p. iiUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

January 23, 1922

THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY

Mildred M. Coen

ENTITLED Country Life In The Poetry of John Clare

IS APPROVED BY ME AS FULFILLING THIS PART OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

Bachelor of Arts

Clarence Valentine Boyer

Instructor in Charge

Approved

HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF English

p. iiiTable of Contents

PAGE

1. Part I

Economic Conditions in the Time of John Clare

1

2. Part II

The Life of John Clare

7

3. Part III

Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

14

4. Bibliography

25

p. 1PART I Economic Conditions in the Time of Clare

About forty years before the birth of the Poet Clare, (1793) there began in England a land revolution which by the end of the eighteenth century pauperized a great part of the rural population. Up until 1750 fully half of the land of England was worked in “common”, or in accordance with what was known as the open field system. This open field system means that there were special fields set aside for plow land. These fields were divided into very small strips which were alternately cultivated and left unplowed. Besides this plow land, there was a definite area of grazing land, known as the commons. With the coming of enclosures this open field system was abolished. (By the term ‘enclosure’ is meant that all the strips of any one man scattered throughout the holdings of the village were given to him in equivalent in a single, consolidated acreage, which he had to fence, ditch, etc. Or again, the term applies to a large district, as very frequently the commons, that was fenced in for the wealthy landowner’s sheep-pens.)

An enclosure began with a private bill introduced into Parliament—often by a wealthy landlord. This bill, showing the advantages of enclosing, was sent to a committee, whose leader or chairman might have been the selfsame landlord who had proposed the bill. After being considered and passed p. 2upon by the house of lords, which was in turn composed of wealthy landowners only, the bill was put into the hands of a commission to be executed. Such a commission, perhaps headed by the nobleman wanting the enclosure, descended upon the district and distributed the land according to their wishes.

Enclosures no doubt increased the national wealth immensely in the long run. Of course, no modern system of farming could survive in which an acre was divided into ten or more strips each with a different crop and different owner. And modern methods were just then being introduced into England, and were finding an obstacle in the old system that was almost identical with the Anglo-Saxon system of a thousand years earlier. But the change was too rapid and altered the character of the national life of England to such a degree that it wrought untold hardships for more than half a century. The people of the villages were robbed of the barest means of making a living. Just as today the small manufacture has no chance against the big one in his line, so then the small landowner could not compete against the wealthy ones, especially since new and expensive machinery and fertilizers were becoming more and more essential. The wealthy landowners improved their estates so that they might raise the rent and make a profit that could be compared to the profit made by the fast-rising merchant

aristocracy. The rent on these improved farms was so high that the small farmer had to give up farming altogether. The commons were enclosed and in a majority of the cases went to p. 3the wealthy landowners who raised a better grade of sheep with heavier wool on the pasturage thus afforded: but the small farmer and in fact all the rest of the agricultural population did not have a place to graze a cow. The small sum of money given them for the loss of their rights in grazing stock on the commons and gathering wood from the waste, was soon spent for the bare necessities of living; and when this was spent, the economic independence of the laboring population was gone.

The enclosures were thus fatal to three classes of the rural population: the small farmer, who had at most thirty acres; the cotter or cottager, who had perhaps five; and the laborer who had less than that or none. The process of enclosing their allottments after the consolidation mentioned, was so expensive that it could not be borne except by a man with some capital to start on. The man who was called upon by the enclosing committee to promptly ditch and fence his little land, and who could not do so, was compelled to sell at whatever price he could get. The small farmer of thirty acres might possibly have borne this expense but he received no adequate recompense for his rights of common; and such advantages as he received from the consolidation of his thirty acres could not make amends for the loss of common rights. For, without pasture he could not keep sheep; with no sheep he could not fertilize his land; without fertilizer the land soon wore out. The small farmer then could emigrate to America, or go to an industrial town, or

become a day laborer. Thus it was that a small, independent farmer in a p. 4few years became a laborer and in another few years was perhaps thrown upon parish relief.

The effect upon the cottager can best be described by saying that before the enclosures he was a laborer with land; and after the enclosure he was a laborer without land. For the inability to fence and ditch his holdings operated even more sternly in his case than in that of the small farmer. A great part of the land, moreover, that was enclosed was turned to pasture by the large owners, and the laborers formerly employed on it were discharged. Where fifteen men farmed, one man herded. The cottager and the laborer were thus made dependent on wages alone at a time when competition for work was beating wages down to a starvation level. The squatter was a poor alien on the land. He settled on the waste, built a cottage, and got together a few geese, perhaps a cow and a horse; and began to cultivate the land. With the coming of the enclosure he lost his common right; and thus uprooted he could start on a wandering journey of beggary.

Perhaps we can get an idea of the misery and universal wretchedness of the rural population if we quote a few words from an eye-witness, Cobbett, in his Parish Register:

“Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds; and the looks would indicate that their food is not nearly the equal of that of a nig. The wretched hovels are stuck upon little plots of ground by the road-side where the space was wider than the road demanded. . . . Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures digging up their little plots of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw p. 5such wretchedness, not even among the plantation negroes.”

The laborer, to keep from starving, often turned to poaching and petty thievery. But the noblemen had their parks enclosed against trespassers. Spring-guns were set up on the estates. Poaching offenses were made punishable by death, or at the least by transportation to Australia. The poor might seek charity from the parish pauper work-house. Or they might starve.

Many reforms to better these conditions were proposed, mainly because the English Aristocracy had just seen in a sister nation what a desperate proletariat could do if pushed to extremes of misery. The reform that was adopted goes under the name of The Speenhamland System. In brief, it provided that if a laborer did not receive a certain minimum wage (which was set on a sliding scale to correspond to the price of wheat), he was to be given from the parish relief to make up the set amount. Nothing was done to force the employer to pay this minimum wage; and since he could depend upon the parish having to pay it, he seldom did give the laborer a living wage. The result was that those who were not already paupers speedily became so. The scheme was the culmination of a series of strokes that pauperized an already impoverished nation.

The laborer was separated from the land by the enclosures in a greater degree than can be readily realized. Before the industrial and agrarian revolutions, Arthur Young estimated that out of a population of 8,500,000, the agricultural portion was 2,800,000, or one-fourth of the total number. In the p. 6second decade of the nineteenth century the total number engaged of farms and dairies was 1,300,000: that is not half the actual number engaged in the century before; while the proportion had sunk from one person in four to one in twenty-five.

The main features of this land change were; the open field system was abolished; the plow and grazing lands were enclosed; small farms were consolidated into larger ones; new methods and machinery were introduced; and the laborer was separated from the land. It was in this change of rural conditions that the poet John Clare was born and reared—in Northamptonshire, which was a purely agricultural district and felt the misery and universal pauperization that went with the agrarian revolution.

p. 7PART II The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)

John Clare was horn in the little village of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, in 1793. His family, one of the poorest in the village, was enrolled in the parish pauper list. When the poet was seven, his father by the greatest privations sent him to a certain “Dame-School”; but the money could not be spared to keep him there very long, and John was hired out to tend the geese and sheep on the commons. He saved up his few pennies during the next two or three years; and again, at the age of ten, went to school for a few months. This was all the formal education that the poet received; for at twelve he was already working regularly in the fields. With hardly strength enough for the slightest labor, so small and weak-armed that his father made him a special flail to thresh with, he must have endured sufferings of body and spirit those years.

When he was thirteen, the reading of Thomson’s “Seasons” led him to believe that he was a poet himself. He had already showed a poetic temperament: as a very young child he had set out one day to walk towards the horizon, that he might touch it. As he grew older he was unusually credulous of supernatural things, fancying all kinds of ghosts and goblins in the swamps ready to attack him. Then, when he read the “Seasons”, he scribbled down on a piece of paper the lines which were afterwards known as “The p. 8Morning Walk.” He wrote other verses on scraps of paper which he would stuff into a hole in the wall. When his mother would find them, she used them for lighting the fires. The poet showed some of his verses to a Mr. Thomas Porter living near Helpstone, and was advised to learn grammar. The attempt to do this kept him from writing any more poems for several years.

During these years, Clare engaged in various forms of day labor to support himself. For a time he worked among the gardeners in Burghley Park, where he acquired the habit of carousing and drinking. He ran away for a few months but after wandering about, went back home to work on a farm. Later he found work at a lime-kiln; where, though the work was hard, he found time to write half a dozen poems in the course of a day. It was at this time, in 1817, that he met Martha Turner, the “Patty” of some of his poems, whom he married after many hesitations and differences.

Between the meeting with Patty and his marriage, three years later, Clare became almost a beggar, and put down his name, as his father did, on the pauper list, claiming relief from the parish. The money he had saved when he worked at the line-kiln had been spent on the printing of a hundred copies of a prospectus, which he called: “Proposals for Publishing by Subscriptions a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Subjects, Religious and Moral, in Verse, by John Clare of Helpstone.” He intended to raise money on this subscription and get married. As the title might indicate, only seven subscribers p. 9could be found; and it seemed as if the poems would never be printed. But by good luck they fell into the hands of a Stamford bookseller called Drury, who sent them to London to his relative, Mr. Taylor, a prominent printer. Taylor saw the value of the poems, and announced them in the first issue of his new “London Magazine”. On January 16, 1820, he published the “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire Peasant.” He attached an

introduction that was almost an appeal to charity.

The success of the poems was immediate. Praise came from the Quarterly Review that had attacked Keats. Madame Vestris recited some of the poems at Covent Gardens; Rossini set one of them to music. The poet was taken to London under the guidance of his editor, Mr. Taylor, who took him to theatres and dinner parties. There, because of his naive rusticity in dress, manner, and speech, he became as popular as his rural verses. At his first visit, he gained the friendship of two life-long friends, Lord Radstock and Mrs. Emmerson. Subscriptions were raised; the money was invested for him; and Clare found himself with an income of forty-five pounds a year.

On that amount the poet thought he could live without working. In the day he would wander about the commons writing poems; at night he sat in the inn-parlors receiving his admirers. In 1821 he brought out another book, “The Village Minstrel.” Gilchrist and Taylor p. 10had fought the battles of the first volume; but Gilchrist at this time was busily engaged in a literary battle between the editors of Pope and Byron and the Quarterly Review. This second volume of Clare’s was left neglected. The next year he made a second trip to London. The poet stayed there long enough to get acquainted with the taverns and gay theatres, and to fall in love with an actress and the young wife of a friend. He met Gifford and Murray, and supped with Lamb.

The freedom and gaiety of London had done Clare no good when he came back to Helpstone; the trip had merely made him discontented and lonely. However, he wrote verses copiously and tried to make better bargains in selling them. He was not successful at this, and the little money he had soon dwindled away. Stinting himself in food that his ever increasing family and old parents might have enough to eat, he became seriously ill. He went to London again, and receiving medical aid, became better rapidly.

On this visit, he met all the leading literary men as they gathered for dinner parties at the home of the editor, Taylor. Mr. Martin, Clare’s biographer, gives the poet’s naive reaction to the “Lions” on the times. Like a child he sat spell-bound listening to their talk, while he felt keenly a disappointment that they were not as he had imagined them in his day-dreams. At such parties he met Hazlitt, Reynolds, Coleridge, Lamb, Cary, the translator of Dante, and many others notables.

p. 11As soon as he was strong enough and had returned to Helpstone, he got a job digging ditches and draining marshes; but he was too weak to do the work. Sickness, poverty, cares, came faster and faster. His thoughts naturally came to him in verse; but the circumstances of his life prevented him from developing to the extent he otherwise might. Sometimes his poverty and his cares, sometimes drink, sometimes starvation, prevented him from writing at all. Out under the open sky he felt free. “There was a favorite spot where he delighted to sit, and where the hallowed vein of poetry flowed freely. This spot was the hollow oak on the border of Helpstone heath, called Lea Close Oak. Few human beings ever came to this place; inside this oak the poet used to sit for hours in silent meditations, forgetting everything about him and unmindful of the waning day and the mantle of darkness falling over the earth.” (Martin’s “Life of John Clare.”)

A few years of prosperity relieved the ever-oppressed, poverty-cramped life of the poet. During these few years there was scarcely a wish left unfulfilled, save the one of wanting a strip of earth and to be king of his own land. A poor crop and more sickness brought him back into the dire want of his former years. The Earl Fitzwilliam gave him a few acres of land and a small cottage; but the change from the spot where he had always lived was more than he could bear, and signs of approaching insanity became more p. 12noticeable. The Earl proposed to send him to an asylum, since it was decided that the poet had lost his mind. Mr. Taylor with some interested friends arranged to send him to a private asylum managed by a Dr. Allen, at High Bridge. Homesickness for his wife and children made him run away, after he had been at High Bridge for four years, treated with the utmost kindness. His experiences on this journey, as described afterwards in a letter, were of the most pathetic kind. For ninety hours he had nothing to eat, save

a few tobacco crumbs he had found in his pocket and the green grass by the roadside. Dying on the road from hunger, with bruised and bleeding feet, he was picked up on the roadside by his wife. Two county physicians came and signed the certificate that was to shut him up in the Northamptonshire Insane Asylum for the remaining twenty-two years of his life.

At this place Clare was treated with the utmost respect. The officials placed him in a ward with the private patients, paying honor to him as well as to themselves by recognizing the poet in the pauper. In a recess in one of the big windows, he spent the greater part of the years, writing and thinking. When he became very weak and infirm, he was wheeled about in the gardens. On Friday May 20, 1864 he died. The superintendent of the asylum wrote to the Earl Fitzwilliam for the small sum necessary to carry out the wish of the poet that he be buried in his native soil. The Earl refused; but some kind friends raised the sum. Clare now lies under a broad sycamore tree p. 13in the little cemetery of Helpstone, “with nothing above but the green grass and the eternal vault of heaven.”

p. 14PART III Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

Although John Clare was a peasant suffering from poverty all his life, his poetry was not written with a propagandistic but with an artistic purpose. The literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dealing with country life was either artistic or social in purpose. Ebenezer Elliott, living at the sane time as Clare, wrote poems with a social purpose—for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the lowering of the import duties on raw material. Although Elliott was actually benefitted by the Corn Laws, yet he wrote against them most bitterly. John Clare, on the other hand, impoverished all his life by the Corn Laws and other similar measures, wrote nothing dealing with a change in the agricultural situation. Both writers are to be praised for their honesty, for their ability to detach themselves from immediate personal interests, and for their fidelity to their artistic and social purposes.

The poems of Clare may be divided into three classes: the Love Poems, the Nature Poems, and the Poems dealing with social life. In all the poet’s writings he is dominated by an artistic purpose rather than by a desire to reform or p. 15change conditions. We should expect this to be so in the Love Poems, which form the bulk of his work. Yet, we may learn something of the country life from these poems, if we take them, written by a peasant as they are, to be typical of the sentiments felt by all the rural laborers. In spite of the material hardships and privations, there is a simplicity and sweetness in the peasant’s love, an inner life of tender emotions and warmth of feeling, that is in stark contrast with external hardships. Clare, in the love poems, expresses these sentiments of the peasant. The poem best illustrating the simple love is one entitled, “My Love, thou art a Nosegay Sweet.”—