above.

  47. 47.

    An insightful account of the erasure of class politics in ecocritical accounts of Wordsworth is offered by Scott Hess, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), especially pp. 147–55. For Hess, ‘an explicit environmental focus’ appears to denigrate a critic’s sensitivity to class politics: summarising his account of critical responses to Wordsworth and the Lake District railway protest, Hess writes that ‘critics who come to the railway protest without an explicit environmental focus tend to be much more sensitive to these class politics, likely because they are not predisposed by their own affinity for a Wordsworthian version of nature’ (p. 149).

  48. 48.

    This passage summarises the findings of the Appendix to Barrell’s book, ‘John Clare and the enclosure of Helpston’, in Barrell, pp. 189–215.

  49. 49.

    Barrell, pp. 214–15.

  50. 50.

    Barrell, pp. 201–2.

  51. 51.

    See Bate, Biography, p. 50 and note, who cites E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 180–1, and Robert Waller, ‘Enclosures: The Ecological Significance of a Poem by John Clare’, Mother Earth: The Journal of the Soil Association, 13 (1964), 231–7. See also Edward Goldsmith, ‘Robert Waller’, http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/914/robert-waller/, 15 November 2005 [accessed 30 July 2016].

  52. 52.

    By Himself, p. 90. A couple of these lines are quoted in Barrell, p. 212.

  53. 53.

    Barrell, pp. 212–13. Jonathan Bate mentions that Clare worked on enclosure, but the length of this period of work remains indefinite, the dating of events in Clare’s teen years being so difficult. Some dates are available: his work as a gardener in the nursery at Burghley Park from 1816–1817, for example. See Bate, Biography, pp. 75, 80, 94, 106 and, for Burghley Park dates, p. 81.

  54. 54.

    ‘Don Juan’, LPI, p. 95, l. 151.

  55. 55.

    See H. W. Gardner and H. V. Garner, The Use of Lime in British Agriculture (London: Farmer & Stock-Breeder Publications Ltd., 1953), pp. 14–22; Michael Havinden, ‘Lime as a Means of Agricultural Improvement: The Devon Example’, in Rural Change and Urban Growth 1500–1800, ed. C. W. Chalklin and M. A. Havinden (London and New York: Longman, 1974), pp. 104–34; Richard Williams, Limekilns and Limeburning (Princes Risborough, Bucks.: Shire, 2004), pp. 3 and 7–8. My particular thanks go to John Goodridge and Robert Heyes here.

  56. 56.

    See Bate, Biography, pp. 83–7. For Clare’s own accounts of the lime-kiln work and its social impact, see By Himself, pp. 21–22, 86, 92, 105 and 112.

  57. 57.

    Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 30.

  58. 58.

    Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 30.

  59. 59.

    The minoritarian position and the definition of a ‘minor literature’ – which they develop through their analysis of Franz Kafka – first appears in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Original French publication 1975.

  60. 60.

    Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 30. De Certeau’s italicised emphases.

  61. 61.

    Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 36.

  62. 62.

    Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 36, 37 and 38. De Certeau’s emphases.

  63. 63.

    John Goodridge and Kelsey Thornton, ‘John Clare: the trespasser’, in John Clare in Context, pp. 87–129. This essay has been substantially revised and published as a standalone book: John Goodridge and R. K. R. Thornton, John Clare, The Trespasser (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2016).

  64. 64.

    Robert Heyes, review of Simon J. White, Romanticism and the Rural Community, Romanticism, 21.3 (2015), 319–21 (321).

  65. 65.

    EPII, pp. 660–5.

  66. 66.

    Lyrical Ballads (Bristol: Longman, 1798), pp. 189–90.

  67. 67.

    Bate, Biography, pp. 81: ‘When John was “discovered” as a poet late in 1818, the family owed two years’ arrears and were going to have to leave the cottage the following year – Parker, Ann and grandmother Alice to the poor-house, John and Sophy into service.’

  68. 68.

    By Himself, p. 5.

  69. 69.

    The Parish, EPII, pp. 698–779; workhouse section pp. 764–6; quotation is l. 1790.

  70. 70.

    MPV, pp. 105–14 (p. 107, l. 79).

  71. 71.

    Two other poems – both of them love poems of desire with no mention of a workhouse or anything like it – feature the name of a loved addressee, ‘Mary Lee’: ‘Mary Lee’ of 1830 (MPIII, pp. 410–11) and an untitled lyric of forty-two lines, first line ‘If I was bonny Mary Lee’ of 1834–5 (MPV, pp. 237–8).

  72. 72.

    In July 1820 Clare was infuriated that ‘false delicasy’ meant the poem was extracted, meaning ‘the gold is lickd off the gingerbread’ that was his first collection (Letters, pp. 83–4). See also the discussion of ‘Dolly’s Mistake’ and the popular song from which it derives, in Deacon, pp. 47 and 58. On Clare’s patrons, editors and this song – along with others that similarly fell away from Poems Descriptive after the first edition – see Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 56–7; Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader, p. 9; Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 96–7; and Bate, Biography, pp. 164–5.

  73. 73.

    The Parish, EPII, p. 765, ll. 1797–8.

  74. 74.

    This is Timothy Morton’s term, developed in part out of his reading of Clare’s ‘I Am’ – and pretty much only this poem – in ‘John Clare’s Dark Ecology’, Studies in Romanticism, 47.2 (2008), 179–93; this is developed further in his Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), especially pp. 197–205. For a sustained critique, see Emma Mason, ‘Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare’, in New Essays on John Clare, pp. 97–117.

  75. 75.

    In Clare’s first two collections we might also consider ‘Helpstone’ (PD), ‘Helpstone Green’ and ‘Home’ (VM) as poems about village and cottage comforts, though of course the home is present in many other poems too.

  76. 76.

    VM, 2, p. 152. For a manuscript-based transcription, see EPII, p. 28.

  77. 77.

    Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 67. First published in French in 1958.

  78. 78.

    Valerie Pedlar, ‘John Clare’s Recollections of Home: The Poetics of Nostalgia’, JCSJ, 33 (2014), 5–19 (11).

  79. 79.

    Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 22.

  80. 80.

    John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 169.

  81. 81.

    Transcribed from Pet. A61, p. 50. See also MPV, p. 271, ll. 1–5.

  82. 82.

    See Ronald Blythe, ‘Clare in Hiding’, Talking About John Clare (Nottingham: Trent Books, 1999), pp. 39–47.

  83. 83.

    Helen Feder makes a similar point in her fine essay, ‘Ecocriticism, New Historicism, and Romantic Apostrophe’, in Steven Rossendale (ed.), The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), pp. 42–58.

  84. 84.

    James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 79.

  85. 85.

    For a summary of the ways in which critics tend to see the move to Northborough as a catastrophe of displacement, see Simon J. White, ‘John Clare’s Sonnets and the Northborough Fens’, JCSJ, 28 (2009), 55–70 (55–57). White suggests that any changes were more to do with altered topography rather than the mere fact of leaving Helpston.

  86. 86.

    Bate, Biography, p. 389.

  87. 87.

    Sara Guyer, Reading With John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 98 and 98–9.

  88. 88.

    Shalon Noble, ‘“Homeless at Home”: John Clare’s Uncommon Ecology’, Romanticism, 21.2 (July 2015), 171–81 (173).

  89. 89.

    James Reeves, ‘The Savage Moon: A Meditation on John Clare’, Selected Poems (London: Allison and Busby, 1967), pp. 31–8 (p. 36).

  90. 90.

    Cecil Scrimgeour, ‘John Clare and the Price of Experience’, JCSJ, 2 (1983), 28–39 (32).

  91. 91.

    Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 128.

  92. 92.

    Living Year, 1841, p. 154.

  93. 93.

    William Hazlitt, ‘Lord Byron’ in The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits, 2nd edn (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), pp. 149–68 (p. 149).

  94. 94.

    This transcription of this quotation is from MPV, though it is also available in Letters. Clare first sent the poem to the sculptor Henry Behnes in November 1832, who did not like it at all. Clare’s aim was to rouse Behnes’s interest in his building subscriptions for a putative collection, and to help him find a publisher for his work. 10 November 1832, Letters, pp. 596–600 (p. 599n1).

  95. 95.

    MPV, p. 9, l. 21.

  96. 96.

    To Henry Behnes (later known as Burlowe), 10 November 1832, Letters, pp. 596–600 (pp. 599–600).

  97. 97.

    MPV, pp. 9–12, ll. 29–48, 57–68, 77–80, 85–8.

  98. 98.

    Oliver Goldsmith writes: ‘if size and strength, combined with rapidity of flight and rapacity, deserve pre-eminence, no bird can be put in competition with it’. A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 6 vols (London: Wingrave and Collingwood, et al., 1816), 4, pp. 77–81. Goldsmith cites tales about the condor’s legendary ability to survive all manner of violence at the hands of man, and to pick up sheep, cattle and even children when hunting.

  99. 99.

    In Clare’s time, the Andean Condor was thought remarkable for being one of the world’s largest birds, but also the highest-flying bird, recorded at an estimated 20,000 feet. ‘Of all living beings, it is without doubt the one that can rise at will to the greatest distance from the earth’s surface’ wrote the influential naturalist of South America, Alexander von Humboldt, ‘On the Lofty Flight of the Condor’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (January–April 1830), 142–3 (143).

  100. 100.

    The Rural Muse (London: Whittaker & Co., 1835), pp. 94–8 (p. 95).

  101. 101.

    See Duncan Wu’s chapters ‘Byron was a great lover of women’ and ‘Byron was a “noble warrior” who died fighting for Greek freedom’ in 30 Great Myths About the Romantics (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 140–8 and 156–64. If these are myths, they were foundational for Clare’s appreciation of Byron, as was the other ‘myth’ Wu scorns, that ‘Byron was a champion of democracy’ (pp. 149–55). Wu has no patience with the idea that myths (if that is what these aspects of Byron are) can be as historically significant as facts; or that, sometimes, in literary history facts might not matter much at all in the appreciation and celebration of a poet and the work.

  102. 102.

    MPIV, pp. 158–9, ll. 1, 13–14. Here the Oxford editors note that ‘Lord Byron’ was published in the Stamford Champion, 16 March 1830, and in The Rural Muse (1835), p. 120.

  103. 103.

    By Himself, pp. 156–8.

  104. 104.

    ‘Introduction’, in Scott McEathron (ed.), Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, vol. I: 1800–1830 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), p. xix.

  105. 105.

    In his first couple of letters to Octavius Gilchrist in late 1819 and early 1820, Clare asks for Byron, ‘that Vol which has the smaller poems’, and then asks to keep hold of a particular volume, ‘a little longer wishing to read “Child Harold” a Second Time’ (Letters, pp. 23–25).

  106. 106.

    By Himself, p. 65.

  107. 107.

    For example, John Hamilton Reynolds was Clare’s favourite of the London Magazine scene and he seems to have got to know him well. Reynolds had received praise from Byron in rich correspondence, and then had dined with the lord and received advice from him on how to cope with reviewers. See Leonidas M. Jones, The Life of John Hamilton Reynolds (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 49–50. For Clare’s account of Reynolds and his association with Byron, see By Himself, pp. 140–1.

  108. 108.

    Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 13.

  109. 109.

    Anonymous, ‘Labour and the Poor’, The Morning Chronicle, 16 January 1851, pp. 5–6 (p. 6).

  110. 110.

    See By Himself, pp. 11 and 93, for example.

  111. 111.

    By Himself, p. 70.

  112. 112.

    By Himself, p. 40.

  113. 113.

    For critical accounts of the relationship between Lamb and Clare, see Scott McEathron, ‘John Clare and Charles Lamb: Friends in the Past’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 95 (July 1996), 98–109, and Simon Kövesi, ‘John Clare, Charles Lamb and the London Magazine’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 135 (July 2006), 82–93.

  114. 114.

    To James Hessey, 7 January 1823, Letters, pp. 255–7 (p. 256).

  115. 115.

    Richard Cronin, ‘John Clare and the London Magazine’, in New Essays on John Clare, pp. 209–27 (p. 211).

  116. 116.

    To John Taylor, 8 February 1822, Letters, pp. 229–30 (p. 230).

  117. 117.

    In 2007, the John Clare Trust – set up to purchase the cottage in Helpston – was awarded £1.27m by the UK government’s Heritage Lottery Fund. This was supplemented in 2013 by a £500,000 ‘matched funding’ endowment grant. See http://www.hlf.org.uk/our-projects/john-clares-cottage-opening-door-countryside and http://www.clarecottage.org/pages/catalyst respectively [accessed 13 November 2016].

  118. 118.

    The 2010 report of the UK government’s gambling commission revealed that the UK National Lottery Draw was by far the most popular form of gambling in the country. It is popularly thought that this is another form of tax on the poor (some sorts of gambling – football pools, bingo, betting shops – seeming to be more central to working-class culture), yet the 2010 report reveals that the lottery is fairly equally popular across all household income brackets and social classes. Helen Wardle et al., British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2010 (London: Gambling Commission, 2010), http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/PDF/British%20Gambling%20Prevalence%20Survey%202010.pdf especially ‘Profile of Gamblers’, pp. 37–51. Profits from the government-sanctioned lottery support the Heritage Lottery Fund, which is overseen by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

  119. 119.

    Barry Sheerman MP was Chairman of the Education Select Committee from 2007 to 2010.

  120. 120.

    Rebecca Cooney, ‘Barry Sheerman: his story’, FE Week (10 March 2014), http://feweek.co.uk/2014/03/10/barry-sheerman-his-story/ [accessed 1 September 2016].

  121. 121.

    Linda Young, ‘Literature, Museums, and National Identity; or, Why are there So Many Writers’ House Museums in Britain?’, Museum History Journal, 8.2 (July 2015), 229–46 (242).

  122. 122.

    Linda Young estimates ‘a ratio of nearly 60% of writers to little more than 40% of all other vocations among UK heroes’ house museums’ in her article, op. cit., 233.

  123. 123.

    Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 36. First publishe d in French, 1958.

  124. 124.

    Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 199.

  125. 125.

    Tom Peck, ‘Rhyme and reason for the MP who bought country pub in the village of the Peasant Poet’, The Independent (7 April 2012), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rhyme-and-reason-for-the-mp-who-bought-country-pub-in-the-village-of-the-peasant-poet-7624919.html [accessed 1 September 2016].

  126. 126.

    Sheerman is listed as director of two separate entities relating to the cottage: John Clare (Helpston) Limited and the John Clare Trust. http://companycheck.co.uk/director/904343900 [accessed 1 September 2016]. The net worth of the latter is £1.5m.

  127. 127.

    Famously, Martin Heidegger roots his sense of the truth that only art can evoke in Van Gogh’s painting of a muddy peasant’s boots. See ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–56. Reaching his climax, Heidegger writes: ‘The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the certainty of bread, wordless joy at having once more understood want, trembling before the impending birth, and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and finds protection in the world of the peasant woman’ (p. 14). For the best account of Heidegger and Clare, see Emma Mason, ‘Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare’, in New Essays on John Clare, pp. 97–117.

  128. 128.

    David Tuaillon (ed.), Edward Bond: The Playwright Speaks (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 31.

  129. 129.

    Local historian of Helpston Peter Wordsworth, who has made a private but as yet unpublished study of the documentation attesting to property, ownership and enclosure in Helpston throughout the nineteenth century, is convinced that during Clare’s time, what is now called Woodgate farm (one of whose buildings is the threshing barn opposite the cottage) yet is often referred to as Savidge farm would in fact have been owned by the Wright family, the male head of which was one William Wright. The Savidge family only took ownership in the 1880s. My sincere thanks to Peter Wordsworth for sharing this information with me. Clare does mention ‘Hellen Wright’, a ‘cruel maid’ who is the addressee of the late love ‘Song’ (first line, ‘O Hellen Wright, O Hellen Wright’, LPII, p. 892), but there is no evidence that she is any relation to the family from Helpston.

  130. 130.

    Mark Storey, ‘Edward Drury’s “Memoir” of Clare’, JCSJ, 11 (1992), 14–16 (16).

  131. 131.

    By Himself, p. 5.

  132. 132.

    ‘The Village Minstrel’, VM, I, stanza LXVII, p. 36, ll. 1–4.

  133. 133.

    ‘With hand in waistcoat thrust the thresher goes’, MPV, pp. 276–7.

  134. 134.

    The official entry for this building on the UK’s ‘Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest’ reads: ‘Probably early C18. Small coursed stone rubble barn with steeply pitched slate roof with coped gable ends. Facing road a central doorway with chamfered lintel and plank door. Date “1832” inscribed above door. Barn doors facing garden at rear. Square ventilation holes in north end and loft door in south end.’ See British Listed Buildings Online, http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-50109-barn-immediately-south-west-of-no-17-spri#.VbgJuPlViko [accessed 29 November 2016].

  135. 135.

    By Himself, pp. 3–4.

  136. 136.

    Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1865), p. 9; J. L. Cherry, The Life and Remains of John Clare (London: F. Warne, 1873), p. 6; J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble, John Clare: A Life (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1932; revised edn., London: Michael Joseph, 1972), p. 11. See also Bate, Biography, p. 22–3.

  137. 137.

    Tim Chilcott (ed.), Shepherd’s Calendar, pp. 180 and 182, ll. 173–81 (Chilcott’s MS transcription). Interestingly, in the instance of this particular stanza, alterations in the published 1827 version – apart from the first line – are relatively light.

  138. 138.

    By Himself, p. 5.

  139. 139.

    By Himself, p. 5.

  140. 140.

    John Sinclair, An Account of the Systems of Husbandry Adopted in the More Improved Districts of Scotland, 2nd edn., 2 vols (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1813), 2, p. 17. For an extended discussion of the problems of barn flail threshing and the improvements offered by threshing mills, see, for example, R. W. Dickson, Practical Agriculture; or a Complete System of Modern Husbandry, 2 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 2, pp. 294–301; and Anon., The Complete Farmer; or General Dictionary of Agriculture and Husbandry, 5th edn., 2 vols (London: R Baldwin, et al., 1807), 2: see entries for ‘Thresher’, ‘Threshing’ and ‘Threshing Machine’ (alphabetised entries; no pagination).

  141. 141.

    A comprehensive account by E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé of possible reasons behind the peculiar focus of the Swing rioters on the breaking of threshing machines appears as Appendix IV, ‘The Problem of the Threshing Machines’, Captain Swing (Old Woking: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), pp. 359–64.

  142. 142.

    Merryn and Raymond Williams (eds), John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 16.

  143. 143.

    Having been called the John Clare Car Park since 1982, the multi-storey facility of the Queensgate shopping centre in central Peterborough was renamed in 2011, with only one zone of it now retaining a trace of the poet in the name ‘Green Clare Car Park’. The word ‘Clare’ was retained only after a public outcry that ‘Green’ should erase his name altogether. I was told all of this by a local resident, to whom I offer sincere thanks.

  144. 144.

    PD, p. xx.

  145. 145.

    PD, p. xx.

  146. 146.

    ‘The Meeting’, PD, pp. xiii–xiv (p. xiii). See Letters, pp. 20–21. For a full account of the development of this collection, see P. M. S. Dawson, ‘The Making of Clare’s “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery” (1820)’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 56.224 (April 2005), 276–312.

  147. 147.

    An aaaabcccb stanza – again with an iambic tetrameter line – is famously used by Tennyson in ‘The Lady of Shallott’, first published in Poems (London: Edward Moxon, 1833), pp. 8–19, while Christina Rossetti uses an aaabcccb octave but with a trimeter line for the triplets, and an even more abbreviated dimeter line for the c pair, in ‘Dream Land’, first published in The Germ, I (January 1850), 20. Thomas Hardy uses the rhyme scheme for the mournful pentameter poem ‘The Mongrel’, in Winter Words; in Various Moods and Metres (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 83–4.

  148. 148.

    William Wordsworth, Poems, Including Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), 1, pp. 243–4. As mentioned above, in December 1819 Clare returned a loan of Wordsworth’s poems from Octavius Gilchrist (Letters, p. 23; p. 23, n. 2), which means he was reading Wordsworth at the behest of one of his closest admirers, across the time Taylor says he was writing this poem. Byron was looming large, but there is no doubting Wordsworth’s presence in Clare’s first collection too, perhaps most especially in the form of this poem written just before publication, in Taylor’s account.

  149. 149.

    PD, pp. xxiii–xxiv.

  150. 150.

    ‘O, Were I On Parnassus Hill!’, The Works of Robert Burns, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813), 1, pp. 291–2 (p. 292).

  151. 151.

    By Himself, p. 82. Clare lifts the phrase from Charles Dibdin’s staple ballad (first line ‘We Tars are all for fun and glee’), which was known as ‘Jack at Greenwich’, and reproduced in songbooks throughout the nineteenth century: A fiddle soon I made my own,That girls and tars might caper;Learn’d Rule Britannia, Bobbing Joan,And grow’d a decent scraper…The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, Written by Himself. Together with the words of six hundred songs [etc.], 4 vols (London: Charles Dibdin, 1803), 4, pp. 223–5 (p. 224).

  152. 152.

    See Deacon, pp. 37–68, and Trevor Hold, ‘The Composer’s Debt to John Clare’, JCSJ, 1 (1982), 25–30.

  153. 153.

    Hessey to Clare, 14 March 1820, British Library, Egerton Manuscript 2245, fol. 57. My thanks to Erin Lafford for generously providing this transcription.

  154. 154.

    See Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1865), pp. 103 and 111; Bate, Biography, pp. 157 and 166; and Deacon, pp. 65–7. Deacon includes two facsimiles of the song: one an anonymised setting without music published by Catnach (undated, p. 65) and the other Corri’s original score (p. 66).

  155. 155.

    Haydn Corri (1785–1860), was ‘Pianist, organist and composer, son of Domenico Corri. In 1811 and 1819–1820 he travelled to Ireland as maestro al cembalo for a series of performances given by Italian opera singers from London, at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre. In 1821 he settled in Dublin, with his wife soprano Ann Adams (Adami) whom he had married in London on 15 July 1814…Quickly establishing himself as a teacher of the voice and piano, Haydn played a central role in the musical life of the city for many years…He published a singing tutor and wrote a number of glees and songs.’ Peter Ward Jones and Rachel E. Cowgill, ‘Haydn Corri’, in Stanley Sadie et al. (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn., 29 vols (London: Grove, 2001), 6, p. 502.

  156. 156.

    By Himself, p. 136.

  157. 157.

    Bate, Biography, p. 214.

  158. 158.

    Philip Gossett, ‘Gioachino Rossini’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 21, pp. 734–68 (pp. 734 and 738). A ‘cabaletta’ specifically ‘denotes the second, usually fast movement of a double aria in an Italian opera, consisting of a melodic period of two stanzas which is repeated with decorations added by the singer after an orchestral ritornello, often accompanied by choral or solo pertichini and followed by matching coda designed to stimulate applause’, according to Julian Budden, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 4, p. 759.

  159. 159.

    Kirsteen McCue (ed.), James Hogg: Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. xxiv.

  160. 160.

    Published in London by I. Waring, Fleet Street. The Bodleian Library provides a date of 1820 for this item, though the music sheet itself is undated. As both Broadhurst and Waring go unrecorded by Clare or any of his associates, it might be that 1820 is too early (though the Williams and Duruset performance suggests 1820 was a busy year for this song, in ways as yet unregistered). Broadhurst was active at this time – and had been a busy if uncelebrated Regency singer. He is recorded as singing on the London stage as early as 1810. See, for example, Teggs’ Prime Song Book: Fifth Collection (London: Thomas Tegg, 1810), p. 1, and The Jovial Song-Book for 1810 (London: T. Hughes, 1810), p. 22. A reviewer of a performance at the English Opera House on 26 December 1821 notes ‘the pleasure we shared with the audience in hearing the songs sung by Mr. Broadhurst in a style at once, sweet, simple, and pathetic’. This was the very same venue at which Broadhurst performed Waring’s setting of Clare’s song. European Magazine (January 1821), p. 71.

  161. 161.

    ‘Review of New Music’, La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, 139 (August 1820), p. 94.

  162. 162.

    James Ely Taylor (ed.), The Beauties of the Poets, Lyric and Elegiac, Selected from the Most Admired Authors (London: John Bumpus, 1824), p. 124. This is a companion volume to Ely Taylor’s The Beauties of the Poets, Moral and Sentimental, Selected from the Most Admired Authors (London: John Bumpus, 1824) which includes the Clare poem ‘What is Life?’, pp. 81–2.

  163. 163.

    F. Campbell (ed.), Beauties of the British Poets; with Notices, Biographical and Critical, 2 vols (London: Richard Edwards, 1824). ‘The Meeting’ and note: 1, pp. 110–11.

  164. 164.

    Published in Philadelphia by G. E. Blake, 13 South 5th Street.

  165. 165.

    The Sky-Lark: A Choice Selection of the Most Admired Popular Songs, Heroic, Plaintive, Sentimental, Humourous, and Baccanalian. Arranged for the Violin, Flute, and Voice. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1825), pp. 112–13.

  166. 166.

    The Universal Songster; or, Museum of Mirth, 3 vols (London: John Fairburn; Simpkin and Marshall; Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1826): ‘Here we meet…’: 2, p. 57; ‘In these arms, my Julia, Rest’: 3, p. 151.

  167. 167.

    The long title of this work provides the context in which the song was appearing: John Parry, The Vocal Companion, Consisting of Favourite Songs, Duets, Glees…Comprising Many Works by the Most Celebrated Composers, adapted for the Voice, Violin, or Flute. Volume the First. (London: Goulding and D’Almaine, 1829), pp. 38–9. The second volume in Parry’s series was The British Minstrel of 1830, while the third was Flowers of Song, 1837.

  168. 168.

    Again, the long title of this collection is worth reproducing in full, as it shows how the song was regarded by the collectors: The London Songster; A Cabinet Edition of Naval, Military, Bacchanalian, Comic, Sentimental, Love, Patriotic, and Other Popular Songs, English, Irish, and Scotch: comprising those Singing at the Theatres, Private Concerts, and other Places of Fashionable Resort, we well as those held in General Estimation (London: Dean and Munday, 1830), p. 59.

  169. 169.

    Hodgson’s Fashionable Song Book, for 1831: A Choice Collection of Nearly One Hundred Popular, Favourite, and Entirely New Songs (London: Bernard Hodgson, 1831), [no pagination].

  170. 170.

    See ODNB on James Catnach (1792–1841). Catalogue of Songs and Song books. Sheets, Half-Sheets, Christmas Carols, Children’s Books, &c. &c. &c. (London: J. Catnach, 1832), p. 3. See Steve Roud and Paul Smith (eds), A Catalogue of Songs and Song Books Printed and Published by James Catnach 1832: A Facsimile Reprint with Indexes and Examples (Doncaster: January Books, 1985), p. 19. The Harp was an illustrated collection published by ‘J. Catnach, 2 Monmouth Street’, which the Bodleian dates to c. 1830–1837. Many cheap songsters in which Clare’s song appears are undated, in the Harding collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford, but are likely of the 1820s and 1830s.

  171. 171.

    Tommarroo Songster (London: Lovelace and Perkess, ?1833), in Patrick Spedding and Paul Watt, gen. (eds), Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 4, Derek B. Scott (ed.), pp. 327–55 (pp. 354–5).

  172. 172.

    Derek B. Scott (ed.), Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, vol. 4 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), pp. xix–xx.

  173. 173.

    E. L. White, The Boston Melodeon: A Collection of Secular Melodies, Consisting of Songs, Glees, Rounds, Catches, &c., Including Many of the Most Popular Pieces of the Day Arranged and Harmonized For Four Voices, 2 vols (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey & Co., c. 1845), 1, p. 152.

  174. 174.

    Lloyd’s Song Book; containing upwards of Four Hundred Songs, Duets, Glees, & c., &c. (London: E. Lloyd [1845]), p. 66.

  175. 175.

    Grigg’s Southern and Western Songster: Being a Choice Selection of the Most Fashionable Songs…New edn. (Philadelphia [PA]: Grigg, Elliot & Co., 1847), p. 234.

  176. 176.

    S. M. Hewlett, ‘We Are All Singing’, Hewlett’s Temperance Songster. A Collection of Songs, Dedicated to All the Temperance Societies in the World, 6th edn (Cooperstown [New York]: S. M. Hewlett, 1846), p. 11.

  177. 177.

    James Rees, ‘Three Eras of a Woman’s Life: A Dramatic Sketch, in Three Parts’, in Mysteries of City Life (Philadelphia [PA]: J. W. Moore, 1849), pp. 182–198 (p. 191).

  178. 178.

    ‘Here we meet…’ appears as song 404 listed in the catalogue of Duncombe’s Music for the Million! (London: Duncombe and Moon, c. 1848).

  179. 179.

    ‘Labour and the Poor’, The Morning Chronicle, 16 January 1851, pp. 5–6 (p. 6). This is one in a series of correspondents’ letters covering the poor across rural areas, the full title in this instance being ‘Labour and the Poor. Rural Districts [from our Special Correspondent.] Counties of Northampton, Leicester, Rutland, Nottingham, and Derby. Letter XLIV’.

  180. 180.

    ‘The Income Tax (From the Times)’, The Aberdeen Journal, 29 January 1851, p. 3. See also Dundee Courier 29 January 1851, p. 1, and Caledonian Mercury, 27 January 1851, p. 1.

  181. 181.

    Davidson’s Universal Melodist, Consisting of the Music and Words or Popular, Standard, and Original Songs, &c., 2 vols (London: G. H. Davidson, 1853) 1, p. 218.

  182. 182.

    Cyclopedia of Songs and Recitations (London: ‘for the Booksellers’, 1853), p. 58.

  183. 183.

    Selkirk’s Songs & Ballads for the People, no. 9 (Newcastle: Selkirk, 1853), p. 192.

  184. 184.

    The Popular Vocalist; Containing a Choice Selection of Favourite National Songs, as sung at the Different Places of Entertainment by the Most Eminent Singers (Glasgow: George Cameron, 1856), p. 102.

  185. 185.

    Diprose’s Music Hall Song Book, no. 5 (London: J. Diprose, c. 1859–1862) p. 34, and J. Diprose (ed.), The Red White and Blue Monster Song Book (London: J. Diprose, c. 1860), p. 19.

  186. 186.

    J. E. Carpenter (ed.), Songs for All Ages (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1864), pp. 55–6. This book was reprinted by Routledge in New York in 1866.

  187. 187.

    Johnny Ludlow (nom de plume of Mrs Henry Wood), ‘The Tragedy’, The Argosy, January 1886, pp. 28–44; February 1886, pp. 112–28; March 1886, 192–208; and April 1886, pp. 269–85. The song appears in full in the April issue on p. 274, while the narrator’s discussion quoted here follows on p. 275.

  188. 188.

    Ibid., pp. 274–5.

  189. 189.

    See note 7 above.

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    Simon Kövesi

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Kövesi, S. (2017). John Clare and Place. In: John Clare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59183-1_1

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