British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730-1837

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 Bridget Keegan British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 Als...

Author: Bridget Keegan

49 downloads 930 Views 751KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 Bridget Keegan

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837

Also by Bridget Keegan LITERATURE AND NATURE (co-edited with James C. McKusick) EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LABOURING-CLASS POETS (editor of Volume 2) ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (co-edited with Simon White and John Goodridge)

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 Bridget Keegan Creighton University

© Bridget Keegan 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230536968 hardback ISBN-10: 0230536964 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keegan, Bridget. British labouring-class nature poetry, 17301837 / Bridget Keegan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0230536964 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry“18th century“History and criticism. 2. English poetry“19th century“History and criticism. 3. Nature in literature. 4. Working class writings, English“History and criticism. 5. Working class authors“Great Britain“Aesthetics. I. Title. PR555.N3K44 2008 821 .609920623“dc22 2008011807 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For everything I felt a love, The weeds below, the birds above, And weeds that bloomed in summer’s hours, I thought they should be reckoned flowers; They made a garden free for all And so I loved them great and small And sung of some that pleased my eye, Nor could I pass the thistle by But paused and thought it could not be A weed in nature’s poesy. – John Clare, from ‘The Progress of Rhyme’

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: ‘A Weed in Nature’s Poesy’ – British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837

1

1 ‘The Fields His Study’: Robert Bloomfield’s Poetics of Sustainability

10

2 Return to the Garden: James Woodhouse and Polite Cultivations

37

3 Heavenly Prospects: Views From Clifton and Cliffden

65

4 Writing Against the Current: Anne Wilson’s Teisa and Labouring-Class River Poetry

98

5 ‘What Terms of Art Can Nature’s Pow’rs Express?’: William Falconer and Labouring-Class Poetry at Sea

122

6 ‘And All is Nakedness and Fen’: John Clare’s Wetlands

148

Conclusion: The Politics and Poetics of Wood – LabouringClass Poetry in the Victorian Era

172

Notes

193

Index

212

vii

Acknowledgements

Almost 20 years ago, my undergraduate tutor, Svetlana Boym, gave me some advice that changed the course of my professional future. Upon hearing the names of the well-known authors I planned to write about in my dissertation, she said simply, ‘You should work on someone non-canonical’. I had only recently discovered John Clare, whose work challenged my assumptions about Romantic poetry. It was thanks to several dedicated Clare editors, including the late Geoffrey Summerfield, the late Margaret Grainger, Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson, that I was able to make my discovery. I join an entire generation of Clare scholars in expressing my gratitude for their tireless efforts and commitment to publishing the complete works. While only very loosely related to the topic of my dissertation, this book represents the latest expression of my 20-year fascination with Clare’s writing. My desire to explore the broader contexts within which he wrote was the initial motivation for this study. Clare’s response to the natural world is undeniably original, but he was not the only poet from labouring-class origins who wrote about the environment. Earlier scholars such as Raymond Williams had begun to sketch this particular genealogy for Clare’s writing, but during the many years that I have worked on this project I have been astounded and delighted by the true depth of the archive that had remained unexamined. That archive is, thankfully, not one that I have had to plumb alone. I have been able to build on the important research of other scholars, and my debt to them is enormous. First and foremost are my ‘Elsie’ collaborators: John Goodridge, Bill Christmas, Simon Kovesi, David Fairer, Scott McEathron, Tim Burke, and Kaye Kossick. John Goodridge read – and often patiently edited – large portions of this book. He has been a constant ally and source of inspiration. His intellectual and personal generosity is without par. I gratefully acknowledge his and John Lucas’s permission to quote from their edition of Robert Bloomfield. Bill Christmas also read sections of the book and made sure I didn’t give up on the project when it would have been easy to do so. Intrepid Clare editor Simon Kovesi showed me what true intellectual viii

Acknowledgements

ix

risk taking is. He is the model of scholarly integrity, and I’m grateful for his friendship. With Simon, Sam Ward assisted at an especially critical late stage in the project. I’ve been blessed by the support of numerous friends from among the broader community of Clareans, Bloomfieldians and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteen-century poetry, including Jim McKusick, Bob Heyes, Simon White, Tim Fulford, Donna Landry, Bill Jones, Alan Vardy, Gary Harrison, Mina Gorji, Sarah Zimmerman, Sue Edney, Richard Greene, Kevin Binfield, Paul Chirico, Stephen Bending, Stephen Behrendt, David Worrall, Anne Janowitz, David Simpson, John Sitter, Kate Rigby, Kevin Hutchings and the members of the Robert Bloomfield society, especially the late Philip Hoskins. Chris Mounsey and Scott Lewis made sure that I never spent a dull or lonely moment at the British Library, and Lorna Clymer kept my spirits up while there, at the Huntington and at many times and places in between. A writer could not hope for more congenial and intelligent company. Closer to home, I’ve been fortunate to have the assistance of several graduate students, including Matthew Lowe, Natalie Roxburgh and Amber Haschenburger. Colleagues at Creighton provided help of various kinds over the past 12 years. I wish to thank in particular Jackie Masker, Brent Spencer, Rob Dornsife, Greg Zacharias, Lorie Vanchena, Geoff Bakewell, Rose Hill, Bob Whipple, Susan Aizenberg and Brooke Stafford. The previous and current Deans at Creighton, Tim Austin and Bob Kennedy, and the previous and current Graduate Deans, Barbara Braden and Gail Jensen, provided valuable support, including sabbatical funding, summer research grants and funding for research assistance. During the time I was working on portions of this book, I was the beneficiary of a summer grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Huntington Library grant; I gratefully acknowledge the support of those organizations. Librarians and staff members at the British Library, the Huntington Library, the Houghton Library and the Bodleian Library helped with access to what were often very obscure texts. The Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, the Northampton Library and the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library made available microfilms of manuscripts in their collections. I am grateful to Microform Academic Publishers, Wakefield, for permission to transcribe quotations from its microfilm edition of the Clare manuscripts. I wish also to thank Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife and Steven Hall at Palgrave for their patience and professionalism at all stages. I am deeply obliged to the anonymous reader at Palgrave who offered generous, thoughtful corrections and ideas for revision.

x

Acknowledgements

Last, but by no means least, I am indebted to my family and to my partner, Jeff Day, who has always been very good-humoured about my fascination for ‘the olden days’. Earlier versions of parts of this book have previously been published in Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons (September 2006); A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), edited by Christine Gerrard; The Wordsworth Circle 34 (2003); ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 10 (2003); Women’s Studies 31 (2002); and Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period (Alexander Street Press, 2002) edited by Nancy Kushigian and Stephen Behrendt. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these books and journals for permission to include the material here. Carry Akroyd understands Clare’s poetry better than any critic. I am honoured that she has given permission to use her Winter Fenscape as the artwork for the cover of this book.

List of Abbreviations

ECLCP

Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, General ed. John Goodridge, 3 volumes (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) EP The Early Poems of John Clare: 1804–1822, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) LP The Later Poems of John Clare: 1837–1864, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) MP John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period: 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson, 5 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–2003) NCLCP Nineteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, General ed. John Goodridge, 3 volumes (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006) Remains The Remains of Robert Bloomfield, 2 volumes (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1824) SP Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems, Revised and Enlarged Edition, ed. John Goodridge and John Lucas (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2007)

xi

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: ‘A Weed in Nature’s Poesy’ – British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837

First follow Nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring NATURE, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of Art.1 In Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope aims to establish the criteria for poetic excellence. His work inspired poets of all backgrounds throughout the eighteenth century and Romantic period and often served as the standard against which their work was judged. Pope’s readers, then as now, brought a wide range of interpretations to the aesthetic dicta contained in the poem. One question that continues to invite critical contention is what precisely Pope means by ‘Nature’. Intellectual historians agree that the concept undergoes important changes in the century before Pope wrote, and the term’s semantic instability persists to this day. Nature is at once a physical space and a state of being. It is the site of dynamic processes and of eternal, unchanging Truth. Something is natural when it represents all that is not human as well as when it represents what is most human.2 Nature is set in opposition to the artificial (or ‘Art’) but Nature is also, as Pope’s poem argues, the foundation of all that is best in art. Whether the word appears with an upper- or a lower-case ‘n’ sometimes indicates the connotation the author wishes to convey, though not always. The question of what ‘nature’ is and how it should be represented took on new dimensions during the eighteenth century, in part due to the growing predominance of Enlightenment empiricism and scientific and technological experimentation. Seventeenth-century scientists, such as 1

2


Frances Bacon and René Descartes, developed mechanistic theories of nature. New technologies, from Jethro Tull’s seed drill (1701) to John Harrison’s marine chronometer (1761) to the Montgolfiers’ hot air balloon (1783), changed how humans could interact with and control nature. Carl Linnaeus provided a more systematic way to categorize and organize observations about plants and animals with his taxonomies. At the same time, authors like John Evelyn and theologians such as John Ray and William Derham laid the foundations for a more conservationist perspective (even if it was one still grounded in the notion of human superiority over the rest of creation).3 These theories and discoveries invited both enthusiasm and scepticism, and eighteenth-century poetry likewise abounds with explorations of beliefs about and models of nature, both ancient and modern. Traditional literary modes persisted. In the pastoral, nature is a serene but often lost paradise. In the georgic, nature is raw material to be worked on or a force to be struggled against. Despite the continuity of many classical conventions, new forms and topics were introduced. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, for instance, the aesthetic rehabilitation of mountains as a topic and setting fed the vogue for prospect poetry. Or, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, imperial expansion and developments in maritime technologies enabled experiments in the style and content of poetry devoted to the ocean. This book will argue that works that can be broadly categorized as ‘nature poetry’ take on particular – and often political – relevance for poets of labouring-class origins. Nature – variously defined – is never a socially neutral space, all the more so for the labouring poor. As Kate Soper argues, ‘the endorsement of nature as a site of truth and intrinsic value may easily proceed at the cost of proper recognition of the reactionary use to which these ideas have been put’.4 Although Soper’s argument here is concerned with sexual politics and the way nature has been used to underwrite women’s oppression, for the eighteenth century it obtains equally well for questions of class. For example, the poets discussed in the following chapters were often classified as ‘natural geniuses’, their poetic proclivities presumably emerging from the soil from which they sprang, rather than from their hard won efforts at literacy.5 Moreover, appeals to the ‘natural order’ were used to explain and rationalize the poets’ social oppression.6 Despite the efforts of many patrons and early critics to capitalize upon the supposed uniqueness and rarity of the figure of the labouring-class genius, these poets were well aware of one another’s work, often writing poems addressing or commenting upon fellow authors. The presence

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry

3

of a large enough and long enough literary lineage was recognized as early as 1831 by Robert Southey in his Lives of the Uneducated Poets. Southey’s literary history of writers from John Taylor in the seventeenth century to the servant John Jones (whose poetry is introduced by Southey’s essay) in the nineteenth century may have done more harm than good in memorializing labouring-class writing of the eighteenth century. While Southey’s perspective is sympathetic, it is also condescending. He expected his commentary to be the final word about a tradition that he believed was drawing to a close, with Jones’s verse as its swan song.7 Thanks to the work of innovative scholars during the last three decades, critical attentiveness to the extent and value of labouring-class literary production has expanded and Southey’s prediction has long ago been disproved. Critics such as Raymond Williams and John Goodridge have looked at how labouring-class poets wrote about rural life and landscapes; Donna Landry and Moira Ferguson, among others, have emphasized the interplay of gender with class; and Gustav Klaus and William J. Christmas have looked more holistically at how these poets explore the notion of class and the work of writing.8 Individual author studies such as Richard Greene’s critical biography of Mary Leapor, Mary Waldron’s study of Ann Yearsley, Simon White’s analysis of Robert Bloomfield and Roger Sales’s, Jonathan Bate’s, Alan Vardy’s and Paul Chirico’s respective works on Clare have each traced genealogies of labouring-class writing within which to situate their particular subjects.9 Critical attention to later nineteenth-century labouring-class literary culture is equally robust. Martha Vicinus’s survey and Brian Maidment’s anthology remain important statements about Victorian working-class writing, and their efforts have been furthered by critics such as Anne Janowitz and Florence Boos.10 That different accounts of the labouring-class literary tradition can be given is in part the result of the ongoing work of textual recovery, fuelled by debates over the nature of the canon of British literature in the long eighteenth century. Roger Lonsdale’s two anthologies represent the point of departure for this more thorough re-examination of the archive of eighteenth-century poetry, work that continues to be done by anthologists such as Andrew Carpenter and Christine Gerrard and David Fairer.11 The past several years have also seen the publication of the final volumes of the nine-volume Oxford edition of Clare, as well as other single-author editions, such as those devoted to Leapor or Robert Bloomfield.12 Yearsley and Leapor are now included in the revised editions of almost all of the popular teaching anthologies of the period.13 Most recently, I have been

4


involved in the production of the six-volume Pickering and Chatto collection that attempts to survey two centuries of labouring-class poetry from 1700 to 1900. Along with this project, the Pickering and Chatto editorial team, led by John Goodridge, has produced an extensive online bibliography of over 1300 labouring-class poets, all of whom wrote and published in Great Britain in the same 200-year period.14 Only a small fraction of their works could be included in the print volumes, suggesting the depth of the archive still to be plumbed. The critical issues open to be explored have increased in tandem with the growing awareness of the diversity and sheer number of poets from the lower ranks of society publishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why they wrote, whom they imagined they were writing for and what the impact of their writing was on the literary culture of the period are questions for which a variety of responses can be provided. The present book aims to answer these questions by focusing specifically on how these poets wrote about the natural environment. Nature is by no means their sole subject, but it is an important one because it is often linked explicitly to the theories of genius applied to or assumed by the poets. Nature provides an important metapoetic vehicle for labouring-class poets to comment upon their vocational formation and is a critical device in their literary selffashioning. The turn to nature, in all of its connotations, is not only a means for the poets to write about themselves. In their representation of nature, the writers discussed in this book also offer significant insights into other important aesthetic problems of their age, including the relationship between nature and art that Pope’s Essay sketches. Perhaps just as significantly, their representation of nature opens up political dimensions that might, at first glance, seem to be missing from their work. Even as more labouring-class poetry has been recovered, those poets whose work evinces more recognizable proto-proletarian perspectives have typically been privileged by critics. Labouring-class poets who favoured themes that were not explicitly socio-economic have been overlooked and considered to be less interesting. Modern critics must remember, however, the practical limitations impeding labouring-class poets who wished to find their way into print. When labouring-class writers address social issues, they frequently do so without employing an explicitly political rhetoric which would have cost them patrons and a chance at publication. Rather, as I will argue in the chapters that follow, by turning to the codes and convention of nature poetry, they examine questions that are ultimately, though not always immediately, political. Primary among


5

those questions is how their social position affects their response to the natural world. The very real limits of time and access are legible in their representation of beauty in nature. A poet whose daytime hours were being overseen by an employer would not have the leisure time to pause and contemplate a view. As James Woodhouse’s poetry amply demonstrates, common labourers were rarely granted access to the cultivated garden spaces of the gentry. Although enhancing an appreciation for the less obvious political dimension of labouring-class nature poetry is important, in the chapters that follow, my aim is ultimately broader. First and foremost, I hope to expand knowledge of the range and depth of labouring-class poetry’s formal and artistic accomplishments, demonstrable in the variety of ways the poets wrote about nature. Second, but no less importantly, in providing this critical survey, I wish to contribute to expanding the boundaries of environmental literary criticism. In the subsequent chapters, I will test the work of the poets against the work of contemporary ecocritics, to see whether the vocabulary of ecocriticism is useful for understanding the poetry and to what extent the poetry reveals limits and fissures within the theory. As recent scholars, such as Sylvia Bowerbank, Steven Rosendale and Michael Branch have each argued, our grasp of the current environmental situation is enriched by a deeper understanding of the ways in which pre-Thoreauvian or pre-Wordsworthian writers expressed their relationship to and knowledge of the natural world. We may find these earlier writings objectionable because they privilege humanity and humanity’s desires above the rest of creation.15 But in the words of Michael Branch:

We need to study literary representations that may offend precisely because their thorough theologizing of landscape may be alien to our modern secular sensibility, or because their scientific understanding of nature is by our own standards so fatally flawed, or because their mercantilist interpretation of the landscape appears so reductive in its ignorance of the aesthetic and spiritual value of the natural world. Only in this way might we begin to transcend the inevitable limitations of our own vision in order to catch glimpses of this land from the points of view of those who came before us – and only in this sympathetic engagement of other perspectives can we fully understand the roots of our own environmental assumptions and values, however different from those of our predecessors.16

6


Writing more specifically about the challenges posed by eighteenthcentury nature writing, Christopher Hitt acknowledges that while the period’s concepts of nature differ significantly from our own, crucial commonalities remain. Hitt argues that ‘the great legacy of that age with respect to attitudes about nature is best described not as incipient ecologism but rather as a profound ambivalence, the paradoxical recognition that we both master and are mastered by the non-human world’.17 This ambivalence reveals itself even more intensely in the works of labouringclass writers whose social situation – as ‘mastered’ by those above them – was defended through appeals to nature and the natural order. In the eighteenth century, in particular, rethinking the concept of nature and the natural order was inextricably linked with the type of questioning of the social order that culminated, in some respects, in the discourse surrounding natural rights in the 1790s, as critics such as Nicholas Roe have demonstrated.18 This more revolutionary turn was prepared for, in part, by labouring-class writers’ entrance into the debate that developed at the turn of the century. In their struggle to claim aesthetic and other kinds of non-instrumental relationships to nature, eighteenth-century labouring-class poets challenge assumptions that are surprisingly still common in ecocritical scholarship that the rural poor (or women or Native Americans) are somehow ‘closer to nature’. Commenting on the work of John Barrell, whose Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972) remains the most important book on Clare’s aesthetics to date, Kate Soper argues: there is a persistent tendency to deny any popular aesthetic of landscape in the presentation of the peasant or labourer as so closely in harmony with it that they become a party to it, and are thus – like the rest of nature – incapable of any evaluative relationship to it at all. The real feelings of the rural workers are refused or repressed through an idealization of their condition as one that is freed from alienation. Being so immanently part of their surroundings, they are spared the existential angst of cognitive separation from them, and in this guise, not infrequently, become the object of philosophic or poetic esteem and envy.19 By claiming that the rural labourer is closer to nature, Soper asserts, artists and critics imagine the labourer as incapable of expressing aesthetic responses for him or herself. Soper observes wryly that ‘Had all country workers offered us poetry comparable to that of John Clare, we may be sure that poetry written about them would itself have been quite


7

different. As it is “their’’ closeness to nature can only be affirmed through “our’’ distance’.20 Soper appears unaware of the fact that there were many other rural and artisanal workers who wrote poetry comparable to Clare’s, and it regrettably made little difference in the art that represented them. Whether or not labouring-class poets had more frequent or direct contact with nature in all of its incarnations and connotations is an open question. Polite poets presumably went outside too. While refined writers may not have pushed a plough or milked a cow, working on and in nature is surely not the only way to have closeness to it, nor would such work prevent feelings of alienation from it. By modern environmental standards, in fact, the individual who respects pristine nature and eschews intervention with nature’s processes through any kind of work is held to be in closer communion with nature. What is certain, however, is that labouring-class poets did express their sometimes ambivalent feelings about nature and were keenly aware of the fact that a variety of symbolic practices – poetic language primary among them – always mediates the human relationship to nature. I will argue throughout what follows that by using language comparable to that of ‘polite’ authors, labouring-class poets are not demonstrating a false consciousness or bad faith towards their humble origins, by denying their ‘closeness to nature’ and mindlessly parroting the abstract distances of the gentleman poets. Instead, even more so than the polite poets whom they are said to imitate, they remind us that any expression or exploration of our relationship to nature engages with a set of symbolic practices that at once alienate us from nature even as they try to connect us with it. Many of the poets discussed in the following chapters master the conventions – such as the description from a prospect view – but also transform them, producing what might be called a hybrid discourse, articulated by speaking subjects who are aware of their cultural marginalization as they turn to nature as a resource to challenge or overcome that marginalization.21 Because of the large number of poets whose works I will discuss, the differences among their individual biographies, and the variety of ways in which they wrote about the natural world, this book proceeds via a series of thematic case studies. The dates offered as rough chronological boundaries in my title recognize two key figures in the tradition. The year 1730 marks the publication of Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour, while 1837 is the year that Clare first entered the asylum. Each chapter centres on a particular writer and a particular genre of nature writing or site for natural description occurring between those two dates. In Chapter 1, I focus on Robert Bloomfield and poetry about agriculture,

8


arable fields and pastures, as well as those poets who might be identified as the ‘School of Bloomfield’, including David Service, William Holloway and Joseph Holland. Chapter 2 discusses James Woodhouse and how labouring-class poets cultivated the subgenre of garden poetry. It also examines the work of Peter Aram in the early part of the century and John Learmont and Ann Yearsley in the later part. Next, Chapter 3 analyzes William Lane’s interventions into topographical poetry, primarily prospect or ‘hill’ poems. The chapter also highlights four poets – Henry Jones, Thomas Chatterton, Yearsley and J.F. Bryant – each of whom positioned him or herself on or near Clifton Hill in Bristol. Chapter 4 turns to Anne Wilson and riparian verse, a genre which provides a particularly privileged site for labouring-class poets, Clare among them, to explore their connections to multiple literary traditions. In Chapter 5, I focus on the best-selling labouring-class poet of the eighteenth-century, Scottish sailor poet William Falconer and his contribution to writing about maritime environments. Falconer’s popularity led to a spate of imitators, including Edward Rushton, Christian Milne and George Woodley, for whom shipwrecks symbolized social oppression. Chapter 6 is devoted to a study of Clare’s poetry depicting the East Anglian fens in the context of other labouring-class writing about wetland environments. In each chapter, I explore how particular geographical locations provide real and figurative ways for the poets to consider the place of humanity in nature and their own place as labouring-class subjects in landscapes that are political and cultural as much as physical. In the conclusion, I revisit some of these sites, suggesting how Victorian era labouring-class poets adapted and developed the strategies of their precursors within the framework of a more clearly identifiable ‘working-class consciousness’, evident after the advent of organized labour movements such as Chartism. To highlight the changes and continuities, I briefly trace the poetic representation of forests and trees across the full 200-year period from 1700 to 1900. Because much of the poetry discussed is likely to be unfamiliar even to specialist readers, and because much of it remains unavailable despite more thorough recent republication, I provide description as well as analysis of the poetry, necessarily relying upon more ample quotation than might be found in studies of well-known authors. In addition, particularly when quoting from original editions, I will reproduce the poetry as it was published and refrain from inserting ‘[sic]’ where a typo or other infelicity is found in the published text. My aim overall is to demonstrate that the poetry produced by many labouring-class authors can sustain a detailed analysis. Bloomfield, Woodhouse, Falconer, Wilson,


9

Lane and Clare, among others, wrote poetry that offers insights into important questions about aesthetics and the dynamics of class relations. They witness the variety of ways of thinking about the human place in nature, and they question prevailing assumptions about access to forms and types of literacy, both poetic and environmental. Their work is instructive and important to developing a more thorough understanding of the labouring-class literary tradition and the history of nature writing in Britain.

1 ‘The Fields His Study’: Robert Bloomfield’s Poetics of Sustainability

A working country is hardly ever a landscape. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City1 Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for natural beauty: as is well known, agricultural occupations, in which nature as it appears is an immediate object of action, allow little appreciation for landscape. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory2 Robert Bloomfield is a tree-hugging poet. As he writes in an anecdote published in his Remains: The great Oak in Euston Park. – My self, my wife, and my daughter Hannah, (then nine years and a half old), embraced his rough rind at arm’s-length, touching our fingers; and could thus encompass it all but about half a yard. By observation afterwards, I found the girth of this tree to be fifteen feet, in May, 1801.3 Despite this clear demonstration of his love for nature, and despite the fact that Bloomfield is a poet who consistently writes sensitively, thoughtfully and provocatively about the natural world, his poetry remains neglected by contemporary ecocritics.4 While the popularity of ecocritical approaches has led to an increased interest in John Clare’s writing, the poet to whom Clare claimed a profound and direct debt has yet to receive adequate attention from most critics, environmental or otherwise. Bloomfield’s neglect by environmental criticism is especially puzzling, for his work meets many of the critical parameters offered 10

Bloomfield’s Poetics of Sustainability 11

by the various environmental approaches to literature. More significantly, as I will argue, his poetry enriches the scope and relevance of such approaches. It has become something of a truism that modern environmental consciousness is a product of the Romantic period and the sensibility it cultivated.5 Nevertheless, only a particular subset of Romantic poetry constitutes the current canon of British writing privileged by ecocritics. Poetry that praises places untouched by human hands, that expresses wonderment at the workings of nature or that descries the ruin wrought by human acquisitiveness is most frequently studied. Such poems best reflect the ecocentric ethic that predominates among today’s critics. But by reading too rigidly within these early twenty-first century aesthetic and ethical expectations, one risks dismissing a good deal of interesting writing about nature from earlier periods and from within Romanticism itself, in particular by writers such as Bloomfield. Because Bloomfield wrote about a working farm – a site of intense human interaction with and intervention in nature – his subject matter risks alienating modern readers more interested in texts where non-human nature is foregrounded and representations of the human touch minimal. We should not disregard such interests entirely, but we ought to be alert to the risk of anachronism when evaluating earlier responses to the natural environment. What a writer like Bloomfield felt, thought and wrote about nature should be considered within his historical context as much as our own. Such qualifications may seem overcautious, but in proposing to read The Farmer’s Boy (1800) as a text that explores the intersection of environmental and aesthetic questions in an agricultural setting, I recognize that fellow ecocritics might question the extent to which a poem devoted to farm life qualifies as ‘nature writing’. What is a farm but nature at its most obviously manipulated by and for humans, nature at its most subjugated to the human will and most exploited for human ends? In an age of corporate megafarming and Frankenfood genetic engineering, such suspicions are certainly warranted. Two hundred years ago, Bloomfield had similar anxieties about the so-called agricultural improvement of his own day. What I will argue is that Bloomfield’s poetry, precisely because it is written on a farm, is overtly mindful of the many interconnections and interdependencies between humans and nature. The Farmer’s Boy, perhaps more so than poems such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ or ‘Mont Blanc’, provides a template for a responsible human relationship to nature, in so far as Bloomfield refuses to deny that humanity and nature are intimately intertwined. For Bloomfield, nature is much more than a mirror

12


of the poet’s mind. That said, I will not argue that The Farmer’s Boy is an important poem solely for being more ‘realistic’. While the poem has documentary value, what John Goodridge has said about Stephen Duck obtains for Bloomfield.6 Bloomfield is a poet, not a social historian. Just as the farmer in his poem balances human needs against those of the earth, the poem balances the documentary and aesthetic. The idea of sustainability is apparent in the poem’s subject matter as well as its design. Before turning to The Farmer’s Boy, however, it may be useful to survey modern ecocritical methodologies with a view towards how they are relevant to an analysis of the poem. That Bloomfield wrote amply about nature is without dispute. But one of the first questions that many ecocritics put to a text is whether such writing is properly environmentally oriented. Does including a forest or a flower in the background make an author a ‘nature writer’? Does an author need to represent a particular political point of view in how that forest or flower is described? Part of the dilemma in ascertaining a work’s environmental orientation stems from the fact that the very word ‘nature’ itself, particularly in the long eighteenth century, had a broad range of meanings, each of them inflected by particular historical, cultural and ideological presuppositions. Writers from the early nineteenth century onward, who adopted a more secular point of view or who were more cognizant of scientific developments, particularly after Darwin, were more likely to question the traditional Christian, hierarchical view which placed human needs and desires above those of the rest of the planet. Writers such as Clare anticipate the modern ecocentric perspective by placing the rights and needs of nature equal to or above human rights. Perhaps because of this, many green literary historians privilege those writers whose texts best anticipate modern environmental political opinions. As the field of environmental literary criticism has expanded, a growing body of scholarship has emerged debating the proper object of its study. Patrick D. Murphy, in Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature, has designed a taxonomy which he applies to literary history in general. He differentiates ‘Nature Writing’ (which is largely non-fictional, such as natural history or travel writing) from ‘Nature Literature’ (poetry and fictional writing describing nature). Both of these are distinct from ‘Environmental Writing’ (which is non-fictional, polemical and works to effect social change) and ‘Environmental Literature’ (which also works towards altering values but does so through fictional or poetic media).7 While it might seem at first that The Farmer’s Boy is nature literature,


using Murphy’s terms, a case can be made that it is an environmental text. Bloomfield’s poem is an ethical poem. The Farmer’s Boy is not ‘just description’. Through his language, through his structural and linguistic choices, through what he elects to describe and how he describes it, Bloomfield makes an argument to readers. Jonathan Lawson describes that argument as ‘emotional’,8 and I will examine Bloomfield’s work in its affective, aesthetic and linguistic dimensions. But because of its argumentative aim, by Murphy’s terms, Bloomfield’s poem is very much environmental literature. Murphy is not the only critic to attempt to better define the scope of this relatively new critical field. Lawrence Buell, in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, lists four separate conditions that a poem or story must meet to be considered an environmental text. First and foremost, Buell stipulates that in an environmental text, ‘The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’. This eliminates texts in which nature is ‘backdrop’, or within which nature does not have an impact on human life and vice versa. Second, for Buell, ‘The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest’; third ‘Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation’; and finally, ‘Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text’.9 Within Buell’s terms, The Farmer’s Boy equally qualifies. The poem’s protagonist, Giles, engages actively with his natural surroundings. His interest in the fate of the farm animals for which he cares shows Bloomfield’s sense of moral accountability to the non-human. Finally, in so far as the poem explores the dynamic connections between the human and the natural over the course of an entire year, it foregrounds nature as process. Unlike Buell, Jonathan Bate’s exploration of ‘ecopoetry’ focuses less on content and more on form and language, less on the prescriptive and more on the experiential and phenomenological. He writes in The Song of the Earth that true ecoliterature is ‘not a description of dwelling with the earth, not a disengaged thinking about it, but an experience of it . . . . Ecopoetry is not synonymous with writing that is pragmatically green’.10 Bate sees the true significance of ecopoetry in its concern with dwelling on earth, not with advancing a political agenda, in experiencing rather than advocating for nature. Bate’s emphasis on the experiential and, in particular, the sensory, affective and aesthetic dimension of the relationship between the human and the non-human

14


is, I will argue, central to understanding Bloomfield’s achievement in The Farmer’s Boy. Finally, James McKusick identifies an ‘ecoloect’ in the poetry of Clare, Coleridge and Wordsworth, one which may also be found in Bloomfield’s verse. McKusick’s concept of ‘ecolect’ is an ecological vision made manifest, for instance, in Coleridge’s organic notion of language. It is ‘a language that speaks for the oikos: the Earth considered as a dwellingplace for all living things’.11 Likewise, McKusick sees Clare’s ‘language that is ever green’ as attempting to fully imitate the landscape that so much of his poetry works to preserve or commemorate. He argues that: ‘By refusing to punctuate his poems or conform to “refined’’ standards of diction, grammar, and spelling, [Clare] created an “unenclosed’’ verse that provides a linguistic analogue to the free, unenclosed landscape that it seeks to conserve and perpetuate’.12 Bloomfield’s language more strictly observes poetic diction, spelling and orthography, thus it may not be as markedly vernacular as Clare’s. And while Bloomfield did not theorize his language to the extent that Coleridge did, he is nonetheless intensely aware of the role that language plays in mediating our relationship to nature as well as bringing us closer to it. Bloomfield uses poetic language carefully, conscientiously and inventively in the poem to speak for and about the flora and fauna of his former home at Mr Austin’s farm. The Farmer’s Boy, as Donna Landry argues, is a text that demonstrates what might be called a ‘georgic’ environmentalism.13 It advocates a stewardship ethic that is historically appropriate to the poem, and that manifests the understanding that ‘Within the georgic ethos, both nature and humans are going to be used, and to be used up’.14 Although the hierarchical world view that this ethical orientation typically supports may be objectionable to more radical greens, the stewardship model nonetheless recognizes human dependence upon nature. Bloomfield urges conservationism, calling humanity to be responsible to nature, acknowledging that we must care for nature if we wish to preserve ourselves. The concept of sustainability is central to this particular environmental viewpoint. Sustainable agriculture recognizes that we must take from the land for our own survival; however, we must do so mindful of the limits of what we can take and aware of what we need to give back. In the poem, the depiction of Mr Austin’s farm, where Bloomfield spent his boyhood years, argues for sustainable agriculture in so far as the farmer’s practices of husbandry are praised as wise, successful and respectful to the human and the non-human. But Bloomfield is not Arthur Young. To describe ‘realistically’ a successful farm is not to make a logical or economically driven case for the


ethical orientation necessary to promote sustainability and care for the earth. Rather, by writing a poem Bloomfield uses the affective powers of poetic language to persuade and to model a responsible relationship to the non-human. The poem employs particular tones and discursive strategies in describing Giles’s performance of his duties. It calls us to remember our duties to the earth evocatively rather than polemically. Bloomfield may not have been the first labouring-class poet to have written about life and labour in the agricultural environment, but his poem represents a decisive turning point in the development of this topos, a bridge between the works of Duck and his imitators and that of Clare and a lesser known group of labouring-class writers who might be identified as the ‘School of Bloomfield’. ∗∗∗ Any discussions of how Bloomfield responded to and transformed earlier labouring-class agricultural writing must return to Stephen Duck’s landmark poem The Thresher’s Labour (1730). Duck’s important place in the representation of agricultural themes has already been exhaustively examined by John Goodridge, though Duck’s (and Mary Collier’s) concerns foreground human working conditions not natural environmental concerns. Duck’s success with The Thresher’s Labour instigated a spate of imitations and responses, just as Bloomfield’s would several generations later.15 One of the early responses to Duck came from Robert Dodsley who, as the London footman to Charles Dartinquenave, had already published a poem entitled Servitude (1729). In his collection A Muse in Livery, or, the Footman’s Miscellany (1732), Dodsley adopts Duck’s strategy of offering quasi-georgic instructions about his primary occupation in ‘The Footman. An Epistle to my Friend Mr Wright’. Dodsley associates himself with Duck based on the fact that both men labour; he is not concerned with where they labour. In fact, in ‘An Epistle to Stephen Duck’, Dodsley rejects the agrarian setting as detrimental to Duck’s (and his own) literary aspirations. Praising Duck, he proclaims, ‘Henceforth, let his lov’d pen employ his hands,/Pity so long degraded with a flail’.16 According to Dodsley, Duck should be recognized not because he wrote from a farm but despite it. Remonstrating Duck’s critics for their severity, he asserts: ‘Think what could be expected from a barn’ (line 38). By 1753, Dodsley appears to have reconsidered the appropriateness of agricultural topics for poetry. In that year he produced the first part of a projected three-part georgic entitled Public Virtue: A Poem. The first book, the three-canto section devoted to ‘Agriculture’, was the only one

16


published (the other two books were to be devoted to ‘Commerce’ and to ‘Arts’). In 1753, Dodsley was no longer the aspiring poet in servitude. Thanks to his shrewd business and literary acumen (and the assistance and encouragement of one of Dartinquenave’s friends, Alexander Pope), Dodsley rose during the 1740s to become a literary powerbroker, publishing and promoting the poets who now form the canon of eighteenth-century poetry.17 It might seem curious, then, that he would return to a subject he appeared to disdain at the start of his career, and one with which, unlike Duck, he had no immediate experience. Juan Christian Pellicer considers Dodsley’s work a productive ‘failure’ within the eighteenth-century’s experiments within the georgic mode, as it offers an interesting counterpoint to current critical generalizations about the georgic’s ideological purposes. Unlike the more acclaimed georgics of the era, Dodsley’s poem does not focus on a particular agricultural specialization (such as hops or sugar-cane). He attempts a broader overview, but as Pellicer asserts, ‘His wide range of topics makes it difficult to deal factually with any of them at satisfactory length’.18 Moreover, for Pellicer, the poem’s failure is linked to Dodsley’s ambivalence about his social position, and its impact on his attempting the genre.19 Because of his labouring-class origins, Dodsley does succeed in ‘foregrounding the labourer in such a way as to present his gentlemanly readers with some more finely differentiated portraits of rural society than are to be found in any other georgic’.20 At the same time, Dodsley’s background appears to get in the way of his confidence representing the panoramic landscape prospects that are definitive of the genre and which represent ‘the nobleman’s “disinterested’’ perspective from his elevated position’.21 In the end, ‘Dodsley’s more ambiguous social position made it impossible for him to take such a “gentlemanly’’ (i.e. distanced) view of class boundaries. In “Agriculture’’, we are invited less to survey the landscape than to observe those who do’.22 Dodsley’s poem is presumably about the relation between the human and the natural in the context of the agrarian environment; however, it is not solely concerned with representing or responding to nature. The poem has an explicit social agenda and is ostentatiously dedicated to the Prince of Wales, one of many of the patriots to whom Pope introduced Dodsley (a set that also included George Lyttelton and Lords Chesterfield and Cobham). Dodsley is sensitive to social divisions, although he is not interested in erasing them, as he makes clear in a remarkable passage near the end of the first canto, addressed to the poem’s putative audience, the ‘sons of Wealth’.23 He urges them to turn to Nature, and more specifically:


Turn to the arts, the useful pleasing arts Of Cultivation; and those fields improve Your erring fathers have too long despis’d. Leave not to ignorance, and low-bred hinds, That noblest science, which in ancient time The minds of sages and of kings employ’d, Sollicitous to learn the ways of GOD, And read his works in AGRICULTURE’S school. (lines 334–41) Dodsley’s message is clear. ‘Low-bred hinds’ (such as Stephen Duck once was) are not equipped to appreciate Nature’s beauty or to take full responsibility for the land and its bounty. Farming is a civic duty for the gentleman who executes that duty with the maximum of wisdom and investment in the national good. The ‘sons of Wealth’ are alone capable of reading the divine message inscribed in the Book of Nature. Doing so is their God-given right and responsibility. As Ben Jonson (another hugely successful poet with labouring-class origins) had done over a century before in his poem ‘To Penshurst’, Dodsley calls the landowners back to the land for the good of the nation. In his poem, nature becomes the raw material to be converted into ideological essences of greater value. Dodsley’s portrait of rural life offsets how skilfully Bloomfield transforms a georgic interest in the material practices of farming with a more nuanced, organic consideration of the human relationship with nature. Dodsley’s farm, like those in many other georgics of the period, serves to shore up national glory, the imperial economy and civic duty.24 The Seasons Dodsley sketches are depicted as allegorical and scantily clad goddesses parading fetchingly before the poet’s fancy. Bloomfield’s farm exhibits similar social stratifications and participates in a larger national economy just as much as Dodsley’s. However, Bloomfield is mindful of humanity’s responsibilities to Nature as much as to the Prince. ∗∗∗ The Farmer’s Boy begins with a call, an apostrophe: ‘O come blest Spirit! whatsoe’er thou art’ (‘Spring’, line 1).25 To most modern readers, such invocations render nature poetry from earlier periods artificial and conventional. The rhetorical device of the apostrophe has become a cliché which risks making The Farmer’s Boy and poems like it uncongenial to an ecocritical reading. One might expect environmental texts to forego the artificialities of poetic conventions and other obviously

18


anthropomorphic trappings. Yet as Helena Feder observes about the apostrophe, to the contrary it is a discourse that recognizes alienation from nature and formalizes the attempt to restore our connectedness with it. Apostrophe . . . is nothing less than a practice of awareness that emphasizes the processes of human perception, the interconnectedness of all things, and the subjecthood of Earth and its inhabitants. . . . Inherent in any invocation of the natural world is a recognition that reciprocity is embedded in the very interconnectedness of all things, in an awareness of the sensitivity and multiplicity of those intricate connections.26 The apostrophe is an invocation, a call that presumes a response. In calling to the earth or to nature, the poet speaks to and with nature and not simply about it. Following Feder’s argument, one might assert that apostrophe is a rhetorical device that assumes subjectivity in nature. Capable of being called – and, by implication, of responding – nature is no longer an object, although it may still be ‘other’. Throughout The Farmer’s Boy and in his later work, Bloomfield calls upon nature and listens to its response. In a moment that is particularly telling, the poet’s avatar, Giles, is shown experiencing his own poetic awakening as he heads to the fields in ‘Spring’. The oaks which shade him on his way, Gave inspiration pure as ever flow’d, And genuine transport in his bosom glowd. His own shrill matin join’d the various notes Of Nature’s music, from a thousand throats. The Blackbird strove with emulation sweet, And echo answer’d from her close retreat; The sporting Whitethroat on some twigs-end borne, Pourd hymns to freedom and the rising morn Stopt in her song perchance the starting Thrush Shook a bright show’er from the Blackthorn-bush, Where dewdrops thick as early blossoms hung And trembled as the Minstrel sweetly sung. (lines 135–46) Here, in distinction from the invocation where the poem’s speaker calls upon nature, we see Giles responding to nature’s call to him. His response is, to use the Schillerian terminology, ‘naïve’. Nonetheless, it reveals that Bloomfield, through Giles, listens to nature’s poetry and sees his poetry


as a direct response to it. He is singing with nature, not to it or about it. Giles, and by extension Bloomfield, engages in a dialogue with the world around him. The song that Giles sings in these lines is sung on his way to perform the duty of protecting the hens from the fox’s predation. His imitation of this song of the earth is thereby connected, through the sequence of events, to an act of animal husbandry. He hears and sings with the wild birds on his way to care for domesticated birds. The contiguity of particular events in the poem, its processual orientation, is essential to the expression of Bloomfield’s poetic and pragmatic ethic of sustainability. The poem must be understood holistically, to use a popular environmentalist term. The premise of the modern science of ecology, Barry Commoner’s First Law of Ecology that ‘everything is connected to everything else’, applies to both the world Bloomfield represents and how he represents it in the poem.27 Returning to the early scenes in ‘Spring’, in these initial vignettes we see that Giles’s relationship to nature is not primarily visual. Bloomfield excels in depicting a more expanded sensory engagement with the world of Mr Austin’s farm. Soon after the scene of Giles singing with the birds, we are introduced to the symphonic cacophony of the intermingled human and natural voices on the farm: The clatt’ring Dairy-Maid immerst in steam Singing and scrubing midst her milk and cream Bawls out, ‘Go fetch the cows!—he hears no more For pigs and Ducks, and Turkies throng the door, And sitting Hens for constant War prepar’d A concert strange to that which late he heard. (lines 165–70) The less melodious voice of the Dairy-Maid, who clatters and sings and scrubs, is echoed by the animals’ squawking and oinking. This juxtaposition contrasts the music of wild and domesticated nature. Although the wild birds’ song is more appealing and inspiring to the nascent poet, all sounds have their place, and the Dairy-Maid calls Giles from his aesthetic engagement to the responsibility of caring for the cows. The voices call and respond for sensuous and practical purposes. Despite the farmyard’s dissonances, Giles continues to make music and to call out to the animal world around him: Straight to the meadow then he whistling goes With wellknown hallo calls his lazy Cows

20


Down the rich pasture heedlessly they graze Or hear the summons with an idle gaze For well they know the Cowyard yields no more Its tempting fragrance, nor its wintry store. (lines 171–6) Several things are worth remarking in this passage. It introduces smell (and by implication taste) alongside sound as an important dimension to the experience of the scene. Very early in the poem, then, Bloomfield evokes an interaction with the environment that is not strictly visual. Much of the recent work on theories of the picturesque in this period has shown that the eye is predominantly associated with the consumption of rural scene. As critics such as Tim Fulford have argued, the elevated visual perspective in eighteenth-century landscape art serves to underwrite claims to possession and domination of particular vistas.28 One doesn’t hear or smell quite so well from the vantage of those grander prospects. Bloomfield’s poem moves in closer, allowing the reader to hear and breathe the experience of the farm. In some sense, then, he brings the reader ‘closer to nature’, but such claims should be made cautiously. To assert that Bloomfield creates more ‘immediate’ access to the natural world risks obscuring a recognition of his awareness of the many and necessary ways that poetry mediates environmental experience. For example, Bloomfield explicitly writes in the third person. He writes the poem as a poet, not in the voice of the naïve peasant boy Giles, thereby distancing the reader and narrator from the scene. The distance is purposeful. It recognizes and respects differences between humanity and nature. Bloomfield is pragmatically aware that all human relations to nature have a distance in them; language both creates and helps to bridge this distance. The poet privileges dimensions of nature that Thomson neglects; however, it would be mistaken to presume that simply because Bloomfield is a self-taught poet that he has access to truths about nature that the bourgeois picturesque tourist does not. Both perspectives have their respective truths and those truths are expressed and limited by their discursive forms. Bloomfield consciously eschews the picturesque in the opening lines of the poem, directly after the initial invocation. He asserts about the poem as a whole: No deeds of arms my lowly tale rehearse No Alpine wonders thunder through my verse The roaring Cataract, the snow-top’t hill, Inspiring awe till breath itself stands still


Nature’s sublimer scenes ne’er charm’d mine eyes Nor Science led me through the boundless skies From meaner objects far my raptures flow O point those raptures, bid my bosom glow And lead my Soul to extacies of praise For all the blessings of my infant days Bear me through regions where gay Fancy dwells But mould to truth’s fair form what mem’ry tells. (lines 7–18) From the outset, Bloomfield is aware of the options available to him in writing a poem about nature. His authorial decisions are not based solely on a less sophisticated and immediate experience of the land. He makes the informed choice to write about ‘meaner objects’, and his intent is to elevate these through praise. His poetic language becomes the medium to do more than represent first-hand experience. The praise that Bloomfield aims for is not the same as an idealization which could lead to the trap of pastoralizing mystification. Truth and memory serve as the ground upon which poetic Fancy works. Much as the farmer works on the raw materials of the earth to bring forth nourishing crops, Bloomfield’s work is to cultivate the ‘meaner’ details through the intercessions of poetic language. His interventions also reject the instrumentalist intrusions of Science. Thus, the mediation of poetic language is paramount, even while it will work upon the ‘trifling incidents . . . That to the humblest menial belong/To him whose drudgery unheeded goes’ (‘Spring’, lines 19–21). Bloomfield sets his artistic goal as sowing ‘Delights from trifles, trifles ever new’ (‘Spring’, line 26). In all his writing, Bloomfield argues that poetry has a real value partly because it cultivates in readers a way to care for the earth, in particular those more neglected, less picturesque components of the agrarian ecosystem. Poetry becomes his vehicle for stewardship. It represents and enacts that ethic. Praising the trifling or the menial, asserting a poetic value in them, Bloomfield sustains them and argues for sustainability. He wisely uses poetic resources to promote a care for nature. Nonetheless, Bloomfield also includes many scenes and descriptions in his poem whose features could strike a ‘green’ reader as offensive. For example, The Farmer’s Boy is a poem littered with the corpses of dead or maimed animals: dead earthworms, dead birds, dead lambs, mutilated post-horses and the remains of poor faithful Trouncer, to name only a few. These bodies are sacrificed to human needs and desires. How might this dimension of the poem be reconciled within an argument that it is a poem about responsibly caring for nature? To be sure, with the exception of

22


the killing of the rooks and crows, Bloomfield does not celebrate death. Many critics have thus interpreted these moments as contributing to the poem’s ‘realism’, its gritty antipastoral recognition of farm life. The poem is undoubtedly georgic, and Bloomfield is well aware of the georgic conventions he was adapting, having read both Thomson and Virgil. But although these corpses are part of the poem’s artistic ‘authenticity’, a political and aesthetic argument is also being made in these passages. I have discussed elsewhere how the slaughter of the lambs at the end of ‘Spring’ may, in fact, be seen as a critique of pastoralism, lambs being the emblem par excellence of that mode.29 Pastoral idealism and pastoral nostalgia motivate much popular environmentalism even today. It can be argued, however, that such idealism may be disabling to real efforts to save the planet. Pastoralism looks to the past, not the present or the future. A sense of past, present and future, of a cyclical – and not a myopically nostalgic – temporality is essential to understanding the role of the dead animals in the poem. The lambs slaughtered in ‘Spring’ reappear at the close of the poem as a whole, in ‘Winter’, in a scene describing humans’ active intervention into the animal world (by disguising the orphaned sheep in the skins of the lambs who have not survived, so as to trick the ewes into adopting them). These measures could be condemned as instrumentalist manipulations of the natural order. But as Jonathan Lawson recognizes, ‘These acts of man that do oppose or augment instinct, however, are considered acts that have been measured in terms of future good and future danger . . . . It is, then, careful husbandry based on the knowledge of the past, the judgment of the present, and the reasonable expectations for the future, that Bloomfield allows to be praised again’.30 At its conclusion in ‘Winter’, the poem is entirely forward looking. Although lambs are slaughtered at the end of ‘Spring’, new lambs are born and cared for. Given the poem’s cyclical organization, their fate a few months hence is on the horizon. The reader thus anticipates that through the farmer’s good husbandry other lambs will be born and the cycle will continue indefinitely. The lambs’ fate is linked to larger issues of sustainability, for even with agricultural advancements, including turnips and clover to help feed livestock, farmers such as Giles’s master would have had access to only a certain amount of pasturage. If allowed to increase, the flocks could not be sustained. As many agricultural historians have noted, the traditional tension between the two main uses for land – as arable or pasture – reached critical dimensions in the eighteenth century with the demand for more pasturage becoming an important rationale for enclosure. Put another way, if Giles or Mr Austin succumbed to the allure of


the lambs as particularly charismatic megafauna and kept them alive for future vegetarian readers, there would be larger environmental and social consequences. The additional sheep would put pressure on the land’s ability to feed them. Keeping each new generation of lambs alive would deplete the pastures threatening the ovine population as a whole. In addition, it could potentially lead to enclosures to claim more pasturage from possibly arable lands (as did happen, landlords knowing that livestock was a more profitable enterprise than corn). Sustainability has costs and benefits. While the slaughter of lambs is a particularly sensational illustration of the cost, the benefit is implicit in the fact that the poem continues and Mr Austin’s farm continues to support the widest variety of species – plant and animal – including the human species. To be sure, Mr Austin might be accused of ‘playing God’ by his interventions. Sustainability promotes human life over and above ovine life. If Mr Austin had spared the lambs, one of the more long-term costs would have been the loss of his own sustenance, not to mention damage to plant life which could endanger the sheep more than the selective work of the butcher. Bloomfield makes a similar argument through the description of one of Giles’s other duties, described earlier in ‘Spring’, namely, protecting the fields from scavenging birds by hanging their corpses nearby. Rooks and crows are not as inherently adorable as lambs, and the ‘us or them’ stakes are clearer and more short-term. But what the poem teaches is that we must see beyond a particular moment in time and balance aesthetic joys against other needs. This may be difficult to do with fluffy lambs, but ‘Spring’ gives way to ‘Summer’ and lambs become sheep with bigger appetites that will need to be fed. Spare the lambs, spoil the farm. Historian Donald Worster has pointed out the term ecology did not exist until the nineteenth century. As he notes, in eighteenth-century works about nature, the term most commonly used to refer to the concept of the relatedness of all living things was ‘nature’s economy’.31 Bloomfield’s farmer is a student of ‘nature’s economy’, and the poem illustrates an affective argument in support of that economy. The work of the ecologist is to understand the connections of the networks of life in a particular ecosystem. The work of Bloomfield’s farmer is to contribute to the maintenance of ‘nature’s economy’. This ethic of care and the compromises needed for a more comprehensive care for the earth are clarified in ‘Winter’, in words placed directly into the farmer’s mouth and addressed to Giles. The farmer catechizes Giles about the necessities of proper husbandry and questions Giles about whether he has properly sheltered the herd to protect them from bad weather. He also inquires after the safety

24


of the poultry against the fox’s predation, as well as against the perils of the storm, for Destruction waits them, Giles, if e’er you fail To bolt their doors against the driving gale. (lines 101–2) The farmer offers a final question and an admonition that summarizes the poem’s ethical argument: Strew’d you still mindful of th’unshelter’d head Burdens of straw, the Cattle’s welcome bed? Thine heart should feel, what thou may’st hourly see, That duty’s basis is humanity. (lines 103–6) The placement of this lesson demonstrates how seriously the responsibility of stewardship is taken within the poem. Bloomfield knows, however, that all humans do not heed their duties, and that even as an excess of sheep could damage the land, so too humans and their greed threaten the balance of the natural economy. This is demonstrated in the long passage devoted to cheese in ‘Spring’. Thankfully, Bloomfield is rarely a polemicist. He elects to make what are important points through humour and indirection. The passage is amusingly effective, beginning with the ironic invocation: Unrival’d stands thy country Cheese O Giles Whose very name alone engenders smiles Whose fame abroad by every tongue is spoke The well-known butt of many a flinty joke That pass like current coin the Nation through (lines 231–6) This unappetizing regional produce must compete in a national marketplace, centralized in London. Broader consumer demands alter local tastes and economic aspirations: Thou, like a whirlpool drain the Country round Till London Market, London price, resound Through every Town, round every passing load And Dairy produce throng the Eastern road Delicious Veal, and Butter every hour From Essex lowlands, and the banks of Stour And further far where num’rous Herds repose


From Orwell’s brink, from Weveny and Ouse. Hence Suffolk dairy-wives run mad for cream And leave their milk with nothing but its name Its name derision and reproach persue And strangers tell of ‘Three-times-skim’d Sky-blue,’ (lines 243–54) With the chains of supply and demand altered, the local product suffers, and the watery milk is made into a dry, rock-hard cheese as difficult to cut as ‘the oken shelf whereon tis laid’ (line 259). The cheese is even unappetizing to the pigs to whom it is eventually given as slop. The metropolis’s demand for the dairy’s cream has left only the watery milk that ‘turn the mead’s sweet Nectre into stone’ (line 268). In this passage, ‘nature’s economy’ at the regional level is represented as in direct conflict with the national economy, and the tensions between the two in matters of money and taste extended. Bloomfield masterfully uses hyperbole to argue for sustainability. In almost Malthusian tones (and we know Bloomfield’s brother, Nate, held Malthusian views on the necessity of war for controlling overpopulation and expressed them in his poem ‘An Essay on War’32 ), he depicts the city’s greed and its demands upon the countryside’s natural resources. The ‘cream of the crop’ is not bought and sold close to its source of production. Urban over-consumption is directly linked to rural depletion, and the passage is monitory while comical. The growth of the human population in cities does not call for quite the same interventions practiced with the sheep several pages earlier. But with the cream going to the city, the resulting inedible cheese appears to leave the country dwellers hungry as they try to maintain themselves on less than optimal food. In this light and witty passage, the threat of famine is not far off, especially given that food shortages had occurred in the period of 1793–1801, a fact of which Bloomfield would have been aware.33 The poet is ever mindful of the issues of balancing needs and resources, for sheep as well as for people. Bloomfield also offers a balanced view of the impact of the Agricultural Revolution. Like his ‘brother Bard and fellow labourer’ John Clare, Bloomfield opposed enclosure and could not see the sense in it, practical or otherwise. As he wrote later in his life: I never see a fine prospect but I wish to bring it away with me. The house and grounds at Wakefield, I have in the storehouse of memory; but I should like to have them on paper. I should extremely like to have a view of Honington Green, as it was till the Inclosing Act took place. Wakefield I may (though unlikely) see again; but my native

26


Green, with its daisies, I never shall. To take such a small bit of ground and divide it into three, was hardly worth while. What man, with a sack of wheat on his back, would stoop for one grain? Inclosing Acts! I do not much like the rage for them. They cut down the solemn, the venerable tree, and sometimes plant another,–not always; like a mercenary soldier, who kills more than he begets.34 Bloomfield objects to the non-renewing, non-sustaining aspect of enclosure – that it kills without reproducing. Moreover, as the prose passage reveals, his objections are aesthetic as well as practical. They come from a love of the experience of the scene as much as a sense of the futility of the practical justification for the Green’s destruction. That being said, Bloomfield is not averse to all technological changes resulting from developments in agronomy. He speaks favourably in ‘Winter’ about the relatively new crop of turnips, which allowed farmers to feed cattle throughout the winter:35 Around their home dependant Cattle low No nourishment in frozen pastures grows Yet frozen pastures every morn resound With fair abundance thundring to the ground. For though on hoary twigs no buds peep out And e’en the hardy Bramble ceace to sprout Beneath dread Winter’s level sheets of snow The sweet nutritious Turnip deigns to grow (lines 17–24) The poet is not atavistic in his environmental politics; he praises what he believes best sustains the earth and its creatures, and he is open to innovations to further this goal. Bloomfield is also alert to the human dimensions and ramifications of agricultural changes, as is evident in the long, Goldsmithian passage at the end of ‘Summer’, uttered by an unnamed mourner about the changes that Refinement has wrought on customs such as the harvest home (see lines 345–400). Further, the passage in ‘Autumn’ describing the scene of the country churchyard demonstrates Bloomfield’s debt to Gray (lines 77–109). Although these passages express more explicitly social and political opinions, they are also, in their evocations of earlier eighteenth-century poets, illustrative of the importance of poetic language, poetic traditions and of the aesthetic within the materialist ethic of sustainability articulated in the poem.


Perhaps more than any of his Romantic contemporaries, Bloomfield strove to experience the poetry in nature. Besides continuing his work as a shoemaker throughout his life, he supplemented his income by constructing Aeolian harps. He was interested in their function and form as a craftsman and also wrote a long essay on their history and fabrication.36 The desire to experience nature’s poetry was thus no mere metaphoric quest. Bloomfield’s work lacks the more daring experiments of someone like Clare, whose ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ directly imitates birdsongs. Nevertheless, Bloomfield surveyed the literary resources available to him and made informed decisions about when and where to use them. Bloomfield was aware of the expectations his readers might have for the aesthetic capabilities of a writer of his social background. In the early lines of his poem, he makes no excuses for the limited and local scope of his endeavour. He writes humbly enough to please an audience from the middle or upper ranks. At the same time, he asserts that social status need not be a limitation in all ways of looking at and experiencing nature. He illustrates this in his description of the ploughman’s prospect view from ‘Summer’ (lines 113–30). Although the scene the labourer regards lacks the magnificence of the domes and columns that decorate the estates of the wealthy, according to Bloomfield, such architecture diverts the viewer from reflecting on what is truly beautiful. By contrast, the ploughman’s view of the farm inspires an appropriate reverence for creation: Here vanity slinks back her head to hide, What is there here to flatter human pride? The tow’ring fabric, or the dome’s loud roar And steadfast Collumns may astonish more Where the charm’d gazer long delighted stays Yet trace but to the Architect the praise, Whilst here the veriest clown that treads the sod Without one scruple gives the praise to God And twofold joy possess his raptur’d mind From gratitude and admiration join’d. (lines 121–30) John Barrell, Ann Bermingham and, more recently, Jacqueline Labbé have each stressed how, within the conventions of landscape art and poetry, labourers (and women) were typically considered part of the scenery viewed, not the active viewer of the scene.37 As is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3, prospects were assumed to be the domain of

28


the gentleman not the ploughman. Bloomfield elevates the ploughman’s viewpoint by demonstrating that he takes an ethically appropriate pleasure in looking at a scene. His pleasure is unrelated to possessing the land. However, he does possess the aesthetic and moral equipment, irrespective of a formal education, to appreciate the natural scene before him and to reflect upon the scene in a wider religious context. As the last two lines assert, even the ‘veriest clown’ is capable of holding those two feelings at once – gratitude to the creator and admiration of the creation. He can read and respond to the landscape, taking moral and aesthetic pleasure in it. Bloomfield makes a political point here, even though he mitigates the ploughman’s elevation with his ultimate submission to divine Authority in the closing lines of the passage. The ability to stake aesthetic and moral claims on nature, claims exclusive of those of ownership, is an important dimension to the poem’s environmental orientation. According to the theories of taste inherited from Shaftesbury, only those who owned the land, and had certain kinds of investments in it (from inheritance, entailment and the like), were capable of having the intellectual ability to read a landscape. Beauty and virtue were the preserve of those to whom nature properly belonged. By showing that Giles and the ploughman, ‘the veriest clown’, experience these emotions and concomitant ideas, Bloomfield suggests all can and should care for and admire the earth, in direct contrast to the view expressed in Dodsley’s ‘Agriculture’ that such duties and tastes were solely the domain of the ‘sons of Wealth’. All have ties and responsibilities to the land, regardless of literal ownership. Those ties are forged in connections that are aesthetic, emotional, theological, discursive and poetic. They are not only economic. While Bloomfield might be condemned by some critics (even supportive ones such as Lawson) for his ‘simple’ or ‘limited’ vision in the poem, a closer reading demonstrates his awareness of the complexities of our various relationships to the environment. For Bloomfield, poetic language evokes that complexity. Bloomfield’s use of poetic diction imposes an order on the natural world that could be dismissed as artificial. As is mentioned in the Preface to the poem, the use of rhyme, a more artificial language, could be said to work against claims for a more ‘natural’ representation of nature. In the Preface, however, the reader is informed of the rhyme scheme’s practical function. Bloomfield composed much of the poem while he was at work and unable to commit his verse to paper for long periods of time. The rhyme enabled him to keep the lines in his memory until he could write them down. Rhyme helped Bloomfield preserve his poetry.


Beyond his use of rhyme, Bloomfield is conservative in his use of poetic figures. He eschews the epic similes that a poet like Stephen Duck, 70 years earlier, included to add heroic grandeur to rural life. Bloomfield’s syntax and overall structure are what best reveal his efforts to find a language fit for his environmental vision. Lawson has already noted that the majority of the poem is written in the present tense. The poem exists not in a lost pastoral past, nor in the deferred future of the more prescriptive georgic mode. The Farmer’s Boy is both pastoral and georgic; it celebrates alternately leisure and labour. This, coupled with the seasonal structure, allows Bloomfield to evoke permanence and change. The seasonal organization demonstrates his debt to Thomson, but, as Lawson has argued, the invocation to the first book, ‘Spring’, makes clear that Bloomfield, unlike Thomson, conceived of the poem from the start not as four individual poems each devoted to describing a particular season, but as a poem depicting the year as a whole.38 Bloomfield subtly but ingeniously plays with the reader’s expectations of what ought to be represented within a particular season. ‘Spring’ culminates not in the celebration of new life and birth but in the butchering of the lambs, whereas ‘Winter’, the season of decay and death, ends with the birth of the lambs. To understand a particular ecosystem, to love it and care for it, one cannot take a partial view. Bloomfield’s observer is not a partial observer. He asks the reader to dwell with him in the farm environment over the course of time and attempt to experience as much of it as possible. No flights of fancy take the reader for imaginative tours of exotic colonies as in Thomson’s Seasons or Pope’s Windsor Forest. Each scene, each episode and each season must be experienced not in isolation but in its connection and relation to other ones. In the analysis of any particular passage, the reader must look at the passages before and after. Bloomfield’s poetry of nature is synecdochal and metonymic. It operates linguistically through connections and relations not abstract substitutions. Such a language is well suited to Bloomfield’s argument in the poem, as sustainability as an ethic asks us to see the connections between human actions and environmental outcomes. For Bloomfield, poetry is a part of nature’s economy, as much as corn or sheep or manure or the farmer’s labour – or any other thing that sustains the productive and self-renewing interaction between the human and the non-human world. Poetry too sustains that economy and can keep it healthy. Bloomfield made this argument literal late in his career in the frame tale for the poems included in May-Day with the Muses (1822). In this poem sequence, the good Sir Ambrose allows his tenant farmers to pay their rent with poetry. At the age of 80, the Lord of Oakly

30


Hall decides to return permanently to the countryside. Reflecting upon how in ‘Time past, he had on his paternal ground/With pride the latent sparks of genius found’,39 he is resolved to encourage the ‘mute, inglorious Miltons’ nearby: ‘Why not’, he cried, as from his couch he rose ‘To cheer my age, and sweeten my repose, Why not be just and generous in time, And bid my tenants pay their rents in rhyme? (lines 75–8) Bloomfield’s last poem imagines a world where land use and poetry are exchanged at equal value. A more practical green critic might denounce this premise as useless and utopic wish-fulfilment. But by asking us to envision such a world, Bloomfield extends more directly the argument he enacts in The Farmer’s Boy. Although Bloomfield was more bound than Clare to the poetic conventions he inherited from the eighteenth century, he was able to master those conventions and use them advantageously to articulate a powerful poetics of sustainability. Bloomfield’s vision, throughout his career, foregrounds his care for nature. That teaching these values remained important to him is underscored by the fact that at the time of his death, he was collaborating with his son on the children’s book, The Bird and Insect Post-Office (which appeared posthumously in the second volume of his Remains). Through letters written in the voices of the animals, the book instructs children in the joys of natural history and the pleasures of a close and loving attention to the natural world. Despite his later nostalgic idealism in May-Day with the Muses, Bloomfield understood in a deep and sophisticated way the complexities – both practical and ethical – of representing what the human relationship with nature was and could be. Bloomfield deserves to be read as a key poet in the annals of environmental literature. His desire is to speak with nature, not for it. His work reveals the confidence that – despite the separation and mediation between the human and the natural – an affective connection exists between the two realms. For Bloomfield, a voice in nature speaks to us if we choose to listen for it. He makes this point in a simple poem, ‘The Flowers of the Mead’, published posthumously: How much to be wish’d that the flowers of the mead The pleasures of converse could yield; And be to our bosoms, wherever we tread, The reasoning sweets of the field!


But silent they stand,—yet in silence bestow, What smiles, and what glances impart; And give, every moment, Joy’s exquisite glow, And the powerful throb of the heart.40 ∗∗∗ Like Duck’s had before him, Bloomfield’s success with The Farmer’s Boy proved inspirational, and a number of poets wrote directly or indirectly in response to it. The final chapters of this book discuss Bloomfield’s most well-known disciple, John Clare. Other lesser known poets also saw themselves entering into dialogue with Bloomfield and his bestselling poem. These writers form a ‘school of Bloomfield’ in so far as they explicitly identify him as their model. David Service, a shoemaker like Bloomfield, produced several volumes of poetry, but his first was a poem entitled The Caledonian Herd Boy (1802). His introduction to readers in the poem’s preface is comparable to what was offered by Capel Lofft about Bloomfield: The author of this poem was a herd-boy for five years on the North banks of the Clyde: he was afterwards an apprentice at Greenock, to a shoemaker, and has followed that employment for six years in England: he is now in the twenty-seventh year of his age, with a wife and family: he has nothing to offer in defence of his publication, but that it was written of mornings before his business commenced, and of evenings after the labour or the day was finished: that he never received a common, much less an academical education; for deficiency in grammar or style, he therefore hopes some allowance will be made by the candid reader. Many of the circumstances which occurred to the author during his herding are brought together as the business of one day.41 As with Duck and so many other writers of rural life, authenticity of experience is marshalled in place of literary training or educational pedigree. But, as with Bloomfield, these protestations notwithstanding, the author has clear literary aspirations which he asserts early in the poem through invocations of Milton and Thomson: Though low my lot, by Providence assign’d, May I possess fertility of mind! Clear and serene as mornings in the spring, Well, well inspir’d by all the nine to sing;

32


Devoid of learning and Minerva’s laws,* No hopes have I to merit much applause, Yet had I learning floating through my brain, I still might court the muses aid in vain; With Milton’s vivid thoughts now me inspire, Fill me with Thompson’s true poetic fire! (lines 17–26) Somewhat ironically, despite its mention of the classical goddess of wisdom, the line above is footnoted with the claim ‘The author of the following poem never received scarcely any education but what he acquired through his own industry and study’. Like Giles, Service’s ‘Sigma’ engages in a variety of rural occupations and pastimes, primarily associated with his work herding cattle. Although the poem is shorter and more limited in scope, following Sigma through the course of one day not one year, it expresses a stewardship ethic seen, for instance, in the passage where Service criticizes inattentive cowherds: Ah! cruel boys devoid of mercy here, How will your brows at mercy’s throne appear? Humanity in mortals should abound, To birds that fly, and brutes that tread the ground! Who without pity can the flocks behold Lie down in wounds, or starve in winter’s cold; No mercy Sigma could expect to find Did he approve your actions in his mind; The power, o’er birds, and brutes, to mortals giv’n Is only delegated power from heav’n. (lines 91–100) Just as Bloomfield had done with Giles, and again, just as directly, Service asserts that Sigma’s love for nature has an aesthetic as well as practical source, and that both of these contribute to his ethical orientation: He who to nature’s beauty, yields his mind, An ample recompense will always find; The great Creator’s high and matchless power Shines in each spire of grass, and simple flower; No insect flies, or crawls upon the field, But will to minds a sweet instruction yield: Yet oft with sad indifference we see Some men despise this rural scenery;


Let nature’s book but once on Sigma shine And that will raise his soul to praise divine! (lines 130–9) Service has learned Bloomfield’s lesson well, although his imitation is less sophisticated. Also in 1802, William Holloway responded to Bloomfield with the long poem, The Peasant’s Fate: A Rural Poem. Like Service, Holloway (who later developed a friendship with Bloomfield and his brother George) states more polemically the themes that Bloomfield explores. His approach is also more nostalgic, and his extended critique of luxury demonstrates Goldsmith’s influence as Holloway acknowledges in the preface. After a long passage describing the landlord’s misappropriation of commons and fields for pasturing his horses, the subsequent deracination of the rural labourers and their suffering in the urban poorhouse, the poem’s speaker condemns the rich who: On Nature’s bounty lay the griping hand, Wrest from the poor the patrimonial cot, His paddock add to their superfluous lot, Mean dependent, bid him seek his bread, While, Timur-like, their vassal down they tread Frustrate the scheme wise Providence has plann’d, And half depopulate their native land!42 In this passage, Holloway is less interested in the relationship with nature and more interested in the land as a space of contention between the rights of rich and poor, elaborating the critique that Bloomfield had placed in the mouth of the ‘mourner’ at the conclusion of ‘Summer’. Perhaps the most intriguing – and most direct – response to Bloomfield is found in Joseph Holland’s An Appendix to the Season of Spring, in the Rural Poem, ‘The Farmer’s Boy’ (1806). The motive for the poem’s composition, asserted in the second sentence of the opening address ‘To the Reader’, is the poet’s concern for the accuracy and authenticity of Bloomfield’s representation of rural life: In reading the charming Poem, ‘The Farmer’s Boy, by Robert Bloomfield’ he was rather surprised to find the Haymaking passed over unnoticed; and therefore, determined to attempt something on that subject, by way of an Appendix to his Season of Spring—He has studiously avoided dwelling on such circumstances as had been handled

34


by Mr Bloomfield: but has introduced others which seemed to him not incongruous with the object which he had in view.43 Holland dutifully notes he submitted his manuscript to Bloomfield himself and includes in the prefatory material an excerpt of Bloomfield’s response, which provides insight into the latter’s writing process. Bloomfield writes to Holland: You are not the first to have noticed the Omission of the Haymaking: the best excuse I have to offer is, that in composing the Poem I was determined that what I said on Farming should be EXPERIMENTALLY true. There was on that small Farm no Hay to make; it formed no part of my business; and Thompson has described it most charmingly. Not only does Bloomfield claim the truth of his own experience, limiting the scope of his poem to describing in poetry only those experiences he has actually had, but he also asserts that such a strategy is, as the final line suggests, part of what he feels makes his work original. Knowing as he did that the poem’s seasonal organization would make comparisons to Thomson unavoidable, Bloomfield shows how careful he is to balance the influences of the tradition to which he contributes with his own experiences, something with which Holland is far less concerned. Holland’s poem further reveals Mandeville’s influence as much as Bloomfield’s, and the poet devotes a large portion of the description in Part I to bee-keeping and drawing the expected political and moral allegories from apiculture. While the majority of Part II of the poem addresses the supposed deficiencies of Bloomfield’s portrait of rural life, Holland clearly has agendas beyond speaking to Bloomfield. The poem, after narrating the drowning of a rural lad, includes an address to ‘The Subscribers to the Life Boats, and to the Humane Society’ (line 23) and ends with an equally sensational description of the death of the lovely and virtuous rural nymph, Eliza, crushed under a cartwheel. As the author notes in the prefatory address: ‘The writer is aware that the catastrophe at the end of the Poem will be thought by some to be of too melancholy a cast; but he chose to give it that turn, in order to exhibit the power of True Religion in the Hearts of Believers, under the most trying circumstances of life’. Among other labouring-class writers who responded to Bloomfield’s representation of rural nature is William Hersee. His collection of Poems


(1808) is far less contentious in its choice of topics and thus, in many respects, much more Bloomfieldian in its response to the natural world. His ‘Sonnet, To Mr Bloomfield, Author of “The Farmer’s Boy’’ ’ suggests he read both Bloomfield and Sir John Denham, whose invocation of the Thames in Cooper’s Hill he echoes: Bloomfield! thy rural song how sweetly flows! Inspiring my young heart with pure delight; Thy true description nature’s beauty shews, And, by thee drawn, her beauty seems more bright; Fresh lovely scenes to my enraptured sight Rise, charm’d by thee; and in my bosom glows (Tho’ but a lowly and unlearned wight) For thee, the warmth that genuine zeal bestows. A youth unknown to thee, unknown to fame, Would fain unfold the ardour of his heart: Aspiring, e’en to friendship’s virtuous name, To thee his grateful feelings would impart. Oh! could I tune like thee the rural theme, And join thee down time’s ever-flowing stream!44 As will be discussed in Chapter 4, John Clare would follow Hersee, also using the imagery of streams and rivers in his tributes to Bloomfield. Unlike many of the imitators from the first decade of the nineteenth century, Clare’s luminous poetry demonstrates its debts to Bloomfield as it initiates a new idiom for labouring-class writing about nature.45 Even if many later followers were desirous only of emulating his fame, Bloomfield must still be seen as empowering a generation of writers from labouring-class backgrounds to speak about the working environments from which they came and about places and activities that they knew. The contemporary success of Bloomfield’s poetry affirmed that early nineteenth-century readers saw value in the lives and language of common men and women, even before Lyrical Ballads.46 For readers today, Bloomfield’s poetry demonstrates that, contrary to Raymond William’s assertion, a working country can be a poetic landscape. Service nicely summarizes the poet’s importance in his ‘Lines to the Portrait of Mr Robert Bloomfield’: That’s modest Bloomfield, nature’s true born child; No school had he—’twas nature him beguil’d: He paints like nature, and of nature sings,

36


To him each object solid wisdom brings. The muse on him shall lasting fame entail, While British taste and poetry prevail. The song of Homer, was the wars of Troy; The theme of Bloomfield, is a Farmer’s Boy.47

2 Return to the Garden: James Woodhouse and Polite Cultivations

Making a garden, like making other works of art and unlike practicing agriculture, involves producing for its own sake . . . . In making a garden, one composes with living things, intervening in and contextualizing, and thus changing, their form without determining all aspects of their development or end. The garden is thereby linked to other means of ordering life: codifying and ritualizing social time and space, creating political orders and social hierarchies. Susan Stewart, ‘Garden Agon’1 From Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730) to John Clare’s enclosure elegies of the 1830s, labouring-class poetry makes significant innovations in the modes available for writing poetry about nature. In The Thresher’s Labour, Duck represents agricultural labour from the ground up, showing it at close range and from a first-person perspective. Duck conforms to but challenges the conventions of early eighteenth-century georgic. As I have written elsewhere, Duck defies Addison’s dictum, delivered in his ‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’ distinguishing the work of the poet from that of the rural labourer: ‘the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but with the address of a poet’.2 A century later, Clare expresses a presciently ecocentric view of the relationship between human and non-human nature. His poems about the devastation caused by enclosure provide a powerful critique of how class interests affected rural land use. The history of self-taught rural poetry is rightfully book-ended by these two poets. The importance of Duck’s and Clare’s writing about agriculture is indisputable, but they are only two from among the hundreds of labouring-class poets who published between 1730 and 1837 and who 37

38


wrote about more than farm labour. Many shared a connection to an equally dominant feature of the British rural landscape: gardens. After his preferment, Duck was appointed the Librarian at Merlin’s Cave in Richmond Park. Clare served for a time as a gardener’s assistant at Burghley Park, which was designed by Capability Brown in 1775. In fact, poem for poem, in the tradition of eighteenth-century labouring-class poetry, the garden appears more frequently than the farm as a subject for poetry. This suggests that despite the fact that they may have had to work in nature for their livelihood, many self-taught poets held a keen interest in the non-instrumental uses of nature reflected in garden landscapes. As I argue in this chapter, garden poetry, and in particular the poetry of James Woodhouse, seeks to claim aesthetic and ultimately political rights for the poet. Access to garden spaces becomes a symbol for other types of rights of access. In a cultural arena where aesthetic sensibilities were often marshalled to make arguments about social refinement, labouring-class poets such as Woodhouse represented artistic abilities as a potential social equalizer. The capacity to appreciate a garden was a cultural and a political litmus test. In politicizing garden spaces, labouring-class poets follow Milton, Marvell and Pope, although their agenda is distinct. At a time when the leisure classes’ experience of nature was being regulated by increasingly curatorial standards of appreciation inherited from the visual arts, many of these poets claimed that they too, regardless of their social background, were competent to master the dominant idiom for reading and writing landscapes. In many cases, their insistence on imitating the perspectives of the elite in their representations of the countryside is paradoxically a form of resistance, although one that is easy to misread as mystification. As feminist criticism has demonstrated, mastery of particular conventions may be the first step in a critique of them. In proving their ability to write within polite forms, the poets engaged in a literary version of what Lawrence Klein has labelled a ‘social tranvestitism’.3 The ease with which polite forms – whether in dress, behaviour or in literature – could be learned and adopted undermined the claim that these were the domain only of those with an elevated social standing. Becoming skilled in the idioms of the dominant culture, for those who are marginalized, is a mode of defiance. As Jonathan Rose summarizes in a discussion of Ann Yearsley, ‘culture was a force for equality and was destructive of ideology, including the ideology supporting the British class structure. That hierarchy rested on the presumption that the lower orders lacked the moral and mental equipment necessary to play

Return to the Garden

39

a governing role in society. By discrediting that assumption, autodidacts demolished justifications of privilege’.4 A vital way that self-taught poets demonstrated their moral and intellectual fitness was through exhibiting the proper aesthetic responses to the natural world around them: they would show that they knew both the beautiful and the good, and thus, implicitly, had a claim to certain political rights that a ‘gentlemanly’ appreciation for landscape had been used to underwrite. While literary gardens have long served as important sites for assertions of and challenges to hierarchies (as Paradise Lost makes clear), actual gardens and parks became even more historically significant arenas of class conflict during the eighteenth century. Engrossments and emparkments, fuelled by tastes for picturesque landscapes, did as much damage to the labouring-classes’ access to land as agricultural enclosures. The garden’s political significance was connected with issues of social status in other ways as well. Stephen Bending has argued that the garden in this period becomes a space where one could demonstrate ‘membership of a polite culture far broader than the landed elite. In this respect, the garden acts as a venue for the polite battles within a society beginning to recognize divisions of class rather than rank . . . . The garden’s ability to naturalize political power in the eighteenth century makes it a space to be fought over all the more strongly’.5 Bending thus develops an argument made by Tom Williamson. Williamson takes issue with landscape historians, such as Ann Bermingham, demonstrating that Gardens, like houses, were certainly expressions of wealth and status, and to some extent, instruments of social control. But the social realities they expressed, or concealed, were highly complex, for eighteenthcentury England was a complex society, and was not composed of simply two opposed groups, the landed rich and the landless poor. Instead it was – or was becoming – a competitive, commercial, capitalist society with a whole range of social groups: merchants, financiers, industrialists, an urban middle class.6 A more important division, for Williamson, is not that between rich and poor, but instead a subtler distinction between ‘polite society’ and ‘the common people’.7 Where to draw the line between the two, as Williamson shows, was especially contentious with the increased instability of a variety of cultural codes. As Fielding and others satirized in their attacks on Richardson’s Pamela at mid-century, the lower orders’ ability to emulate their social superiors, through dress and other

40


forms of conspicuous consumption, revealed the dangerous fluidity of the social scale. Williamson asserts: Landscapes . . . were important markers of social status. The crucial feature of the park in this context was not merely that it was a form of landscape which could be shared by great landowners and lesser gentry. It was also one which was completely unavailable to the broad mass of the middle class. Parks could only be created by those who owned in abundance . . . Only landowners had parks, and thus the adoption of the park as the prime setting for the fashionable house clearly set the gentry, and the upper bourgeoisie, apart from society as a whole. It was they who were unquestionably the ‘polite’: traditional hierarchy was thus maintained in an increasingly fluid world.8 As Williamson suggests, large-scale gardens indicate particular pressures and anxieties being negotiated among and within different tiers of society. Several labouring-class poets represent gardens to emphasize the social differences being redefined during the early and middle part of the century. Some look to gardens as a utopia where social differences might be erased because of a common aesthetic appreciation for beauty, one shared by both the ‘refined’ and ‘rustic’. By the 1790s, however, aesthetic arguments using gardens to claim equality gave way to self-consciously political assertions about the inescapability of class-based prejudices. James Woodhouse’s career and the transformation of his writing over the course of nearly 50 years illustrate those changes. ∗∗∗ Peter Aram’s Studley Park (1733) is the first major eighteenth-century autodidact garden poem, predating Duck’s poems about Richmond Park by three years. The son of a fisherman, Aram was not the gardener to Studley Park itself. He served as gardener to Sir Edward Blackett at Newby Hall near Ripon in Yorkshire and then later as land steward for Sir John Ingilby of Ripley, Yorkshire. He was also the author of A Practical Treatise on Flowers.9 Unlike Duck, who foregrounds his experiences as a thresher to authorize his literary efforts, Aram does not call attention to his occupational training, referring only obliquely to his lack of fitness for poetic tasks. Paradoxically, however, his self-presentation in the opening of the poem, and his literary techniques throughout, reflect a knowledge of the traditions of English and classical garden writing, as much as


41

the lived knowledge of a practicing gardener. He writes in the opening lines: Shall Waller’s Verse St. James Groves refine, And Windsor’s, POPE, outcharm themselves in thine! Shall Denham’s Muse bloom Cooper’s Hill with Bays, And Claremont live in Garth’s immortal Lays?10 After rehearsing a learned list of poetic predecessors, Aram opines that the task of depicting Studley’s charms devolves upon him, ‘of all others far more unfit,/With Art and Nature, to match Art and Wit’ (lines 15–16). For the remainder of the poem, Aram continues to demonstrate his debt to his literary precursors. He quotes Pope in describing the ‘genius of the place’ and imitates Milton with an inventory of the flowers found in the Park. Yet Aram does not follow one significant convention: The poem is not dedicated or addressed to the park’s owner, John Aislabie, Esq., but to William Fisher, his Gardener in Chief, the true artist behind the landscape praised in the poem. His practical and artistic abilities are the ones that should be celebrated, as Aram writes in the Preface to the poem: No meaner ART, and no inferior Toil, Could give such Rules, or so adorn the Soil. ’Tis just that He, who did these Scenes contrive, Should have his Memory preserv’d alive; That future Ages by these Lines may know, What to ingenious FISHER’S Name they owe; (lines 1–6) Fisher is ‘Adept in all the GARDEN Mysteries’ (line 11) and has horticultural expertise as well as being ‘Learn’d in Design’ (line 17). He alone is the one ‘That has this PARK to such Perfection brought’ (line 18). Aram’s description claims that the gardener gives the land value. Fisher understands the material grounds of possibility of his task (such as the needs of the plants and the quality of the soil), yet he is also knowledgeable about larger issues of design. Despite performing manual labour, he is skilled in the polite art. Aram thus underscores that the garden’s beauty is not solely a function of a landowner’s wealth or taste; it requires the gardener’s mediation. By creating the garden and the poem about it, Fisher and Aram demonstrate their fitness to appreciate nature’s beauties through their abilities to create them, implicitly raising themselves to an equal footing with the landowner.

42


Other labouring poets turned to a more celebrated garden to explore questions of legitimacy, hierarchy and their social standing as self-taught poets. Richmond Park and Kew Gardens provided a site for Duck, Henry Jones and Thomas Chatterton to explore their relationship to power. Enclosed in 1637 by Charles I, Richmond Park became controversial during the 1730s when Queen Caroline began extensive alterations, promoting on a grand scale the English style of gardening. William Kent’s improvements to the site were read as attempts to connect the Hanoverian court with a longer tradition of Englishness. Kent’s designs included several pastoral follies that glamorized the experience of rural life in a way that Duck would have known to be false. These follies masked the hardships faced by rural working populations, and a modern reader might anachronistically expect Duck to speak out against such idealization as he had done in his debut poem. He did not; in fact, he found himself at the geographical centre of the controversies surrounding the Queen’s efforts when he was appointed caretaker of Merlin’s Cave, the Park’s most contentious addition. Merlin’s Cave was not an actual cave but a thatched ‘Gothic’ cottage with a simple interior. It contained six wax figures, including ones of Merlin, Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth, as well as figures that may have represented Britomart (from The Fairie Queene) or Bradamante (from Orlando Furioso). Judith Colton has argued that the political symbolism of the cottage and the effigies were interpreted as Caroline’s response to Cobham’s Temple of British Worthies at Stowe. According to Colton, who surveys the cultural controversy the space spurred, through the construction of Merlin’s Cave, Caroline was carefully suggesting a link between the Hanoverian dynasty and the lineage of King Arthur. Colton demonstrates, moreover, how Caroline’s opponents turned her carefully chosen iconography against her, drawing upon legends depicting Merlin as a duplicitous, partially demonic trickster to impugn Caroline’s association with Walpole. Merlin’s Cave was a frequent target of the main anti-Walpole periodical, The Craftsman.11 Given the contemporary public debates about the building, Duck had a strong self-interest in defending the queen, her garden and its follies. Neglecting the more immediate political and cultural context, even Duck’s modern sympathizers, such as Raymond Williams, dismiss his garden poetry as formulaic and tedious, because such poems erase the class markers that make The Thresher’s Labour interesting. Duck’s tribute to his royal patron, ‘On Richmond Park, and Royal Gardens’, naturalizes both the legitimacy of his Hanoverian patrons and Duck’s self-taught intervention into the subgenre of garden poetry.


43

As he did in The Thresher’s Labour, Duck first elevates his plebeian voice with the requisite demonstration of familiarity with the tradition of garden writing. He dutifully invokes Pope’s Windsor Forest, most notably in his description of how ‘Albion’s KING pursues the Royal Chace’.12 He details how ‘Royal GEORGE, and Heav’nly CAROLINE’ (line 134) transformed the land from ‘A gloomy Waste, not worth the Muses Strain;/Where thorny Brakes the Traveller repell’d,/And Weeds and Thistles overspread the Field’ (lines 130–2). The subsequent stanza completes an epic simile likening their efforts to those of imperial Rome as it civilized the world. The poem ends with a patriotic portrait of the king single-handedly protecting the nation from invasions and involvement in foreign war. The king’s paternalistic care for his nation makes British swains smile, but Duck closes the poem with a portrait of the suffering of swains in other countries, ‘Poor Peasants with their rigid Burdens groan/And Till the Glebe for Harvests not their own’ (lines 193–4). The land’s fruitfulness, like the garden’s beauty, is linked with British liberty, protected and provided by the Hanoverian king. Despite his humble origins, Duck writes this poem with a confidence more laureate-like than thresher-like, praising the king and demonstrating mastery of polite conventions. Whatever its failings as a work of art, the poem illustrates that Duck felt he had a right to write poetry addressing subjects of national interest, which the construction of Merlin’s Cave certainly was. His labouring-class patriotism ought not to be dismissed outright. In the poem, Duck proves his ability to appreciate the landscape and draw political lessons from it, in the tradition of Milton, Denham and Pope, all three of whom his poem cites. Duck’s appreciation for nature’s beauty in part validates his ability to comment upon socio-political concerns. The poem implies that reading and admiring natural beauty are skills that can be acquired regardless of one’s social background. Duck’s royalist poem is thereby potentially levelling. Several decades later, as Capability Brown was reshaping Kent’s designs at Richmond and obliterating Merlin’s Cave, another self-taught poet, Irish-born bricklayer poet Henry Jones wrote Kew Garden (1763). Even more so than Duck, Jones connects the garden space with the monarch, this time George III, making Kew into a mirror for the king. As Bending remarks: ‘It becomes difficult here to distinguish between monarchy and garden as each becomes the ideal of nature and art combined . . . both George’s actions and the national “garden’’ within which he acts demonstrate his liberal mind, his virtue, and his role as the bringer

44


of concord and victory’.13 Echoing Windsor Forest, Jones’s description of this royal green space celebrates Britain’s international power. His detailed inventory of its foreign plants and flowers symbolizes the extent of British imperial conquest. That these exotic plants are depicted as flourishing at Kew implies the benefits of colonialism, suggesting as well that British soil nurtures and sustains transplants, including Anglo-Irish authors such as Jones. Jones’s paean to royal power and national conquest embodied in the garden landscape did not go uncondemned, and it was another selftaught poet, Thomas Chatterton, who in 1770 wrote of Kew Garden to attack royal corruption and hacks like Jones who promoted the garden in poetry. For Chatterton, Kew remained an image of the nation, but a nation whose natural beauties had decayed due to the moral degradation of its leaders. Chatterton satirizes Jones’s poem directly. Whereas Jones describes ‘temples celebrating the victories of the Seven Years War’, Chatterton describes them as ‘shrines to tyranny and oppression’.14 In Chatterton’s poem, ‘the garden maps out not a stable if various order but an unquenchable thirst for frivolous novelty’.15 Chatterton’s debate with Jones confirms that labouring-class poets politicized representations of the countryside, engaging in debates with each other as well as with their polite peers. Duck’s, Jones’s and Chatterton’s politics are by no means recognizable as proto-proletarian identity politics and certainly not as ‘green’ politics; however, their writing about rural spaces has political significance and represents their efforts to speak meaningfully about broader national concerns. All three writers had humble beginnings, but each had come to feel that he could speak about royal issues. This suggests that they felt enfranchised rather than disenfranchised by their aesthetic appreciation for rural landscapes. The fact that they taught themselves such an appreciation challenges any essentialized social hierarchy which would naturalize the category of taste. But Duck, Jones and Chatterton stop short of any more radical political conclusions. The poets claim only for themselves the privilege of speaking about nature and the political circumstances it is made to symbolize. Their arguments are not directly concerned with the rights of the poor in general to have access to garden spaces and to the privileges that those spaces embodied. Like them, James Woodhouse began his literary career making claims only about his own aesthetic and moral fitness. But unlike them, Woodhouse would later reconsider who could or should have access to the garden. ∗∗∗


45

Originally a shoemaker, Woodhouse is the most prolific eighteenthcentury self-taught poet of gardens. He was ‘discovered’ in 1758 by William Shenstone, Oxford Professor of Poetry Joseph Spence and London publisher and bookseller Robert Dodsley. Shenstone’s estate, the Leasowes, was located near Lord Lyttelton’s estate, Hagley Park. Lyttelton and the other men of letters shared a collective interest in natural genius and gardening. Woodhouse first piqued Spence and Dodsley’s interest because he had composed two elegies to Shenstone, the first petitioning him and the second thanking him for access to his grounds. Six years later, Dodsley would publish Woodhouse’s first collection of poetry. Until their respective deaths, both Shenstone and Lyttelton would offer Woodhouse intellectual support and patronage. Significantly, this encounter of plebeian and polite writers occurs in a particular type of garden: the ferme ornée or ornamental farm. Bringing together the instrumental and non-instrumental value of land, its agricultural and aesthetic uses, the ferme ornée foregrounds what would become an increasing disparity of these two functions. As Ann Bermingham has noted, the general lack of popularity of this approach to land management was due to the fact that ‘the period made an increasingly rigid distinction between the landscape garden as the natural domain of the landlord and the agrarian landscape as the appropriate province of the laborer’.16 The ferme ornée thus captures what was, for the eighteenth century, an increasingly impossible situation, namely the ability of the leisured and labouring ranks to share a landscape and to experience nature as functional and beautiful, observed and worked.17 The Leasowes under Shenstone’s ownership exemplified and balanced these contradictions. It was a working farm, and Shenstone occasionally speaks in his letters of supervising the hay-making and the pleasure he takes in his livestock, in particular in raising poultry. But like more conventional garden spaces, The Leasowes contained purely picturesque, non-functional elements such as serpentine pathways, decorative waterfalls and evocatively placed statuettes and urns. Moreover, it was a landscape replete with English and Latin verse inscriptions and poetic allusions. To be able to read this landscape required training in aesthetic appreciation and an education in the classics that someone who had to leave school at the age of seven, as Woodhouse did, was unlikely to possess. But the problems posed by those unable to properly ‘read’ the garden had less to do with knowledge of Greek and Latin than with knowing how to maintain a properly museum-like distance from nature. In a 1749 letter, for instance, Shenstone complains of the visiting mob’s

46


‘pillaging’ of flowers, and in another letter he grumbles, ‘Tho there are Prim-Roses to be gathered in the Fields in Plenty yet if they can discover one that is apparently planted, they are sure to crop it’.18 Such crassness led Shenstone eventually to declare his property off-limits to common visitors. It was this exclusionary punishment that inspired Woodhouse’s first public poetry. The ‘Advertisement’ to Poems on Several Occasions (1764) details that Shenstone’s benevolence was such, that he permitted the lowest of his neighbors the benefit of these delightful scenes; amongst them was poor Crispin, our author; but his happiness was not of long continuance, for the liberty of Mr. SHENSTONE’s good-nature was soon turned into licentiousness; the people destroying the shrubs, picking the flowers, breaking down the hedges, and doing him other damage, produced a prohibition to every one without application to himself or his principle servants.19 Shenstone understood the incidents as an illustration of the mob’s aesthetic and moral failings and their inability to properly read and respond to the garden setting. (The mob’s eviction from this formerly productive landscape could, by contrast, appear emblematic of how emparkment furthered the deracination of the rural labouring class from productive farmland. Indeed, one wonders whether some of the vandalism might have been purposeful.) The capacity for misreading the landscape was not confined to the mob. Even for those who considered themselves sophisticated enough to appreciate the Leasowes’ mixed message, the intense allusiveness of Shenstone’s inscriptions and other embellishments appeared to require explication. Dodsley’s ‘A Description of the Leasowes’, attached to the posthumous two-volume collection of Shenstone’s poetry, provided such an explanation. Although Dodsley was not the only one to provide such a guide, because he was Shenstone’s friend and publisher he was in a privileged position to write about the beauties of the place. It might seem that a comparison of Dodsley’s prose ‘Guide’ with Woodhouse’s poetry would display the differences between a refined and a rustic response to the Leasowes, but such is not the case. Dodsley does not speak from a purely ‘refined’ perspective, nor does Woodhouse assume a purely ‘rustic’ view. Despite the authoritativeness of refined taste that Dodsley’s ‘Guide’ assumes, its source was not an aristocratic connoisseur, but an entrepreneur who had begun his career with a poem entitled Servitude (1729) and whose first published volume was entitled A Muse in Livery,


47

or the Footman’s Miscellany (1732). By 1758, Dodsley was Spence’s travelling companion and a literary powerbroker in his own right. But in 1732, Dodsley submissively presented himself as a brother to Spence’s earlier prodigy, Duck. Dodsley’s ‘Epistle to Stephen Duck’ begins with a request for indulgence for ‘An Infant Poet, and unlearn’d as you’,20 and invokes Duck in defence of the socially equalizing potential of cultural improvement: VIRGIL wrote not his AENEID in a Day: Nor is’t impossible a Time might be, When POPE and PRIOR wrote like You and Me. ’Tis true, more Learning might their Works adorn, They wrote not from a pantry, nor a barn: Yet they, as well as we, by slow degrees Must reach perfection, and to write with ease. (lines 91–7) Dodsley’s talents allowed him to rise in the world, and his is one of the great success stories in the history of British self-taught poets. Though it is uncertain how much Woodhouse knew of Dodsley’s past, in 1758 the two would have had more in common than Dodsley ever did with Duck. Woodhouse’s poetry demonstrates that he had learned the properly aestheticized response that guaranteed that he would not mar the flowerbeds. In his poems, Woodhouse describes his relationship to a landscape that is both the site of class distinctions and a place where those divisions might be equalized. Woodhouse writes in ‘An Elegy to William Shenstone’ Tho’ no auspicious rent-rolls grace my line, I boast the same original divine. Tho’ niggard fate with-held her sordid ore, Yet liberal nature gave better store; Whose influence early did my mind inspire To read her works, and seek her mighty Sire.21 Woodhouse’s rights of access to the land are aesthetic not economic, bestowed upon him by ‘nature’ and ultimately, by God, who gives him these gifts presumably to increase his faith. As his pious justifications indicate, Woodhouse is not arguing for radical egalitarianism. His poetic sensibility does not elevate his fellow labourers, whose destructive actions have made them the equivalent of ‘Belial’s sons’ (line 114). In a second elegy to Shenstone, Woodhouse distinguishes himself from the

48


‘ruthless crowds, disdaining bounds’,22 speaking both from and against his plebeian subject position, a double-voicedness he would maintain throughout his long career. Woodhouse’s longest locodescriptive poem ‘The Lessowes’, written after Shenstone’s death, serves the same guiding function as Dodsley’s prose text. Although Woodhouse visits many of the same sites as Dodsley, he does not devote his lines to transcribing emblems or directing the visitor’s footsteps. Dodsley’s text occasionally employs first person, but it is largely depersonalized and describes a depopulated landscape. By comparison, Woodhouse provides a highly personalized reaction to the sites and describes their intimate relation to him. Mentioning the inscription to Joseph Spence, Woodhouse writes: ‘He deigns to smile on meritorious lays;/And Crispin’s numbers are to him as dear/As equal merit in a prince or peer’.23 Woodhouse elsewhere records his personal response to the garden’s altars, urns and inscriptions. He highlights that response as coming from the unlikely source of his own pen. In so doing, he calls attention to his excluded position in the social landscape even as he claims his equality in being able to demonstrate a proper response to the landscape’s texts. Such a paradoxical strategy is revealed in another element that Woodhouse includes, but which Dodsley overlooks, in his description of the ferme ornée. While Dodsley’s account is concerned with non-functional ornamentation, Woodhouse, in ‘The Lessowes’, also gives us the farm. His descriptions of rural labour are pastoralized, but they record a working environment nonetheless: Here nymphs and swains the shining pitchfork wield, To spread the swarth, or turn the with’ring field; There, rang’d with rakes, the shining wind-rows seen, In length’ning stripes; or cocks bespot the green: And there, with mixed tools, a jovial train Mould larger cocks, or load the groaning wain, Or comb the reliques of the scatter’d plain. (lines 672–8) The ‘shining pitchfork’ and the ‘jovial train’ are glamourized and the onerous work of gleaning mentioned in line 678 seems scarcely pleasurable activity, but Woodhouse’s goal is partly to dissociate himself from what he represents. He does not link himself with the real nymphs and swains. If Woodhouse dubs himself a ‘poor plebeian swain’, the modest label masks higher aspirations. The lesson he learns under Shenstone’s patronage makes him wish to free himself from manual labour and its


49

attendant discomforts, and he muses on the possibilities that literary success might bring. He imagines a time when: No longer, then, I’d pine a landless boor, Nor trudge, thro’ sloughs, around a rented door, In russet garb, whose ragged rent-holes grin, And ill conceal the skeleton within: Nor heavy hours in listless labour waste; Nor pall, with viands coarse, my blunted taste; (lines 440–5) But Woodhouse is simultaneously careful to qualify his aspirations. His desires are modest, but they also have classical precedents. He derives his fantasy of rural retreat from Horace: Nor wish I sceptre, diadem, and throne, But, HORACE-like, a vill and farm my own; To range among my lawns, my streams, my trees, Such as he wish’d; or rather, such as these: (lines 450–3) Work in nature is the partial subject of the poem, but Woodhouse depicts it as something to be escaped through his art. While he imagines himself owning a farm, as the passage illustrates, he does not see himself working on it but ranging within it, taking a distanced pleasure in regarding the scenic swains who do the heavy lifting. The Horatian bliss Woodhouse imagines here was not to be his. Shenstone’s death caused ‘Crispin’ (as Woodhouse styles himself after the patron saint of shoemakers) to dash his lyre to bits in grief at the conclusion of the poem. Woodhouse would remain publicly silent for 20 years after his second volume. During that time, he first became a servant to Shenstone’s neighbour, Lord Lyttelton, but was then taken on as land steward by bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu. After a falling out with Montagu, he began to write again, but unlike Dodsley, Woodhouse never converted his status as servant into the kind of cultural capital that enabled Dodsley’s success, although he too eventually joined the London book trade and died in comparative affluence. With the help of Robert’s brother, Joseph, Woodhouse ended his days as a London bookseller, living until 1820. Woodhouse continued to write poems about polite landscape gardens until late in his career, publishing the poem Norbury Park in 1803 (although the poem was finished in 1798). This shorter poem serves as a transition point between his earlier and later garden poetry, combining

50


the language of compliment found in the poetry to Shenstone and Lyttelton, with a much stronger moralizing strain that would predominate in his later poems. The poem engages in the conventional praise of the park’s owner, William Lock, and describes its many beauties and attractive features. Still paying homage to Pope, Woodhouse embarks upon a contrast of country and city, juxtaposing Norbury with London: ‘How different all the foul effluvia there/Compar’d with thy pure, scented, atmosphere’.24 These aromatic differences underscore the differences in the virtuousness of the respective inhabitants. Speaking of ‘Augusta’, he asserts, ‘Her great—her gross—incorrigible crimes,/Are never known in these Elysian climes—’ (lines 202–3). As is evident in his subsequent work, Woodhouse believes that environmental factors influence moral and religious behaviour. Norbury Park also initiates a critique of how hunting and racing misappropriate land that could otherwise be used for more productive – and morally upright – purposes. In his description of the racing grounds at Epsom, he writes: Is this improving Nature’s pure intent, Perverting basely what Heav’n’s bounty lent? Destroying blessings meant for better use, For Sport or Avarice butcher’d by Abuse? Thus wasting Wealth, and tantalizing Time? Still adding Cruelty to every other Crime! (lines 302–7) Woodhouse takes the moral argument further, using the park to demonstrate the goodness of divine design and the human obligation to care for nature, ordained in the original garden, Eden, To move, and modify, inferior parts— To clump, or scatter—ravel, or arrange— Operate on all susceptible of change— Select the subjects—lights and shadows place— Retouch what’s fading—what offends erase! ... With imitative skill can mimic all, Heaven’s hand has fashion’d o’er this earthly Ball; Yet, still, with delegated pow’rs Man plods, Materials—tools—ev’n Artists—all are God’s (lines 502–5, 513–16)


51

In designing and redesigning garden spaces, humanity fulfils a divine delegation; improvement becomes a Christian duty. The former land steward clearly sees his responsibility as a poet to instil a stewardship ethic in others. Lest he be accused of urging readers to think they may aspire to god-like status in their work in the garden, he ends the passage with a reminder of the subordination of all creation to the original creator. Woodhouse’s expositions, here and elsewhere, of the environmental ethic of Christian stewardship may explain why his work has not been as enthusiastically received as that of Clare by modern ecocritics. Robert Mayhew has argued that modern scholars of landscape and garden writing have overly privileged political readings of landscape poetry and painting. For Mayhew, it is more appropriate to the context within which the literature was created to consider its relationship to the religious rather than the political discourses of the day.25 As Mayhew demonstrates, bringing religion into discussions of nature was a way of elevating the topic through linking it to more dignified subjects. The ‘Book of Nature’ was invoked to support a variety of religious opinions, and poets and theologians frequently used analogies equating natural/material principles or conditions with spiritual ones, as Woodhouse increasingly does over the course of his career. Woodhouse thus participates in what Mayhew demonstrates to be a prevalent strategy in eighteenth-century garden description. More generally, the use of garden landscapes as sites of consolation, resignation and potential revelation, particularly of the religious variety, is conventional. As John Dixon Hunt remarks, ‘No landscape garden of the eighteenth-century was complete without its hermitage or even its hermit’.26 Rural retirement to garden spaces was frequently theologically inspired. This may explain why poetry such as Woodhouse’s lacks appeal for Marxist and new historicist critics. While Woodhouse uses religion as the basis of his critique of the corruptions of wealth, he frequently supports his attack on the upper classes with evidence of their poor stewardship of nature. Because Woodhouse so willingly and frequently submits himself to God, his politics do not fulfil a modern reader’s hope to find a neat turn to nature to justify proletarian liberation. While liberal modern readers might find his moral message unattractive or even offensive, one might argue that Woodhouse’s increasing emphasis on the spiritual significance of nature anticipates contemporary forms of environmentalism that celebrate the sacred in nature (although the sacred spirit in nature is, generally speaking, not the patriarchal, hierarchical Christian deity). Woodhouse consistently imposes Christian theological

52


significance on his natural surroundings, and we cannot dismiss this as merely evidence of his false consciousness. Mayhew offers an important corrective in this respect: Modern incomprehension of the consistent personification of landscape elements (to raise them to the human/moral sphere) and discomfort with the continued injection of the deity into landscape discussions cannot be taken as a gauge of the sincerity with which these statements could be made or the enthusiasm with which they could be read in eighteenth-century England. The presuppositions which guided political and intellectual debate at this time made moves such as personification, allegory and linkage to other discourses entirely acceptable and, indeed, to be expected if landscape was to focus as a centre of intellectual concern.27 Such cautions are essential when analyzing the representations of garden spaces in Woodhouse’s magnum opus, wherein the Book of Nature is decidedly a religious work. Woodhouse’s verse autobiography, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus was written during the 1790s, but because it expresses radical political positions (all of which were grounded in his zealous Methodism), as well as its potentially libellous descriptions of Elizabeth Montagu, the approximately 29,000-line, seventeen-chapter epic was only published in full in 1896 in an edition brought forward by Woodhouse’s grandson.28 It was published, but in partial form, pseudonymously, in 1814.29 As becomes clear in this poem, the hope voiced in his writing of the 1760s – that shared aesthetic preferences could override social differences – wholly disappears. In his autobiography, Woodhouse writes bitterly of how aristocratic landscapes exploit and disenfranchise rural labourers. His tone and rhetoric are dramatically different from his earlier more conciliatory approach. The rich are now a ‘wretch’d brood’ whose emparkments destroy the ‘simple Hovel—Hut—or sheltering Shed’ of the small holder.30 Just as devastating to the labouring poor, the rich enclose their gardens and other parcels, taking away what Woodhouse construes as everyone’s God-given right to some share in the earth’s bounty. He admonishes the rich to be alert to the debts they owe to the labourers: They fence Your Gardens—force Your fruits to grow— And will not You some petty patch bestow, Where Industry may find its frugal dish,


53

While God gives you Game—ven’son—fowls—and fish? They dress Your meadows—fertilize Your field; And ought not You some small inclosure yield, Where each may range, or rest, when Sundays shine, Look round their little spot, and cry—’tis Mine? (3: lines 763–70) Woodhouse protests enclosure in ways that ought to be of interest to political critics and agricultural historians, although many may be daunted by the length and sometimes fanatical tone of moral exhortation that predominates in much of the poem. Woodhouse is clear about his feelings on the misappropriation of the land by the rich. But to a modern reader, his politics of land use in the poem as a whole may seem highly inconsistent. For example, Woodhouse strongly objects to the gentry’s decision to seize the land to render it unproductive (or as a space to graze the ever-objectionable race horses). The land provides sustenance to rich and poor, and the decision to conserve the land as ‘wild’, so as to keep it available for pursuits such as hunting, inspires Woodhouse’s moral indignation. In a passage that revisits Shenstone’s productively beautiful ferme ornée, he writes in praise of land that is fertile and productive rather than ornamental but fallow. The Leasowes is beautiful because: No cropless Park, or Down, or Forest, drear, Encourage pomp, or Melancholy, here! No Dome dismantled; field, or fence, destroy’d, To stimulate a Lord’s or Prince’s, pride! No flocks, or herds, exchang’d for beasts of chace; A Monarch’s stigma, and a Realm’s disgrace! No wilderness where horse and hound may fly, The Puppy’s pastime, and the Madman’s joy! No tangled brakes supplant pure wheaten store— Nor, stead of milk and honey, human gore— Instead of cots, inclos’d, abandon’d dells— Instead of rustic sonnets, raving yells— Nature reduc’d to savage state agen, Excluding culture, and expunging Men! (1: lines 976–89) Woodhouse’s ideal landscape is not a wilderness, but a place carefully and constantly tended by humans; his Eden is both garden and farm. His notion of divine order, revealed in nature and maintained by humanity, is paralleled in his poem’s use of the couplet form, which imposes

54


linguistic order and regularity. Woodhouse’s debt to Pope exhibits itself, even in a poem that otherwise testifies to a more Romantic sensibility, with its interest in how nature shapes the growth of the poet’s mind. Caring for nature is Woodhouse’s moral duty, as his description of his efforts to avoid harming any other living creature demonstrates: He watch’d each living Creature’s woe and weal; And shunn’d, with shame their suff’ring frames to wound, Where Wisdom show’d such pow’r, and skill profound; (1: lines 1691–3) Bloomfield and Clare shared such sensibilities, but Clare was an avid fisherman, and Bloomfield’s Giles destroys birds and their nests. Woodhouse, by contrast, spares every creature including insects: He ne’er from Passion—Whim—Caprice—or Pride, Nor, to indulge a wanton, froward, Will, Pursued poor Flies to persecute, or kill; But, that Life’s blessings they should longer share, Oft freed their wings from Spider’s tangling snare. (1: lines 1696–1701) The poet also eschews fishing because of its potential cruelty to the fish, ‘Lest the barb’d steel the torn line might retain,/Fixt in rent jaws, to kill with lingering pain!’ (1: lines 1716–17). Unlike Bloomfield – or even Wordsworth – Woodhouse protests the harm done to birds. His avatar in the poem, Crispin, lovingly cares for them instead: No harmless Birds pursued in brutal quest, Or pillaged eggs, or young; or spoil’d their nest, But flew to feed them in the wintry storm, Or hugg’d them to his heart, to make them warm! (1: lines 1718–21) The subsequent passage details how Crispin also despises cockfighting, dog-fighting and hunting of all kinds. So solicitous is he of the birds and beasts that he would rather: ‘Thro’ road circuitous, on tiptoe, stray/Than wake a Lamb which slumber’d in his way’ (1: lines 1738–9). All of this Woodhouse explains through Crispin’s unwavering Christian faith, which leads the poet to make an argument that appears anticipatory of more modern notions of animal consciousness:


55

He wish’d no conscious Creature e’er might miss Its amplest portion of embodied bliss; Well knowing all Things form’d, by Providence, With pow’rs of motion and with proofs of sense, Whether they crawl, or creep, run, fly, or swim, Experience’d pains and pleasures much like Him— And He who made them part of His pure plan, To taste the sweets of Life as well as Man, Will, with strict justice vindicate their cause, Against the reasoning brutes that break His Laws. (1: lines 1744–53) Alongside passages such as these, however, we find an equally long passage praising the work of mines and miners. Thus, while Woodhouse sees it as his duty to protect and preserve non-human living creatures, he does not yet view the earth itself as worthy of similar care and respect. Despite differences between Crispin’s environmental politics and those of many modern readers, his reverence for the Book of Nature, a Book that is most clearly legible in the gardens of good and noble landowners such as Shenstone, Lyttelton and Lord Dudley Ward (whom he also praises in his Lucubrations) is unwavering. The Book of Nature, more so than the Scriptures it supplements, inspires Woodhouse’s avatar to the vocation of poetry. Like other labouring-class geniuses, Crispin discovers his talents early and in direct relation to his heightened sensibility towards his natural environment. As a mere youth: . . . he turn’d his leisure time To Nature’s exhibitions—most sublime! To seek acquaintance with its varied store— Its mysteries most profound, in part explore— Thence gathering knowledge, free from care, or cost, Let scarce a single sand of Life be lost! (2: lines 589–94) Just as Wordsworth would later admonish, Crispin lets nature be his teacher. But Woodhouse employs the emblem of the Book of Nature far more literally: ‘The leaves of Earth’s large folio, eager, turn’d/And, from each nascent line some science learn’d’ (2: lines 595–6). He has no need for any formal education, beyond looking at the natural world around him, which serves as a ‘Rich source for Science! endless fund for Arts!’ (2: line 604). The ultimate lesson he learns takes him beyond the terrestrial and towards the transcendental, as Crispin finds that ‘ . . . as

56


far as Sense, and Reason, reach,/God’s Wisdom, Pow’r, and Goodness, grav’d on each!’ (2: lines 605–6). Woodhouse’s use of the figure of the Book of Nature is highly conventional. More innovative descriptions of the poet’s experience of nature are found in passages that move from expressing the poet’s relationship to nature with an abstract metaphor to those describing his complete sensory engagement with his environment. Like Bloomfield and Clare, Woodhouse savours the pleasures of scents and sound. In lines that make a strong olfactory and auditory appeal, Woodhouse details how Crispin takes pleasure in . . . drinking raciest draughts of rosey health; While fully feasting hearing, sight, and smell, From warbling bow’r, hale height, and odorous dell, Pure Air, suffus’d with every rich perfume, In field, and wood, from bud, and leaf, and bloom, His nostril’s snuff’d, that fann’d the vital flame, That urg’d Life’s tide more strong thro’ all his frame, While fascinating fugues, entranc’d his ears, In symphonies more sweet than fancied spheres; Which, thro’ the skies, in liquid cadence run, To greet, with grateful songs, the new wak’d Sun; Till all the heav’nly vault with fragrance fill’d, And ever-varying strains, his bosom thrill’d; Suspending all his pow’rs with two-fold flood, Pour’d, pure, from each glad hedge-row, grove, and wood! (2: lines 682–96) Although the poet is frequently disposed to moralize the landscape, Woodhouse here shows that he is well attuned to the pleasures of the senses. Woodhouse also recognizes how the visual can predominate in experiences of nature: But oft, by fits, on visual beauties bent, His nostrils miss’d each aromatic scent; His ears, unbrac’d, forgot each blissful sound, While wondering eyes rang’d all Creation round (2: lines 697–700) The visual has tremendous pleasures, and Woodhouse demonstrates throughout the poem his mastery of the conventions of visual


57

description. But by offering alternative modes of experiencing nature, Woodhouse reaches towards an expanded aesthetic. Such an aesthetic is not necessarily linked to his labouring-class background, and in the passage in question, he does not present Crispin’s ability to have this engagement as resulting in any way from his being ‘closer to nature’ as the son of a tenant farmer. Nevertheless, in this, his last and most ambitious poem, Woodhouse becomes more vehemently egalitarian in his opinions about the rights of members of the different ranks of society to take pleasure in nature – provided, of course, they have the moral fitness. Spiritual piety takes precedence over social status as Woodhouse’s opinions grow more politically radical. The poem devotes many lines to a tirade against the corruption of the rich, but as Woodhouse becomes more explicit about his politics, he frames his views in religious and moral terms. Woodhouse’s description of his struggles with Elizabeth Montagu, in particular, a topic which takes up nearly half of the poem, provides an important contrast to his earlier writings, particularly in terms of how the garden becomes a site of social and theological divisions. Labelling Montagu ‘Vanessa Scintilla’, his attack on every aspect of her character ensured that the poem could never be published in full in his lifetime. Woodhouse has much to say about her character (haughty), her morals (corrupt) and her intellectual ability (puny). Woodhouse opines about how, while he was in charge of caring for her Berkshire estate Sandleford, he was trotted out at parties as a curiosity to amuse the guests as resident peasant poet. Perhaps Montagu fancied herself Queen Caroline. Unlike Duck under Caroline’s patronage, Woodhouse did not write while he was in Montagu’s employ. He does, as he claims in the poem, make every effort to execute his numerous other duties fully and faithfully, despite how he was treated. Woodhouse describes his efforts to oversee her farms and his excellent husbandry of the natural resources under his care. He follows the wisdom he inherited from his parents and routs out weeds, drains marshy areas and drives away the gypsy camps. While he must protect the fields from marauding birds, given his disdain for harming animals, he demonstrates remorse for driving these away, and deputizes another to take up the unpleasant task of trapping and killing them. His practices render good yields, but matters take a turn for the worse when Scintilla greedily demands that the land be made even more productive and enforces various experimental schemes for improvement. Crispin, unlike his avaricious patroness, realizes that there is a limit to the earth’s bounty and that such schemes will ultimately damage the land. Just as he had

58


criticized enclosure earlier in the poem, he also satirizes the fads driving agricultural ‘improvement’. The scathing passage descrying how he was compelled to implement his employer’s foolish plans is worth quoting in its entirety:

Each weak and idle whim—each wild-goose chace, That Fribbles blunder o’er, or Fools embrace— That theoretic Dunderheads adore, Or injudicious Booby slabbers o’er, Must by our hapless Hero be essay’d, To learn, complete, the agricultural trade. All half-inform’d Philosophists suppose, In whose bleak brains each cold conundrum grows; Or Fancy-Farmers’ vanity invents, To grace the glebe, and raise the conjur’d rents. All wild and paltry projects must be tried, To nourish nonsense, and to pamper pride. Tried at vast risques, without a glimpse of gain, With prostrate credit, and increasing pain— By harsh behests, that best suit ignorant Hind, And trampling Tyrants, only, e’er enjoin’d: To gratify a greedy Dupe’s desire— Raise rash Ambition one gradation higher— Add one fresh flash to Admiration’s flame, The fond experimental Farmer’s claim; To wealth—ton—letters—boasted long before, One sounding brass, or tinkling cymbal, more! (4: lines 1313–34)

The rich flatter themselves that they are specially qualified to care for the land – a belief promulgated and promoted by poems such as Dodsley’s ‘Agriculture’. To counter such prideful delusions, the poem offers georgic advice about appropriate farming procedures, advice that falls on deaf ears. Unsurprisingly, Montagu’s efforts to increase productivity fail, and Crispin is wrongfully blamed. Woodhouse has numerous other complaints about the indignities he is made to suffer at Montagu’s hands, including her persecution of his faith, her requirement that he work on the Sabbath, her falsely accusing him of cheating her and her being miserly, dishonest, ignorant and immoral. But one grievance he cites is worse than any other: her treatment of


59

the garden he designed and tends. Gardening is a duty Crispin clearly delights in. He describes how he works with simple, indigenous plants to beautify the estate: Chief, Crispin’s tasks employ’d plebeian Trains, In corps collected from the neigbouring plains, To execute the schemes his pregnant Mind, For usefulness and beauty both, design’d. Bestow’d and disciplin’d the order’d Bands To polish and improve the bordering Lands— To cut, with winding Walks, thick woodlands through, And lead the Lake across the varied View— To spread Plantations o’er the haggard heath, Hiding its drear deformities beneath— To fill the fresh-form’d Shrubbery’s grassless ground, With colonies of strawberries, reddening round; Bestowing countless toils, and constant care, To keep all former plans, and prospects, fair; (9: lines 856–68) Woodhouse’s efforts to revamp the landscape are not on the grand scale. He envisions himself working with nature more intimately, unlike the celebrated garden designers whom he invokes ‘He claim’d no capabilities, like Brown;/Nor wish’d, like Wyatt, architectural crown’ (9: lines 872–3). Like his initial foray into farming, his work in the garden is an equally smashing success. But instead of being pleased with his efforts, Montagu, apparently from sheer spite and what he depicts as her characteristic greed, also ruins this landscape. Her intentions are particularly mercenary, as she plucks the flowers that Woodhouse so lovingly cultivated to sell for her own profit. ‘To serve her cunning, and to save her coin . . . . She pillag’d all the blooms, both sweet, and fair,/That flower’d, and flourish’d, under Crispin’s care’ (9: lines 988, 1002–3). Despite her high birth, she behaves like a member of that uncivilized mob who vandalized Shenstone’s property in the 1750s. Although she has social status, she is unable to appreciate nature’s beauty seeing it only as an instrument for her profit. She is thus unfit for her position. She is not, moreover, the exception that proves the rule. As Woodhouse explains, the current social hierarchy has no basis in the actual moral worth of the individual, as Montagu and her friends demonstrate. She is, Woodhouse puns, completely ‘uncultured’. His outrage is clear in the passage describing her crimes:

60


The rich Carnations that his care had nurs’d As Mischief’s martyrs feel, her victims, first; When she, her Friends, with spiteful purpose, led, To pluck their beauties from their humble bed, In tyrant triumph on their bosoms borne To strike the troubled Bard with cruel scorn (9: lines 1046–51) Although Woodhouse acknowledges that she owns the land upon which the garden grows, he questions her right to cull these particular fruits, which he feels his labours have given him some right to preserve: Her’s, truly, was the lean uncultur’d soil, But was not quit-rent paid by care and toil? Completely paid to Reason, Sense, and Taste, By forming Eden from a rueful Waste? Were not carnations—roses—pinks—and stocks, Better than thistles—nettles—dwale—and docks? And pleasant odours, where a Lady dwells More grateful than gross filth, or fetid smells? Nor could the arbitrary Tyrant trace Faint right or title to the flowery Race, For every fragrant, fair, and beauteous Breed, Were free donations from a Friend indeed. (9: lines 1052–63) In Montagu’s defence, flowers such as carnations, roses and pinks actually benefit from being cut frequently. Deadheading ensures they produce more blooms.31 But it appears that it is the issue of her then selling the flowers she cuts, instead of simply enjoying them, that most rankles Woodhouse. Even worse than this, in an exhibition of the basest form of hypocrisy, although she destroys the flowerbeds for her own profit, she tyrannically forbids Woodhouse from walking in the garden and enjoying it during his Sunday leisure. She accuses Woodhouse of using the excursion as a means to steal from her, taking the flowers that she wishes to sell for profit. In a passage that also reveals Woodhouse’s fuller sensory appreciation of nature and his continued and deft use of the metaphor of the Book of Nature, he writes in defence of himself and a friend that They only wander’d round the woods, and dells, To greet their sights, and gratify their smells. They were not Coxcombs—Savages—or Brutes,


61

That pillag’d shrubs, and flow’rs, and pilfer’d fruits— They only read clear labels Heav’n inscribes On the fair fronts of Nature’s tongueless tribes! Just trac’d the types of Heav’n’s Pow’r and Wisdom weaves But ne’er to gratify wish—whim—nor rage, Stole frontispiece, nor tore one title page. Just gaz’d upon the paintings God imprints, Explor’d their fair complexions, features, shapes, But plann’d no plots, nor schemed rude, cruel, rapes— They only view’d those charms that always lie Uncover’d, to the ken of every eye— They only took those tempting spoils as prey, Which ev’ry passing breeze would waft away; (9: lines 1092–110) Woodhouse only takes away the scents and scenes, to which not even Montagu can lay claim. In the lines that follow, he makes explicit that all have equal rights to enjoy nature’s sensory beauty. From there, it is not far to go before he moves to defend other basic human rights, and his politics, while still devout, take a levelling turn. The snide allusion to Burke, with the adjective ‘swinish’ at line 1137 of the following passage, asserts an argument linking aesthetic capacities to other kinds of privileges claimed by rank: But ought a Clown, with like Companion, rude, On Scenes, so sacred, daringly intrude? Shall vulgar Ignorance dare those haunts invade For Knowledge—Learning—Wit—and Wisdom—made? Shall beastly Boors those hallowed paths explore Which Taste, and Genius, trod but just before? Shall Ignorant Penury trace the tracks where Wealth E’er paced for pleasure, or patroled for Health? Loath’d Rustics’ footsteps thus presume to tread Where Fame and Fashion, Lords and Ladies led? Such swinish nostrils seek to snuff the scent, Solely for noble Births and Noses meant? (9: lines 1127–38) The passage is rhetorically framed as a series of questions, but the answer is clear. The garden is no longer the utopian space that Shenstone made possible, where appropriate tastes in natural beauty could allow someone like Woodhouse to transcend his social station. The presence of a woman in the garden (and the gender politics of this drama will have to remain,

62


for the present, unexplored) becomes the vehicle for a fall from Woodhouse’s earlier vision of a landscape where plebeian and polite poets could together enjoy the beauties of the earth. Woodhouse would, after much persecution, leave Montagu’s employ and have his revenge in this ‘novel in verse’. In his later writing, Woodhouse continues to illustrate the transformations in self-taught writing about rural topics. It was not merely self-taught poets, of course, who began to draw attention to how picturesque gardens deracinated and impoverished rural inhabitants. By the later part of the eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith had brought such a critique into the mainstream of polite poetry in his ‘Deserted Village’. In the last decades of the eighteenth century other labouring-class poets wrote about the failures of garden spaces to bring a wished-for social equality based on a common aesthetic appreciation of nature. Like Woodhouse, Ann Yearsley saw herself barred from garden spaces privileged by poetry. As a woman and a labourer, she was doubly excluded from gentlemanly landscapes. She too writes of that marginalization, one that her poetry fails to discursively overcome. ‘Written on a Visit’, from Yearsley’s second collection, Poems on Various Subjects (1787), details her excursion to Twickenham and her rapturous and appropriate aesthetic responses to its beauties. Donna Landry notes that Yearsley turns to Twickenham because it ‘served Pope well as a retreat from public criticism, and so will serve her as a retreat from everyday hardship’.32 Yet the poem’s concluding stanzas deny that hope: Yet, Precept! shall thy richest store be mine, When soft’ning pleasure would invade my breast; To thee my struggling spirit shall resign; On thy cold bosom will I sink to rest. Farwel, ye groves! and when the friendly moon Tempts each fair sister o’er the vernal green, Oh, may each lovely maid reflect how soon Lactilla saw, and sighing left the scene.33 As Landry argues, what forces Yearsley to depart is the recognition that the idealized and serenely unproductive landscape ‘cannot mean for her what it meant for Pope . . . there is a difference between the liberties that a financially secure poet with many powerful friends can take in verse and the liberties that a Lactilla can afford’.34 Yearsley was never as sanguine as Woodhouse that innate taste could overcome social inequities.


63

The making of garden spaces a site for class conflict is underscored in a 1791 poem by John Learmont, ‘The Petition of the Journeymen Gardeners of Scotland . . . to the Nobility and Gentry of these Realms’. Just as Aram had in the early part of the century, Learmont is explicit in the opening stanzas in making sure the gentlemanly viewer or reader is fully aware of who is responsible for his beauteous prospects. In fullthroated dialect verse, Learmont reveals that labour is behind even what appears to be a non-working landscape: Look round amang your balmy bowers,— Thae smiling witnesses are ours;— An’ a’ the family of flowers Attest our hand, Do cause their scentit innate powers Fairer expand.35 While the gentry may enjoy the scenery at their leisure, Learmont reminds them that In short, whate’er’s sublime or great, Or worth while seein’ round your seat, Or renders nature’s dress complete, To cleek the een, We do, an’ toil ’neath streams o’ sweat Baith morn an e’en. (1: lines 43–8) Learmont’s inventory of what the gardeners’ work affords allows him to introduce a practical argument to raise the gardeners’ wages. To further his point, he details what else the ‘grit fock’ waste their money upon, money that should rightfully be paid to the gardeners. Learmont provides a more ‘realistic’ portrayal of how garden spaces are produced. He unmasks the labour needed to create the artifice of the unworked landscape. At the same time, he understands the theoretical, aesthetic principles behind that work: What wad avail Corinthian order Gif near it nettles shed disorder? Or frowin’ to its base or border Rude nature a’ Her quagmires—stagnant pools like ordure— Did to us shaw? (1: lines 49–54)

64


Learmont knows both classical order and nature’s quagmires and has no illusions about the effort needed to reconcile the two. Yet if these two contraries might be reconciled, might the gardeners and the ‘Lords, Dukes, Princes’ for whom they work also be? If the differences between master and servant cannot be resolved, Learmont insinuates another means of blurring class distinctions. Addressing the ladies for the first time in the poem, Learmont writes: An’ ye’ fair ladies i’ your bowers, Whase charms eclipse the fairest flowers, Come an’ spend a’ ye’re orrow hours ’Mang groves an’ glades; An’ we will ever bend as yours The Gardener Lads. (2: lines 49–55) If the gardeners’ demands are not met, and perhaps even if they are, the gardeners hold the ability to threaten the legitimacy of the lord’s patrimony, throwing into question the purity of aristocratic bloodlines. Even when they did not write directly political poetry as Learmont does, labouring-class poets frequently questioned the rights of certain classes to claim privileged views of nature. Their impulse in the earlier part of the century was often to elevate themselves alone to the gentleman’s prospect, as in the case of Duck, Dodsley, Jones and Woodhouse. However, by the end of the century, we begin to see a more explicit expression of the desire for the general human equality symbolized by a prelapsarian garden, as in Learmont’s poem. As Learmont unequivocally asserts in the epigraph to his poem: ‘The FATHER of all MEN was a GARDENER’.

3 Heavenly Prospects: Views From Clifton and Cliffden

Sure there are Poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon, we therefore may suppose Those made not Poets, but the Poets those. And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court, So where the Muses and their train resort, Parnassus stands; if I can be to thee A Poet, thou Parnassus art to me. Sir John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill’ (1642), the first modern English prospect poem, opens with a declaration of how the work of the poet transforms nature into ‘landscape’ – land shaped, modified and mediated by the artist’s vision.1 Looking out from his elevated vantage point, the poem’s speaker reflects upon the scenes beneath him, representing them as they appear before him now and recalling the role they played in history. Historicizing his representation of the landscape, Denham makes a Royalist argument which David Fairer argues, ‘tests out at a local level the state’s capacity to harness into an effective economy those potentially competing forces: freedom and obedience, change and continuity, individual and social good, the arts of war and the arts of peace’.2 In transforming the view around him through the device of the concordia discors, the poet is also transformed. While Denham’s poem serves a variety of ideological purposes for king and country, it is also a vocational poem. Because he writes about natural scenery, transforming it into poetry that performs geo-historical work, the poet’s identity is linked 65

66


with a particular conception of nature illustrated in the oft-quoted lines addressed to the Thames: O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full. (lines 189–92) Denham’s strategies are imitated in the subsequent history of British prospect poetry by Pope, Dyer and Jago as well as numerous labouringclass poets. Although its politics may not be recognizable as modern ecopolitics, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the prospect poem stands as a dominant form for writing about landscape, contemporary social questions and poetic vocation. The prospect topos takes on an additional resonance for labouring-class poets whose vocational questions were distinct from those of refined poets. Contemporary reviews of labouring-class poetry, as well as the apologetic prefaces produced by patrons, editors and the writers themselves, offer a recurrent concern that in taking up the pen, the poet is attempting to rise above his or her station. The geographical elevation that the poet must assume to write a prospect poem raises explicit concerns for their largely bourgeois readers, as poetical ascents could be symbolic of social ones. In response, labouring-class poets frequently adopt a variety of tactics in anticipation of any accusations of social climbing via their literary pursuits on hills and mountains. Prospect poetry thus becomes a site for poets to confront their ambitions, as it literalizes the question of rising and provides the space for turning to nature, natural genius and the source of that genius in God to justify the poet’s vocation. For example, in 1781 an author who styles himself ‘An Unlettered Bard’ produced an unremarkable poem entitled ‘Verses Written Under a Hill’. Populated with pastoral deities and overrun with lambkins, the poem is worthy of attention because of where it is set: under a hill. The poet writes: Here in a frock of motley grey, Much tarnish’d by each sultry ray Of Sol’s resplendent beams; I rest below the verdant hill, Where giddy sports a tinkling rill, To meditate new themes.3

Heavenly Prospects

67

The poet’s unlettered state (as helpfully indicated by his frock) confines him to experiencing the landscape from a lower position, precluding the expansive view of the countryside favoured by polite poets. While the scope of the poem is far less ambitious than that of Thomson’s Seasons or Jago’s Edge-hill, it neatly illustrates one way that labouring-class poets respond to mainstream poetic conventions for writing about the countryside. Simply reversing the point of view was not the only method that the poets employed to work within given generic expectations while also transforming them. To varying degrees and with varying effects, labouring-class poets tried a variety of strategies to remind readers how their social position led them to produce poetry that resembles but revises what was produced by their more refined contemporaries. Modern critics, from Raymond Williams and John Barrell to Tim Fulford, Jacqueline Labbé and Rachel Crawford, agree that eighteenthcentury topographical poets use the elevated perspective to separate themselves from rural nature, privileging the visual to create distance between observer and observed, symbolically asserting control over the countryside in ways that were both classed and gendered.4 The literal elevation of the poet’s prospects above what he (or more rarely she) depicts has ideological implications. As Crawford comments, this can be heard in the pun created by the word ‘prospect’. She writes that ‘[B]uilt into this concept is . . . the double entendre . . . in which the viewer’s apprehension of space presupposes an analogue in the viewer’s expectations of fortune’.5 The elevated view belongs to those with social and economic opportunities and the poets who wrote for them. Fulford observes further that ‘[T]hrough the prospect-view, the propertied classes were able to present their political dominance as confirmed by the natural scene’.6 Demonstrating the appropriate aesthetic response to nature served as ‘a mark of the viewer’s gentlemanliness’ and ‘a criterion for the exercise of legitimate social and political power’.7 It might be supposed that self-taught poets, with their more straitened socio-economic expectations, would remove the depiction of distances, offer readers a greater sense of immediacy and be more ‘realistic’. As I have been arguing, however, it would be misleading to claim that, on the whole, labouring-class poets were ‘closer to nature’ simply because many had worked as agricultural labourers. Regardless of the poet’s social background, the human relationship to nature is always mediated by language, although how that linguistic mediation occurs will vary. A good deal of labouring-class poetry about nature remains more imitative of mainstream trends than overtly resistant. Most poets elected not to flout conventions as neatly as the ‘Unlettered Bard’, who simply looked up at

68


and not down upon the scenery. Regardless of the particular technique of perspective, in labouring-class prospect poetry, the poet is always conscious of where he or she is placing him or herself, geographically, socially and, in terms of his or her relationship to particular details of the scene, to the literary tradition and to national culture. This chapter explores how labouring-class poets engage with the aesthetic and social distances figured in natural settings and use these exercises to understand the source and purpose of their own literary endeavours. Prospect poetry is prime real estate for self-fashioning. As Fairer and other critics assert, however, the primary ideological work of this genre focuses as much upon issues of national identity as upon poetic identity, often through its mapping the local onto the national (although this trend was increasingly resisted by the early nineteenth century). Writing of Jago and other mid-century prospect poets, for example, Fairer notes that ‘[I]n the tradition of Denham and Pope they gave the prospect poem an expansive economy that worked from small localities to identify a wider regional character that could help to constitute a national idea of continuity’.8 Labouring-class poets who engaged this particular topos were fully cognizant of the tradition inherited from Denham, and they were aware of the obligations to connect the regional and the national. To this historical and political agenda, they frequently added an overtly religious one. Religion offered labouringclass poets consolation for their sense of oppression in the promise of an eventual spiritual elevation. If the poet did not have good financial prospects in this world, with devotion and piety he or she could look for better prospects in the next. The prospects seen from the hills on which the poets find themselves often open onto a spiritual not a temporal Paradise. Mount Zion is invoked alongside of Mount Parnassus. For many plebeian poets, finding God in Nature confirmed their hope for salvation and for rewards that might not be received for their poetry or other labours. Although it remains mostly implicit, from this particular reading of the landscape, it was not far to a more levelling and latitudinarian point of view, one which turned to religion to eradicate social distances within the ranks of society. Christian morality allowed the poets to move beyond simply claiming an aesthetic pleasure in the landscape. Even more so than with the garden landscapes discussed in the previous chapter, the prospect genre authorizes poets to draw theological and political conclusions from aesthetic experiences. To better explain the different approaches that labouring-class poets take towards the hills in their poetry, this chapter is organized by specific locations and the prospects seen of or from them. The first section focuses

Heavenly Prospects

69

on Clifton near Bristol and surveys how four poets – Henry Jones, Thomas Chatterton, Ann Yearsley and J.F. Bryant – each write about their differing prospects from this site. These four writers exemplify the varied methods that labouring-class poets took when they worked in the genre. The second section examines in detail William Lane’s several poems devoted to the landscape around Cliffden (or Cliveden), the estate built in 1666 by the second Duke of Buckingham. Lane’s work is of particular interest in so far as he relies upon the landscape to develop a clear theological argument that has unambiguous political implications. Lane’s work is exemplary of how later eighteenth-century labouring-class poets, including James Woodhouse or George Woodley, increasingly turn to principles of theology to argue for social equality. The chapter closes with a brief survey of later Romantic and Chartist poets’ contributions to this genre, discussing works by William Hersee, Robert Story and Ebenezer Elliott. ∗∗∗ Prospect poetry, more than any other subgenre of topographical writing, is poetry that considers human imprints on a site in history. The genre is concerned with time as much as space and contemplates the interaction of the human and the natural in a dynamic fashion. Fairer remarks that ‘[T]opographical poets are interested in how things evolve, decline, or grow. The principle of variety becomes a challenge, and their poems tend to celebrate diversity, as if the more multifarious the text’s fabric is, the stronger is the spirit holding it all together’.9 By taking in a prospect view, poets seek unity in variety, aiming towards the ideal of illustrating concordia discors. The harmonious resolution of various events and locations is a common motif. What often serves to impose that coherence is a superior external power, usually taking the form of an earthly or sometimes a heavenly king. Canonical works such as Denham’s or Jago’s respond to threats to hierarchical power, specifically kingship. They react with calls to rise above, quite literally, the contentious terrain caused by civil war or other political strife to find national and ideological union by reaffirming allegiance to power. One of the earliest plebeian attempts in this genre does not stray far from Denham’s influential model, adapting only slightly its techniques and devices. Stephen Duck’s Caesar’s Camp; or St. George’s Hill (1755) excavates the terrain for monitory lessons from the past, as was expected within the genre, while linking a critique of Roman colonization in Britain to the current destruction of the landscape. The majority of the text is devoted to the poet’s dream (inspired by the remains of the

70


Roman camp of the title) of an imprisoned Druid who berates a Roman captain for his rapacious waste of English natural resources. The Druid’s diatribe addresses the soldier as an ‘Illustrious Robber!’10 He demands to know why his country’s imperial ambitions extend to Britain. Significantly, the Druid’s anger over Roman expansion derives from his outrage over its environmental impact: ‘Must all our crops be ravish’d from the land?/Must all our forests fall beneath your hand?’ (p. 15). Despite the destruction of nature around him, the Druid consoles himself with his vision of a future where Britons will reclaim and replenish a landscape devastated by war and conquest: I see those future times—I see, with joy, Those who can faster plant than thou destroy. Thy Camp, where now embattled legions shine, Shall bear the spreading beech and tow’ring pine. Roll swift ye years—produce the men of taste, To crown with verdant woods the barren waste. (p. 15) Disappointingly for the modern green reader, instead of elaborating his critique of the environmental ravages of imperialism, Duck follows these cautions with an inventory of the different improvements that select eighteenth-century landowners have made to their estates. Duck is not Goldsmith. He chooses not to link the damages of Roman conquest with the damages being done by British colonialism, an enterprise that contributes to the maintenance of those very estates whose wise, tasteful ‘improvement’ of nature the poem proceeds to praise. Duck’s use of the prospect poem to comment obliquely on colonialism, only to lapse into an extended homage to local nobility, was not the only example of such a seemingly self-contradictory strategy. Henry Jones is perhaps the first plebeian poet to make a prospect the sole topic for a long poem. His ‘Rath-Farnam’ predates Duck’s by six years. Jones would return to the hill topos throughout his prolific career, and he is unique among mid-century plebeian poets for his unabashed ambition and his lack of timidity about ascending socially. Although his early work demonstrates the humility and piety expected of writers from the lower orders, even in those first poems, Jones is unashamed of writing in search of patronage and elevating himself through his writing. Born in 1721 in Beaulieu, close to Drogheda in Ireland, Jones was first a bricklayer who worked his way to Dublin, probably by 1745. Not much is known of his early life and education.11 Although he wrote and shared his

Heavenly Prospects

71

poems with others in his native town, Jones made his first official appearance on the literary scene in 1745, with two poems: the first addressed to the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield (The Bricklayer’s Poem. Presented to his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant), the second to Chesterfield’s wife (The Bricklayer’s Poem, to the Countess of Chesterfield, on her Ladyship’s Saving the Soldiers from Being Shot). He is said to have encountered Chesterfield while employed in working on the parliament house. These two poems were calculated to secure patronage, and they were successful. By 1748, with Chesterfield’s help, Jones had relocated to London where he would live and publish for the remainder of his life. ‘Rath-Farnam’ appears in Jones’s debut collection of 1749, and his ideas about the natural order show his debt to Pope. The opening lines make clear the analogy between the social and the natural hierarchy, using the imagery of geographical elevation to naturalize the social scale: As in the moral World we, wond’ring, see Such diff’rent Stations, yet such just Degree; Which all contribute wisely to sustain The mutual Intercourse, and social Chain, Whose Links in regular Gradation fall, Whilst all on one, and each depends on all: Wise Nature, thus, proportions her Degrees, From Shrubs to Cedars, and from Brooks to Seas; As princely Dignities, exalted, rise, So lofty Mountains meet the bending Skies; Inferior Honours hold inferior State, As lesser Hills upon those Mountains wait12 Although Jones asserts the necessity of hierarchy, he also tries to equalize such distinctions, suggesting how the divisions among the different social stations and natural objects might be reconciled in a demonstration of that concordia discors ordained by a benevolent God. As he extrapolates in the ensuing lines which paraphrase the conclusion of Epistle I of Pope’s Essay on Man: Things great and small, if small and great there be, In Contrast stand; tho’ opposite, agree; The thund’ring Tempest and the rolling Whale, The Bee that murmurs in the Morning Gale,

72


All, all, one aptest Harmony combine, And speak the Author of their Frame, Divine! (lines 13–18) His imitation of Pope accomplished, it is another 10 lines before the reader is introduced to the particular site named in the title. Any actual description of the landscape is deferred until the concluding lines, and even then it is a landscape so generically idealized that it could exist anywhere and nowhere. The site’s geographical features are of the standard stock: Here, high with horrid Brows, o’erhang the Rocks, Beneath, lie Lawns out-stretch’d, and fleecy Flocks: The gloomy Thickets, and the op’ning Glade, The Arch magnific, and the clear Cascade (lines 83–6) Jones marshals poetic conventions formulaically. Yet this generic location is, as the title indicates, at least nominally in Ireland. On the one hand, by using the conventions of English poetry to depict an Irish locale, Jones may be said to grant the site the same dignity and importance as an English one, perhaps implying the equal worth of England and Ireland. Given how topographical poetry serves nationalist ends (and Pope’s Windsor Forest is exemplary in this regard), that Jones uses those same conventions to portray colonial terrain could imply a sense of national pride. This interpretation is countered by the fact that Jones ascribes the harmony of the scene (looking towards Dublin, or ‘Eblana’) to the presence of the English Lord Lieutenant, Stanhope. If Dublin has any classical beauties, it is only because of its colonial government. Eblana’s beauty and prosperity are due to its open embrace of colonial trade and submission to supposedly benevolent English governance. As Jones asserts, ‘And Health and Peace are hers; – for Stanhope reigns’ (line 40). The poem depicts an Anglo-Irish subject celebrating Ireland’s colonization, and the poem pays more attention to the presence of Chesterfield, his wife and other English gentry living in Ireland than it does to any particularities of the region they inhabit. That he likens such a landscape to Eden (‘In thee, Rath-Farnam, Eden’s Bloom revives’, [line 77]) places the poet’s self-interest before any opportunities to praise a distinctively Irish scene. For Jones, paradise is the prospect of social and financial elevation, thanks to would-be patrons who inhabit this landscape. The elevation he assumes for topographical observation metaphorically prepares him for the financial boost that

Heavenly Prospects

73

writing such prospect poetry was likely to bring. Unsurprisingly, after moving to England, Jones abandoned the practice of identifying both his Irish and his labouring-class origins as he did in his initial publications. While almost all eighteenth-century plebeian poets draw attention to their autobiographies as a part of their poetic self-fashioning, Jones is unique in his nearly complete omission of his life story from the majority of his later work. After his relocation to England, Jones continued to write topographical poetry. He also engaged critically and originally with other polite writers besides Pope. His The Vindication: or, Day-Thoughts on Wisdom and Goodness: Occasioned by the Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1753) answers Edward Young and satirizes the gloomy sententiousness of poems of retreat and retirement. While The Vindication is more properly a philosophical rather than a locodescriptive poem, it demonstrates Jones’s lively and contentious engagement with the literary culture of his age. As The Vindication illustrates, like other poets, including Collins, Gray or the Wartons, Jones shared a concern with moral issues, thus his landscapes were always, in some fashion, paysages moralisés. While other mid-century poets were retreating into nature for increasingly personalized or private reasons, Jones continued to see landscapes as sites for public debates. His motive in writing of them nevertheless remained his desire to associate with their socially superior inhabitants. The major poems that Jones produced during the last decade of his career were predominantly locodescriptive: Kew Garden: A Poem (1763, second edition 1767; discussed in the previous chapter); Vectis. The Isle of Wight: A Poem. In Three Cantos (1766); Clifton: A Poem in Two Cantos. Including Bristol and all its environs (1767); and Shrewsbury Quarry (1769). Visiting Clifton, the site of the popular Hotwells spa, Jones marshals some of the same moral lessons brought to bear in ‘Rath-Farnam’. He extends the requisite descriptive compliments to the local landowners and their estates and includes historical descriptions of the landscape’s associations with both Roman conquest and the Civil Wars. He demonstrates his acquaintance with Claude’s landscape painting, as well as Pope’s poetry (with some passages reading as paraphrases of Windsor Forest). However, Jones’s meditations on the nature of Health, its sources and causes, constitute a more innovative component of his otherwise conventional poem. Clifton is near the Hotwells which, like Bath, was a popular eighteenth-century retreat for those seeking the restorative powers of its waters. The Hotwells was primarily a summer retreat, visited between April and October, and particularly

74


recommended for young women suffering from consumption.13 After describing the Wells, Jones begins a lengthy panegyric to the allegorical figure of Health. Health is synonymous with the harmonious ordering of parts within a whole, a bodily manifestation of the expected concordia discors: Hail, health! thou harmony of parts and whole, Thou sweet consent of body and of soul, Who makes thy citadel the central heart, And sends rich succours thence to every part14 The spring at Hotwells near Clifton Hill is likened to the classical Castalian spring, the source of poetic inspiration, tended by the Muses on Mount Parnassus. Praising the salutary properties of the springs on Clifton Hill enables Jones to drink from the symbolic waters of one of the mythic sources of artistic creativity. Health is thereby linked to Imagination: Thee, goddess, thee the grateful muse would sing, And dip her deep in thy Castalian spring: Hail, thou fountains fair, inspiring health, Thou soul of rapture, and of reason’s wealth; (I: lines 230–3) Bodily health is also an important component in maintaining the social order, as its absence may have a levelling effect: ‘If thou art absent, gold but grieves the more,/And kings look up with envy at the poor’ (I: lines 236–7). As the passage illustrates, Health is necessary to the proper enjoyment of wealth and status, being the precondition for all other pleasures. Without it, wealth and status are meaningless. Health therefore becomes the most valuable of possessions, theoretically available to all classes of society. In practice, however, the popularity of spas such as the Hotwells indicates that Health was a possession that was becoming increasingly commodified and priced beyond the reach of the majority of the population. Clifton’s medicinal cordial connects it to another source of national health: Commerce. Bristol, as an important centre of eighteenth-century maritime trade, had the reputation of being a particularly commercially minded city, and it would seem to be a fortuitous location for a poet as mercenary as Jones to describe. Jones’s poem celebrates Commerce and imperial trade in a manner akin to Pope and Thomson. For Jones, just as the waters of the Hotwells bring physical well-being, the waters of

Heavenly Prospects

75

the Avon bring the nation the economic well-being that he asserts is the precondition for virtue and wisdom. Hail, commerce, hail! thou gate of ev’ry good, Who swells triumphant, like thy trading flood; Thy precious stores in countless values rise, They make us virtuous, and they make us wise (II: lines 255–8) According to Jones’s vision of Bristol’s contribution to the national economy (which conveniently overlooks the city’s active participation in the slave trade), commerce generates morality. It unifies nations and peoples. Through the benevolence that ‘naturally’ flows from wealth, it brings concord between rich and poor, with the rich disposing of the wealth they have gained in international trade to support hospitals to restore the health of the less fortunate. The wealthy and ‘naturally’ charitable citizens of Bristol: Mix sweet compassion with the toils of gain, And all the wants of sinking life sustain. Lift up infirmity with potent hand, And draw down blessings on a grateful land: (II: lines 269–72) In Jones’s eighteenth-century version of ‘trickle down’ economics, increased wealth translates to increased charity, and thus health is better distributed through the creation of hospitals and almshouses for the poor. The Hotwells remains a source of liquid Health primarily for the affluent, but the wealth-bearing waters of the Avon will indirectly lead to health for the poor. The social hierarchy is maintained even as the question of social inequality is addressed. Like Jones, Chatterton also emphasizes the theme of health in his poem on Clifton, making a more positive allusion to Jones’s work than he had in his response to Jones’s poem on Kew. Chatterton opens his short poem describing only the more privileged space of Clifton, ‘The lov’d retreat of all the rich and gay’.15 Chatterton’s vistas are more circumscribed than Jones’s, and his shorter poem begins with a much more personal and particularized perspective. Chatterton knows his purpose within this genre, as he states: ‘Here can I gaze, and pause, and muse between,/And draw some moral truth from ev’ry scene’ (lines 13–14). He must do more than experience aesthetic pleasure in nature’s beauty; he must draw some lesson from it.

76


Chatterton remarks on some of the same topographical features that Jones does, such as St. Vincent’s Rocks or Brandon Hill, as well as some of the sites of Civil War battles. He also includes an encomium to the benefits of commerce, but he does so with greater concision. His poem diverges from the more formulaic near its conclusion. Chatterton’s poem does not offer tribute to a local aristocrat and his estate, nor does it proclaim a royalist anthem. Instead, it celebrates the Shakespearean actor William Powell and mourns his death in 1769.16 In the closing lines, Chatterton’s survey of the area stops at Bristol Cathedral, where Powell is interred. Here he opines that No more at Clifton’s scenes my strains o’erflow, For the Muse, drooping at this tale of woe, Slackens the strings of her enamour’d lyre, The flood of gushing grief puts out her fire: (lines 107–10) His grief leads him to reject all of the anticipated themes and topics that the scene might otherwise inspire: Else would she sing of deeds of other times, Of saints and heroes sung in monkish rhimes; Else would her soaring fancy burn to stray, And thro’ the cloister’d aisle would take her way, Where sleep (ah! mingling with the common dust) The sacred bodies of the brave and just. (lines 111–16) Moreover, his emotional state physically depresses him, preventing the elevation required for a prospect poem, forcing the poet to retreat to lower ground: But vain th’ attempt to scan that holy lore, These soft’ning sighs forbid the Muse to soar. So treading back the steps I just now trod, Mournful and sad I seek my lone abode. (lines 117–20) The poem’s abrupt elegiacal turn halts the poet’s figurative flights of fancy through the landscape. The poem that began by extolling health ends with a sombre recognition of the inevitability of death. Although initially inspired by the landscape, the reminder of another artist’s death causes the muse to ‘droop’ and extinguishes the poet’s desire

Heavenly Prospects

77

to ‘soar’ not simply through this particular topos but instead checks Chatterton’s pursuit of his cherished antiquarian themes. The failure of poetry and of the otherwise salubrious location to revive Chatterton’s fellow artist reminds him of the limitations of art and of the limitations placed upon the artist. The poem ends on a personal rather than nationalistic note, one that appears to adversely affect the poet’s sense of vocation. Ann Yearsley’s prospect poem turns even bleaker, going further than Chatterton’s in troubling prospect poetry’s conventions through differences in perspective derived from gender and class. Donna Landry writes of Yearsley’s innovations that: the dominant consciousness of the poem is always a feminine one, though not so much a unified ‘self’ as a scattering of fragmentary female perspectives. Far from being at odds with the natural world, or seeking to dominate or exploit it in accordance with eighteenthcentury notions of progress and empire associated with the prospect poem, these female subjects find consolation and safety in the ‘inhuman’ world of natural forces. And the discursive passages on social and political matters address specifically sexual politics, especially the victimization of young women of fashion whose tragic stories are as well known to the ‘remote’ Lactilla as we might expect from the resident of a rising spa town.17 Yearsley’s ironic use of this site of a health spa to elegize the loss of her mother and the tragic fate of the madwoman Louisa extends Chatterton’s resignation about the uplifting possibilities he had expected to find in the genre. Yearsley herself had, in a later collection, written an ‘Elegy, on Mr. Chatterton’, and in that poem, she plants a rose from Clifton Hill upon his grave. Yearsley may have read his poem on Clifton and had its gloomy message in mind as she composed her own. Yearsley may also have read Jones’s poem. Like Jones, Yearsley’s muse climbs St. Vincent’s Rocks and visits the Hotwells. Yet in her poem, such scenes introduce a critique of the dangers of wealth. She articulates a more sceptical attitude towards the consequences of commerce, in particular, female Indolence. In her moralizing, Yearsley sees a direct threat to female health in the form of Fashion and Conceit, which she presents as consequences of wealth (as opposed to the Charity that Jones optimistically argued was the ‘natural’ result of riches). Her concern specifically for women’s well-being culminates in the lengthy passage devoted to ‘the fair Maniac’, Louisa, which concludes the poem. Sensationalist, sentimental tales like the Louisa episode were not uncommon within

78


descriptive poetry, particularly during the second half of the eighteenth century. Vignettes depicting feminine persecution and madness were frequently inserted into topographical verse to produce greater ‘variety’ and to facilitate moralizing (the most well-known example of this being Cowper’s Crazy Kate). The causes of Louisa’s loss of mental health (the oppressive patriarchal culture that first locks her away in a convent) and her subsequent resistance to charitable attempts to ‘cure’ her, link her to Yearsley (and Yearsley’s resistance to Hannah More’s condescending patronage), thereby politicizing the class relations of ‘Clifton Hill’. The proto-feminist politics that Landry explicates in the poem are quite different from the more overtly public tone adopted by Jones and, to a lesser extent, Chatterton. As Chatterton had, Yearsley depicts Clifton as a place where she comes to reflect on her status as a plebeian poet. Setting the poem’s opening scene in winter suggests Yearsley’s sense of the grimness of her own prospects as a milkmaid. The second half of the opening verse paragraph also singles out for opprobrium the ‘rough clown’ who has murdered the brothers of the ‘beauteous red-brest’, because he was incapable of responding to ‘Her song’ that ‘oft wak’d the soul to gentle joys’.18 Her fellow rustic inhabitants are insensitive to nature’s intrinsic beauties. As a poet, she is distinguished from the ‘clown’, as she later differentiates her verse from the ‘clumsy music’ and ‘vulgar dissonance’ of the sailors who participate in Bristol commerce. Just as Jones and Chatterton had aspired to do, she rises above those of her own class because of her refined sensibilities to nature and art. At the same time, the fate of the mundane songbird offers an ominous foreshadowing of the poet’s possible future, just as Chatterton’s resignation had brought an end to his interest in writing in other genres. The condition of the aspiring poet is the subject of J.F. Bryant’s poem about Clifton near Bristol, ‘Morning’ (1787). While not predominantly a prospect poem, it includes several prospect passages and is the most piously Christian in the moral lesson it draws from the landscape. A struggling clay-pipe maker, Bryant finds personal relief in his retreat into the countryside around Bristol. There he rhapsodizes about the beauties of nature, but he is ever mindful of how the wonders of creation should call us to praise the Creator. In describing the landscape, Bryant is less specific than his predecessors. He does not name particular locations, and the only indication given that the poet is actually on Clifton Hill comes at the conclusion, when his more generalized pastoralizing leads him not to a generic milkmaid, but a real one: Ann Yearsley. His poem pays homage to her, not to any landowner or wealthy

Heavenly Prospects

79

trader. He describes how Lactilla joins poetic and manual labour on Clifton Hill: Her easy task the ruddy-featur’d maid Begins, and each full udder to her pail Resigns its burthen, sweetly while she sings Her simple song of some inconstant swain, Or mournful fate of rural maids in love.19 The poem moves on to a full paean for Yearsley: O thou sweet muse! that oft on Avon’s banks Hast tun’d the harps, and taught th’ immortal verse Of Bristol bards—that partial didst inspire Lactilla’s numbers, while the rocky scene And Clifton’s villa’d heights she sung—yet deign To crown my invocation with thy smiles, While emulous I court thy sacred aid, And sing the various beauties of the Morn! (lines 60–7) The only person praised in Bryant’s poem, besides the Creator, is another plebeian poet, one whose moral song inspires the younger poet. Yearsley supplants the estate owner as the object of the poem’s tribute, and Bryant cements the association of Clifton with aspiring plebeian poets. Not only did Bryant address Yearsley; she also addressed him in verse. In ‘To Mr. ∗∗∗∗, An Unlettered Poet, On Genius Unimproved’, she advises him that if he wishes to rise with his genius, his themes must be Christian and religious, not classical: Ne’er hail the fabled Nine, or snatch rapt Thought From the Castalian spring; ’tis not for thee, From embers, where the Pagan’s light expires, To catch a flame divine. From one bright spark Of never-erring Faith, more rapture beams Than wild Mythology could ever boast.20 Although Yearsley is elsewhere less explicitly pious, she indicates here that if labouring-class poets wish to rise, to have new prospects through their poetry, their style and tone must be devout. Writing about the Hotwells spring instead of the Castalian spring on Mount Parnassus

80


necessitated a more self-effacing humility. Yearsley wrote about soaring flights of genius with great effectiveness (in poems such as ‘To Mrs. Montagu’ and ‘To Stella’). Here, she advises that genius should be reined in by an appropriate demonstration of piety and submission. The comparison of these four poets who wrote about the ‘same’ space demonstrates that for Jones and Chatterton, two poets who ambitiously wished to dissociate themselves from their labouring-class backgrounds, the prospect motif allowed them to imagine their social elevation through their connection to the scenes of wealth and culture that dot the landscapes they survey. Jones, as the most ambitious (and in his own day the most successful) of the four poets, mirrors most closely the themes and strategies of mainstream prospect poetry as it developed from Denham, through Dyer, Pope, Thomson and Jago. Chatterton’s less ambitious venture into the genre takes an elegiac turn at its conclusion, suggesting, through its focus on the death of a gifted actor, the limits to the powers and hopes that artistic abilities can grant. Yearsley’s landscape around Clifton is the most dramatically innovative, inverting several of the genre’s conventions. She resists imposing harmony and unity upon disorder through her focus on the emotional and psychological distress of her avatar, Louisa. Finally, while Bryant does not highlight the entropy in nature as his self-declared muse, Yearsley, does, his prospect and topographical poetry exemplifies an important element of the labouring-class tradition, namely the use of Christian themes, particularly in writing about the natural environment. ∗∗∗ William Lane may not have known Yearsley’s or Bryant’s work, but like them his topographical prospects were coloured with pious moralizing. Contrary to what Yearsley had advised, however, Lane’s earliest poem Cliffden (1792?) begins by relocating the classical trappings to his British location: No more on Grecian Plains, ye Muses sing! Nor on Parnassus Mount expand the Wing! With Raptures fly to Britain’s happy Shore, Unfeign’d Elisium here with Joy explore.21 After this invocation, and much as Yearsley and Bryant had done, Lane meditates upon his particular ability as ‘A Poor Labouring Man of Flackwell-Heath’ to represent this impressive scene. His supplications to the Muse draw attention to his low status even as he challenges those who might question his fitness for his task:

Heavenly Prospects

81

Assist, O Muse! Descriptive Aid impart, The noble Theme requires Poetic Art: The bare Attempt thy Beauties to define, Requires a Genius far surpassing mine; By why? the soaring Lark with warbling Throat, Doth not forbid the Robin’s feeble Note. Who would not Sing whom Gratitude inspired? Or who that’s with the like Affection fir’d. (lines 15–22) The problem of the appropriateness of the elevated prospect for the labouring poet hereafter forms a leitmotif in the poem. Lane knows his conventions as well as Jones does. But unlike Jones, he remains selfconscious about his mastery of literary language and form. Several lines later, Lane specifically describes his relationship to the poetics of altitude, likening himself to ‘the humble Daisy’ (line 44). He claims that this ‘lowly Situation’ (line 45) is the ‘State best suited to my feeble Muse’ (line 46). In case the analogy has not fully carried his point, Lane continues hoping that at least his personal modesty and choice of subject matter will improve his prospects: To each superior Genius I’d submit, And at their Feet a willing Pupil sit. Tho’ not deterr’d from Emulation’s Prize, May I with Prudence and with Caution rise; And as I’ve chosen no inglorious Theme, May I not do Injustice to its Fame. (lines 32–7) Like the ‘Unlettered Bard’ writing under the hill, Lane first symbolically lowers himself in order to make the climb required of any prospect poet. Lane’s exploration of the fitness a poet from ‘low’ origins to adopt a grander perspective transforms his poem from simply another exercise in imitation of Denham and Pope. By its conclusion, Cliffden is predominantly a vocational poem, detailing Lane’s search for an appropriate style and theme. Much like a labouring-class version of Milton’s Lycidas, the poem ends with the poet’s sketch of his ‘prospects new’ as a religious poet. The poem, then, is as much about a poetic and spiritual pilgrimage as it is about a particular landscape. According to Jago’s model, it is structured temporally by the passage of a single day, from sunrise to sunset, and follows the poet as he makes an actual and allegorical voyage up the side of the hill. In the course of that journey, the poet tests his skills in various genres lower on the literary hierarchy, such as the pastoral (in

82


lines 94–151), building his fitness for higher things. The poem prepares the reader to anticipate that the poet aspires only to be worthy to pen a prospect poem. But Lane aims even higher. The poet reaches the crest of the hill at Cliffden and fulfils the conventions of the prospect poem, patriotically praising King and country and rhapsodizing about the harmony of art and nature as he looks down on Windsor castle. These generic obligations fulfilled, the poem takes an innovative turn as the sun sets. Although the poet appreciates and admires the earthly paradise he views along the Thames, he rejects it within a more levelling theology. He writes in the concluding lines that like the fading sunlight, all earthly things decline and decay. He too will return to dust. These sobering reflections in view, the poet questions his motives: Then why, my Soul, with such Solicitude, Pursue the fleeting Charms, the transient Good; Soon that, or I, or both, our Exit make, My fond Resolves, and that fair Promise break. (line 593–6) From this scene, the poet turns to contemplate eternal paradise, finding his true vocation not as a topographical but as a theological poet. The final lines renounce terrestrial projects: Adieu, ye pleasing Scenes! diversify’d With all that Art or Nature could provide. May nobler Themes my serious Thoughts possess, And brighter Images my Mind impress: Howe’er unfit to attempt the Lyric Strain, May I a more exalted Gift obtain; May Grace divine my ev’ry Power prepare, The Song of Moses, and the Lamb to share. (lines 603–10) Just as Jones had linked his hopes as a poet to the material advantages gained by describing aristocratic prospects, Lane allegorizes the scene, drawing upon Milton (and Thomson, who also ends The Seasons with a hymn) to explore the specific purposes of his poetic vocation. The three poems included in Lane’s next collection, ‘Isaac’s Meditations’, ‘The Harp on the Willow’ and ‘Benevolence’, are each explicitly religious, as was much of his output for his subsequent and prolific career. Yet despite his apparent renunciation of the scene of Cliffden in his debut poem, it was a landscape Lane could not resist revisiting. He

Heavenly Prospects

83

did so most frequently with the purpose of continuing to reflect on his artistic development and career, making the site a vocational touchstone. Cliffden is next mentioned in his poem ‘The Author’s Apology’ from his Poems on Various Subjects (1795). This poem is framed as a debate among the author’s various friends, each of whom express concerns about or defences of the author’s endeavours. In the introduction to this debate, Lane offers the typical justification of his poetic inspiration as natural, arguing that such inspiration, much like religious salvation, is bestowed regardless of an individual’s rank or station. Speaking of his desire to write, he details the workings of his ‘natural genius’:

Unforc’d, and oft unsought, the soft invasion O’erspread the passive pow’rs with sweet persuasion; As free as air, as the clear current pure, As nature unconfin’d, as instinct sure. So wrought the gen’rous Muse; nor erudition, Nor art has made the smallest imposition, While each fond faculty yields due submission. ‘Pray trust (said she) to what nature dispenses; ‘She gives alike to peasants and to princes; ‘Always the same, she ever keeps her station, ‘Time, clime, or language, make no alteration.’22

Although the muse ‘keeps her station’, she appears to be heedless of the poet’s social status. The poet’s friends are not similarly accepting. Their first concern is that by writing a prospect poem, Lane appears to seek patronage and financial support. They fear he will appear to be trying to ‘extort’ his neighbours with his writing. This suggests Lane was alert to the motives of a poet like Jones. Using the deferential language common to so many defences of labouring-class poetry, another friend supports Lane’s poetry as work of necessity not ambition or greed:

‘I do not think he writes to bilk his neighbor; ‘Infirmity unfits him for his labor: ‘His family is large, his wants are many, ‘And his necessities demand each penny; ‘He has a talent, and he loves to shew it, ‘And from these motives he commenc’d a poet.’ (lines 59–64)

84


The friends then debate not merely the provenance of the work (and whether it might be plagiarized) but also its relative merit, irrespective of the author’s impoverished condition. A ‘learned friend’ (line 108), for example, acknowledges the poet’s financial need but claims it is not excuse for the verse’s ‘lame condition’ (line 111). He condemns the poetry as ‘A mock’ry of our judgment, taste and senses;/Nor more correct in number, case, and gender’ (lines 112–13). He thus refuses to recommend the work based on any intrinsic artistic merit. Religion, however, is marshalled at the poem’s conclusion as that which best justifies Lane’s artistic endeavour. The final friend to enter in the debate states conclusively that: ‘While each succeeding piece seems more to favor, ‘The cause of Christ, and of his Grace to savor. ‘I’ll wish success, and to that God commend him ‘Who can from pride and poverty defend him.’ (lines 145–8) In the final stanza, the poet agrees with this judgement, ending with a prayer for divine intercession and asking God to make clear to his audience that regardless of his subject his religious purpose predominates: LORD! grant that I reject not thy dominion. Be thou sole sov’reign of each pow’r and passion, And the sole subject of each meditation; Nor e’er permit or wit, or sense, or satire, Faint sparks of art, or the full glow of nature, Or fav’rite topic, or fantastic notion, To quench the smallest spark of true devotion! (lines 151–7) As he had at the end of Cliffden, Lane rejects other poetic modes in favour of purely devotional writing. The religious emphasis continues in his subsequent volume of Poems . . . and Detached Pieces (1798). In this collection, in ‘The Flood of Formosa, and the Fire of Cliffden’, Lane writes of Cliffden to describe the estate’s destruction by fire in 1795, using the catastrophe to illustrate the vanity of earthly things. The loss of the manor house enables Lane to reflect on his poetic development and its connection to this particular site:

Heavenly Prospects

85

When first the secret movings of the muse Did thro’ my veins resistless force diffuse; When first in tune the tender passions flow’d, And thro’ the pow’rs poetic fervors glow’d; These the fair scenes my panting breast assuag’d, The subject CLIFFDEN, first my pen engag’d. (lines 139–44) Significant as the spot is to him, the memorialization of poetry is no protection against physical destruction. Even greater poets than Lane cannot grant lasting immortality to the places they describe. Lane thus rejects the typical consolations of poetry: But what alas! avails my feeble strain, When bolder, stronger, sweeter notes are vain! Alike in vain did Pope or Thomson sing Of ‘Cliffden’s proud alcove,’ and crystal spring— The muse’s boast; her beauty, strength, and fame, Could not secure her from the vengeful flame! (lines 145–50) Deriving a moral lesson about human vanity from a ruined setting was a topographical commonplace, although typically those ruins were of older empires, such as Duck had described. Lane’s poem is unique in using a contemporary estate, one just recently praised, to provide a lesson about the futility of the quest for ‘terrestrial things’ (line 151). Forces of nature dominate, destroying human improvements and threatening the harmony of nature and culture the prospect poem imposes. Nature may have given Lane his poetic proclivities, but the forces of nature can also be destructive of the sources of poetic inspiration. Lane’s pious conclusions suggest that divine power disrupts as much as determines the harmonies that the genre attempts to impose. Despite these monitory meditations, Lane continued to compose topographical poetry, such as ‘The Vale of Wycombe’ and the shorter ‘Hedsor Hill’. By 1806, his sense of poetic vocation expanded as he explored his relation to other plebeian poets, most notably Robert Bloomfield, with whom he became friendly. Much like Woodhouse, in the course of his career Lane grew more confident in his labouring-class identity, and as with Woodhouse, his religious faith bolstered that confidence. Bloomfield’s unquestionable success further validated Lane’s continued poetic efforts. In his poem, ‘On Mr. B----------d’s indulging the Author with his Company, from his own House to Hackney, in the fine Autumn

86


of 1805’, it is not surprising that his homage includes specific reference to Bloomfield’s ‘Shooter’s Hill’ (a poem which also uses the hill prospect to meditate on health). Describing their walk, Lane notes: Augusta’s turrets rising on the right; And Shooter’s antique tower appears in sight, Which soon detach’d from yonder lofty hill, Will shine more famous by poetic skill!23 As he had before, Lane doubts his abilities to ascend, but here his model for such an ascent is not Pope or Thomson but a fellow labouring-class poet who: By Nature’s aid he reach’d Parnassian height, Nor waited erudition’s tardy flight. But Ah! I fail Parnassian heights to soar, Nor can my feeble optics e’er explore, Where Bloomfield’s native pow’rs his efforts lift, To pluck the laurel from the topmost clift! (lines 63–8) By the poem’s conclusion, Lane’s consolation remains a resignation to the wisdom of God’s providence and a check to any ambitions that he might still maintain. But his reference points for imagining his ambition have shifted. Just as Cliffden persists as a touchstone for Lane, so did the problems of ascent associated with it. In his later writings, the landscape continued to serve as the place for meditation on divinity and on literary tradition. Lane comments critically on prospect poetry in ‘Some Cursory Remarks on the Life and Character of Solomon’. He opens the poem by confronting questions of poetic originality: Is there a scene or subject yet unsung, That has not occupy’d some tuneful tongue? Is there some secret, some sequester’d nook, In which poetic eyes disdain’d to look?24 The poem provides an interesting survey of the history of prospect and landscape poetry, written from the perspective of a labouring-class reader and writer and offering assessments of Denham, Pope and Cowper. With

Heavenly Prospects

87

a bit more humour, Lane shows his originality as he introduces the particular relation of labouring-class poets, such as himself, Bloomfield and Burns within the tradition: Here B—m—d comes! well Bobby where’s your clue? Sure there can be but little left for you! Did you not know your brother Burns has been And merciless has stript each rural scene, Of field and fold, of cottage, grove and green? Has diligently pick’d up every scrap That lay unnotic’d in dame Nature’ lap? Thus Denham, Pope and Thomson, Cowper, Burns, They all have made their choice & serv’d their turns. And where those nobler geniuses have been, Sure little can remain for us to glean. (lines 78–88) Lane cleverly represents the labouring-class poets as gleaners, gathering the tiny grains that were not already harvested by their precursors. The poem’s satirical spirit, at least in this long passage, has much in common with Woodhouse’s Crispinus Scriblerus. In the lines that follow, Lane confronts the problem of poetic innovation by addressing the fact that in attempting the highly intertextual and allusive genre, he is risking accusations of plagiarism, a concern articulated in the earlier ‘Author’s Apology’. Similarly, this poem resolves the question by turning towards the Biblical topic of the poem’s title. Lane engages secular literature, but he returns to religion as a justification for his efforts: Dear Lord, direct me to some useful theme, That may promote thy cause and praise thy name. And with thy grace be ev’ry pow’r embu’d, And ev’ry passion to thy will subdu’d; The operation of thy hand to trace, Or in creation, providence or grace. (lines 162–7) Although his Christian moralizing remains consistent, Lane’s changing relationship to the prospect landscape parallels his shifting sense of himself as a poet. His artistic identity was increasingly shaped by his sense of belonging to a labouring-class tradition, endowing him with a greater ability to comment on social and political questions.

88


Lane’s last three collections, written when he was the age of 73, 75 and 78, as well as his prose autobiography (written when he was 80), confirm his sense of dispensation as a religious poet with a divine authorization to speak on political matters. His collection The Gleanings of the SeventyThird Vintage includes the poem ‘Strength Equal to the Day’. Although the first 47 stanzas are devoted to meditations about the presence of providence in his life, the second half calls for the need for education for the poor. His scathing allusion in the passage below to Burke’s politically repressive remarks in Reflections on the Revolution in France about the ‘swinish multitude’ places Lane squarely within a potentially revolutionary discourse. He admonishes his fellow labourers to take pride in themselves and their efforts at self-improvement: Neglected education rise, With genuine beauty shine; To make us humble, just and wise, And all our pow’rs refine. ··· And thus reclaim’d the swinish herd— The gloomy aspect chang’d: Our broken character repair’d— Society arrang’d!25 For Lane, improving literacy also improves morality and other social ills. Commenting upon other social concerns, unlike other prospect poets who celebrated the benefits of commerce, Lane does not see national economic well-being leading to a trickle-down effect. He writes: Tho’ trade and commerce make their boast, Of most essential use; They’re but precarious good, at most— Much subject to abuse. (lines 237–40) For Lane, financial speculation destroys ‘the gifts of providence’ (line 244) and increasing the prosperity of the rich does not increase their motivation for charity. Instead Thence want, disease and poverty, The vulgar class depress; Their numbers greatly multiply— Their sufferings make no less! (lines 245–8)

Heavenly Prospects

89

Lane challenges the stock arguments voiced in earlier poems such as Jones’s Clifton about the overall social benefits of wealth. On the contrary, he vehemently attacks the supposed connections among wealth, virtue and civic good. Riches destroy health: Luxury, thou most destructive bane Of Health, content and peace, How many thousands hast thou slain! How doth thy pow’r increase! Thy bold pretence to public good, Unable to sustain; While thy contaminated blood, Flows thro’ the public vein. (lines 249–56) While such directly political verse represents a relatively new direction in his writing, Lane still revisited the question of his poetic vocation, always framing it in the conventions of hill poetry. In ‘On Reading A Poem, Entitled Modern Parnassus’, Lane narrates how he began his career, ‘Shut up in mental and material gloom,/Recluse, in my obscure and rustic home:’ (lines 1–2) but was then encouraged by friends to write his poem on Cliffden.26 His success leads him to a spirited defence of the rights of labouring-class poets, demonstrating the distance he had travelled since his self-effacing earlier works: Why wish those tuneful energies supprest, That rise spontaneous in the rustic breast? Each ‘village Hampden,’ each Miltonic hind In drudg’ry, and obscurity confin’d? Virtue and talents to the shades condemn’d, Their genuine efforts haughtily contemn’d? While birth, wealth, learning, lay th’ exclusive claim, The grand Colossus of unrival’d fame! (lines 56–63) Lane cautiously argues for the benefit of encouraging self-taught poets, suggesting that sympathetic patrons and editors (such as Bloomfield’s early supporter, Capel Lofft) correct rather than censor aspiring authors: ‘If candid and sincere, they might afford/Essential service to the rhyming horde’ (lines 68–9). But even without the interventions of his patron,

90


Bloomfield (a poet Lane believes to be of unquestionable merit) illustrates the argument for the equal rights of all to write. Lane’s more democratic leanings are also illustrated by the fact that he extends his discussion of ‘natural genius’ to make a case for educating the poor in general: Genius, always coeval with our birth; Quite independent of exterior worth, Thro’ all impediments will force it’s way, And all it’s native properties display. If nature knows not native excellence, At once abandon patrimonial sense; Send us to school to learn to hear and see, To heave the lungs, and pant for liberty! (lines 90–7)

This last line is particularly significant since Lane here reveals the distinction of his position from that of someone like Hannah More (who wanted the poor to learn to read, but drew the line at teaching them writing).27 Literacy had a political as much as a religious purpose for Lane. His more levelling point of view is further in evidence as he meditates upon the relationship of nature to art in the creation of poetry and of the relative merits of the learned perspective:

From various sources tuneful efforts spring; And few, perhaps, from genuine impulse sing. Oft where external aids are most deny’d, There nature proves the most unerring guide! With rich munificence does oft impart, The warm effusions of the feeling heart. Her vot’ries alone do truly know The animating, energetic glow; The sweet enthusiastic instinct trace, And unsophisticated truth embrace. (lines 98–107)

In something of a reversal from his earliest assertion of his unworthiness to write, here it is precisely his lack of a refined education that leads to a more authentic poetry. This view bears implicit witness to the impact of the Romantic aesthetic on Lane’s work. Lane then repeats a line from

Heavenly Prospects

91

Cliffden that he had written in 1792 and uses bird imagery to figure the problem of ascent for the plebeian poet: But larks with soaring wing, and warbling throat Do not forbid the robbin’s feeble note! The birds, tho’ taught by nature to ascend, Do not alike their notes and wings extend; Tho’ formed for flight, and some round our houses hop, And scarcely dare ascend the chimney top; While some sublimely soar and reach a hieght, Beyond the utmost stretch of human sight. (lines 120–7) As Lane continues this epic simile, he argues that just as we celebrate the natural diversity of species of birds, each with their particular song and plumage, so too ought a diversity of poetic voices and educational pedigrees be honoured. He concludes his more egalitarian aesthetic argument on a humorous note: If ‘little learning is a dang’rous thing,’ Then sure th’ unletter’d bard may safely sing! And Daddy Pope, and I the danger shun, As he had just enough, and I have none! (lines 184–7) Humour was only one of the ways in which Lane defended his rights to self-expression. Lane’s last collection of poetry includes a final long poem, ‘The Mount’,28 describing his religiously authorized right to write at the site of a hillside. Here, for one final time, he meditates upon his fitness as a poet, petitioning the Holy Spirit and not the Muse to inspire him in his lofty topic. Having already sung ‘Of what to nature’s ample stores belong’ (line 70) and ‘rifl’d streams, and groves, and vales and fields’ (line 71), Lane is ready for a real ascent and ‘Would now know what the lofty mountain yields’ (line 72) as ‘Mountains important properties possess,/Health, prospect, safety and stability’ (lines 73–4). The remainder of the poem offers an extended inventory not of the prospects of landed estates but of the biblical significance of mountains and elevations. For example, the security of mountains provides refuge for the persecuted, the physical shelter serving as an objective correlative of God’s protection.

92


As mountains round about Jerusalem Stand as a safeguard to the holy place; So doth the Lord protect, and shelter them, Who are the subjects of His special grace; His arm outstretch’d to bring deliv’rance nigh! His hand stretch’d out with plentiful supply! (lines 103–8) Lane continues to record different Biblical scenes ‘of trial, glory, prayer and pain!’ (line 110) that occur on mountains, and his inventory concludes with a meditation on Christ’s crucifixion on Mount Calvary. In Christian theology, Christ’s sacrifice enables the believer to ascend to Heaven in death. Because of his faith, then, Lane has available to him the ultimate elevation. From thence, with joy, survey the dreary vale, Thro’ which I’m by my gracious Leader brought; With rapture tell the soul-transporting tale, Of all the wonders sov’reign grace has wrought! Bearing the impress of my Father’s name, I stand upon mount Zion, with the Lamb! (lines 277–82)

Empowered by his salvation, Lane is granted an elevation on mount Zion that he could never attain at Cliffden. He is vindicated by faith, as he rises above his human station and ascends to a divine one. Lane’s autobiography, his final publication, provides additional details about his spiritual life and development, documenting his association first with Methodism and later with the Society of Friends. Near the conclusion of that text, he asserts the connection of his vocation as a poet with his election from God: the Lord’s conduct towards me, and disposal of me, are indefeasible proofs that my literary efforts not only met with his approbation, but were much under his influence and direction, and that they were the source whence originated most of the friends and friendships I have been indulged with.29 By the end of his long life, Lane felt his prospects – and the poetry he wrote about them – were sanctified. Living well into the nineteenth

Heavenly Prospects

93

century, Lane witnessed the changing political conditions that led to Chartism and the Reform Bill and which transformed his sense of vocation from humble to prophetic. ∗∗∗ Other early nineteenth-century labouring-class poets employ strategies and themes similar to Lane’s, ascending hills and mountains and turning to theology to warrant more egalitarian political claims. In distinction from Lane, however, many also refocus attention towards neglected regional locales and participate in the larger Romantic challenge to the nationalist agenda of earlier prospect poetry. Another admirer of Bloomfield, William Hersee, illustrates this Romantic rejection. Claiming that the national space belongs to greater poets and assuring his reader that his regional emphasis is thus not due to his lack of patriotism, Hersee asserts in his short piece ‘My Native Hill’, ‘I love my country—and admire/With glowing heart, my native hill!’.30 Hersee denies himself any grander goals, as those are the domain of poets who are ‘Ambition’s slave’ (line 27). The poet’s more modest aims are mirrored by his modest landscape. While he cites the conventions that hill poetry ought to follow, he does so negatively, albeit in a somewhat more sophisticated way than his colleague the ‘Unlettered Bard’. Not only for Hersee, but also for other early nineteenth-century plebeian poets, the prospect became much more circumscribed and the poems grew shorter although they continue to link their poetic vocation or ‘natural genius’ to a particular geographical setting. Just as they do in their riparian verse, discussed in Chapter 4, in celebrating more neglected provincial spots, the poets at once humbly assert their obscurity while participating in a genre that links them to a larger literary tradition, one that is not only British. Robert Story’s description of poetic vocation, for instance, is immediately connected with his early life as a shepherd upon the Lanton Hills in Scotland and with his religious fervour, inspired by biblical poetry. Writing in a letter that is quoted in his posthumous collection, The Lyrical and other Minor Poems of Robert Story (1861), he notes that: The life of a shepherd, too, is favourable to devotion: living amongst the lone hills he seldom sees a human being, save those of his own house; and his occupation is of a nature so little engrossing, that his mind is for the most part at liberty to feed on its own meditations— whether derived from his favourite Bible, or from the eternal hills

94


which every day unfold to him, and which he contemplates as the workmanship of his unseen but omnipresent Creator.31 God’s two Books – the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature – are the extent of the poet’s education. For Story, it was not the muses on Mount Parnassus who inspired him, but the Psalms, also presumably written by a poet of the hills, King David: The Scotch Metrical version of the Psalms of David (I speak of it with reverence) divided my veneration with the Hymns of Dr. Watts. I had a pocket edition of it, which I seldom went to the hills without carrying with me, and which I read in the loneliest places, my heart burning with the sweet devotion inspired by the sweet singer of Israel. I was already a poet in heart and imagination, and the scenery amidst which I experienced these raptures, for there were little else, is still hallowed in my recollections. (p. xviii) The poetic tradition Story places himself within is one that, even in its more unpretentious regionalism, transcends national boundaries and has a more archaic provenance, dating back well before Denham. Even as Story asserts a more ancient source of inspiration, as he writes in the poem ‘Beaumont Side’, the hills are also associated with the innocence of childhood, where Amid yon broom, my Bible dear, And David’s harp my joy and pride, I felt as Angels hovered near— Was half in heaven on Beaumont’s Side! (lines 29–32) The hills take on the characteristics of a more typical Romantic landscape of nostalgia, but Story’s actual work as a shepherd there makes them literally pastoral. His prospect, like Gray’s, looks down upon a country churchyard and the location brings with it thoughts of mortality. These sad thoughts, however, lead to a conversion experience: ‘Why weep, fond Boy?’ a kind voice said, ‘’Tis but the shell that wastes in earth.’ I dashed away the tear just shed, And knew me of immortal birth! —I ask not Glory’s cup to drain, I ask not Wealth’s unebbing tide!

Heavenly Prospects

95

O for the INNOCENCE again My young heart knew of Beaumont’s Side! (lines 41–8) Again, despite the poet’s claims to simplicity and limited literary training, the poem is a palimpsest of different literary influences. The landscape is transformed through the work of nostalgia and religious awakening. Through these, the poet witnesses the prospects of a paradise on earth. As he writes in another poem ‘Sweet Beaumont Side’: Sweet Beaumont Side, and Beaumont Stream! There is so much of gloom and ill, That it is soothing thus to deem Earth bears one spot of sunshine still; To feel that—while my hopes decline, And joys from life’s bleak waste depart— One bright illusion—yet—is mine, One changeless landscape of the heart! (lines 17–24) Borrowing from Wordsworth’s great vocational prospect poem, ‘Tintern Abbey’, Story uses this location as a personal touchstone. As Cliffden did for Lane, the site defines who he is as a poet. As Lane had done, Story imbues the landscape with a sacred as much as secular literary history, although his religious views have no ostensible political implications. Such is not the case with Chartist poet Ebenezer Elliott, writing in the tumultuous years of the 1830s. Elliott extends the religious tones and themes of other labouring-class hill poetry but turns it towards unabashedly political aims in his ‘Win-Hill, or the Curse of God’. The poem narrates an ascent of the hill by the ‘bread-tax’d Artisan’ who takes his Sabbath rest by enjoying the pleasures of the scenery. Following the artisan’s footsteps, the poem’s narrator attends to a spot along the slope where a human skeleton had been found. Luridly imagining the death of this unfortunate person stranded on the mountainside, Elliott indicates that he does not include this description as a sentimental digression. His point is polemical, as the prose footnote appended to the passage demonstrates: Was this unfortunate a victim of the Corn Laws? Then, for the honour of our common nature, the system of free exchange and unrestricted industry ought to be fairly and fully tried. If it fails to rescue man from pauperism, and his name from disgrace, which would enrage a viper,

96


and make the earthworm blush, let us, like the failing eagle, retire indignantly to woods and deserts and perish there.32 Once at the summit of Win-Hill, a storm descends, and the poet’s style grows Shelleyan: ‘Storm! could I ride on thee, and grasp thy mane,/A bitless bridle, in my unburnt hand;/Like flax consum’d, should fall the bondman’s chain’ (lines 225–7). His desire to harness the storm’s power for political purposes leads him to ask of the mountain: And what are they, O land of age-long woes! Who laid the hope of thy redemption low? Are they not Britain’s sons, and Labour’s foes, Who, sowing curses, ask why curses grow, And league with fate for their own overthrow? When will their journey end? They travel fast!— Slow Retribution! whereof art thou slow? When will the night of our despair be past? And bread-tax’d slaves become Men, godlike Men, at last? (lines 234–42) Elliott’s prayer to nature becomes a Christian prayer, invoking the one who made the mountains and storms to bring justice and divine retribution. Whereas poets in the polite tradition use prospect views to bring a concord to the nation at a time of national strife, Elliott expresses no such optimism that any harmony, poetic or otherwise, might be imposed. The prospects are bleak, and the poet calls down God’s punishment: O Thou whose whispering is the thunder! Power Eternal, world-attended, yet alone! O give, at least, to labour’s hopeless hour That peace, which Thou deny’st not to a stone! The famine-smitten millions cease to groan; When wilt Thou hear their mute and long despair? Lord, help the poor! For they are all thy own. (lines 252–8) The final stanzas of the poem continue the visionary strain as the mountain becomes a site not of paradise or means to bring harmony to a divided nation, as it did two centuries before with Denham. Instead, Win-Hill becomes the locus of apocalypse, with Elliott’s vision of God grinding down the mountain with his heel:

Heavenly Prospects

97

While earth and skies alone bright as molten steel; For under all the stars Thou took’st thy stand, And bad’st the ends of heaven behold and feel, That thou to all thy worlds had’st stretch’d thine hand And curs’d for evermore the Legion-Fiend of Land! (lines 265–9) The disparities between the rich and poor resist the harmonizing and unification that the prospect genre had sought to impose; by the end of the Romantic era, for labouring-class poets, the concordia discors cannot resolve class divisions. As with Lane (and with Woodhouse), the poet’s invocation of the divine is not simply personal, to justify or authorize a vocation. The poets call for divine intervention to bring social change, not to posit a harmonious continuity with the past. The prospects from the hillside grow prophetic. With Lane and more strikingly with Elliott, Christianity is put in league with radical and egalitarian politics. By the mid-nineteenth century, the elevated prospect view offers entirely new vistas to labouring-class writers, ones that looked towards a future of social and aesthetic liberation.

4 Writing Against the Current: Anne Wilson’s Teisa and Labouring-Class River Poetry

Hail, sacred Peace! hail long-expected days, That Thames’s glory to the stars shall raise! Tho’ Tyber’s streams immortal Rome behold, Tho’ foaming Hermus swells with tides of gold, From Heav’n itself tho’ sev’n-fold Nilus flows, And harvests on a hundred realms bestows; These now no more shall be the Muse’s themes, Lost in my fame, as in the sea their streams.1 Pope’s Windsor Forest amply illustrates how rivers are important resources, poetically and otherwise. They have supplied energy for village mills and for factories. They have also provided a means of mobility, of travelling and trading. In the countryside, riverbanks have long offered a place for refreshment and relaxation, to water livestock or to fish. In geography, rivers serve as boundaries between counties or countries. While rivers can separate one region from another, they can also symbolically unite a nation or culture. Pope’s lines underscore that nearly every empire of antiquity, nearly every European nation, has a major river symbolically running through it, whether it be the Nile, the Tiber or the Thames. Rivers thus become synonymous with entire civilizations, in part because they make the development of those cultures possible, whether through providing water for irrigation or maritime access for trade. As Wyman Herendeen argues, the flow of the river from its source to the sea offers an analogy for a nation’s history and its destiny.2 During the Renaissance, river iconography was widely used in the nation-building chorography of English writers such as Michael Drayton and William Camden. In early 98

Writing Against the Current

99

modern poetry, the celebration of symbolic marriages of rivers naturalized the often unnatural work of national unification and imperial assimilation. In English literature, the river proves an important symbol for the elaboration of national ambitions and doubles as a figure for the poet’s vocational ambitions, for tied up in the poet’s effort to map national and imperial consolidation through river imagery is his attempt to distinguish his voice from his predecessors. Herendeen writes that for Renaissance poets, the river ‘became identified with the quest for a personal and national voice, the search for a cultural identity in terms of the myths and literary motifs of antiquity’.3 In Cooper’s Hill, for example, as was discussed in Chapter 3, Denham famously opines to the Thames, ‘O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream/My great example, as it is my theme!/Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull/Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full’ (lines 189–92). Prospect poems such as Denham’s and those discussed in Chapter 3 quite often look down upon rivers, thus riparian verse complements prospect poetry in terms of topography and as a site of artistic self-fashioning. Rivers also serve as a useful metaphor for the literary tradition as a whole. Since Robert Southey first identified a separate labouring-class tradition of British poetry in 1831, critical accounts of labouring-class poetry point to John Taylor, the seventeenth-century ‘water poet’ and Thames boatman, as one early source of the tradition.4 One could say, then, that the origins of the labouring-class poetic tradition are in river poetry. For Taylor, being a labouring poet was being a river poet. Taylor’s eclectic literary production, including much scurrilous and satirical work, features a history of the British monarchy, narrative poems detailing several sea voyages he took to York, Edinburgh and Hamburg, Germany, prose accounts of contemporary naval battles and elegies for the King and other nobles. Throughout his work, however, Taylor’s identification with the Thames predominates, and his national pride is one with his pride in his occupation. More significantly, he is well aware of the river’s richness as a natural resource and of its necessity to the lives of Londoners, and he is alert to the human impact on the river environment. In a poem entitled ‘The Praise of Hemp-Seed’, Taylor offers a paean to this useful plant (one which could likely strike a chord with today’s environmentalists who also appreciate its multiple uses). He concludes with an encomium for the Thames and a call to respect it as a symbol of nationhood and a natural resource, since thanks to it ‘Millions of soules have fewell cloathes and food’.5 As the place where watermen earn their livelihood, and thus are able to support their families, ‘It doth

100 British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837

maintaine neere twenty thousand lives’ (line 1105). These real benefits compel Taylor to protest against those polluting the river: And therefore ’tis great pitty, shelfe or sand From the forgetfull and ingratefull land, Should it’s cleare chrystall entrailes vilefy, Or soyle such purenesse with impurity. What doth it doe, but serves our full contents, Brings food, and for it takes our excrements, Yeelds us all plenty, worthy of regard And dirt and mucke we give it for reward? (lines 1110–17) Looking then to the rivers of myth and legend, Taylor takes it upon himself to ‘divulge thy glory unto men’ (line 1127) as well as offer further practical arguments to sustain the river ecosystem of his own time. His poetic identity, as that of so many other poets, has its source in the river, thus he is all the more concerned to protect it as an environment that provides material and cultural sustenance. Through poetry such as Taylor’s and in the prospect poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rivers continued to be an important feature of locodescriptive writing. With the rise of the taste for the picturesque at the end of the eighteenth century, river landscapes took new precedence, in part through the influence of William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782). Gilpin’s journey would be emulated by Robert Bloomfield in his second longest poem, The Banks of Wye (1811). In particular, among polite poets, interest in picturesque regionalism also contributed, as Daniel Robinson and David Fairer have each noted, to a vogue for poems – especially sonnets – devoted to poets’ ‘native streams’.6 Warton’s sonnet ‘To the River Lodon’ is perhaps the founding example of this type. William Lisle Bowles composed sonnets on the Itchin, the Wensbeck, the Tweed and the Cherwell; Charlotte Smith wrote to the Arun; Anna Seward wrote to the Derwent; Coleridge to the Otter; and, most notably, Wordsworth wrote his sonnet sequence to the River Duddon (not to mention other poems on the Derwent or the Wye, most notably ‘Tintern Abbey’).7 In each of these poems, the river serves a personal function, to explore poetic vocation and the poet’s specific or ‘native’ gifts, his or her uniqueness which is shared by the particular river of the region. Self-taught poets, including Anne Wilson and John Clare, as well as numerous others, worked with the rich and multiple resonances of this topos, taking it in new directions while demonstrating


101

their knowledge of conventions which they adapted as their own. Their reliance on the river, like Taylor’s, was also actual and symbolic. ∗∗∗ One of the earliest works by a woman within the subgenre of river poetry, Anne Wilson’s 1600-line poem Teisa: A Descriptive Poem of the River Teese, Its Towns and Antiquities (1778), appears at first to fulfil all of the conventions of eighteenth-century locodescriptive verse in general and river poetry in particular.8 As the poem’s speaker traces the course of this north-eastern river, she narrates the beauties of the landscape and interjects meditations on regional and national history. She pays homage to relevant nobles and literary precursors, and she includes the requisite dose of moral reflection. But Teisa represents more than one woman’s foray into topographical poetry. Wilson does more than simply fulfil generic conventions. She attempts to transform them. Both because of the landscape she chooses to describe and because of the singularity of her prospects in describing it, Wilson’s poem is a neglected but important contribution to eighteenth-century nature writing. In Landscape, Liberty and Authority, Tim Fulford observes that ‘Through landscape-gardening, through painting, and through the descriptions of prose writers and poets, views of the landscape owned by gentlemen became representations of the legitimacy of their power and the benefits it brought the nation . . . Nature . . . predominant in eighteenth-century culture, was a ground on which the legitimacy of gentlemanly power and taste could be tested and confirmed above that of “a man bred to trade’’ ’.9 What has become the canon of such poems – some of which have been discussed in Chapter 3 and which include Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642), Pope’s Winsdor Forest (1713), Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) and Jago’s Edge-hill (1767) – illustrates quite nicely Fulford’s contention that Through the prospect-view, the propertied classes were able to present their political dominance as confirmed by the natural scene. The ability to distinguish and possess shared standards independent of self-interest (standards of aesthetic value or taste) in agreement about the beauty and sublimity of landscape seemed not only a mark of the viewer’s gentlemanliness but a criterion for the exercise of legitimate social and political power. And that ability was itself seen to depend upon the capacity of the observer to take a distant, extensive, and detached view of the scene, to be above self-interest.10


Gender and class were fundamental qualifications for a proper reading and writing of the landscape whether it was a garden, prospect or river scene. Wilson questions these received standards for natural beauty and the power relations they may represent through incorporating into her poem shifts in perspective and representing a lack of distance and detachment from the scenery. That an obscure ‘northern female Bard’ (as Wilson labels herself) should try her hand at a form in which few women wrote is significant. That well prior to the Romantic vogue for regionalism she should also privilege regional over national geography makes her work noteworthy. Although the value of the particular and the local is continually stressed by modern ecofeminist writing, pre-Romantic eighteenth-century nature writing valued the local only in so far as it functioned metonymically for the national. Emphasis on the regional in and for itself relegated the author to perpetual ‘minor’ status. Perhaps contributing to her neglected status in current literary history, Wilson’s social status was not illustrious. Little is known about her life, beyond the few self-deprecating and veiled comments she makes about herself in the poem. From these, it appears she was a well-read widow, most likely from the lower ranks of society, perhaps a servant of some kind. She refers early in the poem to her ‘servile hopes and fears’ (line 383) and her life in a ‘hir’d house’ (line 386). Elsewhere she asks for pardon for attempting a subject that a ‘letter’d bard’ (line 1510) might accomplish better than she. My own searches at county records offices, archival resources and cemeteries in the region have yet to yield any external biographical information. Another work, Jepthah’s Daughter, a drama in verse, was written by an Ann Wilson and published in London in 1783. Roger Lonsdale, who includes a selection from Teisa in his EighteenthCentury Women Poets anthology, asserts that this later work is not by the author of Teisa. However, Lonsdale fails to provide evidence for this claim. Given that this Old Testament story was one that was adapted by several other poets of labouring-class origins, it is at least possible that these two works were written by the same author, and that she hailed from a humble background. In The Muses of Resistance, Donna Landry argues that writers from the lower ranks of society often wrote ‘verse that ventriloquizes and thus challenges the verse forms and values of mainstream culture’. Such verse allows them ‘a way of speaking out, and of altering social discourse. This is ventriloquism . . . with a subversive twist. It is as if the dummy did not merely serve to demonstrate the master’s skill at speaking through another’s body, but took on a life of its own, began to challenge the


103

master by altering the master’s text’.11 Although Landry does not discuss Wilson, her observations apply to how Wilson fulfils the generic obligations of locodescriptive poetry in general – and of river poetry in particular – and how she fulfils these conventions in order to interrogate them. The sheer length of Wilson’s poem precludes a full inventory of each of the sites of intervention, but several episodes speak directly to the relationship of the woman writer and the natural world and demonstrate the poet’s deep awareness of the varieties of forms that this relationship can take: in agricultural labour, literary tradition, science and history. I will examine first how Wilson works within and against the generic parameters of locodescriptive poetry in general, and then focus more specifically on how she works within and against the traditions of British river poetry. Just as rivers both fix and blur boundaries, Wilson uses the Tees in her poem to play upon the boundaries of genre. Such generic play is essential to how the poem investigates the redrawing of British imperial boundaries and ideological landscapes in the north of England and in North America. In addition, Wilson’s poem examines how contemporary technological and industrial developments altered physical geography, describing the impact of agricultural trends popular in the late eighteenth century.12 While rivers play significant roles in poems such as Pope’s Windsor Forest or Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (both poems to which Wilson repeatedly expresses her literary debt), it is typically only one of several features of the landscape emphasized. In Wilson’s poem, the river as it moves and meanders through the landscape forms the central organizing principle. By this choice, Wilson demonstrates that her influences may be as much Renaissance as Augustan. Whereas Thomson’s Seasons or the hill poems of Denham, Dyer or Jago situate descriptions of the landscape from an elevated and often static vantage point – the speaker/spectator placed symbolically above the scenery – the eye/I who sees and speaks in Teisa follows the river as it moves through the landscape, rising and falling with the river as it flows, narrating the scenes that pass, almost as if from a boat. The speaker in the poem identifies with rather than objectifies the river which forms the poem’s focal point. The speaker consistently looks from the river, rather than at it, and she locates the visual perspective not as stationary and looking down on a scene, but rather in motion and looking upward. David Fairer observes that Wilson’s attention to the river’s course provides ‘almost a democratising principle. All the landmarks and figures we encounter are treated with equal interest and consideration, and there is no single viewing-point. The miners’ thatched cottages get as much attention as the castle or the comfortable vicarage’.13


Wilson implicitly feminizes the landscape from its very source by gendering the Tees as female. The opening lines of the poem inform the reader that Far from corrupting man, her purer source Pursues thro’ rugged rocks, its infant course: Where wild heath its purple dye displays, As on the russet plain we wandering gaze, The wand’ring eye is lost in mists, that frown Suspended o’er th’ extensive horizon: (lines 7–12) Both the river and the poet are identified as female, and from the outset the speaker rejects the distanced gentlemanly vantage that Fulford describes. Additionally, Wilson’s choice of river, the lesser known Tees and not any ‘great Father of the British floods!’ (as Pope describes the Thames), is an act of revision and possible resistance. Wilson’s regionalism is significant, in so far as she is writing within a particular topographical tradition that from the Renaissance forward served predominantly nationalistic purposes. Herendeen notes that after the English Reformation, river poetry becomes synonymous with the ‘quest for a personal and national voice, the search for a cultural identity in terms of the myths and literary motifs of antiquity’.14 Questions of nation, of class and of gender all flow from Wilson’s scenic descriptions. Fulford argues that the gentlemanly perspective on the landscape is one that was meant to demonstrate the masculine speakers’ ownership of the land surveyed, and moreover, their freedom from having to labour on it. Whatever labour is accomplished in Thomson’s Seasons, for example, is performed by those other than the speaker – as is evident in the lines describing hay-making or sheep-shearing in Summer (lines 352 ff.). The form requires that the landscape depicted be both beautiful and productive. However, though its productivity may benefit the poem’s speaker, his only active work is to record the work of others in his verse. By contrast, the productivity represented in Wilson’s Teisa is distinctive on two counts. First, the labour that occurs on the banks of the Tees is not primarily conventional male agricultural or shepherding activities. It could be called ‘women’s work’ such as cheese-making and herbgathering. In fulsome georgic detail, Wilson’s poem takes the reader through the cheese-making process, from the milking of cows to the best method to prepare and consume the whey, curds and whig (a beverage made of whey and herbs). She also inserts what might be classified as


105

‘terms of art’ with words like ‘thrivel’ in the following passage (a ‘thivel’ is an archaic term for a wooden stirring spoon; Wilson’s spelling is likely a regional variant). Finally, the speaker’s direct engagement in this manufacture is implied by her sustained use of the collective pronoun ‘we’ in the narration of the work: Now to the whey, O rural muse return; We left it in the shining, brazen urn; Which urn upon the sparkling flames is plac’d, And e’er it boils, with butter-milk they haste; Then with a thrivel stir it all around; This being done, we see white froth abound Upon the rising surf, which by degrees, Hardens into a substance like to cheese (lines 278–85) This ‘we’ engages the reader in the work and further distinguishes Wilson’s project from those of the ‘gentlemen’ poets whose works she elsewhere actively cites. Wilson’s assumption that her reader is not a genteel male landowner but a female labourer like herself is also suggested by the instructive tone of the poem’s subsequent discussion of the work of gathering useful and salutary herbs and berries. The speaker directly addresses the reader with a hortatory ‘you’, in conveying her directives on the best ‘simples’ to add to whey prepared for the swains the speaker imagines that ‘you’ serve: Pale green sorrel the shady woods produce, And this affords a pleasant acid juice; To these add rose-leaves of musky favour, They will give a cooling pleasant flavour: (lines 338–41) Female labour in the poem is not limited to agricultural work. Wilson also incorporates women’s contributions to artisanal activities. The river’s course takes the poem through both town and country, and when the river arrives in Barnard Castle, Wilson tells of women workers in the trade of weaving. She reveals that the women at first take on this work because greed has made it unprofitable for men to pursue it, but the trade becomes so uneconomical that even the women cease to weave as they are unable to subsist on what pittance they continue to earn:


By making wages small, thus Barnard forc’d Her working people out, her trade thus lost. Industry they so far discourage now, That the laborious females, not a few, Who in the weaving art, with men would vie, From practicing this heav’n taught art they tie. (lines 589–94) Wilson then asserts that ‘they’ deny women access to an art and employment that is their legacy from time immemorial – substantiating this claim with a neoclassical digression on Queen Andromache’s gifts as a weaver. Wilson’s advocacy of women’s right to weave extends beyond the classical precedents. She also provides a more practical justification. Weaving is ‘An art well fitting them who peaceful spend/Their time at home, while men robustly bred/Tend flocks, and sow the grain by which we’re fed’ (lines 604–6). Given the well-known analogy between women’s writing and weaving, Wilson’s stake in the women weavers’ ability to work suggests that this scene also speaks to Wilson’s sense of her vocation as a poet. Does she see her writing as a suitable sort of women’s work, to occupy her peacefully at home? Does she, moreover, see economic forces that would demand more familiar forms of ‘industry’ from the labouring classes, undermining her efforts to occupy her time with poetry? Wilson depicts other forms of human work on and in nature along the banks of the Tees. One of the more intriguing passages is dedicated to the salubrious impact of draining the wetlands along a portion of the river. While a modern environmentalist might read this celebratory passage in horror, following the scientific knowledge of her day, Wilson sees the drains as a beneficial intervention that will help animals (with whom she elsewhere demonstrates a strong sympathetic bond) and liberate the earth from an excess of water which she believes to be robbing the plants of adequate nourishment. Describing ‘Morrit’s drains’ (the ruins of which can still be seen today a few miles outside of Barnard Castle), Wilson praises the transformation of the landscape. Where previously ‘dejected sheep all bleating stood,/Benumb’d with chilly damps and starv’d for food’ (lines 665–6), after the installation of the drains: Behold firm land appear, with wholesome grass; The cattle’s looks proclaim it as we pass: Death, which so oft in tainted rots appear’d, Is by the farmer now no longer fear’d. (lines 667–70)


107

As is discussed in Chapter 6, Wilson was not alone in believing the wetland ecosystem to be pernicious. Polite poets such as Dyer and plebeian poets such as Woodhouse shared Wilson’s distaste for swamps and moors. While Wilson’s views might seem to be bad science to the modern reader, her understanding of the benefits of agricultural improvement is of a piece with the environmental ethic of Christian stewardship predominant in the eighteenth century. Wilson advocates drainage’s more widespread implementation not only to combat an environment she believes to be unhealthy but also to preclude the need for foreign colonization and emigration, since drainage created more arable land in Britain. The increase in land available for farming would yield additional economic benefits in the form of greater opportunity for employment: This plan wou’d each land-holder but pursue, England a paradise we then might view: Not then wou’d her own sons, like exiles, seek More lands to till beyond the foaming deep: Lovers of agriculture all might here Employment find throughout the circling year; (lines 671–6) Wilson then provides specific, detailed instructions for draining, apparently based upon direct experience. At the start of this extended passage, for example, she guides the reader: Where bubbling waters rise, then with a spade Let a broad trench, three feet in depth, be made; Observe that with descent your conduit run, Whether to rising or setting sun; Let it in breadth about a foot extend, And with a wall you must its sides defend; This wall in height at least must be a foot, And over the canal be sure to put Large shelvy stones, the wall will them sustain; With ling or straw then cover it again; And careful stop each little hole or chink, Lest through these the mould’ring earth shou’d sink, (lines 681–92)

The passage as a whole shows that while Wilson is a firm defender of fauna, her attitude towards the flora is clearly more interventionist and potentially less politically appealing to a modern audience.


The poem is elsewhere marked by mixed political messages that can be read primarily in and through the landscape. This is apparent in Wilson’s use of history – traditional history, legendary history and political events of her day – to locate the significance of the region around the river Tees in relation to the British nation and to the work of nationalism. The significance of more canonical locodescriptive poetry to the project of British nationalism and imperialism is axiomatic. However unlike Pope’s Windsor Forest, the landscape along the Tees serves at key junctures to map the region’s rejection of British nationalism, a resistance that stems in part from the area’s proximity to Scotland. The first instance occurs in an extended description of Baliol Castle – a site of repeated rebellions against the English monarch: Baliol, of Caledonian race, First rear’d this sweet, this once most happy place; Which, when its Prince homage refus’d to pay, Did England’s valiant Edward take away: The lofty Warwicks then its Lords became, But next possess’d by honourable Vane. Proud Warwick to the Virgin Queen refus’d Allegiance, and her princely pow’r abus’d; (lines 543–50) The poem elsewhere describes similar challenges to authority. Its exploration of disunion, political and otherwise, is closely linked to the poet’s ambivalence about adhering to prescriptive generic parameters, as Wilson’s poem appears to reference sixteenth- and seventeenth-century river poetry as much as eighteenth-century prospect poetry. The Renaissance river poetry that Wilson cites had also influenced male Augustan poets. Pope’s nationalistic uses of the river Thames in Windsor Forest is, as Pat Rogers has shown, directly linked with the precedents of earlier nationalist projects in Camden’s Britannia and Drayton’s PolyOlbion.15 It would appear, however, that Wilson’s knowledge of the river tradition is more direct and not simply mediated by the early eighteenthcentury writers. Her most direct influence is likely Poly-Olbion, which includes a lengthy passage on the river Tees in Book 2, and Britannia, which uses rivers to organize the text overall, and which quotes, within its prose passages, from Camden’s phantom river poem on the marriage of Tame and Isis.16 While Wilson’s origins may have been humble, her poetry demonstrates her formidable knowledge of the poetic tradition.


109

The central feature of earlier river poetry is a plot, often presented as a pageant, narrating the marriage of rivers. The union of Tame and Isis to produce the Thames predominates in English river poems. The conjunction of tributaries, symbolizing marriage, has the politically symbolic purpose of celebrating national or international concord, harmony and union. In Wilson’s poem, however, everywhere along the river marriages both real and symbolic are shown to be prevented or breaking apart. First and foremost, the river Tees, lovely as she is, is never represented as marrying, although Wilson dutifully lists all the other rivers and streams that flow into her. While Wilson carefully inventories her tributaries, with a nod to the generic convention of the pageants in Spenser, Drayton and Pope, Teisa remains a virgin goddess when she finally flows out to the sea. The only man in her life is her father, Teisus, who expresses valedictory words of thanks to the poet near the conclusion. If river poems, as Herendeen has asserted, are as much about poets finding their voice as nations mapping their identities, then with the appearance of Father Teisus and with Wilson’s ventriloquism of William Pitt at the poem’s conclusion, the poem illustrates a symbolic drowning of the feminine-voiced river as it flows out to sea and of the female poet as she speaks within a chorus of largely male voices. Wilson goes beyond avoiding marriage for the Tees in her defiance of poetic conventions. The poem contains several other episodes of failed or thwarted marriages. The poem’s initial narrative episode, in fact, is a pastoral elegy transposed from the fields of Arcadia to a northern mining village. It tells of a young male miner who meets his doom in the pit and of the subsequent suffering of his betrothed, who nearly joins him in a chaste grave upon learning the horror of his fate (lines 93–117). Although Wilson is not directly critical of the environmental damages resulting from mining, she indicates its human costs. The mountain, which affords the prospect from which the wealthy gentleman might view his power and dominion over the landscape in traditional locodescriptive poetry, becomes a space of loss and mourning for the miners and the women in their lives, especially when the underground archways (which form the extent of the miners’ prospects) collapse on top of the labourers. The mountain is not the only natural marker of women’s loss. In an autobiographical passage in the poem, Wilson represents herself as a widow, in an imitation of Milton’s elegiacal poem of rivers, Lycidas, going so far as to identify her dear departed by the same name. Wilson longs for a more secluded and permanent retreat where she might mourn her loss, ‘But, with sweet Cowley I must yet lament,/That in a hir’d-house


all my days are spent’ (lines 385–6). As with Cowley, her poetic proclivities offer her some relief from her distresses, ‘Since the muse, ever uncontroul’d and free/Can traverse the earth, expatiate thro’ the skies’ (lines 388–9). Nonetheless, Wilson continues to grieve the death of her companion, her ‘dear Lycidas’ (line 400): ‘But, ah! that friend no more consoles my cares,/Nor pain, nor pleasure, more with me now shares’ (lines 393–4). Wilson’s grief is echoed by the natural world around her and other tragically ended marriages populate her verse. Earlier in the poem, she relates the sad separation of a devoted animal couple as a sentimental but impassioned argument against hunting. Depicting the pursuit of moorhens by a hunter with his pack of dogs, Wilson describes the episode as: A sight too painful for the tender muse: With mangled limbs to earth they flutt’ring fall; A sight so sad, ah! shall we pleasure call? Can man with soft emotions in his breast! Ah! can he with pain, and misery jest? (lines 156–60) What renders the scene all the more heartbreaking is how it destroys the bird’s family life: But hark! a call, some has escaped we see; O! ’tis the father of the family, Who ignorant of his poor young ones fate, Now calls on them, and his late faithful mate; (lines 161–4) The father bird soon discovers his irreparable loss. Through such scenes of personification and pathos, Wilson consistently protests violence towards animals. Wilson’s critique of hunting departs decisively from locodescriptive convention. A poem to which Wilson is otherwise indebted, Pope’s Windsor Forest, celebrates the royal hunting grounds, and Pope uses the analogy of the hunt to discuss British military prowess and conquest. After describing the pursuit of the game, Pope writes: Thus (if small things we may with great compare) When Albion sends her eager sons to war, Some thoughtless Town, with ease and plenty blest, Near, and more near, the closing lines invest; Sudden they seize th’ amaz’d, defenceless prize, And high in air Britannia’s standard flies. (lines 105–10)


111

In Wilson’s verse, the pursuits of the male nobility are depicted instead in their unflinching savagery. Elsewhere, as Bloomfield would do several decades later in The Farmer’s Boy, she speaks out against human cruelty to horses, in docking them and in mercilessly driving them17 : Witness yon huge machine that flies away, Why so much haste, ye foolish drivers say? To breathe let these poor panting creatures stay: Cruel, you rob them of their limbs and breath; (lines 1064–7) Wilson calls upon scriptural precedent, invoking the dignity of these creatures to make her case against modern carriage drivers. The horse is in the book of Job describ’d, The stately horse, of animals the pride! With nimble feet he paweth in the vale, The spear and arrow both before him fail; Stranger to fear he the fierce battle meets, Neighing, gloriously, the warrior greets; Even to thunder, does the sacred story, His majestic neck compare for glory: In days wherein they thus these creatures prize, They never thought of fell destructive flys (lines 1071–80) In this passage, as in the passage on hunting, Wilson criticizes the privileging of human wants and desires over and above a sympathetic and respectful coexistence with animals. While such a critique finds its way into the works of some eighteenth-century male poets, such as Cowper and other writers of sensibility, it is not strictly speaking the norm for the period’s poetry about nature. Perhaps, the strongest evidence for Wilson’s unique place in the history of locodescriptive and river poetry is found in one of the poem’s major episodes, which, like the description of Baliol Castle, underscores the poem’s northern location and its relevance to disputes around the Scottish/English border and to the struggles for independence that occurred there. Farther downriver, near the town of Rookby, another more historically significant and symbolic marriage fails to occur, and Wilson uses legend to situate the banks of the Tees as a location of opposition to English dominance, an opposition that is accomplished by a


female poet. The Enchantress Genuera uses her beautiful voice, Sirenlike, to lure Uther Pendragon into her castle and away from the battle to defend his nascent kingdom from invasion. The enchanted Uther is only liberated when the goddess Britannia goes to Cornwall to enlist Merlin’s powers to combat Genuera. Genuera, whose name is suggestive of her status as a ‘genius’ or spirit of the place, thwarts the ‘goddess’ Britannia’s project for solidifying and consolidating her young nation. Allegorically domesticating the struggle against nationalist assimilation, Genuera argues with Merlin that Britannia is simply jealous of the hero’s preference for herself and her domain, and that she has brought war on herself as a ploy to claim Genuera’s beloved: Britannia has, envious of our bliss, In contradiction meditated this! Or else, why did those vile Banditti land? This mighty empress of the seas cou’d strand Their vessel on some distant coast, where they To savages might fall an easy prey: But, jealous of our loves, she thus was wrought, And her lov’d country now to ruin brought: (lines 923–30) Though Genuera does relinquish Uther, she does so only under protest, suggesting how the construction of a nation also entails destruction of regional needs and concerns. Uther is reluctant to leave Genuera, and Wilson’s lengthy legendary digression ends with his promising to return one day. Once again, instead of describing marriages to reflect a pervasive sense of unity and concord – both personal and national – Wilson emphasizes continued discord through the separation of lovers. Wilson embeds these historically displaced moments of opposition to what Fulford describes as the project of mainstream masculine discourses of landscape to ‘speak uncontroversially for a united British nature properly represented by the gentry for the nation’.18 Wilson distinguishes her poem as a female, regional response to the work of poets such as Denham, Pope and Thomson. She privileges marginalization over centralization and division over assimilation and confluence. Perhaps conscious of how her poem subverts the larger ambitions of landscape poetry even while it fulfils some of its stylistic conventions, Wilson concludes with a patriotic flourish drawing upon current events that play directly towards a more popular readership. Even here, where she appears to be most devoutly patriotic, she again thematizes the separation and


113

the breakdown of union and of empire. Wilson devotes her poem’s last one hundred lines to England’s war with the American colonies, castigating America’s scornful rejection of ‘mother England’s’ loving embrace. The poem’s last fifty lines are given over to ‘The sad mournful news of lov’d Chatham’s death’ (1560) and the poem itself ends with his dying words: ‘When he cou’d no more, the patriot cry’d,/O Camden! save my country!—and died’ (lines 1614–15). Wilson ends her poem adopting the voice of a powerful gentleman, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in a poem which traced the course of the feminized river Teisa, and which described the countryside not from a ‘gentlemanly’ position of elevation but from the more immediate perspective of a humble labouring-class woman, and which further memorialized the agrarian and artisanal work of other women in this countryside. Unlike Pope who concludes Windsor Forest with Father Thames’s speech announcing concord and the end to war, Wilson’s poem ends abruptly, in the midst of the unresolved hostilities between England and its colonies in North America. While the Thames at the end of Windsor Forest flows out over the world majestically, the Tees disappears into the sea, and the river’s voice is subsumed into that of the far less spectacular Father Teisus, just as the poet’s is lost in Chatham’s dying utterance. Wilson writes of locations that map the struggle with and within forces of nationalism and imperialism. But she closes by giving the last words to a male national hero who perishes while attempting to preserve British imperial claims. Perhaps, like any good subaltern, Wilson, in her conclusion, exemplifies what Homi Bhabha has labelled ‘sly civility’ – the language of the subject of colonization that is ‘splitting, doubling, turning into its opposite’19 – but that is also the place of resistance, and the only way in which resistance to the colonizer might be written. Donna Landry has argued that ‘writing that has been dismissed as derivative, conventional, or imitative needs now to be reread for its dialogic, innovative, and critical possibilities, for its muted protests and attempts at subversion, its curtailed yet incorrigible desires’.20 Wilson’s writing – her intervention into eighteenth-century discourses of landscape and particularly the tradition of river poetry – deserves to be read and recognized for its slyly civil reproduction and disruptions of locodescriptive conventions. Its narrative of loss and of disintegration of the feminine within the landscape embeds a critique that has, heretofore, wrongfully been written out of most conventional literary histories. ∗∗∗


Like Wilson’s, Clare’s use of the river topos is richly intertextual. With it he explores the sensual and sensuous pleasures of the riparian scene, as well as his relationship to literary history, to his fellow Romanticperiod poets and, finally, to other labouring-class poets. As it did for Wilson, river poetry offered Clare an organic objective correlative to write about the course of literary history and to understand his place within it. His well-known anti-enclosure poems, such as ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’, ought then to be read in the context of Clare’s demonstrable familiarity with earlier British river poems that forge and celebrate national unification. In this regard, the project of the Round Oak poems is oppositional beyond simply speaking out against parliamentary enclosure. Where Renaissance chorographers use the course of rivers and their symbolic pageants and marriages to celebrate national unification, like Wilson, Clare uses river imagery to critique and contest the assimilation of regional distinctiveness in the process of enclosure. Clare turns the chorographic project on its head. His rivers do not disappear into one another to form a national river, as in the glorious marriage of Tame and Isis celebrated by Renaissance river poets. His waterways simply disappear. Speaking in the voice of the ‘genius of the brook’, Clare writes in ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’: ‘But now alas my charms are done ‘For shepherds & for thee ‘The Cow boy with his Green is gone ‘And every Bush & tree ‘Dire nakedness oer all prevails21 Clare’s river poems are not epithalamiums but elegies. Yet, Clare’s relationship to the riparian tradition is much more complex than simply a rejection of its conventional ideological premises. Clare is less critical when he turns to the more intimate and erotic river imagery found in seventeenth-century Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry.22 As was the case with Wilson’s influences, the sources for Clare’s river imagery are deeper than might be expected from a poet who was first presented to the public as an artless ‘natural genius’. Clare’s earliest use of the river as a setting for amorous encounters is the ballad, ‘Streamlet thou hast known my love’23 (as with ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’, Clare uses a ballad form in this poem as well). In this poem and in several others similar to it, Clare creates the waters’ edge as a locus of seclusion, privacy and intimacy. As in ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’, the poem highlights the brook’s ‘voice’, its


115

gurgling and babbling. The stream’s voice covers the amorous encounter transpiring on its banks, but threatens to reveal it also, by ‘telling’ of it, onomatopoeically imitating sounds of lovemaking. Similarly, the river ballads and love poems, which form the largest category within Clare’s riparian verse, hide and reveal Clare’s voice. In this particular stream of riparian poetry, Clare ventriloquizes other voices, imitating or pretending to transcribe the voice of a bard or storyteller often through using the ballad form. The fragment ‘The brook from its fountain rock drop after drop’24 uses a stream’s banks to evoke a more general sense of obscurity, privacy and protection. Here the dove cannot be molested by the ‘rude netterd boy’ (line 6), and the bee can store honey without having its hive destroyed by the mower. Clare celebrates the shelter offered by the river environment. Such security is emotional and aesthetic as well as physical. The river’s ecosystem offers the poet a sanctuary where he can test his voice in private. The river’s voice provides an acoustic shelter or cover for the sounds of poetic creativity and sexual procreation. (Similarly, in ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’, the genius of the brook singles Clare out because it notices him using the privacy of the brook’s banks to recite his poetry.) Clare’s imitations of amorous early modern river poetry never specifically name the rivers they depict. The waterways in these evocative, sometimes erotic poems are rivers in and of the imagination. They are not particular to a place, but rather rivers of intimate personal memory. In protecting the voice of the individual poet, they contribute to an anonymity of voice that forges the folk tradition, upon which such poems as ‘Banks of Ivory’, a later river song, are based. In this poem, Clare alters the original title of the folksong ‘The Banks of Inverary’ and appropriates a collective memory as his own.25 Here Clare also adopts archaized poetic diction, and the river covers his voice stylistically. Clare uses a similar strategy in the later poem ‘A Wimpering Brook’,26 which hearkens back to the earlier ‘Streamlet’, with the poet addressing his beloved ‘Lucy’ to join him by the side of the brook. Again and again, Clare assumes the voice of another to sing of these rivers. His imitations allow him to explore other styles while defining his own. Clare’s riverside love poems employ another seventeenth-century amorous conceit: fishing. Clare wrote several poems devoted to angling. While some of the poems describing fishing are not specifically linked to the riparian poems, they express Clare’s most significant association with the longer tradition of river writing, namely through Izaak Walton. In his poem dedicated to Walton, Clare defends anglers against charges


of cruelty, and punningly calls Walton ‘thou man of angel mind’.27 Elsewhere, in his journal of 1824, Clare calls Walton’s Compleat Angler ‘the best English Pastoral that can be written the descriptions are nature unsullied by fashionable tastes of the time they are simply true and like the Pastoral Ballads of Bloomfield breath of the common air and the grass and the sky one may almost hear the water of the river Lea ripple along and the grass and flags grow and rustle in the pages that speak of it I have never read a happier Poem in my time’.28 I have written elsewhere of the importance of Walton to Clare’s development as both a natural historian and a poet.29 Walton’s ideal of ‘compleatness’ is one that provides a means for Clare to think organically and holistically about his natural environment. The discursive hybridity of Walton’s text also provides Clare with a useful stylistic model to write about riparian ecosystems. Moreover, Walton plays a significant role in Clare’s published efforts to disguise and experiment with his voice. Clare’s use of traditional river imagery, in the case of the sonnet ‘Sweet brook, I’ve met thee many a summer’s day’, links him to the riparian sonnets of his more immediate contemporaries.30 This sonnet was published in London Magazine under the name of Percy Green. As John Goodridge has discussed, Clare created several poetic masquerades, in some cases adopting the identity of well-known seventeenth-century poets.31 Like Chatterton, Clare created supporting materials, prose texts that elaborated and worked to substantiate the imposture, one of which is entitled ‘Excursion with the Angler’.32 In it, the poet keeps company with Walton, John Donne, George Herbert and others. While the Percy Green poem is not one of the seventeenth-century forgeries, as it was written in 1822 (the ‘Excursion’ is from 1825), the impulses behind the poem are similar. Clare searches for alternative ways to reveal himself as a poet while concealing his actual identity. As Mark Storey points out in Clare: The Critical Heritage, this particular poem was published pseudonymously because ‘there was a feeling that there had been too many sonnets in the magazines, especially the London, under Clare’s name’.33 By 1822, river sonnets had flooded the literary market, with the contributions of Bowles, Coleridge and Wordsworth. In these Romantic-period poems, the river serves a more personal function, which is to explore poetic vocation and the poet’s specific or ‘native’ gifts, his or her uniqueness which is shared by the particular river of the region. The sonnet also appears to be Clare’s preferred form for his river poetry, and the earliest of these is his sonnet ‘The River Gwash’.34 Clare’s first critics singled out this poem as a particular success. John Taylor identifies it as being one of the best examples of Clare’s fine use of colour in his


117

‘Introduction’ to Poems Descriptive.35 The reviewer from the New Monthly Magazine cites it for ‘the exceeding beauty of the epithets, and that happy sense of the “light, shade, and mezzotint of landscape’’ ’.36 The critic for the Antijacobin Review closes his review quoting the sonnet as an example of Clare’s talent.37 Clare most frequently identifies himself as a poet with Round Oak Waters, for he speaks directly as the stream in that poem; however, like Wordsworth, Clare identifies with multiple regional rivers, including the Gwash and the Welland. In the River Gwash sonnet, Clare views the river from the vantage point of ‘its wildest scene’ (line 1) and paints the rapid movement of the water mirroring the movement of the clouds. The wild scene matches the poet’s wild musings, both of which offer him solace, rest and peace. In a second, longer poem on the Gwash, ‘Verses Written on the Banks of the River Gwash at Bridge Casterton’, Clare extends his description of the river’s ecosystem, depicting it as a place where humans and other creatures find solace and refreshment.38 As the evening approaches, the poor beggar ‘Drops on the bank to rest or eat his crust’ (line 4), the cows escape the persecution of the sun and flies, the cart horse refreshes himself, the milkmaid picks a rose, the morehen slumbers, the dreaming dormouse chitters, the cricket sings. Contemplating these serene images, the poet remarks, in the final stanza: And pleased to watch the summer evenings birth I linger here wild gwash thy quiet guest And from reposing natures sober mirth Catch these soft sounds that lull my cares to rest (lines 53–6) In these lines, Clare adopts the position of Walton, who states in The Compleat Angler that ‘the very sitting by the river’s side is . . . the quietest and fittest place for contemplation . . . when God intended to reveal any future events or higher notions to His prophets, he then carried them to the deserts or the sea-shore, that having so separated them from amidst the press of people and business, and the cares of the world, he might settle their mind in a quiet repose, and there make them fit for revelation’.39 Such revelations may be those uttered by the genius of the brook in ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’. However, other kinds of revelation occur by the river’s edge, along the banks of another important regional river in ‘To the Welland’.40 In this, one of Clare’s earliest river poems, Clare firmly establishes his poetic identity through the river, a strategy he would have known well from his reading of fellow Romantic writers’ river poems. However, rather than using


such an identity to elaborate his relationship to a refined locodescriptive tradition, Clare quickly diverts the course of the poem to a more homely watershed. He affiliates himself not with the nationalistic topographical writing of Denham or Pope, nor with such contemporaries as Wordsworth, Bowles or Smith. Instead, he establishes his connections with two contemporary, regional, labouring-class poets. The course of the Welland allows Clare to link himself with David Hurn, a farmer from Holbeach, who published his Rural Rides in 1813: E’en I the meanest of the train While now I hum this simple strain Along thy banks.—cannot refrain My praises to reveal For when his charming page I turn Nay at the very name of Hurn My heart and soul with raptures burn And quite inspir’d I feel (lines 17–24) Although Hurn never wrote a poem to the Welland, several of the poems in his collection involve river imagery. The Welland flows between Clare’s dwelling place and that of Hurn in Spalding, and it links both poets to Robert Bloomfield’s home, Honington: Then roll thy waves his fame to spread While village maids by shepherds led Shall gather garlands for his head And weave a rural Crown And swains more fit his praise shall tell While Spalding—Honington as well Alike—(not caring to excell) Shall gain the same renown (lines 25–32) While the course of the Welland links Spalding to Peterborough, it does not pass anywhere near Honington (which is on the banks of the Stour). Clare imposes a fictive geography to underscore his intention of using the tradition of river poetry to map an alternate ‘stream’ of regional, labouring-class poets. Furthermore, Clare eschews representing the Welland as flowing into any other river or having any other rivers flowing into it. This ‘stream’ of poetry does not become a tributary into other rivers, but rather (unlike the actual Welland) is undiluted by other waterways. The river figures the distinctiveness of labouring-class literature as


119

separate and unique. Although rivers feature prominently in how Clare explores his poetic identity and his relationship to literary history and culture, he was not the only labouring-class poet to demonstrate an interest in writing about rivers. In another poem ‘To the Memory of Bloomfield’, published in The Rural Muse, Clare again uses water imagery to create his homage. Addressing the ‘Sweet unassuming Minstrel’,41 Clare naturalizes his predecessor, figuring him as a ‘quiet brook’. He advises him: The tide of fashion is a stream too strong For pastoral brooks, that gently flow and sing: But Nature is their source, and earth and sky Their annual offering to her current bring. The gentle muse and memory need no sigh; For thine shall murmur on to many a spring, When prouder streams are summer-burnt and dry. (lines 8–14) Clare’s decision to equate his forbearer with a stream may have been partly driven by the fact Bloomfield too was a poet of the river, publishing his major locodescriptive poem, The Banks of Wye, in 1811. For Bloomfield, this poem represented an effort at creative renewal and a redefinition of himself as a poet, as Tim Burke argues.42 An avowed admirer of all of Bloomfield’s work, Clare unsurprisingly esteemed this poem in particular, one which includes a moving invocation to the ‘Spirit of Burns’ in Book 3. Looking down upon the river from a prospect on the summit of Pen y Vale or ‘Sugar-Loaf’, Bloomfield meditates upon how Burns’s landscapes nourished his poetry: ‘How blest thy Caledonian hills! . . . Thy mountain haunts,–thy classic streams’.43 Bloomfield then expresses concern whether his scenery will inspire similarly powerful poetry, given the comparative lack of grandeur of Welsh peaks. But Bloomfield does more than simply use the river scenery to connect to a fellow labouring-class poet. Given the place of the Wye within the development of picturesque aesthetics, thanks to Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (not to mention its commemoration in ‘Tintern Abbey’, a site Bloomfield also visits on his tour), like Wilson before him and Clare after him, Bloomfield self-consciously engages with the conventions and also resists them. In particular, with his depictions of scenes of labour and labourers along the Wye, as Tim Burke argues, ‘Bloomfield renegotiates the value of picturesque productivity, and in so doing defies Gilpin’s interdictions, by refusing to present the laboring body as an “appendage’’ . . . . The effect is to repopulate this picturesque


environment, correcting the case made explicitly in Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye for an aesthetic depopulation of the landscape’.44 The riverside was not always an empowering or inspiring locale, as Irish servant poet Ellen Taylor (no relation to John) makes clear, in her ‘Written by the Barrow Side, Where She was Sent to Wash Linen.’45 Tim Burke remarks that despite her use of the river setting, Taylor appears to have no wider awareness of the tradition of labouring-class poetry, including the work of fellow washer-woman, Mary Collier.46 The beauties of the riverside scenery conflict with the demands of the work Taylor must perform there: To view thy dimpled surface here, Fond fancy bids me stay, But servitude with brow austere, Commands me straight away (lines 5–8) Although the river does not inspire a sense of connection to her fellow plebeian poets, it does have explicitly – and negatively – literary connections. Taylor wishes the Barrow were the mythical river of forgetfulness, Lethe, so that by drinking its waters she might forget about books, since: I can but from them learn to know What’s misery compleat, And feel more sensibly each blow, Dealt by relentless fate. (lines 13–16) Despite her previous pleasure in reading, she claims these pastimes ‘ill suit the sphere/Of life in which I move’ (lines 21–2). Instead, Taylor now wishes for a ‘cold insensibility’ (line 37) to the beauties of both nature and literature, as the only condition that might give her a ‘hope for peace’ (line 40). Not every author shared Taylor’s bleak outlook. The inventory of other labouring-class poets who contributed to the topic of river poetry is extensive, and their verse demonstrates a range of concerns. Robert Burns, Bloomfield’s inspiration, wrote poems to the ‘bonny’ Doon. Among Burns’s fellow Scots, Robert Anderson wrote poems to the river Caldew and to the Eden and David Service wrote to the Clyde. Abolitionist poet William Holloway wrote ‘To the River Stour, in Dorsetshire’ in his 1808 collection, The Minor Minstrel in praise of a local estate on its banks. Robert Franklin, a miller by trade, has a poem to the Humber which is also largely a tribute to would-be patrons. Robert Millhouse,


121

called ‘The Burns of Sherwood Forest’, features the Trent as an organizing symbol for his Song of the Patriot (1826). William Lane, whose hill poetry was discussed in Chapter 3, wrote a spiritual autobiography of his journey along the River Mersey (availing himself of the river’s homophonic resonance). Romantic-period labouring-class women poets also contributed. Ann Batten Cristall composed a poem on the Dart, and Isabella Lickbarrow wrote several river poems, including ‘Lines Written on the Banks of the Eden’, ‘Written on the Banks of a Rapid Stream’ and ‘On the Sprint at Garnet Bridge’, all of which appear in her Poetical Effusions (1814). While these poets demonstrated a range of artistic self-awareness in their use of river imagery, for many the obscurity of the streams they depicted provided an easy figure for the poet’s sense of his or her fame or lack thereof. While the trope is repeated in their works, Clare and Bloomfield explicitly link the river with their respective vocations and their efforts to identify an alternate stream within literary history. Clare diverts the course of the actual river in ‘To the Welland’, just as he diverts the history of river poetry, to claim it for labouring-class poets. If Clare’s other streams, like Round Oak Waters, could be destroyed by the processes of agricultural ‘improvement’, he could use rivers of the imagination to redirect, reveal and recreate the course of rivers and the literary history and environments they memorialized.

5 ‘What Terms of Art Can Nature’s Pow’rs Express?’: William Falconer and Labouring-Class Poetry at Sea

In days gone by, two men lived out in the often intemperate weather: the peasant and the sailor. How they spent their time, hour by hour, depended on the state of the sky and on the seasons. We’ve lost all memory of what we owe these two types of men, from the most rudimentary technologies to the highest subtleties. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract 1 One of the more important stylistic shifts distinguishing early eighteenth-century and Romantic representations of nature is the abandonment of neoclassical periphrases and other seemingly artificial techniques for writing about the environment. As the century progresses, writers increasingly demonstrate a growing preference for less portentous, more direct diction in their description. Romantic writers are less likely to make their borrowings from Virgil as explicit as their Augustan forbears did. To understand the difference at its starkest, one need only consider John Clare’s poetry, such as ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, which literally mimics the songs of the birds, next to poems such as Thomson’s Seasons or Pope’s Windsor Forest. Although he read Pope and Thomson closely and admired them deeply, Clare does not participate in the Augustan practice of referring to birds as the ‘feathery tribes’ or to fish as the ‘finny legions’. From the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, then, the conventions for representing nature in poetry become less abstract and anthropomorphic. Likewise, in the same period, as ecocritics such as Max Oelschlaeger have demonstrated, the taste for more ‘wild’ or ‘uncultivated’ landscapes increases, as reflected in park and garden design or in the changing attitudes towards mountains, once considered the painful scars of the Deluge, now deemed pleasurably sublime.2 The 122

Labouring-Class Poetry at Sea

123

reasons for these transformations are several, and poets of all backgrounds demonstrate a shift of attitudes towards nature that has been broadly documented by historians such as Keith Thomas and Marjorie Hope Nicolson.3 This transformation involved a general demystification of nature’s process through scientific inquiry, as well as an overall desacralization and demoralization of nature, as theorists such as Carolyn Merchant and Kate Rigbey have argued.4 Whether or not nature was God’s book, within which we should read moral or social lessons prescribed for strictly human ends, became a more open question, feeding both doubts and certainties as to whether the purpose of the rest of creation was solely to serve humankind’s needs. In many cases, as is discussed in Chapter 4, labouring-class writers resisted this trend, although in some cases it may have been driven by their need to demonstrate the requisite piety to be published. The impact of this revolution in the perception of nature on various terrestrial locations has been discussed in scholarship devoted to the development of the three main aesthetic categories of the era (the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque), but how these changes in attitudes affected depictions of the ocean, an environment that covers seventenths of the globe, has received much less consideration.5 Britain’s relationship to the sea has always been central to its national identity. Anthems such as Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’ illustrate how much being an island nation was a source of national pride, as Britain’s dominance at sea made its imperial dominion possible. Yet despite how poets of the period celebrate how Britain ruled the waves, we witness simultaneously an increased fascination with stories and images of shipwreck.6 Popular interest reached its peak in the early nineteenth century, as Carl Thompson’s recent anthology illustrates.7 These shipwrecks served as reminders that any claim to mastery over the sea was an act of potentially dangerous hubris. Unlike land, where control and dominion can be marked through the physical traces of enclosures, such as walls or hedgerows, through the regular geometry of large-scale farming, or through the unimpeded vistas of parklands, humans cannot leave traces of their claims to dominance on the waters of the ocean. Some progress in humanity’s instrumental relationship to the sea occurred in the eighteenth century as sailors gained new tools and knowledge for navigating and charting courses through distant seas. Even with the great breakthrough of the ability to calculate longitude, as the poetic narratives make clear, the seas could make a mockery of human claims to command them. As mountains were being scaled, wastes enclosed, forests denuded and wetlands drained through enlightenment technologies,


the seas remained a wilderness, a space that continued to resist the imposition of instrumental knowledge. The confrontation of nature with nautical technology was given its most popular representation by a writer of labouring-class origins. William Falconer’s popular epic, The Shipwreck (first edition, 1762), is a pivotal text for understanding how eighteenth-century British culture imagined the seas. Falconer influenced subsequent polite artists such as Coleridge, Byron and J.M.W. Turner, as well as many plebeian poets whose work will be the focus of the second half of this chapter. The Shipwreck became a best-seller soon after its publication and continued to sell well into the nineteenth century. An overview of the poem’s publication history suggests that Falconer is second to Burns as the most commercially successful poet of labouring-class origins. Like Burns, Falconer was also Scottish. He was born in 1732 in Edinburgh, where his father was a wigmaker. He likely served his apprenticeship working on board ships carrying coal between London and Newcastle, and by the time he was 17, he had begun serving on merchant routes in the Mediterranean. During those early years, he experienced the shipwreck that serves as the basis for his poem.8 Falconer also received critical approbation long after his death, although his unfortunate and early demise in a shipwreck may have enabled him to fulfil the stereotype of the doomed natural genius. He made two major revisions to the poem, one in 1764 and the last in the year of his death in 1769. Posthumously ‘revised’ editions continued to be produced in England, Ireland and America well into the late nineteenth century, and small extracts from the poem are still included in modern anthologies such as the Oxford Book of the Sea.9 Only recently has an accessible and reliable critical edition been produced by William R. Jones. Jones’s edition, which allows page opposite comparisons of each of the editions produced by Falconer in his lifetime, attempts to correct the errors introduced in most editions produced after 1804, as a result of J.S. Clarke’s belief (based on very shaky evidence) that Falconer’s final corrections were the product of his mental instability. Falconer’s revisions explicitly address the question of finding the appropriate language within which to represent the human encounter with the maritime environment. In Falconer’s case, unlike Duck’s, the problem of a suitable style moves beyond concerns about the possible clash between his labouring-class voice and the conventions of polite locodescriptive poetry. More specifically, Falconer’s poem brings to bear an important perspective on the wider eighteenth-century debate about the appropriateness of ‘terms of art’ – the specific technical language used


125

by practitioners of different occupations – to the realm of poetry, and in particular georgic or didactic poetry.10 Although The Shipwreck is based on Falconer’s personal experiences of surviving a disaster much like the one described in his poem, the poem is not explicitly autobiographical. Nevertheless, Falconer’s presence as a working sailor is felt in the shifting treatment, across all three editions, of the highly specialized language of seafaring. Falconer makes use of a vocationally particular vocabulary, one that requires the poem to be extensively footnoted, as Falconer was no doubt aware that the majority of his audience would not be familiar with his terminology. His investment in educating readers about the sailors’ language is further illustrated by the fact that he was also the author of an equally popular reference work, The Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769). A characteristic indicator of the ocean’s sublimity is the difficulty that it poses to the artist’s powers of description, provoking, as it does, the requisite feelings of awe and terror and the speechlessness that accompanies those emotions. Falconer’s poem approaches this artistic problem first by using analogies to more familiar terrestrial objects and the tropes of classical epic and georgic verse. What distinguishes his work is how he also brings the seaman’s knowledge and language to bear on this artistic dilemma. Falconer faced criticism for this decision, because of the ongoing aesthetic debate about the appropriateness of ‘terms of art’ in poetry, and each of the two subsequent editions diminished the terms of art and increased the neoclassical conventions.11 Because of this, my discussion will focus on the first edition of 1762 with reference to the later editions. In his discussion of Thomson’s Seasons, Alain Corbin summarizes the problem that presents itself to any artist wishing to write about a maritime environment. For most of the eighteenth century, the open ocean (as opposed to coastal regions) offered few points of reference, whether for navigation or for literary or pictorial representation.12 If Nature was the Book of God, then the oceans called to mind the Flood and the divine power to obliterate human civilization. The Ocean could be rendered a symbol of the Sublime and thus as a reminder of divine omnipotence. In his 1712 essay in the Spectator, Joseph Addison notes the ‘pleasing Astonishment’ as well as the ‘Horrour’ inspired by regarding the Ocean. Addison writes ‘it is impossible for me to survey this World of fluid Matter, without thinking on the Hand that first poured it out’.13 Beyond these stylistic strategies, the ocean continued to present a unique representational dilemma for eighteenth-century writers. Notwithstanding William Diaper’s 1712 Nereids (which simply transposed pastoral conventions wholesale to an undersea fantasy world),


most of the poetry written about the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century is dedicated to a celebration of British naval power. Thomson’s ‘Rule Brittannia’ is the most well known, but others include Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, Edward Young’s Ocean: An Ode or his ‘Imperium Pelagi’. The ocean in these poems serves as backdrop for international conflict and imperial conquest. As with classical precursors, such as the Iliad or the Aeneid, the ocean was something simply to be got through. W.H. Auden observes in his classic study of sea symbolism, The Enchafed Flood, ‘A voyage . . . is a necessary evil, a crossing of that which separates or estranges. Neither Odysseus nor Jason goes to sea for the sake of a voyage.’14 In his opening lines, Falconer acknowledges the classical and neoclassical precursors and the artistic problems posed by the maritime setting, even as he distinguishes his effort from those preceding it: While jarring int’rests wake the world to arms, And fright the peaceful plains, with fierce alarms; While Neptune hears Britannia’s Thunders roll In vengeance, o’er the deep, from pole to pole: Declining martial strains and hostile rage, An unknown Author treads th’ Aonian stage15 Falconer will not write about the ocean to depict the rage of nation against nation, as poets such as Young or Thomson had done. Although he is unknown as a poet, he ventures to depict a conflict between humanity and nature and of nature with itself: Far other lays of sad Distress to sing, Than ever trembled on the lyric string: To paint a scene, the muses never knew; A scene, where never Phocian laurel grew; Where adverse elements dire conflict wage, And swelling surges brave the Tempest’s rage; Where Dangers, in one sad succession, rise, And Hope immers’d in present Anguish lies. (‘Proem’, lines 7–14) In staking his distinction from the other writers before him, Falconer here and elsewhere displays the requisite familiarities with the classical allusions of polite locodescriptive verse. The environment he will describe, however, is one which has literally and figuratively never grown any laurel. Such an environment has never provided any firm ground for


127

poetry. At sea, conflict and drama can occur without a human presence, but when humans clash with the ocean, a providential outcome, one that would enable humanity to triumph over this generally hostile setting, is never guaranteed. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, the sailors in Falconer’s poem find no island paradise to colonize, and, at least in the earliest edition of the poem, the poet refuses to offer the consolation of a divine justification for nature’s destructiveness. Falconer does not represent nature, at least oceanic nature, as existing to serve humanity’s – or God’s – needs, nor can he find any satisfactory moral lesson to draw from these particular pages of the Book of Nature. Falconer fully understands the challenge his topic presents and figures this in his ‘Proem’ by having the Muses reject his pleas for assistance precisely because of the setting of his poem: ‘With them perpetual harmony remains,/While endless Discord fills these dire domains’ (lines 33–4). Falconer presents his artistic quandary through the polite terms of classical allegory, even as he approaches the challenge of depicting a natural setting for which few literary precedents exist. He turns to Memory, the mythological mother of the Muses, to be his metaphorical source. He relies upon his own memories, as one who has experienced the oceans first hand, to lend authority and authenticity to his subject. In his introductory ‘Proem’, he provides an epic inventory of his voyaging (albeit displacing and distancing himself by writing in the third person): ‘Thro’ Poland, Denmark, Norway he has stray’d,/And Sweden, France, and Russia each survey’d’ (‘Proem’, lines 43–4). These journeys, he notes, like most journeys undertaken by early modern seamen, brought with them immense personal suffering. Yet they also qualify him, in the absence of classical precursors or a refined education, to speak. Addressing those who would question a sailor’s ability to compose a poem about the sea, Falconer admonishes: Then censure not severe th’ unvaunted song! Tho’ jarring sounds that lab’ring verse prolong: Tho’ terms uncouth shou’d strike th’ offended ear, For sake of truth, the uncouth measures bear! No laurel wreaths he asks, nor does he claim To stand recorded in the rolls of Fame: The Muses’ aid he supplicates no more; But trusts alone to Mem’ry’s ample store. (‘Proem’, lines 80–7) Falconer foregrounds and draws ample attention to the artistic and discursive challenges that his poem’s subject matter presents. His work is


the product of personal memory (transposed into third person) and not adapted from or derivative of a longer tradition. To confront his task, Falconer must use language that might be considered ‘uncouth’ to his audience, namely those terms of art of the working sailor that invited criticism from the poem’s earliest reviewers. These terms, as much as the class background of the poet writing them, produce the ‘jarring sounds that lab’ring verse prolong’ (line 81). The verse is the product of a person who laboured at sea, and the presence of a technically trade-specific language make the verse feel labouring to an audience unfamiliar with the world it represents. In the 1762 edition, however, Falconer defers introducing these ‘uncouth’ terms through a lengthy and very couth description of the Goddess Memory and her appearance to the poet. As if to claim a politely classical source for his original work, he places the telling of his tale directly into the goddess’s mouth. Falconer thereby recuperates a more familiar literary framework for his story, even while insisting that it resists such conventions. The ship in the poem, like the one in which Falconer himself wrecked, is called the Britannia. Falconer appears largely uninterested in the moral or ironic possibilities that might be made of that name, particularly in light of the fact that the ship will wreck after a voyage to Candia, or Crete, the home of the once mighty ancient Minoan culture, an island-based civilization that had held sway over the Mediterranean (and thus suggestively paralleling British imperialism). Depicting current-day Candia, by Falconer’s time a mere outpost of Greek culture, Falconer refuses to pastoralize modern Aegean culture. Like the sea itself, the landscape of Candia and the neighbouring Cyclades is described negatively, represented by what it is not and by what it has lost: Sharp Penury afflicts these wretched isles, There Hope ne’er dawns, Prosperity ne’er smiles: These eyes have seen, while famish’d babes complain, The barren soil a sev’nth year till’d in vain: No lovely Helens grace the wretched shore, Or Cytheria’s rival Gods adore: (I: lines 160–5) While off the shores of Crete, Falconer demonstrates some of the more practical uses for the gods of classical mythology, namely as signs to identify the astronomical reference points that sailors use to navigate: . . . in his radial wheel, the circling Sun Thro’ bright Astraea and the Scales had run:


129

Thrice ten degrees, along th’ Ecliptic, gained Of longitude, and in the Scorpion reign’d (I: lines 174–7) The mariners’ ability to read nature, to look towards the skies and the waters for guidance, is essential to their survival. The eighteenth century witnessed the solution to the most important problem of navigation, the ability to accurately calculate longitude and subsequently the development of various other technologies to help master the seas. But at the time of Falconer’s writing, the sailor’s knowledge of his environment continued to be based first and foremost on keen observation and inherited lore gained from others’ observations. Navigation remained an interpretive art as much as a science, but an art with important influences on modern science. As Vladimir Jankovic has documented, meteorology, the science of predicting weather (as opposed to simply describing past weather anomalies), was still in its infancy.16 But this new field was indebted to the specific knowledge of the sailor. Reading signs in nature not simply for moral messages but for actual indications of expected changes to the environment, and employing the technology at hand to enhance that interpretation, was the first step in the effort to exert human dominion over the seas. The messages to be found in the Book of Nature were not always allegorical. They could be a matter of life and death. Nevertheless, Falconer’s initial description of navigational techniques continues to blend classical allusion with technical didacticism: The Pilots now an Azimuth attend, On which all courses, duly shap’d, depend: The compass and the octant ready lay, Reflecting planes and incident, survey; Along the arch, the gradual index slides, While Phoebus down the vertic’ circle glides: He, o’er th’ horizon, vibrant seems to swim, And, tangent, sweeps it with his nether limb: They height and polar distance thus obtain, Next latitude and declination gain: In Chiliads, then, th’ analogy is sought, And on the sinical triangle wrought: By this, magnetic variance is explor’d, Just angles form’d, and polar truth restor’d. (I: lines 233–46) Phoebus coexists in these lines with an octant, an instrument used to make angular measurements. Falconer’s debt to georgic poetry is evident in this highly precise passage detailing the methods and tools for


navigation, although Falconer’s pilot chooses the more complicated technique from those available to him.17 Surviving at sea demanded specific knowledge and a high degree of mathematical ability. After describing more modern and scientific knowledge gathering about his environment, Falconer’s narrator introduces dolphins, a more traditional sign of changing weather. According to customary lore, their appearance indicated a shift in the winds. In a passage that some critics believe influenced Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the sailors hunt and kill the dolphins for sport. The scene might subtly indicate the potentially negative implications of a move away from the more experiential encounter with nature towards a more scientific and instrumental interaction (as demonstrated in the use of navigational tools). Falconer does not point to that moral message explicitly, as he avoids moralizing in general. But given the tragedy about to ensue, the reader is warranted in asking herself whether the abandonment of reading nature directly (through the movement of the dolphins) in preference for reading nature through the medium of instruments and abstract calculations lays the groundwork for the subsequent fatal errors in judgment that occur when the sailors battle the storm that wrecks their ship.18 Falconer seems to imply that technical and instrumental mediation does not grant the sailors better knowledge or potential mastery over their environment. Sophisticated tools and calculations fail to alert the sailors to the impending catastrophe. Technology gives the Pilot a feeling of false domination over nature that is paralleled by the sailors’ abandoned hunting of the dolphins for purposes other than food. Perhaps if the sailors had heeded the dolphins instead of hunting them, they might have fared better. The poem does not say, although Coleridge appears to have interpreted the poem in this way, transforming the dolphins (often a symbol of Christ) into the famous albatross. After describing how the dolphins change colour once they are killed, Falconer ends the first canto by stating another version of his initial artistic problem: ‘But here, description makes each beauty less,/What terms of Art can Nature’s pow’rs express?’ (lines 276–7). ‘Terms of art’ carries a double meaning in these lines. Because he capitalizes ‘Art’, the line may refer to the poetic terms and language that Falconer borrows in part from works such as Windsor Forest to describe the hunting of the dolphins. But he also refers to the ‘terms of art’ as the technical language of the sailor’s trade. Neither poetic nor technical language can sufficiently describe oceanic Nature. If these forms of discourse fail, other forms of human control over the environment must fail also. The futility of human efforts to control the sea is made clear in the scene which opens the first canto of the 1762 edition, as the sudden


131

and dangerous appearance of a waterspout threatens the ship. In order to control it, the sailors fire their cannons into it to dissipate it (according to Jones’s annotations, this was a common practice). The tools of military might are used against nature, to conquer and subdue it. While the sailors may win this battle against the raging powers of the sea, they are about to lose the war. With the description of the onslaught of the storm, Falconer’s poem relies most heavily upon the technical ‘terms of art’. Early editions of the poem contain extensive footnotes, making the experience of reading the work much like that of reading a text in a foreign language, and that, in effect, was what Falconer’s seafaring language was likely to be to his readership. On some pages, the majority of space is given to annotations glossing only four or five lines of verse. Regardless of how extensively eighteenth-century British culture was shaped by its relationship to the sea, most Britons were unfamiliar with the specialist language of sailors. In the passage which introduces the first squall, Falconer’s nautical language attempts to exert linguistic control over the situation: Beneath its driving force, the waves engage; And foaming white, the whirling surges rage: Now, black with pregnant ruin, it impends, And, cataracts with storm, tempestuous blends: Impell’d by mighty pressure, down she lies: ‘Brail up the mizzen quick!’ the Master cries: ‘Man the clue-garnetts, let the main-sheet fly!’ ... ‘A-weather heave the helm!’ the Chief commands, ‘To trim the fore-sail, next prepare all hands!’ (II: lines 21–7, 33–4) Even with its unfamiliar terminology, Falconer’s depiction of the sailors’ response to the storm is filled with drama and intensity. Each of their actions directly answers the storm’s power. Yet even as the poem describes these actions with georgic precision, Falconer introduces an epic simile, appropriate to the epic battle between the sailors and the storm, in his description of the initial damage done to the ship: As when by hunter’s gall’d, a mountain boar, The cultur’d glebes, and vineyards, rushes o’er; Resistless, forces thro’ each fencing bound, Tears up the sprouts, and tramples to the ground The tender vines and shooting plants around;


The lab’ring Husbandman, with toil and care, Attempts, by props, the drooping limbs to rear; New grafts th’ uprooted shrubs, in just array, And from his grounds, the ruins clears away. (II: lines 65–73) The hunting metaphor in these lines echoes the earlier scene of the hunt of the dolphins. The storm is like a hunted boar, and once again hunted nature wreaks revenge on the human hunter. Faced with an insufficiency of words to describe the ocean setting, Falconer turns to an agricultural analogy, common to sailors who would often described their going to sea as ‘ploughing the deep’. Such expressions illustrate the wishfulness of any desire to domesticate maritime spaces. In his vivid description of the adversarial confrontation of storm and ship, Falconer moves between poetic conventions, such as the epic simile, and the highly detailed and technical language of the sailors’ steps to adjust their vessel to the ocean’s unpredictable assaults: To windward, ready, waiting the command, At the clue-garnett, tack, and brails they stand: The tack’s eas’d off, involv’d the doubling clue. Between the pendent blocks, ascending flew: The sheet and weather-brace they now stand by, Bunt-lines and lee-clue-garnett, next apply; Then all prepar’d, ‘let go the sheet!’ he cries, Loud rattling, jarring, thro’ the blocks it flies, Beneath the lee-yard-arm expanding, fills, Till close embrail’d, and squar’d, the belly spills: (II: lines 130–9) Although a reader may not know the exact meaning of the terms used in the passage, Falconer is able to use them within a syntax and rhythm that simulates the scene’s fast-paced intensity. The rapid succession of monosyllabic words imitates the pounding of the rain and winds. Just as nature and humanity confront one another in the dramatic conflict of the storm, within Falconer’s poem, the terms of poetic art clash directly with terms of navigational art. The poem demonstrates a discursive hybridity, a mixture of linguistic styles, which is heightened as the storm increases in strength. Falconer links the treacherous work of the sailor with the work of the poet of the sea by using another epic simile to identify the heroism of the one with the other. He likens the sailors’ efforts to guide the ship to the quest of Orpheus, trying to retrieve Eurydice from Hades. He then directly reflects upon the difficulties of the


133

poet who would try to write about the encounter with nature at its most alienate from human: Not more advent’rous was th’ attempt to move Th’ infernal Pow’rs with strains of heavenly love. When faithful Orpheus, on the Stygian coast, In sacred notes implor’d his Consort lost; Tho’ Fates and Furies fill’d the dire domain, And tortur’d Souls forever mourn’d in vain; Than mine, in ornamental verse to dress The harshest sounds mechanic Arts express: (II: lines 198–205) The poet hopes to conquer the certain death that the storm will bring. Thus he wishes to exert the same magical control over natural elements and natural forces that ancient poets were believed to possess. He realizes too that like the efforts of the first poet, Orpheus, his attempt to write about the scene in language of the ‘mechanic Arts’ is without precedent. Continuing his endeavours to balance the ‘harshness’ of his nautical vocabulary with a more pleasing refined style, the poet introduces another classical allusion, likening his position as an original artist to that of the ancient hero Daedalus, who is aided by art in his attempts to find a means to transcend his natural limits: Elated then, on wings before unknown, He ‘scap’d the winding labyrinth, his own. Thus by Experience taught the rugged way, Where Phoebus’ Daughters never dar’d to stray, Th’ untrodden desert, long I’ve wander’d o’er, Where Phocian strains were never heard before, And now, like him, my Fancy aims to soar: The verse attempts in smoother notes to flow, Replete with sad variety of woe. (II: lines 210–18) Unlike other poets from labouring-class origins, for whom the comparison with Icarus, the son of Daedalus, is made to seem more apt (due to Icarus’s perishing for attempting to go against the natural order of things by rising too high), in this passage Falconer demonstrates a degree of confidence in his abilities and talents for his task. Daedulus means in Greek ‘skilfully wrought’; in classical mythology, Daedalus was a clever craftsman who invented many new and important tools. As the lines imply, his lived experience, rather than any kind of abstract education, led to his


success. Although he was imprisoned in the maze he created for the King of Crete (and given the poem taking place off the shores of Crete, the analogy is even more suitable), Daedalus was able to invent the means of his own rescue, although his son did not fare so well. Daedalus was a highly original and highly practical artist and craftsman. He was able to survive through his imaginative intelligence and practical experience, much as Falconer hoped to do. Immediately after this passage celebrating the fleeting triumph of his original verse over the scene, he describes the failure of the Captain’s knowledge and tools to do likewise: In vain, he spreads the graduated chart, And bounds the distance by the rules of art; Across the geometric plane, expands The compasses to circumjacent lands; Ungrateful task! for nought he now explores Beneath the lee, but Death and fateful shores. (II: lines 227–32) The poet, by making innovative choices with the rules of his art, is able to partially control the storm within his verse. The captain, by contrast, recognizes the futility of navigational instruments to do likewise. Only through poetry, through art, might humans hope to contain the sea’s vastness. Falconer’s message is one that might meet with approval from modern environmentalists. We cannot delude ourselves that our tools and technology will allow us to control nature. Only in the work of the imagination can we approach an understanding, though not necessarily a control, of the non-human world around us. At the very moment that the Master recognizes the futility of his instruments and charts, an enormous wave crashes over the side of the ship and breaks it apart. Despite his neo-classical digressions and his highly specialized vocabulary, Falconer demonstrates a remarkable use of dramatic timing. The tragedy of the scene is underscored by the description of the sailors’ furious but futile efforts to save the vessel. However ‘Accumulated perils thus arise,/And adverse Fate experience’d Art defies’ (II: lines 263–4). The use of ‘Art’ in this line is again ambiguous. The sailor’s practical ‘arts’ fail. Similarly, the poet’s art is also defied by the nearly apocalyptic vision that he is attempting to depict. In the poem’s third and final canto, the captain makes a desperate last attempt to save the crew by veering them towards the island of Falconera. Here Falconer alludes, if a bit obliquely, to his own sense of poetic awakening. In a precursor to the Romantic crisis lyric, Falconer


135

comes to an awareness of his poetic vocation at the height of the catastrophe on board the ship. He opens this important passage with another invocation to his muse, Memory, and he describes (as always in the third person) the presence on board the ship of

. . . some Youth, whose life’s continu’d page Is one sad tale of Fate’s vindictive Rage, Tho’ doom’d, unhappy! ’mongst the number’d Crew, An ampler share of sacred Science knew; (III: lines 42–5)

This nascent poet is prevented by the Adversity from going ashore along the Greek seacoast to encounter the classical heritage. Memory, however, is able to sing of Athens, the land of Socrates and Solon, of Corinth, of Arcadia and Ithaka. Falconer devotes many lines to the history and mythology of ancient Greece, demonstrating a knowledge that he elsewhere claims to have been denied. His inventory of the tales of classical gods and heroes dramatically postpones the inevitable destruction of ship and crew. The immediacy of the sailor’s encounter with the ocean’s devastating power is deferred as Falconer paints a broader backdrop with ancient stories of triumph and tragedy. But ever the practical sailor, Falconer surveys the regions of Greece and their particular mythological claims to fame and supplies practical directions on how to locate them:

If we north-east quadrant first bisect, Then, from the centre seventy leagues project, The linear distance which that angle bounds, The fertile plains of ruin’d Troy surrounds. (III: lines 216–19)

Falconer ends his lengthy descriptive geography at Parnassus, which provides the reader a brief respite from the emotional intensity of the description of the storm. From there, he returns from the more familiar poetic terrestrial locales of epics and of pastoral verse, to the ocean, the ‘raging Elements and scenes of woe’ (III: line 279). After moving the poem towards the final moment of crisis, when the ship is fully lost and the sailors cast into the merciless Ocean, the first edition of the poem draws quickly to a close. Four of the crew reach the shore and are assisted by those dwelling there, who


Tho’ lost to Science and the nobler Arts, Yet Nature’s lore inform’d their simple Hearts: Straight down the vale their hast’ning steps they bend, The wretched Suff’rers helpful to attend. (III: lines 494–7) No art of any kind is required to respond sympathetically to tragedy and devastation. Nature, the cause of the shipwreck, is also the source of some small consolation given to the wreck’s survivors. What is remarkable about the final lines of the 1762 edition is the noticeable absence of any effort to explain, justify or rationalize within a broader ideological schema the catastrophe that has just been narrated. The storm has occurred, its impact is horrific. It is not presented as a punishment for human vice. No higher Being is called upon or questioned. The sea’s power and brutality simply exist. Falconer makes no reference to a God for whom the storm stands as a sublime symbol. While the poem closes with a reassurance of the human kindness of the coastal dwellers who assist the wrecked sailors, such consolation is dwarfed by the occasion for it. That Falconer resists moralizing nature is evidence of his originality. He confronts the technical problem of how to represent the maritime environment, how to find the language and thus the human space within it, through his alternate exploration of poetic and nautical terms of art. His stylistic choices anticipate a more modern environmental ethos. If human language is insufficient to address the destructive powers of the sea, then perhaps our anthropomorphic concepts, including that of a Deity who exerts control over all nature, are comparably inadequate. George P. Landow argues about the poem that ‘By failing to derive any metaphysical, moral, or religious value from this sea disaster, Falconer has . . . been true to his original commitment to his Muse, which is memory, since he has presented what happened as he saw it’.19 Unlike Coleridge several decades later, Falconer foregoes a comforting (and now clichéd) coda about creatures great and small and God’s love for all. The disaster Falconer narrates is never reconciled with a divine master plan. Falconer continued to revise his poem, and by 1764, likely in response to negative critical consensus about the absence of the divine, he altered this feature of his conclusion in the subsequent two editions in his own lifetime. By the third edition, he had also limited his use of nautical language, and, most significantly, developed the characters of the individual sailors, inserting a love story. The encounter between humanity and nature is given greater pathos in the later editions, in so far as the storm means that the sailor Palemon will never be reunited with the


137

lovely Anna. But the lengthy additions devoted to the human relationships diminish the dramatic aspect of the storm’s effects found in the earliest edition. In adding characters such as Palemon, Falconer is able, for instance, to insert a pious soliloquy where the young sailor commends his soul to God upon his death, mitigating the otherwise bleak and areligious ending that the poem previously provided. Yet even by the third edition, no fully sufficient justification for the sea’s fury is offered. ∗∗∗ In 1826, John Clare produced a series of six related poems detailing the exploits of three different British admirals: Grenville, Benbow and Nelson.20 These poems seem anomalous given stereotypes of Clare as a provincial, rural poet. But they illustrate that Clare’s political and literary engagements went well beyond protesting enclosure and nostalgizing the Helpston of his youth. Throughout his career, Clare maintained an interest in national and international politics and history. While Clare never set foot on an ocean-going vessel, and only saw the ocean once in his life, at Boston, he was well aware of how the oceans shaped British culture. Although Clare and other labouring-class poets like him are typically thought to write primarily about the local, not the global, such assumptions bespeak a critical provincialism. Over 1300 labouring-class poets published in Great Britain in the years between 1700 and 1900, and many of them wrote about places well beyond their native village.21 The substantial amount of poetry they produced about the sea checks the tendency to characterize eighteenth-century or Romantic period labouring-class poetry as predominantly parochial or agricultural. Labouring-class poems about seafaring after Falconer explore social, environmental and international concerns, mapping the maritime environment. Clare’s library contains a 1762 edition of The Shipwreck. Falconer’s vision of the alterity of nature, of the otherness of the maritime environment, would certainly have resonated with Clare, whose descriptions of nature also resist the imposition of larger ideological schemas. Clare does not depict nature to demonstrate a hidden but divine order or to create a mirror of the poet’s imagination. For Clare, the natural world fascinates but does not always fit into humanity’s rationales for it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Clare’s very first poem to take the sea as its theme is a short lyric called ‘The Shipwreckd Ghost’.22 In this early poem, Clare indulges in the Gothic opportunities that the topos could provide (and that Coleridge made canonical), with a gory seaweed-covered phantom


returning to haunt his beloved. While in some ways easy to dismiss as an unremarkable contribution to a highly conventional theme, this poem is exemplary of how shipwrecks – as well as the terror of them and of the sea in general – haunted later eighteenth-century and Romantic labouring-class poetry. While William J. Christmas has pointed to a decline in poems devoted to specific labouring-class occupations over the course of the eighteenth century, this was not the case with the work of seamen.23 Numerous poems from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries follow Falconer by providing in-depth examinations of the life of sailors, written by the sailors themselves, and detailing the particularity of their work and working environments. Each of these poets, either within their vocational poems or elsewhere, wrote verse devoted to shipwrecks. George Woodley’s early poem ‘The Shipwreck, Or Naval Eclogue’ (from his 1804 collection Mount-Edgcumbe) parallels and directly quotes Falconer’s in its vivid depiction of the destruction of a ship at sea, in its use of annotations to nautical terms (although here the terms are more basic, such as ‘bow’ and ‘hold’) and in its refusal to offer any rationale, divine or otherwise, for the loss of life, although the sailors in the poem pray to God for deliverance: ‘Alas! how unavailing is their suit!/To their request the Lord of Heav’n was mute;/A chill refusal all the breezes blow,/And, in rough sounds, the billows thunder, “No!’’ ’24 The anonymous sailor who wrote The Son of Commerce, An Original Poem in Thirty Four Cantos (1806) provides a wide-ranging description of life on board a merchant ship over several voyages and includes vignettes of shipwrecks and other dangers of maritime work. Edward Anderson’s The Sailor, a Poem (1792?), which went through at least 12 editions, is a verse autobiography and partial conversion narrative describing his earliest years working as a shepherd on his father’s farm until financial difficulties forced him to sea. For Anderson, however, the perils he faces at sea inspire him to seek divine consolation for his sufferings. Equally detailed, but with a stronger patriotic message, is Woodley’s later poem, Britain’s Bulwarks; Or, The British Seaman: A Poem, in Eight Books (1811). The poem details the various phases of the journey of a British man of war, The British Oak.25 With Britain’s stature as a sea power reaching undisputed heights as its navy and merchant ships dominated the globe, it is not surprising that readers continued to be fascinated by the work of those who made that power possible. The popularity of prose shipwreck narratives is amply documented by Carl Thompson’s recent anthology. Stories of exotic voyages, like that of Captain Cook, as well as the continued popularity of


139

novels such as Robinson Crusoe, meant that poems devoted to similar topics would find an audience, hungry for a wider world view. Woodley’s avatar in his longer poem, Britain’s Bulwarks, the cabin-boy Idas, is inspired to go to sea from having read Defoe. Woodley himself went to sea and was writing poetry at the age of 11, much as Idas is depicted doing. Woodley further directly references Falconer, whom he identifies by his ‘nomen poeticum’ of Arion in a footnote in the introduction to a passage detailing a dangerous storm at sea: O! for Arion’s melting pow’rs of verse, The scenes of sad disaster to rehearse; And, in a seaman’s artless phrase, to tell The fresh misfortunes which our ships befell; Till the sad numbers wake the sigh of woe, And sympathetic tears unbidden flow. (VII: lines 19–24) Although his depiction of the storm’s sublime power has much in common with Falconer’s, his purposes are more clearly ideological, in so far as the storm illustrates the real and symbolic strength of the British warship that can withstand such pounding (whereas the French ship, due to its shoddy French craftsmanship, is quickly and definitively wrecked). Woodley’s representation of the society of seamen in the wooden world is much more highly idealized than the reality of a sailor’s existence, as Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea makes clear.26 Yet each of these poems, Anderson’s, that of the ‘The Son of Commerce’ and Woodley’s, illustrate Rediker’s argument that with sailors of the eighteenth century we see the beginnings of a collective labouringclass consciousness. Maritime workers were the first to engage in forms of collective protest, such as mutinies. Rediker notes that the origin of our modern term ‘strike’ (or a work stoppage protest) ‘evolved from a decision of British seamen in 1768 to “strike’’ the sails of their vessels and thereby cripple the commerce of the empire’s capital city’.27 Likewise, in the work of sailor poets, we find important political and social commentary often missing from the work of their landlocked peers. Although Christmas is correct that during the eighteenth century an overall decline in ‘occupational’ poetry occurred, sailor poets continued to depict the perils of their working life well into the nineteenth century. Their poems are, moreover, always political because their labour took place on an international stage, involving sailors directly (and often unwillingly) in the work of colonization and military conquest.


As discussed above, The Shipwreck is based on Falconer’s personal trauma, but the poem is not explicitly autobiographical, given that the poet displaces his story to a third person perspective. Instead, Falconer’s experience as a working sailor is felt primarily in his explicit use of the highly specialized vocabulary of seafaring, a language that required the author to include extensive footnotes. Falconer’s poem confronts the question of the appropriate language within which to represent the human encounter with the maritime environment. The issue involves more than the possible clash between the poet’s ‘low culture’ labouringclass voice and the ‘high culture’ conventions of polite locodescriptive poetry. While the poem foregrounds the clash between humanity and nature, the discursive confrontations are just as significant. How a sailor poet should speak and what authority he has to speak are questions elaborated upon by Falconer’s several successors. Critics of labouring-class poetry, including Donna Landry and Gary Harrison, have highlighted the important concept of hybridity in labouring-class poetry, borrowing some of the terminology for this discussion from post-colonial theory.28 Scottish sailors such as Falconer may be seen as the victims of internal colonization even as they participate (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not) in the work of British colonial expansion. Falconer and the poets after him were often explicit about the linguistic contradictions necessitated by their work – contradictions that underscored the social and political tensions embodied in the sailors’ lives. They participated in colonial and capitalist expansion, even as they protested their oppression as labouring subjects within an imperial order. British imperialism was built on the backs of labouring-class sailors, and other hewers of wood and drawers of water (to use Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s preferred phrase from their study, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic).29 These labourers from Great Britain, as well as those taken in slavery from Africa, ‘built the infrastructure of merchant capitalism . . . They built the ports for capitalist trade. They reproduced the households, families and laborers for capitalist work. The labors of hewing and drawing were usually carried out by the weakest members of the demographic structure: the dispossessed, the strangers, the women, the children . . . . Terror was inherent, for such work was a curse, a punishment’.30 That terror is evidenced in a poem of eighteenth-century seafaring life that predates Falconer, Robert Barker’s The Unfortunate Shipwright and Cruel Captain (1756). Barker’s poem details how he joined the crew of a slaver, only to be imprisoned, beaten, starved and treated worse than the slaves by the captain and his officers. Their mistreatment of him


141

was so severe that it caused him to go blind. He threatens to press charges against the captain and crew for their cruelty, but this only incites further abuse. He is stripped of his clothing, which is thrown overboard, and left out on the deck in the freezing weather by none other than the ship’s doctor: Now come you Dog, the Doctor did cry, Now come upon deck, your Courage to try; then straght upon Deck I was forced to come, Exposed to the Weather, Boys, then was my Bum. three weeks I lay in this naked State, And oftentimes beg’d for a Morsel of Meat 31 His situation on board goes further downhill from here, and only the fear of being hanged prevents the crew from murdering Barker. His poem serves as his effort to seek justice for himself. He later developed the poem into a longer prose narrative and found work as a blind ballad singer. William Craw, author of the Naval, or Poetical Journal (Kilmarnock, 1807), depicts his sailor imagining heaven as a place where he might escape the social oppression that he has met with on board the intensely hierarchical community on ship. This volume also includes an extensive glossary to decode its nautical terminology. In ‘The Dying Sailor’ from his second collection, the sailor serenely looks towards a world without the evils of commerce and war, both of which were supported by Britain’s maritime power: IV. To th’ far land of peace my course I am steering, To waft me on high it blows a brisk gale; There no Boa’swain’s mate, with his voice domineering, There no lordly despot my rest to assail. V. There’s no thirsting for power, no mad-brain’d ambition, No wars to perplex us on that happy shore; The people agree, of a mild disposition: No troubles invade them, their sorrows are o’er.32 For other sailor poets, the image of the shipwreck, inherited from Falconer, stood as an objective correlative for the terror and oppression that Barker and Craw describe, and many labouring-class poets after Falconer emphasize it. Poems such as Clare’s several shipwreck


poems – and others like those by Anderson, Woodley, the blind former sailor Edward Rushton, the anonymous author of Love Elegies by A Sailor, or by Christian Milne, the wife of a Scottish shipwright – might be dismissed as trite contributions to a popular sentimental literary theme. But read more carefully, these poets offer a unique commentary on the real perils of the sea trade and travel that made British colonial dominance possible. According to Linebaugh and Rediker, the enclosure that Clare was protesting in the 1820s was at the root of the expropriation of masterless men that fuelled English Atlantic capitalism starting in the seventeenth century.33 The eviction of smallholders and the appropriation of commons forced large numbers of the working poor to redeploy their labour force into alternate geographical settings such as the sea. The shipwrecks in these poems are more than sensationalist spectacles. They symbolize the larger wreckages and traumas wrought upon the labouring poor throughout Britain and Ireland as they were forced either by impressments or by economic necessity to sea. As Auden writes, ‘The ship, then, is only used as a metaphor for society in danger from within and without. When society is normal the image is the city or the garden. That is where people want and ought to be’.34 Arguing for social reform through the image of a ship in peril is Edward Anderson’s strategy in his first appearance in print, with the long poem (later folded into his verse autobiography), Description of the October Gale, 1789, When One Hundred Sail of Shipping were cast away near Yarmouth Roads, And more than One Thousand Men were drowned, with Observations and Reflections (1790?). Approaching the narration of the shipwreck he suffered as a young sailor, his reasons for representing the catastrophe are distinct from Falconer’s as he states at the outset: Ye landsmen listen to the tale I tell, And sailors you can understand it well. However unskill’d in verse, my muse may prove, The motive of my lays is christian love; Design’d, if possible t’impress a sense, A reverential awe of Providence.35 Anderson relies upon a Christian consolation his precursor declined. Early Romantic sailor poets also address more significant social evils and inequalities. No poet of the period makes the horrors and dangers of life at sea clearer than Liverpool poet Edward Rushton (1756–1814). Rushton was apprenticed on board a slave ship, but his maritime career


143

was short-lived. He lost his sight to ophthalmia while caring for the slaves on board his ship who had also contracted the disease. Returning to Liverpool, Rushton became active within the abolition movement and was also a supporter of the French Revolution.36 His first book-length poem, The Dismember’d Empire (1782), begins with lines that read as a labouring-class answer to Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’: Seven times the globe has made its annual round, Sublimely rolling through the vast profound, Since Britons first aspir’d to govern slaves, And hurl’d destruction ’cross the Atlantic waves; Since freedom’s boasted sons, elate with pride, Deny’d to others what themselves enjoy’d; Since they resolv’d to banish freedom’s reign, And bind three millions with oppression’s chain, Or raise aloft grim warfare’s crimson’d head, And strew their wide domain with mangled dead. (lines 1–10) For Rushton, British imperial greed leaves behind a trail of bodies, white and black, killed in naval warfare to protect colonial territory or killed through the tortures of slave labour, impressments or indentured servitude. The oceans were a vast wreck of British liberty, and in Rushton’s poetry, particularly in his later work West Indian Eclogues (1787), nature itself lashes out in punishment against the inhumanity of the slave trade, unleashing fatal storms upon the plantation that serves as the setting for the poems. His evocative representation of the hurricane enacts the poem’s abolitionist argument. Woodley also includes a passage on the iniquities of slavery and the slave trade in the form of a pedagogical dialogue between young Idas and an older mariner, who describes for Idas its many evils. Idas’s natural sensibility and innocence enable him to understand the horror of slavery even without having to be told. Likewise, in a long descriptive poem, ‘The Ocean. Written at Scarborough, In the Summer of 1805’, Scottish poet and divine James Montgomery uses the vantage point of a prospect onto the sea to meditate upon the need for Britannia to use her ocean-based might to abolish slavery.37 Although James Field Stanfield’s claim to be labouring class is not as certain as Rushton’s (according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was likely educated in France for the Roman Catholic priesthood but became a seaman before spending the majority of his career


as an actor), his long poem The Guinea Voyage (1789) is equally adamant in its anti-slavery position and also modelled directly in its style on Falconer.38 Stanfield depicts the treachery through which common seamen are deceived and entrapped to serve on such a venture, and he depicts the cruelty against them, even at the start of their voyage, as comparable to that inflicted upon the slaves they would later transport: Far from fair freedom’s blissful regions thrown, The mournful seamen heave th’ unheeded groan. At ev’ry movement of th’ imperious brow, Beneath rude hands, the hapless victims bow. Should discontent be seen, or angry eye, Struck to the deck the prostrate suff’rers lie: Or to the shrouds ingloriously bound, They feel the lash in many a smarting wound. .... The vital current flags—th’ sinews faint, Th’ exhausted voice scarce breathes the weak complaint: A torpid languor seizes ev’ry vein, And the soul sinks beneath th’ oppressive chain.39 That Stanfield is writing of the British sailors here and not the African slaves supports Linebaugh and Rediker’s point about the common oppression of both black and white labourers in the early modern transatlantic world. Not all poets were as outspoken as Rushton and Stanfield in their criticism of political issues such as the slave trade – few would dare to be. The politics of patronage, through which most labouring-class poets found their way into print, would rarely promote potentially unpatriotic verses. Rushton and Stanfield found support and patronage in abolitionist circles, but other poets could only express more obliquely the human costs of transatlantic expansionism and the wars needed to maintain it. Christian Milne, for example, makes the political personal in her sentimental lyrics. Her single collection, Simple Poems on Simple Subjects (1805), published in Aberdeen, contains several poems in which Milne examines the anxieties she feels. In ‘When in Dread of My Husband’s Safety at Sea’, she articulates the terror that Linebaugh and Rediker identify as the main instrument through which imperial capitalism disciplined the hewers and drawers of the British Atlantic. In this poem, Milne consoles herself with the promise of her eternal union with her spouse in a heaven where:


145

No dashing rock, or yawning wave, Shall part us any more; No howling winds, no beating rains, Assail that happy shore.40 The pious coda of this stanza comes only after 12 stanzas of potently voiced anxiety for her spouse’s safety. Such a resolution feels forced in comparison to the emotional intensity of the lines preceding it. Milne wrote numerous songs and poems, some transposed into third person, some in first person, that reiterate this motif, such as ‘Painful Anxiety’, a love poem with an unusual enthusiasm for imagining gruesome ways in which the speaker’s beloved might die: Since William cross’d the roaring seas I cannot taste a moment’s ease; Imagination’s busy train Presents him buried in the main. At times, I see him climb the mast, To reef a sail amid’ the blast— The rope gives way! he’s quickly hurl’d To the tempestuous wat’ry world Again, I see the rushing tide Rude dash him ’gainst a rock’s rough side! Torn by the shock, the gushing blood Distains around the angry flood. (lines 1–12) The poem continues in this vein until the speaker checks herself with the cursory remembrance of providential goodness. The terror voiced in the poem predominates over the consolation. Elsewhere, Milne turns to a secular consolation in a tale of lovers separated by the sea, in her poem ‘The Captive Sailor’. Although Jack the sailor dies, he ‘fought for Britain’s glory’ (line 75), and this is offered to his beloved Nancy as her recompense. The poem does not mention whether or not Jack was press-ganged into service. While Milne writes poems patriotically supporting Britain’s military initiatives, she also writes just as many meditative poems offering prayers for peace. Pacifism dominates her collection and mitigates its martial patriotism. Such patriotism must also be read in light of Milne’s Scottishness. As I have written elsewhere, Milne’s use of language resembles what Homi Bhabha has theorized as the speech of the subaltern.41 As a Scottish


female servant, Milne could be said to share a similar status to the colonial subaltern. In her poems, Milne, like several others discussed in this study, writes in a language that demonstrates what Bhabha has labelled ‘sly civility’ – a language of the subject of colonization that is ‘splitting, doubling, turning into its opposite’.42 But such language is also the place of opposition, and the only way in which resistance to the colonizer might be written. Milne does not write in Scottish dialect or in direct protest to the demands that British colonialism and militarism have made on herself and other women like her. She writes patriotic poems in proper English, her language mimicking that of her colonizer. But if we listen carefully to all that Milne says and refuse to accept her own (perhaps deceptively self-protective) claims to simplicity – paying attention to the expressions of dread and anxiety predominating in her poetry – we notice fissures, spaces where her imitation, her mimicry may be purposefully imperfect. While Milne balances her comments on the costs of the sea with either patriotism or piety, she is aware of the opportunities that it provides as well. In the poem ‘The Sailor’s Adieu’, for example, the beloved’s departure is justified through the economic opportunities he gains. Here too, we sense a potential mimicry of the myths of easy wealth used to lure the labouring poor to enlist or to serve in the unimaginable working conditions on board a ship. Clare’s late poem ‘’Twas wi Sadness o’ Heart’, written in the voice of a Scottish speaker, narrates a success story of a sailor who dolefully leaves his wife and children only to return home over two years later after having ‘toutch’d at both the Indies and then hurried hame/Wi a bag full o gold well rigg’d and light hearted’.43 That Clare would choose the persona of a Scottish speaker, which many of his later poems using the sea as their setting do, supports a potential anticolonialist critique submerged in what might otherwise be dismissed as conventional exercises in balladry. Gary Harrison has written persuasively about the ways in which postcolonial theory enables a much richer reading of Clare’s poetry – particularly his later asylum poetry.44 Clare writes most frequently of the sea during his years in the asylum, a trend which may be significant. In Clare’s later sea poems, as well as in a majority of labouring-class poetry about the sea, more often than not the poet will represent sailors’ engagements with the work of international trade affected by disaster. The sea is a vast graveyard rather than a space of opportunity, a realm of unutterable loss, not gain, following the paradigm that Falconer had established. Writing of James Thomson, another poet with a profound influence on Clare, Corbin notes that ‘human activities leave no trace upon the sea. As a barren landscape


147

that mankind can neither arrange nor endow with moral significance, the immensity of the waters is the antithesis of the garden’.45 This may be why Clare turns increasingly to maritime imagery and themes later in his career. Separated from his native region, struggling to remember the green land of his youth, to hold on to his identity even while exiled from the Edenic space of the nostalgized Helpston, Clare movingly associates his own life with a shipwreck in haunting poems such as ‘A seaboy on the giddy mast’.46 This late poem shows how powerful a metaphor shipwreck continued to be. For poets such as Clare, more so than for their more privileged peers, it was a metaphor of economic and psychological oppression. Labouring-class poems of the sea enable us to hear the sometimes terrified voices of the hewers of wood and drawers of water who have been neglected by historians and literary critics, but whose sacrifices provided the material infrastructure for British imperialism and Enlightenment and Romantic cultural cosmopolitanism.

6 ‘And All is Nakedness and Fen’: John Clare’s Wetlands

For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates Nothing. Graham Swift, Waterland1 The Leech Gatherer is one of the Wordsworth’s most mysterious poetic figures. Scholars have long puzzled over his significance, about how differently he is represented in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and about why William transformed him as he did in his poem.2 One thing both Dorothy’s and William’s accounts agree upon is that the Leech Gatherer’s hardships arise in part from the scarcity of leeches. In the poem, the man says of leeches, ‘Once I could meet with them on every side;/But they have dwindled long by slow decay;/Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may’.3 For those concerned with the Leech Gatherer’s social, metaphysical or metapoetic significance, this detail may seem irrelevant. But for an ecocritical reader, these lines underscore the close and vital connection between human and non-human nature and prompt the question of why leeches ‘have dwindled long by slow decay’? One reason for the decline, at least by 1800, was the threat to their natural habitat. Medicinal leeches, the variety that would be gathered for profit, thrive in shallow freshwater ponds or ditches, preferably those edged with water plants. Due to advances in engineering first imported from the Netherlands, the wetland ecosystems in England witnessed wholesale drainage and eradication from the mid-seventeenth century forward, thereby limiting the locations where leeches and other animals and plants dependent upon such an environment might thrive. 148

John Clare’s Wetlands

149

Drainage often occurred as a prelude to land enclosure and was a part of the larger historical movement of agricultural improvement. As Oliver Rackham observes in The History of the Countryside, ‘The Enclosure Act movement was very hostile to wetlands. Although we did not, as the French Revolution did, “abolish’’ all marshes by statute, agricultural writers treated the existence of even small fens as a scandal; the greedier landowners, not deterred by the poor results from draining the bigger peatlands, repeated the same mistakes with the smaller ones’.4 The economic and artistic impacts of parliamentary enclosure have been carefully studied, but comparatively little has been written about the cultural ramifications of wetland drainage, even though acre for acre drainage led to an equally dramatic alteration of rural environments.5 This chapter discusses that less familiar site of labouring-class poetic innovation, namely in representations of the wetlandscape. Even more so than with the enclosure of the commons, wetland eradication embodies the mechanistic attitude towards nature that Romantic poetry famously protests. Some of the strongest statements about Romanticism’s environmental agenda have come via a renewed interest in the poetry of John Clare. Jonathan Bate and James McKusick, among others, have each argued persuasively for Clare’s originality as a writer about nature and as a poet who anticipates ecocentric ethics.6 Clare’s achievements as a green thinker reach beyond even those of his Romantic peers such as Wordsworth. Yet one thing that recent critical work on Clare has neglected to highlight is that Clare is the first English poet to celebrate systematically the almost universally despised wetland ecosystem. In writing lovingly about fens, swamps and moors, Clare writes virtually without literary precedent. In contrast to earlier poets, both polite and plebeian, who praised the disappearance of wetlands, Clare works to conserve this environment in his poetry primarily by emphasizing its resistance to the conventions of visual consumption. Critics after John Barrell have demonstrated how Clare alters the paradigms of poetic visuality prevalent in most earlier locodescriptive poetry.7 Clare looks at nature up close, not from a distance. He emphasizes the particular over the general and resists imposing a hierarchical order of value on what he describes. Nature is valuable as more than a mirror for the poet’s mind. But in addition to these innovations, in evoking the flat and level topography of the East Anglian fens, Clare levels the hierarchy of the senses generally found in locodescriptive poetry. The wetlandscape offers no elevated prospect from which the speaker can place himself above nature, looking down upon it to describe it.


The unstable ground, neither water nor earth, provides no place for the speaker to stop long enough to consume a picturesque view. The environment itself compels the poet to seek alternative ways of experiencing and depicting it. In his fen poetry, Clare’s accomplishment is unique. He takes up the challenge of writing about a place which bears no features that could be categorized as beautiful, sublime or even picturesque – all values largely attributed through a visual relationship. Despite this, Clare insists upon its significance, albeit within a different representational rubric, one more fully engaging the senses of sound and touch. ∗∗∗ English writing about wetlands begins with St Guthlac (674–715).8 Guthlac’s decision to reside in the Fens was part of a larger plan of self-mortification, as he submitted himself to what was even then widely believed to be a pernicious environment. The writing about his experiences demonstrates that the belief that fens were dangerous and unhealthy is of ancient provenance.9 The notion that wetlands were threatening, even monstrous, is as old as the beginnings of the English literature. Grendel and his mother are creatures of the swamps, and their marshy monstrosity is linked with the dangerous material ‘in-betweenness’ of wetlands, which are neither land nor water.10 Bunyan’s Slough of Despond (actually located in Bedford) further weaves wetlands in a negative chain of associations: places of disease, of danger and of spiritual, physical and mental illness.11 As Rackham summarizes, dating from the publication of Felix’s Life of St. Guthlac in the middle of the eighth century, ‘The material discomforts of fenland were copied and elaborated down the centuries by upland writers who despised a way of life that was not their own’.12 Unlike mountains which were aesthetically rehabilitated by the discourse of the sublime during the course of the eighteenth century, there seemed to be little that could be done with the flat fens except drain them, converting them to more ‘productive’ farmland.13 Only one mainstream poetic description prior to Clare’s avoids condemning the landscape outright. It is found in Drayton’s Polyolbion, Second Part (1622): The toyling Fisher here is tewing of his Net: The Fowler is imployd his lymed twigs to set. One underneath his Horse, to get a shoot doth stalke; Another over Dykes upon his Stilts doth walke: There other with their Spades, the Peats are squaring out, And others from their Carres, are busily about, To draw out Sedge and Reed, for Thatch and Stover fit.14


151

Few other writers approached the area with similar objectivity, and none with a more positive perspective. Rodney Giblett comments that, ‘Wetlands – swamps, marshes, mires, morasses, bogs, lagoons, sloughs, shallow lakes and estuaries, etc. – have been seen by many in “the west’’ as places of darkness, disease and death, horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous – in short, as black waters’.15 Even today wetlands represent places of contest between the elements of water and earth and between nature and humanity, as they are particularly resistant to human habitation. The East Anglian fens were one of the first modern sites of widespread environmental dispute during the mid-seventeenth century.16 While rudimentary drainage technology is as old as human habitation in Britain, the first large-scale modern efforts at land reclamation were undertaken by the Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, financed by the fourth Earl of Bedford and given the full blessing of King Charles I. Although the enclosures of the commons during the eighteenth century have received more scholarly attention, in terms of impact on the lives of the labouring poor, if one seeks evidence of what today might be called ‘environmental classism’, then the dispute over draining the Fens is of equal historical significance. Keith Lindley has argued in his book, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution, that the battle between the gentleman drainers (often referred to as the Adventurers or, in a name that might strike modern readers as ironic, as the Undertakers, for undertaking this risky scheme) and the fenland commoners stands as a clear case of the privileged exploiting both nature and the lower classes in pursuit of economic gain.17 From the seventeenth century forward, fen dwellers retaliated through legal action and through direct destruction of drainage works. Debates about drainage found their way into the popular poetry of the time. Making the case in favour is a poem attributed to Samuel Fortrey and found in Jonas Moore’s The History or Narrative of the Great Level of the Fenns, called Bedford Level (London, 1685). In ‘A True and Natural Description of the Great Level of the Fenns’, the poet uses a language of violence against nature, describing the desire for an oppressive control over the environment. Man wages war to imprison the land, which is presented as criminally rebellious for not producing as it should: I sing of Floods muzled, and the Ocean tam’d, Luxurious Rivers govern’d, and reclam’d, Waters with Banks confin’d, as in a Gaol,


Till kinder Sluces let them go on Bail; Streams curb’d with Dammes like Bridles, taught t’obey, And run as strait, as if they saw their way.18 The reclaimed land, once appropriately disciplined for its profligacy, is transformed into an unlimited source of wealth and bounty, so that the poet can ‘sing of heaps of Gold, and Indian Ore,/Of private Profit, and of Publick Store’ (lines 19–20). Fortrey then shifts to a religious rhetoric and praises the ‘Undertakers’ for punishing this land that has fallen into watery crime. By their actions they have created a new Eden on earth, whereas the opponents of drainage are slothful, witless and, worst of all, Catholic: When such as have no Wit, but to defame All generous Works, and blast them with the Name Of giddy Projects, are describ’d to be But Slaves to Custom, Friends to Popery (lines 55–8) The poet sees this great achievement – one ranking in scale and importance with the construction of the great pyramids and other ancient wonders of the world – as bringing agricultural abundance and curing the country’s physical, moral and social ills. A disciplined environment disciplines the inhabitants rendering them healthy and pious: When with the change of Elements, suddenly There shall a change of Men and Manners be; Hearts, thick and tough as Hydes, shall feel Remorse, And Souls of Sedge shall understand Discourse, New hands shall learn to Work, forget to Steal, New leggs shall go to Church, new knees shall kneel. (lines 91–6) The poem concludes with a lengthy poetic sales pitch, offering a detailed inventory of the bounty of natural resources of the drained land – resources that will allow Britain to dominate in an international marketplace. ‘Lusty hemp’ will empower the Royal Navy. The ‘proud Rape’ will allow England to dominate in trade with Spain. Osier will provide additional sources of income. The drained fens become a fantastical cornucopia:


153

To scan all its Perfections, would desire A Volume, and as great a Skill require, As that which Drayn’d the Countrey; in one word, It yields whate’re our Climate will afford; And did the Sun with kinder beams reflect, You might Wine, Sugar, Silk and Spice expect. (lines 163–8) After this inventory, Fortrey appeals to various ‘market sectors’ to invest, both literally and figuratively, in the work of ‘improvement’. He promises the ‘Usurer’ far greater returns than his usual ‘6 per cent’. To the Farmer, he claims, ‘These fields shall yield thee Gold, And yet require/No labour, but the Alchymie of Fire’ (lines 179–80). He entices the Curate by asserting, ‘How large, how fat, the Livings here must be’ (line 186), and to the Merchants, he promises greater rewards and fewer risks than those offered by colonial trade. He boasts, ‘spare your pains; here’s Florida hard by’ (line 198). Although the poet marshals moral, political and aesthetic arguments to defend the practice of wetland drainage, by the poem’s conclusion it is clear that the main impetus behind the undertaking is economic. As the allusion to Florida indicates, the Fens are seen as a site for internal colonization. Indeed, representations of the indigenous inhabitants of the Fens often depicted them as savage or primitive. The anonymous author (a ‘Fen-Parson’) of ‘The Inundation’ (1771) makes the parallel explicit, as he asserts about the poem’s protagonist, a nameless and long-suffering Fen-Man, ‘The American Indian also bears a near resemblance to our hero’. He notes, however, that the Native American has a life far more comfortable than the East Anglian native.19 Both are said to eke out lonely existences with few material comforts and demonstrate little capability for higher thought or feeling. The other side of the story of ‘improvement’ is presented in an anonymous mid-seventeenth century poem entitled ‘Powtes Complaint’ (a ‘powte’ is a lamprey eel). The lines are addressed not to the would-be investors but to those whom the draining would most immediately affect, the ‘brethren of the water’. Written in the voice of nature itself, the opening lines accuse the Undertakers of unnaturally valuing livestock over humans, and engaging in what would today be called ecological imperialism. Having animals or features of the landscapes protest their own oppression is a device Clare often employs; given that this was a popular drinking song, one wonders if he knew it. It begins: Come, brethren of the water, let us all assemble, To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble:


For we shall rue, if it be true, the Fens be undertaken; For where we feed off fen and reed, they’ll feed both beef and bacon. They’ll sow both beans and oats wherever man yet thought it, Where men did row in boats, ’ere undertakers bought it; But Ceres thou behold us now – let wild oats be their venture, Oh! Let the hogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter. Behold the great design, which they do now determine, Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermin; For they do mean all fens to drain, and waters overmaster; All will be dry, and we must die, ’cause Essex calves want pasture.20 The lines refer to the imposition of a more traditional agrarian economic model upon the fens. Turning the land into pasture will allow the interlopers to raise cattle. So too will they sow ‘foreign’ crops, such as oats. The Undertakers, in their efforts to better feed themselves, will starve and destroy the fenland flora and fauna. But just as the Undertakers claimed to do battle with nature, their opponents invoke nature’s personified power to fight back. The drainage works are depicted as a spiritual as well as natural offence: They mean ye to disease, and with fen-water choke thee; But with thy mace do thou deface and quite confound this matter; And send thy sands to make thy lands, when they shall want fresh water. (lines 34–6) While the Undertakers have church and king on their side, the fensmen claim the power of nature. In so far as the initial seventeenth-century attempts at drainage met with a number of unforeseen results (such as the shrinkage of the peaty soil once drained which led to disasters such as the collapse of the Denver Sluice in 1712), it might seem that the fen dwellers were on the right side. Despite popular resistance, drainage continued with great zeal throughout the eighteenth century as did the poetry about it. Anne Wilson’s Teisa (1778), discussed in Chapter 4, includes a long passage extolling drainage for its salubrious benefits for humans and animals. Although Wilson is elsewhere conservationist, protesting the felling of trees and enclosures of commons, she waxes rhapsodic about drainage and offers meticulously detailed georgic instructions on how to install drain systems. Shoemaker poet James Woodhouse opposed enclosure vehemently in The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus, discussed


155

in Chapter 2. In the same poem, however, Woodhouse reveals himself to be a devotee of drainage, describing his personal efforts at land reclamation in bombastically heroic third person and overwrought periphrases: He drain’d the fenny swamp’s unfruitful sod, Where Scythe ne’er swept the swarth, nor Cattle trod— Completely banish’d, from the splashy plain, The speary weapons of each hostile train— The Cat-tail’s halbert, high, with sable brush; The bayonetted Reed, and javelin’d Rush— The quiver’d Equisetum’s arrowy race— The rough-rob’d Moss, that cloth’d, but clamm’d, its place, And made, in lieu of Earth’s abandon’d breed, Each sweet gramineous progeny succeed. (4: lines 1173–82) Woodhouse’s rhetorical style is close to Fortrey’s, associating immorality with the absence of traditional agricultural productivity: From each rebellious, unproductive, lugg, Of quivering bog, black, spongey peat was dug; That useless, and unnotic’d, long had lain, Tho’ oft laid open with dissecting drain— Now, on each hearth, exhilarating, glow’d, Whose rich cinereous refuse, widely strew’d O’er every freshen’d field, or moist morass, Encourag’d trefoil tribes, or gainful grass; To make fair sheep, and labouring cattle, smile, Let from the fold, or loos’d from daily toil. (4: lines 1182–93) In these lines, Woodhouse departs from his typically irenic representations of nature, presenting the wetlands as the enemy, physically and morally dangerous and impractical for animal husbandry. Unlike other enthusiastic drainers, Woodhouse maintains a respect for the inherent powers of nature, even as he might try to control them; there are limits to natural resources, and several lines later, he admits that despite his best efforts at eradicating the wetlands: Predestin’d limits bound all earthly things, Terrestrial Kingdoms, and terrestrial Kings! A providential point still strongly stands Like polar ice, or Ocean’s rocks and sands!


Some ne plus ultra runs all Nature through, No art can counteract, or strength subdue! (4: lines 1271–6) Woodhouse’s and Wilson’s enthusiasm for drainage is linked with one of the most important georgics of the eighteenth century, a poem that Clare also knew well, John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757). Dyer too was a drainage enthusiast, praising the proper disciplining of land and environment for the better care of the flocks. He offers particular praise for the Earl of Bedford’s efforts: . . . Bedford Level, erst A dreary pathless waste, the coughing flock Was wont with hairy fleeces to deform; And, smiling with her lure of summer flowers, The heavy ox, vain-struggling, to ingulph; Till one of that high-honoured patriot name, Russel, arose, who drained the rushy fen, Confined the waves, bid groves and gardens bloom, And through this new creation led the Ouse, And gentle Camus, silver-winding streams: Godlike beneficence: from chaos drear, To raise the garden and the shady grove.21 Whereas Fortrey presented drainage as imprisoning the land, Dyer sees it releasing nature from bondage. The Earl of Bedford is godlike, using his considerable (financial) powers to create a new Eden, after separating the waters and the earth in a re-enactment of the Creation story. Drainage reclaims the land and implicitly redeems humanity’s fallenness, of which the fens are an objective correlative. The connection between healthy arable landscapes and pious and morally healthy humanity is drawn by other labouring-class poets including Edward Anderson in his autobiographical poem The Sailor. After his tumultuous life at sea, surviving several shipwrecks, Anderson returns to farm in Yorkshire and reflects upon the changes he witnesses: In Holderness where stagnant waters stood, Now drains are cut, they seek their native flood. There shaking bogs were dangerous to pass, Where nought but rushes grew and sedgy grass: For rotting sheep those places were well known,


157

They now are dry, and cloath’d with smiling corn: May they go on to dry each bog and Car, And leave no stagnant pool by Hornsea Mar22 Anderson’s praises suggest his debt to Dyer. Not only are livestock well cared for: ‘The people are improv’d as well as place:/On Sundays now instead of foot-ball play,/You see them meet together now to pray’ (p. 33). Again and again, drainage is equated with moral purification. In writing about the fens, marshes and meres, the imposition of a moral upon a natural order is striking and blatant. Thomas Batchelor, in The Progress of Agriculture (1804), sets his work near the banks of the Ouse, near the region of the drained fens. Batchelor’s support for drainage is not surprising given his overall enthusiasm for all forms of agrarian improvement. He adds his voice to the chorus of panegyric for drainage and disparagement of wetlands. While ‘sedgy swamps, unknown to Ceres store’ remained, the terrain was ‘a fibrous, spungy mass’ and ‘Unsafe for beast, or human foot to pass’.23 The land resisted all efforts to farm it, and ‘The delving lab’rers urg’d incessant toil’ (line 212). Once the land has been reclaimed, however, the land loses its noxious and dangerous qualities and becomes implicitly morally ‘redeemed’: A fairer aspect beams on every side. No longer now the cattle walk with dread, Nor sink, ingulph’d, as o’er the mire they tread; No noxious fumes from stagnant pools arise, Nor lights nocturnal, cheat the trav’ller’s eyes; But there the oat its quiv’ring bells displays, The barley whitens in the tropic blaze; The wheat, fair crest in Nature’s diadem, Unripe, yet trembles on its yellow stem; And scented zephyrs court the new-mown hay, White blossom’d beans, and pease with crimson gay. (lines 232–42) Drainage was a direct route to regain Eden. For the practical-minded Batchelor, utility and beauty were identical. Clare wrote precisely against opinions such as these. These views, however, were endorsed by Arthur Young, the best-known agricultural prose writer of the period. Young comments pithily about the embanking and enclosing of the Fens in The Agriculture of the County of Lincoln (1799): ‘So wild a country nurses up a race of people as wild


as the fen; and thus the morals and eternal welfare of numbers are hazarded or ruined for want of an inclosure’.24 Once drained, reclaimed and redeemed, the end result was ‘Health improved, morals corrected and the community enriched’.25 As Giblett summarizes, ‘Young enumerates and equates what he sees as the worthless, useless, and the indigenous, if not downright harmful elements of the Fens, against which he poses monoculture and bourgeois culture. It is as if the drainage and discipline of the wetlandscape had a salutary and necessary connection with morality, the former producing the disciplining and draining of the unruly recalcitrance of indigenous populations, the latter restraining evil and inducing good morals’.26 The marshalling of ideas of what is ‘natural’ in order to justify forms of social control (as much as agrarian schemes) is particularly conspicuous throughout the history of wetland literature. Only one other poet besides Clare spoke in partial favour of conserving the fens in their natural state, although his writings are highly ephemeral. The poet and antiquarian William Hall (who alternately styled himself ‘Low-Fen Bill’, ‘Will Wilbeso’ and the ‘Aquatic Bard’) compiled several whimsical but often clumsy collections of verse and observations based on his life as a dweller in the Fens.27 He dedicates his work to another labouring-class water poet, John Taylor, who had written about his travels in the region and ‘Who near two centuries ago,/Wrote much such nonsense,–as I do’.28 Hall’s purpose, attained in his fragmented and hudibrastic verse, is, as he writes in his ‘Prefatory Salutation’, ‘narrating the lives of fenmen’ (line 6) for ‘Such scenes of life have been my lot,/I wish them not to be forgot’ (lines 13–14). That way of life was disappearing with the disappearance of the wetland environment. Hall sees his identity as inseparable from his dwelling place, and he combines autobiographical writing with fits and starts of descriptive poetry, as well as brief efforts at natural description and history. As Clare does, Hall makes clear that the flat and seemingly static landscape of the fens has a literal and figurative depth and a geological dynamism (and thus he seems to have digested his Burnet quite well, with his attention to the traces of an archaic natural history of his environment). He writes in his prose account of the origins of the fens ‘That the Globe is nothing else but one vast and general wreck from NATURES CONVULTIONS, I think not many will undertake to dispute; and, while there are so many manifest discoveries of Marine remains on the highest Mountains; let us not be surprized at finding the face of a Forrest, at 4 6 8 and more than 10 feet below the present surface of Fens and Marshes’ (p. 39). The movement between states attracts his notice, as does the richness and diversity of the fen environment. While it may be physically flat when seen from a distance,


159

there is an historical depth and variety noticeable to those who will look closer. The landscape is not, as Graham Swift claims, a visual approximation of ‘nothing’. The effort to demonstrate the diversity and dynamism of the undrained landscape is also evident in Hall’s brief bursts of poetry, such as ‘Aquatic Bardism, Canto 1st , which depicts the Lincolnshire Levels in 1763 and 1764: I sing of floods in high domain, Incessant and continued rain (from michs. to chrs) Till tips of banks were inundated, More, more, more, more; nor yet abated; Till all the Levels were one blea, A literal fresh water sea. Swell, swell, swell, swell, nor took their stand, Till drowned much high country land; And when the wind upon them bore, They overswell’d so much the more; For long time ere they took their station, The whole a scene of desolation, Except the east of Wildmore bank, Which hung upon a dreadful hank; But had it in the least gave way, That, must have been the deepest sea. (lines 1–17) Despite the almost Biblical deluge, Hall never condemns the flood as a sign of divine retribution. It is simply part of the diverse and vibrant habitat that he honours. Only fragments of Hall’s poetry remain. While he was by no means as accomplished a poet as Clare, he succeeds in representing an environment which had been the object of almost unanimous anathema until Clare. Edward Story observes that ‘Clare is the only poet of importance that we may reasonably make any claim to as a Fenland poet’.29 Hall’s emphasis on the dynamic complexity of fen life is his strongest link with Clare, although he stops short of the consistent praise and celebration of wetlands that we find in Clare’s poetry. Nonetheless, like Clare, Hall implicitly realized that a different kind of looking and a different standard of judging were required to see the inherent value of wetlands. ∗∗∗ James McKusick has observed that Clare often introduces descriptions by announcing, ‘I love’.30 In his first line index of Clare’s poetry, John


Goodridge further documents that among Clare’s published poems ‘53 begin with “I love ...’’ and 6 with “I loved ...’’ ’.31 Unlike other locodescriptive poets, he does not begin with ‘I see’ or a command to readers to ‘Behold’. Clare’s poetry substitutes an intersubjective relation of love for the objectifying relationship of the gaze. By foregrounding a loving relationship, Clare disrupts the conventional hierarchy of active human seer and passive natural seen. Clare’s poetry does not deny the pleasures of the visual. Rather it strives to evoke the pleasures of the other senses and their contributions to his experience of the natural environment. Vision becomes one sense among others, no longer the privileged mode of perception or representation. Clare engages sound, touch and even smell and taste. In his poems about swamps, moors and fens, Clare makes some of his most important innovations in reconfiguring the relationship of the ‘I’ or ‘eye’, the seeing subject, with nature.32 Although he notes in a letter to Edward Drury that ‘The Fens are not a literary part of England’, from his first collection of 1820 to the ‘Child Harold’ poems he wrote while in the asylum, wetlands were, for Clare, landscapes associated with love and which he loved.33 Clare had little precedent for the positive representation of the wetlandscape (unless he knew ‘Powte’s Complaint’ or William Hall, which is unlikely). Yet, he consistently emphasized how this environment productively resists conventions of poetic visuality. Clare reveals his love for the wetlands, depicting them as a landscape of love, in a poem included in his first collection, Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). Here, he addresses them and then links the watery terrain with the woman who would become his wife: Ye swampy falls of pasture ground, And rushy spreading greens; Ye rising swells in brambles bound, And freedom’s wilder’d scenes; I’ve trod ye oft, and love ye dear, And kind was fate to let me; On you I found my all, for here ’Twas first my Patty met me.34 This is by no means the traditional pastoral landscape of young love. Clare’s love for the swampy ground is related not solely to the sight of them, but to having ‘trod’ upon them, felt their spongy touch under his feet. He continues his immersion with an apostrophe:


161

Flow on, thou gently plashing stream, O’er weed-beds wild and rank; Delighted I’ve enjoy’d my dream Upon thy mossy bank: Bemoistening many a weedy stem, I’ve watch’d thee wind so clearly; And on thy bank I found the gem That makes me love thee dearly. (lines 9–16) The sound of the stream ‘plashes’, and the poet enjoys the feeling of moisture as he sits along its banks. In the third stanza, he feels the touch of brush and briars. The poem contains only one word denoting an explicitly visual engagement, namely ‘I watched’ at line 14. While the opening lines give the landscape to the reader’s view, Clare accomplishes this through the trope of apostrophe. He describes the scene by calling out to it, not merely by looking at it. By calling out, the speaker implicitly expects a response. Apostrophe is a trope that animates and presupposes animation. As Barbara Johnson writes about the use of the figure, ‘it manipulates the I/Thou structure of direct address in an indirect, fictionalized way. The absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is thereby made present, animate, and anthropomorphic. Apostrophe is a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws his voice, life, and human form onto the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness’.35 Clare’s poem, then, does not describe a static or dead landscape. It calls to and listens for a dynamic ecosystem. Sound is as essential as vision to Clare’s representation of the landscape. While such use of apostrophe is conventional in Romantic poetry, no other poet joins Clare in wishing to animate this otherwise loathed landscape. Clare’s love of wetlands is repeated in a ‘Song’ that appears in his second collection, The Village Minstrel (1821). Once again, apostrophe is his mode of presentation, particularly at lines 5, 6 and 8: Swamps of wild rush-beds, and sloughs’ squashy traces, Grounds of rough fallows with thistle and weed, Flats and low vallies of kingcups and daisies, Sweetest of subjects are ye for my reed: Ye commons left free in the rude rags of nature, Ye brown heaths be-clothed in furze as ye be, My wild eye in nature adores every feature, Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me.36


In his poems, Clare works to evoke the swamps as more than a two-dimensional picture. The opening lines privilege textures over sight, through adjectives such as ‘squashy’ or ‘rough’. Although line 7 introduces a visual relationship, Clare resists objectifying the scene by immediately asserting that his vision is loving, not objectifying. Because he identifies the swamps with his own heart, it is an intersubjective relationship. Clare continues with a more explicit apostrophe which contextualizes the swamps within a larger regional ecosystem. O native endearments! I would not forsake ye, I would not forsake ye for sweetest of scenes; For sweetest of gardens that nature could make me, I would not forsake ye, dear vallies and greens: Tho’ nature ne’er dropt ye a cloud-resting mountain, Nor waterfalls tumble their music so free; Had nature deny’d ye a bush, tree, or fountain, Ye still had been lov’d as an Eden by me. (lines 9–16) Clare’s devotion is again not primarily visual, as the speaker asserts his commitment to this location over and above the more conventionally attractive sights of the garden or the visible allure of mountains. The scene is not picturesque or sublime but it has emotional and artistic merit for the poet. Clare then explicitly calls for the conservation of this environment, despite its lack of appeal to the eyes: And long, my dear vallies, long, long may ye flourish, Though rush-beds and thistles make most of your pride; May showers never fail the green’s daisies to nourish, Nor suns dry the fountain that rills by its side. Your skies may be gloomy, and misty your mornings, Your flat swampy vallies unwholesome may be; Still, refuse of nature, without her adornings Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me. (lines 17–24) In this stanza, Clare demonstrates his awareness of the tradition he is writing against. He had read Bunyan, Dyer and Milton, who often associated swamps with Satan.37 Clare’s good friend H.F. Cary had translated Dante, who represents portions of the Inferno as swampland (primarily around the river Styx in the fifth bolge), and Clare likely had read this poem as well. Clare does not deny that this environment has been


163

considered ‘unwholesome’ and ‘gloomy’. But for him, the undrained landscape is Eden. Unlike writers who saw the wetlandscape as synonymous with earth’s fallen condition, as nature ‘imprisoned’, its fecundity trapped until it is liberated by drainage, Clare viewed the absence of any human touch on the wetlands as a sign of its true freedom. Clare’s desire to protect wetland ecosystems even though they were not fit for agricultural use or aesthetic consumption is best seen in what is today one of his most celebrated ‘enclosure elegies’, ‘The Mores’. Written in the early to mid-1820s, but not published in Clare’s lifetime, in ‘The Mores’, Clare makes explicit his case for the inherent value of an environment for reasons beyond its existence for human use or human pleasure. For Clare, its value paradoxically comes from an absolute absence of agrarian productivity: Far spread the moorey ground a level scene Bespread with rush and one eternal green That never felt the rage of blundering plough38 The moors are a site difficult to frame within descriptive poetic language, because they create a vista that extends beyond the eyes’ ability to consume and contain it. Due to the unbroken horizontality, the scene ‘wanders’ out of the range of the spectator’s sight and she must move her eye to attempt to see it fully. The scene controls the viewer rather than the reverse. The moors elude visual boundaries and the organizing viewpoint required by the codes of the picturesque aesthetic: Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene Nor fence of ownership crept in between To hide the prospect of the following eye Its only bondage was the circling sky One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree Spread its faint shadow of immensity And lost itself which seemed to eke its bounds In the blue mist the orisons edge surrounds (lines 7–14) The scene has ‘lost itself’ even as the I/eye of the speaker has lost itself in that ‘shadow of immensity’. Clare here approaches a language of sublimity. The sublime resists being contained by language or the imagination, although the scene lacks sublime grandeur, as its immensity is just a ‘faint shadow’.


The moors do ultimately vanish but not due to their inherent sublimity. The landscape disappears because ‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave/Of labours rights and left the poor a slave’ (lines 19–20). As opposed to a space ‘That seemed to lengthen with the following eye/Moors loosing from the sight far smooth and blea’ (lines 36–7), enclosure divides up and commodifies the drained wetlands, rendering them consumable to the eye. Freedom and unboundedness are exchanged for limits and imprisonment and fences frame a land legible as an object to be used and consumed: Fence now meets fence in owners little bounds Of field and meadow large as garden grounds In little parcels little minds to please With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease (lines 47–50) Within such fencing and bounding, the landscape is paradoxically lost to one type of vision even as it is made a more conventional object of visual consumption. Clare’s own writing attempts to re-embody it prior to drainage and enclosure, thus one might argue that his work here is visionary rather than strictly visual. His poetic writing struggles against enclosure’s mechanistic writing which erases that which it writes upon: . . . the rude philistines thrall Is laid upon them and destroyed them all Each little tyrant with his little sign Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine On paths to freedom and to childhood dear A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’ And on the tree with ivy overhung The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung (lines 65–72) In writing to possess the land, the enclosers objectify it. The signs posted by the encloser identify limits and boundaries, framing the unbroken vistas and, by making the wetlands into arable lands, banishing those creatures who made the moors their habitat. The undrained pre-enclosure landscape, written over but erased by enclosure, becomes a landscape existing and capable of being envisioned only in the poet’s memory. In another poem, written for Clare’s greatest unpublished manuscript, The Midsummer Cushion, Clare adopts the perspective of the natural historian or botanist in ‘A Walk’ which is devoted to exploring a ‘swampy


165

fenland void of heaths & woods’.39 It is the plant life, especially, which charms the poet in this otherwise ‘drear’ landscape. He depicts ‘yarrow ragwort fleabane all in flower’ (line 11) and ‘Green closen osier clumps & black topt reeds’ (line 21). With such rich vegetation, Clare meets with nature ‘so intensely green’ (line 36), ‘I could have wasted half a summers day/To gaze upon their beauty so serene’ (lines 37–8). Although his travels did not take him through any conventionally pastoral or bucolic setting, he nonetheless returns home ‘refreshed with green delight’ (line 57). Greenness, for Clare ever synonymous with goodness, exists in wetlands as much as in the meadows, fields or forests. Although he wrote about other wetlands during his years at Helpston, such as the often flooded meadows near Lolham Bridges,40 or about swampy woodlands in the sonnet ‘Wood Pictures in Winter’,41 Clare’s writing about fens peaks subsequent to his move to Northborough in 1832, which brought him in closer proximity to the Great Peterborough Fen. Clare’s relocation three miles from his native village was emotionally devastating to him. Yet Clare remained a defender of the fens. He resisted making the fens the landscape of his despair and dislocation. In a long poem often printed with the title ‘The Fens’, Clare offers his most detailed representation of the fenland environment. The poem begins with the speaker ‘Wandering by the river’s edge’,42 assuming a mobile and non-static point of view necessitated by the unstable ground upon which he walks. It introduces the subsequent description in typical Clarean fashion: ‘I love to rustle through the sedge’ (line 2). The poet loves not to see the scene, but to move through and in it, creating the onomatopoeic ‘rustle’. Clare then narrates a dramatic encounter between poet and nature: Yet, turning quick with shudder chill, As danger ever does from ill, Fear’s moment ague quakes the blood, While plop the snake coils in the flood And, hissing with a forked tongue, Across the river winds along. (lines 5–10) The meeting with the snake is physically unsettling and causes the speaker to ‘quake’ as if he were ill. Clare feels the creature before he sees it. He senses the snake’s presence viscerally not visually. He hears it plopping and hissing before he spots it. He does not turn his encounter towards a moralizing judgment or express a disgust or fear of nature. The snake does not lead the poet towards any Biblically inspired comment


on nature’s fallenness. Instead, the snake simply falls into the water and glides away. This ecosystem remains a paradise where snake and human coexist without animosity. Clare writes in opposition to the prejudices against wetlands, but he does not deny the difficulties of representing the scene according to conventions of locodescriptive poetry. He notes: There’s not a hill in all the view, Save that a forked cloud or two Upon the verge of distance lies And into mountains cheats the eyes (lines 24–7) The landscape ‘cheats the eyes’, particularly if one expects elevated prospects from which to look down upon nature. But it also cheats the eyes in that there are things which an eye, looking for the expected picturesque features of landscape poetry, might fail to notice, such as the detailed play of the waterfowl that Clare lovingly inventories. Although the landscape does not fulfil pictorial conventions, it is not a landscape of Nothingness. It is a place full of life, both human and animal. Clare takes pleasure in this place, even though no prospect allows him to take it all in at once and consume it as an object of vision. Although the area is ‘unimproved’, Clare is alert to the encroachment of a different kind of relationship to this landscape, one that predominated over the rest of East Anglia, and which threatened to overtake the setting Clare then describes: Green paddocks have but little charms With gain the merchandise of farms; And, muse and marvel where we may, Gain mars the landscape every day— (lines 80–3) Paradoxically, the absence of apparent value in the fens – the fact that perhaps nothing might be gained from them – preserves them: Change cheats the landscape every day, Nor trees nor bush about it grows That from the hatchet can repose, And the horizon stooping smiles Oer treeless fens of many miles. Spring comes and goes and comes again And all is nakedness and fen (lines 91–7)


167

A landscape with trees is a landscape that invites pillage, thus Clare turns what might seem a lack (of trees) into a positive value. The fens’ lack of certain resources preserves the ecosystem. What cannot be seen in this wetlandscape is what allows the poet to experience it in the fuller dimensions that he here describes. The fens cheat the eye, but such a cheat is necessary, given how change, in the form of so-called agricultural improvement, is out to cheat nature. In the other poems that Clare writes in this period, including several of his Northborough sonnets, he represents the fens in their extreme openness as a paradoxical place of secrecy and seclusion. The environment of the fens is both land and water, open and secure, unbounded and protected. Clare eloquently voices the material uncertainties of this ecosystem in ‘To the Snipe’. The features of the fens that are inhospitable to humans make it an ideal habitat for the waterbird. Yet in exposing the bird’s habitat in the poem, Clare risks endangering the snipe through revealing its location to the human predators it has sought to escape. In giving up the environment to our view in the poem, he risks making it an object of both aesthetic and material consumption. Adam Phillips argues about Clare’s techniques in his bird poems that ‘description may be redemptive – provide a voice for otherwise marginalised people and experiences – but it may also be predatory and encourage other predators. Once nests are located they are there (asking?) to be stolen from. So Clare’s distinctive clarity is always accompanied by a more paradoxical and protective celebration of obscurity, and silence and mist’.43 In ‘To the Snipe’, the fenland environment allows Clare to take a different tactic: he never actually sees the snipe’s nest or gives it to the reader’s view. Clare thus represents the nest without actually describing its visual particularities. ‘To the Snipe’ is a descriptive poem about the unseen, and it reminds us that a creature or an environment does not require the validation of the poet’s vision to exist. The snipe is introduced in the opening lines as a Lover of swamps The quagmire overgrown With hassock tufts of sedge—where fear encamps Around thy home alone44 The bird is depicted in its affective relationship with its environment. That relationship of emotion – not vision – continues in the third and fourth line, as the landscape is one surrounded by fear, which ‘encamps’


or inhabits the snipe’s home. However, the bird’s fear does not imbue the landscape; it is human fear, due to the fact that The trembling grass Quakes from the human foot Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass Where thou alone & mute Sitteth at rest In safety neath the clump Of hugh flag-forest that thy haunts invest Or some old sallow stump (lines 5–12) The environment is dangerous to humans. It will literally not support human trespass. Implicitly, it cannot support the poet either, and it becomes clear that what is described is something the poet may not have seen up close, even as he imagines its features. In the lines that introduce the snipe’s nest, Clare turns to a language that is not predominantly visual, again suggesting that he has not seen the nest and thereby protecting it from any predatory view. Rather, he supposes its presence and his language is elusively conditional: & here may hap When summer suns hath drest The moors rude desolate & spungey lap May hide the mystic nest Mystic indeed For isles that ocean make Are scarcely more secure for birds to build Then this flag-hidden lake (lines 21–8) The nest may exist, hidden from view. Because it cannot be viewed, Clare calls the nest ‘mystic’. The mystical is that which escapes rationalistic proof, the kind of empiricism that privileges the visual as the grounds for possessing knowledge and truth. The nest’s mystical, unseeable qualities guarantee the snipe’s continued survival, for: Boys thread the woods To their remotest shades But in these marshy flats these stagnant floods Security pervades


169

From year to year Places untrodden lie Where man nor boy nor stock hath ventured near Nought gazed on but the sky (lines 29–36) To be out of the sight of man is to be safe from predation; to be seen is to be hunted, thus consumed. The inaccessibility of the fens makes the apparently inhospitable a refuge: Here tempests howl Around each flaggy plot Where they who dread mans sight the waterfowl Hide & are frighted not ... Here thou are safe to roam Far as these washy flag-worn marshes stretch A still & quiet home (lines 45–8, 71–3) Clare then revises the traditional strategy of prospect poetry which draws moral conclusions from looking down on a panorama from a distance. Here he looks up: In these thy haunts Ive gleaned habitual love From the vague world where pride & folly taunts I muse & look above Thy solitudes The unbounded heaven esteems & here my heart warms into higher moods & dignifying dreams (lines 73–80) Clare symbolically places nature above him and his gaze is reverential. He concludes: I see the sky Smile on the meanest spot Giving to all that creep or walk or flye A calm & cordial lot Thine teaches me Right feelings to employ That in the dreariest places peace will be A dweller & a joy (lines 81–8)


The right feelings Clare learns here, his source of joy, liberate his eye from the tyrannies of visuality that prevail elsewhere in topographical verse. Clare’s descriptive poetry typically avoids the overtly moralizing lesson attached to the conclusion of this poem, thus the very presence of such a lesson stresses its significance. The snipe retrains the poet’s eye, and indeed all of his senses. Nature itself, symbolized in the snipe’s nest, in refusing to give itself to be seen and hunted by the human eye, admonishes Clare suggestively as to how the poet might be as ecologically threatening as the encloser condemned in the ‘The Mores’. Clare is acutely aware that although his poetry bears a loving intention towards nature, his presence also is potentially damaging. His eye may not see nature in its nakedness, but will continue to show vestiges of the conventions of visuality that he strives to transcend. After 1837, when he was confined in the asylum, Clare continued to revisit the fens in his poems. He does so almost exclusively in writing of Mary Joyce, his first love whom he transformed in his poems into a mythical symbol of lost happiness. Clare’s poems to Mary, in the long sequence entitled ‘Child Harold’, frequently associate her with the fens. The fens thus remain, as they were from his earliest poetry, a landscape of love. Moreover, Clare now conflates Mary’s absence with the unseeable environment of the fens. Early in the poem he writes: I love thee nature in my inmost heart Go where I will thy truth seems from above Go where I will thy landscape forms a part Of heaven – e’en these fens where wood nor grove Are seen – their very nakedness I love For one dwells nigh that secret hopes prefer Above the race of women – like the dove I mourn her absence . . . 45 Clare asserts his love for nature for its own sake, even in its most unadorned and ‘naked’ condition in the fens. Hearkening back to his love poem to Patty written early in his career, this poem demonstrates that despite the change in Clare’s own circumstances, his esteem for wetlands does not waver. In Clare’s work, the flora, fauna and inhabitants of the fens and moors, including men like the Leech Gatherer, have a champion. Clare’s poetry, from his earliest work to his writing during the asylum years, reclaims a landscape which so many other poets, both rustic and refined, had reviled. His poems prove a powerful corrective. They reveal


171

Clare at his most courageous and innovative as a poet. Clare was only one of many poets of labouring-class origins who wrote about nature during the long eighteenth-century and Romantic period. However, in his evocative and luminous poetry about this particularly neglected landscape, he demonstrates himself to be one of the most profound and ingenious writers in the labouring-class tradition – indeed in the tradition of British poetry as a whole.

Conclusion: The Politics and Poetics of Wood – Labouring-Class Poetry in the Victorian Era

Change is the diet on which all subsist Created changeable, and Change at last Destroys them. William Cowper, ‘Yardley Oak’1 For Cowper, the venerable but decrepit Oak memorialized in his poem provides a vehicle for him to reflect upon the organic cycles of germination, growth and decay. The Oak symbolizes how nature endures beyond human temporality, and, at the same time, how all of creation is subject to the degradations of time. In his address to the tree, the poet acknowledges how their lives are and are not comparable. The tree has witnessed an historical past that the poet can only imagine, but the poet’s devout Christian faith offers him another avenue towards eternity. Cowper’s poem exploits much of the rich and deep symbolism of trees, including their function as figures for the nation. Writing his poem after the American and the French Revolutions had altered British imperial hegemony, the poet ensures that we read the oak as an image of Britain, ‘hollow and misshapen, but with its roots intact’.2 Trees and forests stand for more than governments. In Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison observes that ‘Human beings have by no means exploited the forest only materially; they have plundered its trees in order to forge their fundamental etymologies, symbols, analogies, structures of thought, emblems of identity, concepts of continuity, and notions of system. From the family tree to the tree of knowledge, from the tree of life to the tree of memory, forests have provided an indispensable resource of symbolization in the cultural evolution of humankind’.3 For these reasons, among others, I conclude my study by examining poems devoted to woods and trees. After providing an 172

The Politics and Poetics of Wood

173

overview of the general transformations in labouring-class writing about nature that occurs during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, I analyze the broad range of silvicultural images and symbols found in labouringclass poetry from 1700 to 1900. Forests are described in a number of ways – as places of sanctuary and peril, madness and magic; however, overall, tree poetry reveals more consistent political positions than are generally legible in other labouring-class nature writing. ∗∗∗ For documenting the full breadth and variety of mid- to late nineteenthcentury labouring-class poetry, Brian Maidment’s The Poorhouse Fugitives stands as one of the earliest and most important modern collections and commentaries.4 Maidment has few kind words for the majority of the nature poetry produced in this period. In his view, what gave Victorian labouring-class poetry much of its vitality was its debt to eighteenthcentury forms and conventions. For Maidment, the pernicious influence of Romantic period poetic preferences led to a thudding predictability in later nineteenth-century labouring-class nature writing. However, Maidment’s standards for what gives value to labouring-class writing appear to be based upon the presence or absence of explicit political content. He summarizes: ‘The landscape of the many hundreds of rural lyrics produced by self-taught writers is a de-politicized one of an Edenic, pre-social world, in which human perfection can only be achieved without the presence of Man’.5 As I have argued in the previous chapters, if we expect an explicit political argument in labouring-class writing about nature, we are likely to be disappointed. There is, however, a more latent politics of nature in the poetry, as well as an exploration of many other themes and concerns that were valuable to the poets themselves, if not to their modern critics. Shifts in popular poetic styles and tastes are not the only change that needs to be considered in evaluating the shape of labouring-class nature writing into the middle and later part of the nineteenth century. Marx was challenging common conceptions about society just as Darwin was revolutionizing ideas about nature. Ideas of class itself and of what constituted labour look much different in 1850 than they did in 1750, as E.P. Thompson and others after him have richly documented.6 Historical and demographic surveys show that the machinery of industrial capitalism forced more and more workers to toil indoors in factories and to reside in urban rather than rural settings. Railroads, smokestacks and slums enter into the repertoire of poetic images. As Janet Hamilton writes in ‘Luggie, Past and Present’: ‘Why you ask, does Nature fail?/Lo! the cause—the


rail, the rail!’7 Industrial disasters replace shipwrecks as the catastrophe most likely to capture the poet’s imagination, such as the Hartley Pit disaster of 1862, memorialized by both Joe Wilson and Joseph Skipsey, where 220 men and boys lost their lives in a mining accident.8 Finally, the concept of a collective class ‘consciousness’ which appears only nascently or sporadically in eighteenth-century labouring-class poetry is given full voice by Chartist writers and those who followed them, as critics like Martha Vicinus and, more recently, Anne Janowitz have explored.9 Calling for worker’s rights – and later, women’s rights – no longer preclude a poet from finding a publisher. Thus expectations and value judgments such as Maidment’s are not as wishful as they might be for earlier poets. Through David Vincent’s work in the history of literacy, supported by his magisterial bibliographies, we see that the number of those from the lower ranks of society who took up the pen increased exponentially during the course of the nineteenth century.10 Prose forms, primarily autobiography, came to predominate over poetry in labouring-class literary endeavours. However, poetic production remained healthy into the early twentieth century. By 1850, Janet Hamilton could write, in her Uses and Pleasures of Poetry for the Working Classes, that ‘thanks to the facilities of cheap literature’ by then available, one could know and feel ‘that on them [the labouring classes], amidst all the toils, privations, and hardships incidental to their position in life, the gifts of God, of Nature, and of the Muses are as impartially and profusely bestowed as on that portion of the community whose highest distinctions are too often found to consist only in the accidents of birth and fortune’.11 John Goodridge’s online bibliography of labouring-class poetry demonstrates that many more labouring-class poets wrote and published in the nineteenth century than the eighteenth.12 Despite Maidment’s abrupt dismissal, labouring-class poetic engagement with nature is as broad as in the previous century. Nature and natural imagery continue to dominate in poems devoted to the poets’ sense of their own vocation. What does change, however, is that in so far as the types of work available to the lower classes moved from country to city, the poets more consistently equate nature and poetry as entities similarly inaccessible to the city-dwelling factory labourer. Glasgow poet Jessie Russell opens her poem, ‘Tuning My Lyre’ [from her single collection The Blinkin’ o’ the Fire and Other Poems (1877)] by asserting that: I tune my lyre ’mang ither scenes Than chimney taps and causeways, Reek, if he’s ane o’ Nature’s freen’s, The poet’s mind harasses.13


175

Russell’s poem continues by imagining how access to the river Clyde, not harassment by the urban smoke (or ‘reek’), might enable her to produce better poetry. This more antagonistic relationship between Nature and Poetry due to the vicissitudes of working class life is explored by another Scottish woman labouring-class poet, Ellen Johnston, who published under the sobriquet, ‘The Factory Girl’. Johnston’s ‘Address to Nature in Its Cruelty’ (1869) apostrophizes Nature and complains of the fact that although Johnston has been granted poetic gifts, she exists in an environment hostile to their expression. Moreover, those critics who read her poems expressing an affinity for nature’s beauty accuse her of plagiarism, for . . . who could deem to gaze on me, That e’er I mused on land or sea, That I have sat in shady bower Musing on thy fairest flower; That I have sought the silvery stream At midnight hour calm, and serene ··· And critics read my simple rhyme And dared to say it was not mine?14 Turning to a discourse of natural genius that hearkens back at least 150 years earlier to Stephen Duck, she asserts Imperfect though my lays may be Still they belong to none but me. My blighted breast is their abode, They were placed there by nature’s God. (lines 55–8) Religion as the true source of natural genius remains a powerful line of self-defence for plebeian poets. Natural genius is also invoked through poetry that pays homage to earlier self-taught poets and which uses natural imagery to explore questions of poetic aspiration and vocation. Mary Hutton wrote poems in memory of John Clare and James Hogg. In her poem ‘On Reading the Distressing Account of John Clare’s Aberration of Mind’ [from her last collection, Cottage Tales and Poems (1842)], Hutton invokes God and Nature in more resolutely pious strains, using the familiar trope of Nature as the ‘book’ of God and pointing to Clare’s representations of nature in his poetry as sacred in their emulation of divine creativity. However,


when musing on the fate of James Hogg, Hutton bitterly counters the presumption that ‘The poor should ne’er attempt to rhyme/ . . . /For in old England’s christian clime,/Our men of gold alone should be/Endowd with genius, wit, and sense’.15 While institutionalized Christianity might suppress labouring-class poetic expression, ‘Yet nature will at times dispense/Her rarest gifts most bounteously,/Amongst the sons of poverty’ (lines 30–32). Citing Gray’s Elegy, the poem then plays with variations on the theme of the ‘flower born to blush unseen’. Other natural images of neglected genius prevalent in eighteenthcentury poetry recur well into the nineteenth. Combining the unseen flower motif with that of the storm as the symbol of the threats to a poet’s creativity, weaver poet William Heaton composes his poem ‘Stanzas on gathering two Daisies after a Severe Storm early in January’. Heaton also uses the metaphor of a storm at sea to organize his poem ‘The Cry of Neglected Genius’, and elsewhere writes of an actual shipwreck in the poem ‘Grace Darling’, which tells the tale of an heroic young woman who rescued nine victims of a wreck. As a resident of the Scilly Islands, Robert Maybee had the opportunity to witness several wrecks as well as to write poems about them, such as his ‘Lines on the Loss of the “Earl of Arran’’ ’. Happily, no lives were lost in this accident. Railway disasters were overtaking shipwrecks as a topic of poetic curiosity, as poems such as Alexander Anderson’s ‘Rid of His Engine’ or ‘Jim’s Whistle’ and William McGonagall’s ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ witness.16 While poems of sea and shipwreck fell out of vogue, rivers continued to predominate in poems about poets’ relationships to poetic vocation and poetic tradition. Richard Watson was unfamiliar with Anne Wilson, but the Tees channels his imagination to an equal degree. His locodescriptive poem, ‘My Journey To Work’, details his trek to the lead mines where he earned his living. Although he visits some of the same sites as Wilson, such as the waterfall at High Force or the pastures around Cotherstone, and traces the course of the Tees as it accompanies him in his journey, his engagement with these places is more cursory. Given his need to arrive at his destination in a timely fashion, he does not linger long enough by any natural wonder to endow the landscape with mythological significance (though he does include a brief acknowledgement of Barnard Castle’s national historical significance). As a poet, Watson is less engaged with literary tradition, and his poem pays no homage to Pope or Jago. The poem’s distinctiveness arises near its conclusion, in the more detailed treatment it provides of the site of the Tees Valley mines. Watson describes the remains of the Lodge Syke mine, whose ‘mineral wealth’ is done. Watson’s father, who died when the poet was 14, had


177

worked there, and the depletion of the mine’s resources is linked in the poem with the loss of his father. Watson’s poem resists reflecting upon the ways in which mining not only harms the land but ultimately harms the economic well-being of the workers. Instead, he describes how the former site of the mine has been reclaimed and the miners’ huts converted into cottages with productive gardens. Although the mining industry in the region had been declining since the 1850s, by 1878, Watson and other miners like him were confronting a real economic crisis, as veins dried up and cheaper imported ore flooded the market. The natural surroundings of the mine offer the poet solace in the face of economic hardships: O lovely native vale with fond regard I look on thee; though dreary, tough, and hard My way has been, yet no amount of ill Can loose the ties that bind me to thee still.17 Using a negative aesthetic reminiscent of Clare, Watson praises his countryside as lovely despite its being ‘dreary, tough, and hard’. Watson’s connection to the land is reflected in other poems, and while he does not protest the environmental degradation caused by mining (which may be understandable given his economic dependence on the industry), he does protest the coming of the railway. Speaking in the voice of the Tower of the ancient Barnard Castle, he castigates the Railway Bridge for defacing Nature’s beauty: Alas! it makes me sorely weep: It makes my whole foundation creep To see tall trees and meadows fine Destroy’d to make a railway line.18 The Bridge defends itself by claiming that it brings trade and thus wealth to the region. The dialogue between the two landmarks becomes a debate between the forces of modernization and those of tradition, not merely about the environmental impact of the railways.19 Watson does not resolve the debate, and his closing ‘Recitative’ has him simply leaving the scene. Writing of Edward Capern, the rural postman poet of Bidewell, Kaye Kossick notes how contemporary critics naturalized the poet in describing his poetry of nature, likening him to ‘herbage’ and noting that he did not so much write as ‘chirp’ and ‘warble’. Capern himself played into the


persona of the natural genius in many of his poems, such as ‘Art thou a poet?’ He names wild-bird song and the ocean as his only inspirations, doing so in language a bit too rarified to fully support such claims to wildness: I took my lyre and dashed its strings, And music, wild and free, Sent forth the tuneful echoings Of Nature’s minstrelsy.20 Capern was, however, capable of greater originality in linking his poetic identity with nature, as is illustrated by his clever poem, ‘My Latest Publication’, from his collection Wayside Warbles (1870). Informing a friend that his latest work has been published by ‘Mattock and Hoe’ and titled ‘An Essay on Nature’, Capern plays with the parallel of agriculture and literary culture; ‘A spade was my steel pen, my paper the soil./But after a scratch or two made with good will,/I found that my metal would write like a quill’.21 This endeavour results in a bounty of productivity: I have stanzas of lettuce, and parsnips, and leeks, And a canto of onions, a study for weeks. I have sonnets of celery, turnips and sage; And sweet mint and savory – what a sweet page! (lines 33–6) Not only does this garden of words bring the poet pleasure, but as he notes in his final lines, it also produces ‘ “A work’’ the reviewers say, “suiting the taste’’ ’ (line 55). The same prejudices that met Stephen Duck’s efforts still obtain for Capern’s, and Capern wryly shows his awareness of how the limited expectations for what a labouring-class poet can and should produce have not changed greatly from the 1730s to the 1870s. ∗∗∗ While some elements of the labouring-class tradition may not have altered, after the popular success of the Chartist poets, and thanks to the propagation of a greater number of publications aimed at workingclass readers (periodicals which often featured a ‘Poet’s Corner’), plebeian writers who wished to express political points of view had a greater opportunity to do so. But across the tradition of plebeian poetry from the Augustan to the late Victorian age, one motif has always had political connotations: poetry about trees, woods and forests. Tree poetry allows us to look back on important trends and moments in the long eighteenth century and see the continuities into the long nineteenth century. At the


179

start of his 1831 poem ‘To A Fallen Elm’, Clare writes of listening to the murmurs of an elm tree near his cottage. The tree sings ‘the sweetest anthem autumn ever made’.22 Clare’s own anthem, written about the tree’s destruction, contains some of his most explicitly political verse, an impassioned argument against the process of parliamentary enclosure that dramatically devastated Clare’s native region of Helpston. By focusing on a tree to express sentiments about human rights and liberty, Clare demonstrates that while a self-educated and self-designated ‘peasant poet’, he was deeply aware of the long literary tradition within which trees and forests had been used for symbolic explorations of political rights and responsibilities, and he anticipates how this theme would continue to develop for generations after him. Clare writes poems devoted to the legend of Robin Hood as well as the destruction of trees due to the modern demands of enclosure and war. While Clare and other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century labouring-class poets like him drew actively and self-consciously from the rich heritage of literary trees and forests, as I have argued throughout, because of their social background, these poets’ engagements with the natural world reflect and resist the ways in which more privileged poets of the period looked to the natural environment to explore social questions. Robert Pogue Harrison, Keith Thomas and Simon Schama, among others, have written about the general significance of forests and trees in literature.23 In the British tradition alone, from the Renaissance forward, woodlands play a central and varied political role in Drayton’s Polyolbion, several of Shakespeare’s plays, poems by Margaret Cavendish and Anne Finch and more familiar works by Pope, Cowper, Wordsworth and Coleridge. With these latter authors, images of trees and forests were made to serve a variety of political agendas. First and foremost, because of their longevity, their rootedness and fixedness in the ground, trees depict writers’ feelings about tradition and heritage. Cowper’s Yardley Oak is a ‘relict of ages’, an oracle that ‘might correct . . . The Clock of History’. As Tim Fulford has observed, particularly during the period of French Revolution, tree symbolism was put to use by polemicists such as Edmund Burke, who depicted the stout and ancient British oak as the true ‘Liberty Tree’.24 But the politics of woodland was more than simply symbolic. The fate of trees was an essential component in debates about enclosure and agricultural improvement. As anyone who has read Mansfield Park is aware, trees were crucial in controversies over picturesque emparkment and property engrossment. Woodlands were the focal point in disputes over game laws and poaching statutes, and, last but not least, this essential natural resource was central to matters of domestic policy and foreign, imperial policy. Wood was necessary for building the


ships that fought for, conquered and maintained the burgeoning British Empire, and it is a longstanding if somewhat disputed truism that the excessive deforestation that occurred during the eighteenth century was directly the result of naval and commercial shipbuilding enterprises. The politics of wood, then, like the politics of many other natural resources, reveals how nature was increasingly exploited in the service of imperial capitalism. Although frequent efforts were made during the long eighteenth century to conserve and better manage woodlands (not all of which were motivated by the desire to create more picturesque estates), the sustained deforestation of Britain is undeniable.25 Such deforestation had social as well as environmental consequences, as it contributed to the dispossession and impoverishment of the labouring classes at home (as well as colonial subjects abroad). The loss of wooded areas, whether through enclosure or through silvicultural harvesting to supply the needs of the navy, took away an important element in the economy of makeshifts necessary to the survival of the rural poor. As Clare would have known, trees and underbrush offered a place for the poor to gather kindling, find shelter or graze livestock. Because the soil in wooded areas was less desirable for larger scale agriculture, woods were often the sites of small gardens where the rural poor could grow vegetables. But just as importantly for Clare and his fellow poets, trees also offered aesthetic pleasures as well as economic sustenance. While one might expect that, given what was at stake in the fate of woods, labouring-class poets would pen polemics against the exploitation of trees as well as the exploitation of labourers, for Clare’s labouringclass poetic precursors, such is not necessarily the case. As has been discussed in the previous chapters, labouring-class poetry, particularly in the eighteenth century, rarely fulfils our anachronistic critical fantasies by expressing a proto-proletariat argument. Much of it has been dismissed as participating in a kind of pastoral mystification. As I have attempted to show, we must be alert to how ecopolitics is otherwise encoded in labouring-class poetry, closely examining how these poets mimic refined poetic forms and themes, as well as where they depart from them, to determine their distinct political statements. Their political agendas draw from a larger discourse within which trees are used to symbolize freedom; however, such a discourse is differently inflected when the writer’s origins are labouring class. To show this double movement, I turn first to a more straightforward example, one that makes interesting use of one of the most significant tree symbols in British culture, the oak. In his poem, ‘The Royal Oak’, journeyman woolcomber poet Christopher Jones references the story of


181

King Charles II who escaped from Cromwell’s forces after his defeat in the Battle of Worcester in 1651.26 Fleeing his pursuers, the King eluded capture by hiding himself in a large oak tree at Boscobel House in Shropshire, thus cementing the Oak as a symbol of the monarchy, of king and, by extension, of country. The oak’s natural longevity and sturdiness made it the perfect icon for the Restoration after Charles returned to assume the throne in 1660, and many pubs (another hearty British institution) were named in its honour. The Oak in Jones’s ballad, then, is a pub not an actual tree, but the human institution piggybacks on the natural symbolism. What becomes clear in the poem is that while Jones may seem to invoke patriotic monarchism and the hierarchies of such a system of government, the Oak and what it symbolizes also have a powerful levelling quality. All classes, trades and professions are sheltered while drinking under its ‘leaves’, and they come together on an equal and convivial footing. The oak in the poem symbolizes a hierarchical social structure even as it flattens it, and the use of the ballad form links it to a more customary oral culture. The double message, at once patriotic and potentially revolutionary, is found in another popular legend involving forests, the story of Robin Hood. Weaver poet, Robert Millhouse, called ‘The Burns of Sherwood Forrest’, takes up the tale in his long poem Sherwood Forest (1827). Complete with scholarly footnotes, the poem chronicles the history of the forest and identifies the subject as one the poet takes up out of a sense of patriotic duty. The poem is further motivated by the suggestion that the forest, and hence the values it represents, are fast disappearing. Its earliest natives resisted Roman invaders, and its most famous inhabitant, Robin Hood, resisted tyranny and defended the working poor. Although the poet notes that those same working poor can still find traces of the more glorious past, Millhouse chronicles those traces as ones written out of official history, an alternate, and ultimately silent history, one that is disappearing, but one which his poem attempts to preserve: Oft the peasant, as he breaks the soil, Finds ruined vestiges of Roman pride, Villas and camps, the works of mighty toil, Medals and coins of warriors deified; And oft the woodman, as his tools divide Knarled oaks, which braved long centuries of old, Sees, where within their solid boles abide The barbs of arrows; while boars’ tusks unfold Tales of departed times historians have not told27


This is by no means a predictable presentation of the popular legend. Millhouse’s description of Sherwood Forest frames the patriotic story of Robin Hood within a landscape of loss and nostalgia, celebrating Robin’s revolutionary works and spirit while elegizing the disappearance of virgin woodland. One could read this serious presentation of the Robin Hood myth as potentially politically radical – radical in the true sense of the term, that is to say, attempting to call Britons to a more fundamental and original concept of indigenous liberty. Millhouse’s conservationist message in the poem may be linked with potentially conservative politics. This would be in keeping with Simon Schama’s argument, in Landscape and Memory, about the political significance of Robin Hood legend. Schama notes that ‘though he may be an outlaw, he is no rebel. In fact he is a passionate and nostalgic conservative who yearns for the restoration of a just, personal monarchy and who wants a social order dislocated by rogues and parvenus to be set right in its proper ranks, stations, and portions’.28 Robin’s enemies are also the king’s enemies, and the ethos of Robin’s band of Merry Men embodies loyalty and chivalry, qualities that were felt to be missing from the Renaissance court. To a certain extent, however, in so far as Millhouse’s poem recasts the legend, it could counter support of monarchical government and hierarchical class society. Indeed, Millhouse opens his poem with an assertion of his own personal labouring-class liberty and freedom, one he maintains despite his social status, a liberty that is granted to all and that is equated with Sherwood Forest itself. The poem is full of such purposeful contradictions. Popular forms and legends were not the only source of labouring-class tree poetry. As I have argued, despite their lack of formal education, most labouring-class poets were extensively and deeply read, and drew from more than oral culture. As I have also tried to show with nearly all of the sites of nature poetry discussed in the previous chapters, one of the most influential poets for the labouring class tradition was Alexander Pope. Poems such as Windsor Forest, Epistle to Burlington and Epistle to Bathurst each influenced later labouring-class representations of woods and trees at home and abroad. Mary Leapor, a poet whose lively wit has made her one of the most anthologized of eighteenth-century labouringclass poets in the twentieth century, draws upon Pope’s aesthetic and formal principles and turns them upside down in her parody of the country house tradition, Crumble Hall. Based on Edgecote House where Leapor served, the poem presents the building from the kitchen maid’s point of view, showing the reader downstairs as well as upstairs and


183

exposing the dirt and dust that the maid must clean to maintain the image of grandeur that the manor and its inhabitants wish to claim. The poem’s conclusion, however, which moves from the interior of the house to its grounds, adopts a more serious tone and condemns projects to improve the decrepit estate. Despite having humorously detailed the decayed condition of the building, Leapor makes a strong statement against improvement, primarily because of the damage it will do to the woods and trees. Describing the ‘rev’rend Oaks’ who ‘have known a hundred Springs’,29 she asks:

Shall these ignobly from their Roots be torn, And perish shameful, as the abject Thorn; While the slow Carr bears off their aged Limbs, To clear the Way for Slopes, and modern Whims; Where banish’d Nature leaves a barren Gloom, And aukward Art supplies the vacant Room (lines 173–8)

Reading these lines, Marxist critic Moyra Haslet asserts that this passage ‘might be a conservative reaction towards change, an idealised clinging to a pastoral vision. But this section also suggests a revolutionary, if subdued voice: the poet calls upon the nymphs to haunt the house in “vengeance’’ for their exile . . . . The poem suggests that the removal of this green space will destroy the contentment of the (labouring) “hapless swain’’ and the “nymphs’’, “dryads’’ and “fairy elves’’ who will continue to haunt the estate and are perceived only by this labouring-class poet (l. 168) and by the kitchen-maid Ursula (l. 182)’.30 Just as with Clare, though certainly less contentiously, the preservation of ancient trees is directly linked with protecting the rights and pleasures of the poor. Tees-side poet Anne Wilson also draws heavily from Pope’s locodescriptive poetry in her representation of woodland. In Teisa, Wilson often transposes aspects of Pope’s poetry onto her own. In one passage, in particular, she looks down upon the river from the prospect of Towler Hill, remarking upon the denudation of the hillside on the banks just upriver from Barnard Castle: Large Patrician oaks here shadowing stood, And with majestic looks adorn’d the flood; But these are gone, to visit foreign shores, Returning home with rich and wealthy stores. (lines 505–8)


The passage overall appears patriotic, supporting the harvesting of these woods in support of British imperialism. Yet the persuasive strength of this passage is elsewhere undermined by other passages that are far less jingoistic. As is discussed in Chapter 4, sections of the poem memorialize sites of resistance against tyranny and against internal imperialism. The vista from Towler Hill itself, for instance, continues to look down river to the site of the ruins of Barnard Castle, once home to John of Balliol who rebelled against King Edward I in 1295 and also the site of a major rebellion to depose Queen Elizabeth I, events which Wilson’s poem commemorates. By juxtaposing passages of patriotism with passages describing resistance, Wilson offers a more complex if indirect political message. Like Leapor and Wilson, Ann Yearsley acknowledged her debt to Pope in several of her poems. In Clifton Hill, discussed in Chapter 3, Yearsley paints a picture of a woodland ecosystem quite different in scale and significance than Pope’s Windsor Forest, but one that is also connected to British imperialism. Describing a wood near the banks of the Avon, Yearsley presents not a royal hunting ground but a scene whose ‘lovely verdure scorns the hand of Toil’ (line 157). These woods have a beauty that transcends the interference of Art, and the scene proves an obvious parallel for Yearsley’s own self-presentation as a ‘wild’ and ‘untutored’ poet. The denizens of Yearsley’s woods are not charismatic megafauna, but reptiles, toads and moles. By depicting these less cuddly forest dwellers, one might say that Yearsley introduces a greater sense of ‘realism’ within the pastoralizing conventions of eighteenth-century prospect poetry, putting the poetry’s more wild content into conflict with its formal neo-classical couplets. All of these ‘skulking’ ‘tenants of this tangled wood’ (line 180) look down upon the commerce of the river Avon flowing below, and lead Yearsley to a subsequent stanza apparently in praise of Commerce, seatrade and the work of mariner and merchant. In this sense, Yearsley’s poem returns to the more familiar and patriotic ground covered by Windsor Forest. Yet, in the passage that follows the praise of commerce, Yearsley tells the story of the madwoman Louisa. While the author’s footnote asserts that Louisa is based upon an actual individual Yearsley knew in Bristol, her presence in the poem, in conjunction with the description of the forest, frame the passage patriotically praising international trade. This frame suggests an ambivalence to Yearsley’s feelings about such trade, a trade which in Bristol was linked to slavery, something about which Yearsley had explicitly written in protest of elsewhere.31 Thus, Yearsley’s more uniquely ‘realistic’ depiction of woods, coupled with the


185

subsequent passage on the madwoman Louisa, creates a text that subverts any simple statement of unqualified support for commerce and imperialism. Yearsley identifies with the lowly woodland snail and the socially marginalized Louisa. Their more careful depiction, as opposed to the predictable and conventional lines praising trade, indicates where Yearsley’s real sympathies tend. Like Yearsley, Clare is also widely recognized for his more precise attention to the neglected and less glamorous flora and fauna of his local natural environment, and his devotion to wetlands, discussed in Chapter 6, demonstrates this. Clare is recognized today not only as a poet but also as the first labouring-class natural historian. As a writer and observer of the world around him, he was aware of how all elements of the natural world, not just the sublime or picturesque ones, were essential to the overall health and well-being of the humans, plants and animals in each ecosystem. Clare’s poems work to capture aesthetically what is now a well-accepted scientific point of view. Removing a single elm tree, as Clare’s poem discovers, has a far greater impact than might be imagined. The tree offers shelter to birds, children, wild rabbits and domesticated cows and does not discriminate in offering itself as a habitat, even to those who later wield the axe against it. The elm was not the only tree which Clare celebrated in his poems. A veritable arboretum is contained across his complete works. Many of Clare’s poems about trees are written in sonnet form, from ‘To A Favourite Tree’ which appears in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, to ‘To A Dead Tree’, as well as ‘In Hilly Wood’ and ‘A Copse in Winter’ in The Village Minstrel. Clare’s final collection, The Rural Muse (1835), includes the greatest number of tree poems representing a wide variety of tree species including sycamores, willows and crab-trees. Not all of these poems are political. What these trees have in common is the solace and comfort that they offer the poet. ‘The Shepherd’s Tree’ is, like Cowper’s oak, a place to reflect upon human transience and the poet’s yearnings to transcend ‘life’s sordid being’32 through some ‘eternal ditty sings/Humming of future things, that burn the mind/To leave some fragment of itself behind’ (lines 12–14). Underneath the willow, Clare reflects on his own past, as a child hunting pooty shells there, and expresses gratitude for the shelter its branches and leaves offer from the rain. In the last of three sonnets devoted to ‘A Woodland Seat’, Clare provides a concise expression of the aesthetic that has made him so popular among modern green readers. The poem sequence presents the speaker addressing an unnamed companion as they rest beneath some trees after a long walk. Clare uses a


formula common to many of his natural history poems. The speaker invites his interlocutor to notice the details of their surroundings, details that might be overlooked by those less sensitive to the intricate beauties of nature. The final poem in the series concludes by offering a more abstract moral lesson to be derived from the first two poems which were predominantly descriptive: ‘In every trifle something lives to please/Or to instruct us’.33 The poet then turns to praise the dandelion using slightly more political language: Search but its slighted blooms, kings cannot wear Robes prankt with half the splendour of a flower Pencilled with hues of workmanship divine,— Bestowed to simple things, denied to power, And sent to gladden hearts as low as mine. (lines 11–14) Nature is granted a power superior to that of any monarch, and that power is used to console or ‘gladden’ the plebeian poet. Clare’s politics of nature, like that of many of his predecessors (and his fellow Romantics, for that matter), turns to nature for an escape from the social. But through his consistent elevation of flowers like the dandelion, he uses the aesthetic to sketch a political argument about the need to value more equally all living creatures, humans included. Clare’s trees, just as the trees and forests depicted in the work of Jones, Millhouse, Leapor, Wilson and Yearsley, symbolize the possibility of greater social equalities. Looking at the fallen elm tree, Clare writes ‘I see a picture which thy fate displays/& learn a lesson from thy destiny’ (lines 37–8). While the political lesson that Clare learns is one more revolutionary and outspoken than that which could be written by his predecessors, this ‘sweetest anthem’ that Clare’s fallen elm teaches contains a political message that we find suggested but emergent in the poems and songs of trees and forests in British labouring-class poetry during the eighteenth century and which continues to develop into the nineteenth. Allen Davenport is another poet whose work spans the divide between the Romantic and the Victorian ages but whose commitment to Chartism takes his writing in more programmatically political directions. Like Woodhouse and Bloomfield, Davenport was originally a shoemaker. Early in his career, he was influenced by Thomas Spence and active in unionization in London. During the 1820s, he left his trade to become watchman at Tollington Park in what is now the borough of Islington, but which at the time was a more suburban area that contained Hornsey


187

Wood, the locale that is the subject of the lead poem in his collection The Muse’s Wreath (1827). Anne Janowitz identifies the poems in this volume as representative of the second stage of Davenport’s poetic development. While his earlier and later works were more radical and interventionist, the 1820s for Davenport were ‘a period of retrospect . . . in which [he] blends together philosophic materialism and landscape imagery’.34 The poem, somewhat like Wilson’s tale of Genuera, the goddess of the Tees Valley, is predominantly a fanciful fairy tale of Hornsia and Londonus. And although Hornsey Wood at the time he was writing was a place where the ‘spruce mechanic’35 might escape the alienation of his London labour and reconnect with nature, the poem seems at first another kind of escape likely to disappoint those hoping for the more fiery tone of the poet’s earlier and later poetry. Calling it ‘not a very successful pastoral poem’, Janowitz nonetheless claims for ‘Hornsey Wood’ ‘a surprising ecological power’36 because of a long passage dedicated to the reflections of ‘a child of genius’ (line 211) who visits the park. This figure for the poet sees a power in nature, a ‘revolutionary state’ (line 227). Much as Cowper’s Oak stood as a symbol for the constancy of change: ‘ . . . not a grain in Nature’s ample frame,/For one short moment can remain the same! ‘(lines 231–2). If change itself is natural, then it is not far to an argument about the need for (and naturalness of) the revolutionary social change for which Davenport fought for much of his life. Anticipating the communitarian symbolism of someone like Walt Whitman, Davenport works to connect humanity and nature in a positive and dynamic way: Change as it may, it cannot be destroy’d: It falls in man, then rises up in grass, And through a hundred changes quickly pass; And by a process, easily to scan, That which was grass becomes a living man! (lines 234–8) Even in urban spaces like London, labourers maintain a connection to nature, and this connection serves as a source of hope for change. Natural revolutions support and justify human ones, although Davenport stops short of making such an argument explicitly in any of the poems in this collection. Like Clare and Davenport, William Heaton also witnessed important national and personal revolutions related to his status as a manual labourer. At the age of 50, he was forced to move from rural Yorkshire, where he worked as a weaver in his own home, to work in a carpet factory


in Halifax. Much of his poetry reflects the pains and stresses of his displacement into an industrialized urban existence, and he nostalgizes his earlier way of life and the close connection to nature that it enabled. Kossick notes that Heaton’s ‘regret for his lost autonomy and contact with the natural world is also inextricably bound with his self-figuring as a romantic poet’.37 Heaton’s poem, ‘Stanzas, On an Ash Tree in Ovenden Wood, near Halifax, on which the Author had cut the initials of his Name eighteen years before’ from his first collection, The Flowers of Calder Dale (1847), demonstrates neatly his sense of loss in moving away from a preindustrial way of life. Like Cowper’s Oak, the Ash is a witness to history, to the natural cycles of the passing years and to the day to day rhythms of rural life. But the imposition of the abstract work-time discipline of the factory system desensitizes people to the temporality of nature and to a more organic relationship to time: ‘They hear not now the linnet’s song,/Nor care they for departing hours’ (lines 19–20). The tree is a touchstone for the poet’s sense of contact with nature and reminds him of his own mortality. Showing that he has read Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, Heaton regards the initials he had previously carved on the tree 18 years before and speculates on where he might be 18 years hence. Writing allows him to attempt to transcend his own mortality, and he ends the poem by wishing to spend the rest of his days in a ‘cot near to this tree’, rehearsing a brief Horatian wish for retirement, which, surprisingly, he was granted. Heaton’s story has something of a happy ending. Martha Vicinus records that Heaton’s fame as a poet enabled his appointment late in life as the ‘caretaker of Halifax’s first public park’.38 The fortunes of Stephen Duck live on. An even deeper nostalgia imbues the poetry of Thomas Miller, in his collection A Day in the Woods (1836). Miller wrote historical romances and epic histories as well as poetry and was, like his fellow Nottingham poet Robert Millhouse, drawn to the lore and legends of nearby Sherwood Forest. The influences of Scott and Tennyson are apparent on Miller’s medievalist themes, but in ‘The Old English Wood’, the poet is interested in primeval, not medieval, history. The landscape described in the poem is one that attempts to describe the forest prior to any human inhabitation, a true wilderness of a kind that had long ceased to exist in England and was fast disappearing from the North and South American continents: ‘Here Nature sat enthroned in wild array,/Profusely decked, with firs and witching bay;/Here broad oaks threw afar their shady arms’.39 After a long inventory of the trees, plants and animals, Miller asserts that such biodiversity flourished because ‘The savage forest then no lordling owned,/No studious art bedecked her native bowers’ (lines 66–7). The


189

forest is a place of freedom, not for the likes of Robin Hood, but for nature itself, and the poem continues for several more Spenserian stanzas lovingly detailed the flowers and herbs to be found on the forest floor. Trees are a potent symbol of freedom for the poet known only as ‘Marie’, who published poems in a variety of working-class periodicals, such as The People’s Journal and The Working Man’s Friend. Janowitz has discussed the paradoxes of the image of the Liberty Tree; surveying the different uses of the figure from the 1780s forward, she notes how it ‘reminds us how differently configured can be the notion of custom and rootedness’ which the tree embodies.40 With the tree of liberty, political poets had a symbol through which they might confer deeper historical roots to their efforts. According to Janowitz, the liberty trees which gained a vogue in the revolutionary 1790s remained an important emblem for Chartism into the 1840s, as Marie’s poem ‘Trees of Liberty’ (from 1852) certainly makes clear. This optimistic anthem offers advice on the proper care and feeding of any new liberty tree: With gentle, steady-moving hand, Pour in bright Knowledge as a stream, Chase Ignorance throughout the land, Efface her dim debasing dream41 With such efforts ‘in due season, golden fruit/Will hand upon its branches fair’ (lines 39–40). The poem ends with a call to her fellow political silviculturalists: ‘Oh, quickly help, who’er ye be,/To plant such Trees of Liberty’ (lines 51–2). Printer J.B. Leno is better known for his songs and dialect poems, works which show his love for oral culture, even though as a London printer he took full advantage of the power of the press as much as the power of song to promote the causes of workers’ rights. His series of poems depicting his boyhood village of Kimburton represent various villagers with different relationships to woodlands, spoken in their own voices, from the ancient village naturalist, to the poachers, to the labourers whose duty it was, 40 years prior during the height of enclosure, to grub up the trees and bushes on the commons. In ‘Herne’s Oak’, however, he speaks not in Uxbridge dialect but in the voice of the tree of legend. The tree, said to have been located in Windsor Forest, was the site of the suicide of King Richard II’s huntsman, Herne. Herne saved the king from a charging stag but was gored by the stag’s antlers in the process. Although different versions of the legend exist, most agree that


Herne was rescued from certain death by the sudden appearance of a wizard who cured him by attaching the dead stag’s antlers to his head and forcing him to promise never to hunt again. Once cured, Herne despaired over being denied his livelihood and hanged himself from the oak still wearing the antlers. From that day forward, the tree was believed to be haunted, and sightings of Herne’s ghost were held to be ill omens, particularly for members of the royal family. The first literary appearance of the legend is in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, scene 4, where Mistress Page tells of it, though folklorists speculate that the legend of Herne might be of much longer date, as an adaptation of the myth of the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos, who is linked with the Green Man figure found across Europe or the Greek god Pan in pagan mythology. Herne serves as a trace of the ancient Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the forest and of the deeper, primordial connection between humans and animals. What is striking about Leno’s poem is that despite the rich cultural, historical and literary tradition it invokes – from myth and legend to Shakespeare and Pope (another poet who commemorated hunting at Windsor Forest) – the poem seems interested only in the tree’s point of view. The first stanza is the tree’s recollection of its time as a sapling, when ‘I was King of the Forest—all around me was free!’.42 The poem’s second stanza then tells the story of Herne’s suicide using present tense for added intensity: With frenzy-strung nerves he engrasps me around, With brain changed to fire he springs from the ground, Till, at length, ’mid my branches, he’s dangling high, And sinks into hell as he climbed to the sky (lines 31–4) This human action changes forever the oak’s status, making it a curiosity for the ‘learned’ who visit the tree to find ‘A memento of actions in ages agone’ (line 38). The tree mourns that now ‘each child as he passes beholds me with dread’ (line 41), and the tree looks towards its death: My beauty hath faded, no flower at my feet, No wide-spreading branches, no shady retreat; All those friends of my youth have long gone to decay, And I feel that life’s tide is fast ebbing away. (lines 43–6) What was believed to have been the legendary tree was pulled down by King George III in 1796. It is rumoured that he later regretted his actions, which were imagined by some at the time to have contributed


191

to his madness (during which he was reported to talk to visions of the tree). Queen Victoria replanted an oak on the site but this was knocked down in a storm in the 1860s. King Edward VII replanted yet another oak which still stands today. Legends claim that the sightings of Herne’s ghost near the tree have coincided with misfortunes for the monarchy, such as the execution of Charles I, and in modern times the occurrence of more widespread tragedies, on the eve of World War I and World War II. Although the tree in the poem does not draw any attention to it, Herne’s Oak is nature endowed by humans with a supernatural power through the legends which surround it. The poem, through its choice of subject, points to a more archaic, animistic world view, one which Leno’s poem recalls through the technique of giving voice and consciousness to the tree itself. Herne the hunter is a symbol of a man at once deeply connected to nature as well as betrayed by it. In his association with Pan and the Green Man, he is also a shaman figure, but one who is forced for his own survival to cut himself off from the engagement with nature. Later legends about him suggest the emotional and larger political consequences of disrespect for nature, a willed disconnection that is embodied more broadly in the mechanistic world view that has predominated since the seventeenth century. We cannot label Leno an ‘ecopoet’ in any modern sense, and his politics in this poem seem neither green nor terribly ‘red’. Indeed, there seems to be no politics at all. But Leno’s decision to commemorate this legend in particular, and in the particular way that he does, in the voice of nature, gives the poem a deeper significance. Donna Landry’s The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 surveys the complex class politics of English literature and art about hunting in which this poem can be said to participate. Despite its stereotypical reputation as an activity of the elite, one that has historically oppressed the labouring classes through draconian game laws (which Leno elsewhere protests), hunting can be seen, at least as Landry makes the case for it, as a ‘green’ activity, one that has contributed positively to efforts at conservationism. Leno’s poem, telling the story of one man’s alienation from nature, which is offered to him as a magical cure but which ultimately causes his death, may be an allegory for both the working classes and those above them. As someone who had worked in nature, a figure for the pre-industrial worker whom Leno elsewhere nostalgizes, Herne is compelled to relinquish his daily interaction with the forest for his monarch. It was fatal for him, but the consequences were also ominous for the king whom he served, as the first appearance


of the ghost was said to have occurred the night of Richard’s death and recurred directly before the demise of several subsequent monarchs. While a writer’s social class is a significant factor in how he or she chooses to depict nature, how class matters is manifested in any number of ways. From Duck to Leno, labouring-class poets wrote within and against the expectations imposed upon them by patrons, critics and the polite reading audiences whom they primarily addressed. Using images of nature and the various genres of natural descriptions, these poets were able productively to cultivate a parallel tradition within English literature. Sites such as hillside prospects provided a place to enter into dialogue with their refined forbears, whereas riparian verse allowed them to see themselves in relation to one another. But nature was not simply fodder for metapoetic meditation. Many of the poets began to formulate a politics that today can be identified as anticipating threads that would become important within the environmental movement. Although Clare’s protest poetry is rightfully the most celebrated, Clare was by no means the first or last labouring-class poet to meditate upon the dangerous consequences of a mechanistic attitude towards the natural world. Poets such as Bloomfield, Woodhouse, Wilson, Lane and others into the nineteenth century wrote poetry that suggests that ecocritical concerns in literature have a longer and wider genealogy. By reevaluating labouring-class poetry, we can see that thinking about the relationship between the human and the natural was not simply the domain of the Romantics, nor of those privileged by formal educations. Their work constructively expands and deepens our understanding of the history of environmental literature in particular and of British literature in general.

Notes

A note is provided the first time a poem or other primary source is mentioned in the text. All subsequent page or line references are then given directly in the text.

Introduction: ‘A Weed in Nature’s Poesy’ – British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 1. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), lines 68–73. 2. In What Is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), Kate Soper presents one of the most thorough philosophical explorations of this question, while Peter Coates’s Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) offers an historical overview. See also Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). 3. See Merchant (2004), p. 85. Evelyn’s Sylva (1664) is a pioneering work on forestry and tree conservation. Ray and Derham were theologians and natural historians who promoted physico-theology, or the seventeenth-century version of the ‘Argument from Design’, through which God’s existence – and providence – could be interpreted in nature. 4. Soper (1995), p. 149. 5. See Tim Burke, ‘Ann Yearsley and the Distribution of Genius in Early Romantic Culture’ in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), pp. 215–30; and Bridget Keegan, ‘Boys, Marvelous Boys: John Clare’s “Natural Genius’’ ’ in John Clare: New Approaches, eds. John Goodridge and Simon Kovesi (Peterborough: The John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 65–76. 6. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Vintage, 1983) provides a thorough discussion of the persistence the assumption (well into the Victorian age) that poverty was unavoidable and ‘natural’. 7. Shortly after Southey’s work appeared, another collection was published anonymously, Sketches of Obscure Poets. With Specimens of Their Writings (London, 1833). Included in this anthology are William Hall, Christian Milne, Joseph Holland and Edward Rushton, among others. 8. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford UP, 1973); John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry 193

194 Notes

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) and The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); H. Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton UK: Harvester, 1985); and William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). Richard Greene, Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Mary Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Simon J. White, Robert Bloomfield, Romanticism and the Poetry of Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); and Paul Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974); Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1987); Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also several works by Florence Boos, including ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’ a special issue of Victorian Poetry 39 (2001), edited by Boos; ‘Class and Victorian Poetics’, Blackwell’s Literary Compass (Winter 2005); and ‘WorkingClass Poetry’, in Companion to Victorian Literature, eds. Alison Chapman, Richard Cronin and Anthony Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 204–28. See Lonsdale’s The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); see also Andrew Carpenter Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 1998); and David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, eds. Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Anthology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). MP v. This is the last of the nine-volume complete Clarendon edition of Clare. Richard Greene and Ann Messenger’s edition of The Works of Mary Leapor was also published by Clarendon in 2003. John Goodridge and John Lucas released a second edition of the Selected Poems of Robert Bloomfield in 2007 through Trent Editions. The eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, for instance, includes two poems by Mary Leapor and a much more ample selection of poems by Clare. The Longman Anthology includes Leapor, Yearsley and Clare. The Broadview Anthology, volume 3, includes a separate section devoted to labouring-class poetry. See ECLCP and NCLCP. The companion website is available at http://human. ntu.ac.uk/research/labouringclasswriters/elsie1.htm. See Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Michael P. Branch, ‘Saving all the pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism’ in Rosendale; and Steven Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary

Notes

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

195

Scholarship: Literature, Theory and the Environment (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002). Branch (2002), pp. 7–8. Christopher Hitt, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’, College English, 31 (2004), pp. 123–47, p. 126. The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1992). Soper (1995), p. 237. Soper (1995), p. 238. Margaret Doody has discussed the ‘double-voiced’ quality of much Augustan verse in The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Doody includes thoughtful discussions of poets of labouring-class origins such as Falconer and Chatterton (see pp. 226–31). However, my use of the term hybridity is modelled after Donna Landry’s. Landry brings to bear this important concept from post-colonial theory to explicate important tensions in labouring-class women’s poetry. See Landry, 1990, pp. 217–19.

1 ‘The Fields His Study’: Robert Bloomfield’s Poetics of Sustainability 1. Williams (1973), p. 120. 2. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Teidemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 65. 3. Remains, volume 2, p. 81. 4. Two essays in the collection, Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, eds. Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006) will help to reverse this trend. Kevin Binfield’s essay, ‘Labor and an Ethic of Variety in The Farmer’s Boy’, and Donna Landry’s essay, ‘Georgic Ecology’, make arguments similar to my own by demonstrating how Bloomfield’s poetry is valuable to current environmentalist debates when it is read within the terms of its chosen generic conventions and the historical and economic context of its composition. 5. See Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 6. In his comparative analysis of the works of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier with James Thomson, Goodridge warns against reading the former poets only for their ‘documentary’ value: ‘A poet is not a social historian, though s/he may incorporate this role; a poem is not merely a statement of fact, a regurgitation of sensuous or statistical information. The processes by which a poet selects from experiences and beliefs, selects genre, imagery, language, and develops all these elements into a literary artefact are sophisticated; and modern literary and linguistic theory teaches us, too, that language is not simply “transparent’’ in the way that a direct reading of history from literature may

196 Notes

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

assume. . . . Neither do the biographical accounts of these two writers suggest that their writings are simply concerned with transmitting the truth of their working lives. . . . It seems to me that these modern readings of the poems are in danger of falling into a fallacy whereby the fact that these writers were proletarian has become the all-encompassing consideration in reading their poems. Because Stephen Duck was a farm labourer it is assumed too easily not only that what he says about farm work must be true, but that in this truth lies the whole of the poetry’s significance’ (Goodridge [1995], pp. 16–17). Patrick Murphy, Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 11. Jonathan Lawson, Robert Bloomfield (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 59. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 7–8. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 42. McKusick (2000), p. 44. McKusick (2000), p. 91. See ‘Georgic Ecology’, in White, Goodridge and Keegan (2006), pp. 253–68. Landry (2006), p. 253. For a survey of Duck’s admirers and imitators, see Christmas (2001), pp. 95– 129. Robert Dodsley, The Muse in Livery. A Collection of Poems (London, 1732), p. 11, lines 25–6. For an excellent modern biography see Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Juan Christian Pellicer, ‘The Georgic at Mid-Century and the Case of Dodsley’s “Agriculture’’ ’ Review of English Studies 54 (2003), p. 81. Pellicer (2003), p. 68. Pellicer (2003), p. 87. Pellicer (2003), p. 83. Pellicer (2003), p. 85. Robert Dodsley, Public Virtue: A Poem in Three Books. I. Agriculture. II. Commerce. III. Arts (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1753), Canto 1, line 326. For additional discussion of the ideological features of English georgic in this period see Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Roman Georgic in the Georgian Age’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33.2 (1991), pp. 182–214; Richard Feingold, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of Pastoral and Georgic (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978); John Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); and Dwight Durling, Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1935). All quotations from the poem are taken from Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems, Revised and Enlarged Edition, eds. John Goodridge and John Lucas (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2007). I use this as my source text because we know that Bloomfield felt Lofft’s editing of his work to be intrusive. Goodridge and Lucas’s edition is based upon the version of the poem that Bloomfield wrote

Notes

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

197

‘afresh, from memory, in October 1801. As the poet explains in his authorial note . . . this was an attempt to put on record what he claimed was his precise original text of the poem, complete with original errors, which are carefully noted on the blank versos of the manuscript’ (p. 19). Bloomfield’s memory was prodigious, and he claims to have composed the entirety of his poem and kept it in memory before ever committing it to paper. Helena Feder, ‘Ecocriticism, New Historicism, and Romantic Apostrophe’, in Rosendale (2002), pp. 43–4. See Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Random House, 1971). See his Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ‘Lambs to the Slaughter: Leisure and Laboring-Class Poetry’, Romanticism on the Net 27 (2002), available at http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/ 2002/v/n27/006562ar.html. Lawson (1980), p. 90. Worster writes that the modern concept of ecology ‘begins in eighteenth century, when it emerged as a more comprehensive way of looking at the earth’s fabric of life: a point of view that sought to describe all the living organisms of the earth as an interacting whole, often referred to as the “economy of nature.’’ This phrase gave birth to a rich set of ideas out of which emerged the science of today . . . ’ [Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. xiv]. Nathaniel Bloomfield, An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems (London, 1803). See Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1803 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). Remains, volume 2, pp. 53–4. According to Mark Overton, the widespread use of turnips as fodder crops began after 1750. See his Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). His essay ‘Nature’s Music. Consisting of Extracts from Several Authors; with Practical Observations, and Poetical Testimonies, In Honour of the Harp of Aeolus’ is included in Remains, volume 1. See John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology. The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Jacqueline M. Labbé, Romantic Visualties: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). Lawson (1985), pp. 64–5. Included in Goodridge and Lucas, eds. (2007), lines 69–70. Remains, volume 1, p. 39. David Service, The Caledonian Herd-Boy; A Rural Poem (Yarmouth, 1802). William Holloway, The Peasant’s Fate: A Rural Poem (1802), lines 527–33. Holloway also includes a learned footnote explaining his allusion to Timur. Joseph Holland, An Appendix to the Season of Spring, in the Rural Poem, ‘The Farmer’s Boy’ (1806), n.p. William Hersee, Poems (1808), lines 1–14.

198 Notes 45. Bloomfield and Clare corresponded briefly. Clare wrote two poems to Bloomfield’s Memory (included in MP iv, pp. 181–2), and in his journal of October 1824, he sketches his plans to write a ‘Life of Bloomfield’ and ‘a criticism on his genius and writings’ because he was concerned about the quality and authenticity of other work being produced about the poet. See John Clare: By Himself, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1996), p. 185. For a critical discussion of Clare and Bloomfield’s relationship, see John Lucas, ‘Bloomfield and Clare’ in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. John Goodridge (Helpston, UK: The John Clare Society and Margaret Grainger Trust, 1994), pp. 55–68; John Goodridge, ‘Clare and Eighteenth-Century Poetry: Pomfret, Cunningham, Bloomfield’ Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42 (2001), pp. 264–78; John Goodridge ‘ “The Only Privilege our Sex Enjoy’’: Women’s Storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare’ in White, Goodridge and Keegan, eds. (2006), pp. 159–77; and Chirico, (2007), pp. 54–61. 46. The initial editions of The Farmer’s Boy vastly outsold the initial editions of Lyrical Ballads, going through 26,000 copies in its first three years. Although Lyrical Ballads sold well, its figures paled in comparison with the success of The Farmer’s Boy. See Scott McEathron, ‘Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry’ in Nineteenth-Century Literature 54 (1999), pp. 1–26. 47. David Service, The Wild Harp’s Murmurs; or, Rustic Strains (Yarmouth, 1806), lines 1–8.

2 Return to the Garden: James Woodhouse and Polite Cultivations 1. Susan Stewart, ‘Garden Agon’, Representations 62 (1998), pp. 111–43, p. 111. 2. Joseph Addison, ‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’ in The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. George Washington Greene, 6 volumes (Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott, 1888), volume 2, pp. 379–88, p. 380. See also Bridget Keegan, ‘Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour’’ ’, Studies in English Literature 41 (2001), pp. 545–62. 3. Klein’s use of this term relies upon the example of how, during the eighteenth century, the dress of the upper echelon of society became increasingly easy to emulate. Klein sees this as a metaphor for how other forms of behaviour could be imitated. These behaviours, on the part of the lower and middling orders, were threatening to their social superiors as much as they were liberating to the ‘plebes’. They demonstrated that one’s class ‘identity is not an essence but rather a set of skills adapted to a range of environments . . . As soon as pretensions become social practices, they take on a reality and authenticity of their own. Even daydreams have their significance, since they map the trajectory of aspirations. Since, in a mobile society, people’s careers are built on their aspirations, their social dreams and fantasies seem an ineradicable element of their identity’ [‘Politeness for Plebes: Consumption and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England’ in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, eds. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 362–82, p. 377].

Notes

199

4. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 20–1. 5. Stephen Bending, ‘A natural revolution? Garden politics in eighteenthcentury England’ in Refiguring Revolutions: British Politics and Aesthetics, 1642–1789, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 241–66, p. 242. 6. Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 8. 7. Williamson (1995), p. 112. 8. Williamson (1995), p. 113. 9. See John Goodridge, ‘Aram, Peter (bap. 1667, d. 1735)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www. oxforddnb.com.cuhsl.creighton.edu/view/article/39742, accessed 1 June 2007. 10. Peter Aram, Studley Park. A Poem. In The Antient and Modern History of the Loyal Town of Rippon (York, 1733), lines 1–4. 11. See Judith Colton, ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10.1 (1976), pp. 1–20. 12. From Duck’s Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1736), included in ECLCP i, p. 150, line 85. 13. Bending (1998), p. 247. 14. Bending (1998), p. 249. 15. Bending (1998), p. 249. 16. Bermingham (1986), p. 30. 17. No less than Humphrey Repton, in his Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803), duly dismissed Shenstone’s efforts, noting that ‘his taste, rather than his ambition, led him to ornament the whole of his estate; vainly hoping that he might retain all the advantages of a farm, blended with the scenery of a park. Thus he lived under the continual mortification of disappointed hope, and, with a mind exquisitely sensible, he felt equally the sneer of the great man, at the magnificence of his attempt, and the ridicule of the farmer, at the misapplication of his paternal acres’. I am grateful to Sue Edney for drawing my attention to this passage. 18. The Letters of William Shenstone, ed. Marjorie Williams (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), p. 141. 19. James Woodhouse, Poems on Sundry Occasions (London, 1764), pp. iii–iv. 20. In Dodsley (1732), line 8. 21. From Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1766), lines 15–20. 22. See ‘Elegy II. Written to William Shenstone, Esq: of the Lessowes’ in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1766), line 47. 23. Woodhouse (1766), lines 511–13. 24. James Woodhouse, Norbury Park (1803), lines 194–5. 25. Robert J. Mayhew, Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660–1800: Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2004). 26. John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 1. 27. Mayhew (2004), p. 63.

200 Notes 28. The poem’s title signals its satiric purpose, alluding as it does to the early eighteenth-century Scriblerians. St Crispin is the patron saint of shoemakers, thus Woodhouse foregrounds his artisan background. 29. Steve Van-Hagen has recently brought out a modern edition of selections from the final poem: The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: A Selection (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2005). 30. R.I. Woodhouse, ed., The Life and Poetical Works of James Woodhouse (1735–1820), 2 volumes (London: The Leadenhall Press, 1896), chapter 3, lines 747 and 753. 31. I am grateful to Sue Edney, and her remarkable knowledge of garden history and practice, for pointing this out to me. 32. Landry (1990), p. 53. 33. Poems on Various Subjects (1787), lines 44–52. 34. Landry (1990), p. 54. 35. ECLCP iii, p. 209, lines 1: 25–30.

3

Heavenly Prospects: Views From Clifton and Cliffden

1. Lines 1–8 are quoted in the epigraph. From The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928). 2. David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–89 (London: Longman, 2003), p. 94. 3. From Poems on Various Subjects, Chiefly Pastoral (1781), lines 1–6. 4. See Williams (1975); Barrell (1972, 1980); Fulford (1996); Labbé (1998) and Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5. Crawford (2002), p. 26. 6. Fulford (1996), p. 3. 7. Fulford (1996), p. 3. 8. Fairer (2003), p. 205. 9. Fairer (2003), p. 203. 10. The text is published without marginal line numbers. The passage occurs on p. 15. 11. William J. Christmas, ‘Jones, Henry (1721–1770)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb. com.cuhsl.creighton.edu/view/article/15012, accessed 18 June 2007. 12. Henry Jones, Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin, 1749), lines 1–12. 13. Bryan Little, The Story of Bristol (Tiverton: Halsgrove, 2003), pp. 53–4. 14. Henry Jones, Clifton; A Poem, in Two Cantos (Bristol, 1767), I: lines 222–5. 15. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), volume 1, p. 341, line 2. 16. Leslie du S. Read, ‘Powell, William (1735/6–1769)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www. oxforddnb.com.cuhsl.creighton.edu/view/article/22663, accessed 18 June 2007. 17. Landry (1990), p. 131. 18. Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1785), lines 30, 23 and 27. 19. ‘John Frederick Bryant’ in ECLCP iii, lines 53–7.

Notes 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

201

Yearsley (1787), lines 19–24. William Lane, Cliffden (High Wycombe, 1792?), lines 1–4. William Lane, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1795), lines 25–35. William Lane, Poems (1806), lines 35–9. Line 39 is footnoted by the author: ‘Mr B----------d’s Publication has appeared while this was in Press’. William Lane, A Few Clusters of the Seventy-Fifth Vintage (Wycombe, 1819), lines 1–4. William Lane, The Gleanings of the Seventy-Third Vintage: Consisting of Poems, Religious and Moral (Wycombe, 1818), lines 205–8 and 217–20. Lane (1818). More wrote ‘I do not in general approve of teaching charity children to write for the same reason that I confine within very strict limits my plan of educating the poor. A thorough knowledge of religion, and of some of those coarser arts of life by which the community may best be benefited includes the whole stock of instruction . . . ’ [The Works of Hannah More (New York, 1852), p. 171]. William Lane, A Few Clusters of the Seventy-Eighth Vintage; Consisting of Poems, On Various Subjects (Wycombe, 1822). William Lane, Fourscore Years of the Life of William Lane, Flackwell Heath, High Wycombe, Bucks. Written by Himself (Wycombe, 1825), p. 126. William Hersee, Poems Rural and Domestic (Chichester, 1811), lines 7–8. Robert Story, The Lyrical and other Minor Poems of Robert Story (London, 1861), p. xvii. Ebenezer Elliott, The Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1840), p. 130.

4 Writing Against the Current: Anne Wilson’s Teisa and Labouring-Class River Poetry 1. Alexander Pope (1903), lines 355–62. 2. See From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Ithaca: Duquesne University Press, 1986). 3. Herendeen (1986), p. 161. 4. See The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (London, 1831). 5. All the Workes of John Taylor, Water-Poet . . . . Collected into one volume, 1630 (Menston and London: Scolar Press, 1973), pp. 60–81[75], line 1101. 6. See David Fairer, ‘ “Sweet Native Stream!’’: Wordsworth and the School of Warton’ in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, eds. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 314–38; and Daniel Robinson, ‘ “Still Glides the Stream’’: Form and Function in Wordsworth’s River Duddon Sonnets’, European Romantic Review 13.4 (December 2002), pp. 449–64. 7. For a full discussion of river imagery in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, see Frederic S. Colwell’s Rivermen: A Romantic Iconography of the River and the Source (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). 8. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be provided parenthetically within the text. 9. Fulford (1996), p. 3. 10. Fulford (1996), p. 3.

202 Notes 11. Landry (1990), p. 6. 12. Because Wilson’s poem is neither well known nor easily accessible (with only two extant copies of the poem, one held at the British Library and the other at the Huntington Library), in my discussion, I will be quoting longer passages than might typically be expected to provide a fuller sense of Wilson’s writing. 13. Fairer (2003), p. 209. 14. Herendeen (1986), p. 161. 15. See his ‘Windsor Forest, Britannia, and River Poetry’ in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 45–69. 16. Other noted Renaissance examples of the genre of river poetry include John Leland’s Latin Cygnea Cantio and Book IV of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, although it is less likely from internal evidence that Wilson knew these last two texts directly. In the seventeenth century, both Marvell and Milton fed the tributaries of river poetry, and Wilson makes direct allusions to Milton’s river imagery in Lycidas and Paradise Lost. 17. In ‘Winter’, lines 159–212, the rural horse Dobbin is asked to compare his relatively comfortable existence with the brutal conditions of the post-horse, whose ‘life is misery, and his end disgrace’ (line 202). 18. Fulford (1996), p. 9. 19. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 97. 20. Landry (1990), p. 7. 21. Northborough MS 1, pp. 162–9, lines 93–7. 22. John Donne’s ‘The Bait’ and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ are the two best-known seventeenth-century examples of riparian love poetry. 23. EP ii, p. 248. 24. EP ii, p. 523. 25. MP iv, p. 552. 26. LP ii, p. 856. 27. MP iv, p. 209, line 9. 28. John Clare, By Himself, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1996), p. 171. 29. ‘John Clare’s Rivers’, The Wordsworth Circle (2003), pp. 134–7. 30. MP iv, p. 280. 31. See John Goodridge, ‘Identity, Authenticy, Class: John Clare and the Mask of Chatterton’, Angelaki 1.2 (Winter 1993–1994), pp. 131–48. Goodridge further develops the argument from this essay in the first chapter of his forthcoming book. 32. The passage is dated from c. 1825 and reads ‘I have been having a weeks delightful Excursion with some delightful company the latchets of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose & yet were they very civil to me & seemed quite at home with my rudeness who were they think you why no less in honour then [for ‘than’] the Exelent Angler & Poet Izaak Walton & his illustrious apostles of the Muse Sir Henry Wooton Sir Walter Raleigh Dr. Donne Charles Cotton Mr. George Herbert Mr. Richard Hooker . . . ’ [John and Anne Tibble, John Clare, His Life and Work (London: Heinemann, 1956), pp. 127–9]. 33. Mark Storey, ed., Clare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 193. 34. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820).

Notes

203

35. Storey (1973), p. 49. See also Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, pp. xviii–xix. 36. Storey (1973), p. 71. 37. Storey (1973), p. 106. 38. EP i, p. 536. 39. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation (London: J.M. Dent, 1973), p. 23. 40. Northborough MS 1, p. 74. 41. The Rural Muse (1835), p. 127, line 1. 42. Tim Burke, ‘Colonial Spaces and National Identities in The Banks of Wye: Bloomfield and the Wye after Wordsworth’ in White, Goodridge and Keegan (2006), pp. 88–122. See also John Goodridge, ‘ “That Deathless Wish of Climbing Higher’’: Robert Bloomfield on the Sugar Loaf’ in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, eds. Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 43. From the forthcoming Cyder Press edition, edited by Tim Burke, Book III, lines 148 and 150. 44. Burke (2006), p. 97. 45. From Poems by Ellen Taylor, the Irish Cottager (Dublin, 1792?). 46. ECLCP iii, pp. 253–4.

5 ‘What Terms of Art Can Nature’s Pow’rs Express?’: William Falconer and Labouring-Class Poetry at Sea 1. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 28. 2. At the beginning of his study The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), Oelschlaeger remarks: ‘The nineteenth century also marked the beginning of an important change in the meaning of the idea of wilderness. Elliptically stated, a shift transpired from viewing wild nature as merely a valuable resource (as a means to economic ends) and obstacle (wilderness must be conquered for civilization to advance) towards a conception of wilderness as an end in its own right and an endangered species in need of preservation’ (p. 4). 3. See Thomas (1983), pp. 17–51 and Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). Nicolson argues that Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1691) had a revolutionary impact on aesthetics. Prior to the eighteenth century, mountains rarely appeared is a positive light in poetry. But Burnet’s work ‘precipitated arguments between notions of regularity, derived from classical and medieval thinkers, and native English feeling for irregularity, as an aesthetic norm. It led men to consider more carefully “absolute’’ and “relative’’ standards of Beauty, to question also whether such standards were inherent in nature or in their own minds. It led them also to consider, more than man had considered before, similarities and differences between Beauty and Sublimity. . . . From the discovery of the new cosmic heavens, vastness and irregularity passed to terrestrial Nature. In the wide seas and the mountains of the earth, men were discovering a new “Magnificence of

204 Notes

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

Nature’’, finding that their “elastical souls’’ expanded with the vastness and expansiveness of Nature’ (pp. 269–70). See Merchant (2004), especially pp. 65–89. See also Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004). Merchant writes: ‘The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution. Because nature was now viewed as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external, rather than inherent, forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature’ (1995, p. 86). Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757, though as Carolyn Merchant observes, his examples of sublime natural places were ‘forests, mountains, and waterfalls’ (Merchant, 2004, p. 87). Alain Corbin’s work, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) stands almost alone in accounting for the history of human ways of thinking about the sea. Kate Rigby also gives some attention to this question in her fifth chapter, ‘The Family of Floods’, pp. 173–214. Finally Carl Thompson’s anthology, Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2007), provides a welcome addition of key primary texts to further the scholarly exploration of this subject. According to Corbin: ‘Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the shipwreck became the second most evocative figure of catastrophe, after the earthquake, and sensitive souls were moved by any mention of it. . . . In the 1740s, however, its grip became stronger, and the emotional strategy which it made possible became more complex. It also gained the rhetoric of pity . . . . Shipwrecks were the most common form of accident then. Quantitative studies show how frequent they were. Between 1779 and 1791, thirty five ships sank within the roadsted or harbour of Dunkirk, only nineteen off the city’s shore; thus 64.8 per cent of these catastrophes took place within the roadsted or the harbour’ (p. 234). According to Thompson, ‘A modern survey by Terence Grocott identifies some 1,500 wrecks that occurred between 1793 and 1816, but suggests that these represent just a tiny fraction of the vessels lost at sea during even this short time-span. 2,000 wrecks a year world-wide, Grocott concludes, is a more likely figure. This estimate includes vessels of all nationalities, and not just British ships, but according to one contemporary source there were still in the region of 5,000 Britons dying each year at sea’ (pp. 6–7). Thompson (2007), pp. 8–14. See the biography included in William Jones’s modern edition A Critical Edition of the Poetical Works of William Falconer (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2003), pp. 1–12. The Oxford Book of the Sea, ed. Jonathan Raban (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Addison’s ‘Essay on Georgics’, discussed in Chapter 1, states the fundamental terms of this debate. Jones amply documents the debate about Falconer’s technical language in the contemporary reviews of the poem and in other works of poetic theory in the period. See pp. 77–91. Assessing the revisions to the 1764 second edition,

Notes

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

205

the Critical Review writes: ‘We cannot help congratulating ourselves upon the character we gave of this performance, as, at the same time, we animadverted upon its irregularity and incorrectness, which, we observed, might be owing to the author’s education and occupation. He has, in this edition, fully removed those objections, by introducing most beautiful poetical connections which fill up the charms that rendered it irregular’ [17 (1794) p. 294]. Corbin notes, however, that the seashore, because it could be made subject to the appropriate viewpoint, did become an object of picturesque consumption (pp. 138–48). The Spectator, no. 489, 20 September 1712 in The Spectator, ed. Donald A. Bond, 5 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), volume 4, pp. 233–4. The Enchafed Flood, or the Romantic Iconograpy of the Sea (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1950), p. 17. Proem, lines 1–6. All quotations from the poem are from the 1762 edition. Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See Jones’s annotation to these lines, in particular his thorough explanation of the complex concept of the azimuth, in his edition, pp. 370–1. See also Margaret Doody’s discussion of this passage in The Daring Muse (1985), pp. 172–3. See Landow’s website version of his book, which includes a chapter on Falconer, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 75–84. Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/art/crisis/crisis2g.html. All of these poems can be found in MP iv, pp. 90–104; the titles include ‘Ocean Glories—Tune “Old Benbow’’ A Beautiful Melodie’, ‘Sea Song’, ‘Come come brave seamen all who have fought who have won’, ‘Benbow A Sea Song Take Down from My Fathers Memory’, ‘Sea Song’ and ‘Nelson & the Nile’. John Goodridge, A Biographical and Bibliographical Database of British and Irish Labouring-Class Poets 1700–1900, Version 6.2 (1 February 2006), published online at: http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/labouringclasswriters/ elsie1.htm. EP ii, p. 36. Christmas writes that a significant shift occurs in the work of plebeian poets writing after 1748: ‘The plebeian poets of the 1730s wrote about work as if it were a subject worthy of poetry. Mid- to late-century versifying plebeians, however, are more apt to consider their writing itself as a form of work. Vestiges of the labor realism evident in the 1730s poets remain . . . But the visceral workaday detail which characterized the poetry of Duck and Collier is not to be found here’ (2000, pp. 160–1). George Woodley, Mount-Edgcumbe, A Descriptive Poem; the Shipwreck, a Naval Eclogue; and Miscellaneous Verses on Several Occasions (1804), p. 66. Edward Anderson, The Sailor; A Poem. Description of his Going to Sea, And through Various Scenes of Life, Being Shipwrecked, Taken Prisoner: And Afterwards Safely Returning to his Family, who had not heard of him in several Years: With Observations on the Town of Liverpool [Printed and Sold by the Author, (1792?)]. Anonymous, The Son of Commerce, An Original Poem, in Thirty-Four Cantos, Written by a Sailor. To Which is Added His Grand Ode On the Death and Funeral of the Late Lord Nelson (London: Moore and Son, 1806). George

206 Notes

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

Woodley, Britain’s Bulwarks; Or, The British Seaman: A Poem, in Eight Books (Plymouth Dock: Printed and Sold by L. Congdon, 1811). Other poems by sailors (not discussed in the chapter) include James Coates, A Pathetic Elegy on the Death of W. Brown and C. Choddick, Who suffered on the Tempestuous Night of October 30th, 1807. While engaged in the Herring-Fishery, Bridlington Bay (York: T. Wilson and R. Spence, 1808) and Bridlington-Quay, A Descriptive Poem, Second Edition, Enlarged and Improved: To which is added a list of the lodging houses (Scarborough: G. Broadrick, 1813 [?]); Anonymous, Love Elegies, By A Sailor, Written in the Year MDCCLXXIV (London: Printed for G. Wilkie, 1780); and John Mitford, Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy (1818) and Poems of a British Sailor (1818). Rediker provides thoroughly detailed documentation of the hardships and privations – physical and psychological – of the grim reality of the common seaman’s life in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Rediker (1987), p. 110. See Landry (1990), pp. 218–19 and Gary Harrison, ‘Hybridity, Mimicry and John Clare’s Child Harold’ in The Wordsworth Circle 34 (2003), pp. 149–55. See pp. 41–70 in their book (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). The phrase originates in from a 1611 translation of the Bible and they trace its use even into our own day. They note that ‘While hewing and drawing suggest timeless travails, the phrase in fact originated in the early era of capitalism . . . These workers were necessary to the growth of capitalism, as they did the work that could not or would not be done by artisans in workshops, manufactories, or guilds. Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that have usually been taken for granted by historians’ (p. 42). Hewers and drawers were a kind of proto-proletariat. Linebaugh and Rediker begin their alternative history of the early modern Atlantic with the story of a symbolic shipwreck. Linebaugh and Rediker (2000), p. 49. Robert Barker, The Unfortunate Shipwright and Cruel Captain (1756), lines 50–5. Poetical Epistles (Kilmarnock, 1809), pp. 58–9, lines 13–20. They argue that ‘many expropriations of the day—of the commons by enclosure and conquest, of time by puritanical abolition of holidays, of the body by the child stealing and the burning of women, and of knowledge by the destruction of guilds and assaults on paganism—gave rise to new kinds of workers in a new kind of slavery, enforced directly by terror’ (Linebaugh and Rediker [2000], p. 40). Sailors were foremost among these workers as the remainder of their book illustrates. Auden (1950), p. 17. Lines 1–6. See ‘Edward Rushton’ in ECLCP iii, pp. 9–37; Tim Burke, ‘ “Humanity is Now the Pop’lar Cry’’: Labouring-Class Poets and the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1787– 1789’ in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42 (2001), pp. 245–63. In Poems (London, 1861). Pieter van der Merwe, ‘Stanfield, James Field (1749/50–1824)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.cuhsl.creighton.edu/view/article/26236, accessed 30 June 2007.

Notes

207

39. The Guinea Voyage, I: lines 239–46, 251–4. 40. Christian Milne, Simple Poems on Simple Subjects (1805), lines 34–7. 41. ‘ “The mean Unletter’d—female Bard of Aberdeen!’’: The Complexities of Christian Milne’s Simple Poems on Simple Subjects’, Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, eds. Nancy Kushigian and Stephen Behrendt, (Alexander Street Press, 2002). 42. Bhabha (1994), p. 97. 43. LP ii, p. 971–2, lines 42–8. 44. Harrison (2003), pp. 149–55. 45. Corbin (1994), p. 125. 46. LP i, p. 327.

6

‘And All is Nakedness and Fen’: John Clare’s Wetlands

1. (Basingstoke: Picador, 1992), p. 13. 2. Dorothy paints a much grittier portrait than her brother’s monitory figure. In her journal for Friday, 3October, she provides more specific information about reasons for the decline of leeches: ‘He said leeches were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they have been scarce—he supposed it owing to their being much sought after, that they did not breed fast, & were slow of growth. Leeches were formerly 2/6 100; they are now 30/’ [The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 24]. For a comparative discussion of Dorothy and William’s versions, see Gary Harrison’s Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). Observing how William erases Dorothy’s key details about the Leech Gather’s other occupations of begging and selling pious books, Harrison discusses how ‘As a result of these historical displacements, the leech gatherer becomes a mythic sign of affective power in the face of economic deprivation’ (p. 137). 3. William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’ in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, volume 2, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), lines 124–6. 4. Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside: The Classic History of Britain’s Landscape, Flora and Fauna (London: Phoenix Press, 1986), p. 391. 5. For the former, see J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Barrell (1972). 6. See Bate (2000) and McKusick (2000). 7. See for example, Timothy Brownlow, John Clare and the Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) or Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987). 8. Henry Mayr-Harting, ‘Guthlac [St Guthlac] (674–715)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.cuhsl.creighton.edu/view/article/11783, accessed 1 July 2007.

208 Notes 9. There were two poems produced about St Guthlac as well as hagiographic writings. See Jane Roberts, The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). See also Felix, Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). One modern commentator notes of Guthlac’s decision to establish his hermitage in the Fens, ‘Unlike the well drained arable land of today, the Fens were then a labyrinth of black wandering streams, broad lagoons and quagmires with vast beds of reeds, sedge and fern. The islands amongst this dismal swamp were a great attraction for the recluse’. Available at http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/adversaries/bios/guthlac.html, accessed 1 July 2007. There is a church of St Guthlac in Market Deeping; it is not certain if Clare knew this saint’s tale, but it is possible. 10. When Grendel is first introduced early in the epic we are informed of how he has spent his time ‘haunting the marches [marshes], marauding round the heath/and the desolate fens’ (lines 104–5). Later in the poem, describing where Grendel and his mother come from, the poet mentions the mere where they dwell as one overgrown with ‘a maze of tree roots’ (line 1364), a place where ‘ . . . water burns. And the mere bottom has never been sounded by the sons of men’ (lines 1366–7). This likely refers to the phenomenon also known as ‘will o’ the wisps’ which were believed to be souls of the dead who were cursed to remain on earth (much like Cain, from whom Grendel and his mother are said to be descended). In fact, will o’ the wisps are produced by marsh gases such as methane, produced by the decaying vegetation. Concluding his description of Grendel’s natural habitat, the poet summarizes, ‘That is no good place’ (1372) [Beowulf, a Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002)]. 11. Early in his pilgrimage, Christian falls into the slough: ‘Now I saw in my Dream, that just as they had ended this talk, they drew near to a very Miry Slough, that was in the midst of the Plain, and they being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the Slough was Dispond. Here therefore they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with dirt; and Christian, because of the burden on his back, began to sink into the Mire’ [John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Grace Abounding, and A Relation of his Imprisonment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 16]. 12. Rackham (1986), p. 374. 13. See Nicolson (1963). 14. Quoted in H.C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 27. 15. Rodney Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. xi. 16. In The Many-Headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker name fen drainage as one of the critical early modern acts of expropriation, one which turned a ‘commoning economy of fishing, fowling, reed cutting, and peat digging into a capitalist economy of sheep raising’ (2000, p. 45). Oliver Cromwell served as one of the commissioners for the initial draining of the Bedford Level. 17. Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1982). 18. The History or Narrative of the Great Level of the Fenns, called Bedford Level (London, 1685), lines 7–12.

Notes

209

19. The Inundation or The Life of a Fen-Man. With Notes Critical and Explanatory. By A Fen Parson (Lynn: W. Whittingham, 1771[?]), p. 7. It is also included in Fenland Notes and Queries IV, ed. Rev. W.D. Sweeting (Peterborough: Geo. C. Caster, Marketplace, 1900). 20. Included in Valerie Gerrard’s The Story of the Fens (London: Robert Hale, 2003), pp. 90–2, lines 1–12. 21. Quoted in Darby (1956), p. 162, lines 165–76. 22. Anderson (1792?), p. 30. 23. Thomas Batchelor, Village Scenes, The Progress of Agriculture, and Other Poems (London: Vernor and Hood, 1804), lines 208–10. 24. Quoted in Darby (1956), p.154. 25. Quoted in H.C. Darby, The Changing Fenland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 142. 26. Giblett (1996), p. 111. 27. Hall was well known enough to merit an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See Francis Watt, ‘Hall, William (1748–1825)’, rev. Rebecca Mills, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.cuhsl.creighton.edu/view/article/11996, accessed 1 July 2007. He is also included in Sketches of Obscure Poets (London, 1833). 28. William Hall, A Sketch of Local History, Being a Chain of Incidents Related to the State of the Fens, From the Earliest accounts to the Present time (Lynn, 1812). The poem is entitled ‘Non Dedication, alias Non Sense’, p. 3, lines 31–2. 29. Edward Storey, Portrait of the Fen Country (London: Robert Hale, 1978), p. 191. 30. McKusick (2000), p. 82. 31. John Goodridge, A First-Line Index to the Poetry of John Clare: Introduction. Available at http://www.johnclare.info/firstlineintro.html, accessed 1 July 2007. 32. See Simon Kovesi, ‘John Clare’s “I’’ and “Eye’’: Egotism and Ecologism’ in Green and Pleasant Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside, ed. Amanda Gilroy (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 73–88. 33. Quoted in Edward Storey’s Spirit of the Fens: A View of Fenland Life Past and Present (London: Robert Hale, 1985), p. 173. 34. John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London, 1820), lines 1–8. 35. Barbara Johnson, ‘Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion’ in Diacritics 16 (1986), pp. 28–47. 36. John Clare, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, 2 volumes, (London, 1821), volume 1, pp. 105–7, lines 1–8. 37. In Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton describes Satan, seeking out the Serpent, as a ‘black, low mist creeping’ (line 180), thus granting him characteristics often attributed to the ‘poisonous’ wetland atmosphere, the miasma that was believed to lead to the disease known as ‘fen ague’. 38. From The Poems of John Clare, ed. J.W. Tibble (London: J.M. Dent, 1935), lines 1–3. 39. MP iv, pp. 311–14, line 3. 40. See ‘The Flood’ in MP iv, p. 234. 41. MP iv, p. 240. 42. In Poems Chiefly From Manuscript, ed. Edmund Blunden (London, 1920), line 1.

210 Notes 43. Adam Phillips ‘The Exposure of John Clare’ in John Clare in Context, eds. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 181. 44. Peterborough MS B6, p. 22. 45. Northborough MS 6, p. 11.

Conclusion: The Politics and Poetics of Wood – LabouringClass Poetry in the Victorian Era 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

In Fairer and Gerrard (2004), p. 505–10, lines 72–4. Fairer (2003), p. 237. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 7–8. Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1987. Maidment (1987), p. 137. See The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963). In NCLCP ii, lines 66–7. See Wilson’s ‘In Memory of the Hartley Catastrope’ and Skipsey’s ‘The Hartley Calamity’. Both poems are included in NCLCP iii. Fuller details about the event can be found at http://www.north-country.co.uk/hartley.htm. See Vicinus (1974) and Janowitz (1998). See The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, 1790–1900, eds. John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall (New York: New York University Press, 1985), and the Supplement, 1790–1945 (New York: New York University Press, 1989). See also Vincent’s monographs: Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1971); Literacy and Popular Culture, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). NCLCP ii, p. 249. See http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/labouringclasswriters/elsie1.htm. John Goodridge writes in the introduction to NCLCP iii that of the nearly 1400 poets included in this online bibliography ‘well over half of these were writing in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (p. xv). NCLCP iii, p. 299, lines 1–4. NCLCP iii, pp. 123–5, lines 43–8, 53–4. NCLCP ii, pp. 36–7, lines 25, 27–9. All three poems are included in NCLCP iii. NCLCP iii, p. 50, lines 195–8. In ‘Baliol’s Tower and the Railway Bridge. A Dialogue’, in NCLCP iii, p. 37, lines 41–4. Both passenger and commercial rail services to Barnard Castle stopped in 1964. Much of the area around the Tees is not accessible by rail, and this may be why this very scenic region has escaped the over-exploitation by tourists that areas like the Lake District have suffered. NCLCP ii, pp. 290–1, lines 37–40. In Maidment (1987), pp. 148–9, lines 12–14. MP iii, p. 443, line 2.

Notes

211

23. Pogue Harrison (1992); Thomas (1983) and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995). 24. See Tim Fulford, ‘Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees’, The John Clare Society Journal 14 (1995), available at http://www.johnclare.info/fulford. html. 25. According to Keith Thomas, ‘In the 1690 Gregory King estimated that there were only three million acres of cultivated woodland left (about 8 per cent of England and Wales) and another three million of forests, parks and commons . . . . By 1800 there were not more than two million acres of woodland in England and Wales, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the percentage of the United Kingdom occupied by woodland (4 per cent) would be the lowest in Europe’ (1983, p. 194). 26. In ECLCP ii, pp. 328–30. 27. Robert Millhouse, Sherwood Forest (1827), Canto 3, lines 73–81. 28. Schama (1995), p. 150. 29. ‘Crumble Hall’ in Poems on Several Occasions, the Second and Last Volume (London, 1751), pp. 111–22, line 172. 30. Moyra Haslett, Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 189–90. 31. Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade (1788). 32. John Clare, The Rural Muse (1835), line 11. 33. Clare (1835), lines 1–2. 34. Janowitz (1998), p. 119. 35. Allen Davenport, The Muse’s Wreath (1827), line 149. 36. Janowitz (1998), p. 128. 37. NCLCP ii, p. 205. 38. Vicinus (1974), p. 177. 39. NCLCP ii, pp. 91–4, lines 40–2. 40. Janowitz (1998), p. 66. 41. NCLCP ii, pp. 243–4, lines 15–18. 42. NCLCP iii, p. 78, line 14.

Index Addison, Joseph, 37, 125 ‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’, 37 Spectator, 125 Adorno, Theodor, 10 agricultural improvement, 11, 22, 25–6, 58, 70, 107, 121, 149, 153, 157, 166–7, 179, 197n35 see also drainage; enclosure agricultural labour, 7, 11, 15–17, 19, 22, 31, 34, 37, 42, 45, 48–9, 57, 58, 67, 87, 103, 104–5 Aislabie, John, 41 Anderson, Alexander, 176 ‘Jim’s Whistle’, 176 ‘Rid of His Engine’, 176 Anderson, Edward, 138, 139, 142, 156–7 Description of the October Gale, 142 The Sailor, 138, 139, 156–7 Anderson, Robert, 120 apostrophe, 17–18, 160–1, 162 see also poetic language Aram, Peter, 8, 40–1, 63 A Practical Treatise on Flowers, 40 Studley Park, 40–1 Auden, W.H., 126, 142 Austen, Jane Mansfield Park, 179 Bacon, Francis, 2 Baliol Castle, 108, 111 ‘The Banks of Inverary’, 115 Barker, Robert, 140–1 The Unfortunate Shipwright and Cruel Captain, 140–1 Barnard Castle, 105–6, 176, 177, 183, 184, 210n19 Barrell, John, 6, 27, 67, 149 Batchelor, Thomas, 157 The Progress of Agriculture, 157 Bate, Jonathan, 3, 13–14, 149 Bending, Stephen, 39, 43 Bermingham, Ann, 27, 39, 45

Bhabha, Homi, 113, 145–6 Binfield, Kevin, 195n4 Blackett, Sir Edward, 40 Bloomfield, George, 33 Bloomfield, Nathaniel, 25 ‘Essay on War’, 25 Bloomfield, Robert, 3, 7, 8, 10–36, 54, 56, 85–90, 93, 100, 116, 118–21, 186, 192, 195n4, 196–7n25, 198n45 The Banks of Wye, 100, 119 The Bird and Insect Post-Office, 30 The Farmer’s Boy, 7, 11–15, 17–36, 111, 198n46 ‘The Flowers of the Mead’, 30–1 May-Day with the Muses, 29–30 Remains, 10 ‘Shooter’s Hill’, 86 ‘Book of Nature’, 17, 51–2, 55–6, 60, 94, 123, 125, 127, 129, 175 Boos, Florence, 3 Bowerbank, Sylvia, 5 Bowles, William Lisle, 100, 116, 118 Branch, Michael, 5 Bristol, 8, 69, 73–9, 184 Brandon Hill, 76 Bristol Cathedral, 76 Clifton Hill, 8, 69, 73–80, 89 The Hotwells, 73–5, 77, 79 St. Vincent’s Rocks, 76–7 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, 38, 43 Bryant, J.F., 8, 69, 78–80 ‘Morning’, 78–9 Buell, Laurence, 13 Bunyan, John, 150, 162, 208n11 Burke, Edmund, 61, 88, 179 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 88 Burke, Tim, 119–20 Burnet, Thomas, 158, 203n3 Burns, Robert, 87, 119–20, 121, 124 Byron, George Gordon, 124 212

Index Camden, William, 98–9 Britannia, 108 Capern, Edward, 177–8 ‘Art thou a poet?’, 178 ‘My Latest Publication’, 178 Wayside Warbles, 178 Caroline, 42–3, 57 Carpenter, Andrew, 3 Cary, H.F., 162 Cavendish, Margaret, 179 Charles I, 42, 151, 191 Charles II, 181 Chartism, 8, 69, 93, 95–7, 174, 178, 186, 189 Chatterton, Thomas, 8, 42–4, 69, 75–8, 80, 116, 195n21 Chirico, Paul, 3 Christmas, William J., 3, 138, 139, 205n23 Clare, John, 3, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14–15, 25, 27, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 51, 54, 56, 100, 114–19, 121, 122, 137, 141–2, 146–7, 148–50, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159–71, 177, 178–9, 180, 183, 185–6, 187, 192, 194n13, 198n45, 202n32 ‘Banks of Ivory’, 115 ‘The brook from its fountain rock drop after drop’, 115 ‘Child Harold’, 160, 170 ‘A Copse in Winter’, 185 ‘Excursion with the Angler’, 116, 202n32 ‘The Fens’, 165–7 ‘In Hilly Wood’, 185 ‘The Lamentations of Round Oak Waters’, 114–15, 117, 121 The Midsummer Cushion, 164 ‘The Mores’, 163–4, 170 Northborough Sonnets, 167 Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, 116–17, 160, 185 ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, 27, 122 ‘The River Gwash’, 116–17 The Rural Muse, 119, 185 ‘To A Fallen Elm’, 178–9, 185–6 ‘To A Favourite Tree’, 185 ‘To the Memory of Bloomfield’, 119 ‘To the Snipe’, 167–70

213

‘To the Welland’, 117–19, 121 ‘A seaboy on the giddy mast’, 147 ‘The Shepherd’s Tree’, 185 ‘The Shipwreckd Ghost’, 137 ‘Song’, 161–2 ‘Streamlet thou hast known my love’, 114–15 ‘Sweet brook, I’ve met thee many a summer’s day’, 116 ‘Twas wi Sadness o’ Heart’, 146 ‘Verses Written on the Banks of the River Gwash at Bridge Casterton’, 117 The Village Minstrel, 161, 185 ‘A Walk’, 164–5 ‘A Wimpering Brook’, 115 ‘Wood Pictures in Winter’, 165 ‘A Woodland Seat’, 185–6 ‘Ye swampy falls of pasture ground’, 160–1 Clare, Martha ‘Patty’, 160–1, 170 Cliffden (Cliveden), 69, 80–6, 89, 91, 92, 95 Clifton Hill, see Bristol Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 100, 116, 124, 130, 136, 137, 179, 201n7 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 130 Collier, Mary, 15, 120, 195–6n6, 205n23 Collins, William, 73 colonialism, 44, 70–3, 140, 142, 143 146–7, 153, 180 see also imperialism Colton, Judith, 42 Commoner, Barry, 19 concordia discors, 65, 69, 71, 74, 97 Corbin, Alain, 125, 146–7, 204n5, 204n5, 204n6, 205n12 Cowley, Abraham, 109–10 Cowper, William, 78, 86, 111, 172, 179 ‘Yardley Oak’, 172, 179, 185, 187, 188 Craw, William, 141 ‘The Dying Sailor’, 141 Naval, or Poetical Journal, 141 Crawford, Rachel, 67 Crispin, St, 49, 200n28

214 Index Cristall, Ann Batten, 121 Cromwell, Oliver, 181, 208n16 Daedalus, 133–4 Dante, 162 Inferno, 162 Dartinquenave, Charles, 15–16 Darwin, Charles, 12, 173 Davenport, Allen, 186–7 Hornsey Wood, 187 The Muse’s Wreath, 187 David, 94 Defoe, Daniel, 139 Robinson Crusoe, 127, 139 Denham, John, 35, 43, 65–6, 68–9, 80, 81, 86, 94, 96, 99, 103, 112, 118 Cooper’s Hill, 35, 65, 99, 101, 103 Derham, William, 2, 193n3 Descartes, René, 2 Diaper, William Nereids, 125 Dodsley, Joseph, 49 Dodsley, Robert, 15–17, 45–9, 64, 196n18 ‘Agriculture’, 15–17, 28, 58 ‘A Description of the Leasowes’, 46–8 ‘An Epistle to Stephen Duck’, 15, 46–7 ‘The Footman. An Epistle to my Friend Mr Wright’, 15 A Muse in Livery, 15, 46 Public Virtue: A Poem, 15–17 Servitude, 15, 46 Donne, John, 116, 202n22, 202n32 Doody, Margaret, 195n21 drainage, 57, 106–7, 123, 148–59, 163, 164, 208n16 see also agricultural improvement Drayton, Michael, 98–9, 109 Poly-Olbion, 108, 150, 179 Drury, Edward, 160 Dryden, John Annus Mirabilis, 126 Duck, Stephen, 7, 12, 15–17, 29, 31, 37–8, 40, 42–4, 46–7, 57, 64, 70, 85, 124, 175, 178, 188, 192, 195–6n6, 196n15, 205n23

Caesar’s Camp; or St George’s Hill, 69–70 ‘On Richmond Park and Royal Gardens’, 42–3 The Thresher’s Labour, 7, 15, 37, 42 Dyer, John, 66, 80, 103, 107, 156, 157, 162 The Fleece, 156 ecocriticism, see environmental literary criticism Eden, 50, 53, 68, 72, 82, 95, 96, 127, 147, 152, 156, 157, 163, 166, 173 Edward I, 184 Edward VII, 191 Elizabeth I, 42, 184 Elliott, Ebenezer, 69, 95–7 ‘Win-Hill, or the Curse of God’, 95–7 enclosure, 22–3, 25–6, 37, 39, 52–3, 58, 114, 123, 137, 142, 149, 151, 154, 163, 164, 179, 180, 189, 206n33 see also agricultural improvement environmental literary criticism, 5–7, 10–15, 17, 23, 51–2, 122–3, 149 environmental ethics, 21–2, 24, 28, 29, 51, 53–5, 57, 107, 134, 136, 151, 195n4, 204n4 see also nature, concepts of Evelyn, John, 2, 193n3 Fairer, David, 3, 65, 68, 69, 100, 103 Falconer, William, 8, 122, 124–42, 144, 146, 195n21, 204–5n11 The Shipwreck, 124–37, 140 Universal Dictionary of the Marine, 126 Feder, Helena, 18 ‘A Fen Parson’ ‘The Inundation’, 153 Ferguson, Moira, 3 ferme ornée, 45, 48, 53, 199n17 Fielding, Henry, 39–40 Finch, Anne, 179 Fisher, William, 41 fishing, 54, 115–116

Index Fortrey, Samuel, 151–3, 155, 156 The History or Narrative of the Great Level of the Fenns, called Bedford Level, 151 ‘A True and Natural Description of the Great Level of the Fenns’, 151–3 Franklin, Robert, 120 Fulford, Tim, 20, 67, 101, 104, 112, 179 George I, 43 George III, 43, 190–1 georgic, 2, 14–17, 22, 29, 37, 58, 104–5, 125, 129, 131, 154, 156, 196n24 Giblett, Rodney, 151, 158 Gilpin, William, 100 Observations on the River Wye, 100, 119–20 Goldsmith, Oliver, 26, 33, 62, 70 ‘The Deserted Village’, 62 Goodridge, John, 3, 4, 12, 15, 116, 159–60, 174, 195–6n6, 196–7n25, 210n12 gothic, 42, 137–8 Gray, Thomas, 26, 73, 94 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, 26, 106 Greene, Richard, 3 Grendel, 150, 208n10 Guthlac, St, 150, 208n9 Hall, William, 158–9, 160 Hamilton, Janet, 173–4 ‘Luggie, Past and Present’, 173–4 Uses and Pleasures of Poetry for the Working Classes, 174 Harrison, Gary, 140, 146, 207n2 Harrison, John, 2 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 172, 179 Haslet, Moyra, 183 Heaton, William, 176, 187–8 ‘The Cry of Neglected Genius’, 176 The Flowers of Calder Dale, 188 ‘Grace Darling’, 176

215

‘Stanzas, On an Ash in Overden Wood, near Halifax’, 188 ‘Stanzas on Gathering two Daisies after a Severe Storm’, 176 Helpston, 137, 147, 165, 179 Henry VII, 42 Herbert, George, 116 Herendeen, Wyman, 98–9, 104, 109 Hersee, William, 34–5, 69, 93 ‘My Native Hill’, 93 Poems, 34–5 ‘Sonnet to Mr Bloomfield, Author of “The Farmer’s Boy’’ ’, 35 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 193n6 Hitt, Christopher, 5 Hogg, James, 175–6 Holland, Joseph, 8, 33–4 An Appendix to the Season of Spring, 33–4 Holloway, William, 8, 33, 120 The Minor Minstrel, 120 The Peasant’s Fate: A Rural Poem, 33 ‘To the River Stour, in Dorsetshire’, 120 Homer Iliad, 126 Horace, 49, 188 Hotwells, see Bristol Hunt, John Dixon, 51 hunting, 50, 53, 54, 110–11, 130, 132, 169, 170, 179, 184, 185, 189–91 Hurn, David, 118 Rural Rides, 118 Hutton, Mary, 175–6 Cottage Tales and Poems, 175 ‘On Reading the Distressing Account of John Clare’s Aberration of Mind’, 175–6 hybrid discourse, 7, 47, 113, 116, 132, 140, 195n21 see also poetic language Icarus, 133 imperialism, 2, 17, 43, 44, 70, 74, 99, 103, 108, 113, 123, 126, 128, 140, 143, 144, 147, 153, 172, 179, 180, 184, 185 see also colonialism

216 Index Jago, Richard, 66–9, 80, 81, 103, 176 Edge-hill, 67, 101 Jankovic, Vladimir, 129 Janowitz, Anne, 3, 174, 187, 189 Johnston, Ellen, 175 ‘Address to Nature in Its Cruelty’, 175 Jones, Christopher, 180–1, 186 ‘The Royal Oak’, 180–1 Jones, Henry, 8, 42–4, 64, 69–76, 77–8, 80–2, 83, 89 The Bricklayer’s Poem, Presented to his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant, 71 The Bricklayer’s Poem, to the Countess of Chesterfield, 71 Clifton, 73–5, 89 Kew Garden, 43–4, 73, 75 ‘Rath-Farnam’, 71–3 Shrewsbury Quarry, 73 Vectis. The Isle of Wight, 73 The Vindication: or Day-Thoughts, 73 Jones, John, 3 Jones, William R., 124, 131, 204n8, 204–5n11, 205n17 Jonson, Ben, 17 ‘To Penshurst’, 17 Joyce, Mary, 170 Kent, William, 42–3 Kew Garden, see Richmond Park Klaus, Gustav, 3 Klein, Lawrence, 38, 198n3 Kossick, Kaye, 177, 188 Labbé, Jacqueline, 27, 67 labouring-class tradition, 3–4, 7, 9, 37–8, 80, 87, 99, 114–21, 137, 171, 178–9, 182, 192 labouring-class consciousness, 8, 139–40, 174 Landow, George P., 136 Landry, Donna, 3, 14, 62, 77–8, 102, 103, 113, 140, 191, 195n21, 195n4 Lane, William, 8, 9, 69, 80–93, 95, 97, 121, 192 ‘The Author’s Apology’, 83–4, 86 ‘Benevolence’, 82 Cliffden, 80–2, 84, 86, 88, 91–2

‘The Flood of Formosa, and the Fire of Cliffden’, 84–5 The Gleanings of the Seventy-Third Vintage, 88 ‘The Harp and the Willow’, 82 ‘Hedsor Hill’, 85 ‘Isaac’s Meditation’, 82 ‘The Mount’, 91–2 ‘On Mr B----------d’s indulging the Author with his Company’, 85–6 ‘On Reading a Poem, Entitled Modern Parnassus’, 89–91 Poems . . . and Detached Pieces, 84 Poems on Various Subjects, 83 ‘Some Cursory Remarks on the Life and Character of Solomon’, 86–7 ‘Strength Equal to the Day’, 88–9 ‘The Vale of Wycombe’, 85 Lawson, Jonathan, 13, 22, 28, 29 Leapor, Mary, 3, 182–3, 184, 186, 194n13 Crumble Hall, 182–3 Learmont, John, 8, 63–4 ‘Petition of the Journeymen Gardeners’, 63–4 Leland, John, 202n16 Leno, J.B., 189–92 ‘Herne’s Oak’, 189–91 ‘Liberty Tree’, 179, 189 Lickbarrow, Isabella, 121 Lindley, Keith, 151 Linebaugh, Peter, 140, 142, 144, 206n29, 206n33, 208n16 Linnaeus, Carl, 2 Lock, William, 50 Lofft, Capel, 31, 89 Lonsdale, Roger, 3, 102 Love Elegies by a Sailor, 142 Lyttelton, George (1st Baron Lyttelton), 16, 45, 49, 50, 55 Maidment, Brian, 3, 173, 174 Malthus, Thomas, 25 Mandeville, Bernard, 34 Marvell, Andrew, 38, 202n16, 202n22 Marx, Karl, 173

Index ‘Marie’, 189 ‘Trees of Liberty’, 189 Maybee, Richard, 176 ‘Lines on the Loss of the “Earl of Arran’’ ’, 176 Mayhew, Robert, 51–2 McGonagall, William, 176 ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, 176 McKusick, James, 14, 149, 159 Merchant, Carolyn, 123, 204n4, 204n5 Merlin, 38, 42–3, 112 Merlin’s Cave, see Richmond Park Miller, Thomas, 188–9 A Day in the Woods, 188 ‘The Old English Wood’, 188–9 Millhouse, Robert, 120–1, 181–2, 186, 188 Sherwood Forest, 181–2 The Song of the Patriot, 120 Milne, Christian, 8, 142, 144–6 ‘The Captive Sailor’, 145 ‘Painful Anxiety’, 145 ‘The Sailor’s Adieu’, 146 Simple Poems on Simple Subjects, 144 ‘When in Dread of My Husband’s Safety at Sea’, 144–5 Milton, John, 31, 38, 41, 43, 82, 162, 202n16 Lycidas, 81, 109–10, 202n16 Paradise Lost, 39, 202n16, 209n37 mining, 55, 103, 109, 174, 176–77 Montagu, Elizabeth, 49, 52, 57–62 Montgolfier, Joseph Michel and Jacques Étienne, 2 Montgomery, James, 143 ‘The Ocean. Written at Scarborough’, 143 More, Hannah, 78, 90, 201n27 mountains, 2, 66, 91–2, 93, 96, 109, 122–3, 150, 162, 203–4n3, 204n5 Parnassus, 68, 74, 79, 80, 89, 94, 135 Zion, 68, 92 Murphy, Patrick D., 12–13 natural genius, 2–3, 4, 45, 55, 66, 79–80, 83–4, 87, 90, 93, 114, 124, 175–8, 187

217

nature, concepts of, 1–2, 6, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 23, 29, 38, 46, 65, 67–8, 123, 125, 136, 149, 173, 197n35 see also environmental ethics Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 123, 203–4n3 Oelschlaeger, Max, 122, 203n2 Orpheus, 132–3 paradise, see Eden pastoral, 2, 22, 29, 42, 48, 66, 78, 81, 94, 109, 125, 135, 160, 165, 183, 184, 187 patronage, 2, 4, 42–3, 45, 48–9, 57–62, 66, 70–1, 72, 78, 83, 89, 120, 144, 192 Pellicer, Juan Christian, 16 Phillips, Adam, 167 picturesque, 20–21, 39, 45, 62, 100, 119–20, 123, 150, 162, 163, 166, 179, 180, 185, 205n12 Pitt, William, 109, 113 plagiarism, accusations of, 84, 87, 175 poetic conventions, 2, 7, 17, 22, 27, 30, 37, 38, 41, 43, 50, 56–7, 67, 72, 77, 80, 81, 82, 89, 93, 101, 103, 109, 112–13, 119, 122, 124–125, 128, 132, 140, 146, 149, 160, 161, 166, 170, 173, 184, 185, 195n4 poetic language, 7–8, 13–14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 26, 28, 29, 43, 50, 56, 72, 81, 91, 99, 115, 122, 124–5, 130, 131, 132, 163, 204–5n11 see also apostrophe; hybrid discourse poetic identity, 65–6, 68, 87, 100, 116–17, 119, 178 see also vocational poetry Pope, Alexander, 1, 16, 38, 41, 43, 50, 54, 62, 66, 68, 71–4, 80, 81, 86, 98, 107–9, 110, 112, 113, 118, 122, 176, 179, 182, 183, 184, 190 Epistle to Bathurst, 182 Epistle to Burlington, 182 Essay on Criticism, 1, 4 Essay on Man, 71 Windsor Forest, 29, 43, 72–3, 98, 101, 103, 108, 110, 113, 122, 130, 182, 184

218 Index Powell, William, 76 ‘Powtes Complaint’, 153–4, 160 prospect poetry, 2, 7, 8, 16, 20, 27–8, 65–97, 99–102, 108, 149, 166, 169, 184, 192 Rackham, Oliver, 149, 150 Ray, John, 2, 193n3 Rediker, Marcus, 139, 140, 142, 144, 206n26, 206n29, 206n33, 208n16 religion, 12, 51–2, 50, 51, 52, 54–6, 57, 58, 66, 68–9, 79, 80, 82, 84–5, 87–8, 92, 94–7, 125, 136–7, 142, 152, 175 religious poetry, 32–3, 34, 47–8 Repton, Humphrey, 199n17 Richard II, 189–90, 192 Richardson, Samuel Pamela, 39–40 Richmond Park, 38, 40, 42–4 Merlin’s Cave, 38, 42–3 Kew Gardens, 42–4, 75 Rigbey, Kate, 123, 204n5 Rivers, 35, 98–121, 176 Arun, 100 Avon, 75, 184 Caldew, 120 Cherwell, 100 Clyde, 120, 175 Dart, 121 Derwent, 100 Doon, 120 Duddon, 100 Eden, 120 Gwash, 116–17 Humber, 120 Itchin, 100 Lea, 116 Mersey, 121 Nile, 98 Otter, 100 Stour, 118, 120 Styx, 162 Tame and Isis, 108–9, 114 Tees, 101–13, 176, 183 Thames, 66, 82, 98–9, 104, 108, 109, 113 Tiber, 98 Trent, 121

Tweed, 100 Welland, 117–18, 121 Wensbeck, 100 Wye, 100, 119 Robin Hood, 179, 181–2, 189 Robinson, Daniel, 100 Roe, Nicholas, 5 Rogers, Pat, 108 Rose, Jonathan, 38–9 Rosendale, Steven, 5 Rushton, Edward, 8, 142–3, 144 The Dismember’d Empire, 143 West Indian Eclogues, 143 Russell, Francis (4th Earl of Bedford), 151, 156 Russell, Jessie, 174–5 The Blinkin’ o the Fire and Other Poems, 174 ‘Tuning My Lyre’, 174–5 Sales, Roger, 3 Schama, Simon, 179, 182 ‘School of Bloomfield’, 8, 15, 31–6 Scott, Walter, 188 Service, David, 8, 31–3, 35, 120 The Caledonian Herd Boy, 31 ‘Lines to the Portrait of Mr Robert Bloomfield’, 35–6 Seward, Anna, 100 Shakespeare, William, 76, 179, 190 Merry Wives of Windsor, 190 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 96 ‘Mont Blanc’, 11 Shenstone, William, 45–50, 53, 55, 59, 61, 199n17 shoemaker poets, 27, 31, 45, 49, 154, 186, 200n28 Sketches of Obscure Poets. With Specimens of Their Writings, 193n7 Skipsey, Joseph, 174 slavery, 75, 140, 142–4, 184 Smith, Charlotte, 100, 118 Solomon, Harry M., 196n17 The Son of Commerce, An Original Poem in Thirty Four Cantos, 138, 139 Soper, Kate, 2, 6–7, 193n2 Southey, Robert, 3, 99, 193n7 Lives of the Uneducated Poets, 3

Index Spence, Joseph, 45, 47, 48 Spence, Thomas, 186 Spenser, Edmund, 109, 189 The Faerie Queen, 42, 202n16 Stanfield, James Field, 143–4 The Guinea Voyage, 144 Stanhope, Philip Dormer (4th Earl of Chesterfield), 16, 71–2 Stewart, Susan, 37 Storey, Mark, 116 Story, Edward, 159 Story, Robert, 69, 93–5 ‘Beaumont Side’, 94–5 The Lyrical and other Minor Poems of Robert Story, 93 ‘Sweet Beaumont Side’, 95 sublime, 122, 123, 125, 136, 139, 150, 162, 163, 185, 204n5 Swift, Graham, 148, 159 Taylor, Ellen, 120 ‘Written by the Barrow Side’, 120 Taylor, John (1578–1653), 99–101, 116, 120, 158 ‘In Praise of Hemp-Seed’, 99–100 Taylor, John (1781–1864), 116–17 Temple, Richard (1st Viscount Cobham), 16, 42 Tennyson, Alfred, 188 ‘terms of art’, 105, 124–5, 128, 130–2, 136 see also poetic language Thomas, Keith, 123, 179, 211n25 Thompson, Carl, 123, 138, 204n5, 204n6 Thompson, E.P., 173 Thomson, James, 18, 20, 22, 29, 31, 34, 67, 74, 80, 82, 86, 112, 126, 146, 195–6n6 ‘Rule Britannia’, 123, 126, 143 Seasons, 29, 67, 82, 101, 103–4, 122, 125 Tull, Jethro, 2 Turner, J.M.W., 124 ‘An Unlettered Bard’, 66–7, 81, 93 ‘Verses Written Under a Hill’, 66

219

Vardy, Alan, 3 ventriloquism, 102, 109, 115, 161 see also hybrid discourse; poetic language Vermuyden, Cornelius, 151 Vicinus, Martha, 3, 174, 188 Victoria, 191 Vincent, David, 174 Virgil, 22, 122 Aeneid, 126 vocational poetry, 4, 55, 65–6, 68, 73, 77–8, 81–3, 85, 89, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 106, 116, 121, 135, 138, 174, 175, 176 see also poetic identity

Waldron, Mary, 3 Walton, Izaak, 115–17, 202n32 Compleat Angler, 115–17 Warton, Joseph and Thomas, 73 Warton, Thomas, 100 ‘To the River Lodon’, 100 Watson, Richard, 176–7 ‘My Journey to Work’, 176–77 weaving, 105–6, 176, 181, 187 White, Simon, 3 Whitman, Walt, 187 Williams, Raymond, 3, 10, 35, 42, 67 Williamson, Tom, 39–40 Wilson, Anne, 8, 100–13, 114, 119, 156, 176, 183–4, 186, 187, 192, 202n12, 202n16 Jepthah’s Daughter, 102 Teisa, 101–13, 154, 183–4 Wilson, Joe, 174 Woodhouse, James, 5, 8, 37–8, 40, 44–62, 64, 69, 85, 97, 107, 154–6, 186, 192, 200n28 ‘Advertisement’ to Poems on Several Occasions, 46 ‘An Elegy to William Shenstone’, 47 ‘The Lessowes’, 48–9 Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus, 52–62, 87, 154–6 Norbury Park, 49–50

220 Index Woodley, George, 8, 69, 138, 139, 142, 143 Britain’s Bulwarks; Or the British Seaman, 138, 139 Mount-Edgcumbe, 138 ‘The Shipwreck, Or Naval Eclogue’, 138 Wordsworth Dorothy, 148, 207n2 Wordsworth, William, 11, 14, 54, 55, 95, 100, 116, 117, 118, 148, 149, 179, 188 ‘Lines, Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, 11, 95, 100, 119 Lyrical Ballads, 35, 198n46 ‘Resolution and Independence’, 148, 207n2 Worster, Donald, 23

Yearsley, Ann, 3, 8, 38–9, 62, 69, 77–80, 184–5, 186, 194n13 Clifton Hill, 77–9, 184–5 ‘Elegy on Mr Chatterton’, 77 Poems on Various Subjects, 62 ‘To Mr ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗, An Unlettered Poet, On Genius Unimproved’, 79–80 ‘To Mrs Montagu’, 80 ‘To Stella’, 80 ‘Written on a Visit’, 62 Young, Arthur, 14, 157–8 The Agriculture of the County of Lincoln, 157–8 Young, Edward, 73, 126 ‘Imperium Pelagi’, 126 Ocean: An Ode, 126

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730-1837

Modern British Poetry

Thematic Guide to British Poetry

Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism

Other: British and Irish poetry since 1970

British Poetry in the Age of Modernism

British Renaissance Poets (Critical Survey of Poetry)

Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction

Poetry

Poetry

Poetry in the British Isles: non-metropolitan perspectives

A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry

The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600

Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British, and American Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry

A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry

The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000

No hiding place: essays on the new nature and poetry

Poems for a small planet: contemporary American nature poetry

Nature

NATURE

Nature

Nature

War Poetry

Writing Poetry

Praha: Poetry

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

coleridge-poetry

Heroic Poetry

donne-poetry

Poetry (SparkCharts)

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730-1837

Modern British Poetry

Thematic Guide to British Poetry

Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism

Other: British and Irish poetry since 1970

British Poetry in the Age of Modernism

British Renaissance Poets (Critical Survey of Poetry)

Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction

Poetry

Poetry

Poetry in the British Isles: non-metropolitan perspectives

A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry

The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600

Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British, and American Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry

A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry

The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000

No hiding place: essays on the new nature and poetry

Poems for a small planet: contemporary American nature poetry

Nature

NATURE

Nature

Nature

War Poetry

Writing Poetry

Praha: Poetry

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

coleridge-poetry

Heroic Poetry

donne-poetry

Poetry (SparkCharts)

Recommend Documents