by Melvyn Bragg
JOHN CLARE
John Clare is seen now as one of the great poets of the nineteenth century and, according to one of my guests on this programme, the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. He was born in Helpston on the brink of the Fens near Peterborough in 1793 and knew the world around his cottage intimately. His work describes nature and country life in an extraordinary level of detail that few, if any, have equalled before or since. Clare also fires up against the threat to that countryside. For this, he achieved fame in his late twenties, though often with condescension from the London literary world, who made allowances for the man they called the ‘Northamptonshire peasant poet’. The last twenty-four years of his life were spent in what was then called a lunatic asylum.
With Melvyn to discuss the life and works of John Clare in this 750th edition of In Our Time were: Sir Jonathan Bate, provost of Worcester College, Oxford; Mina Gorji, senior lecturer in the English faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; and Simon Kövesi, professor of English literature at Oxford Brookes University.
John Clare was born in 1793, just after the French Revolution, and was a contemporary of Lord Byron and John Keats. He was born deep in the countryside, Jonathan Bate told us, in a little village called Helpston, halfway between Peterborough and Stamford in what was then Northamptonshire but is now part of Cambridgeshire. This home was on the edge of the Great Fen, the eastern flatlands of England.
JONATHAN BATE: His community was one that had really not changed for hundreds of years. His father was a casual agricultural labourer, he was brought up in a tiny cottage. But the way in which the agricultural system worked there was unchanged since the Middle Ages. It was the old open-field system where each peasant would have a little strip of land, and the commons were available where you could maybe graze a cow.
This was very different from the kind of landscape that emerged later, as we were to hear.
Clare had a twin sister who died as an infant. Much of Clare’s work is bound up with the sense of loss, and Jonathan Bate suggested that losing his baby twin may have influenced this. That work began with another incident in his later childhood.
JONATHAN BATE: He was out working in the fields as a teenager and there was another boy who was reading a book. Clare had got some education at the little local school. The book was a volume of poems called The Seasons by James Thomson, very popular genteel poetry but a poetry of landscape. And Clare read it, loved it. He saved up his little bit of earnings and went along to the bookshop in Stamford and arrived before the shop was open but duly bought a copy of this book. And that really got him hooked on poetry.
This interest in verse was supported by a great tradition of folk culture in the village, where Clare’s father would love to sing ballads and folk songs in the pub and play the fiddle, and Clare learned the songs of gypsies living on land near Helpston.
John Clare spent much of his time outdoors. He was a great noticer of the natural world, Mina Gorji said, paying attention to minute changes such as how the hawthorn bud would unseal, or how the catkin became covered in downy white. He recorded these in his poetry, with the tiniest details that other poets before him had not mentioned.
MINA GORJI: He also celebrated the local landscape, which was not a very glamorous place really, it was a sort of ‘swampy desolate place’, [as] his publisher described it, and he found beautiful things there to celebrate: the wild flowers; the weeds like the ragwort, which most farmers wouldn’t like very much because it kills livestock; the fleabane. His poetry is full of the celebrations of these unsung things in the natural world.
Whereas Thomson in The Seasons was talking about nature and the landscape from above, John Clare was very much inside nature, noticing it on his rambles, sharing his local world through his verse. Reading Clare’s poems, there is a strong sense of him being in the place, as with the sound of snow underfoot, which he described as ‘crumping’, a word that readers could look up in the glossaries in his books if they could not glean it. He was not a dialect poet, where every other word might have to be looked up by the uninitiated, but he used words like ‘crumping’ sparingly and to great and powerful effect.
MINA GORJI: A word like ‘gulsh’, which is the sound a tree makes when it falls on wet ground, or a word like ‘prog’, which is a dialect word for prodding, which he uses in a poem called ‘The Mouse’s Nest’. And when a word like that appears, like ‘prog’, we can sense that it means prod, but it also gives his readers a bit of a startle, in the way in which he was a bit startled when he saw this mouse scurrying out of the nest.
Clare told how he used to write on scraps of paper and tuck them into a hole in the wall of his parents’ cottage, only for his mother to find them and use them as firelighters. This can be construed as a negative comment on her, but Simon Kövesi stressed that, although Clare’s mother was illiterate, she valued literacy and supported his education. His parents saved really hard for this and Clare started threshing, when he was a boy of nine or ten, to help pay for school, and, with all the extra labour, there was not much room for leisure or writing. There was support for Clare in the village, but also suspicion of his unusual habits.
SIMON KÖVESI: He was born into a world of war, 1793. Britain’s already at war with revolutionary France; it doesn’t end really until the Napoleonic Wars finish in 1815, when Clare’s in his twenty-second year. There is a suspicion of anyone walking around the countryside on their own, which is one of the reasons when he buys The Seasons, coming back from Stamford, he jumps over a wall into the Burghley Estate in order to secrete his reading. There was always a sense that he’s got to be secret, and secrecy is a really important motif in Clare’s life.
After reading and being inspired by The Seasons, Clare was writing poetry in his teens and early twenties while earning his living by working in the fields or as a lime-burner. But then, Jonathan Bate said, his poetry was seen by a local publisher called Drury, who happened to have a cousin, John Taylor, who was a London publisher and who had a very good eye for new talent. He was the one who, arguably, had discovered John Keats.
JONATHAN BATE: Drury says to him, ‘Look I’ve found this local poet, I think he’s really good, let’s join together and publish his work both provincially here in Stamford and down in London.’ So, in 1820, Clare’s first volume, called Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery by John Clare, the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, is published in London. And Taylor brings him to London and does a brilliant marketing campaign.
Robert Burns had been enormously successful a generation earlier in Scotland, so publishers in London were on the lookout for the ‘English Burns’. Clare was a great success, even having his portrait painted in London. This success, though, unsettled him and made him very anxious.
MINA GORJI: He worried that he’d be forgotten very quickly as he knew people like Burns had been forgotten. Even Wordsworth was neglected when Clare was writing in the early days. He worried that he’d be picked up and then tossed aside by the world of fame. Also, in those brief years of fame, he was treated like a cultural curiosity. He said he hates what he calls the peep show – the ‘puppet show’, he calls it – it makes him very uncomfortable.
It could be that John Clare’s anxiety over this insecurity contributed to the decline in his mental health since, as he feared, he was lifted up to great excitement and later dropped into neglect and obscurity, and that neglect coincided with the beginnings of his mental decline. The interest in him was not entirely negative, by any means. Although Clare was part of a puppet show, as he termed it, the people who came to see him in the fields at Helpston did so because they liked his poetry, and the local aristocrats supported him with small pensions. One of these was the Marquess of Exeter, one of the Cecil family, who owned Burghley House and the land around it, where Clare had hidden on the way back from Stamford on the day he had bought The Seasons.
MINA GORJI: Clare had worked as a gardener there in Burghley House, and then the m
arquess invites him to visit and offers some support. Clare finds it mortifyingly embarrassing. The clatter of his hobnail boots on marble, he says he’s so ashamed of the sound they utter on the marble. Still, he was being offered help, even though the shift of worlds made him uncomfortable.
Even at the height of his celebrity in London, when he had been introduced to Charles Lamb and to Coleridge, John Clare kept coming back to his home in Helpston. There, Simon Kövesi said, he would receive letters from labouring-class poets, enclosing their poems and asking him how they could get into print, too. This would annoy Clare sometimes as, in those days, the recipient paid for the letter on delivery and he did not have much money. In Helpston, though, he was at home and there he was a great celebrant of ritual and habit and custom in village life.
SIMON KÖVESI: In the open-field system before enclosure, before the sowing of seed, the whole village would go and collect stones from the fields. If you’re a kid and you found a stone with a hole in it, you would try to string that to the back of the master’s coat and, if you did that, then you would win a prize off all the other kids. There’re these fantastic rituals, there was an enormous amount of tactile play with sticks, with pudges, little puddles, with stones. Clare says the moment enclosure comes, the sense of the village coming together in those big fields, those big jobs together, those customs disappear.
There were fertility rituals around Helpston, and marriage rituals, and rituals around predicting who was going to marry whom, and going to a local spring and drinking the water to get healthy, and these were very much curtailed by the process of enclosure.
The land was inseparable from Clare. He had mapped out everywhere in his village in great detail, and everywhere for a day’s walk around. He knew the names of lanes and gave names to the bushes, and described the birds’ nests in great detail.
JONATHAN BATE: He’ll take the reader on a walk and then he’ll spot a bird’s nest and he’ll look at the markings on the egg and say that it looks ‘pen scribbled’, like writing. That’s the yellowhammer’s nest. But then, also, this very, very strong sense of particular places. For instance, there was a bush called Langley Bush where the village always used to meet in a parliament that almost went back to the Middle Ages. And there’s a lovely poem of his called ‘Remembrances’ where he just recites the names of bushes, lanes and trees, and these, he says, are all things that have gone because of this thing, the enclosure.
With so many mentions of enclosure already in the discussion, Melvyn provided his own summary – ‘in infinite wisdom, they decided this open land, which had been going for centuries and so on, and was common land for many people, should be privatised, and the privatisation consisted of fencing it off, barring ordinary people from it, diverting streams, cutting down woods, taking it over and trespassers were prosecuted’.
The Enclosure Act for Helpston had been passed in 1809, when Clare was sixteen, and the landscape was transformed over the next ten years. Consequently, he always associated the old open fields, the open moor, the common lands, with a childhood that had gone, and he saw enclosure as an offence not only to village customs but also to nature.
JONATHAN BATE: All of a sudden, the villagers couldn’t go to that little spring because it was on a piece of enclosed land with a ‘no trespassing’ sign. He says even the birds are prevented from going there and trees get cut down because of the enclosures. [There is a] wonderful poem of his called ‘The Fallen Elm’ where he looks at this elm tree, huge tree, that had been part of village life for generations, and suddenly a man owns it and decides he’s going to cut it down for profit and that’s the end of that tree, that’s the end of a long history. It’s a form of tyranny, he says. In the poem ‘Remembrances’, he says enclosure ‘like a Bonaparte’ came, and destroyed everything.
Clare was a contemporary of Keats, they shared the same publisher, and some people compared or rather contrasted them. They both wrote poems inspired by nightingales, although Keats thought Clare, in his works, merely described the birds, and Clare thought Keats only described things as they appeared to his fancies, not as though he had seen them for himself. But Keats died before Clare’s best poetry got going, Mina Gorji said, and one of his best poems is ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’, which is so different from Keats’s wonderful ode, so informal, where Clare gets down on his hands and knees and watches the bird while she sings.
MINA GORJI: Not only does Clare’s nightingale tremble in her ecstasy – her feathers stand on end (where Keats doesn’t see the nightingale at all) – but also Clare, very importantly, takes us to her nest, and her nest is made of dead oaken leaves, he said, and velvet moss and scant and spare of scarce materials, down and hair. He’s taking us into the centre of this nightingale’s universe and the texture of this nest.
John Clare also had a line, as Melvyn recalled, in which he says it ‘made me marvel that so famed a bird should have no better dress than russet brown’, which was very down to earth. More than that, Mina Gorji said, Clare knew full well that russet was associated with labourers and peasants, the colour of their homespun cloth, which was a way of connecting this songbird with him and his poetry. Keats, meanwhile, was not so interested in the real nightingale; his nightingale is an immortal bird, a symbol of poetry, a symbol of music.
MINA GORJI: What’s special about Clare’s is it’s a real, trembling, actual bird and Clare’s worried about how the bird is made anxious when he comes close. Clare, in many of his bird poems, is thinking about how the bird is feeling. It’s panicking, it’s scared. And Keats isn’t thinking about the bird in that way at all.
Clare’s first couple of collections in 1820 and 1821 were very successful, especially the first one, which went through four editions in the first year. The reviewers, as Simon Kövesi told us, were surprised by someone from what they called an uneducated background, with very little formal education, sold by his editor and his publisher, John Taylor, in the introduction as being the poorest of the poor. There was a vogue then for not just regional and dialect verse but also poetry that included the poor, which may have begun with Wordsworth and his Lyrical Ballads, poems like ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘We Are Seven’.
SIMON KÖVESI: The life that Clare lives, for Taylor’s readers, is shockingly poor and [Taylor] makes sure that you know that. The reviewers are surprised and amazed at his work and the quality of his work, but also there is always that, ‘But if only he knew grammar a little bit better … and maybe all these dialect terms, well, they’re okay, but where’s the organising principle?’
This was one of the big tensions for Clare, Simon Kövesi thought, and also one of his great contributions to literary tradition, in that he did not always want to drive a poem’s narrative, so there was not an organising principle telling a story. He did not want to have an overarching concept of how rural life or the natural world should be packaged.
The matter of Clare’s mental health has been referred to throughout the conversation, and, in his lifetime, this was called lunacy. In 1837, he went into a private asylum in Epping. He came out in 1841 and then he went into an asylum in Northampton where he stayed for the last twenty-four years of his life, although he was allowed to come and go during the day. There are some insights into his mental health in his letters and journals and from what people wrote to him.
Enclosure and the Agricultural Revolution changed the face of the countryside and the way of life in rural England.
JONATHAN BATE: It looks as though he had what we would now call bipolar disorder. There would be periods of weeks where he would struggle to get out of bed in the morning. There would be other periods where he couldn’t stop writing: he wrote over 3,500 poems, he was one of the most prolific of all English poets.
There was also, Jonathan Bate added, something significant about Clare’s poetry, which, as it got better, became less well known. There was a recession, poetry publishing got into trouble and Taylor went out of business. By the early 1830s, Clare had been struggli
ng to publish his poetry and he was beginning to feel very cut-off, both from the world of fame and from his own community. His friends had provided Clare and his family with a cottage in another village, about 3 miles from Helpston, and it was at this point that he lost his sanity. Clare said that he had lost his own sense of who he was. This was the place from which he was sent to the asylum in Epping, 80 miles away, later setting off from there on a long walk home, which he wrote about in a three- or four-page piece of prose, ‘Journey Out of Essex’.
JONATHAN BATE: The lunatic asylums at the time were relatively liberal places – we’re not talking about straitjackets and iron bars. He was allowed to walk in the woods and that’s why he was able to escape to go back home. But, by this time, he is increasingly having delusions. In that first asylum, the private asylum, in the Epping Forest, he’s written poems in the voice of Lord Byron and he’s announced that he is Jack Randall, a famous prize-fighter, and there seems to be a real psychological disturbance there.
For a poet who is regarded as eco-centric rather than egocentric, Simon Kövesi said, Clare did write a lot of poems that were considerations of the stormy self and the depressed self. He adopted the voices of poets like Byron and Burns to give himself a sense of identity that was confident with women and the literary marketplace, though sometimes their air is of utter despair. Still, physicians at both asylums regarded writing as a good thing for him to be doing. One of the most beautiful poems he wrote in the asylum, Mina Gorji thought, was ‘Clock-O’-Clay’, a Northamptonshire dialect word for ladybird.