Abstract
In Letter II of The Borough (1810), the mosses and lichens on the walls of a parish church are transformed into a metaphor for organic and hierarchical paternalist communities: ‘There she [Science] perceives them round the surface creep / And while they meet, their due distinctions keep; / Mix’d but not blended; each its name retains, / And these are Nature’s ever-during stains’.1 Today the church spire or tower remains the strongest visual sign that one is approaching a small village in the countryside. From a visual and geographical perspective, the borough (a large county town which has been granted some degree of self-governance) does not have the same identity because each parish merges into the next. But at the turn of the eighteenth century, even within a borough, the church indicated the presence of a community of some kind. It is just that the membership of a community within a borough would have been harder to identify. In Crabbe’s vision the fabric of the church develops in synergy with the evolving community. Recent innovations are naturalised and incorporated seamlessly into existing ways, just as the different varieties of moss and lichen on the church walls remain ‘mix’d’ rather than ‘blended’. In paternalist communities everyone knew their place, while the gentry and the clergy maintained order through a combination of carrot in the form of outdoor relief and stick through the threat of social exclusion.
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Notes
George Crabbe, The Complete Poetical Works, 3 vols, ed. Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Vol. 1, ll. 49–52. All future references will be to this edition, and will appear within parentheses in the text.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 26.
Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 231.
Aaron Fogel, ‘Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” and Crabbe’s “The Parish Register”: Poetry and Anti-Census’, Studies in Romanticism, 48:1 (2009), 23–65 (60).
R.B. Hatch, ‘George Crabbe, the Duke of Rutland and the Tories’, Review of English Studies, ns. 24:95 (1973), 429–43 (432 and 438).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), pp. 91–2.
See John Broad, ‘Housing the Rural Poor in Southern England 1650–1850’, Agricultural History Review, 48:2 (2000), 151–70.
Gavin Edwards, George Crabbe’s Poetry on Border Land (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 98.
E.P. Thompson observes that for labouring people at the end of the eighteenth century, the possession of a watch or clock was an indicator of prosperity (see E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 370).
Colin Winborn, The Literary Economy of Jane Austen and George Crabbe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 27.
See John Broad, ‘Parish Economies of Welfare, 1650–1834’, Historical Journal, 42:4 (1999), 985–1006 (990).
François de La Rochefoucauld, A Frenchman’s Year In Suffolk, trans. and ed. Norman Scarfe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), p. 55.
K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 67–103.
See also Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 49–93 and 120–34.
William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 227. See also Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, pp. 67–103.
K.D.M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 95 and 101.
See Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1763–1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), pp. 1–181.
See Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 186.
Crabbe later identified a similar disjunction between the interests of masters and labourers in the Trowbridge clothing industry: ‘on One Side; the Masters feel the Necessity of employing Agents who do not eat or drink, and on the other the men who are hungry & thirsty, threaten & no wonder, their Rival the Machines, with utter Destruction: Who can truly say, if I were a Master I would give up Machinery; If I were a Workman I would starve in Quiet. — I leave the melancholy Subject: A Way will be found, though my Wisdom is at a Loss where to look for it’ (letter to Sarah Hoare, 27 January 1829, Selected Letters and Journals of George Crabbe, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 350).
The Anglican Church had a vested interest in parochial exclusivity, and often helped to fund and organise perambulations. See Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, 1700–1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982), p. 273.
W.H. Hudson, Hampshire Days (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980), p. 184.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 268.
Jerome McGann, ‘The Anachronism of George Crabbe’, ELH, 48:3 (1981), 555–72 (557).
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© 2013 Simon J. White
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White, S.J. (2013). George Crabbe and the Architecture of the Parish. In: Romanticism and the Rural Community. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_5
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