John Clare's Religion (The Nineteenth Century Series)

John Clare’s Religion The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, dev...

Author: Sarah Houghton-Walker

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John Clare’s Religion

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester


SARAH HOUGHTON-WALKER Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, UK

© Sarah Houghton-Walker 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Sarah Houghton-Walker has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Houghton-Walker, Sarah John Clare’s religion. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Clare, John, 1793–1864 – Religion I. Title 821.7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Houghton-Walker, Sarah. John Clare’s religion / by Sarah Houghton-Walker. p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6514-4 (alk. paper) 1. Clare, John, 1793–1864—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Clare, John, 1793–1864— Religion. 3. Religious poetry, English—History and criticism. 4. Pastoral poetry, English—History and criticism. I. Title. PR4453.C6Z72 2009 821’.7—dc22 09ANSHT ISBN: 978-0-7546-6514-4

2008049977

For my family.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

ix x

Introduction

1

PART 1 Clare’s Disorganized Religion: A Context For Belief 1 ‘still I reverence the church’: Clare and the Established Faith 11 The Parish: Structure and Genesis 11 The Parish and the Failings of the Early Nineteenth-Century Church 15 Politics and Religion 21 Clerical Matters and Clerical Men: the Reality of Clare’s Parish 26 2

‘I have joind the Ranters’: Alternative Denominations and Groups Methodism and Dissent Methodism and Enthusiasm Clare’s Methodism Denominational Diversity

35 35 40 45 53

3

‘he sets his face against all mention of fairies’:‘Alternative Beliefs’ and Evangelical Zeal ‘Village Faith’: Living Suspiciously Literary Pressures and Biblical Sanction Clare’s Ghosts Clare and the Anglican Evangelicals

57 59 69 73 79

4

‘Learning is your only wealth’: Reading and Reasoning Literacy, Religion and Radicalism Clare’s ‘Religious’ Reading The Literature of Letters Reason and Reasoning

85 86 90 99 104

5

‘faiths ’lumind scroll’: Clare and the Scriptures Clare and the Bible Scripture as Literary Influence: The Biblical Paraphrases

113 113 118

viii


Part 2 Clare’s Subjective Faith 6

‘There is a language wrote on earth & sky / By Gods own pen’: The Sublime Experience of God Sublimity and Enthusiasm Aspects of the Sublime: Language, Mystery and the Natural World

133 134 141

7

‘long evanish’d scene’: Eden and Eternity as Patterns for Faith Clare’s Eden Eden and ‘Knowledge’ Eternity

151 152 157 162

8

‘There is a cruelty in all’: Challenges to Faith Evil and Cruelty Knowledge, Vulnerability and Culpability Clare’s Theodicy

173 173 180 188

9

‘a power that governs with justice’: The Tenets of Clare’s Faith 195 Clare’s God 196 Clare’s Creed 206

Conclusion: ‘Child Harold’

213

Bibliography Index

225 245

Acknowledgements For their help with my research I would like to thank the respective staffs of the Northampton Central Public Library, the Manuscript Room and the Rare Books Room of the British Library, the Peterborough Museum, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the New York Public Library (especially Steven Wagner, Curator of the Pforzheimer Collection), the John Rylands University Library and the Cambridge University Library. I am grateful to G.T. Martin, Honorary Keeper of the Muniment Room, Christ’s College, Cambridge for his assistance; to William St Clair, Bob Heyes, Howard Erskine-Hill and Jeremy Morris for useful pieces of advice, and to Paul Chirico for providing an optimistic sounding-board. Eric Robinson showed me generosity in many ways, in particular by lending me a manuscript version of the final volume of the Clarendon edition of Clare’s poems, and by guiding me through the manuscripts in the Peterborough Museum, as well as by offering various other pieces of advice and information. Peter Moyse was similarly generous with his help in assisting with the cover illustration, as were the Peterborough Museum Society, especially Mrs Ruth Rodwell, who arranged for permission for me to use the image of Helpston. Carcanet Press Limited kindly gave me permission to quote extensively from John Clare By Himself and from A Champion for the Poor, and the contents of the Clarendon editions of Clare’s poems are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of Eric Robinson, copyright © Eric Robinson 1983. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The author would be pleased to rectify any omissions brought to her notice at the earliest opportunity. This book began life as the PhD thesis I completed in 2003, and it is a pleasure to thank Anne Barton for her patient and painstaking supervision of my work and for much wider advice and generosity. Simon Jarvis and Jonathan Bate were encouraging examiners, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board and St John’s College, Cambridge both generously funded my research; St John’s College also offered me the Research Fellowship which gave me the opportunity to complete the project. It seems a very long time since I first thought these thoughts, and various delightful but practical matters have held up the preparation of my work for publication. In the light of this, Ann Donahue has been a fantastically understanding and extremely supportive editor, and I offer my thanks to her. A particular debt of gratitude is due to my family, who offered and continue to offer invaluable and incalculable support in many and various ways.

Abbreviations

Clare’s poems: EP

The Early Poems of John Clare 1804–22, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

MP

John Clare: Poems of The Middle Period 1822–37, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–2003).

LP

The Later Poems of John Clare 1837–1864, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). All references will be to these editions unless otherwise stated; volume and page references (and, where appropriate, line numbers) will be given in the text.

NMS

Northampton Public Library manuscript

PMS

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery manuscript

Manuscripts from these last two collections will be cited according to David Powell’s Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library (Northampton: County Borough of Northampton Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery Committee, 1964), and Margaret Grainger’s Descriptive Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery (Peterborough: printed for the Earl Fitzwilliam, 1973). Conventions Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved as far as possible in all cases.

Introduction

We cannot read John Clare’s verse adequately if we ignore that his own vision is informed by a religious awareness that is both intellectual and experiential. This is the premise of this book, which therefore aims to investigate the foundations of Clare’s faith, to understand some of the reasons for his beliefs, to examine his conception of and relationship to God, and to explore the ways in which his faith, underpinned as it is by a profound spirituality, shapes his poems. Robert Ryan claims that ‘British Romanticism’s historical milieu was at least as intensely religious in character as it was political … the political and the religious dimensions were often indistinguishable in the agitated public life of the time.’ A similar privileging of religion as a fundamental aspect of historical framework is vital for the wider as well as the more intimate context of Clare’s life. A critical reconsideration is therefore imperative if we are to appreciate the nature of Clare’s experience and his interpretation of it, by which his poetry is informed. When John Taylor appended ‘The Northamptonshire Peasant’ to the title page of John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), he placed an obstacle in the path of literary scholarship which, as yet, has fully to be overcome. As Clare emerges from relative obscurity, he is increasingly being recognised as more than a nature poet: reassessed as a valuable chronicler, his work is being approached as a repository of social history, and scholars are beginning to understand Clare as an important critic as well as a brilliant creative writer. No longer the work of a naïve peasant interested only in descriptive verse, his poetry is beginning to find places in ‘canons’ of literature. The critical and general interest in Jonathan Bate’s recent biography of Clare (in which Clare is acknowledged as a ‘major English poet’) testifies to this revived fascination. Yet even as Clare’s poetry gains new sanction, the peasant image has not been lost. Refutations of the ‘Unlettered Rustic’ label have not been accompanied by sufficient consideration of the implications of their defence. This combines with over a century of critical neglect to produce some conspicuous gaps in our understanding of Clare’s life and work. One of the most glaring examples of this Robert Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 10. For examples of criticism seeking to dismantle the image of Clare as an ‘Unlettered Rustic’, see John Goodridge’s ‘Introduction’ to The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-taught Tradition (Helpston, 1994), pp. 13–24 (especially pp. 13–15), and Bridget Keegan, ‘Boys, Marvellous Boys: John Clare’s “Natural Genius”’, in John Clare: New Approaches, ed. John Goodridge and Simon Kovesi (Helpston, 2000), pp. 65–76. John Clare: A Biography (London, 2003), p. xv.


deficit is the absence of any satisfactory enquiry into Clare’s religion, which might impart a clearer understanding of his belief and the creed and theodicy emerging from it. Critical assumption has tended to pursue the guidelines laid by John Taylor in the 1820s: Clare, despite some half-hearted sampling of alternative groups, is essentially a conservative and faithful churchgoer (whose asylum poetry is then explained as the – occasionally visionary – ramblings of a desperate madman). Some more recent work has attempted to delineate Clare’s experience of certain types of organised religion, to draw attention to Clare’s spirituality, or to assess the extent of Clare’s belief in God, but even in those efforts there are significant gaps, and the overwhelming critical assumption remains, fundamentally, one of naïvety on Clare’s part. It has not been difficult to demonstrate that the picture is more complex. Clare’s faith and religious experience are indebted to a combination of apparently orthodox and unorthodox religious practices, social observation, subjective spirituality, idiosyncratic education and highly intelligent reasoning. The interplay between these and other factors, quite apart from their own inherent interest, has important personal and literary ramifications. The experience of organised religion is obviously important to such an examination, but I intend to demonstrate that, for Clare, religious faith is something which extends far beyond Church and Chapel (indeed, Clare’s separation of religion and faith is consistent, and significantly so: as will be addressed later, the use of the word ‘religion’ in the title of this book is the use that the modern reader might make, rather than Clare’s own). Working with and out from Clare’s long poem The Parish, the first section of this book discusses Clare’s experience and record of religious groups, but it moves on to explore his engagement with superstitions and the ghosts and witches of ‘Alternative Belief’ (continually questioning what ‘orthodoxy’ really is to Clare’s rural community), as well as some of the literary influences (in the widest sense of the ‘literary’) acting upon him; it incorporates a survey of Clare’s correspondence with a range of acquaintances, and sees all of these aspects as parts of an aggregate of experience, which cannot be properly understood outside of its own entirety. Of course Clare’s life and thought are affected by the Church of England, quite how much I hope to demonstrate. But his

See Mark Minor, ‘John Clare and the Methodists: A Reconsideration’, Studies in Romanticism, 19 (Spring, 1980), 31–50; Eric Robinson, ‘John Clare (1793–1864) and James Plumptre (1771–1832), “A Methodistical Parson”’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 11 (1996), 59–88; George E. Dixon, ‘Clare and Religion’, John Clare Society Journal, 1 (1982), 47–50. At times this book shares a common subject with Janet Todd’s In Adam’s Garden: A Study of John Clare’s Pre-Asylum Poetry (Gainesville, 1973), but, as will be suggested, our conclusions are very different. The best extended work on Clare’s ‘faith’ is Greg Crossan’s A Relish for Eternity: The Process of Divinisation in the Poetry of John Clare, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment 53 (Salzburg, 1976). Although his discussion largely neglects the objective reality of Clare’s religion, Crossan’s thesis, that ‘Clare would have been as reluctant to accept a religion centered entirely on the evidence of the natural world as he would have been to deny the potential of Nature to communicate God’s presence’ (p. 161), is astute.

Introduction

experience and knowledge of other denominations and other ways of believing is diverse, and that very variety is an essential part of their significance. Having attempted to survey Clare’s own religious context, the book goes on to examine the more subjective aspects of Clare’s faith. Central here is the importance of the aesthetic discourse of the sublime for Clare’s understanding and intimation of the divine. The second part of this book thus begins by looking at the way in which Clare encounters rapture in the natural world and interprets it (through the vocabulary of affective religious and supernatural experience) as an intimation of the presence of the deity, and it explores the relevance and operation of related concepts including ‘Eden’, ‘Eternity’ and ‘childhood’ to and in his verse. The ramifications of recognising the operation of the sublime in Clare’s verse are potentially very great: if we accept that Clare’s often-recorded sense of ‘rapture’ is connected by the poet to something beyond the actuality of the physical scene (which he undoubtedly appreciates in itself as well), then this sense becomes implicated throughout Clare’s descriptive poetry, in all those places that traditionally have fascinated critics. It is because a sense of transcendence is so pervasive in Clare’s work, and because he describes its operation in precisely the same terms he uses to describe specifically religious ‘enthusiastic’ experience, that these two aspects of experience form reciprocally important elements of any consideration of Clare’s belief. The book also examines Clare’s awareness of encroaching evil, moving beyond the critically well-treated theme of ‘enclosure’ to examine other types of badness in the world from Clare’s point of view. Only by understanding how (a Christian, and thus omnipotent and wholly good) God and this badness are, or are not, reconciled in Clare’s poetry may we approach his perception of God, and thus the study attempts to grasp Clare’s theodicy. The work concludes with a fuller exploration of Clare’s conception of God, and examines his professed creed, finally offering a reading of Clare’s long, asylum poem, Child Harold, in view of these conclusions. Throughout the book, Clare’s verse is read in the light of the contexts which are established, and I have aimed to include some of the less well-known and less successful, as well as some of the more familiar and more accomplished, of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the prevalence of certain thematic concerns across a range of his work. All of these aspects, then, are important factors in an account of Clare’s belief, but this book also aims to demonstrate that, taken together, they underpin the vast edifice of Clare’s poetic output at its best and at its worst because an essentially religious sense is implicated in the way that Clare perceives the natural world. This book is to some extent historical and biographical, and through the use of manuscript and archival materials alongside other resources I hope to shed new light on the historical realities of the circumstances in which Clare wrote his poetry; it also seeks to appreciate Clare’s attitude to his own poetic act, and, through both of these factors, to suggest a new approach to his literary output. The study demonstrates that an appreciation of Clare’s verse necessarily involves an awareness of his understanding of inspiration, and its inherent connection to


the divine; it also insists that Clare’s experience of and engagement with faith, in numerous different manifestations, is seminal in forming him as a poet. One of the points I will contend is that both religious ideas and religious experience mark the content and the vocabulary of Clare’s writing, and in this sense are obviously central to his verse. But we also need to recognise a sense of divinity, and thus religious faith, as fundamental to Clare’s work, because through his sight and through his insight they are implicated in the very way he that sees the world and, in this more subtle but nonetheless crucial way, they underpin his legacy as a poet. This book, then, is not simply about when John Clare went to Church, or his relationship with his vicar (though these are important aspects of it); nor is it purely an examination of the poetry with specifically religious content that he wrote. (Nor, indeed, does it attempt any comprehensive exploration of Clare’s doubts: Clare certainly does doubt at times, but this study aims to appreciate the character of his faith, when he has faith.) Rather, ‘Clare’s religion’ offers an organising principle through which to examine many and various facets of his life and work. When I began this research, I had hoped to produce as part of it a largely chronological account of Clare’s evolving creed. This has not been possible. Firstly, Clare’s work cannot be dated accurately enough to allow the charting of any such evolution. Secondly, Clare was not working upon a system, and it would be wrong to portray his work in any order implying that he was. There are one or two broadly chronological features of Clare’s explicitly religious writing, and I have indicated these. But Clare’s implicit comments suggestive of how he sees and understands faith as a feature of his life are frequently in conflict with his explicit statements, which are themselves often contradictory. Thirdly, I am more and more convinced that the impossibility of the attempt to trace a development reflects an important aspect of Clare’s creed. He changes his mind frequently, and is able to entertain apparently mutually exclusive possibilities simultaneously. Far from an impediment, this lack of unity becomes a potentially enabling feature of Clare’s thought. It also renders it necessary to accept from the outset that any ‘conclusions’ drawn regarding Clare’s faith can only ever be generalisations, features which seem to recur, or aspects of a very particular moment: Clare is by no means consistent, and his inconsistencies are elements of his faith. The particular circumstances of Clare’s life impose certain difficulties on any attempt to complete a thematic study such as this. Clare’s ability to accept contradictions as co-possibilities, to know with certainty a fact, and yet simultaneously to believe (or at least to hold a quasi-belief) in its opposite, is central to an appreciation of the way Clare thinks about anything. This habit of mind renders the temptation to try to reconcile Clare’s contradictions strong. However, such reconciliations miss the central fact that Clare is not attempting to evolve inflexible, partial systems (indeed, he derides the attempts of others to

Introduction

do so), but is more simply producing records of his quotidian life and thoughts. This does not make it any easier to try to gain an idea of Clare’s opinions and of what underwrites his poetry. It is tempting, whatever the subject, to write off or to ignore Clare’s apparent fluctuations in opinion simply as the results of mood swings (which they may well be: his life may sometimes be inspired, for example, but it is often simply mundane), but ultimately they do not necessarily act as contradictions for Clare even when they have no obvious resolution. His mind does not seem to find any problem with entertaining apparently irreconcilable ideas simultaneously. Clare noted in his Journal for 3 April 1835, ‘I dont like these comparisons to knock your opinions on the head with’: he favours comprehensive consideration to single-minded assumption, preferring to sustain different ideas and opinions rather than blinkeredly pursuing one constant path. An approach to his writing must at least aim to mimic this by remembering that ‘conclusions’ about his work are rarely truly conclusive. Not unconnectedly, an analysis of Clare’s work must also accept from the outset the problem of language. Clare is no Coleridge, preoccupied with the precise definition of words and phrases. He frequently uses the same word in radically different ways; this is not a deliberate ploy to expose something fundamental about the nature of language itself (although Clare is well aware of its limitations), it is simply the way Clare uses his vocabulary. He can, as we will see, deride ‘mystery’ in one poem as obfuscatory nonsense, and praise it in another as an aspect of the divine. A word such as ‘love’ might at times carry an intensely religious connotation; at others, it might be far removed from the holier realm. Such non-exclusivity with terminology creates complications, and for this reason, Clare’s statements must always be read in their own context and a wider context: again, ‘conclusions’ are precarious. There are obvious problems, also, inherent in an attempt to gain a sense of historical perspective which might approach Clare’s own. Because of the difficulties relating to the reliability of Clare’s declarations, and the problematic nature of available source material, I have been prompted to include as wide an historical survey as possible (which has attempted to understand a ‘history’ appropriate to Clare) and to avoid where feasible applying received ideas or terminologies to Clare, who (this study demonstrates) never fits easily within the categories such terminologies invoke. At the same time, such terminologies provide a necessary framework within which to explore Clare’s faith. An important example of this is the poet’s attitude towards the Established Church. Clare’s background and upbringing, according to his own declarations, situate him firmly within an See for example Clare’s comments on Paine, in John Clare: A Champion for the Poor: Political Verse and Prose, ed. P.M.S Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester, 2000), p. 294, comments considered more fully, below (see pp. 104–5). John Clare By Himself: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester, 1996), p. 221.


Anglican Christianity, and we cannot simply extract Clare from this environment as if his exploration of faith occurs from an entirely impartial perspective; and yet, throughout his life, he challenges and questions what he describes as his own orthodoxy. On one hand, then, Clare’s Anglicanism (or otherwise) is never straightforward, to the point at which the term ‘Anglican’ becomes almost inapplicable. On the other hand, it is necessary that we see Clare in this, his own context, and remember that his experimentation and criticism takes place from within this environment: to some degree, the extent to which the context of Clare’s society is inseparable from its ties with the Church of England means that Clare is an Anglican, even when theologically he is not. And then again, in recognising Anglican Christianity as to some extent a naturalised ideology for Clare, one must also recognise that (as the exploration of ‘alternative beliefs’ within Clare’s community in Chapter 3 of this study makes clear) modern perceptions of what that ideology is do not always coincide with Clare’s own. Not least because of the essentially anachronistic nature of much recorded history, particularly that concerned with people of the social status of Clare’s parents, I shall be depending quite heavily on Clare’s own prose in the course of this study. This brings its own obvious problems: for many and various reasons, Clare’s reliability as an autobiographer is not always certain. Similarly, we should not read Clare’s correspondence as an unproblematic representation of affairs. One particularly valuable, and under-exploited, resource for the Clare scholar is the extant body of letters to Clare. In Clare’s circumstances, letters provide vital connections between Helpston and the ‘literary’ (and wider) world, and the range of Clare’s correspondents suggests something of the variety of his acquaintances. Clare clearly delighted in some, and was vexed by others, of the letters he received. This correspondence deserves a full study of its own, but some aspects of it are particularly pertinent to this book, both because they reveal a great deal about Clare’s thoughts and fears throughout his life as a published poet, and also because they constitute a significant influence upon his religious opinions and ideas. Yet in reading Clare’s letters, one must always be aware of his constant worry about selfrepresentation, exacerbated by an acute awareness that his letters might be passed around for shared reading: he knows that letters are not private communications. This is acutely evident throughout the correspondence of Eliza Emmerson, Lord Radstock and John Taylor, in scattered allusions to showing one another Clare’s letters; it is apparent also in letters from outside this circle as Charles Mossop ‘begs’ of Clare that a letter ‘may be kept private’. Clare’s consequent anxiety is tangible: to one letter from Taylor, which contains the lines ‘you have no better friends than Lord M & the Earl Fitzwilliam’, Clare has added in his scratchy ink: ‘(I know that – who said I had)’. Confusion exists over recipients, readership, dates, and the reliability of the contents of Clare’s letters, but perhaps the best testament to their importance to Clare is the fact that the vast majority of the

Letter dated 04 March 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 52 r (as a postscript). 16 May 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 124v.

Introduction

preserved letters are unmarked by Clare’s own scrawl, in spite of the blank spaces they offered, and in spite of the shortage of paper for writing on with which Clare was faced. The questionable veracity of letters, autobiographies and histories was not ignored by Clare or his contemporaries. A letter to Clare signed in the spidery hand of ‘H.B.’, and dated 27 August 1820, wonders about the accuracy of the claim, in the ‘Introduction’ to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, that the poem ‘Helpstone’ had been written before Clare was seventeen. Referring to the lines, ‘Dear native spot which length of time endears / The sweet retreat of twenty lingering years’, ‘H.B.’ asks: ‘Now sir if you had felt the sweats [sic] of Rural Helpstone twenty years when you wrote this Poem, how could it be Written before you were seventeen’.10 Clare’s friend Octavius Gilchrist, writing one of the biographical pieces that established Clare’s reputation as a ‘peasant poet’, was also well aware of the contrived nature of the exercise, and only too willing to make a joke of it in a letter to Clare of April, 1820: What’s to be done now, Measter? Here’s a letter from William Gifford, saying I promised him an article on one John Clare for the Quarterly Review. Did I do any such thing? Moreover, he says he has promised Lord Radstock, and if I know him, as he thinks I do, I know that the Lord will persecute him to the end. This does not move me much. But he adds, “do not fail me, dear Gil: for I count upon you: – tell your simple tale and it may do the young bard good.” Think you so; then it must be set about! But how to weave this old web anew; how to twist the same rope again and again, how to continue the interest to a twice–told tale. Have you committed any rapes or murders that you have not yet revealed to me? if you have, out with ’em straight, that I may turn ’em to account before you are hanghed; and as you will not come here to confess, I must hunt you up at Helpstone[.]11

All of these factors beg interesting wider questions about the nature of historical resources, relevant to any study: such questions are beyond the scope of this introduction, but they do urge the necessity of reading these prose extracts in conjunction with Clare’s poetry, and with an open mind regarding their accuracy and truth. These reservations aside, Clare’s personal prose provides a valuable record. Yet it is ultimately a reading of Clare’s poetry informed by this understanding with which I am concerned, and it is with a sadly neglected example of it (his satire, The Parish) that I begin.

See for example John Clare By Himself, p. 7. See Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London, printed for Taylor and Hessey, and E. Drury, 1820), p. xxii for the original claim, and 27 August 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 206r–v. Clare’s ‘Helpstone’ is reprinted in EP.I.156–63. 11 10 April 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 84 r. 10


PART 1 Clare’s Disorganized Religion: A Context For Belief


Chapter 1

‘still I reverence the church’: Clare and the Established Faith

Clare’s intimate verse satire The Parish (which was never published in the poet’s lifetime) contains his most comprehensive and extended survey of religious figures and practices. Whilst we never can be sure of Clare’s original vision for his work, we can be certain that he meant to expose in his caustic, scorching verse the cant and hypocrisy (for these are the words Clare uses) of those who, from their positions within local officialdom, oppress the poor. Inevitably (for the very essence of their conduct should be the avoidance and eradication of such traits), Clare’s vitriol is never more evident than when he is deriding religious figures. His target, after all, is precise. Whilst many contemporary figures of oppression are scrutinised, he does not, for example, call his work The Enclosed Village, or Helpstone, or Hypocrites Exposed. The dissected unit is that of Christian religious jurisdiction, and the poem’s subtitle, in its simplicity, encapsulates Clare’s opinion of this structure. The Parish / A Satire: the parochial edifice is worthy of pillory. But The Parish is not merely an attack; it is also a lament. Clare bewails the passing of the ‘old religion’ which allows in its place the fullest title of his poem: The Progress of Cant.

The Parish: Structure and Genesis The textual history of this ‘progress’ is complicated, as Clare’s modern editors have discovered. In the introduction to his 1985 edition of the poem, Eric Robinson freely acknowledges that he can provide only ‘its fullest recoverable form’, and even this has been an immensely complicated (and, at times, necessarily conjectural) scholarly enterprise. The composition of its parts is dated by Robinson as between 1820 and 1827 (with the majority complete by 1824); those parts are spread throughout eighteen manuscripts, and at least one separate poem (‘The Vicar’, complete by August 1821) is incorporated into its span. These years were some of Clare’s most successful in terms of his literary career, but that success was cruelly combined with times of physical and psychological struggle, and all

The Parish, EP.II.697–779. Line references will be given in the text. Subtitle in NMS.30. John Clare: The Parish / A Satire, ed. Eric Robinson, with notes by David Powell (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 9 (hereafter ‘1985 ed.’).

12


of these factors have been identified as contributing to his written output. Clare’s Parish, then, as Robinson attests, ‘actually emerges from a whole mass of writing about religion, both in prose and poetry,’ and, one might add, about all manner of other things too. Yet this mass of (often unpublished) material offers us the best reflection of the shifting diversity of Clare’s ‘religious’ stance: paradoxical though it may seem, it is this very diversity which provides the most accurate insight we may achieve into Clare’s experience and opinions. As the Clarendon edition stands, The Parish is a poem of 2002 lines. Clare treats farmers and the ‘flimsey’ (l.239) farming class, squires, calvinistic and ‘Ranter’ preachers, the village doctor and constable, village politicians, the churchwardens and overseers, the Parish Clerk, the bailiff, the magistrate, the workhouse (its structure, occupants and keepers), local self-styled intellectuals and the clergy of the Church of England with the scathing tongue he believes they deserve. All of these appear as part of a social structure which should be, as John Mullan and Christopher Reid describe it, ‘a focus of identification and belonging.’ Yet as E.P. Thompson notes, ‘The Parish’, although ‘a term which once suggested home and security,’ is one which at Clare’s moment ‘was becoming a term (“on the parish”) suggestive of meanness and shame’, and this sense is present as Clare writes in an ‘Autobiographical Fragment’ that his poem was inspired by the treatment shown his father, on application for ‘Parish relief’. In the poem’s couplets, mordant outbursts are (occasionally, for Clare’s is predominantly an angry poem) interspersed with exemplars and ideals, mostly from the past. Clare’s attacks extend to several characters not explicitly connected with the religious praxis of the time, but their presence in the poem is vitally significant to Clare’s ‘religious’ theme, not least because they illustrate the extent to which essentially political figures of local officialdom and their actions are inextricably connected to the Church through the organisation of the parish. The Parish belies those professions which Clare makes elsewhere of love and affection for the Church of England. The Church here is depicted as an arena of social snobbery and as an oppressor of the poor, and religion in general is shown to be riddled with hypocrisy: ‘Religion now is little more then cant / A cloak to hide what godliness may want’ (ll.455–6). Whilst Clare’s prefatory quotation of Pope, with which the first 104 lines of The Parish are preoccupied, suggests a brave challenge to the subjects of his satire (‘no injury can possibly be done, as a nameless character can never be found out but by its truth & likeness’), the apologetic portions of the (largely erased) passage beneath Clare’s prefatory note reveal that Clare was clearly and justifiably frightened by the potential ramifications of his verse falling into the wrong hands. Yet he did show his work

The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 21. Eighteenth Century Popular Culture (Oxford, 2000), p. 20. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), p. 182. See John Clare By Himself, pp. 117–18. See EP.II.698; consider also The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 24.

‘still I reverence the church’

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to at least three acquaintances. Whilst, surprisingly, Mrs Emmerson (one of Clare’s evangelical friends) praised the extracts that she had seen, claiming to ‘admire this … exceedingly’ (although noting it is ‘not for present publication’), even the loyal and encouraging Henderson (Head Gardener at Milton Hall) advised Clare: ‘It is reather too severe’.10 In one of the few academic approaches to Clare’s religious experience, Mark Minor identifies The Parish as an example of Raymond Williams’s ‘retrospective idealism’,11 but although this notion initially seems appropriate to Clare, the label is inaccurately applied. Clare is not concerned here, as retrospective idealists traditionally are, with a final judgement of God. His is more simply an extreme nostalgia for a way of life, tantalisingly close, yet devastatingly inaccessible. This way of life, which we might call Clare’s ‘ideal’, involves a society in which all aspects of the world, animate and inanimate, form part of a cohesive ‘community’ which is regulated and marked by festive times of the year (such a model bears striking similarity to the Survivalist system recorded by historians of the seventeenth century).12 This ideal society is most extensively represented in Clare’s long poems, The Shepherd’s Calendar (1822–27) and ‘The Village Minstrel’,13 and its association with an ideal has ramifications throughout Clare’s satire. When Clare considers the kind old vicar, late of the parish, his lines recall ‘The Cottager’ (MP.III.416), a shorter poem, whose church-going subject ‘often shakes his head / To think what sermons the old Vicar made / Down right [&] orthodox … / But now such mighty learning meets his ears / He thinks it greek or latin which he hears’ (ll.41–6). To this we might compare Clare’s perception of ‘old’ and ‘new’ farmers. Clare recalls fondly the ‘thread bare customs of old farmers days’ in ‘June’ of The Shepherd’s Calendar, when the farmer partook of the same beer and ‘frumity’ as his workers (MP.I.75–83, esp. ll.60–107). Conversely, his sentiments regarding post-enclosure farmers are notoriously bleak. Like these two types of landowner (or, more accurately, land-occupier: it is ‘upstart’ tenant farmers that Clare scorns,

23 March 1823, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 168r. 21 May 1823, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 198v. Frank Simpson (and possibly others) also saw the manuscript: see Robert Heyes, ‘Looking to Futurity’: John Clare and Provincial Culture (unpublished doctoral thesis, Birkbeck College, 1999), p. 116. Heyes also explores Clare’s relationship with Henderson in greater depth. 11 Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 38. 12 On the similarity between Clare’s ‘ideal’ and the Survivalist cycle, see my ‘The “Community” of John Clare’s Helpston’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (Autumn, 2006), 781–802 (pp. 791–792), and also my ‘“Some little thing of other days / Saved from the wreck of time”: John Clare and Festivity’, in John Clare Society Journal, 23 (2004), 21–43. 13 The latter is the title poem of Clare’s second volume; most critics agree that it is to some extent autobiographical. In it, Clare, through the figure of ‘Lubin’, begins to work out some of the essential contradictions in which he felt himself to be caught: some of the most interesting recent work on Clare has been on this work and the poems which appeared with it in 1821. 10

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rather than the landed gentry), the Anglican clergymen in Clare’s verse are, to a degree, less embodiments of a sector of society, and more intrinsic parts of two different ways of life: one desired and unobtainable; the other lived and disliked. To some extent, then, all of the religious figures of The Parish must be seen as implicitly compared with figures of the preceding era, as representative of a new era, rather than of abstract religious principles. Useful overarching formal comment on Clare’s poem is difficult, because what we have is a reconstruction constituted through several manuscripts, and not a polished, published piece ratified by its author. There are undoubtedly generic associations with the form Clare chooses as his vehicle. Its status as a ‘long poem’, its self-styling as satire, and its couplet form (especially alongside the epigraph from Pope) suggest a deliberate engagement with the epic (through the mock-epic) form; yet, if this is any kind of epic, it is inverted (anti-heroic?), and twisted so much that Clare has fundamentally altered the form he inhabits. Moreover, Clare’s other ‘long poems’ are specifically not in the epic tradition, owing rather more to the calendar- and season-poems of his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors. Clare more generally has no compunction about taking from the literary tradition what is useful to him, and it would not be particularly constructive to judge The Parish by a generic pattern to which it has no pretensions. That is not to say that Clare’s poem is without unity: Kelsey Thornton has offered a sensitive reading of the poem which finds that it ‘gains its coherence not from its argument or its narrative but from the consistency and the complex interrelationship of its themes and images.’14 However, there are more important things to say on the microcosmic level. Elaine Feinstein has pointed out that Clare’s anger is enacted by ‘the bluntness, and trenchancy of rhythm and vocabulary’ in the poem;15 the insistent rhyming couplet form is also peculiarly effective (especially when combined with Clare’s idiosyncratic use of grammar) because as readers we are constantly driven on through the poem, without being allowed to reflect too much; not only is this tactic successful in making the reader complicit in Clare’s attack (because we don’t have the opportunity to stop and disagree, and because the logic of form transfers itself, to some extent, to the logic of sense), but it also forces him or her to make connections between unrelated and ambiguous words and images. That is not to suggest that Clare deliberately misuses grammatical and syntactical structures, but the errors and ambiguities of his language nonetheless function in this way, and as a consequence of this, Clare can jump between disparate subjects, such as religion and enclosure, whilst at the same time yoking them together, as the discussion, below, on Clare’s ‘hunting Parson’ will demonstrate.

14 R.K.R. Thornton, ‘The Nature of The Parish’, in John Clare Society Journal, 5 (1986), 30–35 (p. 35). For an example of a claim that Clare’s poem lacks unity, see Mark Storey’s The Poetry of John Clare: A Critical Introduction (London, 1974), p. 60. 15 Elaine Feinstein, John Clare: Selected Poems (London, 1968), p. 7.


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Thus, then, Clare’s helter-skelter writing can work towards his meaning: although there are innumerable witty instances and clever plays on words which engage the readerly imagination, and although Clare’s meaning is clearly discernable, Clare’s lines are especially effective because we don’t (because we can’t) stop to fathom phrases even when they might be grammatically confusing (or just plain wrong), as we are carried away with the unrelenting character of Clare’s form. It might be said that, in this way at least (in being interconnected, indivisible even when discrete, in being adaptable and thus inhabitable by the poet without being ‘owned’), language becomes like the properly communal structure that Clare thinks the parish should be, and it is thus unsurprising that it offers him a resort.

The Parish and the Failings of the Early Nineteenth-Century Church I have reflected long on the subject & find at last as I thought at first that the prayer book contains prayers that are inimatable & that as better cannot be written it is not expected that better can be uttered from extemporaneous prea[c]hers16

Clare’s ‘as I thought at first’ suggests an underlying traditionalism to his religious practice, reinforcing an essentially conservative sense of the place retained in his affections by the Established Church. In The Shepherd’s Calendar, for example, as well as in many extracts from his prose writing, he celebrates the traditions and rituals of a way of life intimately bound up with the Church year. These patterns form a way of thinking, perceiving and living for Clare, and the Church in question is undeniably the Church of England. Other of his pronouncements regarding religion (including almost the entirety of The Parish) prove less easy to reconcile with this position. In the course of Clare’s long poem, modern denominations and their representatives are held up to the yardstick of the ‘old vicar’, and repeatedly are found to be wanting. The general importance of the Church as a cultural, social and political force within quotidian life between the Reformation and the 1689 Act of Toleration cannot easily be exaggerated: as E.R. Norman has demonstrated, ‘it was the interdependence of Church and State, and not the dependence of the Church upon the State, that formed the basis of the eighteenth-century view … they were in practice inseparable.’17 Nor, however, can the steep decline into which this overarching dominance entered in the subsequent century and a half. A religious census of 1858 indicated that membership of the Anglican communion had fallen 16

The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 21. Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford, 1976), p. 19. See also for example Martin Ingram, ‘From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Cultures in England, 1540–1690’ in Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c.1500–1850 (London, 1995), pp. 95–123 (esp. pp. 96–7). 17

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to less than 50% of the population,18 and we can only understand Clare’s peculiar relationship to the Church if we appreciate his responses to the factors implicated in this fall. The principal of these were widespread clerical neglect, and the rise of alternative denominations catering for precisely those areas being neglected. Clare is sickened by The Parish’s neglectful local priest: ‘Excuse the priest he’s prest with weighty cares / & tho the pauper dyes without his prayers / What if such worthless sheep slip into hell / For want of prayers before the passing bell / The priest was absent twas a daily song …’ (ll.1566–70). He goes on to define these ‘weighty cares’: Perhaps when death beds might his aid desire His horse was sick & might a drink require Or friends for just nessesitys might claim His shooting skill to track the fields for game & when they needed partridges or hares The parish pauper coud not look for prayers (ll.1572–7)

As the censure of Austen’s Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price reminds us, Clare is echoing a widespread complaint: that the distinguishing feature of the early nineteenth-century Church was the pervasive absenteeism of its ministers. Clerical laxity (such as that portrayed in Clare’s ‘The Summons’, MP.IV.482– 93), and particularly non-attendance, was widely blamed in the early nineteenth century for decreasing congregations, increasing crime and immorality, the shocking state of education and the rapid decline of the Church’s previously formidable moral influence. Non-residence of clergy was to some degree, and in some cases, undoubtedly caused by an increase in pluralism, which in turn was often the necessary consequence of the poverty of some livings (which varied hugely in value: as Pounds describes, ‘The spectrum of the wealth and status of the clergy had always been broad [...] in the course of the eighteenth century it became broader.’19) However, like William Cobbett’s roughly contemporary commentary, Rural Rides (1830), Clare’s long poem claims that parish neglect was just as often the consequence of the lazy, self-indulgent character of a clergy keen to socialise with their high-ranking, good-living neighbours (‘To mix in circles of the worldly gay’, l.1597), and pluralism the result of clerical desire to hold as many livings as possible, so that ‘added salarys’ might keep ‘their dog & gun’ (l.1599). Whatever the reasons behind the trend, Clare’s professed experience was that of the majority: by 1830, parishes served by curates outnumbered those served by incumbents, and more were served by non-resident than by resident clergy. 37.7% of English parishes hit the double jackpot of being served by a non-resident curate.20 18

N.J.G. Pounds, A History of the English Parish (Cambridge 2000), p. 502. Pounds, p. 501. See also Norman, pp. 91–2. 20 See James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), p. 116. 19


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Absenteeism embodies precisely the opposite of what Clare understands the right way of the Church, as properly a communal structure, to be, and he associates this dreadful state of affairs with Enclosure: the ‘good old vicar’ lived in the parish, ‘Ere hunting Parsons in the chace begun … / To claim & trespass upon ground not theirs / The game for shooting well as tythe for prayers / Ere sheep was driven from the shepherds door / & pleasure swallowed what might feed the poor’ (ll.1598–1603). Here, then, is an example of how the syntactic confusions of Clare’s couplets can work to support his meaning. Clare’s tightly knit lines, with their idiosyncratic grammar, connect the idea of ‘trespass’ (which is here the inverse-trespass of landowners and their acquaintances upon what was formerly common ground) with the greedy claim for the fruits of their shoot: Clare’s complaint about the parson-sportsmen is that the appropriation of common land by enclosure has made ‘the poor’, who might previously have bagged a bird for their pot, hungry (or, and the implication haunts the passage though Clare’s use of the same vocabulary to describe the targets of his attack, into trespassing poachers). But Clare’s syntax throws the criminality back onto the leisured hunters: it is they who trespass; this in turn drags the tithe issue into the same ambiguous situation. Into this mix, Clare flings an image of ‘sheep … driven from the shepherds door’, a line which, in the context of this poem, suggests a parish flock not able to access their pastor (and thus, perhaps, exclusion from their ‘shepherd’ in a biblical sense), as well as the more literal sense of a loss of grazing rights. Seventy lines later, Clare reinforces the connection with absenteeism: the current situation, Clare insists, is far from the days ‘When the old vicar with his village dwelt’ (l.1678). We shall meet this parson, and consider his place in history, later on. Absenteeism was not the only reason for public disenchantment. Even where incumbents were in residence, parish livings changed hands rarely. This ostensible stability carried with it the concomitant danger of tedious monotony (at Clare’s moment, morning services often lasted closer to two hours than one; dry sermons filled most of this time, and the same lengthy, dull sermon might repeatedly be delivered to a congregation, whose members, ‘if the parsons speech be long’, Clare knows, ‘wait its end wi pain’ – see EP.II.140, l.411). It simultaneously meant that an inadequate minister could be thrust upon a congregation for decades. Furthermore, ‘residence’ itself was often a visible sign of a hard-to-stomach absence of genuine charity. The Parish’s vicar of ‘days gone bye’ lived in ‘… yon house that neighbours near the show / Of parish huts a mellancholy row / That like to them a stubble covering wears / Decayd the same & needing like repairs’ (ll.1588–91). Now in the cottage ‘Instead of Vicar keeps the vicars clerk’ (l.1697) because it has ‘neither lawn or park’ (l.1696), and no vicar would ‘stoop from pride to dwell in cots of thatch’ (l.1701). Clare is registering a familiar complaint attendant on the springing-up of substantial rectories, in part paid for by Queen Anne’s Bounty, which replaced more modest cottage-parsonages.21 Such houses 21 Compare Cobbett: ‘The parish is a rectory, and … the parson (whose name was TRIPP), says, that … the parsonage house will not hold him! And why? Because it is ‘a

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acted as a tangible sign of affluence and a certain social position: certainly in Clare’s own village, a glance at the beautiful (now ‘old’) vicarage suggests why parishioners living in poverty might have become increasingly disinclined to respect their ‘moral guides’. Most reprehensibly for Clare, the ranks of the clergy are filled with hypocrites. Oppression, tyranny, hypocrisy and cant are the words Clare uses to describe the things he holds responsible for the blight on the world, and all of these are attributes of the religious figures he depicts.22 So much has money become an issue that religious calling is now a business, and in the parsonage lives someone not even worthy to call himself such an entrepreneur: ‘there was one who priesthoods trade profest’ (l.1586). Such ‘profession’ seems full of the sense of claim, but empty of the notion of practice. A description of contemporary observance even provides the occasion for a rare denunciation of custom: ‘Their prayers are read as old accustomd things’ (l.471). This, however, as we shall see, is symptomatic of Clare, who glories in the beauties of the Prayer Book, but for whom religion is something constantly to be considered, rather than blindly, unthinkingly absorbed. Clare’s denigration of the hypocrisy of those simply ‘Paying religions once a week respects’ (l.490) implicitly distances his own observances from the same accusations. He is, in the autobiographical prose as well as in verse, only too willing to admit his frequent absences from the pew. (Clare’s Church truancy is surely in part attributable to the unavailability of alternative leisure time and the consequent ‘bliss from labour freed / Which poor men meeteth on a Sunday morn’ (EP.II.294, ll.172–3), and, earlier, to his youth: see for example the ‘rustic boy’ who ‘Scrambs up his marbles’ on a Sunday (EP.II.361, ll.48–50); Clare apparently was attending reasonably regularly in 1821: ‘as its sunday I must prepare for the parson & going to church for he mostly seeks me up’.23) It is the hypocrisy itself which he detests and derides in churchgoers, and most especially in the clergy: ‘if every mans bosom had a glass in it so that its secret might be seen what a blotted page of christian profession and false pretensions woud the best of them display’.24 For Clare, ‘God’ is separate from the ‘Church’ (just as faith is separate from religion), and thus to behave as Christians who ‘Lay bye religion with their sunday cloaths’ (l.548) do is utterly ridiculous.

miserable cottage’. I looked about for this ‘miserable cottage’, and could not find it. What an impudent fellow this must have been! … Did Jesus Christ and Saint Paul talk about fine houses? … What impudence! What, Mr TRIPP, is it a fine house you have been appointed and ordained to live in?’ William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. Ian Dyck (Harmondsworth, 2001), p. 91. 22 See for examples beyond The Parish extracts from Clare’s parodic ‘The Bone & Cleaver Club’, reprinted in A Champion for the Poor, pp. 286–9 (‘Cant humbug & hypocrisy are the three in one grand principles of this age …’). 23 The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford, 1985), p. 138. 24 John Clare By Himself, p. 133.


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One witty piece of unpublished prose shows Clare attacking modern ‘Christians’, and as the extract exemplifies, it is the hypocrisy he ridicules, and not the acts which are mentioned: I consider it said Mrs Slinkum a sin & a crying shame to read any thing but the bible & prayer book on a sunday & even so much as to speak naughty words aloud on that day & our good vicar thi[nks] so also for he always lowers his voice when he has to mention the devil in scripture & tho I am reading aloud after the clerk I always pass such words over in a whisper___ you accuse me of breaking the sabbath by once looking into a novel on a sunday but it was a righteous book I assure you for the expression of “O Lord” was mentioned three times in it & the presence of such words would sanctify any thing from wick[ed]ness & let the book be what it will if there be not lord of god mentioned in it it is a wicked book & after I have hunted for these words I lay it down as a very wicked book & would never look into it again___ & to let you know it nobody keeps the sabbath from profaneness more then I do for I would not so much as heat a Oven for dinner (yet she was uttering this oration over roast meat gentle reader but pardon the inconsistencys of modern saints for they have nothing else to distinguish them from the res[t] of sinners nay the difference is like picking the wicked from the ungodly)I would not continued Mrs Slinkum no bless the lord I would not so much as cut up a herb or a sallad__gentle reader she had got a piece of stuffed pork on her plate … “I never” said Mrs Slinkum “committed blasphemy commit what I might for I never either heard or uttered the name of Jesus without dropping a curtsey__& tho you Mr B never bend your neck at church once all the service when such sacred names are mentioned you ought to respect my feelings so far as to avoid swearing in my presence for it makes me exceedingly uncomfortable …25

Throughout the piece, Clare’s ‘Barnaby’ (‘Mr B’) is only able to see the faults of others, and ‘Mrs. Slinkum’ is comically unconscious ‘of the evil wink over her failings for she is the representative of a vast class of pretenders’ (and, whilst it may not have been deliberate on Clare’s part, the absence of much conventional punctuation in Clare’s manuscript actually works very well to enhance the relentless, unselfaware nature of Mrs Slinkum’s diatribe).26 Elsewhere, however, Clare treats the theme with less good humour. In one extract ‘For the Bone & Cleaver Club’, the gloves come off as Clare remains within the satiric genre, adopting the voice of a boozy member of a ‘popular debating society’27 to deal with a more serious kind of hypocrite: Well you see as I sed says I this is pretty work this ove our viker baiting me about working my donkey on a sunday now you see our viker dus duty at three 25

PMS.A42, vol. 1, pp. 20–21. Ibid. 27 See the editors’s preface to ‘The Bone and Cleaver Club’, in A Champion for the Poor, p. 283. 26

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John Clare’s Religion chirches & rides one hoss to all three now you see as I sed says I whose beest is the most woked the vikers hoss what goes three jurneys of severel miles in a day or my donkey that oney goes one28

In one fell swoop, Clare attacks absenteeism, hypocrisy and the current environment in which ‘the plan for hard times’ is ‘cheat as cheat can … to live in the world we must live by the world’.29 But in The Parish Clare’s vitriolic aim is certainly not confined to an erring congregation: ‘Self interest rules each vestry’ (l.1364) of the Church. The strength of Clare’s anger at the goings-on within this parish nerve-centre is especially evident in lines dealing with the ‘clerk’, and the parson who ‘puts his sermon bye’: both are culpable, because ‘what one sticks for is the gain of all / The set’ (ll.1365–6): when these parish vestrys next shall meet To fleece the poor & rob with vile command … For in these Vestrys cunning deep as night Plans deeds that would be treason to the light & tho so honest in its own disguise Twould be plain theft exposed to reasons eyes (ll.1353–61)

Again, the shepherd–preacher imagery is manipulated in the ‘fleecing’ of the village flock. Nepotism supplies a curate ‘Who wears his priesthood with a traders skill’ (l.1530). This is a man who must be paid for prayers: With him self interest has a face of brass A shameless tyrant that no claims surpass Who shrinks at nothing & woud not disdain To take a farthing in the ways of gain … & leave poor souls in Satans claws confind (ll.1552–64)

As for the dying pauper, ‘What cared the priest—dye & be d—d for him (l.1579). At this point in the poem, a former, ‘ideal’ church and its cleric are figured in natural metaphors. The ‘old’ beloved vicar himself is positioned in the heart of a specifically natural scene: The Vicars greensward pathways once his pride His woodbine bowers that used his doors to hide & he himself full often in his chair Smoaking his pipe & conning sermons there The yard & garden roods his only farms & all his stock the hive bees yearly swarms (ll.1634–9) 28

A Champion for the Poor, p. 287. A Champion for the Poor, pp. 287–8.

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Where a man-made object intrudes into the scene (the vicar’s door), it has been ‘naturalised’ by the creeping plants; his only association with ‘farming’ and the control of nature is his welcoming of the (naturally unpredictable) bees. Clare’s familiar preoccupation with nostalgia then fully emerges, climaxing in a line heavy with resonance for a model of tradition I identified above as similar to the Survivalist cycle, whose passing Clare so laments: ‘Were lifes a shadow & were flesh is grass’ (l.1661). That he begins to be distracted here by more familiar ‘secular’ themes is evident as the habitual concern with land enclosure emerges: ‘Ere mockd improvments plans enclosed the moor’ (l.1692). In the Clarendon edition (which is not, of course, straightforwardly ‘Clare’s’), the section breaks again, and the following passage (ll.1726–53) explicitly and nostalgically deals with notions of religion in nature, with enclosure, and with retrospection. The poem thus suggests that the destruction of nature and community as Clare knows them to be, or at least as they are in his ideal, is directly linked to the decline of the ‘true’ or ‘plain’ faith he laments, firmly identifying connections between politics and religion.

Politics and Religion A large part of Clare’s disenchantment with organised religion can broadly be ascribed to what he perceives as its political aspects. Clare insightfully and repeatedly identifies the specific political nature of early nineteenth-century English organised religion, clearly distinguishing this ‘religion’ from true ‘faith’. Recognising the Church’s place at the heart of the State, he understands their inseparability. If at one point he states that ‘Religion is not only nessesary for the interests of the individual but useful for the better order & government of the comunity at large’,30 he elsewhere (in a sketch for the ‘Essay on Political Religion’ he intended to write, an essay whose very title emphasises the connection Clare makes between the discourses) declares that ‘The government religion of a state or empire is properly speaking a political religion – framed to suit the demands or nessesitys of governments as well as the conversion of souls … self convenience & not honest opinions weigh most in these matters.31 In The Parish, Clare describes ‘Justice Terror’, a man who is not only a ‘politician’ but also holds religious sway as a preacher. This was a common combination: citing Anthony Russell’s The Clerical Profession, Robert Ryan concludes that ‘The number of clerical magistrates increased markedly from the 1790s to the 1820s’, and Cobbett similarly suggests that the clergy ‘are, from necessity, everywhere; and their aggregate influence is astonishingly great’.32 Extracts printed in A Champion for 30

A Champion for the Poor, p. 298. A Champion for the Poor, p. 281. 32 Ryan, p. 241, n. 43; see also Anthony Russell, The Clerical Profession (London, 1981). Cobbett is cited in Norman, p. 32. 31

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the Poor demonstrate Clare’s criticism of the increasing numbers of clerics on the magistrate’s bench, and the approach of Justice Terror to unorthodox religious groups and the responses he provokes (ll.1400–1511) further suggest Clare’s disenchantment.33 Clare seems bitterly to conclude that ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ are inseparable, because both are instruments for self-aggrandisement and power, having nothing to do with what he elsewhere labels ‘truth’ and ‘right’. Both, rather, are just cloaks for hypocrisy and self-interest: ‘Laws or religion or be what they will / Self will not yield but stickles to it still’ (The Parish, ll.1508–09). Elsewhere he insists that ‘The religion of power is never the religion of common sense’.34 It is hence frequently unclear whether Clare is discussing politics or religion; certainly, he employs the same terminology with regard to both discourses. (He is well able to vent his spleen at something he specifically calls ‘politics’, but perhaps for brevity we might here summarise this ‘politics’ as ‘doctrinal power’, that aspect of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ associated with the prescriptions of man; in this case, of course, ‘religions’ can’t be apolitical.) One early instance of this interaction occurs in Clare’s ‘England’ (EP.II.69– 71), written in April 1820. Cowper’s ‘The Timepiece’ provides an epigraph for this patriotic work. This is a poem with obvious political concerns; in the fourth and fifth stanzas it would seem almost exclusively so. However, the use of Cowper’s lines inevitably introduces another layer of meaning, tied up with Cowper’s connection to the evangelical tradition. Throughout his poem, expressly presented to his publishers as anti-radical verse, Clare’s diction is persistently that which he uses to discuss organised religion: England return to past days for a caution Where foul excesses have blotted thy page Where rebel hypocrites maskd wi devotion Showerd down upon thee the blackest of rage Look at thy state in their power—was it freedom Laws broke & kings murderd was that to be free While basest of savages lurkd to succeed ’em Ah look back & think what the present may be (ll.25–32)

In this memoriam of the Civil War, ‘rebel hypocrites’ specifically are conflated with religious Dissenters, and, more importantly, Dissenters depicted as Clare figures those of his own time in The Parish. Whilst the English Civil War was deeply grounded in and fuelled by the religious sentiment and Dissent of its own time, it obviously also had a secular, political dimension: as in Clare’s long poem, the religious- and the secular-political are certainly not identical, but they are inseparable. In ‘England’ one finds a by no means isolated example of the way in which socio-political issues are deeply linked to religious motifs for Clare, a 33

A Champion for the Poor, pp. xx–xxii. A Champion for the Poor, p. xvi.

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connection easy to understand with even the merest consideration of the context of his life and writing. Both politics and religion in their imagined ‘proper’ form are undoubtedly connected in Clare’s mind with a purely temporal, earthly freedom (and, in their faulty forms, as equivalent restrictions). This freedom is by no means anarchistic: an overarching structure of governance is present, similar to the ideal espoused in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1650). Clare insists that ‘Tyranny may make obedient slaves but liberty & kindness only make willing subjects’, and reinforces the same sentiments more strongly, making the same connection between tyranny and slavery, in a further passage.35 Of course, the two poets endorse different sources of that governance: Clare’s ideal remains national and monarchical, whereas Milton’s disenchantment with England (Britain is ‘naturally not over-fertile of Men able to govern justly and prudently in Peace’) leads him towards classical, republican exemplars; but the proposed model under this umbrella is similar.36 Whilst Clare may not have read Milton’s Tenure, he was familiar with Paradise Lost, in the course of which Milton explores the ramifications of his model, and Clare cannot have failed to recognise its characteristics there. The influence of Milton’s epic on Clare’s theology and especially his theodicy is substantial, and will be explored later in this book. The same criticisms and the same elision of religious and political discourse are seen in The Parish, in the figure of ‘Young Brag’, ‘Turnd radical in spirit and & in purse’: He prays reform & deems the laws a curse … Thus village politics—& hopes for pelf Live in one word & centre all in ‘self’ … & vile hypocrisy the mask it wears Cant as high priest around its alter prays & preaches loud its mockery of praise … Thus freedom preaching is but knaverys game & old self interest by a different name (ll.739–1077)

Here, Brag’s ‘freedom preaching’ seems to be more explicitly ‘political’ than it is ‘religious’, and yet Clare’s diction suggests an angry confusion of religious registers, which drags in the suspiciously pagan with the High Church alongside the more specific ‘village’ politics, thus insinuating that is a universal tendency for men to be lured into the hopes for the filthy lucre suggested by Clare’s use of ‘pelf’. In explicit terms, it is ‘old self interest’ which Clare seems to be attacking, but yet again, it is the ‘hypocrisy’, the ‘mask’, the ‘cant’, the ‘mockery of praise’ which he dwells on: that is, it is less the fact that it is ‘old self interest’, and more that it goes ‘by a different name’, which inspires his spleen. Most appallingly of 35

A Champion for the Poor, pp. 292 and 299. John Milton, ‘Character of the Long Parliament’, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don. M. Wolfe and others, 8 vols (New Haven, 1953–82), V, ed. French Fogle, p. 450. 36

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all, Clare understands that the self-interested egotism of religion’s priests and their essentially political, self-aggrandising arguments are precisely what conspire to render religion ‘political’ and thus to destroy it. Clare writes of Justice Terror, for example, that Anothers faults with him are quickly known Yet needs a micriscope to find his own He deems all wrong but him unless they be Of the same cloth & think the same as he Thus self triumphant both in light & dark He oft leaves reason & oer shoots the mark

so that in the case of religion, The wild mad clamours that its votarys raise Urge those to ridicule who meant to praise & hurts religion tho it wears a gown As bad as deists who woud pull it down (ll.1456–1473)

Tithes were one religious issue that became explicitly political. While Clare undoubtedly maintains in a letter to his publisher, John Taylor, of February 1830 that a man’s right to property (which included the parson’s right to a ‘tythe’) should not be violated, he recognises that the burden of this tax has become too heavy to ignore. Acknowledging fears that ‘The times as you say are bad’, he bears witness to the shifting nature of religio-political stances.37 But this placid resignation contrasts with more bitter comment elsewhere: ‘Perhaps if manna was to fall from heaven as it did in the time of Moses & Aaron it would soon have a tythe & tax on it’. (These lines are cancelled, but Clare repeats them almost verbatim elsewhere, no less forcibly, albeit as part of a parody.38) Such statements as these are acrimoniously reinforced as Clare describes his Parish Clerk, a ‘dog’ kept to ‘bark’ by the ‘Churchwardens Constables and Overseers’, responsible for the collection of rates, taxes and tithes (The Parish, ll.1230–1369). Recent research by Alan Vardy claims that ‘the reduction of church tithes was at the very centre of “radical” debate about Parliamentary reform. There was probably no other issue that more defined political debate at this particular historical moment.’39 When Clare engages with such issues, then, he is engaging with the essence of political and Church debate: they are the same thing. Clare also expresses disgust in The Parish at the new curate, ‘Whose love of gain makes up for want of grace’ (l.1529), and even greater antipathy towards the 37

Letters, pp. 498–500. See A Champion for the Poor, p. 303, n. 31, and p. 285. 39 See ‘Clare and Political Equivocation’, John Clare Society Journal, 18 (1999), 37–48 (p. 44). 38


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curate’s superior, who grasps the parish tithes despite ignoring his responsibilities: ‘Tho he kept one to manage of his kin / Yet self was foreman when the gain dropt in’ (ll.1582–3).40 In The Borough (1810), the Rev. George Crabbe describes the ‘Duty and Love and Piety and Pride’ he understands to be behind the contribution of tithes.41 The parson-poet moves on, writing of ‘cool Reformers’ as men who cry that they would not have ‘“left a Tithe remaining, great or small.”’42 The stern Crabbe upbraids such sentiments, insisting that ‘Men are not equal, and ’tis meet and right / That Robes and Titles our respect excite’.43 Clare, however, maintains that such priests (whose type he elsewhere refers to as ‘the black locusts that eat up a tenth part of our land’: the figure speaking this is not perfectly ‘white’ himself, but Clare registers his point 44) should be providing examples of duty, love and piety, rather than relying on the presence of these virtues in others to fill their pockets, and is scornful of Crabbe’s ignorance of the plight of the poor, suggesting confinement with men like the parson offered an ideal opportunity for dealing with ‘an enemey I coud wish to torture’.45 Those like Crabbe who preached of charity, love and service to God to a hungry, exhausted and neglected congregation found themselves on increasingly shaky ground. William Hone, whose publications Clare both enjoyed and contributed to, produced what Marilyn Butler describes as ‘the most celebrated written example of the day of the fusion of radical politics and popular religion’.46 This, a ‘parody lampooning ministerial corruption in the language of the Ten Commandments’, echoes Clare’s bitter criticism of men ‘of morrals on deseptions plan’ (The Parish, l.1397). Butler continues: ‘For the prosecution, the Attorney-General quoted the words of the seventeenth-century jurist Sir Matthew Hale, “the Christian religion is parcel of the common law of England”.’47 But ‘the Christian religion’ had become something very different to the institution recognised by Hale. Of course, the Church had never been free from its critics and accusers, as Chaucer’s Friar reminds us, but what changed at this particular historical moment was the extent 40

See also Vardy, pp. 43–6 on tithes. Jonathan Bate describes the way in which, further to the amounts creamed from landowners and farmers, the expenditure of the Helpston Church wardens was reimbursed annually by means of an assessment based on the rentable value of each property in the village: see ‘New Light on the Life of Clare’, John Clare Society Journal, 20 (2001), 41–54 (p. 43). 41 George Crabbe, ‘The Borough’, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Norma DalrympleChampneys and Arthur Pollard, 3 vols (Oxford, 1988), I, 340–598 (p. 189, l. 182). 42 Ibid., pp. 392–3, ll. 77–81. 43 Ibid., p. 393, ll. 94–5. 44 A Champion for the Poor, p. 285. 45 Letters, pp. 137–8. 46 Marilyn Butler, ‘Romantic Manichaeism in Shelley and Byron’, in The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J.B. Bullen (Oxford, 1989), pp. 13–37 (p. 20). See William Hone, The Three Trials of William Hone (London, 1818). 47 Butler, pp. 20–21.

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to which the general populace wanted to, and, crucially, could, react against it and retain Christian integrity. Accusations were not confined to specific local grumbles and a drift towards other denominations or away from religious observance altogether inevitably ensued. But that is to jump ahead.

Clerical Matters and Clerical Men: the Reality of Clare’s Parish Clare purports in The Parish to tell ‘as truths that common sense may see / How cants pretentions & her works agree’ (ll.93–4). Yet historical evidence suggests that Clare’s satirical picture of decay contingent upon Enclosure is not entirely accurate. It is true that in a letter of 1727 to the Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, the Rev. Thomas Smith of Helpston complains about a lessee of the rectorial tithe who allows pigs to be kept in the churchyard (the college had the advowson of the church in their gift): Tis certain the Chancel is much out of repair, and lys shamefully; part of the Ceiling being fallen down, and ye rest is very bad, so yt dust and pigeon dung falls as oft as there is a wind, and the windows likewise are broke. So yt ye snow blow in upon us at ye Communion at Christmas.48

A century later, however, change was afoot. In 1816, when Clare was 23 (and the year before he issued his first proposal for publishing by subscription), S.K. Simmond provided ‘A Survey and Valuation of the Estate belonging to the Impropriate Rectory of Helpstone’. He records that ‘An Act having passed in 1809 for the Inclosure of this and six contiguous Parishes, the property has undergone a considerable change.’ Recognising that the parish had been ‘exonerated from Tithes’, he concludes that the net annual value of the parish is £311.5.3.49 (This is a considerable increase from two similar valuations conducted in 1797 and 1806, placing the value at £191.10.0 and £232.13.6 per annum respectively, intimating a relatively recent improvement.50) Simmond predicts a considerable increase in value from the effect of the enclosure of other common land into allotments, and his prediction is sound: records for 1833, 1840, and 1847 place the parish’s value at £380.10.0, £445.0.0, and £460.0.0. After this point, when Clare is of course well away from his old parish, the graph levels out; the figures imply that the period of improvement was at its peak in the first third of the century. Throughout this period, the picture given of Helpston by its valuers is a far cry from that painted by the eighteenth-century Thomas Smith. Rather, ‘The Buildings are all in Tenantable

48

Reproduced in Robinson’s ‘Introduction’ to The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 20. Muniments of Christ’s College, Cambridge, MR33.90, doc. Ab. 50 Ibid., docs V and X. 49


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repair and a considerable deal has been done to them within the last few years. The Chancel of the Church is also in repair.’51 What had caused this improvement? The answer seems to lie in letters from Clare’s patrons, the Miltons, to Christ’s College. Milton begins this correspondence by outlining the situation of Helpston church and its vicar not long before Clare begins writing The Parish: You are of course aware that the College are seized of the advowson of the living and also of the rectorial tythes, which have long been on lease to our family—this separation of the tythes from the living has reduced the income of the incumbent to a very low ebb, the gross receipts amounting as well as I can recollect (for I have not the vicar’s letter with me here) to no more than 54£ per Ann. In consequence of the penury of the living, there has not been in my memory, nor, I believe, in my father’s, a resident clergyman, and perhaps this has been one cause of the immorality & lawlessness of the population. To this evil it is our anxious wish to apply a permanent remedy by effecting an augmentation of the living.52

Recalling an act of George I, he writes that his ‘present objective’ is ‘to ascertain whether … the College would be disposed to give up the advowson to our family.’ Milton’s is a positive letter, confident of its likely success, and the proposal certainly seems well received. Subsequent letters propose family donations of £600 to supplement an anticipated £900 from Queen Anne’s Bounty. They also suggest interesting plans for clerical accommodation: ‘The house that in point of situation wd be the most convenient for the vicar is the rectory, now leased to our family’; this house, however, ‘has been so long used as a farm house, is so surrounded with farm buildings’ that Milton doubts its suitability. It seems quite apparent that the interest of the Fitzwilliam family must have been responsible for the improvements taking place in Helpston. But Clare ignores these improvements and their impetus in his long poem. Perhaps this is because, despite their generosity towards Clare, the Fitzwilliams are simultaneously implicated in Clare’s distress over ‘Inclosure’. Or perhaps, the timing of their intervention in parish affairs (just as Clare reaches maturity), combined with Clare’s tendency to retrospective contemplation, comes too late. Clare’s poem certainly creates a far bleaker impression of the contemporary state of The Parish. In The Parish and in several of his other works, Clare insists that the Church is in a sorry state. And yet, recognising the human agency behind the situation, he retains a fundamental love for the institution. This human agency, so vitally depicted in The Parish, is not unambivalent. Not all Clare’s ecclesiastical characters are reviled. Even within his acerbic long poem, Clare has both good and bad things 51

Ibid., doc. ‘Additional’ 3. Fitzwilliam to Christ’s College, 29 October 1818, ibid., doc. Ae. Discussing Milton’s involvement, Robinson suggests that the vicar of Helpston was resident in the neighbouring village of Etton until 1826 (The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 20). 52

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to say about local religious figures, and these opinions can be found reflected in the creed and faith he adopts. Clare writes of the ‘old Vicar’ of The Parish as one whose ‘chiefest pleasure charity possest / In having means to make another blest’ (ll.1614–15). This, however, was in a time ‘When pride & fashion did not rank so high / Ere poor religion threw her weeds away’ (ll.1595–6), and the good man is remembered only by those ‘Greyheaded now left childern when he dyd’ (l.1665). Noting this individual as an ideal, we should accept the actuality of such a vicar only with reservations. Perhaps Eric Robinson is right, that Clare identifies his own position with that of the old vicar.53 But from where does Clare get his model? We might recall the letter from Lord Milton to the Master of Christ’s College: ‘there has not been in my memory, nor, I believe, in my father’s, a resident clergyman’. Admittedly, it is in Milton’s interest to paint the bleakest picture possible, but this is not the kind of subject about which one could invent details. Supporting the identification with a long-past epitome of charity, Clare writes: ‘the man whom I copy [in ‘The Vicar’] has been gone nearly a century … his character floats in the memory of the village—& from that my resources are gleaned.’54 This ‘floating’ and ‘gleaning’ typifies the assembly of Clare’s ‘memory’, which often is constructed from indefinite sources quite separate from his own experience.55 The editors of the Clarendon edition suggest William Paley (vicar from 1735–45) as Clare’s template, and Robinson elsewhere posits Goldsmith as a possible pattern for Clare; Clare explicitly acknowledges the similarity of his depiction to the preacher of Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ (1768–70),56 and in the light of The Parish, several reasons for Clare’s attraction to this figure (who does not ‘fawn, or seek for power, / By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour’) suggest themselves.57 A tablet in Helpston Church chancel commemorates Thomas Smith (he who in 1727 objected to pigs in the church), and Clare seems to suggest this figure as a model for the ‘greyheaded’ man who is recalled: ‘& this good man is nearly now forgot / Save on his tomb & some few hearts beside’ (ll.1663–4). Yet anyone of Clare’s acquaintance recalling such a figure from knowledge rather than reputation really would be ‘greyheaded’. That Clare’s delineation of the old vicar is not a remembered perfection is obvious: Clare couldn’t have remembered a good old vicar from his parish, because there wasn’t one in his time. Like his relationship to religious groups, Clare’s criticism of the clergy is deeply ambivalent and intensely personal. One example of this intimacy occurs in 53

The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 18. Letters, p. 191. 55 See my ‘The “Community” of John Clare’s Helpston’ on the construction of Clare’s ‘memories’. 56 See EP.II.800; The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 22, and Letters, p. 195. 57 The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London, 1969), p. 682, ll. 145–6. Lonsdale suggests that Goldsmith’s literary character in turn was probably modelled upon Goldsmith’s father (see p. 682, n. 140); thus the model for Clare’s ideal is consequently itself insubstantial, even if it might have had an historical reality of sorts. 54


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a letter of mid-1819, whose contents are reinforced in Clare’s ‘Autobiographical Fragments’: having had his poetic endeavours treated with disdain by a Rev. Twopenny, an infuriated Clare dashes off a personalised invective: Towpenny his wisdom is and towpenny his fame is Towpenny his merit is and towpenny his name is And as twopence is a trifle I may well do without him Ill sing in spite of twopenny and not care towpence about him58

Clare was also less than pleased by his correspondence with the Rev. James Plumptre (of whom more, below). Another of Clare’s encounters with a ‘religious’ representative was still more highly charged and personal. The earliest extant letter from Clare is addressed to J.B. Henson. When, in 1814, Clare first decided to ‘preserve’ what he wrote, it was from Henson’s shop in Market Deeping that he bought a ‘blank book’. This purchase led to Clare’s exposure to the public eye: ‘[Henson] was rather inquisitive to know what I wanted it for and on getting flushd with ale I dropt some loose hints about dabbling in ryhmes and he expressd a desire to see some’.59 In 1818, Henson printed Clare’s ‘Proposals for publishing by subscription a Collection of Original Trifles’, but when he demanded £15 to print a volume of Clare’s poems (adequate subscribers not being forthcoming), Clare abandoned the plan. Henson and Clare fell out quite badly once Clare began to gain more recognition and (as Henson saw it) left the printer behind, and the episode forms one of the infamous chapters of Clare’s biography. However, the relationship between the two men was not based purely on literary pursuits. Clare writes in his ‘Autobiographical Fragments’ that Henson had known him before the purchase of the ‘blank book’, ‘by seeing me often at the chappel at Helpstone for I was then fond of hearing the Independants and was much happier then perhaps then I have been since’.60 Clare also writes of Henson: when he first came to deeping he was a religious man belonging to the congregational dissenters or Independants and then did some dirty doings with sathan or at least the doings were exposd by accident for they are worldly doings and tho preachd and reprobated every sunday by religious of all persuasions they are common to her every family … he was turnd off from his profession of clerk to the Independants61

58 See John Clare By Himself, p.109. As Storey notes, Cowper made a similar play with the name: see Letters, p. 12, and Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford, 1979–86), i, pp. 298–9. 59 John Clare By Himself, p. 102. 60 John Clare By Himself, p. 103. 61 John Clare By Himself, p. 104.

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This double disenchantment seems to have affected Clare more deeply than the collapse of their business relationship, leading Clare to portray Henson in The Parish through the figure of ‘Old Ralph the veriest rake the town possesd’ (l.579), who, despite his ‘new birth’ (l.583), an ‘old sinner ends’ (l.642).62 On the other hand, there were many among the clergy to whom Clare was grateful. One of his earliest extant letters describes how ‘A Clergyman of the Church of Engld. props’d raising a Subsn. for me’.63 Elsewhere, the Revd Isaiah Knowles Holland (a Congregational minister at Market Deeping between 1815 and 1820 who Clare first met in 1819) is described by Clare as ‘the first Encourager of My Obscure productions’.64 Certainly, Holland seems to have been a great champion of Clare in the early days of his endeavours. Despite the fact that, according to J.L. Cherry, Octavius Gilchrist (whom Clare liked and admired) took Clare to task for associating with Holland, Clare ‘warmly resented this interference’,65 and acknowledged Holland ‘Preacher as well in practice as in trade’ in the dedication of ‘The Woodman’ (EP.II.287–96), written for inclusion in The Village Minstrel.66 In a letter to Taylor dated June 1821, Clare lists those people who ‘encouraged’ him, and a large proportion are clergymen.67 Clare received frequent mail from clerics. When, for example, James Hessey (the partner of Clare’s publisher, Taylor) sent Clare a pamphlet by the Reverend Brooks of Retford, Nottingham, Clare admired its sentiments. On 8 May 1824, during an extended period of depression, and around the time that he is working on The Parish, Clare writes to Taylor that he has received a letter from Brooks, and, noting the similarity between his own and the clergyman’s respective religious stances, he tells Taylor that the Reverend appears to him ‘an enlightened & what is far better a good man’. He goes on: ‘I heartily thank him for his kindness.’68 Despite his apparent lapses from ostensible orthodoxy, Clare was also on good terms with his own vicar, Mr Mossop, remarking in a letter of 1830, ‘Mr Mossop our Vicar has been uncommonly kind to me in my illness’.69 (Aside from pleasing coincidences in thought, Clare’s gratitude for more concrete assistance, and the vicar’s respect for Clare’s verse, it is unsurprising that Mossop found a good companion in Clare. James Obelkevich records that, ‘unless he enjoyed additional income … the clergyman was much less well off than a landlord … From the landlords, whose education was similar, he thus was separated by his inferior income, and from the 62 The identification is originally Robinson’s: see ‘Introduction’ to A Champion for the Poor, p. xxxiii. 63 Letters, p. 11: Clare rejected this help. 64 Letters, p. 6. 65 J.L. Cherry, Life and Remains of John Clare (London, 1873), p. 22. 66 See Letters, p. 17. 67 Letters, pp. 192–4, and see, for other examples of clerical interest, Letters, p. 108; p. 296. 68 Letters, p. 296. Brooks’s letter survives in the British Library Egerton Collection of manuscripts: see Egerton MS 2246, fols 334r –337v. 69 Letters, p. 516.


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farmers, whose income was similar, by his superior education, while from the labourers, the majority of his parishioners, he was doubly separated by income and education alike.’70 Clare and Mossop no doubt found in one another a rare, well-read interlocutor.) On Clare’s trips to London he came into contact with a wider range of acquaintances, and through them, with yet others. One of the members of the socalled ‘London Magazine circle’ whose friendship Clare greatly appreciated was Henry Francis Cary (clergyman, translator, periodical contributor, and, from 1826, an officer of the British Museum). A letter from Cary to Clare of February 1825 reveals him to be precisely the kind of cleric that Clare admires: concerned for the welfare of his correspondent; aware of his own fallibility; self-effacing; gently laughing at his own hypocrisy even as the very fact of his letter demonstrates that he is far from a hypocrite: I have been reproaching myself some time for not answering your last letter sooner; & as I am telling my congregation this Lent that it is no use to reproach oneself for one’s sins if one does not amend them, I will mend this. I will freely own I should not have felt the same compunction , if you had been in health & spirits, but when I find you so grievously complaining of the want of both, I cannot leave you any longer without such poor comfort as a line of two from me can give. I wish I were a Doctor, & a skilful one, for your sake. I mean a Doctor of Medicine. For though I were a Doctor of Divinity, I doubt I could recommend to you no better prescription in that way than I now can as plain Mister. Nay it is one that any old woman in your parish could hit upon as readily as myself, & that is patience & submission to a will higher & wiser than our own. How often have I stood in need of it myself & with what difficulty have I swallow’d it & how hard have I found it to keep upon my stomach. May you, my friend, have better success! If you do not want it in one way, you are sure to have occasion for it before long in some other.71

One of the most entertaining of the extant letters to Clare, this time from Thomas Bennion, offers us a glimpse of the friendly, bantering debate into which Clare and Cary entered, simultaneously suggesting that Clare did not confine his criticisms of the clergy to his writing. Bennion begins by describing a meeting he has had with Eliza Emmerson, shortly after Clare has visited London: ‘Mrs E—you know who i mean … commenced her conversation in the usall Theatrical Manner respecting you, first by enquiring if you had not disgraced yourself very much the night you dine with the contributer of the London Mag’. The ‘theatrical manner’ Bennion attributes to Mrs Emmerson is wonderfully reminiscent of her 70

Obelkevich, p. 114. 19 February 1825, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 452r–v. Cary’s mental health was affected by the death of one of his daughters in 1807, and this illness was to recur later in his life; as a consequence, it is tempting to identify in this element of Cary’s biography an extra reason for fellow-feeling between the two men. 71

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own letters to Clare, liberally punctuated as they are with exclamation marks and underlinings. Bennion’s gleefully mischievous depiction sets the tone for the rest of the letter: Mrs Emmerson next has brought the conversation round specifically to the intercourse that has taken place between Clare and Cary, asking if you had not given great offence to the Revd Mr C— by saying you wish’ed the churches where all in ashes and the parson’s sent to beg their bread, i told her I did not hear you say it, and if you did some excuse was to be made for you as you might be a little fresh, i told her that Mr C— was on very good terms with you so i was sure that he was not offended she said she heard you was very D— I told her it was not so you was very Merry She said she had heard all this from a friend that you had told, and that she was very sorry to think you was so strong a deist i told here you was [‘very’, crossed through] but a little way inclined to deisem’72

This is an exquisite sketch, by proxy, of an apparently gloriously drunken evening that Clare has spent with the ‘London Magazine circle’, and Mrs Emmerson’s shocked response to a report of it. The letter is more interesting for these purposes, however, because it suggests the facility with which Clare can be considered (by Bennion at least, and, we assume, Mrs Emmerson is giving some credence to what he says) to be ‘on very good terms’ with a clergyman whose living he has been suggesting should be destroyed. Cary, like many of his contemporaries, went into the Church to satisfy his family, rather than because of a personal sense of vocation; indeed, having been disappointed in a desire to obtain a fellowship at Oxford, he subsequently had wished to join the army before his father stepped in; it is not difficult to understand why such clergymen would have been more inclined than certain others to discuss issues of faith and belief in a rational and apparently irreverent manner. The light tone here (a tone set by Bennion in echo, we must assume, of the tone of the evening itself) does not of course diminish the fact that Clare has been – to paraphrase Bennion, as we do not know exactly what Clare said – demonstrating an inclination towards deism. In this sense, the underlying implications of Bennion’s letter are significant to this book, and this is certainly not the only instance when Clare’s attraction to deism is apparent. Such an attraction highlights his propensity to have faith, even when he cannot accept the validity of the Established or other churches; it also further emphasises his sporadic – or at least, sporadically expressed – rejection of organised religion. Having said that, as I will consider more fully, below, this letter should not be taken as direct evidence for Clare’s deism in the sense that we might understand it. Yet although, as a later chapter of this book will demonstrate, it is literary influences rather than pious sermons which seem to persuade Clare’s mind to accept a more specifically Christian faith (and the distinction between Christian faith and Christian religion is important, as I have said), it is noteworthy that Clare feels able to explore this serious ‘inclination’ with a clergyman of the Church, and in the 72

21 July 1822, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 88 r.


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course of an evening decidedly unserious in tone. Bennion’s letter, like the various instances of Clare’s comments on tithes, mentioned above, is important because it lays bare the complexity which characterises the picture of Clare’s response to religion: here, that response is made in one particular context, and in one particular tone; elsewhere (in The Parish, for instance, and in numerous comments scattered through Clare’s prose manuscripts) both context and tone are notably different. This does not indicate that contributions are any more or less important, relatively speaking; it merely underlines the diversity of the approaches Clare takes to the subject, and the variety of places in which we find his comments manifest. Declarations of indebtedness to members of the clergy are strengthened in Clare’s ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, and he certainly encourages his children to show respect before clergymen: ‘Look upon the Clergy with reverence for they are Gods servants’.73 Clare was grateful for the friendship of many clerics, able to separate those who take advantage of their office (behaving like ‘a savage under the mask of religion’74) from what he sees as the honour due to that office. That I have included Clare’s dealings with Holland and Henson is indicative of the fact that those mentioned are not necessarily Church of England ministers (although many certainly are). Clare’s interest in the religious denominations that Holland, Henson and others represent is vitally significant to the evolution of his faith, and his experimentation with alternative groups forms the subject of my next chapter. Yet even when he praises other groups, he is careful to remain publicly loyal to the Church: ‘no Inovations on Religion & government say I’.75 Careful, perhaps, because of a very particular political climate; but that an evidently geniune affection exists which is to some degree the consequence of the former role of the Church in society, its tradition and rituals, and to some degree the consequence of Clare’s admiration of fundamental Christian precepts easily separable by Clare from Church dogma and creed (an admiration explored in a later chapter), is undeniable: it is the Christian Church of England and thus is deeply entrenched in Clare’s affections. Despite (and frequently alongside) his various divergences from orthodoxy, and in the face of the vitriol he periodically aims towards it members, Clare thus insists: ‘still I reverence the church’.

73

A Champion for the Poor, p. 290. A Champion for the Poor, p. 282. 75 Letters, p. 110. 74


Chapter 2

‘I have joind the Ranters’: Alternative Denominations and Groups

I never did like the runnings and racings after novelty in any thing, keeping in mind the proverb ‘When the old ones gone there seldom comes a better’. The ‘free will’ of ranters, ‘new light’ of Methodists, and ‘Election Lottery’ of Calvanism I always heard with disgust and considered their enthusiastic ravings little more intelligable or sensible then the belowings of Bedlam.

The Parish’s angry, sad attack upon ‘The Progress of Cant’ is not confined to the Church of England, and it is interesting in the context of the above passage to return to the poem, bearing in mind that the epitome of good religious deportment in Clare’s work is firmly in the past, and to assess how contemporary options might have appealed to the poet in its stead. In the autobiographical Sketches in the Life of John Clare (1821), Clare depicts himself as an orthodox Anglican in the statement with which my previous chapter began and ended: ‘still I reverence the church and do from my soul as much as any one curse the hand thats lifted to undermine its constitution’. Mark Minor claims that this passage excuses Clare’s earlier critics (in particular, the Tibbles) for their ‘unsatisfactory’ account of the association of Clare with the Methodists. It is, however a weak excuse. If we read the lines preceding the above quotation, we learn that Clare himself doubted his religious propriety: ‘In matters of religion I never was and I doubt never shall be so good as I ought to be’. Such extracts confirm that Clare is not as orthodox as the previous quotation seems to suggest. Yet Clare’s evident affection for the Church of England proves less difficult to reconcile with his apparent deviation from it than has been proposed. Methodism and Dissent Mark Minor identifies letters which indicate Clare’s attachment to a Methodist group at least two years before the writing of the Sketches, and a secession from the Wesleyans in late 1819, and goes on to demonstrate that Clare ‘rediscovered and rejoined the Wesleyans some five years later, at a time when it has been assumed he was interested only in the Primitives.’ Minor’s article is structured around the

John Clare By Himself, p. 30. John Clare By Himself, p. 30. Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 32. Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 32.

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claim that Clare deliberately suppressed evidence of his attachment to groups of religious Dissenters, as ‘a strategic move to ensure that his career prospered’ in the contemporary political climate. However, largely because of his repeated conflation of Dissent and Methodism, Minor’s assertions regarding Clare’s ‘Methodism’ are unstable. The use of a word such as ‘Methodism’, particularly with reference to the Methodist Movement of Clare’s lifetime, should be viewed with caution. The identification of ‘Methodism’ as a branch of the Dissenting tradition has both political and religious ramifications which need to be assessed, and the temptation neatly to package ‘Methodism’ as a part of the tradition of Dissent has led to a false representation of the denomination and its effects in discussion of Clare’s experience. In A Short History of Methodism, John Wesley describes early Methodists as ‘zealous members of the Church-of-England’, and claims that they were ‘not only tenacious of all her doctrines, so far as they knew them, but of all her discipline[.]’ The passage insists that ‘those who remain with Mr. Wesley are mostly Church-ofEngland men. They love her Articles, her Homilies, her Liturgy, her discipline’, and according to Wesley, his people remained members of the Church unless they dissented positively from its worship and Sacraments. In a journal entry of 15 October 1739, he recognised that, theologically, there was no difference between Methodism and ‘the plain old religion of the Church of England’. He insisted that only the emphasis had changed, being now aligned with an Arminian message of the love of God. Despite this inherent connection between Wesleyanism and Anglicanism, Methodists became increasingly unwelcome at parish communions, and Wesley’s desire, that the connection between Methodists and the Church be maintained, became progressively more difficult to satisfy. By 1812, 182,947 Methodists were recorded as meeting in Britain and Ireland; still there was no formal act of separation between the Methodists and the Established Church, and the Book of Common Prayer was closely followed in the Methodist Book of Offices. It was not until 1843 that there was a ‘revolution in attitudes’ towards disestablishment. Yet despite the consistent adherence of Wesley and his followers to the Church, the name of ‘Methodism’ repeatedly has been conflated with the label of Dissent, and this misperception has gravely impeded those critics who have attempted to take a more catholic view of Clare’s experience: religious generalisations have obscured For a more detailed exploration of various factors relevant to Clare’s experimentation with alternative denominations and groups, see my unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, ‘John Clare and (Dis)organised Religion’ (Cambridge University, 2000). Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 3rd edn, 14 vols (London: Mason, 1829–31), VIII (1830), 348–50 (p. 348). The Journal of the Reverend John Wesley, ed. N. Curnock, 8 vols (London, 1909– 16), II, 293. Anthony Armstrong, The Church of England, the Methodists and Society, 1700– 1850 (London, 1973), p. 198.

‘I have joind the Ranters’

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an accurate insight into the sentiments of Clare regarding his orthodoxy. Eric Robinson claims that, when Clare states in Drakard’s Stamford News in January 1820 that his father ‘was brought up in the communion of the church of England, and I have found no cause to withdraw myself from it’, the poet tells ‘only part of the truth’. It is true that Clare does experiment with other religious groups for a time; but if Clare’s desire was to join Wesleyan Methodists, he would have found no cause to withdraw from the Established Church on religious principles even during this experimentation. Clare’s honesty need not be challenged if we understand the denomination as an unorthodox element within the orthodox system of Anglicanism. This must be borne in mind when considering Clare’s responses, explicit and implicit, to organised religion. Who are the ‘methodists’ Clare mentions explicitly? The question of who the Methodists were more generally in the early nineteenth century is unanswerable. Even if an accurate record of nation-wide chapel attendance existed (and one does not), it would exclude what David Hempton calls the ‘band of denominational gypsies of no fixed abode.’10 As Robert Colls concludes, there was never one ‘Methodism’, but ‘many Methodisms in many places and times.’11 In 1799, the Bishop of Lincoln commissioned a report on one hundred of his parishes. Hempton summarises the three groups of ‘Methodists’ therein distinguished as: those who professed membership of the Church of England and attended sacraments within the Church; those who had gradually moved outside the Established Church and administered their own sacraments; and those wild men of popular religion whose ignorance, superstition and anti-establishment rhetoric made them thoroughly undesirable. They were the Ranters who had their base in cottage prayer meetings, and who operated most successfully within a highly charged spiritual atmosphere. 12

These ‘Ranters’ are described as politically ‘dangerous’; such political implications have connections to the label of Dissent, and this perceived political threat is one of the characteristics shared by many of the new religious groups. Nonetheless, they are distinct, and we should be wary of the conflation of different traditions. Having mentioned the political nature of the early nineteenth-century Church, we cannot ignore that of other groups. Organised religion outside the Church of England, as well as being to a large extent responsible for increasing consciousness of the politics of the Church, was simply by virtue of its opposition to the Establishment widely regarded as ‘political’. To join an alternative denomination

The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 18. David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750–1850 (London, 1984), p. 12. 11 ‘Methodism and the Common People’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1981), pp. 354–62 (p. 357). 12 Hempton, p. 77. 10

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was, unavoidably, a political act. Hempton points out that ‘Methodism was unfortunate in making “its first, well-publicised appearance in many areas during the Jacobite scare of the 1740s”’,13 and an article in the Quarterly Review for December 1824 suggests a continued connection: ‘That in many places the religion has not been able to eradicate the foul taint of political Jacobinism; that the bitterness of dissent has worked and fermented with the leaven of discontent and sedition, is not to be wondered at.’14 E.P. Thompson argues that ‘We might suppose, from some popular accounts, that Methodism was no more than a nursing-ground for Radical and trade union organisers’.15 Hempton insists that ‘the ministerial leadership closed ranks to defeat “Methodist Jacobinism”’,16 although whatever the leadership might have said, the example of William Stephenson (struck off the local preacher’s register for speaking at a radical meeting, and later claiming that ‘since three-quarters of local Methodists were radical reformers, his expulsion would create havoc within the connexion’17) clearly points to some justification for the accusations of radicalism. As Armstrong observes, ‘The fulsomeness with which official Methodism displayed its loyalty indicated a basic uneasiness.’18 But as soon as the Toleration Bill was secured, the Methodist Committee of Privileges decreed that ‘no persons who are enrolled as members of those dangerous Private Political Associations which are now prevalent in the Disturbed Districts of our Country, should be allowed to be Members of our Society’,19 and certainly it was not the case that all members of unorthodox groups were politically ‘radical’. Henson, for example, Clare’s ‘Old Ralph’, was an Independent, and belonged to some very conservative associations.20 Clare’s description of Justice Terror (‘Ranters & Methodists his open foes / In person & in sermons hell oppose’, The Parish, ll.1476–7) shows that Clare naturally separated ‘Methodism’ from its breakaway sects such as ‘Primitives’, ‘Jumpers’, ‘Tent–’, ‘Magic–’, and ‘Quaker Methodists’, ‘Bryanites’, ‘Bible Christians’ and ‘Independents’. All of these (and more) could be referred to under the blanket 13

Hempton, p. 32. See also Norman, pp. 31–2. ‘New Churches—Progress of Dissent’, Quarterly Review, 61, in vol. XXXI (London: Rowarth, 1825), p. 244. All further references to the Quarterly will be to this series of volumes. 15 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963; 1980), p. 45. 16 Hempton, p. 71. 17 Hempton, p. 106. 18 Armstrong, pp. 193–4. Hempton turns to the work of Hobsbawm, to propose that ‘Methodism and radicalism grew in roughly the same places at approximately the same time for broadly similar reasons. One was simply a religious, and the other a political, expression of more profound changes in English society.’ (Hempton, p. 74. See E.J. Hobsbawn, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), pp. 23–33.) 19 See Hempton, pp. 104–7; see also Norman, p. 20. 20 I am grateful to Eric Robinson for information on Henson. 14


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term, ‘Ranters’. One of the main features distinguishing the loose class of ‘Ranters’ from Wesleyans was a greater perceived political threat. If the Wesleyans were understood to be a threat to the Establishment, tainted with Jacobinism, the Ranter sects were categorically painted in radical colours. It has become commonplace to say that Wesleyan Methodism was a religion for the poor, but Primitive and other breakaway sects were religions of the poor. In the words of Thompson, ‘We can scarcely discuss the two Churches in the same terms.’ And yet, Thompson goes on to show that in rural areas, Methodism ‘of any variety necessarily assumed a more class-conscious form’, because a non-Church focus of worship was a direct affront to parson and squire, and worse, it was one in which the labourer gained new self-respect and independence.21 Those who encouraged this behaviour or participated in it could be accused of seditious intent, and hence the connections between radicalism, Methodism, and Dissent were cemented. Clare was almost certainly not a radical in the sense of a politically active figure.22 He undoubtedly rebelled against the excision of his work derided as ‘radical slang’ by Lord Radstock, but this same excision was a price that he was ultimately prepared to pay to secure a slice of literary fame. Furthermore, his ‘political’ outbursts generally originate in a sense of personal outrage, he or his family having been touched by injustice, rather than from a sense of wider political philanthropy. This personal element is accompanied by other practical factors. To publish in a ‘radical’ newspaper, for example, is not necessarily to espouse its cause wholeheartedly: rather, it might be to seize a chance to get into print. Similarly, as John Lucas justifies his assertions of Clare’s radicalism with the claim that the early poems ‘use exactly the language of popular radicalism that can be found in radical newspapers of the time’,23 we should consider that Clare read anything he could get his hands on, and in the absence of a more constant, less various influence, it is inevitable that his language is marked by all of this literature. Again, Lucas writes that ‘the closing lines of “The Flitting” make use of language and image which are best understood if we recognise that they are expressions common to popular radicalism’,24 and we must agree about the source of the images, but we should also acknowledge that they are not necessarily adopted solely for political 21

Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 436–7. For approaches to Clare’s politics (and fuller bibliographies), see Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke, 2003); Vardy, ‘Clare and Political Equivocation’; John Lucas, ‘Clare’s Politics’, and John Goodridge and Kelsey Thornton, ‘John Clare: The Trespasser’, both in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 148–77 and 87–129; see also Lucas’s John Clare (Plymouth, 1994), and ‘Peasants and Outlaws’, in England and Englishness (Iowa, 1990), pp. 135–60; Eric Robinson’s ‘Introduction’ to A Champion for the Poor; and Leonora Nattrass, ‘John Clare and William Cobbett: The Personal and the Political’, in Goodridge, ed., Independent Spirit, pp. 44–54. 23 Lucas, in Clare in Context, p. 155. 24 Lucas, in Clare in Context, p. 171. 22

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reasons, but perhaps also for literary ones. Another crucially important factor is that documented by Thompson in Customs in Common, a Gramscian contrast between ‘the “popular morality” of folklore tradition’ and ‘official morality’. One might have a ‘contradictory consciousness’: ‘one of praxis, the other “inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.”’25 In his provocative review of the ‘Introduction’ to A Champion for the Poor, Alan Vardy warns that ‘The great danger … in attempting to label Clare’s political views, is that we risk losing their complexity, texture and fluidity. Apparent contradictions may in fact be instances of political positions too subtle for the terms we bring to them.’26 Because, as we have seen, they cannot fully be separated, this notion holds both for Clare’s religion and for his politics. We can only, therefore, hope to compare Clare’s comments and experience with other historical accounts, and to suggest potential similarities and differences. Clare entered into debates, but his antipathy towards party politics, its self-interest and spin, allowed a very individual perspective. The best study of Clare’s political attitude is Johanne Clare’s: her balanced account of Clare’s ‘radicalism’ concludes that Clare ‘was distrustful of and almost entirely disengaged from most forms of political dissent’, and that ‘he appears to have been willing, on at least a few occasions, to express an attitude not only of indifference to political radicalism but of outright condemnation.’ She goes on: He was frightened by any form of political activity which seemed to feed, and feed upon, the extreme polarizing drift of English political life. He believed that reform was needed, and well understood that there were extremists on both sides. But he blamed certain reformist initiatives for the worst polarizing tendencies of the early 1830s.27

As these conclusions suggests, moderation is key. Methodism and Enthusiasm A sketch of the relationship between ‘Methodism’ and society will allow us to see more clearly the relevance of ‘those people called Methodists’ to the life and faith of an agricultural labourer-poet. Methodists of all kinds did deride many forms of popular recreation, yet they lacked much of the contempt for art and feeling of earlier Puritans, and although it is impossible scientifically to assess the bearing that Methodism might have had upon the contemporary current of ideas, it would 25 Customs in Common, p. 10. Lucas discusses this concept in his ‘Clare’s Politics’, p. 149. 26 Vardy, ‘Clare and Political Equivocation’, p. 46. 27 Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston and Montreal, 1987), pp. 18, 20.


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be difficult to deny that Wesley’s denomination comprised an important part of an Arnoldian ‘current of true and fresh ideas’. Early Methodism was not only a belief system, but a method of living, heralding new forms of expression and new ways of imaging nature and conceiving ‘personality’, which impacted on all levels of society to a greater or a lesser extent. All Methodists displayed a relative egalitarianism (though Wesley’s own rule was highly autocratic): at Primitive meetings, a labourer might rebuke his master, and lay persons, including women, could preach alongside ordained clergy. (It’s worth remembering, however, that the perception of social equality in ‘Primitive’ groups, and especially this idea of labourer-to-master rebuke, could only succeed if masters joined the meetings; this was not always likely, for, as Armstrong points out, quoting the Methodist Recorder of 1920, ‘It was said that Wesleyans and Primitives were not of the same social grade’, with ‘the farmers in the Wesleyan Church and the labourers in the Primitive Methodist Church.’28 The attraction of ‘levelling’ must have been reduced where membership was formed by one, already ‘level’, social group.) Given that one of the complaints against Anglicanism was that a congregation could be encumbered with the same inadequate man for generations, the rule of itinerancy of the Methodist clergy may have offered another incentive to its membership. The Methodists encouraged tolerance and love. Their emphasis on communication, self-expression, and simplicity in language combined with a recognition of folk traditions (which found one significant outlet in the metrical arrangements of the Wesleyan hymns) and superstitions to demarcate the denomination as very different from the staid old Church. Carrying derogatory connotations, the term ‘enthusiastic’ repeatedly and persistently attached to the religious deportment of Methodists; this trait is one of the most significant in Clare’s interaction with the denominations. Although Wesley hoped to distance his movement from the term, the felt experience of astonishment or transport was one of the strongest characteristics of the emergent Methodism, and it relentlessly attached to all manner of evangelical groups. Wesley’s insistence upon reason and emotion constituted an alternative (and, to many, attractive) path through the Age of Reason (Blake, for instance, whose importance to the evangelical tradition is now widely recognised, commended the works of Wesley: Wesley’s appeal to reason with emotion, to the passion of feeling in the aftermath of the Augustan age, gratified his own religious sensibilities, fulfilling that in religion which he hoped to achieve in art). To a prevailing current of ‘Sentiment’, Methodism added the powerful emotions of religion. These emotions were those arising from the experience of the members of Wesleyan congregations; ‘real’, they were not merely read about in sacred texts, reinforcing ‘the individual’. Inside Clare’s copy of Gastrell’s Christian Institutes, Lord Radstock has scrawled: ‘Beware, beware, beware of Enthusiasm, it being the most dangerous enemy that true Religion has to encounter.’ Johnson’s dictionary definition of enthusiasm quotes from Locke: ‘Enthusiasm is founded neither on reason nor on 28

Armstrong, p. 199.

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divine revelation, but rises from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain.’ In his Evidences of the Christian Religion, Addison is similarly critical: ‘The two great errors, into which a mistaken devotion may betray us, are Enthusiasm and Superstition.’29 This enthusiasm is a danger to men: when Murray’s review of Scott’s ‘Tales of my Landlord’ in the 1817 Quarterly Review states that ‘enthusiastic nonsense, whether of this day or of those which have passed away, has no more title to shelter itself under the veil of religion than a common pirate to be protected by the reverence due to an honoured and friendly flag’,30 the piratical imagery serves to demonstrate that enthusiasm appeared as a dramatic, threatening spectre overshadowing religious life. Declamations of ‘enthusiasm’ were not confined to prose: George Darley’s Errors of Ecstasie31 is a wonderful example of a poetic attempt to lead the reader away from such excesses. Darley became familiar to Clare principally through his maths books, but the pair also corresponded. Reading his verse (‘Sleep is not joy! / ’Tis impercipient! Certainly. Nor woe!’32), we might hope that it was in maths that Darley’s talent lay. However, his poem-conversation between ‘Mystic’ and ‘Moon’ is a glorious meltingpot of common criticisms of enthusiasm, and the perceived instability of faith arising because ‘Ecstasie, rash production of the thoughts / To what right sanity would never lead, / Doth spread a dark confusion o’er the brain’.33 Similar motifs are employed by numerous others whose work Clare knew well. Clare himself condemns the immoderation of the ‘enthusiasm’ of Ranter Methodists, claiming to prefer ‘calmness quiet cheerfulness and love’ (The Parish, l.563) in religious observance, and criticising ‘Ralph’ because he ‘forcd men to prayers and women into fits’ (l.606). Suspicions about the authenticity of enthusiastic fitting is also paraded by Clare’s ‘Justice Terror’ (not a voice Clare represents as his own), as he vocalises Bishop Lavington’s fear that Methodists replicated the gravest extremes of medieval Catholicism with their revelations, visions, and ecstasies ‘in all but sense’ (l.1479). However, this similarity to the Bishop’s suspicions regarding the genuineness of Wesleyan enthusiastic transport is noteworthy, because in October 1820, the Quarterly Review criticised the way in which Bishop Lavington’s Enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists Compared accounted for Wesley’s incitement of enthusiastic symptoms of frenzy in others. The Quarterly asserted that, in accounting for these ‘symptoms’ as ‘imposture in the patients themselves, or in Wesley,’ and in insinuating ‘various abominable means by which such effects might be produced in persons of weak nerves, or susceptible temperaments’, the Bishop ‘entirely mistook the character of Wesley himself, and did injustice to, by far, the greater number of these religious convulsionaries.’34 By Clare’s moment, then, 29

Joseph Addison, Evidences of the Christian Religion (London, 1809), p. 177. Quarterly Review, January 1817, in vol. 16, p. 475. 31 The Errors of Ecstasie (London, 1822). 32 Darley, p. 8. 33 Darley, pp. 28–9. 34 October 1820, in vol. 24, pp. 36–9 (p. 37). The review is of Southey’s Life of Wesley (a favourite book of Clare’s). 30


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even the Quarterly is prepared to accept that such affective religious response may be genuine. These opinions were shared by two of Clare’s more respected guides, his publishers, Taylor and Hessey. On May 6 1824, Hessey wrote to Clare, inviting him to London for the good of his health (and in particular to visit Dr Darling). Perhaps because Clare previously had expressed a desire for it, Hessey also points out that ‘You will also have an opportunity of becoming acquainted with a class of men into whose way your former pursuits have not much led you, the serious clergy of the church or of the dissenting party, or both. I could much have wished that you had in your own neighbourhood some persons of the former description’.35 Hessey’s acknowledgement of the desirability of an intellectual engagement with faith issues stems from a conviction that it is a ‘delightful thing’ for ‘a man to be made the instrument of spiritual life to his Parents, his Wife, his Children, his Friends, his Neighbours! and such in all probability you may be’. In the absence of ‘this class of men’, though, Hessey is glad that Clare has joined an ‘enthusiastic’ group: … as you have not [been acquainted with some of the serious clergy] I am pleased that you have even joined any body of religious people who are really in earnest – your good sense will preserve you I trust from their extravagances … I would rather see you too warm than too cold, and lukewarmness is worse than all … The chief danger among persons of the class you have joined is that from encouraging too much appeals to the feelings they suffer their passions to be wrought up very highly, and when the passion cools, as cool it must, they find it necessary for the appearance of consistency, to keep up a very high profession with very little feeling – & this either is or becomes hypocrisy … Prayer is the great preservation against presumption on the one hand and lukewarmness on the other, and I hope you will be enabled to persevere in the constant and fervent use of it …36

In April of the same year, Taylor had similarly suggested that ‘authentic’ enthusiasm might not be that bad: As for joining the Ranters, you do right to get real practical Religion wherever it can be found. I am not at all afraid of your plunging into the Excesses of Enthusiasm nor indeed are there any Excesses to be dreaded except those which are a Cloak to Wickedness. In this case Enthusiasm is the grossest and most damnable Hypocrisy.—But where it is innocent & well intentioned, I can find no great Fault with Enthusiasm, & I believe but little will be found hereafter.—I am sure it is far better than Coldheartedness.37 35

06 May 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 340r. 06 May 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fols 340r–341r . 37 Letters, p. 291. 36

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These defences are indicative of a more widespread increase in tolerance. Notions of enthusiastic revelation are to be found in Young and in Akenside and in many of the other poets whose works are found in Clare’s library, several of them the gift of the conservative evangelicals who were his benefactors. Clare’s favourite, Cowper (another protestor against clerical abuses, and a defender of orthodoxy), was an ‘enthusiast’, defending ‘fanatic frenzy’, yet he recognises with Clare its frequent exploitation: ‘But sage observers oft mistake the flame, / And give true piety that odious name.’38 The tide of opinion ebbed and flowed: although terms of ‘enthusiasm’ were frequently intended as insults, its derogatory connotation was not always intended. Ultimately, Clare doesn’t see anything wrong with ‘ecstasy’, only with those who abuse it: ‘& it is with religion as it is with every thing else its extreames are dangerous & its medium is best – enthusiasm begins in extravagance degenerates into cant & hides at last into hypocrisy’.39 If at one point he fears the excesses of the Ranters, and criticises their deportment,40 and if ‘Enthuseism baffles not befriends’ in The Parish (l.1469), elsewhere, Clare envies ‘true’ enthusiasm: I have joind the Ranters … there is a deal of enthusiasm in their prayers & preachings & manners but as it is real & not affected it is not to be found fault with but commended my feelings are so unstrung in their company that I can scarcly refrain from shedding tears & when I went to church I could scarcly refrain from sleep41

We see the desire to share in the enthusiastic ‘manners’ of the Methodists (Clare is not here referring to Wesleyans, but to ‘Ranters’), alongside complaints about the same behaviour. Clare repeatedly is torn between his desire both to be and not to be part of an enthusiastic sect, as we see in a letter from the same period (Spring 1824) to Taylor: doubts & unbelief perplex me contin[u]aley … I much fear that I shall never feel a sufficiency of faith to make me happy the sincere & enthusiastic manners of the methodists in devotion puts my glimmering consience to shame … they like shouting & ranting far better42

Clare often figures the things that disturb him as noisy; here, ‘shouting & ranting’ is a problem because it distracts from an admired preacher, William Blackley, a 38 The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford, 1995), i, 370. 39 The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 21. 40 See for example The Prose of John Clare, ed. by J.W. and Anne Tibble (London, 1951), p. 226. 41 Letters, p. 294. 42 Letters, p. 296.


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Wesleyan Methodist preacher on ‘our circuit’ (the Stamford Methodist Circuit). In the same letter, Clare remarks on the similarity between this man’s way of speaking and Taylor’s own: Clare writes that this Wesleyan Methodist ‘is a favourite of mine’ for whom he ‘felt an affection … the moment I saw & heard him’, noting his ‘persuasive tenderness of speech’; Blackley is described as ‘a good scholar’, who ‘likes to talk about books of which he has a general knowledge’.43 But the above quotation is critical, because it offers an example of Clare’s persistent, endless thinking about religion; it demonstrates that Clare wants to believe; and, even when he doubts (and he certainly doubts at times), part of him almost always does have a certain kind of faith: ‘I have [ ] apathy about me that looks on the powers of hells & heavens as mysterious riddles & Death as an animal consequence I hope its not heathenism—I hope its not worse but so it is’.44 Clare’s very ‘hope’ here undermines the idea of a complete loss of faith. It is the manifestations of Christian religion, ‘bad Christians’, that Clare criticises and struggles with. And as Clare is writing The Parish he is also working on The Shepherd’s Calendar and other descriptive poetry, littering his verse with ‘rapture’; ‘enthusiasm’; ‘extacy’: these and their cognates are words with a specific contextual valence of which Clare was very well aware. ‘Twas natures beauty that inspired / My heart with rapture not its own’ (MP.III.479–89, ll.117–18): in Part II of this book, I will return to the notion of rapturous ‘enthusiasm’ and its connection to ideas of inspiration, nature and sublimity, positing them as vital tributaries of Clare’s faith and belief. Clare’s Methodism We have seen Clare’s admiration for William Blackley, a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, over and above those Methodists who ‘like shouting & ranting’, and Clare greatly esteemed John Wesley as a man: ‘the character of Wesley is one of the finest I have read of they may speak of him as they please but they cannot diminish his simplicity of genius as an author and his piety as a christian I sincerely wish that the present day coud find such a man’.45 Perhaps it is this admiration for Wesley which leads to the events Clare records in the following passage: after this I turned a methodist but I found the lower orders of this persuasion with whom I assosiated so selfish narrow minded and ignor[ant] of real religion that I soon left them [and] sank into m[ethodist] sects agen I som times thought

43

See Letters, p. 296 and n. Letters, p. 277. See also Letters, p. 414. 45 John Clare By Himself, p. 197. See also pp. 10–11. 44

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John Clare’s Religion seriosly of religion and in one of my moral reflective moments found the Methodists but I found them [incomplete]46

These lines suggest that ‘methodist’ here refers to the ‘Wesleyans’ (at least, those who professed to follow Wesley), as opposed to the ‘methodist sects’, those which go by the same name, but different creeds. The word ‘sank’ is interesting: Clare is implicitly acknowledging that his audience of readers will view the movement from the first group to the second as socially or politically regressive. Hence we must understand the movement to be from the (more conservative) ‘Wesleyans’ to other, more radical groups. (Should the last substituted word be other than ‘Methodist’, the sense of my argument remains unaltered: Clare is recording a movement from a Methodist group to another sect perceived as inferior to the former.) This impression is bolstered by the fact that it is not the principles of the first denomination he rejects, but the followers: the specificity of description of those he meets insinuates that his discontent is for personal rather than doctrinal reasons. (Elsewhere, again, he writes that the Methodists’ ‘founder was rather credolous but I believe him a good man and reverence his Memory his followers, both in preaching and in practice, have brought his principles into disgrace’:47 as in Clare’s depiction of Anglicans, it is the deportment of contemporary Methodist Christians, rather than Methodism or Christianity, which is problematic.) And even as he counts himself as one specific type of ‘Methodist’, he seems to be using the term to encompass a plurality of groups: he turns away from them because of faults with their ‘lower orders’. (Similarly, in a letter to Taylor, Clare tells his publisher that ‘sure enough some of the lower classes of dissenters about us are very decietful & in fact dangerous characters especialy among the methodists with whom I have determind to assosiate but then there are a many sincere good ones to make up …’)48 Clare’s sentences about his experiments with methodisms go on, but are badly torn. Eric Robinson reconstructs them thus: ‘they believed every bad [opi]nion [except about] themselv[es] [Henson] the preacher then of [Market Deeping]’.49 The sentence here peters out, but should the edition be correct, we can be confident that it is the Independents, Henson’s group (more radical than some, less radical than others), that put Clare off. (Should it not be, the extract at least does nothing to undermine the readings prompted by earlier passages.) In April 1824, Clare writes to Hessey that he has ‘enlisted in their [the ‘Ranters’’] society’. But even as he claims membership, he does not count himself as part of the group: ‘this is how they keep the Sabbath … they meet to pray … they join the Class … they hear preaching … they meet agen …’ (my emphases). He also is distracted, complaining ‘they are a set of simple sincere & communing christians with more zeal then knowledge earnest & happy in their devotions O 46

48 49 47

John Clare By Himself, p. 133. John Clare By Himself, p. 11. Letters, p. 292 (after Sat 3 April, 1824). John Clare By Himself, p. 133.


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that I coud feel as they do but I cannot their affection for each other their earnest tho simple extempore prayers puts my dark unsettld consience to shame’. Yet this claim to be unable to share in their devotion exists in the same letter in which Clare claims to be ‘unstrung’ as he gets caught up in their services, thanking God ‘that he has opend my eyes in time.’50 Again, a ‘methodist’ group fails to provide the comfort sought, leading only to confusion for the already seriously depressed poet. In his own words, ‘creeds all differ yet each different sect / From the free agents to the grand elect / … thinks his own as right & others wrong / & thus keeps up confusions babel song’ (The Parish, ll.539–44). Perhaps hence come Clare’s personal and direct attacks on religious figures in The Parish. Most reprehensible to Clare are ‘Dissenting’ sects which believe calvinistically in the existence of an ‘Elect’: ‘A chosen race so their consciet woud teach / Whom cant inspired to rave & not to preach’ (The Parish, ll.493–4). Clare’s opposition to such antinomianism is evident in a letter to Taylor of April 1824: I have not answered Hessey’s last letterI delayd it to have some doubtfull passages in our dissenters creeds here explaind but I can see thro the vulgar errors that blinded them & correctly find their origional notions myself it was respecting their ignorant notions of tenets which they stile ‘Free Grace’ ‘Election’ & ‘Predestination’ things that are far better kept out of the way of the ignorant who interpret them to suit their own purposes & make religion grossly rediculous by such abuses51

As early as line 3 of The Parish, Clare attacks Dissenting preachers for ‘The cant miscalled religion in the saint’, ‘saint’ being contemporary slang for the adherents of the fanatics. But ‘saint’ implies ‘elect’: this, then, is a label for calvinistic, rather than Wesleyan, belief patterns. Old Saveall, who is ‘vexd by better men / That beard hypocrisy with honest grace / & tears the mask from cants decieving face’ is scorned because ‘in religion he is made elect’ (ll.430–33). Again, this election indicates that Clare refers to a calvinistic sect. There were branches of ‘Methodism’ which drew upon calvinistic antinomianism (including the followers of Whitefield), but Wesleyans advocated a human note of potential universal redemption. The practices disliked by Clare are those of extremist Ranters rather than the followers of Wesley. In the course of his discussion, Minor quotes from the correspondence of Edward Drury, the cousin of Taylor’s who had acted as the link between Henson and Clare’s eventual publisher. Drury writes that ‘The Methodistical people who alarmed me at first, were piqued at his secession from their society’.52 Drury’s letter is to Taylor, regarding ‘discoveries with respect to Clare’s character’ (implying that Taylor had set Drury to checking that Clare was not a ripe target for an unfortunate 50

Letters, p. 294. Letters, p. 293. 52 MSS of this letter dated (in different hands) ‘about Dec 20’ ‘1819’. 51

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smear campaign). For Minor, this letter provides conclusive evidence that Clare had been a regular communicant with the Primitives, but had recently left their society. Yet Minor does not consider that ‘Methodistical’ in this context may merely be an epithet applied by Drury, simply for reason of appearance or of sentiments expressed by the group. Hempton remarks that ‘Serious Methodists could be recognised by their dress, hairstyles and physical detachment from the world of revelry, sports and dancing.’53 Clare designates James Plumptre ‘A Methodistical Parson’,54 yet Plumptre is certainly not a Methodist, and that ‘Methodistical’ is here employed as an adjective infers that one should be careful not to accept it as a straightforward statement of affiliation when it appears in Drury’s letter. Another important omission from Minor’s consideration is simple village politics: ‘society’ can mean a sect, but equally might mean ‘company’. Minor neglects to mention that Drury’s letter goes on, describing how other people consulted (including Clare’s employers, his neighbours and the people with whom he lodged) spoke of Clare ‘with terms of goodness, not in highflown praisings that may be doubted, but in simple and sincere commendation.’55 These character witnesses are as much part of Clare’s ‘society’ as those ‘Methodistical people’. Perhaps Clare fell out with the group met by Drury on purely personal terms, for reasons not associated with worship or doctrine, just as he first quarrelled with Henson over printing, rather than Henson’s ‘dirty doings with sathan’. It is clear that Minor sees a direct connection between Methodism and Dissent, and implicitly and decisively separates ‘Methodism’ from the Church of England.56 His correction of a mistake made by the Tibbles, and his printing of an alternative text (supported by Storey’s edition) for a letter to Taylor from early April 1824 are valuable.57 However, his subsequent discussion is too quick to turn supposition, posited as such, into similar fact. As Minor records, in 1822, Clare suffered from an intense preoccupation with and fear of death. Minor posits Clare’s ‘spiritual crisis’ at this time as productive of the attack on Dissenters in The Parish, as well as of his re-affiliation with their movement eighteen months later.58 But Minor again ignores that the ‘Dissenters’ in The Parish are by no means automatically to 53

Hempton, p. 14. See Robinson’s ‘Clare and Plumptre’. Emphasis upon the individual and a personal relationship with God increased the equation of evangelicalism with Methodism, but although the Evangelical Revival and Methodism can be seen as two aspects of one general move towards the revival of ‘spiritual’ religion within the Church, they are merely two fruits of the same tree. Interestingly, Methodists were considerably more orthodox than some evangelicals, yet the conservative evangelicals remained beneficed clergy of the Church, whereas the Methodists did not. 55 NMS.43, no. 9. 56 See ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 34, for examples of this conflation and separation. 57 Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, pp. 43–4. 58 Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 42. 54


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be associated with the Wesleyan Methodists. Elsewhere, Minor writes that Clare ‘indicates he has been frequenting the services of the “methodists,” whose “sincere & enthusiastic manners” he finds admirable. His calling them “methodists” should warn us that he does not mean the Primitives’.59 That Minor’s point is controversial is illustrated as Robinson writes it off in an (unfortunately unexplained) footnote to his introduction to The Parish: ‘Unlike Minor, I take these to be Primitive Methodists.’60 I think that Clare uses the term ‘Ranter’ to refer to any relatively radical, non-Wesleyan branch of Methodism, and uses it to refer to more than one such, and to more than one position within each group, so that the word never has a precise referent. Such problems with slippery terminology cloud the important information that is contained within Minor’s article. His account of Clare’s ‘Methodism’ is an important historical document, functioning as a useful summary of Clare’s association with the Methodists of his time, Methodists of all kinds. Unfortunately, Minor’s decisive conclusions are made unsteady because the terminology employed by Clare cannot definitively tell us which branch of nonconformity he refers to on any occasion. A note appended to the manuscript of The Parish in early 1823 claims that the poem ‘was begun & finished under the pressure of heavy distress with embittred feelings under a state of anxiety & oppression almost amounting to slavery … but better times & better prospects have opened a peace establishment of more sociable feeling & kindness—& to no one upon earth do I owe ill will’.61 Minor finds this declaration inadequate to explain the ‘acrimonious tone’ of The Parish’s references to ‘Methodists’, adding: ‘Nor in fact does it account for Clare’s turning again to the very Methodists whom he vilifies in the poem only a little over a year after its completion’.62 But surely it is yet one more strain upon Clare’s mind that the disturbing, widespread novelty (novelty is almost always disturbing for Clare) of the increasingly popular Free Churches and the faulty behaviour of preachers of all denominations collides with his admiration for the tenets of Methodism, producing just such an unsettled series of responses. Clare’s depiction in The Parish of Old Ralph / Henson, ‘the veriest rake the town possesed’ (l.579), echoes his ‘To a Methodist Parson’ (EP.II.85–8), a poem containing the same sequence of hypocritical seduction by a figure of authority (and one which will be explored more thoroughly, in my next chapter): the preacher is in the dock again. The Parish’s Dissenters are also criticised because: Some with reform religions shade pursue & vote the old church wrong to join the new Casting away their former cold neglects 59

Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 47. The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 19, n. 2. 61 EP.II.698. These words are written through earlier lines, not at present decipherable, which might have contradicted these sentiments. 62 Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 41. 60

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John Clare’s Religion Paying religions once a week respects They turn from regular old forms as bad To pious maniacs regular[l]y mad (ll.487–92)

But these ‘pious maniacs’ are ‘A chosen race so their consciet woud teach’ (l.493): as believers in antinomianism, they are not to be associated with the Wesleyans. They are also Christians who ‘cast away’ their former faith (l.509), whereas the desire of the Wesleyan Methodists was to stay within it. What Clare claims to see as the purpose of religion (‘Its essence is to aid our hopes above’, l.564) is precisely what he seems to recognise at his own moment only in the behaviour of a very few clerical figures (including Isaiah Holland), and in Wesley’s teaching. So where are the followers of Wesley in The Parish? ‘Religion never more calm beauty wears / Than when each cottage joins in sunday prayers / The poor man in his ignorance of ill / His Bible reads with unpretending skill’ (MP.IV.151); ‘Religions truth a plain straight journey makes’ (The Parish, l.555): through these fragments, we see that Clare connects ‘true’ religion with what is ‘plain’, or unaffected. The ‘good old Vicar’ (l.1605) of former days (or rather, of Clare’s ‘ideal’) was ‘simple’ and worthy to be called a man of God, and the religion he taught consequently also worthy; the contemporary Established Church is corrupt and hypocritical because its clergy and officials cause it to be so; the Ranters are similarly two-faced ‘upstarts’, only worse: they are inspired by ‘consciet’ (l.493). Yet criticism has ignored the defence of contemporary religious figures within The Parish. It is undeniably brief, but it is highly significant. Still there are some whose actions merit praise The lingering breathings of departed days Tho in this world of vainess thinly sown Yet there are some whom fashion leaves alone Who like their master plain & humble go & strive to follow in his steps below Who in the Wilderness as beacons stand To pilgrims journeying to the promised land To give instructions to enquiring souls & cheer the weak above the worlds controuls To tend their charge & wanderers back restore To rest the weary & relieve the poor (ll.1714–25)

Who are these ‘plain and humble’ folk who offer ‘instructions’? We might recall Hempton’s comments about the sober deportment and dress of the Wesleyan Methodists. Furthermore, because these figures ‘go’, because they ‘strive to follow in his steps’ and are as beacons to ‘pilgrims journeying’, these ‘lingering breathings’ seem almost to be ‘wandering’ themselves. Alongside Christ, and also the ghosts of Isaiah Holland, Cary, and Clare’s ‘greyheaded’, ideal Anglican


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parson, one cannot help but think of Wesleyan Methodists, desperately trying to remain within the Church of England, adoring still the old liturgical worship. Thus in The Parish, both Anglican and Dissenter are revealed as unworthy of holding God’s office as they are compared with the religious leaders and practices of Clare’s idealised past. Clare famously does not need to be within earshot of a Sunday pulpit to be near to God, and remembers escaping from the confines of church as a child: ‘I have often absentet my self the whole Sunday at this time nor coud the chiming bells draw me from my hiding place to go to church’.63 But such absences from a long and tedious service do not equate with a rejection of Christian belief. He simply considers himself better off in the fields,64 and, as usual, derides what he sees as the irrelevant extremism of others: ‘The Ranter priests that take the street to teach / Swears god builds churches where so ere they preach / While on the other hand protestant people / Will have no church but such as wears a steeple’ (The Parish, ll.535–8). Clare laughs at the same sentiments again when he puts them in the mouth of ‘Mrs Slinkum’: Talk of plays said Mrs Slinkum there is no plays like sermons & no play house that can compare to a church & the very reason that I don’t like the new religions chappels is that they are without steeples & so much like a play house that it is utter heatheness to preach the gospel in places where there is no steeples & to pretend to go to church where they chime no bells our Vicar would think it foul scorn to open his Bible in such new fashioned places […]65

Certain of the Free Church preachers frequently spread the Word in open-air settings. Is it not then odd that these too are painted as ‘Sunday morning Christians’ in The Parish? No, because it is a wider sense of deportment that is important to Clare. In ‘Songs Eternity’ (MP.V.3–5) we see Clare propounding a method of praise ‘in’ nature. But Clare’s God is present even when Nature is overcome, ‘When floods covered every bough’: still present, and still figured in natural terms. This is an idea that will be investigated more fully in a later chapter; more pertinent here is the poem’s first stanza. Here, Clare ‘removes’ religion from society’s ‘noise & bustle’, the accepted methods of Christian worship (‘Praises sung or praises said’), even whilst presenting his verse in an hymnodic stanzaic form. He suggests that there is more to faith than such public worship; that in the words of stanza V, ‘Pride & fame must shadows be’: ‘Praises sung or praises said / Can it be / Wait awhile & these are dead / Sigh sigh / Be they high or lowly bred / They die’. Is it a conventional memento mori? Do the praises die, or the praisers? Or is Clare diminishing as irrelevant the

63

John Clare By Himself, p. 7. See pp. 000–000 above on Clare’s Sunday ‘truancy’. 65 PMS.A42, vol. 1, p. 24. 64

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difference between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Christians?66 The ambiguity is peculiarly effective, even if it is unintentional, managing simultaneously to contain derision of the importance of rank and of inter-denominational squabbling, and of the idea that public praise is true worship. Clare’s central concern here is the same as in the opening stanza of ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ (MP.V.105–14): the conventional, social worship of these hebdomadal Christians is not truly religious. So, then, Clare’s explicit comments display intense interest in organised Christianity; he is not simply the puppet of whim. But we cannot know how far practicalities presented obstacles to his exploration of various denominations. There are several aspects of Wesleyanism of obvious attraction to Clare. New notions of personality and emotion; the employment of familiar, unpretentious language and of folk traditions in hymns and in issues of superstition; a love for the natural world and for learning, and a reverence for the liturgical worship of the Church of England: all of these must have constituted a direct appeal to Clare’s priorities. Emphasis upon equality must particularly have tempted Clare, who was thwarted even in love by his social status. Methodist movements were characterised by itinerant preachers and irregular, even rare services in many areas. Just as Clare was attracted to the gypsies with whom he came into contact, these aspects of the faith may have appealed to his sensibilities even as they simultaneously thwarted his attempts to ‘follow’ one particular group. It is implausible that Clare would have been attracted to puritanical Methodist condemnation of drinking and bawdiness, and it is pleasant to imagine that he probably would have been amused at the location of Helpston’s Primitive Chapel (which was next door to the pub). In general, however, it is Whitefield and his like that are parodied most in the literature of the period as ‘kill–joys’, whose brand of ‘Methodism’ introduced a very different type of preaching to that of Wesley. Because Methodism has been misrepresented in Clare studies, Clare’s erratic affection for the Methodists has been seen as more odd than it actually is. According to his own terminology, Clare joined some ‘Ranters’ (although we must not forget that the details of the group are inconveniently hazy, and the terminology might not be similarly applied by modern historians of Methodism), but he was looking for ‘text book’ Wesleyans. The complex politics which the blanket term ‘Methodism’ hides has rendered it obscure that Clare was deeply attracted to the central tenets of Wesleyan Methodism, but that he found religious figures of all kinds, including contemporary representatives of John Wesley, to be profoundly inadequate. We should not confuse this with a dislike of Methodism per se any more than we should interpret Clare’s criticism of modern representatives of the Established Church as a rejection of that institution in (what Clare understands to be) its ideal state.

66 We should remember, however, that ‘The epithet “Low Church” was not levelled at evangelicals prior to 1833.’ (Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 [Cambridge, 1994], p. 32.)


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Denominational Diversity The denominations and sects with which John Clare might have come into contact during his lifetime were manifold. Others, he would probably have been familiar with only by repute. Clare is relatively direct, for example, about his ill-feelings for the Catholic faith when he records in his Journal in late May 1825 that ‘The Catholics have lost their bill once more and its nothing but right they shoud when one beholds the following Sacred humbugs which their religion hurds up and sanctifys’. He goes on to list a variety of relics he has found catalogued in a copy of Nugent’s Travels, including ‘A bundle of hay which the three wise men had for their cattle and left behind them at bethlehem’, ‘A piece of the head belonging to the fish mentioned in Tobit’, and ‘A piece of the apron which the butcher wore when he killed the calf upon the return of the prodigal son’.67 Such relics represent for Clare an aspect of a ridiculous, obfuscatory ‘mystery’, which should not pertain to faith, and which will be discussed in Chapter 4. Perhaps also it is the stylised nature of the Catholic faith that he rejects, or perhaps when he does make comments he is simply writing to appease in a very particular political climate. (Certainly, elsewhere, he is less severe. In a sketch for a novel entitled ‘Vicar’s Sermon’, Clare’s mouthpiece laments: ‘O that people should quarrel oer their creeds Catholics why there are thousands of what men call Heretics who are better men then I who have done more good to their countrys then I can ever do for my cure & who have done more charitys in a day then I could do in a life time’.68) It would be naïve to suggest that a comprehensive survey of all the different religious groups Clare may have encountered would be possible, but as a final example of their potential variety one might briefly consider the possible connection between Clare and the Quakers. Fox’s ‘Society of Friends’, established in response to the perceived failure of ‘Christians’ to live up to their professed beliefs, has no books, set prayers, words or rituals, believing ‘true’ religion to be beyond these ‘empty’ forms. Divine revelation is had through experience and inward revelation, and peace. Recalling the etymology of the society, Charles Lamb records his own witnessing of ‘the old Foxian orgasm’,69 and prefaces his gentle essay on ‘A Quaker’s Meeting’ with lines from Fleckno, dated 1653: ‘With thy enthusiasms come, / Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!’70 These accounts (which Clare knew) indicate why Quakers were frequently understood to be an ‘enthusiastic’ group. Significantly, and not without reason, Quakerism maintained a half-connection with radicalism in the public consciousness: in the early stages of their foundation they had strong connections with the radical cause, and as an unorthodox group they were inevitably regarded with suspicion. Yet, as Thompson writes, ‘In 1792 the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting of Friends urged on its members 67

69 70 68

John Clare By Himself, pp. 229–30. A Champion for the Poor, p. xlix. Charles Lamb, ‘A Quaker’s Meeting’, Essays of Elia (London, 1891), pp. 62–7 (p. 66). Lamb, p. 62.

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“true quietude of mind” in the “state of unsettlement which at present exists in our nation”.’71 This insistence upon peace is very much in accord with Clare’s own fearful dislike of mob violence. Certainly, then, the group holds obvious attractions. Whether or not because Clare had read in Lamb and in Fox’s Journal of Quaker belief and practice, he is inspired to write the following commendation of their comportment: Of all the different sects that differ from church going give me for humility & meekness the quakers the primitive quakers not the hard phisionomy of worldly cunning which we often encounter peeping under a colourless coat & creeping from under a large broad brimmed hat72

Elsewhere, a man is likened to the Quakers in an inadvertent compliment: ‘he seemed by his dress to be an autograph of the sect called quakers which he resembled in every thing but christian charity & meekness’.73 (The compliment was indirectly returned: ‘There was much about Clare for a Quaker to like; he was tender-hearted, and averse to violence.’74) Eric Robinson has pointed out, in a letter to me, some evidence that there may have been a concrete connection between Clare and the Quaker movement. This includes a reference to a Mr. H– –––P (Hislop or Heslop perhaps) at Stamford, who, Robinson believes, must be a Quaker. Another reference lies in a footnote to LP.I.328, to a letter ‘from James Atkins … a Northampton nurseryman, Secretary of the Northampton Horticultural Society in 1832, and a leading member of the local Society of Friends)’: Atkins describes a visit to Clare. Robinson does not of course suggest that these articles provide any kind of proof, but knowledge of Quaker belief and practices, matching Clare’s ideals, must have further added to the plethora of opportunities for religious communion (in its broadest sense) with which Clare was presented. The old Established Church, ‘Where Eloquence & learning preaches / Where Wisdom Sense & reason teaches’ (EP.I.426, ll.59–60) is gone, and the new Established Church, as the Free Churches are, is full of hypocrites: ‘those who go to church’ are never ‘the better saints’ (MP.V.105). Wesley’s movement is ‘new’, it is true, and newness is almost always detrimental for Clare. It yet maintains a love for the old ways of the Church, and the ‘novelties’ it introduces are of a type which must have appealed to the poet. And even Wesley (who died in 1791, two years before Clare’s birth) is a figure of the past now: this can only increase his appeal for Clare, perhaps at the cost of contemporary followers. I suggest that Clare samples various nonconformist sects because he is looking for a denomination that literally follows the doctrines of Wesley, including and especially the adoration of the old 71

73 74 p. 115. 72

Thompson, English Working Class, p. 33. Tibble ed. Prose, p. 227. A Champion for the Poor, p. 285. Thomas Hood and Charles Lamb: The Story of a Friendship (London, 1930),


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Established Church, because, knowing the ‘ideal’ to be inaccessible, he recognises in that denomination the closest extant approximation to it. His document of those trials seems frustrated, because he cannot find a group that precisely fits the criteria. Nonetheless, he cherishes the criteria themselves, knowing they exist in minds other than his own, and desiring to find and join their adherents.75 Yet it would be wrong to present Clare as an adherent of any one church. His is never religious apostasy, but always assimilation. This is hardly surprising when one considers that, as my next chapter will explore more fully, the village Church at Clare’s moment encompassed a range of beliefs which it itself explicitly rejected: integration is thus an implicit part of the rural experience of faith. But it is also the result of Clare’s thinking about his own faith and about contemporary Christianity, and his remaining acutely aware that, in Heaven, ‘there will be no methodists no {dissenters} Independants no church folks or Chatholics’.76 Such willingness to accept a plurality of religious opinions as equally valid is characteristic of Clare’s liberal habit of mind. Ironically, though, this particular tolerance is engendered by the very disillusionment provoked by his exploration of religious groups and traditions. His recognition of the human fallibility of even the best of those who presume to call themselves Christians reflects back on the denominations and traditions themselves, leaving Clare disillusioned, searching (there still is, after all, a Heaven), but unable to find a group in which he might settle, and thus always on the edges of organised religion, looking in.

75

Compare Bamford’s description of his father and uncle, in the context of their reading Paine: both ‘had left the society of Methodists, but to the doctrines of John Wesley they continued adherents so long as they lived.’ (Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days, ed. by Henry Dunckley, 2 vols (London, 1893), I, 52.) 76 A Champion for the Poor, p. xlix.


Chapter 3

‘he sets his face against all mention of fairies’: ‘Alternative Beliefs’ and Evangelical Zeal

Amongst Clare’s ‘Autobiographical Fragments’ is a description of a journey home from work. Like all of the best stories, this one begins on a dark, dark night. Clare has been helping to bring in the harvest, and the urgency of the task has meant that his work has continued well beyond the end of the normal working day; having stayed to supper with his fellow harvesters, his homeward journey has been further delayed. Thus, at the time we join him, it is midnight: it is the witching hour. Clare writes: home … was but the distance of a short mile; but I had a terror haunting spot to cross called Baron parks, in which was several ruins of roman camps and saxon castles and, of course, was people[d] with many mysterys of spirits the tales were numberless of ghosts and goblings that were seen there, and I never passd it without my memory keeping a strict eye to look for them; and one night, rather late, I fan[c]yd I saw something stand wavering in the path way; but my hopes put it off as a shadow, till on coming nearer I found that it was something; but wether of flesh and blood was a question my astonishd terrors magnified it into a horrible figure it appeard to have ears of a vas[t] length and the hair seemd to hang about it like [ ]

(here, there is a gap in the manuscript, but Clare goes on): I trembld, and almost wishd the earth woud open to hide me I woud have spoke; but I coud not, and on attempting to pass it I gave it the road and ran off as fast as I coud; and on stopping at the stile to look were it was my increasd terror found it close at my heels I thought it was nothing but infernal now and scarce [know]ing what I did I took to my heels; and when I got home I felt nearly fit to dye I felt assurd that ghosts did exist and I dare not pass the close next day till quite late in the day when every body was abroad

There are several aspects of this account which offer important insights into Clare’s experience of the supernatural, interpreted as such. Perhaps most important is

John Clare By Himself, pp. 45–6.

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the knowledge and acceptance of an inevitable population of spirits around the ruins of the park’s earthly concerns. This knowledge, moreover, comes from a repository of communal memory, which operates independently of individual volition: ‘memory’ keeps its own eye out, just as autonomous ‘astonishd terrors’ frighten Clare; in such ways, his account highlights the lack of personal agency in the creation of fear, and the weight of tradition on his experience. The imposition of a web of interpretative tools over events to find meaning is partly related to this: so, for example, the common folkloric belief that the devil runs at one’s heels is seen at work, convincing Clare that the ‘it’ giving chase is ‘infernal’. The tenor of the language in which Clare describes his experience is also important. His astonishment, terror, trembling and his subsequent feeling ‘nearly fit to dye’, which contains relief within the residual fear, all partake of the essentially sublime experience which is central to Clare’s observation of the natural world, and his reflection upon it. In this chapter, I want to give a flavour of one aspect of Clare’s faith, which, like all other aspects, forms part of his quotidian experience: his confidence in superstitions and ‘alternative beliefs’. Community rituals and festive traditions also intrude into this discussion, because it is partly through them that these beliefs emerge and are propagated (they are also connected because the same mechanisms that render ‘alternative beliefs’ ‘alternative’, the same habits of recording and legislation, are those blamed for the decline in festive ritual). I don’t want to suggest that any ‘belief’ in this (religious) sense could be not superstitious; while I have hoped as far as possible to avoid implicit value judgements, it is difficult to assemble such research without misrepresenting the nature of its subject. But the familiar absence of a neutral point of view becomes particularly pertinent here, because it is a problem that Clare shared, feeling his increasing separation from his village neighbours with painful keenness. ‘Superstition’, of course, was a multifaceted term in Clare’s own moment, having been exercised in the atheism debates of the preceding era, in eighteenth-century political discourse, and through the revolution discourse of the 1790s and the early nineteenth century. I don’t want to give the impression that Clare was unaware of these discourses: he certainly wasn’t, and records his enjoyment of some of those texts in which those debates were performed (Erasmus Darwin’s work, with which Clare was ‘highly pleased’, provides an example, though it is notably the ‘passages of uncommon harmony & beauty in them particularly his descriptions

The importance of an appreciation of a ‘sublime’ in consideration of Clare’s faith is discussed in Chapter 6 of this book; for a discussion of its more general (and vital) significance to Clare’s poetry, see my ‘“Enkindling ecstacy”: The Sublime Vision of John Clare’, Romanticism, 9.2 (2003), 176–95. See for examples Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1999), and Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997).

‘he sets his face against all mention of fairies’

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of nature or scenery more properly speaking’ which prompt Clare’s praise). In a climate of freethinking, atheism and revolutionary infidelity, superstition becomes something to be pulled down, along with the ‘religion’ it is held to describe. But ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ are both things that Clare upholds, so here, because it is relevant to Clare, I am using the terms to refer to those beliefs outside the lines of ‘officially’ sanctioned religious structures, although, as I’ll discuss below, those lines are far from definite, and certainly not impermeable.

‘Village Faith’: Living Suspiciously We can only understand Clare’s perception of the Church and other contemporary religious groups if we appreciate ‘alternative belief’ as a phenomenon within them. This is an element of religion necessarily excluded from The Parish by virtue of its essentially autochthonous status. It is clear that Clare’s culture was rich in such systems (The Shepherd’s Calendar, effectively written alongside The Parish, provides a fine example, with ‘January’ full of superstitious tales, ‘May’ full of spells, and the ‘Signs’ and ‘Ghosts’ of ‘July’), but historical sources delineating them are notoriously unreliable. Contemporary accounts like Clare’s by those participating in such activities are rare. Other extant accounts tend to have been drawn by folklorists or county societies, interested from an antiquarian standpoint. Clare’s culture is to such accounts a living embodiment of a quaint past, and thus available descriptions lack the essential ordinariness that is fundamental to their character. In considering the religious influences upon Clare we cannot ignore these aspects of his culture, which Clare normally refers to as ‘superstitions’, because such beliefs are precisely not ‘alternative’ within Clare’s local community, within his ‘knowledge’, and within his faith. In ‘Haunted Pond’ (1807–8, EP.I.285–90), Clare recounts a tale which recurs in his work: ‘The Fate of Amy’ who (unsurprisingly) haunts a local pond. Although Clare does make one concession, midway through the poem, to the falsity of superstition (‘superstition the weak mind decieves’, l.49), he is more concerned to emphasise the strength and terror of this ‘agent of Nights solemn hour’ (l.2), and opens with the invocation: ‘O superstition terrifying power’. The piece is convincing as a record of personal experience, which is informed in part by ‘wis[e] tutors’, the ‘Learning’ of the ‘aged dames’ of the village: as Clare narrates in a poem of 1821, ‘& listning to the Haunted tales they told / My very blood within me curdld cold’ (EP.I.286–7, ll.52–60). Having established the vigour and intensity of such ‘superstition’, Clare defines it as part of the religious life of his neighbours: ‘Which village faith as stren[u]ously believes’ (l.50, my emphasis).

Letters, p. 403. See Priestman, Romantic Atheism, on Darwin’s place within the ‘atheism debate’. See for example EP.I.270–84.

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Some recent historical enquiries have addressed the neglect, and asserted the importance, of certain ‘alternative beliefs.’ The dominant trend focuses on witchcraft (which has a different status from forms more commonly mentioned by Clare), and Clare’s accounts contradict some of the conclusions reached by such historians; nonetheless, their discussions remain useful. Bob Bushaway has described a consistent framework of local belief in widely different communities, ‘which lay outside the experience of the representatives of official knowledge and belief but which coexisted with the formal agencies of church and education.’ Discussing the attempts of one contemporary clerical enquirer to chronicle the characteristics of this framework, Bushaway records both the reluctance of his parishioner-informants to discuss their beliefs with the clergyman, and how all of the interviewees referred to ‘things that had been, and were real, and not as creations of the fancy, or old-wives’ tales and babble.’ It is not hard to find evidence which supports this statement, either in Clare’s work or in a much wider context, and Bushaway’s account is extremely useful as far as it goes, but I want to suggest that these beliefs do more than ‘coexist’ with the ‘formal agencies’ he mentions. For one thing, far from being decisively separate from the Established religion, the Church was physically central to many alternative belief rituals, and vice versa, and never more so than in the divination rituals (like that of ‘Watching’ in the Church Porch) which pepper Clare’s verse. The autobiographical works of poet-weaver Samuel Bamford offer another example. Bamford (born in 1788, five years before Clare) details various superstitious rites, and goes on: ‘As for the Parish Church of Middleton, every one in those days admitted that there was not a rood of earth around it which was not redolent of supernatural associations. My poor aunt Elizabeth no more doubted these things than she did the truth of every word betwixt the two backs of her Bible.’ This (deeply religious) Aunt Bamford has earlier been remembered for a conviction that ‘something not exactly “of this world” was stealing the beer from the buttery.’10 The sprite in this case is of course Bamford himself, but the extract illustrates the nature of such supernatural beings:

See for example Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester, 1999), and ‘Methodism, the Clergy and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic’, History 82 (1997), 252–65; Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 2001) and The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996); and Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony, and Community in England, 1700–1880 (London, 1982). Bob Bushaway, ‘“Tacit, Unsuspected, but still Implicit Faith”: Alternative Belief in Nineteenth–Century Rural England’, in Harris, ed., Popular Culture, pp. 189–215 (p. 190). Bushaway, ‘Implicit Faith’, pp. 189–90. Bamford, vol. 1, p. 142. 10 �� Bamford, vol. 1, p. 121.


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not quite of this earth, but not so very far from it, and perfectly acceptable to the most upright, observant Christian.11 They shouldn’t have been. The 1736 Witchcraft Statute had forbidden any member of the legislature, judiciary or Anglican clergy from formally expressing a belief in the existence of witches, sweeping up other ‘ignorant’ and ‘superstitious delusions’ with the same (definitely terrestrially bound) broomsticks.12 The official line was that ghosts, witches and goblins did not exist. John Wesley was one of the more influential critics of the statute, recording in May 1768 a vigorous defence of the belief in witchcraft: It is true, likewise, that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it … the wisest and best of men in all ages and nations … well know … that the giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.13

Nonconformists like Wesley were among the few of those with a public voice who did admit the existence of such phenomena. Confidence in their biblical sanction allowed Wesley to accept the stories related by the ordinary people he met. Of course, Wesley interpreted these ‘popular’ tales from a theological perspective, and placed the blame firmly on the devil. Encompassing superstition was one of the most significant ways in which Wesleyan Methodism appealed to prevailing traditions, and thus increased its popular appeal. Discussing James Obelkevich’s work on Lincolnshire rural culture, David Hempton finds that ‘Religious holidays and rites are given quasimagical interpretations … Even within popular religion … [and here he quotes from Obelkevich] “paganism was dominant and Christianity recessive”’.14 As John Rule’s work on Cornish tinners demonstrates, Wesleyan superstition replicated native superstitions.15 As the nineteenth century progressed, the more conservative branches of Methodism shunned this association. But the Wesley family even had their own ghost, ‘Old Jeffrey’, who noisily haunted their Epworth home. Methodism reached out into the world, and this translation of pagan to Christian

11

George Eliot’s comments in Adam Bede on the religiosity of ‘peasant superstitions’ provide an interesting parallel. 12 See Bostridge, pp. 184–91. It is significant, as he points out, that the loudest parliamentary opposition to the Act came from a Scot, Lord James Erskine. 13 The Journal of the Reverend John Wesley, vol. 5, pp. 265–75, entry for 25 May 1768. 14 Hempton, p. 27. 15 John Rule, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992), p. 149. See also Hempton’s discussion of Obelkevich (Hempton, pp. 27–8).

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tradition was matched by Methodist tolerance of notions of Providence.16 Such attitudes are important in relation to Clare’s attraction to Wesleyan Methodism; they also supplement the sense that Clare’s beliefs were ‘sanctioned’ by the religious figureheads he most admired. Discussing Obelkevich’s work, John Rule concludes that: ‘the “religious realm” of the rural poor reached beyond Christianity to “encompass an abundance of pagan magic and superstition” which was integrated with a Christian doctrine itself not left unchanged as it passed from church to cottage.’17 I think I would want to add ‘and back again’. But the language of appropriation and assimilation here is important. And despite the Witchcraft Statute, it was not only non-conformist ministers who worked within and around popular beliefs. Owen Davies has shown that the targets of the Act remained almost completely ignored by enforcers of law until the 1824 Vagrancy Act altered the official line.18 An extract from the works of R. Polwhele, a Cornish vicar writing in 1826, confirms the picture: Within my remembrance, there were conjuring parsons and cunning clerks; every blacksmith was a doctor, every old woman was a witch. In short all nature seemed to be united … In the last age some of the rusticated clergy used to favour the popular superstition, by pretending to the power of laying ghosts etc. etc. I could mention the names of several persons whose influence over their flocks was solely attributable to this circumstance.19

In this recollection of a ‘united’ community we can see something of the same structure of communal ‘sympathy’ that is to be found in Clare’s ‘ideal’ community. (It is also worth noting, in the context of the past-ness of Clare’s ideal, that the common view of the extracts I have quoted so far has been retrospective.) Adherence to the Church (be it nominal or practical) traditionally, comfortably and instinctively coexists with beliefs loudly rejected by the nineteenth-century established faith. In Clare’s sketch for ‘The Farmer and the Vicar’,20 we see two fine examples of members of this ‘community’: neither, by any means, is painted as perfect by Clare, but both depictions are amiable and affectionate. The farmer, ‘a good fellow’ who is of ‘the old school’, is deeply superstitious, and whilst his smiling friends call his superstition ‘an “innoscent weakness”’, and Clare himself describes it as a ‘failing’, the language in which he does so seems significantly less 16

See Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1934), p. 398. 17 Rule, p. 149. 18 See Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, Chapter 1. 19 R. Polwhele, Traditions and Recollections, vol. 2 (1826), p. 605, quoted in Rule, pp. 148–9. 20 Printed in John Clare: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford, 1984), pp. 438–44.


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authentic than the language in which he describes his own fears in, for example, the account of his journey home through ‘Baron parks’; moreover, the faith in witches and spirits, which the farmer hopes to keep away by hanging a horseshoe over his door, is just that celebrated by Clare in ‘The Village Minstrel’ (as is the same remedy). The vicar himself is ‘as superstitious’, ‘swallowing’ every story with ‘the most credulous faith’, and whilst he invokes the Witch of Endor as his proof and justification when he is laughed at by his neighbours, Clare’s description suggests an equivalence between the vicar’s ‘superstition’ and that of the farmer. This vicar’s fondness for worldly fun would no doubt have scandalised parsons of the James Plumptre mould: he was somtimes disposed to be merry and woud ramp with the servant wenches in hay time about the Cocks and rarely missed kissing them beneath the missletoe at christmass which he considered as a nessesary preface to good luck thro the year for like his old neeghbour [the farmer] he was a stickler for old customs— and it was whispered about the Village in his young days that he was fond of women21

(the ‘Cocks’ here are stacks of corn, but I think it’s obvious where Clare’s mind is leading him). This affectionate combination of superstition and custom is precisely that which Clare elsewhere celebrates. Superstitions and rituals were not necessarily confined to given times of the year, but they were often connected to them. Clare’s ‘occasion’ poems illuminate festive periods as times when communal superstitious rituals are performed, and thus propagated. Given the ‘superstitious’ aspects of many festive rituals, and the traditional connection of those festivities to the Church, it would be interesting to know to what extent the connection subsisted, and whether this effectively gave religious sanction to what could be violent and cruel pranks and scape-goating rituals, as well as superstitious (and of course, more innocent) pastimes. Some historical accounts insist that in the repeated confrontations of the seventeenth century, and the consequent politicisation of the issue, festival became fragile.22 This fragility, such accounts suggest, initiated the separation of festivities from the Church, even as in one sense it heightened their association with the ‘religious’. Focussing more exclusively on Clare’s own moment, historical accounts tend to conflict, although most agree on a decline in the connection.23 As Davies writes, ‘whether the Church liked it or not, until the tradition of popular magic itself 21

‘The Farmer and the Vicar’, p. 444. See for two examples Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), and Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton and Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, 1986). 23 See for example Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society,1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 74: ‘in eighteenth-century England … the Church was only peripherally involved in the traditional festivities of the labouring people … The 22

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declined, the church remained an integral element and focus of popular magic. Thus the Church of England, unwillingly, and often unwittingly, certainly contributed … to the survival of witchcraft and magical beliefs.’24 It might be fair to say, then, that the overtly religious elements of the feasts become no less implicit though they become less prominent; this implicitness marks Clare’s work. Persistently, tale-telling is represented by Clare as an integral part of his ‘ideal’ community: ‘old womens memorys never faild of tales to smoothen our labour, for as every day came new Jiants, Hobgobblins, and faireys was ready to pass it away’.25 Clare understands these tales to be intensely local, ‘Perhaps only known in these Places As my enquiry as never gained any hints of ’em elsewhere’.26 Nowhere are they more common than in Clare’s descriptions of community labour; and of all the aspects of these customs and their associated stories, it is the spooky ones that stick in the communal memory. When Clare considers from which customs one old ‘superstition’ might have sprung, he concludes the ‘customes … were all lost and forgotten long before I was born—yet the ghost stories conected with its lonely situation was as fresh as a dew fall … I would not pass such spots now at nightfal if I could help and to pass them at midnight between the twelve and one if wager was offered that [would] make me a gentleman I dare not win it’.27 In Clare’s writing, as in Polwhele’s recollection, popular superstitions are entirely contingent with the rest of life, including that of the (officially distanced) Church, and that inclusiveness is integral to the social system. Hence, the telling of superstitious tales is supported by the existence of the community, whilst their telling simultaneously contributes vitally to that community. So, Clare’s ‘Village Minstrel’, Lubin, tells of ‘joyful listning while the fire burnt bright / Some neighbouring laboure[r]s superstitious tale’, of ‘haunted tales which village legends fill’, of ‘gohsts’ and ‘tales of fairy land’, of ‘The freaks & stories of this elfin crew’, of ‘charms’ and of ‘superstitions’, and exclaims: & thousands such the village keeps alive Beings that people superstitious earth That ere in rural manners will survive So long as wild rusticity has birth To spread their wonders round the cottage hearth (EP.II.123–79, ll.77–122)

Clare here connects this ‘faith’ to simplicity, to ‘wild rusticity’ (‘wild’ here seems to counteract the potential clumsy, clownish connotations of ‘rusticity’). parish church still retained some association with recreational customs … most of these festivities had become … predominantly secular affairs.’ 24 Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, p. 16. 25 John Clare By Himself, p. 4. 26 Letters, p. 24. This is dated December 1819: already Clare is attempting to collect and collate. 27 John Clare By Himself, p. 48.


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Moreover, Clare exists at a particularly active moment of transformation: Polwhele’s recollections are dated 1826; the Vagrancy Act was passed in 1824; this is the decade in which Clare is writing The Parish as well as his Shepherd’s Calendar along with a mass of other work, much of which is preoccupied to some extent with Clare’s perception of social change. It is not difficult to conclude that the alteration, inspired by the Vagrancy Act, in the official approach to practices constituted one more, and one significant, cog in the mechanism of change which Clare laments as it turns (one small but important aspect of this change was that ‘superstition’, previously having meant an excessive fear of something real, begins to refer instead to the unreal). It would be foolish to suggest that there were within village communities clearly understood boundaries around sacred and secular. While participants in certain rituals would have been aware of barriers clergy were best kept from seeing over, those rituals were not necessarily seen as irreligious, and certainly not as evil, unless they were specifically calculated to harm. (As Ronald Hutton points out, even where the practices of ‘cunning people’ apparently assume blasphemous aspects, ‘the intention seems … to have been pious enough.’28) Even wicked practices would in any case be defined within a predominantly Christian frame of reference. The circumstances of the vast parish majority meant that religious faith for that majority equated with Christian faith: I in no way intend to suggest any intellectual inferiority, I simply refer to the relative lack of education or participation in ‘intellectual’ debate, or opportunities to discover alternatives to Christianity. If certain habits were more pagan than Christian, this was not because of a conscious effort to enact paganism, but because these actions were part of life, which was essentially a Christian life, and in that sense are Christian. Thus Clare describes a visit to an old woman who ‘Woud tell our fortunes both by cups & cards ‘Some calld her witch & wisperd all they dare ‘Of nightly things that had been noticd there ‘Witches of every shape that usd to meet ‘To count the starts or mutterd charms repeat (MP.I.173, ll.176–80)

He describes an array of ‘familiars’, claiming that ‘she to us appeard like other folks’, and that …if the old dames ways was darkly meant ‘I near saw nothing tho I often went ‘Deal as she might wi satans evil powers ‘She read her bible & was fond of flowers ‘& went to church as other people may ‘& knelt & prayd tho witches cannot pray (MP.I.175, ll.229–34) 28

Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, p. 102.

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He goes on to describe her making healing ointments and reading the stars, and declares: ‘& as to ill got knowledge of the sky / She was as innocent as you & I’. Having described her knowledge of what is, essentially, village folklore, he goes on: ‘She might know these which if its sin to know / Then every body is a witch below’ (‘The Sorrows of Love’, 1822–24, MP.I.165–88). Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he snorts that ‘their black arts was nothing more of witchcraft then the knowledge of village gossips’.29 Most recent historical investigations of witchcraft represent the witch primarily as a malevolent village presence; this is not at all what Clare’s account suggests. Even when he paints a more conventional picture of ‘beesom sticks’ ‘hurtling thro the air’, there is a simple and effective remedy (which his ‘farmer and vicar’ well know): ‘Still nurses have a spell they cant get oer / & oft the horse shoes seen naild on the village door’ (EP.II.145, ll.505–9). The only instance of negative accusation I have found is some ‘whisperd … supicions of suspected neighbours’, and this is effectively discredited as the product of a ‘s[i]mple’ mind.30 Apart from their role in the formation and history of community, superstitions play a further, regulatory role within village life. Supernatural tricks are seen to be ‘earned’, as ‘The Village Minstrel’ suggests: ‘The freaks & stories of this elfin crew … / How they rewarded industry he knew / & how the restless slut was pinched black & blue’ (EP.II.127, ll.105–9). They inspire effort in the home, ‘As fays nought more then cleanliness regard’ (l.113), but they also contribute to the resolution of more worldly concerns, through the existence of ‘haunted tales … / Of secret murder done & hidden gold’, and of ghosts Wanting to wisper in the peasants ear … For gohsts neer spake unless theyre spoken too … & had the hind a heart to thus pursue He might come in for ‘money wi out end’ Or bring to light some murder still unkend That justice might revenge & peacful lay The wandering sprite whose hauntings then will end (EP.II.127, ll.82–97)

Elsewhere, the same ‘justice’ is divine (see EP.I.17–18). To this we might compare Clare’s more humorous witch story, ‘The Lovers Journey(b)’ (EP.II.269–77): as night falls on ‘Robin’s’ journey to see his lover, his fear takes the forms his ‘granny’ has put into his head with her ‘tales’. The piece, however, becomes a mockery of ‘Robin’ (‘woe to his breeches / Twas one of Grans night walking witches’), and his misadventures appear as justice for his treatment of his donkey, who runs away to a clover field, ‘F[r]ee from robins st[i]cks & strife’.

29

John Clare By Himself, p. 83. John Clare By Himself, p. 75.

30


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Such a sense of regulatory utility is absent when Clare attacks the Catholics for their superstition.31 In these attacks, however, Clare is participating in the wider discourse of ‘superstitions’ that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Although he is certainly no conventional freethinker, he does share some of the opinions on ‘priestcraft’ that he had read, and those opinions are most strongly borne out in Catholic practice; yet, nonetheless, his comments on the Catholics seem an odd deviation from his usual tolerance. The breadth of that tolerance regarding superstition is clear in the following extract: Any superstition that is perfectly harmless however incredulous may be tollerated & any supersti[ti]on that renders good to individuals …ought to be reverencd as the especial revelation of providence who works by unknown means for the advancement of the earthly welfare & eternal happiness of mankind – giving to every human being an instinct of faith & a tallisman of futurity according to his possesion of natural knowledge & powers of intellect32

Clare’s use of the word ‘Providence’ is often confusingly general, but I think that it can here be understood as the observable actions of the Christian God, which may be made manifest in many ways, some of which find folkloric explanation, and thus Providence provides one more point of confluence between more and less ‘orthodox’ positions. In another of Clare’s autobiographical accounts, he encounters a Will O’ the Whisp: the luminous haloo that spread from it was of a mysterious terrific hue and the enlargd size and whiteness of my own hands frit me the rushes appeard to have grown up as large and tall as walebone whips and the bushes seemd to be climbing the sky every thing was extorted out of its own figure and magnif[i]ed the darkness all round seemd to form a circalar black wall and I fancied that if I took a step forward I shoud fall into a bottomless gulph which seemd glaring all round me so I held fast by the stile post till it darted away when I took to my heels and got home as fast as [I] coud33

Clare encounters the whisp as a terrorist in a dizzying, sublime experience. In Chapter 6, I will suggest that, in non-superstitious situations, Clare doesn’t experience ‘sublimity’ as terror, but as transcendent knowledge of the divine, the obvious ‘content’ of the sublime, the only thing which could be intimated. This is ultimately a logical deduction for Clare, and one heavily supported for him by the vocabulary of religious enthusiastic transport, sustained in its turn by literature on ‘natural religion’. Simultaneously, in terms of ritual superstitions, paradoxical 31

See for example John Clare By Himself, pp. 229–30, and Chapter 2 of this book. A Champion for the Poor, pp. 281–2. 33 John Clare By Himself, p. 252. 32

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‘fearful joys’ inspired by handed-down tales are ‘Sweet childhoods fearful extacy / The witching spells of winter nights’ (‘January’, The Shepherd’s Calendar, MP.I.21, ll.119; ll.234–5). Note the terminology of the experience, and compare it to Clare’s account of the incident that leads to the poem ‘The Night Mare or Superstitions Dream’ (1821–27, MP.I.325–31): ‘I have began one of my terrible experiments agen’, writes Clare, ‘The NightMare or Superstitions Dream’ youl only laugh at its bombast when I send it but my vanity must have its way—the Night Mare is a thing Ive been very much subject too & the thing describ’d is the last judgment nearly as my horrors conscievd it when this witchcraft of the soul was on me34

(Clare was aware that the ‘superstitious’ element might be deemed offensive. In the London Magazine and in The Shepherd’s Calendar the poem is prefaced with a quotation from Job, importing biblical precedent and authority for belief; in The Shepherd’s Calendar the poem is more simply called ‘The Dream’.35) A further account describes another, ecstatic nightmare: a beautiful, supernatural figure approaches Clare, and, ‘leaning her witching face over my shoulder spoke in a witching voice’.36 Clare uses precisely the same terms to describe being overcome in the presence of nature. One brief example of this crops up in ‘The Village Minstrel’, that is, in the poem that more than any other combines Clare’s love and mode of observation of the natural world with a vivid depiction of the traditions and rituals of the society within it. There, ‘Nature look[s] on [Lubin] wi a witching eye’, inspiring ‘wild enthusi[a]sm’ (EP.II.125, ll.55–8) and, through it, ‘song’ (see for example ‘Lubin’s Song 28’, EP.II.134–5). I have already mentioned that this element of experience facilitated the way in which new religious movements made inroads into the belief of traditional communities, but ‘witching’ is also used by Clare to refer to the overcoming of the self by spirits, or bewitching. Thus the rhetoric of the Evangelical Revival, the discourse of the sublime (and consequently Clare’s constant intimations of divinity) and the terminology of superstitious experience coalesce.37 The operation of this common vocabulary is fundamentally important to Clare’s faith.

34

Letters, p. 222. See also MP.I.332, and Letters, p. 382. 36 ‘A Remarkable Dream’, John Clare By Himself, pp. 253–5 (p. 253). 37 See for another example Hempton, p. 27. The ease with which Hogarth adapted his print Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism (1762) from the previously unpublished Enthusiasm Delineated (c.1761), a satire on Methodism, epitomises the way that the operation of the vocabulary of ‘alternative belief’ systems coalesces with that of more ‘orthodox’ religious groups. 35


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Literary Pressures and Biblical Sanction Clare loved reading, and I will discuss its role in the formation of his faith in Chapter 4. But this passion throws up an important tension, identifiable in his work. Reading is both desirable and culpable in its association with the past and with change and decay, and never is this more evident than in Clare’s representation of ‘alternative beliefs’. Clare’s work is fascinating because his recorded experience hovers between past and present, participation in and recording of such beliefs and the practices with which they are associated, and this peculiar situation within change is exemplified by certain habits of mind.38 So, whilst in ‘The Village Minstrel’ Clare suggests that spreading wonders round the cottage hearth continues, elsewhere he suggests that such faith is declining and connects the decline to increased ‘knowledge’ (in all its senses), and more particularly to reading, which (initially through chapbooks) disrupts the same tradition of communal recitation in which it initially participates. Clare writes: Our rustics listened with astonishment to the Strength of Hickathrift [del(Sampson)] & our gentry related with infinite success as to efect the feats of Hercules but these things will do nothing now an old lady reads the one to scholars children who are somthing above a span long & they gape for a moment & enquire if he was not a steam engine & hercules is gone even out of the kitchen39

In his own alteration (‘Sampson’ deleted for the colloquial ‘Hickathrift’) we see Clare’s attempt to re-dumb down tales, to re-make them fantastic and believable in their fantasy. He wishes to silence ‘that venom that destroys / With scornful pride the harmless simple song / That tells the ways & freaks that to such ways belong’ (Martinmass Eve’, 1820–21, EP.II.480). The mention of ‘gentry’ here further contributes to the impression of a previous, more cohesive community. Although Clare’s tendency to ‘nostalgia’ is beyond the scope of this study, it is perhaps the case that the habit of recording belief in superstitious stories as an aspect of the past, or as altered forms in their present manifestations, is a common one. Compare for example Richard Corbet’s ‘A Proper New Ballad, intituled The Fairies Farewell’ (1647) (which Clare probably knew, as Gilchrist published an edition of Corbet in 1807, and is likely to have shown it to Clare40), with Clare’s representations of 38 See my ‘The “Community of John Clare’s Helpston’, pp. 794–7, and also, for example, ‘On the Wonders of inventions curiositys strange sights & other remarkables “of the last forty days” in the Metropolis in a Letter to A Friend’, transcribed by P.M.S.Dawson, John Clare Society Journal, 20 (2001), 21–37 (especially p. 33). 39 Transcribed by George Deacon, in John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London, 1983), p. 42, and also by Dawson as part of ‘On the Wonders of inventions curiositys strange sights & other remarkables “of the last forty days” in the Metropolis in a Letter to A Friend’, p. 27. 40 I am grateful to Bob Heyes for advice on this point.

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sprightly behaviour. Precisely because such retrospection is inherently connected to loss, it remains expediently open for political appropriation. In thus becoming symbolic, to a more or less explicit extent, representations become increasingly less ‘themselves’, and hence ever more distant from their perceived former forms: what is important here, however, is Clare’s perception (or representation) of a decline, rather than the historical reality of it. Even as he thus suggests a growing distance between faith in village tales and his current situation, the extremely well-read Clare is himself unable entirely to disregard such stories because ‘my superstitious Grandmother had instilld those notions into my nature so very early that it woud be hard matter now to make me disbelieve em’.41 This form of historical record has much wider ramifications throughout Clare’s verse, but it is of paramount importance here. Through his grandmother, superstitions are connected to a living past (which was almost certainly through her grandmother); text destroys this life. A letter of January 1821 asserts that Clare’s poem ‘Michaelmas Eve’42 is based on a specific occasion, thus indicating the continuance of its rituals: ‘I was one of the assembly … every incident in it is truth & drawn from the life’.43 Clare’s presence at the evening revel is significant, because written through the poem is a gentle recognition of the fallibility of the beliefs represented (which becomes explicit as ‘once beguiled kate’ ‘Proves gipseys wisdom empty as the wind’, EP.II.487), yet the company (of which Clare is part) seems able to lose itself in those beliefs.44 This faith-with-doubt characteristic is evident in Clare’s contribution to Hone’s Every Day Book. In April 1825, he sent Hone a piece on ‘miscellaneous superstitions & shadows of customs almost worn out here’,45 and was proud enough of such contributions to mention them in a sketch for his autobiography.46 In his letter to Hone, Clare describes the ‘dumb cake’ ritual, designed to reveal one’s future husband. Clare writes about the same ritual in ‘The Sorrows of Love’ (1822–24, MP.I.165–91), where a description of the church seems to draw it into the ritual-gone-wrong, and devotes a whole poem written around the same time to the tradition: We made the dumb cake upon St Marks eve … I think dreams [truths] my self or often such & Joseph in the bible thought as much 41

Letters, p. 62. ‘Martinmass Eve’ in MS.A13 becomes ‘Michalemass Eve’ in MS.A12. This is almost certainly just a slip on Clare’s part. 43 Letters, p. 137. 44 On similar themes, see my ‘John Clare and Festivity’. 45 John Clare, Cottage Tales, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Ashington and Manchester, 1993), p. 138. Clare’s work is reprinted in Thomas Sternberg’s Dialect and Folk–lore of Northamptonshire (London, 1851), but is not there attributed to Clare. 46 John Clare By Himself, p. 168; see also p. 219. 42


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Nay he the causes of such visions knew & Pharoahs baker found his words too true All eyes may see it if they do but look Then who would laugh & disbelieve the book (MP.I.189–91)

When Keats approaches the same theme in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1819), the Chaucerian romance of his setting, combined with the ‘comic misfitting without the comedy’, alienates and chills.47 (One might also compare Bamford’s intimate description of All Soul’s with the ‘coldë Deathë’ of Keats’s ‘Eve of St. Mark’, and note that in both of these poems, Keats apparently has the occasion and the ritual confused.48) Clare’s poem, compared to Keats’s strangeness, provides a neat example of the happy and natural coexistence of popular alternative and organised religion with which he was familiar, lending the ritual the biblical sanction of ‘Joseph’ and the ‘Pharoah’. As well as being a standard of verification, and exhibiting many of its own examples of ‘the supernatural’49 the Christian Bible was actively involved in certain superstitious rituals. In ‘The Sorrows of Love’ (1822–24), Clare makes reference to the mother of a girl crossed in love, who ‘read jobs troubles oer & oer again / Then turned to love & read the book of ruth / … & if said she you trust in god and pray / You may be happy in the end as they’ (MP.I.179). Whilst this may seem simply to be advocating Christian faith and duty, and a very evangelical resignation, the Book of Ruth was also the book of the Bible central to ‘Bible and key’ divination used to identify future husbands and wives or malefactors (a door key was placed in Ruth, i, 16 or the Song of Solomon, viii, 7, and was said to react, when suspended, if the appropriate person’s name was mentioned): such facts lend an alternative edge to the poem. Divination rituals (like the preparation of the ‘dumb cake’) and omens (like an odd crow, or a dream) form the most clearly practical operations of ‘superstition’ in Clare’s community. Such rituals were to be performed with a meticulous precision – a slight error could be disastrous – and those forms were dictated by traditions accepted, as we have seen, with the authority of scripture. Clare’s ‘The Rivals’ provides an example:

47

Jack Stillinger, ‘The “story” of Keats’, in Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 246–60 (p. 254). 48 See The Poems of Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1970), pp. 480–87, l. 110. Keats may not, however, be in error: there is some suggestion in the available evidence that such occasions may have been to some extent ‘moveable feasts’. 49 Such references extend far beyond the Witch of Endor (for mention of whom see ‘The Farmer and the Vicar’, p. 438): mostly from the Old Testament, they tend to be concerned with attempts to divine the future, preoccupied perhaps with the prospect of dangerous knowledge; another commonly invoked example of Biblical sanction of the supernatural was Christ’s ability to exorcise demons.

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John Clare’s Religion My love forgets me never every spell Links as I lap it & betokens well When I was young & went a weeding wheat We usd to make them on our dinner seat & laid two blades across & lapd them round Thinking of those we lovd & if we found Them linkd together when unlapt again Our love was true if not the wish was vain (MP.I.216).

The first line here quoted intimates the run-of-the-mill attitude to village ‘spells’. Alliterative, rhyming and repetitive effects in the couplets go on to weave together a structure as entwined as the corn dolly (‘love knott platt’) being described. The only enjambment here occurs precisely within the sentences in which the straws, like the words, are being wrapped around one another (& laid two blades across & lapd them round / Thinking of those we lovd & if we found / Them linkd together when unlapt again …’); in the same sentences the ‘&’s proliferate, being similarly suggestive of repetitive, cumulative action. In this poem, then, Clare’s verse seems to enact the ritual itself. The claiming of biblical sanction for ritual habits is a recurrent feature in Clare’s writing. In one letter (?1831–32), Clare tells of how ‘superst[it]ions are engrafted in the minds of the common people as beliefs almost like bible truths nay they are looked upon as such’.50 The same equation between superstitions, sanctioned by tradition, and scriptural truth is voiced in ‘The Village Minstrel’s’ ‘haunted tales which village legends fill / As true as gospel revealations told’ (EP.II.127, ll.82–3). A similar legitimisation is sometimes connected to other printed forms, through the chapbooks which recount and disseminate the tales. (Clare loved and collected chapbooks, and when he describes his father’s favourites, they are notably all ‘prophetic’: one is reminded of the popularity of the almanac in communities like Clare’s.) Elsewhere, Clare describes his friend John Turnill encountering a volume on astrology at Market Deeping fair, and its effect: ‘his head was forever after Nativitys and fortune telling by the stars’.51 Davies suggests that a movement towards more ‘learned’ superstitions like astrology was an aspect of the development of ‘alternative beliefs’ in Clare’s moment, although elsewhere he points out that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘an illiterate cunning person was unlikely to go very far.’52 A comparison between Turnill and Clare’s more ‘simple’-minded friend John Billings seems to support the idea that print forms and increasing literacy are implicated in the changing nature of ‘alternative beliefs’ and the changing relationship of rural people to them, at least in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston. Perhaps Sternberg is justified 50

Letters, p. 555. John Clare By Himself, pp. 50–51. 52 ‘Decline in the Popular Belief: Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Rural History, 8 (1997), 91–107 (p. 93). 51


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in his claim that ‘the faith is in its last stage of decay. Sunday-schools have proved more potent exorcists than the “holy freres,” to whom Chaucer attributed their expulsion’.53 Clare’s writing often suggests that the Bible’s printed status, and the infallibility of ‘print’ more generally, exist in a symbiotic relationship, and Clare writes of his friend Billings as an inofensive man he believes every thing that he sees in print as true and has a cupboard full of penny books … acounts of People being buried so many days and then dug up alive Of bells in churches ringing in the middle of the night Of spirits warning men when they was to dye etc … the strange relations happened always a century back were none lives to contradict it such things as these have had personal existances with his memory on as firm footings as the bible history it self.54

Here is the absolute faith in ‘bible history’, and evidence that beliefs founded in chapbook tales share in that ‘truth’. Having listed some examples, Clare remarks that ‘the strange relations happend always a century back were none lives to contradict it’. At the same time, however, these superstitions have had ‘personal existances’ for Billings, and they constitute part of recorded history for the village inhabitants; and this sense, that what one might see as myth is concrete history for those who know it, is reinforced in Clare’s claim that ‘the traditional Registers of the Village was uncommonly superstitious (Gossips and Granneys)’.55 When they lose contact with the personal, when ‘Tom Hickathrift’ becomes ‘Samson’, they lose their place in village communal life and thus faith in them fades. In print, things may become more ‘true’, but they become less intimately ‘real’.56

Clare’s Ghosts Let us go back, now, to Clare, shaking in his boots on the morning after his encounter at the thought of passing ‘Baron parks’, even in broad daylight, to get a sense of how he, generally inclined to rational consideration of phenomena, experiences ‘superstitious terrors’. Having plucked up the courage to venture abroad to face his infernal, shaggy-coated, vast-eared terror, his fears are abruptly quashed: ‘to my supprise I found it was nothing but a poor cade foal … it followd me again 53

Sternberg, p. 131. John Clare By Himself, p. 53. 55 John Clare By Himself, p. 9. 56 See my ‘The “Community” of John Clare’s Helpston’, pp. 796–7 on the way in which writing is implicated in the demise of an ‘ideal’ way of life. Clare is caught in the same double bind with regard to poetry: his love of it is in spite of its inferiority to the natural world (which it should, to merit the title ‘poetry’, represent). 54

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and my disbelief in ghosts was more hardend then ever’.57 Clare’s identification of the ghost as a ‘cade’, or pet, foal contradicts the absolute conviction of the previous night. Once the identity of the spook is established, the terms in which it is described retrospectively render it ridiculous. Suddenly we are faced with a goofy, donkey-like creature, not a malevolent demon, and it is Clare’s own account which performs this, suggesting his own sheepishness: after all, he wasn’t obliged to include those ears. The story narrated here (and repeated in ‘The Village Minstrel’) bears a strong resemblance to Bloomfield’s ‘The Fakenham Ghost’. Bloomfield claimed that his ballad was ‘founded on fact. The circumstances occurred perhaps long before I was born’.58 The indefiniteness of time and origin here is characteristic of such stories: Clare’s is therefore unusual in being a personal account. Slight differences, however, don’t really help us to decide whether Clare took the narrative from Bloomfield (whom he praised as the ‘English Theocritus’) as a good subject, or perhaps to prompt identification with his predecessor (though in that case it is odd that Clare’s is a prose account), or if East Anglian foals have a particular propensity to follow people home through the dark; but that is not what concerns me. Here, I am more interested in the facility with which belief and unbelief take one another’s place. In one sense, this is a very ordinary, human capacity in the case of the supernatural, but it seems to be heightened in Clare’s case, which is hardly surprising, because in far more wide-reaching ways his mind is able to accommodate what seem to be opposing beliefs, without needing to come down definitively on the side of one, to the exclusion of the other. Of course, then, tension between belief and unbelief consistently characterises Clare’s explicit deliberation on the supernatural, and is very clearly seen in the many comments he makes on Will o’ the Whisps. The image of the whisp (or ‘Jack a’ Lanthorn’, or ‘Jenny Burnt Arse’, or ‘the mid night morrice’), a flamelike phosphorescence produced from the gases of decaying vegetable matter, which flits around marshy ground, fascinates Clare.59 These gaseous images were common occurrences in Clare’s neighbourhood: ‘in this november month they are often out in the dark misty nights – on “Rotten Moor” “Dead Moor” Eastwell moor’.60 We need not look far to find the source of the names of the former locations. Most interesting about Clare’s accounts of his encounters with whisps is the strong effort he makes to rationalise, to understand them as phenomena easily explained by science. The same tendency is often seen in Clare’s accounts of the supernatural,61 and it is a strange combination of acceptance with curiosity; but 57

John Clare By Himself, p. 46. Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems, ed. John Goodridge and John Lucas (Nottingham, 1998), p. 54. 59 See for example ‘Ive seen the mid night morrice dance & play’ (MP.II.187–89), or John Clare By Himself, p. 46. 60 John Clare By Himself, p. 46. 61 See for example John Clare By Himself, p. 209. 58


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his mind seems instinctively to pull away from attempts scientifically to account for the whisps. One of Clare’s autobiographical ‘Appendices’ contains a typical whisp description: There had been a great upstir in the town about the appearance of the ghost of an old woman who had been recently drownd in a well—it was said to appear at the bottom of neighbour Billings close in a large white winding sheet dress and the noise excited the curosity of myself and my neighbour to go out several nights together to see if the ghost woud be kind enough to appear to us and mend our broken faith in its existance but nothing came62

The fancy-dress of the ‘sheet’ crops up in Clare’s verse accounts of ghosts as well. Such stereotypical ghostly identity, along with the language of polite courtship, highlights in the prose passage the ‘broken faith’ Clare mentions. Yet he still goes ghost-hunting, and there’s a very understandable edge of fearful belief behind the jocularity of the expedition. Circumstances quickly bring this edge to the fore: on our return we saw a light in the north east over eastwell green and I thought at first that it was a bright meoter it presently became larger and seemd like a light in a window it then moved and dancd up and down and then glided onwards as if a man was riding on hors back at full speed with a lanthorn light soon after this we discovered another rising in the south east on ‘dead moor’ they was about a furlong asunder at first and as if the other saw it it danced away as if to join it which it soon did and after dancing together a sort or reel as it were—it chaced away to its former station and the other followd it like things at play and after suddenly overtaking it they mingled into one in a moment or else one dissapeard and sunk in the ground we stood wondering and gazing for a while at the odd phenomenon and then left the will o wisp dancing by itself to hunt for a fresh companion as it chose

The terminology in which Clare relates this tale seems to be attempting to ground it in a sort of scientific objectivity. Yet at the same time the ‘things’ become increasingly human, seeming to respond to one another almost like lovers. As they do so, however, they become more mysterious, ethereal, and more sinister in their apparent confederacy. As the passage concludes, Clare keeps trying through meteorological and other technical terminology to return to his more scientific account, but is unable to sustain it: the night was dusky but not pitch dark and what was rather odd for their appearance the wind blew very briskly it was full west—now these things are gennerally believd to be vapours rising from the foul air from bogs and wet places were they are generaly seen and being as is said lighter then the common 62

John Clare By Himself, p. 251.

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John Clare’s Religion air they float about at will—now this is all very well for Mrs Philosophy who is very knowing but how is it if it is a vapour lighter then the air that it coud face the wind which was blowing high and always floated side ways from north to south and back—the wind afected it nothing but I leave all as I find it I have explaind the fact as well as I can—I heard the old alewife at the Exeters arms behind the church (Mrs Nottingham) often say that she has seen from one of her chamber windows as many as fifteen together dancing in and out in a company as if dancing reels and dances63

I have already mentioned the communal tale-telling which fuels Clare’s stories, and this ale-wife recalls it. Communal gossip creeps in to feed and legitimate Clare’s suspicions, and those suspicions triumph, for Clare declares: ‘I have often seen these vapours or what ever philosophy may call them but I never wit nessd so remarkable an instance of them as I did last night which has robd me of the little philosophic reason[in]g which I had—about them I now believe them spirits’.64 It is an account with which it is easy to empathise. Most of us (apparently even including, as unlikely as it sounds, Thomas Hobbes65) have made the mistake of listening to ghost stories late at night. But when Clare spends an evening telling ghost stories, he is confirming accepted belief rather than challenging a more usual belief in no ghosts: ‘when a Boy my heart Has ’chilld with dread / To hear what aged dames confirmd & said’ (EP.I.286, ll.51–2). Clare is interesting because he stands on this cusp of faith and doubt, and because his vacillation transfers to all aspects of credence, all modes of faith. Hence, although I have given examples of Clare explicitly addressing and attempting to reconcile his own division, when his beliefs emerge more implicitly, we see no such negotiation between belief and unbelief, and it is perfectly reasonable that his comments on the supernatural reflect this mix of credulity and incredulity.66 Except, that is, when the ideal becomes too distant: as he describes John Billings, who ‘had a very haunted mind for such things and had scarce been out on a journey … without seeing a gost a will o whisp or some such shadowy mysterys’,67 Clare’s account of his neighbour’s store of ghost stories implies a distance from the fear the stories inspire: look how silly I am, for having believed this equally silly man. (Elsewhere, a man who believes that the whisp is a ‘haunting spirit’ is a ‘simple’ shepherd (MP.II.187–9), even though Clare’s description in its very imagery suggests that such a conclusion is perfectly reasonable.) Clare’s fears usually are explained or discredited like this; their explanation always then juxtaposes confidence with fear. Just as in the 63

John Clare By Himself, pp. 251–2. John Clare By Himself, p. 251. 65 See Thomas Hobbes, ‘On Imagination’, from Leviathan, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth, 11 vols (London, 1839), III, 9. 66 The same tendency can be seen in Samuel Bamford’s writing: see Bamford, Chapters 2, 14 and 15. 67 John Clare By Himself, p. 52. 64


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transformation of ‘Tom Hickathrift’ to ‘Samson’, writing things down (Clare’s own autobiography) is implicated in the demise of their real-ness, and thus the superstitions become part of a way of life Clare wants to rejoin, rather than one he participates in. Yet Clare’s continued affection is evident from numerous sources, and despite his own intermittent scepticism, and even as they decline, he never quite relinquishes his faith entirely, and nor does he want to: ‘I myself cannot forget or disbelieve them …’68 Clare’s essentially gentle and materially harmless relationship with the supernatural did not continue in this vein forever. In his biography of Clare, J.L. Cherry describes the poet’s declining mental health, recording that ‘Among the indications which Clare gave of the approaching loss of reason were frequent complaints that he was haunted by evil spirits, and that he and his family were bewitched.’ Cherry also quotes the essentially evangelical, and unfortunately inapt, response of John Taylor: As for evil spirits, depend upon it, my dear friend, that there are none, and that there is no such thing as witchcraft. But I am sure that our hearts naturally are full of evil thoughts, and that God has intended to set us free from the dominion of such thoughts by his good Spirit …69

Nonetheless, before this terrible time, supernatural, unformed beings have been far from horrid. While Clare can weave his own spells with the tales he recounts, evoking Lubin’s terror on a haunted night, he also portrays the comfort that retelling can bring ‘when fear left him on his corner seat’ (EP.II.129, l.136). The terrors the ‘hus wife’s’ tales inspire are ‘fearful joys’ (MP.I.14–21, l.44; l.234): superstitions retain their charm, but lose their severity as they are recited. As stories told by old women, they are always distant enough, always tamed: they always come to an end. Clare’s sadness arises because this becomes more literally the case: as I have described, they become too tamed, and the poet laments the passing of traditions of storytelling and the waning of a way of life which allowed one to believe. With all of the religious influences pressing in upon Clare, then, we must resist the naïve assumptions which repeatedly have been brought to his work. At the same time, we must not overemphasise the case, and should remember that Clare’s way of thinking, and that of his parents and neighbours, was formed by an experience in which Christianity and Christian notions (like ‘suffering’) were vital parts of life, their traditions deeply inscribed on collective thinking. Hence even when religious observance is inadequate or mundane, it still is: Nor sabath days no better thoughts instill The true going churchman hears the signal ring & takes his book his homage to fulfil … 68

Letters, p. 555. Cherry, pp. 113–14.

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John Clare’s Religion & soon as service ends he gins agen Bout signs in weather late or forward spring Of prospects good or bad in growing grain (‘The Village Minstrel’, EP.II.140, ll.403–10)

The return to ‘signs in weather’ unobtrusively coexists with the ‘faith’ of Clare’s villager. Ronald Hutton defines ‘Low Magic’ as activities belonging ‘to the world of popular belief and custom, concerned not with the mysteries of the universe … so much as with practical remedies for specific problems.’70 This is precisely what Clare’s supernatural customs represent, and Clare certainly leaves the ‘mysteries of the universe’ to God. But a consideration of religious context must look further than Church and chapel, to rituals which are no less a part of the cohesive whole of society as it is conceived by Clare because they are omitted from more conventional histories, or regarded as ‘other’ where regarded at all. They are part of the same cohesive ‘religious’ whole; they are also very ‘ordinary’, and that ordinariness is part of Clare’s context. For those participating in the beliefs, they are as much parts of spiritual life as any other, and thus insofar as those people define themselves as ‘Christian’, those beliefs fall within a Christian frame of reference. This, then, is what Christian orthodoxy is to the inhabitants of Helpston. I am interested, as I have said, in the dizzy ‘bewitching’ effect which characterises the way Clare perceives, and his translation of that perception into his poetry, and I will return to this effect in Chapter 6. But perhaps more important to analyses of the content of Clare’s verse is that he stands on a cusp of faith and doubt, as on many other boundaries, held there by the conflicting tensions of village tradition, his interaction with predominantly evangelical ‘friends’ (of whom more, below), and increasing familiarity with a wider world of literature. He is aware of his position on this boundary, and that awareness shapes his literary output. He recognises his experience of a rapid period of change: ‘how many days hath passd’, Clare asks, ‘since we usd to hunt the stag or hunt the slipper … and duck under water on May eve … but inclosure came and drove these from the village’.71 The social change (which includes advancing literacy) Clare describes shifts the situation documented earlier in this chapter, where oral traditions ensured the survival of stories despite the loss of customs. Instead, the decline of traditions of life intimately bound up with the propagation of superstitions through stories takes those superstitions with it, even if it doesn’t necessarily take all the rituals (little children still dance round maypoles today, but few parents imagine their offspring to be performing a fertility ritual); those rituals thus become, for Clare, altered in their nature. Without their associated stories, which were communal memories, and thus history, they are depleted in significance. Describing the same decline, Sternberg suggests ‘Steam–threshing machines have long superseded the magic flail of the drudging goblin; and even the dancing–grounds of Queen Mab 70

Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, p. 84. John Clare By Himself, pp. 46–7.

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and her tiny lieges are menaced by the sacrilegious coulters of patent ploughs’:72 as goblins become labourers, or perhaps vice versa, the decline in beliefs is elided by Sternberg with the decline of the more traditional way of life, which is one of the most common themes of Clare’s verse, thus rendering it doubly sad.

Clare and the Anglican Evangelicals Taylor’s response to Clare’s conviction that he was haunted by malevolent spirits brings us to the opposite end of the belief spectrum: to those evangelicals in Clare’s life who waged war against sprites and phantoms. It is always unwise to take Clare’s statements of evangelical acceptance at face value. He was not so naïve, even in his ostensibly ‘autobiographical’ work, as to forget his audience, and he was acutely conscious of the professional damage he could do by making the wrong statements at the wrong time. The advice that Clare constantly was receiving from well-meaning evangelicals arrived in a variety of forms. Many of the books from his library are inscribed with homilies by their (largely evangelical) benefactors, and we cannot forget the much-discussed ‘censorship’ of Clare’s foremost moral barometers. In a letter to Taylor’s partner, James Hessey, of July 1820, Clare aligns even Taylor (whose evangelicalism is less straightforward than that of, for example, Emmerson and Radstock) with Hannah More’s ilk, writing: ‘I know his taste & I know his embaresments I often picture him in the midst of a circle of ‘blue stockings’ offering this & that opinion for emprovement or omision I think to please all & offend all we shoud put out 215 pages of blank leaves & call it ‘Clare in fashion’ …’73 Clare challenges accusations of his own ‘indelicacy’ in a letter to Taylor of February 1821, writing of his amendments to a poem: ‘I am pleasd with it by throwing such disguise over it to think how it will wrock [wrack] the prudes to find fault there is something in it but they’ll know not were to get at it—tis quite delicate now.’74 In ‘The Author’s Address to his Book’, Clare expresses exasperation at priggish readers, but goes on to suggest that the book is safe anyway, because such pious fanatics would not deign to touch it: ‘Besides the dress that thou art in / It rather smells too much of sin’ (EP.I.426–7). Yet the influence of those ‘Anglican evangelicals’ (especially Eliza Emmerson and Lord Radstock) who befriended Clare is highly present in his thought and work, in particular (in a direct sense) in the 1820s. However repressive their suggestions might at times have seemed, and whatever else affected their treatment of him, it is abundantly clear from their letters that they considered his best interests as important. They offered a wealth of advice concerning poetical, business and personal matters. If this advice was not always what Clare wanted to hear (or not what many modern readers wish he had heard), it was frequently of assistance to him. 72

Sternberg, p. 132. Letters, p. 84. 74 Letters, p. 157. 73

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They rendered help to Clare in material ways, simultaneously and significantly impressing upon him the evangelical necessity of accepting one’s lot in life, and waiting patiently for reward in Heaven. Whilst the strength and insistence of his acquaintances’ respective evangelical beliefs proved problematic, exacerbating Clare’s depression when he struggled to accept their faith, or when he reacted to such ‘precepts’ as ‘forced down the throats of the people to teach them patience only to bear unjust burthens the better’,75 they were also of enormous comfort at times of certain faith, and their influence was to have a crucial bearing on Clare’s belief.76 There was much about the evangelical movement that Clare admired, especially defences of the oppressed. In The Parish, Clare hopes for ‘resignation should the worst befall / & faith to hope the best is best of all’ (ll.577–8), the core of evangelical doctrine. However, there was also much to turn him ‘scranny’.77 In 1820, Clare received a copy of Hannah More’s Tawney Rachel, or, The Fortune Teller (1797) from the Rev. James Plumptre, specifically to dissuade him from his beliefs in ghosts. Clare’s negative reaction, in a letter to Taylor, is brief (Clare complained that Plumptre’s notions ‘woud not do’ for him, and even Taylor encouraged him to ignore the parson’s advice, imploring, ‘Keep as you are’),78 but it is clear from Tawney Rachel itself what Clare found to dislike. The tale opens with derision of a wandering ‘vagabond’ life. The description of the mode of living of Rachel and her husband (‘poaching Giles’) closely matches that of the ‘poor ragd out casts of the land / That hug your shifting camps from green to green’ (EP.II.171, ll.1138–9): the gypsies that fascinated Clare, and inspired his affection and friendship. Apart from delight at their tricks, and fascination with their habits, Clare also admired the gypsies’ superstitions and the spiritual nature of their religion.79 In the early nineteenth century, gypsies had become the victims of heavy anti-vagrancy legislation. Although, as the title of the 1824 ‘Vagrancy Act’ implies, it was ostensibly their wandering lifestyle that prompted a nervous legislature to clamp down on their ‘shifting camps’, the new Act actually built on the fourth clause of the Witchcraft Act of 1736, and in its fourth section fortune-tellers in particular were targeted. This section was aimed directly at gypsy habits, and highlights the perceived connection between the gypsies and the supernatural.80 More’s tract is a typical contemporary contribution to the gypsy debate, deriding those with faith and belief in supernatural traditions, and concluding with the homiletic message: ‘God never reveals to weak and wicked women those secret designs of his Providence, which no human wisdom is able to forsee.’ This sits uneasily with Clare’s experience. More continues: ‘Never believe 75

A Champion for the Poor, p. 281; compare PMS.A42, vol. 4, p. 67. See for an example of comfort found in evangelical doctrine Letters, p. 292. 77 See EP.II.86. 78 17 May 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 126v. 79 For Clare’s opinions of gypsies, see John Clare By Himself, pp. 83–4, 86, and any of the numerous poems in which gypsies feature. 80 See Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, p. 54. 76


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that God conceals his will from a sober Christian who obey [sic] his laws, and reveals it to a vagabond Gipsy’.81 For Clare, however, contrary to More’s claims, the workings of fate and Providence, and the divination of those workings by ‘midnight hags’, can perfectly well coexist with Christianity. In ‘The Gipseys camp’ (1819–20, EP.II.119–20), a poem strikingly similar to Samuel Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory, Clare describes a consultation with one of More’s pseudo-prophetic ‘vagabonds’.82 Clare’s episode is conducted upon a Sabbath: as ever, the release from toil that Sunday brings leaves ‘time to tramp’. The day of the week is a necessary coincidence, and yet, in juxtaposition with More’s homily, it reinforces Clare’s impression of the harmonious coexistence of orthodox and unorthodox elements of the world. Clare gently mocks his own habit along with that of the gypsy: ‘How oft Ive bent me oer their fire & smoak / To hear their gibberish tale’: he is aware that to believe in the predictions is ‘boyish hope’. But his apparently rational mockery is underwritten by a reluctance fully to disregard: ‘Mingld wi fears to drop the fortunes fee’. In the final octet of the poem there is prophecy, but also the potential to alter ‘fate’ with effort if the gypsy warnings are heeded. And although the light-hearted tone persists (‘Alas for fourpence how my dye is cast’), the text is riddled with the inherent conflict in Clare’s tendency to believe despite rationale. Through lines like ‘But as mans unbelieving taste came round’, Clare seems both consciously and unconsciously to defend the predictions despite himself, and this impression pervades the poem to its close. The clash between evangelicalism and ancient beliefs enacted in Hannah More’s opinion of gypsy divination is exemplified in Clare’s lines entitled ‘To a Methodist parson after hearing he had spoken very roughly in my belief of ghosts &c’ (1819–20, EP.II.85–8). The parson in question, ‘One who when told of ghosts & witches / Woud call em lanthorn jaws & bitches / & swore all ghosts where things that such as / Fools only spy’, is James Plumptre, and the poem a response to Clare’s receipt of recommended works (including More’s) from the clergyman. Plumptre initially wrote to Clare in April 1820; though he admired some of Clare’s work, he criticised the use of ‘Fate and Fortune and some curses’.83 Although Clare’s reply does not seem to have survived, Plumptre’s second letter suggests that Clare had challenged the clergyman on ‘the subject of Ghosts, &c.’84 A letter to Taylor more emphatically rejects Plumptre’s advice, complaining: ‘he sets his face against all mention of fairies muses passions in love & forbids all belief of 81

Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole (London, 1996), p. 69. For the relevant extract of Rogers’s poem, see Jonathan Wordsworth’s facsimile edition (Oxford, 1989), pp. 9–10. As Storey points out, it appears that Clare did not have an edition of Rogers’ poems. However, as Rogers was one of the most popular poets of his day, Storey suggests that he was ‘bound to be familiar to Clare’ (see Letters, p. 80); indeed, the closeness of Clare’s poem to Rogers’s makes it obvious that he was. 83 26 April 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 99v. 84 3 May 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 105r. 82

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gohsts hobgobblings witches &c &c’.85 It is helpful in this context to consider Clare’s famous mockery of Keats: ‘behind every rose bush he looks for a Venus & under every laurel a thrumming Appollo’.86 Clare seems contradictory in deriding the supernatural in Keats’s work whilst defending it in his own, until one considers the difference between Keats’s nymphs and the ethereal beings of Clare’s world. Quite apart from generic differences between Keats’s and Clare’s phantoms, Keats’s figures are the stuff of classical ‘education’ and allusion, whereas Clare’s are part of contemporary folklore. When Keats aims at popular superstition in the ‘Eve of St Agnes’, he does so in the gothic vein; his supernatural is very much ‘other’. To Clare (and Bamford, for example, describes his experience in exactly the same way), it is intimately known. As in Collins’s ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland’ (1749–50), where the classical ‘Naiads’ of London must be replaced by the more ancient, pagan spirits of wintry Scottish caves,87 so for the Londoner Keats, souls from the Spirit world are simply pastoral motifs compared to the known sprites of Helpston.88 Clare has no need to resort to the classical or the Gothic to describe the supernatural, even though he was well apprised of their operations in literature, because they are alien to his experience of it. Just as he both believes and mocks the predictions in ‘The Gipseys camp’, Clare effectively ‘lives’ the experience of these ghosts, even while he acknowledges they are imagined. Because Clare lives the traditions, they are, by a strange mechanism not paradoxically, real and down to earth. Where Plumptre’s comments on superstitions are detached and inspired by his evangelical zeal, Clare’s are intimate, because they form part of his ‘ideal’ village community in action. Where Plumptre desires reform, for Clare, such beliefs are not ‘reformable’ things, because they are part of the life he knows.89 But Clare goes further than to criticise a simple inaccuracy regarding the type of supernatural beings said by other poets to be found in England. In a more sober than usual consideration of superstitious ‘creeds’ (mid 1820s–early 1830s), Clare invokes: ‘Satyr & Faun & Driads shadows all / That peopled old religions 85

Letters, p. 62. Tibble ed. Prose, p. 223. 87 ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland’, in The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, pp. 492–519. 88 Wordsworth provides another interesting contrast: for Wordsworth, superstition is ‘uncouth’ (The Borderers, l. 1441) and insubstantial (as in the ‘airy dreams’ of The Excursion Bk 4, l. 610), but the supernatural can be something inordinately powerful, as in the description (in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets Part 2, Stanza XI, l. 6) of the ceremony belonging to the eucharistic host. The status of the ‘host’ might seem by its very nature to be a pertinent aspect of Christian observance for this discussion, but it was of course one which was largely absent from the experience of Clare’s fellow congregation. 89 For a more detailed exploration of Clare’s response to the superstitions which form aspects of village life and they way in which they are propagated through village festivities, along with Clare’s perception of their decline, see my ‘John Clare and Festivity’. 86


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maddening creeds / Which poesy did worship & so make / Reallity of nothings for her powers’ (MP.II.321). Whilst recognising their ‘beauty’, Clare here depicts ‘old religions’ as deceptive, not worthy as religions; these are the classical figures of Keats, and it is certainly not Clare’s intention to associate ‘old religions’ with the superstitions of village rural communities. Clare’s criticism of Keats is amplified through the reasons he gives for finding ‘old religions’ to fail: true, natural beauty is overtaken by ‘fancy’, to which men then become immune. Simultaneously, ‘old religions’ do not encompass suffering, so when their power fades, Clare claims, they leave ‘nought certain but our pains & cares’. In this piece, Clare interweaves notions of true beauty and inadequate fancy with ideas of affliction to suggest that he finds the crucial aspect of ‘religion’ in its proper form to be its encompassing of suffering. As I will clarify in a later chapter, he is encompassing an Old Testament acceptance of suffering within the heart of evangelical Christian doctrine, a Gospel indication that ‘cares’ are part of the way to Heaven, and in this we might identify the influence of Clare’s evangelical friends and sparring-partners. For Clare, though, that way remains lined with the host of ghosts, sprites and fairies which constitute part of Clare’s belief system, and, whatever the strictures of those evangelicals (whose often-invoked ‘suffering’ Clare knew only too well), those spirits remain aspects both of the content of his belief and of his experience of faith.

Chapter 4

‘Learning is your only wealth’: Reading and Reasoning

The absence of an accurate grasp of the nature and extent of Clare’s reading and learning has been one of the most regrettable deficiencies in Clare scholarship. In ‘The Peasant Poet’ (from the asylum-period Knight transcripts), Clare styles himself ‘A silent man in lifes affairs / A thinker from a Boy / A Peasant in his daily cares – / The Poet in his joy’ (LP.II.845). Indubitably, he does not consider these roles to be mutually exclusive, and only a naïve reading of Clare’s writings could conclude that he had anything other than a reasoning and intelligent mind: it is vital that we continue to challenge the implications of the naïf persona presented in the ‘Preface’ to Poems Descriptive. Clare’s way of life was indebted to, to a large extent dictated by, and formed within, the teaching of the Church and other Christian groups. Clare’s beliefs were naturally influenced by the dominant Christian culture which he constantly experienced: the religious doctrines streaming from pulpit, street corner and schoolroom and the observed deportment of those who espoused them, along with the ‘village faith’ of his neighbours, were fundamental to the formation of his faith. But Clare possessed a high degree of intelligence, and a remarkable tenacity that resulted in a truly extraordinary access to ‘literatures’ of various sorts. Within his environment, his reading was undoubtedly a political act, but it was also a highly personal exploration of thought and reality. In turn, Clare was acutely aware of the contemporary socio-political situation, and his anomalous position within it. We cannot fully understand Clare’s faith if we do not consider his reading and its implications, and to some extent that consideration must be within its own political context. Hence, whilst the full examination that these factors deserve is beyond the scope of this work, some of its conclusions are integral to it, and this chapter briefly will discuss those which are directly relevant.

Those who recently have attempted to break down Clare’s ‘unlettered’ reputation and have begun to cast light on the importance of Clare as a reader include Greg Crossan, John Goodridge, Bridget Keegan and others, but the extent and nature of Clare’s reading remains underexplored.

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Literacy, Religion and Radicalism The Parish’s ‘Justice Terror’ highlights the association of literacy, radicalism, and the new religious groups which haunted the consciousness of the early nineteenth century. Members of these groups ‘oppose’ the justice’s sermons, ‘Deeming the plan to which his pride doth cling / “That little learning is a dangerous thing” / From whence reformd opinionists proceed / That neer had been had they not learnd to read’ (ll.1484–7). The Popian maxim Clare here invokes was a major concern of those opposing the education of the masses. Perhaps Clare is making an ironic play in his corruption of the quotation (‘little learning’ implies something different from the Popean ‘a little learning’), but elsewhere, Clare’s claims are less ambiguous. Clare again identifies the prevailing mood (justifying, to a certain extent, contemporary fears) in ‘The Hue & Cry’ (MP.IV.510–43). The ‘crooked old man’ blamed for the prevailing troubles in a time of political unrest assumes many guises: Some said it was Cobbett some said it was Paine Some went into france to Voltair & when they got there why they got back again To discover that nothing was there Some rummaged old sermons some printed new Tracts & handbills like messengers ran … & fresh rumours still from the east & the west Rose up like a storm in an hour That instead of a sword he’d a book in his hand With the motto of ‘Knowledge is power’ (ll.117–22; ll.479–82)

The power of the written word is clearly expounded, and the accusations against literature registered. Many of those conventionally placed within a ‘self-taught’ tradition (Holcroft, Cobbett, Godwin, Hogg and Bamford for example) eventually declared themselves radicals, and several instances where radicalism is attributed to reading exist in biographical material dating from the period. In Clare’s case, contrarily, he claims that reading has inclined him in the opposite direction: ‘I believe the reading a small pamphlet on the Murder of the french King many years ago with other inhuman butcheries cured me very early from thinking favourably of radicalism’. In the arguments Clare offers against radicalism, his terminology is the same as that in which he discusses Christianity, and the worst traits of ‘radicals’ are those he identifies in the worst kind of ‘Christian’: self-interest and See John Clare By Himself, p. 7. In the final line of this quotation, Robinson and Powell print ‘near’. I have instituted an alternative found in MSS.A21 and A29 (‘neer’), which Clare clearly intends. John Clare By Himself, p. 30.

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hypocrisy (although ‘radicals’ could add violence to their list). Yet so complicatedly interwoven are the religious and political elements of Clare’s life that it would be impossible accurately to define a causal relationship, and, indeed, anachronistic to try. We may only identify their interaction: although literacy, political radicalism and unorthodox religions are distinct entities, they are interconnected, and text is frequently the point of their coincidence in the early nineteenth-century situation. That Methodism, Dissenting religion and the Sunday School Movement were at the forefront of attempts to educate the masses heightened the politicisation of both religion and literacy. A huge attraction away from the nineteenth-century Church, as several historians recently have insisted, was the education offered by other religious groups. The Church was not blind to the necessary conditions of retaining its congregational share; thus, in 1824, the Quarterly Review declared: ‘through … the general adoption of the national system of education, we do not despair of seeing a most favourable re-action take place, and the church of England re-assume all its ancient hereditary dominion over the hearts of the true-born sons of the country.’ (This was, of course, a very specialised approach to ‘reading’, and repeatedly Clare is careful to emphasise the ‘littleness’ of his learning.) Never mind that the Methodists, for example, fought to distance themselves from political Dissent. If ‘unorthodox’ religious groups taught reading (and if they effectively forced the Church to offer education), then they could be blamed as part of a direct chain if that reading led to the wider dissemination of radical texts and, thence, of ideas. Thus the general connection between teaching and religious groups complemented the (to some extent correct) impression that religious texts had impacted upon the propagation of political radicalism. As Thompson writes, Pilgrim’s Progress is, with Rights of Man, one of the two foundation texts of the English working-class movement: Bunyan and Paine, with Cobbett and Owen, contributed most to the stock of ideas and attitudes which make up the raw material of the movement from 1790–1850.

Many of those radical, ‘self taught’ figures mentioned above recount learning to read using religious (particularly biblical) material. As critics such as Thompson and Olivia Smith demonstrate, biblical language was, unsurprisingly, a mainstay of radical Dissent. For Smith, ‘The Bible occupies a unique and somewhat awkward place in language theories because its language was clearly not refined,

Such historians of working class literacy include E.P. Thompson, R.K. Webb, R. Altick, Shelia O’Connell, David Vincent and David Hempton. December 1824, in vol. 31, p. 244. See for example the ‘poems not too long’ in ‘Winter (a)’ (EP.II.682–91, l. 38), or see EP.I.57, l. 54. The books Clare first encounters are also repeatedly described by him as ‘little’; I do not think this is attributable purely to their size. E.P. Thompson, English Working Class, p. 34. Perhaps there is something intentional in the echo of Bunyan in Clare’s The Progress of Cant.

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although it was sacred.’ Furthermore, radical leaders found patterns for the nineteenth-century English poor and dispossessed in the plight of the Israelites, and revelled in the promises of justice and delivery that such analogy rendered possible. (Such a resonance can be heard through poems such as Clare’s ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’ (EP.I.228–34) and, more overtly still, in his biblical paraphrases.) There were other important ways in which religion was connected to increasing literacy. Clare denigrates the Methodists because they ‘will not read a book that has not the words Lord and God in it’, but the output of the religious presses from the end of the eighteenth century was important for the production and availability of books qua books (although we should not be blinded by the enormity of that output and ignore that this ‘literature’ was not necessarily read by the poor). Keen to spread knowledge, Wesleyan Methodism dug new literary channels in a purely practical way, helping to popularise reading and education. Wesley set up printing presses, bringing a stream of cheap, accessible literature within reach of the masses. His preachers were to read all manner of literature every morning, often supplied at Wesley’s own expense. Moreover, this dissemination helped to encourage and cultivate the taste for more of the same. Having noticed the popular appetite for chapbooks and ballads, evangelical Christians (like Clare’s bugbears James Plumptre and Hannah More) identified the potential audience share for cheap, hawked publications which could be seized for more worthy means, and, alongside organisations such as the Cheap Repository Tract Movement, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, they set about imitating the style of chapbooks and broadsides, altering the content to religious homily and parable. Copiously subsidised and handed out to anyone judged either worthy or needy (usually the latter) of the advice contained therein, we have seen an example of the campaign in James Plumptre’s ‘gifts’ to Clare, discussed in Chapter 3. I have described Clare’s response to material sent him by the parsimonious Plumptre, but Clare also attacks ‘Religious Tracts’ for other reasons: I had a Tract thrust into my hand tother day by a neighbour containing the dreadful end of an atheist who shot his own daughter for going to a methodist chapple—this is one of the white lies that are suffered to be hawked about the country to meet the superstitions of the unwary—& though it may make the weak shake their heads & believe it—others will despise the cant & pity the weakness of those who propagate such absurditys10

Despite his usual affection for chapbook literature, Clare is here scathing of those who believe in tales propagated by cheap publications. The obvious difference

Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), p. 128. John Clare By Himself, p. 10. 10 PMS.A45, p. 5, transcribed in Deacon, p. 33.


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between those affectionate accounts, and this vitriol, is that here the content is sacred rather than secular.11 Mixed up with this ‘philanthropic’ urge to flood the masses with improving religious tracts, the incidence of religious books in Clare’s reading experience was bolstered by the vanity-printed texts which often were produced by clergymen. Clare mentions his familiarity with the custom in one of his autobiographical fragments, where he writes of critics as ‘dissapointed ryhmsters’: ‘their librarys generaly conseald in one corner the thin lean vollumne splendidly bound and dedicated to some young friend … this little great pretending volume with its unasuming pretentions pleasd the circle of friends for whom it was printed at the authors expence’. His (perhaps, in part, jealous) derision of the practice is here strengthened by the shiftiness suggested in the critic-author who conceals his miserly (‘thin lean’) project on a neglected shelf, and thus suggests Clare’s opinion of such texts themselves. Here, though, Clare is talking about self-styled poets, and specifically those writers who are also critics, rather than about the practice of vanity printing more generally.12 Of course, whether by the efforts of the S.P.C.K. or in Sunday-school instruction, the content of almost all of the reading matter thus rendered available was biblical or in some other way religious, and intentionally so. So, the limited library of Clare’s ‘Cottager’ (locally ‘prized’ as ‘the learned man’) contains ‘His bible’, ‘Prayer book’, ‘The “Pilgrims Progress”’, ‘“Death of Abel’”, ‘Tusser’, ‘the almanacks’, and, Clare tells us, ‘no further learnings channels ran’ (MP.III.417). But we are to understand that this reading experience is relatively great: ‘Still neighbours prize him as the learned man’. The contemporary intellectual battles raging over popular literacy perhaps met their compromise in the assertion that controlled, limited literacy was essential for the provision of a good moral education, yet moral didacts could not possibly prevent the application of skills learnt in the Scriptures to a wider realm of texts. The Bible and religious works supposed to preserve the soul thus continued to provide a major formative influence for the literary experience of the many, simultaneously giving them the skills requisite to approach those texts (including radical ones) from which it was intended their souls should be preserved. Did this, as it was feared, induce thousands of Cobbetts to take up pens and denounce Church and State? On the contrary, naïve though it seems, Clare’s poetry suggests that the ideal of a limited and moral education worked. In ‘Sunday’ (EP. II.359–62), Clare exclaims: ‘Ah who can tell the bliss from labour freed / His leisure meeteth on a sunday morn / Fixt in a chair some godly book to read’.13 11

See Deacon on Clare’s delight in, and debt to, chapbooks. The appropriation of the chapbook format by proselytising evangelicals is perhaps implicated in what Clare sees as the changing relationship between people and the stories the chapbooks recount (see pp. 69–73, this book). 12 John Clare By Himself, pp. 139–40. 13 Compare ‘The Woodman’, EP.II.294, ll. 172–89.

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Summoned to church by the bell, ‘The poor man takes his book devoutly there’, then, after the service, The good man seeks his cottage hearth again & there to read the text he does presume From which the parsons good discourse was taen … As the day closes on its peace & rest The godly man sits down & takes a book To close it in a manner deemd the best & for a suiting chapter doth he look That may for comfort & a guide be took

The reading taking place here (the only time of the week, we understand, when leisure is sufficient for reading to take place) is decidedly devout. This is, significantly, the response of a man ministered to by a parson capable of delivering a ‘good discourse’, a quality of sermon which The Parish suggests is rare indeed, but a similar conclusion may be drawn elsewhere, as a rejected stanza of Clare’s ‘The Village Doctress’ (MP.III.330–45) describes a ‘hawker’ and the contents of his basket: ‘& when a Hawker calld agen her door / Though shed complain shed but few pence to spare / Shed look his godly Tales & ballads oer / & neer failed buying his religious ware / But bawdry ballads she could never bear’ (MP.III.344). We see here the willing sacrifice of monies ill afforded on the part of the purchaser, and that the hawker has bawdy songs tucked in alongside the ‘religious ware’. This purchaser, however, is not interested in such fare: she will only ‘read the prayers & good church lessons oer / Or “Bunyans Pilgrim” errors to beguile / & thus oer godly books her fears will recconsile’ (ll.205–7). (Again, this woman, skilled in ‘mystic’ arts, is a decidedly upright ‘Christian’, and, moreover, her devotion finds a focus in her ‘ancient prayer book’, a text she venerates, ‘For it hath grown in memorys sacred soil / An old esteem from sire to son decreed / & to ill use such book were sacriligde indeed’ (ll.192–8). Such respect for memory recalls that discussed in Chapter 3.) Now, Clare is unlikely openly to celebrate the effect of reading as facilitating the radical cause (or, particularly in ‘The Woodman’, addressed to Isaiah Holland, more simple bawdiness), but he does seem to suggest that in some cases (possibly many) the plan morally to educate the masses was effective.

Clare’s ‘Religious’ Reading The difficulties attendant upon his reading were manifold, but still Clare read voraciously. Despite tantalising clues, it will always be impossible precisely or in anything approaching their entirety to know the nature and extent of Clare’s ‘literary’ influences. We are fortunate to have such a large part of his library


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remaining, and a record of some of the books sold from it since his death.14 But what of books borrowed from friends or libraries? Or lost, or sold to raise much needed funds? Clare was able accurately to identify much anonymous work from newspapers and journals, suggesting a prior and reasonably extensive familiarity with examples of respective writers’s works, and that he had significant access to these periodical resources is itself important: we must remember their context, variety and import. And yet, we cannot know how often such publications were made available to him. In his autobiographical writing, Clare transcribes a list of books which he was reading in his twenties: ‘some of these books were great favourites particularly Waltons Angler … the Female Shipwright … Bloomfields Poems … Hills Herbal’.15 Interestingly, a relatively small proportion of the books listed is ‘religious’. Although by implication some of the books are not ‘great favourites’, these are texts Clare chooses before he attracts the notice of benefactors (not, then, those sent to him, or those he was advised to read). Unquestionably, Clare’s access to books continually was constrained, but there is a marked difference between the types of book listed here, and those he discusses elsewhere, and which are in the extant library at Northampton. Despite these apparent early preferences, only a small percentage of the books Clare refers to could be said to be wholly ‘secular’. Much of the poetry he mentions, for example, contains some religious thought or even the presence of a particular kind of language (like that of ‘enthusiasm’) which, popularly recognised, shifts otherwise ‘secular’ material into a quasi-sacred realm. And undoubtedly, ‘religion’ was not confined to ‘religious’ books. This is succinctly demonstrated in the introduction to J. Macloc’s Natural History, which Clare owned, and which describes itself as ‘equally calculated to gratify a laudable curiosity, to afford an unfailing source of amusement, and to impress the mind with the most exalted ideas of that Divine Being.’16 Gardening manuals can nod towards the munificence of the Creator. Maths books might acknowledge the divine designing mind. Of course, much of this (especially the idea of a terminology or phraseology of a religious sphere) is the inevitable consequence of the more general contemporary influence of religious thought and language upon life. The present objective is merely to ascertain whether Clare’s experience of reading was particularly biased towards ‘religious’ or quasi-religious works, compared with other readers of his time. Our first complicating factor is that Clare will not fit into any convenient ‘category’ of reader. Plumptre certainly distinguishes him from his neighbours by virtue of his literacy: ‘I hope you will turn your thoughts towards some instructive popular songs for the lower classes. Your knowledge of rural life and your sweet 14 See David Powell’s Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library (Northampton, 1964), pp. 23–34. 15 John Clare By Himself, p. 61. 16 A Natural History of all the most remarkable Quadrupeds, Birds, etc (London, 1820), p. v.

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“Oaten Reed” would charm them.’17 Clare is not, then, one of ‘them’. In a way, Plumptre is right to separate Clare from his neighbours: that he had relatively many literary resources available to him, especially such as those of his friends at Milton Hall and those sent by his many correspondents, is peculiar. On the other hand, neither is Clare the type of reader who could choose his own books freely, or join the society of those who could.18 Given Clare’s unusual position, one might more usefully compare catalogues, or the ‘New Publications’ lists in contemporary journals, with the content (and where possible the date of acquisition) of Clare’s own reading, insofar as that can be ascertained. Certainly, we can say that in 1820 (the year of publication of Poems Descriptive) Clare gains new recognition, and, with it, new access to books. The subject of those books with which he is presented is overwhelmingly religious, particularly so if we include poetry with a religious theme. We can also be sure from contemporary library catalogues (public and private) that it was very normal for a ‘serious’ reader of means to have many books on religious matters. In the 1820 Quarterly Review ‘New Publications’ list, for example, theology is one of the best represented topics (although the bias towards it is less than that we see in Clare’s own reading record). Moreover, circulating library catalogues and catalogues advertising the sale of books indicate the mass of theological material then coming out of printing presses for sale, in Clare’s own county.19 However, we should pause. Firstly, there is an obvious inadequacy in considering these examples as indicative of printing output. But even if we were to turn to more comprehensive records, we should not be given a true idea of the proportions in which books sold: print sales figures are notoriously inconclusive.20 Secondly, the library retained in Northampton does not in any way represent the totality of Clare’s reading experience. Thirdly, almost all of the books that I am labelling ‘religious’ were given to Clare by the evangelical Lord Radstock (fifteen books marked as the gift of the Admiral in 1820 survive in Clare’s library, of which only those by Johnson, Hawkesworth and Beattie are not on explicitly religious themes), and throughout the 1820s, Clare continues to be bombarded with religious literature. Exactly the opposite can be said of the many fewer books Clare receives during the subsequent 17

26 April 1820, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 99v. See Bob Heyes’s thesis, for example, on Clare’s interaction with Artis and Henderson at Milton Hall. William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004) offers an unparalleled insight into issues of reading and publishing in Clare’s lifetime; St Clair has confirmed to me in conversation that Clare eludes conventional categorisation as a reader. 19 See for examples currently held in Northampton Central Library Catalogue of Birdsall’s Circulating Library, Northampton (class ref. 027.2), catalogue of the Circulating Library of Samuel George Leigh (1827), and the sales catalogues of J. Abel of Northampton (1827) and of Thomas (and later William) Dash of Kettering (1819–1840), all class ref. 017. 20 St Clair’s The Reading Nation is again useful here for its insight into issues of being a reader and of quantifying readerships in the early nineteenth century. 18


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decade (when Radstock is dead): religion is one of the least common subjects of these gifts, and Clare’s declared favourite subjects for contemplation (natural history and poetry) become far better represented. We cannot know the extent of Clare’s control over his reading opportunities, and it remains difficult to assess how much Clare wanted any book, and how much others wanted him to have it to read (and he certainly read and used such gifts).21 When in his correspondence he makes a request for a book or books, it is rarely for a ‘religious’ treatise. Of course, the 1820s are a decade of great indecision for Clare: perhaps he did desire works offering guidance. But he also wanted to make himself popular amongst his evangelical friends. In the end, such speculation can only result in a futile confusion of suggested cause and effect. For all of these reasons, it is not possible to assess Clare’s typicality, nor to rely on the content of his reading as indicative of his own religious tastes and inclination, and it is difficult to make any useful comment on the selection found in his library, apart from on those Clare mentions in prose. Those remarks are thus all the more important, and help to increase our understanding of Clare’s beliefs, and the sources of his (rationally considered) notions about faith. A letter to Taylor tells us something of Clare’s thoughts early in April 1824.22 In it, Clare describes the illness from which he has been suffering (it is interesting that he imagines his feelings to be like those of a person ‘bitten by a serpent’, suggesting that his mind is perhaps dwelling on evil or sin). Clare’s Journal indicates that around this time his mind is very much on theological matters, and whilst occupied with The Shepherd’s Calendar, he is also working upon The Parish. Complaining of his discomfort, and echoing both the biblical Parable of the Workers and the sentiments of Milton’s God, Clare writes that he often had the thought of destroying myself & from this change in my feelings I satisfactorily prove that Religions foundation is truth & that the Mystery that envelopes it is a power above human nature to comprehend & thank god it is … there is little merit in undergoing a hardship for a prize when we know what it is—the labourer goes to work for his hire & is happy or sullen according to the wages alowd him23

Such a motif of mystery as essential to faith, advocating an Augustinian acceptance of ignorance as necessary, must in part have been expanded by Clare’s reading Erskine’s Evidences of Revealed Religion, which he received from Radstock in October 1824, and which he concludes to be ‘a very sensible book’.24 This is 21

See for example Clare’s comments on ‘Gastrels Institutes’ in Letters, p. 143. Letters, pp. 291–3. 23 Letters, p. 292. See Matthew xx, 1–16, and John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (Harlow, 1968; 1998): ‘Not free, what proof could they have given sincere / Of true allegiance, constant faith or love’, Bk III, ll. 103–4, and see also p. 23 of this book. 24 John Clare By Himself, p. 182. 22

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on Thursday: by Sunday, Clare’s having spent a wet afternoon with the text has modified his opinion further in Erskine’s favour, prompting him to find in it some of the best reasoning in favour of its object I have ever read I think a doubting christian may be set right at a first perusal and a reasoning Deist loose doubts sufficient to be half a christian in some of the arguments and a whole one ere he get to the end25

Clare here subscribes to the tradition that maintains that men’s consciences insist there is a God. As I will explore further in Chapter 6, his faith is to some extent the inevitable extension of a thought pattern which admits of God as a consequence of intimations of the transcendent, but this conviction is both reinforced and anchored by such reading. Just as Clare was both receptive to and critical of various denominations, so he was familiar with various ‘modes’ of belief. Isabel Rivers’s excellent Reason, Grace and Sentiment carefully considers the history of natural and revealed religion, tracing the roots of the freethinking which fostered these two to the Commonwealth Period and earlier, and examining their flourishing in the 1690s.26 Clare certainly shared the poor opinion of a hypocritical clergy and their ‘priestcraft’ expressed in Toland’s Letters to Serena: ‘Natural Religion was easy first and plain, / Tales made it Mystery, Offrings made it Gain’.27 On a few occasions, Clare refers to ‘priestcraft’ explicitly: in the following, deeply sad letter to his wife, Patty (in this instance, Clare remembers her rather than Mary Joyce), he is barely coherent at times, but in his frantic desperation, Clare’s outpouring is given flesh by aspects of the same discourse Rivers discusses, extending out to the works of Paine which he explicitly claimed to have rejected earlier in life.28 Railing at his enclosure in Northampton Asylum, he desperately clings to ‘Truth’, suggesting ‘priestcraft’ as its antithesis: truth is truth & the rights of man—age of reason & common sense are sentences full of meaning & the best comment of its truth is themselves—an honest man makes priestcraft an odious lyar & coward & a filthy disgrace to Christianity— that coward I hate & detest—the Revelations has a placard in capitals about ‘The Whore of Babylon & the mother of Harlots’ does it mean Priestcraft I think it must—this rubbish of cant must soon die29

25

John Clare By Himself, p. 184. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1991–2000). 27 Cited in Rivers, vol. 2, p. 52. 28 For Clare’s comments on Paine, see pp. 104–5, 114, and 199 of this book. 29 Letters, p. 669. 26


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The principal criteria of freethinking as defined by Rivers are a general antiChristian stance, especially of hostility to scriptural tradition (and particularly the mysteries therein), and derision of ‘enthusiasm’ (although Rivers also delineates a connection between the tradition of old Dissent and ‘affectionate’ religion); Clare offers no such direct opposition. As we have seen, Clare does unselfconsciously attack the Catholics for their superstition when it comes to ‘Sacred humbugs’ – relics.30 But we have seen the importance of ‘superstitions’ to Clare, and his attraction to the rituals of the Established Church derided by freethinkers is plain: he loves May Day revelry; he loves to see the Church dressed for Christmas with evergreens, ‘emblems of Eternity’.31 In these important ways, then, Clare is no conventional freethinker, but he does pursue lines of thought usually attributed to freethinking. For clarity, I might here qualify that ‘revealed religion’ denotes religion based on the revelation of ideas to man that he would not have arrived at by reason alone. Clare’s book of Wilson’s Maxims, for example, discusses reason and faith: ‘Whatever is the object of pure faith cannot be the object of reason … [see also Mystery]’.32 And Gastrell’s Christian Institutes (also owned by Clare) justifies every conclusion drawn with scriptural material, because ‘the scriptures having given us a plainer and fuller account of the Divine Being, than the reason of man can discover of itself, the best and easiest way of coming to the right knowledge of God is by his word.’33 Importantly, such knowledge and understanding is always presented as partial, as ignorance: ‘after all we can do or know of him, he is incomprehensible.’34 Natural religion has more various connotations. As Rivers notes, the phrase ‘natural religion’ ‘would obviously mean different things to different kinds of freethinker, for example one who believed in a benevolent Providence, one who regarded the concept of an unknowable first cause as meaningless, or one who regarded God as immanent in nature.’35 Such variety is important for the scope of ‘sanctioned’ belief it allows Clare. Hereunder, I am using ‘natural religion’ to encapsulate the (broad) idea that man is prompted to believe in God from the observation of creation. Psalm 19, a key passage amongst advocates of natural religion and one Clare paraphrased, insists: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handy–work. / Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. / There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.’ As Rivers points out, even Wesley ‘does not dismiss natural religion entirely. Knowledge that God exists can be deduced from God’s works, but this is knowledge of a very limited kind … “The whole creation speaks 30

32 33 34 35 31

John Clare By Himself, p. 229. John Clare By Himself, p. 203. Thomas Wilson, Maxims of Piety and of Christianity (London, 1822), p. 127. Francis Gastrell, The Christian Institutes (London, 1812), p. 10. Gastrell, p. 10. Clare uses these books: see for example Letters, p. 143. Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, vol. 2, p. 9.

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that there is a God … But who will show me what that God is?”’36 This is an excellent model for understanding Clare, for, whilst he at times lacks Wesley’s certainty in Revelation, at other times in Clare’s writing also, God is mysterious, ‘known unknown’ (MP.IV.150), intimated through nature (as in Vaughan’s ‘The Constellation’, nature for Clare is only ever ‘th’herb’ which knows ‘much, much more.’37), and interpreted through the Bible. Such belief structures could easily be and were used to set up an opposition between man and the rest of nature, pace Chateaubriand; Darley’s Errors of Ecstasie provides an example of this that Clare definitely read: ‘There is a God! This truth … / … dumb Earth / Speaks out!38 In Darley, as in Chateaubriand, man, who alone has the capacity to know of God with his mind, denies him. Clare repeatedly makes the same separation between man and the world. In ‘Natures Melodys the Music of the storm’ (MP.III.419–22), for example, ‘All nature owns in glory / The Lord & power of all’. Aspects of the natural world ‘Are all the voice of God’. All of nature participates in this communication, apart from Man: ‘Man hears & heedeth nothing / Man sees & turns aside’, although ‘All else of Gods adornings / Great small & weak & strong / Attend to natures warnings / & thousands greet her song’. Discourse on the subject (which, naturally, variously ridiculed and advocated) extended far beyond the clergy, but clerical (and other) writers hastened to manipulate such ideas to encourage the behaviour they required. In the Methodist Magazine for December 1811, for instance, the silk-worm is employed as an exemplar: ‘While the view of this insect teaches us to bow down and adore the Deity, let its industry inspire us with the same amiable virtue ...’.39 In intellectual spheres, the eighteenth century had been largely successful in separating ‘Christianity’ from the Church. Hugh Blair’s Sermons (given to Clare in 1820) was just one of several attempts to restore this connection. The Anglican William Paley (whose father was, coincidentally, vicar of Helpston between 1735 and 1745) was one of the principal contemporary exponents of theological utilitarianism, reinforcing conclusions drawn from Blair, authenticating belief, just as such authentication was needed. Both his Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802), hugely popular apologies for Christian belief

36

Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, vol. 1, p. 228. The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L.C. Martin (Oxford, 1957), p. 469: the extent to which Clare’s God is or is not manifest in nature will be considered further later in this book. 38 Darley, p. 12; compare Chateaubriand’s Beauties of Christianity, trans. Frederic Shoberl, 3 vols (London, 1813), I, pp. 133–4. 39 ‘The Works of God Displayed: Reflections on the Sloth, or Sluggard, and the Silk Worm’, in The Methodist Magazine for the Year 1811; Being A Continuation of the Arminian Magazine, first published by the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., vol. 34 (London: Thomas Cordeux, 1811), p. 928. 37


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against a current of deism, exist in Clare’s remaining library.40 Paley’s Natural Theology attempts like most books of its type to differentiate between various types of ‘evidence’ for the existence of God, ranging from the pseudo-scientific to the instinctive, ever mindful of the obvious danger in the potential for supposed lessons of nature to lead the enquiring mind to deism. This is progressive ‘science’ of the sort that Clare admired, a reconciliation of science and humility in the face of nature’s grandeur, offering analysis, but recognising the limits of any analysis ignorant of the fact that there is more to nature than mechanical abstraction. Paley is aware when he is on shaky ground: ‘My opinion of Astronomy has always been, that it is not the best medium through which to prove the agency of an intelligent Creator; but that, this being proved, it shows, beyond all other sciences, the magnificence of his operations’.41 (As Clare’s discussion of Genesis excuses: ‘it is a harmless and universal propens[i]ty to magnify consequences that appertain to ourselves’.42) Paley acknowledges fallibility and the limits of the senses. He remains keenly aware that, in essentially demystifying God, he runs the risk of being disproved by science, which otherwise is his ally. He asserts apparent ‘contrivance’ as tangible proof, and yet continues to admit and celebrate a Wesleyan combination of reason, feeling and faith. Clare was given Natural Theology in 1821, at the beginning of a period extremely important for the accretion of his influences; that such ideas occur in much of his reading matter can only have compounded the lasting effects of Clare’s questioning and probing of his faith throughout that decade. Similar ideas are reinforced by diverse sources, as time spent trawling through the extant library reveals, and if no comment on Paley exists, Clare (as we have seen) did commend Erskine’s Evidences. Coincidences between Clare’s and Erskine’s opinions are clear: appeals to universal inclusion (which for Clare must be religious, as well as social: ‘mighty learning’ alienates Clare’s ‘cottager’ from the clergy, although he still goes to Church and bows his head at the name of Jesus (MP.III.416)); emphasis on the necessity of placing the Bible before controversy, creed and doctrine; ‘faith’ understood as a consequence of intimations of God with reasoning. Erskine notes that ‘our actual belief is necessarily limited by our actual understanding … In order, then, to believe the gospel, we must understand it’.43 Clare suggests the necessity of both reason and faith in a poem of 1845, ‘When reason & religion goes a benting’: when reason and religion become withered and dry like old grass, Clare insists, ‘Christianty grows lean as spectres’ (LP.1.177). The Christians Clare denigrates are those who assert the infallibility of the Prayer Book and Bible on 40

William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (London, 1819), and Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature (London, 1819). 41 Natural Theology, p. 314. 42 John Clare By Himself, p. 173. 43 Thomas Erskine, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (Edinburgh, 1823), pp. 193–4.

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the basis of faith without the ‘convincing arguments’ Erskine insists on, who base ‘belief’ upon accepted social practice, rather than on a truer sense. Learning is important, then; but, crucially, this necessary understanding can be a realisation of ignorance. ‘Reason’ has a place for Erskine, and it must know it. Importantly, intimation of God is discussed by Erskine in the terminology of the sublime: the Gospel ‘presents a history of wondrous love, in order to excite gratitude; of high and holy worth, to attract veneration and esteem: It presents a view of danger, to produce alarm; of refuge, to confer peace and joy; and of eternal glory, to animate hope.’44 Wonder; veneration; danger; alarm; refuge; joy: this is a textbook experience of sublimity. Erskine emphasises the idea of ‘love which passeth knowledge’,45 Clare’s ‘known unknown’ (MP.IV.150), and points to love as conducive to ‘more perfect obedience.’46 Erskine celebrates the prophecies of the Old Testament so beloved by Clare, and insists that objective reality is the only means by which intimations of God might be approached. He constructs the perfect refutation of reason as inadequate to comprehend a divinity that is sublime: ‘any intelligent man … is in a condition to examine the most perfect chain of evidence in its support, with the simple feeling of astonishment at the ingenuity and the fallibility of the human understanding.’47 His simplicity echoes that of Clare: ‘The Scriptures teach, that the sentence of death falls upon all mankind, in consequence of the transgression of the first individual; and that eternal life is bestowed on account of the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ.’48 Such ideas anticipate Clare’s creed. In his Romantic Atheism, Martin Priestman examines Enlightenment and Romantic appeals to science to liberate ‘truth’ from religion’s sway. Erasmus Darwin’s writings form one of Priestman’s examples:49 Clare read and relished Darwin, yet, as we have seen, texts such as Paley’s simultaneously provide an alternative approach to ‘scientific’ consideration of the universe which seem to have had a more profound influence upon him. But Clare was not limited to such sermonising literature: another rebuttal of the secularisation of scientific approaches to the natural world can be found in Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (which Clare certainly had by 1828). In these traditions, rather than undermining it, scientific advances provide Christianity with an extra defence as the complexities of nature suggest the intelligence of the creator. I have mentioned these literary examples to suggest that, from within his dominant Christian actuality, in the prose and poetry of countless figures, Clare could read and understand the implications of a wider spectrum of modes of belief. His conclusion, as I will demonstrate, is that we do not need a complete idea of a thing’s essence in order to 44

46 47 48 49 45

Erskine, p. 58. Erskine, p. 135. Erskine, p. 136. Erskine, pp. 186–7. Erskine, p. 146. Priestman, pp. 62–70.


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know or ‘understand’ it, and that God’s being is no more mysterious than anything else in the natural world; it is the ‘known unknown’ (MP.IV.150). Joining in a long tradition, Clare consequently insists on the necessity of bringing scriptural passages to natural religion, to lend authority and, importantly, promises, which can’t be found in nature.50

The Literature of Letters Clare discussed matters of faith and doubt with several Christian correspondents. Given the erratic nature of Clare’s access to text, and given that numerous hints throughout Clare’s work suggest that he did not always privilege one kind of text over another, it is not unreasonable to consider the letters Clare received, and which he greatly valued, as in some sense ‘literary’ documents. Clare’s own letters allow us to witness his engagement with such issues as faith and belief, and several exchanges took place which should be considered here as influential. In his recent biography of Clare, for example, Jonathan Bate alludes to the connection between Clare and James Montgomery (1771–1854). Montgomery, poet and radical publisher, was a genuinely ecumenical Christian, and his philanthropic work included extensive evangelistic and missionary support. Apart from a period of doubt in his twenties, Montgomery’s Christian faith was deep, and is reflected in much of his writing (which Clare knew well). Bate connects the timing of Clare’s relationship with Montgomery with the collapse of the partnership of Taylor and Hessey: ‘The end of Taylor and Hessey led Clare to step up his efforts to find other outlets for his work. In the course of 1825 he … struck up a correspondence with the poet and hymn-writer James Montgomery, editor of a liberal paper, the Sheffield Iris.’51 Alan Vardy has remarked on Clare’s ‘great respect for Montgomery as a public intellectual, reformer and poet’, noting a ‘depth of personal connection, and a shared commitment to [the] social views’.52 Within Clare’s letters to a variety of recipients are references to his feelings of ‘honour’ at being noticed and praised by Montgomery, and, in return, to his own admiration of Montgomery as a poet and a man.53 The two exchanged letters about poetry and publishing, and volumes of their own work, expressing mutual approbation. In the extant letters of their correspondence (of which there appear to be few), there is little to suggest that Clare viewed Montgomery as a religious guide, apart from in one exchange. In January 1828, Montgomery had written to Clare, concluding: ‘For your own sake

50 The term ‘religion’ is perhaps confusing here: in Clare’s writing, ‘religion’ more usually denotes the following of a doctrinal system. 51 Bate, p. 301. 52 Alan Vardy, ‘Playing a Hunch, or the Value of Dead Ends’, in the newsletter of the John Clare Society of North America, 5 (Jan 2003), 4–6. 53 See for examples Letters, pp. 93, 94, 186, 201, 377, 389, 395–6, 407–8 and 412–14.

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go on always writing your best, for nothing less is worth your while.’54 In the postscript to his reply, Clare writes: ‘I will take your kind advice & go on doing my best for I dont think it worth while writing too much unless it be good & I wish I had not published any thing untill now … I am sorry to say that tho my character is not much amiss in the eyes of the world it is not so good in my own eyes as I could wish it the principal thing has been wanting in me full long & that is a religious feeling of faith in the Gospel I believe but always doubt that I shall ever be good enough to meet with heaven & under these feelings when ill I am often miserable’.55 Partial though our evidence of it is, the episode offers another glimpse of the variety of sources to which Clare looked for (and from which he often received) religious advice. Just as he banters with Cary about deism, Clare again here demonstrates his willingness to turn to those with faith and engage with them about his own doubts. One of the most important of Clare’s correspondents in these terms was James Hessey. Hessey frequently wrote to Clare when Taylor could, or did, not, and there is a genuine tone of affection in his letters. Some of his missives are concerned with business, and he offers Clare down-to-earth advice on publishing matters (and, at times, on Taylor). But extant in the British Library is a more interesting sequence of letters, one half of a correspondence in which Clare reaches out to Hessey for advice on explicitly religious subjects, and in which Hessey does his best to instil in Clare his own quiet faith.56 It is to Hessey that Clare repeatedly turns for advice and help during his period of depression, ill health and denominational indecision in the 1820s (at the time, Taylor’s own health was often bad, and he was frequently unavailable), exercising his concerns over the propriety and desirability of his joining Methodist groups.57 Having engaged sensitively in the spring of 1824 with Clare’s anxiety about denominational experimentation, in late August of the same year Hessey responds to a letter which seems to have concerned itself with far broader religious issues (issues which recur throughout Clare’s writing, including in some of the latest extant letters of the asylum period to members of his family, where Clare’s conclusions are similar to those Hessey here draws):58

54

07 January 1828, Egerton MS 2247, fol. 387r. Letters, pp. 412–14. 56 See for example Egerton MS 2246, fols 294–5 (28 February 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fols 304–5 (07 March 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fol. 340r (06 May 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fol. 344 (15 May 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fol. 370 (20 August 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fol. 377 (07 September 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fol. 395 (05 October 1824), Egerton MS 2246, fol. 419 (29 December 1824), Egerton MS 2247, fol. 466 (18 June 1828). Some of Clare’s corresponding letters are extant and are printed in Letters. 57 See Chapter 2 of this book for a discussion of this exchange of letters. 58 See Letters, pp. 664–5, 667, 668–9. 55


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Make no rash resolves – don’t suffer yourself to be startled by words & names – Creeds & Priestcraft are not religion – Consult your own heart, & make use of your own excellent Good Sense, and then disbelieve as much as you like. Read your Bible again without any foolish prejudices and with an impartial mind and a willing heart & I am content to leave the [faded word] to him who dictated it & who made you capable of judging of his word …59

In October of the same year Hessey resumes their religious dialogue in terms which suggest a liberal approach to faith, despite his own firm, scripture-based conviction: ‘How do you go on in respect to this important affair? do you visit your methodist friends, go to hear Mr Mossop, or walk in the fields instead and set a good example to your neighbours and children?’60 (Hessey apparently has scribbled out the word ‘or’ before ‘go to hear Mr Mossop’, an accidental reminder that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive pursuits.) Hessey’s letters to Clare are well-judged and sympathetic, and their correspondence offers a valuable insight into the wide range of questions of faith with which Clare was attempting to cope, from denominational propriety, to scriptural interpretation, to ‘priestcraft and creeds’, in the period. Frequently, however, Hessey’s letters engage more explicitly with individual issues, in particular with aspects of scripture (from which, alongside the liturgy, he quotes abundantly), and he repeatedly advocates deliberation upon passages of the Bible. Hessey does share many of the characteristics of the dominant evangelicalism of his day, in particular the emphases on justification by faith and on the Gospels, reminding Clare, for example, in March 1824, of the Pauline doctrine that ‘By Faith are ye saved’, and offering multiple examples from scripture which support his point in a later letter.61 Yet in general he lacks the tone of high-handed moral paternalism typified by, for instance, James Plumptre, and his letters often suggest a broad-mindedness which mirrors a common sentiment of Clare’s verse: ‘There

59 20 August 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 370v (overwritten in red ink, crossways); Clare’s letter to which this is a response does not seem to have survived. 60 05 October 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 395 v. 61 07 March 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fols 304–5; 18 June 1828, Egerton MS 2247, fol. 466–7: ‘In almost every Page of the Gospels you will find encouragements – “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” – “Come unto me all ye that labour & are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” – “What must I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, & thou shalt be saved.” Pray to God for forgiveness and for an humble Heart – “The sacrifice of God is a broken Spirit – a broken and a contrite heart O God thou wilt not despise.” – This is the language of Scripture throughout, and if you read it with prayer & with a sincere desire to understand & feel it, you will doubtless derive consolation from it. And you will find in it that Peace which the world cannot give, and, what is better, which the world cannot take away except by your own consent.’ (fol. 467r).

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is Poetry & Philosophy and Religion too to be found in the Works of Nature as we call them, but it is not everyone who can discuss them.’62 Hessey’s tone is persistently kind and thoughtful; crucially, he offers advice that Clare has asked for, and he regularly acknowledges his own failings: ‘You ask for my advice as to what you should do to make your Peace with God – alas, my dear Clare, I am a poor Counsellor, but I will tell you what David did …’; ‘I told you, John, that I was a poor preacher’; ‘I need these admonitions, my dear fellow, as much or more than thou dost, and this vision of thine will very probably haunt my mind & perhaps may do me good …’63 His intention throughout seems to be to offer Clare comfort and to break through his feelings of isolation. He answers Clare’s concerns by repeatedly insisting not only on the necessity of faith (which, alone, would be poor comfort to Clare in times of doubt), but also on the idea that it is precisely Clare’s desire to have faith (and it is rare for Clare to express doubt without this concomitant wish) which is sufficient evidence of the very goodness he worries over: The system of religion taught in the Scriptures is remarkably simple, and needs only a willing heart and an humble spirit to enable us to understand it … There is in fact no difficulty in the case if a man is really desirous to know the truth and to practice it when he knows it … if his heart is willing he shall be instructed in the right way.64

Hessey suggests to Clare in various letters that an open mind and the exercise of reason together are sufficient preservation against irreligiosity: ‘You have the Bible in your hands I hope, & the spirit of repentance & humility in your Heart, and you cannot go far wrong if you pray for a right use of such means.’65 Hessey’s advice is also practical: ‘In reading the Epistles, I would have you read a whole Epistle at a time that you may understand the Scope of the reasoning; and I am sure you will derive not only instruction but much pleasure from the perusal of them.’66 Many of Hessey’s letters purport to respond to ‘feelings’ Clare has described, and it is perhaps a measure of his trust in Hessey that Clare seems to turn to him not only in confusion but also even in his suicidal moments. When Hessey writes to Clare at the beginning of May 1824, it is clear that ‘the serious thoughts’ Clare’s ‘illness … has excited’ concern an attempt on his own life;67 in June 1825, Hessey 62

07 September 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 377. 18 June 1828, Egerton MS 2247, fol. 466v, 467v; 29 December 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 419. 64 07 March 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fols 304–5. 65 18 June 1828 , Egerton MS 2247, fol. 466r (written across page). 66 07 March 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fols 304–5. 67 06 May 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 340r; see also p. 43 of this book for a further discussion of this letter. 63


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is again responding to what he terms a ‘rash design upon your own life’.68 Clare’s approach to Hessey, though, is not simply medical or emotional; as elsewhere, the religious aspect of Hessey’s response to Clare’s suicide is invited; Clare has ‘asked’ him what he should do ‘to make [his] Peace with God’ following his most desperate thoughts. The archive of letters from Hessey to Clare is both remarkable and touching, the more so because Hessey’s letters give an impression not only of concern and sympathy, but also of respect. Precisely because of the sparseness of his education and the relative unavailability of books, but also because of his acute ear, Clare is intensely susceptible to the domineering presence of influence. Moreover, and again because of the relative early absence of other literary resources, Clare is particularly influenced by biblical (along with ballad) traditions. The evidence of this recurs in the language of Clare’s poetry, and is also frequently apparent in the content of his verse. It remains impossible and unnecessary to propose that Clare acquired any particular idea from any particular source, but just to read, say, Colton’s satirical Hypocrisy (1812), followed by Porteus’s Summary for the Principal Evidences for the Truth and Divine Origin of the Christian Revelation (1819) and Melmoth’s The Great Importance of a Religious Life Considered (1809), and then to glance at Cowper’s or Darley’s or Young’s poems (all of which Clare read), suggests the facility with which these texts could convince someone already primed to believe that ‘The heavens his wonderous works declare / The firmament his power / His handyworks are written there / Through every day & hour’ (‘Psalm 19’, LP.I.131) of their absolute logic (an example can be seen as Clare’s reading Young’s Night Thoughts coalesces with his joining the Ranters in 1824, prompting him to warn ‘all scoffers’ to remember a particular line of Young, and adding; ‘I shall never forget the horror that I felt in reading this line’).69 If it is inevitable that much of Clare’s reading was explicitly theological, and most was broadly theistic, then not only was Clare’s ruminating intelligence bound to dwell on the implications of the ‘theological’ texts he read, but his more general thinking also was coloured by the same omnipresent, not necessarily obtrusive, sense of God-ness. Whilst Clare was capable of and inclined to sophisticated, rational consideration, the overwhelming bias of his literary influence and the prime role of the Bible in his reading matter coupled with prevailing preaching and the Christian impetus behind the majority of educational programmes did not fail to instil in Clare a quiet but deep Christianity. Literature seems to have affected Clare’s privileging of mystery as essential to faith, and to have worked in tandem with Clare’s experience and perception of the natural world to constitute what is essentially his ‘theology’.

68

18 June 18258 , Egerton MS 2247, fol. 466v. Letters, p. 294.

69

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Reason and Reasoning Clare’s understanding of the concept of ‘reason’, be it innate or learnt, has a significant bearing upon his theodicy. ‘Reason’ has a complex pedigree, and definition is tricky: in the words of Hugh Blair, of whose Lectures Clare owned a copy, ‘Reason is a very general term’. Yet Blair offers a working definition, as ‘that power of the mind which in speculative matters discovers truth, and in practical matters judges of the fitness of means to an end.’70 Reason is undeniably often maligned by Clare. Middleton Murry discusses the use of ‘reason’ in ‘An Invite to Eternity’, concluding that ‘Reason has destroyed the continuity of the past with the present.’71 To a certain extent, this is true: Clare writes in The Shepherd’s Calendar ‘But reason like a winters day / Nipt childhoods visions all away’ (MP.I.22). But Clare’s is no consistent or straightforward opposition. How far was Clare exposed to philosophies of reason? Firstly, we should not assume that he lacked first-hand knowledge of relevant texts; certainly he had a great deal of second-hand, vicarious knowledge, and hence their impact upon his belief, even if indirect, must be recognised. The editors of A Champion for the Poor suggest that Clare must have had knowledge of Hume’s work because of an apparent quotation; it is equally possible, of course, that Clare’s knowledge is here vicarious.72 Secondly, although many texts by those who immediately spring to mind in relation to contemporary discourses of ‘reason’ are absent from Clare’s extant library, Clare knew of (some of) them, writing in the ‘Autobiographical Fragments’: in my younger days I inclined to deism but on reading Pain[e]s Age of Reason lent me by a companion instead of hardening my opinion it broke it and I was doubtful of pain[e]s sub[t]eltys for he seemd determined to get over every obstacle with the opinion he set out with73

(It is after this encounter with Paine that Clare turns to the Methodists for the first time.) Eric Robinson discusses the difficulties inherent in the attempt accurately to date Clare’s ‘Autobiographical Fragments’.74 However, as Clare writes in the 70 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1819), I, p. 13. 71 John Middleton Murry, Unprofessional Essays (London, 1956), p. 65. In Clare’s poetry we find a confusion of ‘pasts’ including at least the Biblical (especially the edenic), that which I have elsewhere described as his ‘ideal’, and the less-recent past: this further problematises Murry’s statement. 72 A Champion for the Poor, pp. xii. Jonathan Bate has suggested to me in conversation that Clare probably knew Hume’s words from reading them as a quotation in a newspaper article. 73 John Clare By Himself, p. 133. 74 See John Clare By Himself, pp. xvi–xix.


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Journal for 17 March 1825 ‘I have not read Tom Paine but I have always understood him to be a low blackguard’,75 we might assume that Clare’s ‘Opinions in Religion’ (from which the above quotation is taken) are written after this date, otherwise, such obvious contradiction seems odd, even for a chronicler as unreliable as Clare. Not long after, however, or so ‘in my younger days’ would suggest. Clare makes a more extended criticism of Paine’s style in a fragment reproduced in A Champion for the Poor, in which he expresses his admiration of Paine’s ‘strong mind & great natural abilities’, but nonetheless criticises his ‘continued warfare against every thing that time had rendered sacred’.76 The first part of the fragment is concerned with the way in which Paine causes these results, and Clare’s Swiftian opinion of polemical religio-philosophical writing is as evident from these lines as it is from the above fragment on Paine’s ‘sub[t]eltys’, and from the Journal, where ‘railing has no substitute for argument’: it is the style of debating Clare is criticising, rather than the theoretical principles of the arguers, but this reflects back negatively on his opinions of the arguments themselves.77 Elsewhere Clare writes that ‘Truth urged too far from understanding flies / In mists & turns to falshood in disguise’ (MP. II.244). Clare’s knowledge of Paine illustrates not only the difficulty with which we are faced when attempting to discuss the texts he knew (apart from a few slight references we might otherwise have assumed Clare’s ignorance of his work at first hand, though Clare’s extant library does contain Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1796) which quotes large amounts of Paine’s Age of Reason), but also that his exclusion from the contemporary philosophical scene was also a liberation, in that it allowed him freedom from the necessity of pushing an argument to the furthest point (frequently the point at which, Clare knows, it begins to crumble). Given his love of the natural world, the receptivity of Clare to deism is easy to understand. Earlier in this book, a letter to Clare from Thomas Bennion offered us a glimpse of Clare actively engaging with the notion that he might be tending towards ‘deisem’.78 Later, when Clare professes to have rejected deism, he writes that My mind was always hung with doubts I usd to fancy at times that religion was nothing and woud say to myself if there is a god let him dry up this pond of water or remove this stone and then I will believe and then on seeing things remain as they were I concluded that my doubts were true but after reflection upbraided my foolish presumption and my conscence woud struggle to correct my errors79

Though we might wonder for whom they are written, such passages provide evidence of the reasoning intelligence of Clare: he has considered such theological 75

77 78 79 76

John Clare By Himself, p. 219. A Champion for the Poor, p. 294. John Clare By Himself, p. 219. 21 July 1822, Egerton MS 2246, fols 88–9; see pp. 31–2 of this book. John Clare By Himself, pp. 133–4.

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positions as deism and atheism alongside other possibilities, and continues (even against the promptings of his own conscience) to try to enlarge his understanding. Clare’s passion for thought and discovery is again evident in his declaration: ‘I puzzled over every thing in my hours of leisure … with a restless curiosity that was ever on the enquirey … it never sickened me I still pursued Knowledge in a new path and tho I never came off victor I was never conqured’.80 In this ‘scientific’ pursuit, Clare’s thinking is deeply marked by the Christian background to his thought-patterns. And yet, we should not assume a false naïvety. In his ‘Advice to his children’, even as he praises the Prayer Book, Clare encourages his children intellectually to find their own ‘Christianity’: traditional Church observance is advocated only ‘untill you are able to chuse your own creeds’.81 Greg Crossan, whilst denying Clare knowledge of Humeian ‘reason’, yet wants the poet to have ‘rejected’ such philosophy. He sees Clare’s writing of ‘Knowledge, the root of evil’ as a rejection of (evil) reason, apparently autonomous from any theological provenance.82 Crossan therefore has to concede that ‘perhaps he momentarily forgets himself in “Verses on Life” when he allows “reason” to procure “A passport for eternity”’.83 On the contrary, however, the concept of ‘reason’ has a highly ambivalent theo-philosophical provenance, which allows precisely of the apparent contradictions Crossan identifies. As in Clare’s lines on star-gazing (EP.II.363), when Clare records in his Journal having read the first chapter of Genesis, his incredulity at man’s self-centred assumptions echoes Eve’s question to Adam, which indirectly leads to the Fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?’84 This is an echo which recurs in Clare’s work, almost certainly because it is itself an echo of an Old Testament passage (from the Book of Job) to which Clare was strongly drawn. However, in his paraphrase of Job 38, Clare adds ‘understanding’ to the content of the biblical passage, wondering: ‘who hath given / Prime understanding to the beating heart’ (LP.I.124). He also alters Job 39: dwelling on images of nature familiar to him, he writes of the bird who lays her eggs on the ground, and which consequently are crushed: ‘God hath deprived / Her heart of reason – understanding lacks’ (LP.I.125).85 Clare evidently sees understanding as something specific to man, given by God, and while this does not necessarily make it a good thing, its absence is certainly problematic. For Clare, ‘reason’ is connected with common sense: ‘I dont see why any man is to be laughed at for the opinions he entertains of his faith any more then another for other opinions equally absurd … commonsense or the right use of reason will 80

John Clare By Himself, p. 59. A Champion for the Poor, p. 290. 82 See Crossan, A Relish for Eternity, pp. 57–8. 83 Crossan, p. 58. 84 Paradise Lost, Bk IV, ll. 657–8. See John Clare By Himself, p. 173. 85 I am not suggesting that Clare was personally familiar with ostriches(!), only that he recognises in the passage similarities to the eggs in the nest of the partridge or ‘pettichap’. 81


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wear out these delusions … if reason & commonsense cannot convert them from harmless superstitions she will not oppress them.86 In approximately 1831, in a letter to Marianne Marsh (the wife of the Bishop of Peterborough, with whom Clare maintained an important correspondence), Clare, invoking the Shaftesburian preoccupations of the previous century, writes: ‘I pretend to very little knowledge in men manners & things—I have only opinions & these are founded upon common sense as far as reason alows me to do so for common sense is the right use of reason among common people who have no advantages of education to come at by different ways’.87 ‘Reason’ and ‘commonsense’ thus combine to arrive at the ‘right’ answer, and are clearly distinct from the sort of knowledge provided by book education. As we have seen, this conviction continues to preoccupy Clare in the asylum years. What begins to emerge in Clare’s writing can most easily be defined as an (inadvertent) fusion of Thomistic and Augustinian concepts of recta ratio, or ‘right reason’, in which emphasis falls upon the inscrutability of the workings of God’s will. As Robert Hoopes summarises, As the origin of ‘sin’ lies in a wrong determination of the will … so ‘error’ results from the effort ‘to make one’s own truth,’ to place knowledge instead of wisdom first … In Augustine’s words, man must be ‘upright and humble enough to deserve to know what is true.’88

In his Summa Theologia, Thomas Aquinas insists that intellect and reason are one, and that because we may advance from one point to another by reasoning to arrive at an intelligible truth, we may know God rationally but not completely, through knowledge of the universe: this is ‘triumphant rationalism’. However, the vice of Thomistic curiositas lurks herein: the desire to know everything without paying due attention to the relation between what is learned and ultimate ‘Truth’, or to know too much, poses a considerable risk. Now, these are just two contributions to a highly complex debate taking place over several centuries, re-ignited during the Renaissance and subsequently sustained through the writing of Hooker, Hobbes, Descartes, Bacon and the Cambridge Platonists, amongst many others. However, they are usefully concise expressions relating closely to Clare’s own sentiments: ‘O power almighty whence these beings shine / All wisdoms lost in comprehending thine’ (EP.II.363). Clare also knows that rational consideration of the universe is important, yet simultaneously recognises (even if he lacks the technical vocabulary) the danger of curiositas. For Clare, of course, it might be said that the dangers are different, and that too much tasteless science destroys the grandeur of nature. But if we accept that Clare receives intimations of God through this grandeur (and this is something that 86

Tibble ed. Prose, p. 227. Letters, p. 556. 88 Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 1962), p. 70. 87

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will be explored further in Chapter 6), then it can be argued that the two cannot be separated. Interestingly, the husband of Clare’s ‘Cress Gatherer’ (EP.II.652–9), the parish clerk, is declared by ‘those around him’ to be ‘more fit for parson then for clerk’ because of his ‘Mystic conclusions drawn from many a sign’. Such signs have been considered in Chapter 3; but this knowledge simultaneously gives rise to a sort of village curiositas: ‘His artless listners’ think ‘he more things then lawful understood / & knowledge got from helpers none too good’. Similarly, Clare’s ‘Cottager’ (MP.III.414–18) ‘views new knowledge with suspicious eyes / & thinks it blasphemy to be so wise’ (ll.9–10). This village curiositas and its more learned, Thomistic equivalent thus coincide, rendering the concept both familiar and theological for Clare. In the course of the ‘right reason’ debate, reason, rationality and truth are probed and repeatedly redefined. I am not suggesting that Clare was steeped in such literature, nor that he had a definite sense of a quasi-discrete discourse surrounding ‘right reason’. Nor, however, would I wish to suggest he did not. He encountered some of the earlier contributions to the discourse, and certainly knew contemporary texts which continued the debate. Even if he had remained ignorant of direct contributions, his work is without doubt influenced by works which themselves are indebted to the tradition. Clare’s love and knowledge of and deliberation upon Paradise Lost, for example, exploring as it does the complex terms of the ‘right reason’ discourse, would have lent him more than a passing acquaintance with the concepts involved, no less considerable for their tacit nature. Once more, Clare’s literary influences in their broadest sense are vital to the formation of his thought: Clare’s notions of Adam and Eve, for example, are as Miltonic as they are biblical. Eric Robinson justifiably suggests Salomon Gessner’s Death of Abel (1758) as a prime source of Clare’s Edenic imagery;89 in his Journal, Clare connects this text to Paradise Lost and posits it as a major early influence:90 it is noteworthy that Clare’s experience is conducted in the knowledge of a literary-historical trend. His ‘theology’ must be understood as similarly indebted. Certainly, Clare lacked a point of entry into the converse of the pseudophilosophical arena, the hypothetical field of debate inhabited, for example, by the High Romantics. For other thinkers, notions might be expounded through their consideration by philosophers in universities or by those to whom such systems were otherwise available. For the older Clare, whatever notions of reason, instinct and imagination might be emphasised for him through the literary climate, religious preaching was probably the only ‘teaching’ (as opposed to learning through reading) regularly available. (Clare did of course speak with and receive letters from many and various correspondents, but the vast majority of those which concern themselves with religious themes are of an evangelical religious prejudice and reinforce Christian orthodoxy.) Similarly, that teaching informs the opinions and minds of his fellow villagers, even as the traffic of ‘village’ 89

John Clare By Himself, pp. 288–9, n. 27. John Clare By Himself, p. 198.

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information is passed around (by a form of transmission we might understand to be a different kind of ‘teaching’). Whilst it is as likely that Clare consciously took his lessons in theology from the literature he loved, as much as from sermons he felt unable to trust, those sermons made a deep impression. Moreover, Clare’s reading immediately subsequent to the publication of Poems Descriptive in 1820 was largely directed and therefore biased by the evangelicals who sent him letters and books, in particular, Lord Radstock and Eliza Emmerson. His quotidian ‘intellectual’ feeding, and any ‘discussion’ (which tended to take place through letters from these and other similarly minded ‘friends’), was therefore largely of an evangelical religious prejudice. Yet despite these and other such impediments, as a highly sensitive reader, Clare remained receptive to the underpinnings of the works he devoured. His highly eclectic taste is therefore significant: he enjoys poets as diverse as Pope and Wordsworth, Milton and Burns, reading Swift and Bunyan and innumerable texts which, even if not explicitly engaging with a discourse of ‘reason’, are influenced or marked by that discourse, in turn influencing or marking Clare. Perhaps through poetic as much as religio-philosophic reading, Clare seems at times to adopt not only the Argument from Design, but also notions belonging to the discourse of reason and rationality which are represented in a vast number of poetic and prosodic texts, culminating most magnificently, as I suggest, in Paradise Lost. Whether or not one accepts that Clare was subject to the influence of such ideas, or whether they are rather understood as innate to his mind, the way in which they are manifest in Clare’s work is important. Crossan concludes that ‘Clare’s term for the first state is, idiosyncratically, the word “disorder.”’91 It is not difficult to see why this should be so. Beyond any notion of ‘order’ available to man, the divine is the unknown, the unordered. The activity of ‘organisation’ or ‘order’ (which takes its most damaging form in Enclosure) is, for Clare, that of man. Clare’s God is always in chaos, pre-order; thus in ‘Shadows of Taste’ (MP. III.303–10) Clare celebrates that ‘Insects of varied taste in rapture share … / In wild disorder various routs they run’ (ll.39–41), criticising that ‘Some spruce & delicate ideas feed / With them disorder is an ugly weed’ (ll.153–4). Clare does hold ‘reason’ and ambition responsible for destroying the sublime simplicity of childhood: ‘& rapture holds the fairy flower / Which reason soon destroys / … childhood disappears / For higher dooms ambition aims / & care grows into years’ (MP.III.251). ‘Reason’ as an adjunct of the understanding is something peculiar to man, and becomes something known, ordered (in this way it differs from heavenly reason, which is beyond man’s understanding: as ever, Clare is not exclusive with his terminology). However, ‘reason’ in the sense of a logical progression by deduction is not simply condemned. Mathematics fascinated Clare, perhaps providing evidence of divine planning (perhaps, of course, simply interesting him). In a letter dated 28 April 1849 (one of his last), he writes to his son, imploring him to ‘read books of 91

�� Crossan, p. 124.

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Knowledge … Learning is your only wealth Mathematics Astronomy & Mechanics should be your “Common Place Book”’.92 An advocation of learning in general is evident in Clare’s earlier years, when science is of the realm of the understanding. However, Clare delineates the limitations of this sort of knowledge: ‘He who seeks wisdom without first seeking self-knowledge tries to read before he knows his letters & so looses his way’.93 Clare’s love for science and scientific knowledge (of course, spheres of knowledge were less distinct ‘disciplines’ than they are now perceived to be), seen in his plan to write a natural history of Helpston, can well coexist with his love of the simple names of plants: they are both necessary, in that ignorance of the greater workings of nature is properly found through knowledge of it, through natural observation: ‘& he who studies natures volume through / & reads it with a pure unselfish mind / Will find Gods power all round in every view / As one bright vision of the almighty mind / His eyes are open though the world is blind’ (LP.I.42). Although he claims to ‘look on nature less with critics eye / Then with that feeling every scene supplies / Feelings of reverence that warms & clings / Around the heart while viewing pleasing things’ (MP.IV.326), Clare’s vast knowledge of the working of the natural world is built up from detailed, extended and addictive observation, as Margaret Grainger’s work amply has demonstrated.94 But just as Johnson’s Rasselas discovers the inevitable gap between even the best theory and experience, what Clare hates is ‘science’ abstracted from nature, particularly when it involves killing and rendering immobile the vibrancy which makes nature what it is. He is uncomfortable with the scientist who attempts to understand ‘While he unconsious gibbets butterflyes / & strangles beetles all to make us wise’ (MP.III.307), even though, in a letter to Marianne Marsh of 1829, he indicates that he has himself been indulging in the practice.95 Despite his love of learning from the discoveries of others, when Clare vents his disgust at cruelty for the sake of science (the trapping of butterflies; the picking of flowers for botany; the dissection of insects), he does it in these terms: for my part I love to look on nature with a poetic feeling which magnifys the pleasure I love to see the nightingale in its hazel retreat & the cuckoo hiding in its solitudes of oaken foliage & not to examine their carcasses in glass cases yet naturalists & botanists seem to have no taste for this practical feeling they merely make collections of dryd specimens classing them after Linnaeus into tribes & familys & there they delight to show them as a sort of ambitious fame96

Elsewhere, he reaffirms that insects should not be hunted, ‘For to kill them in sport as a many folks will / & call it a pastime tis cruel & ill’ (MP.III.402). To 92

Letters, pp. 662–3. �� Tibble ed. Prose, p. 228. 94 The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford, 1983). 95 Letters, p. 469. 96 Tibble ed. Prose, p. 174. 93


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some extent, Clare is echoing the concerns of eighteenth-century humanitarian poetry, but the frequency with which such ideas occur in his work suggests that he feels the truth of such sentiments acutely. Such science thus becomes a source of inspiration. Those who lack taste – that is, those with no interest in the glory of nature – are for Clare as bad as those who are too clinical: ‘The heedless mind may laugh the clown may stare / They own no soul to look for pleasure there / Their grosser feelings in a coarser dress / Mock at the wisdom which they cant possess’ (MP.III.308).97 However, ‘The man of sience in discoverys moods / … by the simple brook in rapture finds / Treasures’ (MP.III.307): his ‘knowledge’ is a discovery of his own ignorance, a rapturous surrender in the face of nature. The importance of this surrender will become clear later in this book. Hence, Clare is an accomplished ornithologist and natural historian, but he enjoys the mystery of ‘nameless flowers’ (LP.I.330, l.25), and ‘strange birds … / We have [no] name for’ (LP.I.250), happy to acknowledge that ‘there are a many of natures riddles not yet resolved’, because this ignorance (which should not be confused with Clare’s occasional exasperation with the imagined limits of his own learning) is a concrete figuration of the way in which we are ignorant of the greater workings of the universe.98 Justified in his habit by writers such as Paley and Erskine, Clare can describe with acuity the physical appearance of natural things, like an eggshell, and still wonder at the ‘mystic’ inscription of the scribbles. In this one is reminded of his belief in ghosts he knows do not exist: he knows and is blind at the same time. This proper kind of mystery is addressed in a poem published in The Rural Muse (1835): ‘Mystery thou subtle essence—ages gain / New light from darkness—still thy blanks remain / & reason trys [to] chase old night from thee / When chaos fled thy parent took the key’ (MP.IV.245).99 These lines invoke paradise-as-chaos, a chaos to which fallen reason is unable to gain access. Clare’s connection of this mystery with faith is summarised in his paraphrase of Psalm 91: ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place / Of God the great & high … / On me his inward love shall call / … I’ll … / … honour his belief’ (LP.I.134–36). With Augustine (and again echoing Milton’s Eve), but most importantly placing faith in a Christian tradition of faith, Clare can conclude in The Parish that: Een earths least mysterys are above our skill & would-be-gods are but her childern still Wisdom still searching with her flickering flame 97 The concept of ‘taste’ and Clare’s understanding of it has been examined by Timothy Brownlow in John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford, 1983), pp. 116–33, and it intrudes into Crossan’s work at various times. For a typical example of Clare’s own thoughts on the subject, see John Clare By Himself, p. 62, and his essay on ‘Taste’, in A Critical Edition of the Major Works, pp. 479–80. 98 Tibble, ed., Prose, p. 165. For an example of Clare’s frustration at what he sees as the inadequacy of his own learning, see Tibble, ed., Prose, pp. 53–4. 99 See also MP.IV.586.

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John Clare’s Religion Lost in her mysterys dwindles to a name Whence goeth light when evening hides the sun & whence the darkness when the night be done Hither it cometh—aye—& there it goes Is the whole sum which mighty wisdom knows (EP.II.719–20, ll.569–76)

Chapter 5

‘faiths ’lumind scroll’: Clare and the Scriptures

Aside from Bibles and the Prayer Book, books perceived as such were not easily accessible to the younger Clare: I deeply regret usefull books was out of my reach, for … I never woud own to my more learned neighbours that I was fond of books, otherwise then the bible and Prayer Book, the prophetical parts of the former, with the fine hebrew Poem of Job, and the prayers and simple translation of the Psalms in the latter was such favourite readings with me that I coud recite abundance of passages by heart

Elsewhere, the Bible is ‘the cottage book the only … book’. Clare’s opinion of what qualifies as a book varies: the chapbooks which feed his early appetite for reading clearly are sometimes accorded that status; in the above passage, through which Clare is attempting to stake a claim within a more conventionally literary world, they are apparently not; but the fact that, according to Clare’s statement, the books available to him in his youth were religious (indeed, here he claims almost exclusively biblical) is noteworthy. Significantly, though, Clare recognises the intrinsic literary merits of the Bible, a text supposed rather to be a moral guide, thus demonstrating an inclination to separate text from context. When Clare describes the character of his early Bible reading, he does it in these terms: ‘tho I read it with the customary reverence instilled into my mind by my parents I read it with a lack of reflection & rather more for amusement then profit’. These quotations, typifying Clare’s approach to the Bible as literature, simultaneously provide examples of the affection for the Prayer Book and Bible which Clare often articulates. But they also intimate that his relationship with Scripture is complex.

Clare and the Bible In September 1824, Clare recorded in his Journal that he had been reading the New Testament, writing ‘I am convincd of its sacred design …’; in a letter of 1827, Clare offers a critical reading of the Bible, apparently demonstrating love of and

John Clare By Himself, p. 5; Letters, pp. 515–16. Letters, p. 516.

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faith in it, and yet a fortnight later he complains to James Montgomery of ‘the principal thing has been wanting in me full long & that is a religious feeling of faith in the Gospel’. Then again, in a prose manuscript, Clare criticises Paine’s attacks on the Bible as ‘pompous’ and argues that his ‘Attempt to under value the bible stird up an evidence in its favour’. Part of this apparent contradiction is perhaps Clare’s typical vacillation of opinion. Another part is attributable to the instability of Clare’s terminology (at times, he uses the word ‘Bible’ to refer to the entirety of the scriptural canon, yet, speaking of the origin of gypsy names, Clare equates ‘Bible’ with Old Testament; in October 1824, he confirms this, writing of the New Testament as ‘testament’, recording his love for ‘that simple hearted expression of “little childern”’, but six days earlier, he had been more precise, writing of the ‘sacred design’ of and the divine inspiration behind the ‘New Testament’, thus suggesting a need to distinguish between the testaments: this confusion is present throughout Clare’s writings). More significantly, in questioning the ‘truth’ of the accounts of the Apostles by denying faith in the ‘Gospel[s]’, and in doing so in a letter to Montgomery (someone he greatly admired and knew to hold a deep Christian faith), Clare is performing a remarkably acute and scholarly critique of the texts (though elsewhere he self-effacingly denies his ability to do so, claiming that ‘to turn critic in such matter would only be “Multiplying words without knowledge” …’). Moreover, in relegating the value of the Gospels in this way, Clare highlights the importance of the other New Testament material; that is, he founds his Christianity in post-resurrection events. Despite uncertainty surrounding what exactly Clare means by ‘The Bible’ and its associated titles, it is clear that, aside from his opinion of the Song of Solomon (considered, below), he does not seem to struggle with the authenticity of the Old Testament as he does with the New (this may help to illuminate the bias of the asylum paraphrases). Clare’s own is certainly a selective and judicious appreciation of Scriptural texts: on 23 September, 1824, disgusted at the Song of Solomon despite his appreciation of it, Clare is writing that he thought the supposd illusions in that lucious poem to our Saviour very overstraind far fetchd and conjectural it appears to me an eastern love poem and nothing further … I fancy that the Bible is not illustrated by that suposision tho it is a very beautiful Poem it seems nothing like a prophetic one as it is represented to be

It is interesting that Clare is unable to take it as such, despite the plethora of natural and erotic imagery, and despite finding it a ‘very beautiful Poem’: more Letters, pp. 409–10, 414; John Clare By Himself, p. 178; A Champion for the Poor, p. 294. John Clare By Himself, pp. 176, 181, 178. Letters, p. 409. John Clare By Himself pp. 175–6.

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usually, it is precisely these things which contribute directly to Clare’s pleasure and (in the case of the natural at least) to his faith. His questioning the Song of Solomon’s place in the scriptural canon is another instance of Clare’s dispassionate and scholarly criticism of the scriptures. Although vague echoes of the Song of Solomon can be identified in Clare’s work, the passages never seem to haunt him with the intensity of certain other books of the Bible. Perhaps this is because when he writes the above paragraph, during which time he is in the midst of his religious turmoil, Clare is beginning to conceive more explicitly and fixedly of a division between earthly and edenic which comes to shape his faith, and to realise that female love is not perfect, and that however wonderful it is, it lacks the splendour of ‘true’ heavenly love (ideas which will be discussed further in later chapters). Or perhaps more simply, the Song of Solomon is not ‘plain and simple’ enough to be an adequate treatment of religion for Clare. Through all the vacillations of his faith, Clare’s appreciation of the Bible’s aesthetic worth remains constant. I shall return to this aesthetic character shortly, but first I should like to highlight some of the other aspects of the Bible and Prayer Book that Clare commends. In ‘Advice to his children’, he urges: ‘hear every sunday the Prayers of the church for they are the best ever written or uttered’. He goes on to describe them as ‘comforts in illness hopes in trouble & a charm over every {ill} evil’, and, elsewhere, declares that ‘There are more pages of true sublimity to be found in the common translation of the Bible than in all the books I ever met with’. Despite his commenting in 1828 that he lacked faith in the Gospels, towards the end of 1830, he is confident in the Bible’s ability to console, writing of it to Hessey as ‘an antidote to my deepest distresses’.10 This ‘antidote’ is trusted, the letter insists (‘I had not the least doubt on my conviction of its truth’), and inspirational (‘it also gave me a relish for thinking’). It is uplifting (‘the one & only book that supplys soul & body with happiness’), and a literary exemplar (‘I also found in it the beautiful in poetry in perfection … I found in it gems of the oldest excellence in sublimity’), and it is certainly not simply the content that makes it so: Clare elsewhere scorns those who believe that ‘writing about religion was the test of Poetry’.11 In this habit of reading the Bible in many ways at the same time, Clare is by no means ploughing his own furrow.12 By the late eighteenth century, scholarly biblical attention had shifted from a focus on the typological to a broad spectrum of approaches, including the aesthetic and the moral, which might or might not

A Champion for the Poor, p. 290. Scrap of paper in Pforzheimer MSS Misc. 197, transcribed by Eric Robinson. Letters, p. 414. 10 Letters, p. 515. See also Clare to Henry Behnes (Letters, p. 409), and compare Clare’s criticisms of Paine’s attempts to ‘under value the bible’ (A Champion for the Poor, p. 294). 11 Letters, pp. 515–16; John Clare By Himself, p. 163. 12 Clare is conscious that there are many ‘ways’ to read, assuming in the previous letter (Letters, p. 515) that he ‘had read the Bible successfully’.

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be directly concerned with the ‘truth’ of texts. This shift is especially relevant here because it is accompanied and facilitated by a critical discourse preoccupied with the sublimity of the Hebrew poetry of the Scriptures, concerned with form, content or both. This scholarly tradition is perhaps most associated with Bishop Lowth, although it is evidenced far more widely, and in texts Clare knew (Aaron Hill’s Gideon provides an example).13 Whilst I have not found any evidence that Clare had read Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753, available in translation from 1778), he certainly knew discussions of Lowth’s work. Hugh Blair, for example, devoted an entire chapter of his Lectures, which Clare owned, to summarising Lowth.14 Lowth had identified the way in which Old Testament imagery invested the very ordinary with great dignity, and recognised ‘parallelism’ as the distinguishing feature of Hebrew poetry.15 Because (in the face of this parallelism) translation of Hebrew passages becomes a different enterprise to the translation of verse dependent on rhyme and/or rhythm, Lowth suggested, Hebrew poetry was better translated into prose. Blair and other critics were swift to recognise that this left the Bible uniquely and expediently open to translation, as works in classical or European languages could not be. Lowth insisted that the roots of Hebrew poetry lay in an oral tradition. His stress on sublimity supplemented extant claims to the appreciation of the Bible as an aesthetic artefact. The importance of the sublime to Clare’s work is something I will discuss further in Chapter 6, but suffice it to say that the emphasis on the sublime which runs through Lowth’s work, as a non-exclusive aesthetic category far less dependent upon terror than the Burkean model, is close to that we find in Clare’s own.16 Lowth cemented an extant connection between poetry, sublimity and prophecy which we also find emerging in Clare’s later poetry. Moreover, as David Jasper and Stephen Prickett write, Lowth’s work introduced an era of ‘trying to understand the state of mind of the biblical writers as people of their time within what was known of their social framework … For Lowth, the prophets and poets of the Old Testament were one and the same.’17 Clare’s awareness of such currents of ideas is important for his paraphrasing experiments, and, as his letter to Hessey mentioned above suggests, he does participate in this discourse. He is also interested in Bibles as artefacts, and recognises their worth as educative tools: What pleases me most in the little book are the cuts of the Ark Babel Solomons Temple &c &c I have never seen such illustrations of the bible before … I wish the common edit of the bible were illustrated in this manner—they interest 13

See John Clare By Himself, p. 190. See vol. 3, pp. 129–48 of Clare’s edition. 15 M.H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1973) discusses this more closely: see especially p. 398. 16 See also my ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, pp. 179–84. 17 The Bible and Literature: A Reader (Oxford, 1999), p. 26. 14


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people to read & teach people as well & even better then notes for the eye is an excellent index to the mind than thoughts18

As we have seen, in less ‘orthodox’ systems, the Bible was also involved in certain superstitious rituals. However, the Bible must be read in a particular, thoughtful way: Clare mocks those who scour it for bizarre snippets of information, and those who read only the Bible.19 His splenetic outbursts in The Parish against women who are able to parrot texts, yet who fail properly to appreciate literature (who, ‘boasting learning novels beautys quotes’, l.161), and against ‘Mr Puff’, who is ‘the man to quote / As if hed read all that was ever wrote’ (ll.2142–3), highlight how necessary Clare believes a proper mode of reading to be: both Puff and the women are reduced to the animistic ‘aping’. The poet hates man’s abuse of biblical material, abhorring the man who, ‘Part urgd as scripture more as self consiet / To suit his ends each passage he repeats’ (The Parish, ll.517–18), and he derides a man because ‘he thought that religion consisted of learning … scraps [of the Bible] … by heart’ (although he then defends him for thinking ‘him self a religious man tho he never went to church and he was so for he was happy and harmless’20). Clare adores the Scriptures as holy writing and as literary artefacts, but also notes their assistance to faith (‘& when I ope the volume which began / Its essence & its mystery with man / I see that divine shadow mystery / & all the attributes of majesty’, MP.IV.259)21 and suggests that the Bible is necessary for right worship (‘The true going churchman hears the signal ring / & takes his book his homage to fulfill’, EP.II.140). The extent of the Bible’s impact on English literary language (a consequence of its age, authority, dissemination, relative prevalence and the intensity of its controversies) does not need rehearsing. It is evident as Clare describes his dameschool teacher Mrs. Bullimore as one ‘Whose learned all—not studiously bent / Extended only to the testament!’ (EP.I.198, ll.33–4). Yet despite this extremely limited range of learning, Clare continues his praise of his teacher: ‘her impressing plan / First laid the basis of the future man / And by imbibing what she simply taught / My taste for reading there was surely caught’ (EP.I.199, ll.47–50). As we witness a concrete manifestation of the Bible’s contribution to the general literacy of the nineteenth-century poor, Clare expresses his faith in such humble lessons to lay the foundations for the taste and education of a poet. Not only had the Bible been more widely available as a book to be read than any other, passages of it had also been battered into the ears of a vast congregational majority in weekly Church or Chapel orations. This influence, first in Latin, and then in English, had of course been in operation for centuries, and its impact is 18

Letters, pp. 556–7. See John Clare By Himself, p. 89. 20 John Clare By Himself, p. 89. 21 As Greg Crossan has pointed out, Clare is circumspect about his use of the adjective ‘divine’: this scarcity intensifies the word when it does appear (Crossan, p. 125). 19

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impossible quantitatively to measure: as Jasper and Prickett point out, ‘Biblical quotations, biblical plots, biblical references became a part of ordinary speech and writing to the point where many people were simply unaware of the origins of the sayings and metaphors they were using.’22 Clare’s writing, published and unpublished, is littered with specific reference to scriptural material, but the direct and indirect influence of the Bible and Prayer Book, through echoes of phrases, vocabulary and style, must also be acknowledged.23 Mark Minor has written an interesting account of the connection between Clare, Byron and the Bible, concluding that ‘Clare’s rediscovery of Scripture during his confinement coalesced with his Byronic delusion to produce a poetic voice hitherto unavailable to him.’24 Whilst Minor’s article is interesting and useful in exploring Byron’s Hebrew Melodies as an important impetus to Clare’s poetic voice during his confinement, his claim to have indexed ‘all references to Scripture in the asylum manuscripts’ is rather great.25 Scriptural language inevitably pervades Clare’s work in a way that would render such a task impossible to any but, perhaps even, the keenest of theological eyes, and this situation is itself important to an appreciation of Clare’s language and his faith.26 Scripture as Literary Influence: The Biblical Paraphrases Although he does not see text as the only divine writing (flowers are ‘The scripture truths of every soil’, LP.I.356; spring is ‘scripture of the year’, LP.I.378, and Clare praises ‘The starry scriptures of the sky’ in Thomas Pringle’s Autumnal Excursion27), 22

Jasper and Prickett, p. 5. See also Sternberg, p. xi, on the Bible’s perceived influence on common speech. 24 Mark Minor, ‘Clare, Byron and the Bible’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 104–26 (p.106). See Tim Chilcott, John Clare: The Living Year 1841 (Nottingham, 1999), pp. 181–2 for a list of other critical work on Clare’s asylum verse. 25 Minor, ‘Clare, Byron and the Bible’, p. 110. 26 For example: in The Parish, Clare’s ‘Religions truth a plain straight journey makes’ (l. 555) echoes Isaiah; ‘were flesh is grass’ (l. 1661) has roots in Isaiah and the Psalms; ‘faith to hope the best is best of all’ (l. 578) echoes Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. See for two arbitrary examples in the later poetry LP.I.69, and LP.II.896. But these are from well-known passages of the Bible. As I have suggested, only someone with an intimate knowledge of scriptural material could even begin to assess its wider influence. (Clare was aware that he integrated various registers of language into his writing. For example, one prose passage interweaves the [classical] myth of Sisyphus with a biblical passage that Clare repeatedly invokes: ‘I am but as an alien in a strange land’ (John Clare By Himself, p. 161; and see Exodus xviii, 3; but the trope recurs throughout the Bible, and the sentiment in Clare’s writing: see for example PMS.A49, vol. 1, p. i). He explicitly addresses such different registers, and shifting meaning, in MP.V.170–78, ll. 211–13. But the language of the Bible is immediate to Clare, constantly on the tip of his tongue.) 27 Letters, p. 438. 23


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one way of approaching Clare’s conception of God lies in his love and treatment of scriptural material. The explicit biblical paraphrases do not show Clare at his best. We should remember that most of them were written in 1841, during which time Clare escaped from Dr Allen’s High Beech asylum, walked home to Northborough (an agonising journey movingly recorded in the ‘Journey out of Essex’), and was committed to Northampton Asylum, therefore when at his most unsettled. Robinson and Powell record in a poignant footnote to ‘Isaiah Chap 47’ that the text ‘follows the fair copy of MS 6 as far as it goes. As this is the last entry in MS 6 it is probable that Clare’s copying was interrupted by his enforced removal to Northampton.’28 That Clare writes at this highly emotional time is itself significant, and we should perhaps be lenient in consideration of the quality of the paraphrases, or at least bear the conditions of their construction in mind. At times Clare demonstrates a keen knowledge of the Gospels: Yet your kind heavenly father bends his eye On the least wing that flits along the sky … If ceaseless thus the fowls of heaven he feeds If o’er the fields such lucid robes he spreads Will he not care for you ye faithless?— Say is he unwise or are ye less than they (LP.II.878–9)

This, heavy with resonances from Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels and intensely emphatic of faith, suggests that Clare knew and depended on such texts. Yet in his explicit paraphrasing exercise, Clare paraphrases Old Testament passages, and then jumps to the Revelation, without further inclusion of the New Testament. Those Old Testament books he focuses on tend to be those detailing faith in the face of challenges to that faith, or moments of delivery, and it is notable that they are quite similar (in their content) to one another: passages from Exodus, large amounts of the Book of Job (those passages paraphrased gesture towards creation as well as despair), accounts of Deborah, Habakkuk, Balak, Solomon, extracts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and most particularly passages associated with David. ‘Bad’ women also feature, and desires for ‘home’ or ‘a dwelling forever’ (‘Solomons Prayer &c &c’, LP.I.117). Though the tendency of the Old Testament to dwell upon the majesty and sublimity of nature offers one point of attraction for the poet (‘the more I read the scriptures the more I feel astonishment at the sublime images I continualy meet with in its Poetical and prophetic books nay every where about it’29), it does not take too great a stretch of the imagination to recognise the paraphrases as those with personal resonance for Clare, particularly when they are read in juxtaposition with their biblical sources, and their deviations from source material noted. (The facility with which Clare adapts Old Testament imagery is perhaps connected to an specific type of ‘memory’, and Camus’s claim about the 28

LP.I.140. John Clare By Himself, p. 193.

29

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memory of the poor being less nourished than that of the rich is pertinent here: the concept of a vaguer lower-class idea of origin has many and wide ramifications for Clare’s work, one of which is the way in which he literally remembers the Old Testament into his own history.) Whilst we cannot say whether any of those changes Clare does make to his scriptural sources are made with specific intention, they remain interesting.30 Apart from some minor alterations which seem to have been instituted for poetic effect (biblical oxen becoming ‘unicorns’), it would seem superficially that Clare makes few notable changes to his source. Yet certain aspects draw attention to themselves. The apparent similarities between Clare’s own situation and that expressed in the ‘Lamentations of Jeremiah Chap. 3’ (LP.I.143–46) need no explanation. The only significant alterations Clare makes are to add natural similes (‘Yet faith shall be new every morning like flowers’, l.40); to emphasise the theme of freedom (Clare writes ‘They’ve cut off my life in the dungeon – to sever / & cast a stone on the door of my freedom forever’, ll.93–4, where the biblical source reads simply ‘They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me’); and the alteration of ‘To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most high’, to ‘To turn aside the right of a man from his birth’ (ll.61–2). In ‘Balaams Parable second part’ (LP.I.106–9), one cannot ignore that half of line 3 and all of line 4 are Clare’s invention, or that he adds content directly connected to his own preoccupations: the biblical ‘but he set his face toward the wilderness’ becomes ‘But he turned to the wilderness loved in his youth / Where nature & God live in silence & truth’; ‘Israel’ becomes the less-specific ‘them’. In accordance with his habit, Clare uses ‘Eden’ as an (unprompted) simile at line 16, and the passage closes with another vision of apocalypse. The ‘Song of Deborah’ (LP.I.109–13) also seems to transfer Israel to Helpston. Instead of ‘the high–wayes were unoccupied’, Clare writes: ‘When The High Ways Were Leveled & Hamlets Laid Low’ (l.2), and again, Eden is added: ‘& eden seemed spreading her rest at his feet’ (l.92). Like many of those paraphrased, this passage is concerned with the role of freedom, so that Clare includes: With The Rulers Of Israel My Heart Would Agree Who Offered To Serve In The Troops Of The Lord

30 Throughout this book, all biblical quotations are taken from the copy of Clare’s Bible held in the Peterborough Museum (H17). This is a Bible printed by Robert Barker in 1639, which includes the text of the Prayer Book at its front, as well as the Apocrypha. Inside the front cover is inscribed ‘John Clare 1813’; an earlier owner has added more liberal annotations. Where transcriptions of Psalms are given, these are taken from the biblical Book of Psalms, rather than from the versions given in the Book of Common Prayer, because the biblical book seems to have been Clare’s source.


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& Joined With The People To Fall Or Be Free They Blessed The True God & Met Truth In His Word (ll.13–16)31

And Let all that love God be as bright as the sun In the might of the morn & in goodness accord Forty years the land rested when freedom was won – So let all thine enemies perish O Lord (ll.109–12)32

It is difficult not to trace these themes to elements of Clare’s biography, and, as such biographical similarities are contained with a sublime poetry (understood as such) which apprehends eternity through nature, it is easy to understand how convenient a form the passages supply for Clare at this time. There are of course other probable reasons for Clare’s attraction to the paraphrasing exercise, which might help us to appreciate the content and form of his work. In MS 6, stanzas of ‘Child Harold’ are apparently influenced by depictions of apocalypse (see LP.I.69). ‘Song Last Day’ (LP.I.175–7) is Clare’s own vision of the end of the world: ‘There is a day a dreadfull day / Still following the past / When sun & moon are past away / & mingle with the blast / There is a vision in my eye / A vacuum oer my mind …’ One can see the attraction to Clare of the idea of God speaking ‘out of the fierce whirlwind & the storm’ (‘Job Chap 40’, LP.I.127), as the ‘voice of God’ is repeatedly ‘heard’ through the elements in Clare’s verse; and throughout these lines, as in the other paraphrases, Clare as far as possible localises the scenes to Helpston. Thus ‘the covert of the reed and fens’ (Job 40.21) becomes ‘the reed forests of the untrodden fens’ (l.39); in a version of Job 41, Clare, with no precedent, adds a simile reminiscent of one of his favourite images: ‘Man to him is as mist in the morn’ (LP.I.130). As this discussion so far will have suggested, my analysis will be concerned primarily with the thematic content of the paraphrases. There are, however, historical reasons why Clare might have been attracted to the enterprise. As speculations, it would not be sensible to dwell on these facets of paraphrasing, but they remain important possibilities. Firstly, there is the tradition of biblical translation as an historically radical act, as the respective fates of Wyclif and Tyndale attest, one which, furthermore, is concerned with widening access: ‘that the weak stomachs may receive it also and be the better for it’ (1534).33 Secondly, in paraphrasing the Bible, Clare is staking a claim to literary accomplishment through contemporary assumption of scriptural moral and spiritual superiority over classical works of 31 The source reads ‘My heart is toward the governours of Israel, that offered themselves willingly among the people: Blesse ye the LORD.’ 32 The source reads: ‘So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD: but let them that love him, be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might. And the land had rest fourty yeers.’ 33 Tyndale’s New Testament, ed. David Daniell (New Haven, 1995), p. 3.

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literature. Thirdly, it is pertinent that the writers of the Old Testament ‘arrived at truth by immediate moral and spiritual intuitions’.34 Moreover, Clare’s paraphrasing marks, at least temporarily, a renunciation of poetry preoccupied with recording a specific natural world (which might in a Newtonian sense be quantifiable even as it remains mysterious) to the subjective interpretation and transmission of something which, perhaps, coalesces with a sense of the Bible as ‘a book in exile’.35 The Lowthian approach to Hebrew poetry mentioned above is also relevant.36 There are also more ‘literary’ precedents, including the poetry of Christopher Smart and, as Jonathan Bate has suggested, that of James Montgomery.37 All of these factors were parts of an exchange of ideas forming part of Clare’s book-learning, inevitably affecting his approach to the Scriptures. It is certainly not enough to regard Clare’s ‘Hebrew’ verse experiments simply as the consequence or as parts of his Byronic imitation. In any case, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies provide a deceptive model: twelve of Byron’s thirty poems have nothing to do with the Bible (or even religion) and several others bear only a slight relation to the theme: as Tom Mole recently has written, ‘with their arrival in the Holy Land, Byron’s language and themes had been translated, but not transformed.’38 Clare knew Byron’s work intimately, and whilst the notion of ‘Hebrew Melodies’ might have given Clare the germ of an idea, the fruits of that idea, which are exclusively religious and cleave to scriptural patterning, come from elsewhere. To return to a more thematic analysis, Clare is particularly attracted to the figure of David, partly as ‘the Psalmist’, but also to the prayers and laments of the boy who enjoyed a brief period of favour, was then forced away from his home, became ‘once lonely’ (this is Clare’s line, extra to II Samuel vii) but returned as ‘King’. This, ‘David’s Prayer’ (LP.I.115–16), wonders with Clare’s sonnet about identity ‘Who am I’ (it would be interesting, if impossible, to know the precise dates of first drafts of these verses, and the dates of Clare’s visionary poems), yet affirms despite this uncertainty that ‘thy servant hath found in his heart / To pray before thee – & he knows from his soul / Thou art God & has promised thy love to impart / To thy servant as long as the seasons shall roll’.39 Then, at the end of ‘Solomons Prayer’ (LP.I.117–21), 34

F.H. Brabant, Time and Eternity in Christian Thought (London, 1937), p. 35. Jasper and Prickett, p. 4. 36 On related themes, see Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London, 1982); David Lyle Jeffrey, A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids,, 1992); David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2000); and Stephen Prickett, Words and ‘The Word’: Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1986). 37 See Bate, p. 492. 38 ‘The Handling of Hebrew Melodies’, Romanticism, 8.1 (2002), 18–33 (pp. 24–5). 39 The source reads: ‘therefore hath thy servant found in his heart to pray this prayer unto thee. And now, O Lord GOD, thou art that God, and thy words be true, and thou hast promised this goodnesse unto thy servant. Therefore now let it please thee to blesse the house of thy servant, that it may continue for ever before thee: for thou, O Lord GOD, 35


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we find the plea to ‘remember the mercies of David for aye’. Clare is attracted to passages concerned with faith despite suffering. He paraphrases, for example, relatively large amounts of the Book of Job (Job’s words also form part of the Book of Common Prayer order for the burial of the dead: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’). Much of Job is concerned also with creation and the promise of reward in eternity. Job 38 emphasises the awe potentially felt in consideration of the immensity of the plan and its execution in the Creation. I have already considered these lines as those echoing Eve’s questioning in Paradise Lost (‘wherefore all night long shine these …’).40 In the Miltonic narrative, Satan’s answer institutes Eve at the centre of the world (‘Whom to behold but thee’41), and, as we have seen, such questions can be dangerous if they lead to the vice of curiositas; in the right context, however, they can be appropriate spurs to faith. It would be easy, then, simply to conclude that Clare found in the content and form of the Old Testament an expedient mode of poetic expression. However, the situation is more complex. Something is troubling about ‘Israel Passing Over The Red Sea’ (LP.I.105). In the context of Clare’s other paraphrases, this appears to be an example of his preference for Old Testament passages gesturing towards ‘Revelation’. Yet, if we trace Clare’s alterations of Exodus, we find the adjective ‘glorious’ to describe the Lord’s ‘triumph’ to be absent, as is the sense of God’s direct and unequivocal agency: in Exodus ‘he hath thrown’ the horse and tyrant into the sea; in Clare, they ‘Are Whelmed.’42 Is it only the post-Christian revelation that will be ‘glorious’? These are subtle changes, and it is dangerous to over-read into ‘Clare’s interpretation’, especially if published versions are composites of several manuscripts. However, the paraphrase adjacent to this in the Later Poems displays the same tendency to reduce the direct equation of an ancient with a personal God, ‘the LORD’ becoming ‘Their Lord’ (LP.I.105, l.3). Hence Clare seems to be identifying the difference between God pre- and post-Christ. The tempestuous Old Testament God is still there; hence the error of Janet Todd when she insists on God’s serenity.43 Yet Clare seems consistently to consider God as a ‘Christian’ God insofar as he has relevance to the poet (for example, Clare makes the God of the ‘Prayer of Habakkuk’ far more beneficent – Christian – than his biblical counterpart), even as he remains aware of hast spoken it, and with thy blessing let the house of thy servant be blessed for ever.’ The potential significance of the fact that the ‘for ever’ of v.29 is replaced by ‘as long as the seasons shall roll’ shall become clearer in the context of the discussion of ideas of eternity and transience in Chapter 7 of this book. 40 Paradise Lost, Bk IV, l. 657. 41 Bk V, l. 45. 42 ‘for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea’: Exodus xv, 1. Verse 21 employs exactly the same phraseology. 43 See In Adam’s Garden: A Study of John Clare (doctoral thesis, University of Florida, 1971), pp. 142, 192–3.

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an historical alteration of the relationship between God and his people. Christ does not change God, Clare suggests. He changes man’s relationship with God. To understand why Clare finds in Job and the Psalms such convenient vehicles for expression, we must read those passages again, with the fresh eye that a fuller appreciation of that relationship can bring. Firstly, we must consider God as Judge. The Psalmists ask incessantly for judgement. They covet it; they rejoice at the thought of it. C.S. Lewis explains the desirability of such judgement by positing the Psalmists and the people they represent not as those who, like criminals in court, plead for leniency, but rather as plaintiffs in a civil case: The one hopes for acquittal, or rather for pardon; the other hopes for a resounding triumph with heavy damages … Hundreds and thousands of people who have been stripped of all they possess and who have the right entirely on their side will at last be heard. Of course they are not afraid of judgement. They know their case is unanswerable – if only it could be heard. When God comes to judge, at last it will.44

The mercy and forgiveness represented by and in Christ is not an issue here, or at least, only ever in a way that Clare understands as essentially anachronistic. To comprehend why Clare relies on the Psalms for expression at a traumatic time, we must secondly appreciate that perhaps the most astonishing thing about the old religion Clare invokes is that, despite centuries of merciless persecution, the best representatives of that religion, far from being destroyed, grow stronger and more pure (such an image is present in Clare’s earliest verse: see my discussion of ‘Helpstone’, below45). Importantly, Clare in no way suggests the (for want of a better word) smugness that such a situation might allow. He avoids this sense because he appreciates so explicitly the simple beauty of Old Testament expressions of suffering, and this simplicity and beauty transfers to the sufferers and their experience. Suffering caused by an ancient Fall is thus the desirable active precursor of inward knowledge and, ultimately, eternal enlightenment.46 (Hence Job’s comforters, far from being the useless voices their proverbial status suggests, assist the path to that enlightenment. They are ‘comforters’, as long as this role is recognised.) Clare’s imaginative dependence on the Psalms is more than an identification of a common grievance, and consequent plea for delivery. It is a recognition of a crucial stage of understanding, an affirmation of faith. Critically, Clare understands this through a Christian frame of reference which insists that, for example, Job was right to be patient. Which ‘Christian’ would dare to address the Divine Father with so cheeky a line as ‘Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord: arise …’ (Book of Psalms xliv, 23)? Despair and questioning are not reactions against or C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London, 1958; 1998), pp. 9–10. See pp. 152–4 of this book. 46 M.H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism is concerned to discuss the adoption of a similar pattern by ‘Romantic’ poets. 44 45


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challenges to Old Testament belief in the God Clare knows now as ‘Christian’, but an inherent and vital part of that faith: when Clare cries out, he is following this tradition of legitimate inquiry. Clare was well aware that Job’s trials effectively had been horrifically experienced by the Jewish many. He also surely identifies parallels with his own life, and thus we begin to see the importance of a theological ‘Fall’ to Clare, as a necessary stage in achieving ‘understanding’. This is more than a simple ‘testing’, because it is also a way of understanding man’s relationship with God, and it is where these two coalesce that Clare finds the justification for faith. I repeat, God has not changed, as Clare understands it. Clare believes that Revelation will usher in a second new relationship with God, and his theodicy is predicated upon his faith in this future. This is most clearly evident in his psalmodic paraphrases. Like the other paraphrases, the transcriptions of the Psalms are poetically poor, tending towards hymnodic metrical patterns. As early as April 1819, Clare writes to Drury that he has ‘nearly finished an Imitation of the 148 Psalmn & intend[s] it for Mr Newcombs “Mercury”’:47 Clare tries psalmodic paraphrase in his earliest attempts to get into print. Certainly, this is no isolated effort: in a letter to Taylor of April 1828, Clare includes ‘another of those Imitations of the Psalms’.48 As far as I have been able to ascertain, this poem was never published in Clare’s lifetime, and Taylor was not encouraging: ‘It appears to me to have this Fault, that it is too much amplified or enlarged, and that each Verse has only one good Line (or Thought) to which the rest of the Verse is sacrificed.’49 Taylor was quite justified in his comments, because Clare’s is not really the right vehicle for the metric, spare poetry of the Psalms. Clare’s own intimations of God, his ‘prophecies’, are found in and through a natural description not an intrinsic part of the Psalmodic exhortation. (That said, an appreciation of the landscape and its population in its widest sense as to some degree utilitarian, which M.M. Mahood calls upon the ‘habitat theory’ of Jay Appleton to explain with regard to Clare, is also present in the Psalms.50) Clare also has a more academic interest in the Psalms, telling Marianne Marsh in July 1831 that ‘the book that has given me most satisfaction since my late illness has been Horn on the Psalms & it is one of the very best books I have ever met with’.51 However, those transcriptions of the Psalms made by 47

Letters, p. 9. Letters, pp. 430–31. See for other examples MP.IV.464–6; 466–70; 476–8 and notes. 49 Letters, p. 431, n. 3. 50 See M.M. Mahood, ‘John Clare: The Poet as Raptor’, Essays in Criticism, 48.3 (1998), 201–23 (p. 216). 51 Letters, p. 544. In the ‘Preface’ to his Commentary on the Psalms (1771), George Horne claims that ‘The psalms are an epitome of the Bible’, and sets out his intention thus: ‘The ancients were chiefly taken up in making spiritual or evangelical applications of them … The moderns have set themselves to investigate with diligence, and ascertain with accuracy, their literal scope and meaning … Piety and devotion characterize the writings of the ancients; the commentaries of the moderns display more learning and judgement … 48

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Clare ten years later in the asylum are very interesting, because he selects (or so it would appear from surviving manuscripts) a few from their vast total body. The first asylum Psalm transcription (chronologically) is the nineteenth (LP. I.131–4). While Clare’s attempt hardly equals its impetus, his first stanza does seem perfectly to summarise a manner of seeing God ‘in’ nature, as representation rather than manifestation, common to him and his source: ‘The heavens his wonderous works declare / The firmament his power / His handyworks are written there’ (ll.1–3). That God is ‘written’ here, as elsewhere in nature, is pertinent. Clare’s experience as a poet of nature, who claims simply to write down poems he finds ‘in the fields’, enables an understanding of art as representation: mimesis always and necessarily invokes an ‘other’, that which is mimed. Nature is thus like an artistic representation of God: it can show ‘Godness’, but can’t show ‘God’. Clare does not suggests that God is the red of sunset or the green of leaves (that would be to confuse the Creator with creation by ignoring that the eternal cannot participate absolutely in fallen life); neither is his God purely an animating force. The biblical Psalm continues by declaring that ‘There is no speech nor language: where their voice is not heard’: here we see the manifestation of a notion of the centrality of silence to religious experience, which in Clare’s mind is connected to sublimity. Clare writes: ‘Day unto day in language speaks / Night unto night will shine / In knowledge – & all language reads / & hears that voice divine’ (ll.5–8). Nature speaks to itself: ‘Day unto day’, and ‘Night unto night’, and this speech has a universal language: ‘knowledge’. Thus ‘all language reads & hears that voice divine’. This is not a language of words, but a deeper, silent understanding.52 Clare follows the Psalmist in celebrating the sun and its omnipotent, vital character: As a bridegroom from his chamber comes He shows his shineing face Rejoiceing as the season blooms As a strong man runs a race To bring them in some measure together, is the design of the following work.’ Horne, pp. i, iv–v. The title page of a two-volume edition of 1821 (London: J. Richardson and Co.) describes it as a work ‘In which their literal or historical sense, as they relate to King David and the people of Israel, is illustrated; and their application to Messiah, to the Church, and to individuals as members thereof, is pointed out; with a view to render the use of the Psalter pleasing and profitable to all orders and degrees of Christians.’ 52 See Chapter 6 for wider a discussion of this ‘language’. Horne describes Psalm 19 in his Commentary (pp. 110–19) as a ‘beautiful Psalm’, in which ‘the heavens are represented as the instructors of mankind’ (p. 110). He continues: ‘Under the name of ‘heaven,’ or ‘the heavens,’ is comprehended that fluid mixture of light and air that is everywhere diffused about us; and to the influences of which are owing all the beauty and fruitfulness of the earth, all vegetable and animal life, and the various kinds of motion throughout the system of nature’ (p. 111). It is easy to see how such notions coalesce with Clare’s own, and to recognise obvious points of attraction for Clare.


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His going forth is from the end & to the end of heaven His circuit shines on every land Where his rays of life are given (ll.13–20)

Thus far, the content of the Psalm and Clare’s own ideas, expressed elsewhere, seem to match very well (Clare’s ideas were of course partly formed by just such texts). In both Clare’s poem and the Psalm, there next comes an apparent shift from descriptive (essentially nature) poetry, to discussion of ‘The law of God a perfect law’; yet such a transition is not a thematic ‘break’ at all, if we understand the obvious equation made by both ancient and modern poet between the character of the sun and of the Law. The ramification of this equation is expanded in the Psalm with: ‘The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoycing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes’ (v.8), and is clearly present in Clare’s manuscript. The printed text reads: ‘The statutes of the Lord are sure / The heart rejoiceing still / The Lords comandments they are pure / My eyes with love they fill’ (ll.25–8). However, the printed edition offers an alternative final line for the stanza: ‘My eyes enlightening fill’. Again, we can see the coincidence of Clare’s and the Psalmist’s thought. The praise of God’s Law continues: ‘The fear of God is clean & pure / Endureing still forever … / & more to be desired are they / Then gold can e’er become’ (ll.29– 34). Clare mimics the precise effect of the psalm (‘the old Jewish feeling about the Law; luminous, severe, disinfectant, exultant’53), and continues to do so in the final stanzas, as he repeats the Psalmist’s personal prayer. This prayer (‘Do thou accept me e’er I fall / By thy avenging rod / My strength my hope my life my all / & my redeeming God’, ll.57–60) is intensely ‘Christian’ even as it is inescapably preChristian, thus demonstrating the way in which potential anachronism in Clare’s use of the Psalms is incorporated and thus avoided. Although Clare dwells upon the Old Testament, as early as September 1824 (during the apparent period of his greatest religious turmoil), he writes: read a chapter or two in the New Testament I am convincd of its sacred design and that its writers were inspird by an almighty power to benefit the world by their writings that was growing deeper and deeper into unfruitful ignorance like bogs and mosses in neglected countrys for want of culture54

He thus, like Hume and other writers on ‘revealed religion’, identifies the New Testament as a relief from the confusions of the Old: a guide to its complexity. Clare finds no difficulties in believing that it is ‘inspired’, because (as Chapter 6 will make clear) he is so susceptible to ‘inspiration’ himself. In his paraphrasing enterprise, Clare moves from the prophecies of the Old Testament to those of the Lewis, Reflections, p. 54. John Clare By Himself, p. 178.

53 54

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New: to the closing chapters of Matthew, and the Book of Revelation. (The only real change made in the former is the alteration of the content of the final line of Clare’s poem from its pattern: ‘But the righteous shall find joys eternity true’ [LP.I.150], where originally they were to find ‘life eternall’ (Matthew xxv, 46). This suggests an obvious and direct equation in Clare’s mind between the two, between ‘eternal life’, and ‘true joy’, which is explored later in this book.) Clare’s paraphrase of Revelation is at times skilfully done, at times less so. The most striking aspect of Clare’s version is the sense of illumination, of God as the source of a glorious and indescribable light. Clare shares Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’’s ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’, and hence God’s figuration can only be made by analogy with the Sun: & no temple there showed itself in my sight For the Lord God himself was its temple & light No need had the city of sun or the moon To shine on its splendour – the builder & giver Of its glory – was also its light & its boon His sun shone upon it for ever & ever (LP.I.154–5, ll.89–94)

(In these lines, Clare’s continuing belief in the irrelevance of religious buildings to religious experience finds expression.)55 But it is in the Psalmodic transcriptions that Clare seems to capture a personal devotion to God absent from some other biblical paraphrases. For example, the Psalmist’s ‘enlightening the eyes’ (Psalm 19) becomes in one version ‘My eyes with love they fill’ (LP.I.132, l.27). Just as he becomes the subjective voice of The Shepherd’s Calendar, Clare seems almost to adopt the role of David, so that, in Clare’s version of Psalm 19, when we read of God’s judgements that ‘In keeping them my being earns / A safe & sure reward’ (LP.I.133, l.39), the being referred to is very much that of Clare. He goes on to add emphasis to the closing verses of the Psalm, so that they become a prayer for preservation (the desire to ‘meet a welcome grave’ (l.47) having no precedent in the source), recalling the reader to Clare’s Christian actuality. The mis en page of Later Poems juxtaposes Psalms 97 and 102 (LP.I.136–7). The first is full of joyous praise. (The printed version reads: ‘The earth reigneth now earth is green in his smiles / Let gladness extend through her hundreds of isles’, seeming to support a direct equation between earth [nature] and God; but ‘The Lord reigneth’ is an alternative: the printed version is probably a slip rather than a statement of pantheism.) Psalm 102 is a prayer for help (‘Lord hear my prayer when trouble glooms’) and is one of the better attempts at poetry amongst the collection. The Miltonic adjective-verb-adjective sequence of the second stanza is a far smoother attempt than many, converting form without drastically altering original 55

Compare p. 51, this book.


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content, and the use of simile in general is much closer to Clare’s early work. In stanza four, Clare adds his own touch: ‘I bear my enemies reproach / … They on my private peace encroach’ (my emphasis): this is an encroachment experienced by Clare not only in Enclosure, but also in the asylum where ‘Babylonians’ (as he calls his fellow inmates) constantly torment his desire for peace. I am not, however, interested in these merely as convenient personal parallels. It seems, in juxtaposition, that these two psalms contradict one another. And yet, Psalm 102 closes with a glimpse of the eternity and revelation which forms the content of Psalm 97, thus bringing the two states of mind together. Hence, in the Psalms, Clare finds a retrospective justification for a future promise. He simultaneously finds a mode through which he can express his place in a paradigmatic situation, and in this expression and questioning becomes not less close to God, but more so. The astonishing subtlety of Clare’s reading of the Bible thus provides the crux on which his faith and his theodicy depend.


Part 2 ‘I have reflected long on the subject’ Clare’s Subjective Faith


Chapter 6

‘There is a language wrote on earth & sky / By Gods own pen’: The Sublime Experience of God

The early chapters of this book have demonstrated the vital role of early nineteenth-century religious influences in the formation of Clare’s belief, but in order to attain a fuller understanding of Clare’s faith it is also necessary that we should appreciate the subjective spirituality by which that belief is underpinned. In my article ‘“Enkindling ecstacy”: The Sublime Vision of John Clare’ I argue for a reconsideration of Clare’s mode of seeing and experiencing, proposing that Clare’s persistent experience of rapture in the presence of nature necessitates an understanding of his vision as inherently ‘sublime.’ This sublimity is critical both because of the way Clare attempts to translate it into verse, and because it characterises the very way in which he perceives. Clare’s experience of the sublime does not depend on vast physical magnitude; it is just as likely to be the result of encountering the microscopic: its essential aspect is awe. Hence, when Clare acknowledges differences between alpine landscapes and his own, he is not degrading the natural scenes of his nativity, but simply marking difference. (There is certainly a precedent amongst Clare’s literary influences for this habit, as in ‘Spring’ of The Farmer’s Boy [1800], Bloomfield declaims: ‘No Alpine wonders thunder through my verse, / … From meaner objects far my raptures flow …’) Clare’s sublime model, I have suggested, has ramifications for his concept of language and for experience, and thus for his attitude towards creation and true ‘Poetry’, and for his sense of self. However, one of the most important aspects of ‘the sublime’ for this analysis is its connection to divinity: as Hugh Blair writes in the third of his Lectures, ‘No ideas, it is plain, are so sublime as those taken from the Supreme Being; the most unknown, but the greatest of all objects’. In Clare’s work, this connection both prompts and affirms belief, even as it diminishes the importance of organised religion to the character of his faith.

Romanticism, 9.2 (2003), 176–95. Bloomfield: Selected Poems, p. 2. Blair, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 45.

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Sublimity and Enthusiasm The way in which Clare experiences sublimity in the face of nature and translates it into his poetry may be summarised with reference to ‘The Fallen Elm’ (MP. III.440–43). Prompted by the threatened loss of Clare’s favourite tree, ‘The Fallen Elm’ is best understood in conjunction with a letter of protest written by Clare, later included in Taylor’s introduction to The Village Minstrel. This letter displays an angry and personal agony; Clare, furious at anticipated grief to come, invokes language with important associations with the gospels and radicalism. In his poem, however, anger gives way to sad resignation. Clare addresses a Friend not inanimate—though stocks & stones There are & many formed of flesh & bones Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred Deeper then by a feeling cloathed in words & speakest now whats known of every tongue Language of pity & the force of wrong What cant assumes what hypocrites will dare Speaks home to truth & shows it what they are (ll.29–36)

Clare gives the tree life, not in any ordinary pathetic fallacy, but by establishing it as more than an object of the natural world (as ‘Friend not inanimate’) and by then giving it the power to communicate, in a universal language which is the language of truth. The tree is possessed of a ‘deeper … feeling’, and Clare’s response to it is similarly affective, beyond the language of words (the notion that it might be ‘true music’ is suggested by line 67, where Clare addresses the tree as ‘music making elm’): this is Clare’s sublime in action. Thus the tree shares in the highest pinnacle of life: it is more alive and knowingly sentient than its ignorant feller. Throughout the poem we hear echoes of Clare’s attacks on the cant of religious hypocrites in The Parish, probably the same hypocrites who shelter under the elm ‘in many a shower / That when in power would never shelter thee’ (ll.43–4): such cant is opposed to this true communion through deeper feeling which stirs the heart, lending a religious resonance to the lines. In his poem, Clare as ever seems quietly astonished by the beauty of nature, an astonishment which he communicates by a precision and exactitude of description (‘& into mellow whispering calms would drop / When showers fell on thy many coloured shade’ (ll.3–4)) which only an entranced observer could achieve. This astonishment is not that of the Burkean sublime. Despite initial impressions, the

John Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey (London, 1973), p. 138. Compare the alternative to this line: ‘Thine spoke a feeling known in every tongue’. For a fuller discussion of this ‘language’, see my ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, pp. 14–22, and pp. 141–6, below.

‘There is a language wrote on earth & sky / By Gods own pen’

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element of fear posited by Burke as a constituent part of the sublime experience is absent: & when dark tempests mimic thunder made While darkness came as it would strangle light With the black tempest of a winter night That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root How did I love to hear the winds upbraid Thy strength without—while all within was mute (ll.5–10)

The turning point comes in line 8: Clare has presented us with a terrible (more conventionally ‘sublime’) storm, but the introduction of the ‘cradle’, with its connotations of maternal love and care, interrupts this, proleptically explaining the pleasure Clare takes in the spectacle. The familiar and comforting stability of the tree is far from the terrible obscurity of Burke, but Clare’s response is no less ‘sublime’ because of that: Clare’s astonishment depends on the amazing glory of creation, which leads to an entranced state in which the true communion with creation that tree and (through it) poet share may be achieved. When this communion is disrupted, by even the threat of the tree’s being cut down, the source of Clare’s rapture is destroyed. The poem continues: Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower Though change till now did never injure thee For time beheld thee as her sacred dower & nature claimed thee her domestic tree

As usual, change is here depicted as debasing, or threatening (‘lower’ could be ‘to bring low’ or ‘lour’). Time is implicated in change, but in this case, the Elm has shared a special relationship with time: the tree is the gift (or ‘dower’), almost the representation, of time, as well as of nature, and this sense of history is part of the sublimity experienced. Thus the knavish hypocrite who institutes this change and brings the tree down is doubly culpable. Since his first publication, critics have been concerned with Clare’s status as a ‘poet descriptive of nature’, and the implications of this status. One of the most common criticisms levelled focuses on the Burkean ‘naked description’ of his poetry; the lack of Coleridgean ‘predominant passion’; the absence of ideas or imagination appended to description. Greg Crossan recognises that ‘if he offers us only fact and no distillation of experience; then one’s vindication of Clare is going to be severely strained.’ Of course, this is not at all what Crossan intends to conclude, and the inadequacy of a statement which asserts that any perception See A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (2nd edn, 1759), ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, 1990), especially pp. 53–4. Crossan, A Relish for Eternity, p. 35.

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might be wholly objective is obvious. We might then (with Crossan) allow Clare his own defence: ‘Trifles may illustrate great mysterys without derogating any thing from their grandeur … & trifles also explain great things … little things lead to great discoverys’. The ‘great discovery’ Clare finds in the ‘little things’ of nature, is an intimation of divinity. This he experiences through rapture, the sublime, felt before nature and interpreted in the light of accounts of enthusiastic religious experience. Although, as de Bolla and Ashfield explain, it is as knowledge ceases to be regarded as wholly grounded in religious belief (becoming instead determined and legislated by other technical discourses, themselves derivative of human ratiocination) that the question of the aesthetic (and in particular the discourse of ‘the sublime’) enters into new prominence, repeatedly challenging the new, empirical world;10 and although the ‘mythical beginning’ of the contemporary discourse, the translation of Longinus, is a potentially licentious theory, the historical ascendance of the term ‘sublime’ and the experience it gestures towards rarely are free from religious connotation. One fundamental feature of the sublime is the apparently ‘content-less content’, the ultimate void behind the intangible. This is the site of the challenge that the sublime poses to empiricist thinking. As Jean-Francois Lyotard more recently has put it, ‘How is one to understand the sublime … as a ‘here and now’? Quite to the contrary, isn’t it essential to this feeling that it alludes to something which can’t be shown, or presented?’11 As Thomas Weiskel remarks, ‘All versions of the sublime require a credible godterm’, and many writers, inspired by the marvels of nature, were quick to fill the void here described by Lyotard with divinity, by instituting God at the heart of the emergent discourse of sublimity: in the aesthetic discourse of the long eighteenth century, centuries of blind faith could find, if not supporting evidence as such, then strong justification formulised into quasi-philosophical theory: ‘when we contemplate the Deity … invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him.’12 Burke’s passage sounds dramatic, but such annihilation can be comforting when juxtaposed with its opposite (an alternative present in Burke’s ‘Vacuity,

Quoted in Margaret Grainger, John Clare: Collector of Ballads (Peterborough, 1964), p. 1. 10 See the ‘Introduction’ to Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, 1996). 11 Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avante–Garde’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford, 1989), pp. 196–211 (p. 196). 12 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, 1976), p. 36; Burke, pp. 62–3. It is significant that the emergence of this discourse is intimately connected to the concept of ‘Genius’: see for example Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1785) or William Duff’s Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767).


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Darkness, Solitude and Silence’13), an idea later to be formalised by Freud, of the invasive fear of the empty spaces imposed by the disappearance of the gods.14 Freud’s horror-picture, however, ignores that, as it is for Clare, the sublime can be affective because it breaks down frightening solipsism, destroying individualism by positing something extra, transcendent. In any case, for Clare, ‘the gods’ never do quite disappear; folklore and fear of his own doubt generally provide substance to fill the gaps which appear in agnostic periods. Moreover, whilst we have seen Clare pour scorn upon the village parson, when he wanders from the Church flock, it is to look for succour from an alternative shepherd. Vitally, when he does so, he tends to search among ‘enthusiastic’ Christians. The connection between Clare’s religious experience and the sublime, then, is concerned with more than the fact that the inevitable unknowability of the glorious divinity found a convenient analogue in the ‘gaps’ of the sublime experience. It involves also the framework within which experience is interpreted, and the vocabulary in which that interpretation is figured. Throughout his life, Clare depicts rapturous emotion felt in the presence of nature as sublime. In one early poem, ‘Childish Recollections’ (1819–20), he writes: An wi enthusiastic excesses wild The scenes of childhood meet my moistning eye & wi the very weakness of a child I feel the raptures of delights gone bye (EP.II.298)

In much later ‘asylum’ poetry, he is vividly expressing precisely the same feelings: The wild flowers studding every inch of ground, And trees, with dews bespangled, looking bright As burnished silver; – while the entrancing sound Of melody, from the sweet bird of night, Fills my whole soul with rapture and delight. (LP.I.389)

In Part I of this book, I began to delineate the role played by the powerful reality of ‘enthusiasm’ in the religious life of the early nineteenth century. The rising popularity of denominations of non-conformity helped to feed a new emotional flourishing which shifted religious emphasis towards feeling, emotion and imagination; this was to be connected with the concept of an ‘original genius’ soaring above the rules. As I already have mentioned, Cowper was an ‘enthusiast’, his conversion to Calvinism the result of an exemplary ‘enthusiastic’ experience: 13

Burke, p. 65. See ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. by James Strachey, Anna Freud and others, 24 vols (London, 1953–1974), XVII, 218–52. 14

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‘Immediately I received strength to believe … Unless the Almighty arms had been under me I think I should have died of gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and my voice choked with transport, and I could only look up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love and wonder.’15 The concluding paragraph on ‘Cowper’s Poems and Life’ in the Quarterly Review for October 1816 attempted ‘to vindicate the present work from the imputation of enthusiasm’ on the grounds that ‘a system of religion so sublime, yet so rational … as he inculcates, could not by any possibility be the effects of fanaticism.’16 As Chapter 2 has demonstrated, to be labelled an ‘enthusiast’ could be either a criticism or a commendation, but the journalist here is denying only the derogatory sense of ‘enthusiasm’, and not that Cowper is an ‘enthusiast’. However, it is Cowper’s ‘overwhelming’, a definitive feature of conversion accounts, that I want to highlight here. In an essential shift from the tradition of Longinus, which remarks upon the sense of power instilled in the reader, the sublime experience begins to be figured (as Burke’s Enquiry emphasises) as an issue of control, of being overcome, thus concerned with an intense individuality and an extra-personal overcom-er. When one considers the elimination of self and the concomitant becoming part of God involved in Christian belief, along with evangelical notions of individuality and a personal relationship with God, it is easy to see how theories of sublimity found parallels with those at the heart of contemporary religious thought. The extreme popularity of much literature dealing with religious enthusiasm and sublimity and, most importantly, using the same vocabulary to do so, further blurs distinctions between the two categories. To connect notions of sublimity and enthusiasm is not merely retrospectively to lump together essentially disparate discourses coincidentally sharing a common vocabulary. Terror plays a great role in John Dennis’s The grounds of criticism in poetry (1704), and is there explicitly connected to religious ideas: ‘The greatest enthusiastic terror must needs be derived from religious ideas … what can produce a greater terror, than the idea of an angry god?’ Dennis also claims that ‘the sublime is nothing else but a great thought … moving the soul from its ordinary situation by the enthusiasm which naturally attends them’.17 Of course, Dennis is concerned with the potential renewal of religious culture,18 but I am here concerned with the impact of ideas, not simply those ideas themselves, and Dennis’s impact (like all such) may have been independent of any intention. Like Clare, Dennis sees the natural world as a set of divine hieroglyphs, whose status as the works of God is enough to render them worthy of poetic treatment, and thus also to render them founts of the awe, transport and terror (in Dennis, as later in other theorists’ work, ‘Enthusiastic’ terror results from danger observed in safety) 15 Cited in David Cecil, The Stricken Deer: The Life of Cowper (London, 1929; 1988), p. 74. 16 Quarterly Review, October 1816, in vol. 16, p. 129. 17 In Ashfield and de Bolla, pp. 36, 37. 18 See Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E.N. Hooker, 2 vols, (Baltimore, 1939–43).


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of the traditional sublime account: ‘the glorious Works of the Creator … never fail to declare His Eternal Power and Godhead.’19 These works, if they are approached with the ‘great Passions’, engender ‘Enthusiasm’, and the greatest ‘Enthusiastick Passions’ ‘must flow from religious Ideas.’20 Dennis’s writing (and his is certainly not a lone voice: the same habit of association is found in many contributions to the discourse) demonstrates that, whether as an irretrievable consequence of shared vocabulary, or as a consequence of a common impetus (or both), the discourse of the sublime meets and collides with that of ‘enthusiasm’; moreover, this collision coalesces with those opportunities presented by revealed and natural religion which this book has explored to root the language in concepts of divinity. ‘Tho natures beautys where a taste is given / Warms the ideas of the soul to flow / With that enchanting, ’thusiastic glow / That throbs the bosom when the curious eye / Glances on beautious things that give delight …’ (EP.II.375–6): these lines ‘On Taste’ demonstrate the way in which Clare’s verse employs the terminology of enthusiasm, which is simultaneously the vocabulary of the sublime, to describe joy inspired by nature. Moreover, he uses the same phrases to depict as well as he can the intimations of divinity such joy prompts: ‘In each ramble tastes warm souls / More of wisdoms self can view’ (‘Reccolections after a Ramble’, EP.II.196, ll.261– 2). This is more unequivocal still in Clare’s explicitly entitled ‘The Enthusiast’ (MP.III.504–15), where angels are created upon an unworldly earth. Elsewhere, the boundaries are less clear: consider for example MP.II.73, ll.254–71, where blossoms and grass are ‘lasting & divine’. Even here, however, nature remains divine without becoming The Divine. ‘Enthusiastic’; ‘Blood rushing feelings thro the soul’; ‘bliss or grief tho past control’; ‘dizzy light’; ‘highest pleasures’: these are words and images with which Clare’s poetry is riddled, and they are those deeply connected to the sublime experience. Repeatedly in Clare’s verse they are also associated with the religious terminology of ‘incense’ and ‘glory’, of creation and prophecy. ‘Rapture’ (the word is frequently Clare’s own) inspired by nature suggests to Clare transcendence, the impression of something beyond, infinitely more wonderful. (Other things can arouse rapture: the ‘Lover’ in ‘Pleasures of Spring’ feels it in the presence of ‘one endearing face’, and the ‘Poet’ in the same poem feels it on cutting open a new book to read, though he is notably ‘neath some forward bush’ at the time (MP.III.50, ll.31–2, ll.25–8), but nature is more consistently inspirational.) This is reinforced by religious doctrine. According to the Book of Proverbs, ‘the knowledge of the holy is understanding’ (Proverbs ix, 10), and this is precisely what Clare believes true insight would be; but he also believes that this is illusive, and that even the affective intimations he receives are partial. Brought up with the Church as a founding principle of life, despite his rational consideration of other possibilities, Clare most commonly interprets the sublime as transcendent knowledge of the Christian God, the obvious ‘content’ 19

Dennis, vol. 1, p. 345. Dennis, vol. 1, p. 363.

20

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of the sublime, the only thing which could be intimated. Clare’s knowledge of revealed and natural religion (described in Chapter 4 of this book) supports his conclusions. Texts such as Paley’s and Erskine’s legitimate his interpretation; indeed, they simultaneously guide it. As we saw in Chapter 3, the ‘fearful joys’ of ritual superstitions are ‘Sweet childhoods fearful extacy / The witching spells of winter nights’ (MP.I.21): even the vocabulary of ‘alternative belief’ systems coalesces with that of more orthodox religious groups to connect such affective experience to the objects of faith. Finally, Clare’s situation outside of the imagined ‘philosophical arena’ allows him to mix and match disparate elements of discourse according to his changing mood or mind.21 Due to a combination of religious teaching, popular belief and book learning, Clare’s internalisation of the sublime experience is almost inevitable, in this sense almost instinctive, and leads him towards his theological ‘truth.’ The vital aspect of the conclusions Clare draws when he attempts to interpret felt rapture is that they are thus logical deductions in his socio-historical context.22 Above, I quoted Burke’s consideration of the absolute surrender to rapture as a (sublime) renunciation of constituted selfhood: ‘in a just idea of the Deity’ we are ‘annihilated before him’.23 Yet, such acknowledgement of relative inconsequence can be an affirmative experience: in de Bolla’s words, ‘the subject must first be present before attempting to grasp the ungraspable, must first be constituted before it is annihilated.’24 De Bolla writes that ‘For Coleridge … the expansion of the mind associated with the contemplation of a sublime object represents a loss of subjectivity, an all-subsumption of the perceiving mind into the eternal and infinite … the very participation of the subject within the experiential leads to an identification of the subject with the object.’ For de Bolla, this involves certain a priori assumptions, one of which is that ‘both subject and object are posited as discrete forms which coalesce in the description of the sublime experience, and result in the annihilation of subjectivity.’25 Echoing through de Bolla’s words are Coleridge’s own, for this, they suggest, is the soul recognised as constituted: ‘inward Adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the Universe.’26 Knowledge of self becomes knowledge of the omnipotence of God in the universe, and of the 21 Clare recognises that his own shifting moods directly affect his belief: see for example MP.III.564, l. 97. 22 For a conceptualisation of what we might describe as a ‘learnt instinct’ from the field of psychology, see Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). 23 Burke, pp. 62–3. Compare also my ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, pp. 22–6. 24 Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford, 1989), p. 71. 25 �� De Bolla, pp. 44–5. 26 �� Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. �� Nigel Leask (London, 1997), p. 364.


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unity of that universe. In Coleridge’s own words, ‘A poet’s heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature’,27 and Clare’s self-renunciation, interpreted through his knowledge of religious enthusiasm, functions as a remarkably similar recognition of the relative power of the deity. The renunciation of selfhood contingent upon an ecstatic experience inspired by the natural world thus leads to an acknowledgement of God himself as the ultimate ‘I am’: ‘All nature owns in glory / The Lord & power of all … / The great ‘I am’ emblazoned / Is seen of every eye / On natures humblest blossom / On thunders grandest sky’ (MP.III.419).28

Aspects of the Sublime: Language, Mystery and the Natural World The idea of ecstasy communicating something which Clare interprets as ‘poetry’ and tries to recreate in the ‘poem’ is central to Clare’s relationship with God. Clare experiences amazement in the presence of nature; this he explicitly interprets as ‘the felt presence of the Deity’. Thus Clare (implausibly, but understandably!) claims that it is not the desire for fame that prompts his invocation of the Muse, of ‘that burning flame / Enkindling Ecstacy’ (MP.III.192); rather, as ‘Impulses of Spring’ (MP.III.183–95) claims, it is to praise ‘poetry’ (or perhaps Poetry) that he desires to create poetry, reinforcing the idea of Poetry as ‘divine’, as of God, because it comes from God’s nature. For Clare, creation is already glorious and thus provides the framework for this idea, only the ideal is nature without Time, because with the Eternal, God, who is beyond time and beyond the sins of man; but this is to skip too far ahead. Ecstasy or rapture for Clare is inherently linked to the self-sublimation of religious experience. However, it is also the intimation of God’s presence, found in nature. This is true ‘Poetry’. Despite his love of verse, in ‘Remembrances’ (MP.IV.130–34), ‘words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away / The ancient pulpit trees & the play’ (ll.29–30). Just as here the trees are ‘pulpits’, the inadequacy of language is frequently connected to the loss of a purer knowledge, which is ‘truth’, and thus also true religion, the secrets of which are known only by the natural world (like the ants who ‘speak a language wisperingly / Too fine for us to hear’, EP.II.56). Vitally, God is truth for Clare: in ‘The Fountain of Hope’, for instance, ‘Truth old as heaven is & God is truth’ (MP.IV.259, l.1). Moreover, in setting out his conception of the sublime in a letter to Taylor, Clare clearly signals the importance of ‘true’ representation to it.29 He quotes Keats’s infamous ‘Beauty is truth’ maxim, thus suggesting that the sublime and the beautiful are not 27 Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (London, 1895), I, 404. 28 Compare also the three versions of ‘another stanza’ appended to the end of ‘Natures Hymn to the Deity’ (MP.III.180–82). 29 Letters, p. 539.

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mutually exclusive; indeed, in a letter to Henry Behnes of 1827, commenting on certain biblical passages, Clare implies that the essence of sublimity is beautiful simplicity, even though earlier he has made a distinction between the two (‘the simple sublimity of the poetry is more then beautiful …’).30 In the letter to Taylor, Clare goes on to describe exactly where ‘truth’, and thus sublimity, is to be found: ‘nature will be herself again & nature will out live them all’.31 If pictures are to be painted in words, we understand, then those words must be as true to nature as possible. Only through such depiction can the experience of the sublime be prompted, and thus most effectively ‘figured’, although even this remains inadequate: ‘There is sweet feelings every soul can feel / That loves to look on spring times budding green / That words however powerful cant reveal / Or bright ideas picture what we mean’ (EP.II.459). Clare describes God as ‘known unknown’, as a sublime being, intangible, yet known to be (MP.IV.150). Might then ‘Poetry’ indirectly be the voice of God? Clare certainly suggest so in ‘This leaning tree with ivy overhung’ (MP.II.211–13) and in ‘To the Rural Muse’ (MP.III.9–24), and the eponymous ‘Muse’ of the latter poem definitely has celestial origins: ‘To me a portion of thy power be given / If theme so mean as mine may merit aught of heaven’ (ll.29–30). To speak of the voice of God is not, however, to suggest a booming voice, thundering from a cloud. Indeed, silence is usually the most significant sound, and God is certainly ‘heard’ in peace: ‘The Prophet heard the still, small voice, / The way but seldom trod; / The Prophet lifted up his eyes, / And knew the voice of GOD!’ (‘The True Spiritual Worship’, LP.I.30). A letter sent by Clare to his son, Charles, in 1848, speaks of early walks: in my boyhood Solitude was the most talkative vision I met with Birds bees trees flowers all talked to me incessantly louder then the busy hum of men & who so wise as nature out of doors … daily communings with God & not a word spoken32

As these lines suggest, through nature, God’s voice speaks through silence (or at least, not through human words). In Chapter 5, I mentioned Clare’s admiration for George Horne’s Commentary on the Psalms, and there, a remarkably similar description of such a language occurs in the context of Psalm 19 (one of those Clare paraphrased). Speaking of verse 3 of the Psalm, Horne writes: ‘although the heavens are thus appointed to teach, it is not by articulate sounds that they do it; they are not endowed, like man, with the faculty of speech; but they address themselves to the mind of the intelligent beholder in another way, and that, when understood, a no less forcible way, the way of picture or representation.’33 Such a 30

32 33 31

Letters, p. 409. Letters, p. 539. Letters, p. 656. Horne, p. 111.


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notion, then, of nature’s ability to communicate through a deeper language which articulates its meaning by prompting a response to natural scenes, is present in Clare’s early work, but it is highly probable that the knowledge Clare had of Psalm 19 from early childhood at least contributed to the development of such a sense in the first place, and it is likely that texts such as Horne’s continued to formalise such ideas, or at least to ally them more closely with a specifically Christian faith. The idea of God speaking through silence is crystallised in Clare’s later verse, in lines which are the more powerful because they constitute a rejection of the literature Clare elsewhere celebrates: O TAKE me from the busy crowd, I cannot bear the noise! For Nature’s voice is never loud; I seek for quite joys. The book I love is everywhere, And not in idle words; The book I love is known to all, And better lore affords. (LP.I.19)

Through Clare’s invocations of a ‘true’ language, Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ is almost inevitably recalled,34 as is the ‘powerful language, felt, not heard’ in ‘Spring’ of Thomson’s Seasons, the poem Clare claims initially inspired him to poetry.35 Such echoes do of course raise questions regarding the extent to which Clare’s statements are the result of influence rather than personal conviction, but such questions are quieted by the frequency and consistency, especially during the periods of Clare’s greatest liberation from poetic predecessors, with which these sentiments occur. Because he is led to deduce that nature comes from God, Clare honours that which is suggested in this communication as absolute knowledge, truth, and ‘taste’. As I have already mentioned, God is ‘Truth’ for Clare. (‘Truth’ is also at times figured as an abstract personification, as in ‘Slander’ (MP.IV.219); even as such, though, it continues its association with God to the end of Clare’s life, as the penultimate extant letter sent by Clare to his wife, Patty, makes abundantly clear.36) Yet even more than with intimations of God’s presence, in ‘The Progress of Ryhme’ (MP.III.492–503) and in ‘The Instinct of Hope’ (MP.IV.279) the fields are possessed with a prophetic power (‘Tis natures prophecy that such will be’), 34

See especially ll. 58–63, in The Portable Coleridge, ed. I.A. Richards (Harmondsworth, 1950), pp. 128–30. 35 See James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook, (Oxford, 1981), p. 42, ll. 849–53. The direct influence of Thomson’s lines may be heard in Clare’s ‘voice thats heard & felt & seen / In springs young shades’ (‘This leaning tree with ivy overhung’, MP.II.211–13). 36 Letters, p. 668–9.

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which is both prophecy of what is to come, and the thing itself; furthermore, this possession is the antidote to the loneliness to which Clare is prone: ‘I … / Had felt my self indeed alone / But promises of days to come / The very fields would seem to hum’ (MP.III.494, ll.65–8).37 Moreover, in ‘Decay: A Ballad’ (MP.IV.114– 18), as poesy’s waning leads to a desperate wish to ‘feel her faith again’ (l.80), Clare makes an explicit connection between the loss of a ‘true’, rapturous, divine ‘language’ experienced in an edenic state, and the loss of faith. ‘Sabbath Bells’ (1832, MP.III.573–4) has an obvious connection to the theme of divinity; this connection, however, is perhaps less important than what happens in the course of the poem. Clare is explicitly attempting a poem about Sunday: ‘The very air seems deified / Upon a sabbath day’; but this impression of deification is lent from the bean-blossom ‘breathed around’, not simply from the ‘distant bells’. That the bells are distant is significant: as so often, Clare is ‘far from terrors that the parson brings’ (EP.II.643, l.23), and the bells are his only reminder of manmade religion. Like poppies in Oz, the blossoms breathe ‘A fragrance oer the mind’, and soon, Clare’s thoughts are completely overcome: & I have listened till I felt A feeling not in words A love that rudest moods would melt When those sweet sounds was heard A melancholly joy at rest A pleasurable pain A love a rapture of the breast That nothing will explain

(Schiller’s ‘On the Sublime’ emphasises just these tensions conceptualised by Clare as a ‘feeling not in words’, an indescribable, oxymoronic ‘melancholly joy’.) The connection to the sound of the bells is then restored, but the bells have become insubstantial, almost imaginary, and the image with which we were presented is eroded as they become merely the impetus for flights of fancy. We might compare Clare’s poem with Charles Lamb’s ‘The Sabbath Bells’, which Clare almost certainly knew.38 If, in Clare’s work, the bells lead into a gentle reverie (‘quiet wind’; ‘slow pausing’; ‘calm settled’), in Lamb they recall the mind from contemplation (like a brisk, jolly parson), rather than leading it there:

37

See also E.P. Hood, The Literature of Labour (London, 1851), in Critical Heritage, p. 265, on nature and prophecy in Clare. 38 It is included in Clare’s edition of Coleridge’s Poems. To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (Bristol and London, 1797). This book was given to Clare by Lord Radstock, but was unfortunately sold from the extant library by the Public Libraries Committee in 1902.


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The cheerful sabbath bells, wherever heard, Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice Of one, who from the far–off hills proclaims Tidings of good to Zion: chiefly when Their piercing tones fall sudden on the ear Of the contemplant, solitary man39

This man, ‘Whom thoughts abstruse or high have chanced to lure / Forth from the walks of men’, is aroused by a second, italicised, ‘Sudden!’ ‘salute’. (Clare’s much earlier ‘Evening Bells’ (1819–20, EP.II.254–5), with its ‘O merry chiming bells’ refrain, is a much weaker poem, closer to Lamb’s depiction of the chimes than ‘Sabbath Bells’, yet Clare’s insistence of the ‘sweetness’ of the sound there remains different to Lamb’s ‘piercing’ salute.) Lamb’s experience, then, is opposite to Clare’s, where the very insubstantiality of the bells (their coming and going into his consciousness) recalls him to their sound. Like the wrinkles on the sand in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry: ‘The ear it lost & caught the sound / Swelled beautifully on / A fitful melody around / Of sweetness heard & gone’. In the final stanza of his poem, Clare is brought back to earth by the movement of a butterfly near to where he lies in the hay (and Clare is left in the hay, whereas Lamb is inspired to seek out ‘the joys of social life’). The Sabbath bells provide an impetus, making Clare’s mind run along a ‘divine’ theme, but he has found God in the swallow’s wing and the waving blossoms: in the familiarity of the natural world. For Clare, ‘Poetry’ is the fruit of the state of ecstasy, even when the experience is not explicitly included in the verse: ‘To think of song sublime beneath / That heaved my bosom like my breath / That burned & chilled & went & came / Without or uttering or a name / Untill the vision waked with time / & left me itching after ryhme’ (MP.III.498). ‘Poetry’ inspires the poem. Thus Clare experiences what we might interpret as the sublime in nature; surrounded by literature and other references to enthusiastic religion, and having considered such ‘affectionate’ worship in depth, it is almost inevitable that he interprets his joy, his transport, as a quasi-religious effect, and even its consequence (the poem) as connected with God. Just as mystery is an essential component of traditional collective patterns of ‘alternative belief’, mystery and solitude are both central to Clare’s individual faith, as it fits into those patterns, but also in its sublime character. Without mystery, apprehension is not revelatory; it just stands, impotent. Mystery is a commonly asserted prerequisite of sublimity, a concrete figuration of the way in which we are ignorant of greater workings, and thus its role in Clare’s experience of divinity is not to be wondered at. Clare was highly conscious of the necessity of mystery for his felt rapture. In the ‘Essay on Landscape’ he writes: ‘like the hand that wrote the mystery on the wall we see it in our imagination but in a picture it cannot be represented for it is a mystery & not a reality which is the only cause of its terror & sublimity’.40 Here, Clare 39

Works of Charles Lamb (London, 1842), Part II, p. 13. �� Tibble, ed., Prose, p. 214.

40

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alludes to terror; that emotion is generally absent from his artistic representations of the aesthetic, but it is as we have seen a vital part of contemporary theoretical approaches to the sublime and the divine. As Lucy Newlyn writes in her essay ‘Questionable Shape’, Obscurity of image, and indefiniteness of language, are effective in intensifying an aesthetic that rests on the sense of terror … (both superstition and religion maintain their hold on the otherwise rational mind, through ideas of greatness and incomprehensibility.) As appropriated by Burke, indeterminacy is therefore a means of mystification: bringing home to the reader a magnified sense of the power of God, it succeeds in closing off, or “finishing,” the expansiveness of subjectivity.41

In the course of Chapter 4, I have already discussed the place of ‘mystery’ in Clare’s approach to ‘science’. As I have explained, the idea that there is a certain amount of knowledge to which one should aspire, beyond which it is dangerous for one to wonder (the vice of curiositas), is an ancient one with its roots in Genesis, and it is one extended not least by Clare’s beloved Milton. Clare has an amazing capacity still to experience wonder simultaneous with his ‘scientific’ knowledge of the natural world. Both are vital to his perception. Clare disliked, however, what he saw as the philosophical mystery of Wordsworth’s works, claiming that they gave him the ‘itch of parody’.42 As Paul Dawson explains, Clare does on occasion use the term ‘mystery’ to refer to a deliberate (as he saw it), pretentious obfuscating of description, all too often at the expense of natural images.43 Again, Clare’s tendency to use language in very different ways is confusing, but we can look for common trends. To ignore the role of mystery in his aesthetic response because of this complication is certainly to limit our understanding of Clare’s reaction to the world and our reading of his verse. For instance, following and extending the work of John Barrell, Paul Chirico writes that many of Clare’s poems are ‘explicitly concerned with the way knowledge is established through an endless series of acute observations which can themselves only gain meaning when related to the perceiver’s pool of knowledge, or memory.’44 Chirico considers landscapes obscured by mist or fog or snow as ‘radically defamiliarised’, arguing for a sense of dislocation ‘repeatedly related to the disruption of agricultural work, which is dependent on vision.’45 I would suggest that Chirico’s otherwise useful analysis is limited because it fails to acknowledge wider, metaphysical implications in the 41

�� In John Beer, ed., Questioning Romanticism (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 209–33 (p. 216). Letters, p. 221. 43 P.M.S. Dawson, ‘Of Birds and Bards: Clare and His Romantic Contemporaries’, in New Approaches, pp. 149–59 (p. 152). 44 Paul Chirico, ‘Writing Misreadings: Clare and the Real World’, in Goodridge, ed., Independent Spirit, pp. 125–38 (p. 130). 45 Chirico, p. 133. 42


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poems he discusses: the most important ‘meaning’ for Clare is a surrender to the unknowability of the transcendent, which occurs with recognition of ignorance (or acceptance of mystery) in the operation of the sublime, through his ‘acute observations’. It is only the disruption of ‘speech and vision … [and] sound’ (which for Chirico occurs as a result of the intrusion of the actual presence into the realm of the ‘emblem’) which allows Clare his realisation.46 Clare’s ‘poetic feeling’ is largely contingent upon the ‘retreat’ and ‘solitudes’ of nature. It is ‘lonly and solitary musing which ended in rhyme’.47 (It often seems that Clare is most inspired on Sundays; this is, I think, a coincidence lent by the Sabbath respite from work.) Clare’s bird poems are remarkable for the way that solitary aerial acrobatics seem to prompt Clare to identify with the natural world, also lifting his thoughts to freedom and obscurity, and thence to sublimity.48 Birdsong is also frequently represented as ‘ecstatic’, and in its familiar music Clare can experience the sublime rapture which he unselfconsciously interprets as the presence of the deity: in ‘To The Snipe’ (MP.IV.574–7), for example, ‘Tis power divine / That heartens them … / Thy solitudes / The unbounded heaven esteems / & here my heart warms into higher moods / & dignifying dreams’ (ll.49–50; ll.77–80). In ‘The Nightingales Nest’ (MP.III.456–61), the Nightingale’s individual ‘ecstasy’ leads to a quasi-sublime recognition of Poetry as distinct from the language of the poem. Hence, when Timothy Brownlow discusses Clare’s ‘Sand Martin’, he is led to write that ‘The poem is ecstatic because Clare is out of himself, beyond normal space and time in a dimension of instinctive joy.’49 For Simon Kövesi, the solitude figured in the bird poems is itself perceived as sublime, and such poetry might well lead one to deduce at least that Clare needs solitude for contemplative feeling. This seems odd: we have seen that in The Shepherd’s Calendar for example, religious experience is very much a matter for and of community, and Clare attempts to root his faith in a Christian denomination, to find a comfortable method of communal worship. However, solitude, as opposed to loneliness, is often a marker of freedom for Clare, of the escape which allows the ‘communion’ with nature which leads to communion with God. Repeatedly, Clare makes nature sentient, analogous in this way to him and his own life. He uses both direct and inferred associations (‘The Lamentations of Round–Oak Waters’, EP.I.228–34, provides a good example of this) to create empathy between himself and the world. Clare often uses cognates of the word ‘sympathising’ in association with nature. In this way, he externalises and projects his inner feelings. So far is this true, that, as 46

Chirico, p. 130. For more on this sense of disruption as an aspect of Clare’s experience of the sublime, see my ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, pp. 180–82. 47 John Clare By Himself, p. 72; consider also for example additional lines from Clare’s ‘Solitude’ (EP.II.338–52)—see EP.II.352, ll. 1–20. 48 The sky generally tends to give Clare’s thoughts a sublime frame, though not always optimistically so: see ‘High overhead that silent throne’, in A Critical Edition of the Major Works, p. 241. 49 Brownlow, pp. 54–5.

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Crossan notes, natural objects become employed as ‘emblems’ of states of mind.50 This imaginative relationship with nature is interactive, and seems to need peace from other men to function. In ‘Sand Martin’ (MP.IV.309–10), the bird’s flitting about the sky prompts ‘a feeling that I cant describe / Of lone seclusion & a hermit joy’. I have described Clare’s sublime as ‘quiet’, and I think that is important here; another clear reason for Clare’s attraction to the silence offered by solitude is that it eliminates the possibility of hypocrisy (as Clare declares in hymnodic stanzas from mid 1832, ‘Hypocrisy can never seem / In silence only heard by thee’ (MP.V.7)). Undoubtedly, ‘isolation’ makes Clare miserable at times. But there is a difference between isolation, which might well be in a room of people, which denies desired companionship of a like mind, and the solitude he relishes because it allows him this personal communion; hence the aptness of the tautological ‘lone seclusion’. Middleton Murry writes, ‘To be with the free, evidently, also meant for Clare to be one with God, as he conceived God’,51 and this fits peculiarly well with Clare’s model of adogmatic Christianity whose character I shall return to later in this book. Hence, despite his attempts to find a denomination within which he could feel entirely at ease, because true religious communion for Clare paradoxically depends upon abstraction from the world of other men, the experience of ‘rapture’, the consequent intuition of God, and thus ‘The Right To Song’ are irretrievably connected to the right to solitude.52 Clare knows that ‘true’ rapture is encountered in nature, and that golden castles in the sky are not necessary for transport, because that is his experience: ‘Give me no high flown fangled things / No haughty pomp in marching chime / Where muses play on golden strings / & splendour passes for sublime’ (MP.III.486). For Clare, then, the sublime effect (which is an intimation of divinity) is indescribable. Nonetheless, it operates through describable things, as ‘Nature’s Hymn to the Deity’ (MP.III.180–82) plainly demonstrates. (In the alternative version of lines 21–4 of this poem, man is isolated from the rest of creation as the only truly and absolutely fallen being: ‘And God is with us all reply, / Creatures that creep, walk, swim, or fly— / The first link in the mighty plan / Alone is still—ungrateful Man.’ This idea, of man’s separation from the rest of the world, will be explored more fully, below.) Nature is not therefore divine in itself. Nature is, and God is, and the one intimates the other’s presence. This is one aspect of Clare’s (relatively consistent) separation of organised religion and faith: ‘Bare fields the frozen lake & leafless grove / Are natures grand religion & true love’ (LP.I.73). It is specifically nature which reveals or results in these intimations, this enthusiasm or transport, figured in the terminology of the Evangelical Revival; the watcher must be possessed with ‘taste’ (which Clare elsewhere suggests is divinely bestowed53) and be ‘curious’, 50

Crossan, p. 141. Unprofessional Essays, p. 60. 52 Crossan makes some interesting comments on freedom and solitude: see his Chapter 3. 53 See p. 111n97 on Clare and ‘taste’. 51


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but ‘wisdom’ is there in nature to learn. Nature consequently allows for a strong faith, even though at times other passions such as love disrupt this equation. The idea of ‘wisdom’ is important: it rules out the possibility that God himself is ever manifest in nature. God’s presence is intimated through nature, yet nature is not sacramental. Rather than being itself possessed of some sacred or mysterious significance, nature is more like the chalice holding the wine, the sanctuary rather than the sanctified, an enabling means of encountering spiritual presence.54 Thus Clare quotes from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’: ‘Oh! at this hour I love to be abroad, / Gazing upon the moonlit scene around / ‘Looking through Nature up to Nature’s God’ (LP.I.389). Nature is necessary for Clare to undergo what he interprets as true religious experience, so, whilst he proclaims his affection for the Church, and at times searches quite desperately for a religious denomination within which he might feel comfortable, these structures only ever offer partial supports for belief, and so he pillories those who, like ‘Mrs Slinkum’, refuse to worship where there is no steeple.55 It would therefore seem likely that open-air preaching was another aspect of early Methodism which Clare, who at one point implores ‘Know God is every where / Not to one narrow, partial, spot confined’ (LP.II.879), might well have appreciated. However, we have seen his objection to that habit (dependent on his aversion to the habitual fanaticism of those who promote it) in The Parish. Ultimately, to whichever denomination Clare was affiliated at any given point in his life, if he lives with ‘rapture every where’ (MP.III.493, l.34), it is because Poetry, nature and God are inextricably linked, and thus true communion must be beyond organised religion. Taking into account all of the ways in which the concept of the sublime is important to Clare’s work, it might be said in conclusion that Clare is repeatedly at his best when he is concerned to express the rapture he encounters. As Clare becomes a better poet, so his religious indecision increases, until in the later, asylum verse we paradoxically find that when it occurs, Clare’s is a relatively more consistent, more conventional celebration of God. Are these two facts linked? Does Clare’s indecision increase because the more he understands and attempts to codify his feelings, the harder it becomes to fit in with offered dogma and sermon? Or is it as he recognises more various modes of belief that he becomes more receptive to the effect of ‘rapture’? This is an unanswerable question. But even as it remains impossible to solve, it further highlights the importance of considering Clare as a poet ‘of’ the sublime, whatever that might mean.

54

See for example EP.II.458. PMS.A42, vol. 1, p. 24: see p. 51 of this book.

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Chapter 7

‘long evanish’d scene’: Eden and Eternity as Patterns for Faith

The idea of a Fall as a trope for understanding Clare’s relationship to the world has fascinated critics of his work. For Janet Todd, the removal to Northborough is Clare’s experience of the Adamic Fall from divine grace, so that, by 1837, the poet’s treatment of the theme has been ‘worked out’. For Robert Shaw, the asylum experience symbolises the Fall. Robinson and Summerfield write of Eden as a standard by which Clare continually judges his own (fallen) society, and Greg Crossan claims that the ‘Eden theme’ is the ‘climax of Clare’s divinisation of the past’. Whilst one might not concur fully with any of these propositions, wishing to debate the extent of Clare’s conscious use of the theme, and to resist the oversimplification of Clare’s position, it must be acknowledged that the Fall provides at least a perceptual model for his experience, and that Clare’s writing betrays a deep interest in ‘Eden’. Clare’s interest in Eden is of course a common one amongst poets, and its character is certainly indebted to literary influences. Eden naturally provides a pattern for Clare as a nature lover, but the preoccupation is further significant if we consider deracination as a personal Fall, with consequent significance for the individual’s theodicy: much has been written of Clare’s uprooting, and it cannot be ignored as a potentially theological evil. Whilst Crossan rightly points out that ‘It would seem most likely that the vacillation of Clare’s emotional moods is the index to his attraction to a variety of scenes and seasons at different times, making it hazardous to generalize about his notions of Eden’s terrain’, there are some salient features to be identified. In Clare’s work, a picture of a sublime, eternal, heavenly Eden emerges, whose affinity with Clare’s known world provides the conditions for the development of his theodicy.

Todd (1973), p. 79. Robert Shaw, ‘John Clare’s “Paradise Lost”—and Regained’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, 3 (1964), 201–2, in Critical Heritage, p. 439. ‘Helpstone was Clare’s Paradise, his Garden of Eden’: Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London, 1966), p. xvi. Crossan, A Relish for Eternity, p. 100. Max F.Schulz’s Paradise Preserved (Cambridge, 1985) explores the interest of various poets in the imagery of Eden. Crossan, p. 116.

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Clare’s Eden Mention of Eden prompts a passing consideration of Clare’s attitude towards gardens more generally. In such a consideration, one might consider Clare’s fondness for his own garden, and understand it to be complicated by the requisition of commonland by the Enclosure Act for larger-scale landscaped parks, and an aesthetic discourse (‘the picturesque’) conducted in the terminology of appropriation and control. Although his own garden is ever only secondary to wild nature, Clare loves his cottage plot; yet he attacks the taking-over of land for cultivation, and attempts to make his garden wilder, as a letter from Mrs Emmerson of 28 August 1826 suggests: ‘you are now turning your Garden into … an Eden of your own, a little Wilderness’. His time working as a gardener for others not only bores him (‘the continued sameness of a garden cloyed me’) it even dampens his inspiration. Part of the apparent paradox with regard to his own patch is certainly explained once we realise that it is the requisition of land he has known to be wild which angers him (‘Fence now meets fence in owners little bounds / Of field & meadow large as garden grounds / In little parcels little minds to please’, MP.II.349), and not ‘gardening’ itself. In a recent article, Bill Phillips draws precisely the same conclusion with respect to agricultural land cultivation: ‘Clare was not opposed to the plough as long as it remained restricted to its traditional fields … What Clare was opposed to was the ploughing up of previously unploughed land—of greens and woodland.’ Extant explicit comment by Clare on cultivated parks-as-gardens is more complicated, too complicated to deal with in detail here, necessitating a full appreciation of Clare’s relationship to the discourse of the picturesque.10 Suffice it to say, that although insofar as they exhibit ‘the natural’, gardens may share many of the characteristics of the wilder natural world, in Clare’s imagery, men’s gardens are usually separate from and different to God’s garden (be it Eden or ‘Helpston’). An overview of Clare’s poetry might imply that he sees the natural environs of Helpston as purely edenic. Clare’s elegiac ‘Helpstone’ (EP.I.156–63), dated by the Clarendon editors to 1809–13, is the poem to which ‘H.B.’ was referring when he challenged the reliability of Clare’s own historical accuracy (see the ‘Introduction’ to this book, p. 7), and that sense of indefinite origins is significant. The piece

Egerton MS 2247, fol. 206r–v. John Clare By Himself, p. 13. See ‘When ploughs destroy’d the green’, John Clare Society Journal, 21 (2002), 53–62 (p. 58). 10 Various approaches to the subject have been made, though there is perhaps more to be said of the extant accounts of Clare’s relationship to the picturesque. See for example John Lucas’s account of Clare as a candidate for the ‘anti–picturesque’ (in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, 1988), pp.83–97), or Timothy Brownlow’s longer study, of Clare as a ‘picturesque poet’, in John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford, 1983).

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opens with a bleakly pessimistic stanza, expressing Clare’s thwarted attempts to feel part of a ‘community’: ‘Oh where can friendships cheering smiles abode / To guide young wanderers on a doubtful road / The trembling hand to lead, the steps to guide / & each vain wish (as reason proves) to chide—’ (ll.13–16). (Clare’s use of ‘vain’, which occurs 14 times in the printed version of the poem, with further occurrences in variations, is interesting. The ambivalence of the word here is fitting to the text: the wishes might be ‘vain’ in keeping with the futility and pessimism of the verse, or their wishers could be conceited; both uses apparently are present in other parts of the poem, more or less ambiguously.) The absent ‘community’ which Clare here seeks is certainly intellectual, but it also assumes a religious aspect, both through the sense that it is moral guidance that is being sought, and through the literary resonances (particularly of Milton and Goldsmith) of the lines. The echoes of the closure of Paradise Lost are clear, and Eden appears explicitly at line 95: Helpston is Thou far fled pasture long evanish’d scene Where nature’s freedom spread the flowry green Where golden kingcups open’d in to view Where silver dazies charm’d the ’raptur’d view & tottering hid amidst those brighter gems Where silver grasses bent their tiny stems Where the pale lilac mean & lowly grew … (ll.95–101)

(‘’raptur’d’ here is a specific change, from ‘Where silver daisies in profusion grew’ to this line with its enthusiastic resonance.) Here, one cannot really fail to perceive the effects of the 1809 Enclosure Act whose coincidence with the end of Clare’s childhood creates the complex conditions for a perceptual Fall; the original invocation (‘O then thou eden of youths golden years’ (l.163)) only serves to heighten this identification.11 Clare’s is not simply a personal response: E.J. Bush has described how pre-Restoration anti-enclosure propaganda connected the image of ‘old England’ to the biblical myths of Eden and New Jerusalem, for instance;12 but there is no doubt that these specific plants are those which Clare has seen flourish together in his native landscape. Described in phrases thus personalised, but simultaneously echoing the Song of Solomon, HelpstonEden represents Clare’s ‘ideal’ community: free, within the comforting rule of the regal golden kingcups (lowly flowers to man’s taste) supporting a descending hierarchy of weaker (‘tottering’, ‘bent’, ‘tiny’, ‘pale’, ‘lowly’) others, themselves interacting as Clare through rhyme, assonance and other alliterative effects enacts this integration. As I briefly outlined in Chapter 1, like Milton, Clare advocates 11 Whilst it surely constitutes the most commonly treated theme in work on Clare, the best account of the impact of the 1809 Enclosure on Helpston and on Clare remains John Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge, 1972). 12 ‘The Poetry of John Clare’, doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1971, pp. 54–6.

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a model of liberty within an overarching system of governance (in the words of Milton’s Raphael, ‘freely we serve, / Because we freely love’), taking an ancient system as its pattern.13 In this poem we witness such a system in action. The penultimate stanza of ‘Helpstone’ invokes ‘Oh happy Eden of those golden years’, and looks to a time When this vain world & I have nearly done & times drain’d glass has little left to run When all the hopes that charm’d me once are oer To warm my soul in extacys no more … May it be mine to meet my end in thee (ll.167–76)

‘Vain’ here is ambiguous, suggesting the transience as well as the triviality of a world which has time in it, as opposed to a better world which does not (this idea will be explored further, below). That it was Clare’s intention to separate the (sublime) identity of true being from existence in the earthly world is suggested by the fact that there are three extant versions of line 167: through these alternatives, we see that Clare understands worldly life as either futile or presumptuous ‘strife’ (or both), and that he doesn’t simply see death as the world finishing with him; his identity assumes an autonomous existence beyond worldly concerns (‘vain life with me’ becoming ‘vain world and I’). He is body and soul, and only the body belongs to the postlapsarian world.14 ‘Open’, untouched (as Clare sees it) Helpston is compared to Eden; the sense of simile thus predominates: ‘As fair & sweet they blo[o]m’d thy plains among / As blooms those Edens by the poets sung / Now all laid waste by desolations hand / Whose cursed weapons levels half the land’ (ll.121–4). Clare claims in this stanza that the Helpston of his early experience appeared edenic, and hence functions as a foretaste of Heaven. The poem’s final stanza concludes: So when the Traveller uncertain roams On lost roads leading every where but home Each vain desire that leaves his heart in pain Each fruitless hope to cherish it in vain Each hated track so slowly left behind Makes for the home which night denies to find & every wish that leaves the aching breast Flies to the spot where all its wishes rest (ll.179–86)

This ‘spot’, Clare has explained, is ‘humble Helpstone’ (l.1). But throughout the poem, the village has become commingled with tacit and explicit references to Eden. Thus Clare seems to be describing his search for an Eden he already knows, yet 13

Paradise Lost, Bk V, ll. 538–9: see p. 23 of this book. An interesting comparison can be seen in my ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, pp. 22–6.

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which will be beyond worldly ‘vanities’ (in all senses of the word). But Clare’s terminology describes a wandering quest: a worthy existence which is elusive, but which when found will be the means by which Clare gains access to edenic, eternal Heaven when he and the world renounce one another. Such notions anticipate Clare’s biblical paraphrases. Clare’s perception of the natural world is a complex negotiation between the pre- and postlapsarian. We lose something if we do not appreciate that ‘Helpston’ represents both Paradise lost and Paradise (to be) regained; thus it is inscribed with glory and loss. As ever, Clare’s terms move around a lot: Eden and Heaven are frequently elided, and, occasionally, Clare considers that Heaven might be more glorious than Eden, which itself is repeatedly claimed to be only as lovely as the familiar ‘reality’ of Helpston (to whichever situation that refers). This tangled situation occurs in part because an incidental vocabulary of Eden is so pervasive in his work, but at times Clare addresses the themes directly, and then he does seem to have some specific ideas. Eden is ‘paradise Gods choice selfplanted vales’ (LP.I.231), and thus like God is properly ‘chaotic’, uncultivated, pre-order; hence ‘every wild weed in perfection glows’ (LP.II.987) (the significance of regulating, levelling Enclosure for Clare’s wild places is obvious). Eden and Heaven repeatedly are equated or connected (‘The Gates of Eden is the bounds of heaven’, LP.I.85), but there is rarely a direct equation between Earth and Eden made, Clare usually figuring the relationship as a simile: ‘Thou still woud bin lovd as an eden by me’ (EP.II.101); ‘While earth seems Eden in such an hour’ (LP.I.461). Whilst earth usually, then, only approximates Heaven, sometimes Clare gets carried away: ‘His thoughts rush out with joys unfelt before / & maddening raptures make his soul run oer / With its divine consceptions till they rise / Forgetting earth & mix with paradise’ (MP.III.62, ll.360–64). Clare repeats these lines almost verbatim elsewhere, as part of a shorter poem (MP.II.317, ll.25–8). Even here, though, his thoughts are only ‘mixing’ with paradise, and Clare stresses that this happens with a forgetting of reality. In a later poem, Clare describes how true love ‘blossomed in Paradise’, and thus ‘ ’Tis a child of the Soul – not a thing of the clay … / For the Soul of earths nature is her clothing of green … / And both are in Eden with Love all unseen / Where God is its being eternal and bright’ (LP.I.592). True ‘Love’, and through it, Eden, is clearly associated with aspects of nature, though not with the ‘world’ (‘the clay’), granting ‘nature’ separation from the rest of the ‘world’. In his discussion of ‘Helpstone’, John Barrell confronts Clare’s depiction of nature, writing that ‘the imagery of Eden seems to be applied to the landscape of Helpston indifferently whether it is still open or enclosed; and in “Helpstone” itself the lines about Eden … are followed by a passage in which Clare prays that he may in his old age return to Helpstone and die there’.15 I think that we can understand Clare’s apparent contradiction better if we appreciate the agency of man in Clare’s edenic drama, and if we place that drama in a cosmic scheme in which the future can mean the ever-after, as well as just the after. Clare certainly 15

Barrell, p. 113.

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seems to be saying that he wants to die where he feels happiest and most at home; but this home has already been described as the rescue of the grave (l.173), and I don’t think it is difficult, as I have suggested, above, to discern a sense of the eternal here; that is to say that Clare draws an analogy (the only analogy he can draw) between the place he loves and the even greater loveliness of the place that, he understands, awaits him after death. Compare, for example, ‘On visiting a favourite place’ (MP.III.561–5). Here, Clare insists that he can feel ‘a breath … / Of eden left’ (ll.1–2). He goes on to posit the glory of the favourite natural scene he surveys as the source of this sensation. He records the solitude and rapture of the sublime; he is inspired; he praises God, whose presence he feels ‘every where’ (l.77), and his concluding stanzas prophesy the even greater wonder and glory of the ‘rising sun’ (resurrection?) by a similar process of using the most wonderful thing he knows to measure the even greater wonder of the Heaven he anticipates. A similar description occurs in ‘Sun Rise’, where Clare equates ‘heaven’ with the glorious scene: acknowledging that the real Heaven is beyond man’s reasoning powers, Clare cannot fail to make the connection (MP.IV.276). Crossan finds Clare’s millenarianism ‘at odds with his belief in the eternity of Eden, since the Judgement traditionally involves a return to an apparent chaos in the transformation of the old order into the new’; but because (despite the similitude) Earth and Eden are not the same, I do not find this transformative stage problematic.16 It is entirely contingent with this model that, as I have suggested, Clare separates ‘soul’ from worldly man, whose presence (made from clay) disrupted edenic perfection and thus removed all men from the constant intimate presence of true ‘Love’, or God. Fallen nature can intimate Heaven, and hence, this true love: ‘Love is of heaven still the first akin / Twas born In paradise & left its home … / Nature thou truth of heaven if heaven be true / Falsehood may tell her ever changeing lie / But natures truth looks green in every view’ (LP. I.83). Significantly, because of this relationship to ‘nature’, Clare’s Eden is not specifically or exclusively ‘religious’. Rather, nature and the object of his faith reflect one another, each prompting thoughts of the other. Creation is certainly fallen, but that which differentiates between Heaven-Eden and earth-Eden (for the purposes of this book, it might be useful to use the term ‘creation’ to refer to this postlapsarian, yet quasi-edenic, natural world) is ‘knowledge’ (which is the province of man) of one sort or another, and whilst nature’s future is subject to the Adamic curse, in the interim her outward appearance still shares in the innocent state. Mankind proves the exception to this. In Sketches in the Life, Clare separates ‘nature’ and ‘the world’ in order to provide an illustration of his own fallibility: My faults I believe to be faults of most people — nature like a bird in its shell came into the world with errors and propensitys to do wrong mantled round her as garments and tho not belonging to her substance are so fastned round her

16

Crossan, p. 186.


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person by the intricate puzzles of temptation that wisdom has not the power or the skill to unloose her nott that fastens them17

The world was, and nature came into it as a consequence of man’s Fall from Paradise: although ‘error’ is ‘mantled round her’, it is not inherent in nature, ‘not belonging to her substance’, rather having been attached to her as a consequence of temptations that defeated, and continue to defeat, (man’s) ‘wisdom’. Eden has always functioned as a paradigm of the unbroken relationship between man, nature and God. It is thus appropriate that, to Clare, creation suggests a sublime state (‘Smiles stolen from joys eternity / When mortals taste of heaven’, MP.III.368), and Clare’s experience of rapture as the felt presence of the Deity combines with this perception to intimate paradisal Heaven. Yet the poet also sees the cruelty in and of the world, cruelty connected by him to ‘knowledge’ and thus entirely consistent with a Fall that opened man’s eyes, and brought death and cruelty into a formerly edenic world. That Clare is profoundly disturbed when nature’s actions (the violence of the predator or the more passive action of dying) betray the edenic appearance is the subject of my next chapter.

Eden and ‘Knowledge’ Man, then, is separated from the rest of nature because of his ‘knowledge’: ah what a paradise begins with ignorance of life and what a wilderness the knowledge of the world discloses surely the garden of eden was nothing more then our first parents entrance upon life and the loss of it their knowledge of the world18

This contributes to the sense of Clare’s awareness of a sort of curiositas. In Chapter 4, I explored Clare’s belief in the importance of rational consideration of the universe and his love of scientific knowledge, alongside an Augustinian emphasis on the importance of ‘mystery’. Reason which seeks to know too much discovers a dangerous kind of knowledge, which it is the condition of man to know. This dangerous knowledge should not be confused with ‘true’ knowledge, which is the condition of God. (I am well aware of the problems inherent in employing the term ‘knowledge’ in these different ways, but it is absolutely appropriate to Clare’s way of thinking.) Barrell writes of the sense that Clare’s ‘knowledge’, the place he knew, was to him a good deal more than that: as long as he was in Helpston, the knowledge he had was valid, was knowledge: the east was east and the west west as long as he could recognize 17

John Clare By Himself, p. 29. John Clare By Himself, p. 36.

18

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John Clare’s Religion them by the landmarks in the parish, and by the simple habit of knowing … But once out of the parish his knowledge ceased to be knowledge; what he knew as fact was only fact19

Barrell’s ‘fact’ can, I suggest, be associated with fallen knowledge, the dangerous knowledge which is all that fallen man can know. ‘Helpston knowledge’ is different, because it shares the knowledge available in the privileged state of childhood. The different perspectives that retrospection allows goes some way to explaining why (as far as the difficulties in dating Clare’s work allow one to judge) the Eden imagery seems always to have been a feature of Clare’s perception of nature (and why it is not possible to define, as critics like Todd have attempted to do, when the Fall starts and stops being a preoccupation for Clare). That is, it’s not that there are no challenges to Clare’s ‘knowledge’ in Helpston, but Clare has enough residual ‘knowledge’ as long as nature appears as it always has. ‘Knowledge’ to Clare, then, is not unrelated to the passage of time. Partly because childhood is unaware of time’s ravages, it is a desired state: in childhood, ‘ignorance’ and ‘timelessness’ combine in a close assimilation of the ideal: ‘When youth seemed immortal / So sweet did it weave …’ (MP.III.436, ll.9–10); ‘The past it is a majic word / Too beautiful to last’ (MP.III.229).20 This ‘childhood’ is an indefinite state, connected to Clare’s ‘ideal’ in its past-ness. As we saw in Chapter 4, ‘reason’ is accused by Clare of the destruction of ‘childhoods visions’ (MP. I.22). In childhood one is sublimely simple enough to believe: ‘So for our lives we couldn’t tell / From whence the wisdom sprung … / & so we guessed some angel came / To teach them from the skyes’ (MP.III.243). The rupture that occurs between this innocent existence and knowledgeable adulthood is clearly elided with the coming into knowledge of Adam and Eve in Clare’s ‘The happiness of Ignorance’ (MP.IV.272).21 In Barrell’s terms, we might describe this as a shift from ‘knowledge’ to ‘fact’. Clare often suggests that life is a continual process of loss: to grow from innocent childhood to knowing adulthood is to continue a Fall begun in Eden. Because the aspects of the past that Clare recalls with such devotion are firmly in the past, as he grows older and his experience becomes ever more copious, they become increasingly remote just as their desirability becomes clearer. At times, Clare despairs of ever re-attaining the blessed state: ‘Lifes passing bell wakes not a deeper sigh / Then the remembrances of days gone bye / … I look behind & like to Adam find / Too late what eden was I left behind’ (MP.II.236). More usually, 19

Barrell, pp. 121–2. See also for example ‘Stanzas’ (LP.I.574–5); ‘Childhood’ (MP.III.228–52); ‘Childish Recollections’ (EP.II.298–301); ‘To the Rural Muse’ (MP.III.9–24); ‘Remembrances’ (MP. IV.130–34); ‘The Mores’ (MP.II.347–50); and ‘Emmonsales Heath’ (MP.III.363–7). 21 See also Crossan, p. 95: ‘The growing child’s loss of that wonderment as he embraces manhood’s “experience” – the knowledge of good and evil – is a re–enactment of the Fall.’ 20


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Clare’s life is a continual tumbling descent through ‘life’ in the world (borne out by his experience), a relentless plunge which will only be halted, reversed, in the achievement of ‘eternity’. Hence apocalypse is figured as an acceleration of this fall away from Eden. A base line must be hit, cleansing must be absolute, before eternal splendour is revealed: ‘The glory from the earth hath passd away / The pleasure of her paths are desolate / & lead but to the ruins of her pride / Flower leaf branch bark & all even all / Down to the root are withered & are gone’ (MP. II.321). In the interim, as Clare comes increasingly into knowledge, he realises that the society of his childhood was never really prelapsarian, hence often he only ‘tastes’ it in recollection, claiming only that he ‘saw’ it when he was a child. As the closing lines of ‘Stanzas’ (LP.I.574–5) claim, ‘I saw it when a little boy / But never found it since’. Yet creation retains the appearance of Eden because in itself it looks the same: a leaf is still leaflike, even if the tree is on forbidden ground. Only man’s relationship to nature has altered.22 Although the fields retain the capacity to promote rapture which provides a link to the former state (‘I love to walk the fields they are to me / A legacy no evil can destroy / They like a spell set every rapture free / That cheered me when a boy’, MP.III.159, ll.183–9), Clare can no longer find the actual land ‘unknown to sin’, because it was only glimpsed in childhood (see again for example ‘Stanzas’, LP.I.574–5). Childhood most nearly replicates the innocence of the former state, and thus the past provides the only possible analogy for Clare: ‘In thy childhood, when flourished the kingdom of God’ (LP. I.300). An idea of perception, then, is crucial to understanding Clare’s depictions of Eden. Clare understands that what is destroyed by the coming into knowledge of adulthood is a simplicity of mind which does not (or perhaps cannot) seek to over-reach its knowledge and thus shares a special relationship with creation, through which it can perceive creation as edenic (pre-knowledge). In adulthood, it is only ‘memory’ that can make ‘these spots’ ‘divine’ (MP.III.467). Clare is not advocating ‘ignorance’ as a substitute for innocence; in a letter to Marianne Marsh from the early 1830s Clare writes of having read the Bible and concludes that he ‘did think ignorance alone would protect me better—yet I find that knowledge is preferable to all things—& that Solomons advice is always in season when he tells one that knowledge excelleth ignorance as far as light excelleth darkness’:23 ignorance for Clare would necessitate a deliberate blindness; innocence is a privileged and unconscious state. Clare recognises the importance of exercising reason; his problem is that this faculty is inevitably fallible. ‘Knowledge’ for Barrell is tied up with the local natural identity in Clare’s poetry (which has important affinities with my own exploration of Clare’s selfidentity24). Barrell is interested in the way enclosure is represented as a destroyer of this identity. I suggest that the local identities which are ‘effaced’ in Barrell’s 22

See MP.III.247–52, especially ll. 329–440. Letters, p. 556. 24 See ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, passim. 23

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account are fallen identities;25 edenic identity, just like ‘true’ personal identity, never could be effaced. That is to say, they are effaced in the here and now, but, repeatedly, the lamented problem is that altering the face of the landscape has altered Clare’s relationship to it. Clare considers the situation from a standpoint which privileges the integrity of creation itself, to which Clare’s and everyone else’s relationship is perceptual. Enclosure becomes emblematic because in a physical and in a metaphorical sense it does the same thing as growing up: it destroys the ability to relate or to perceive in the same way.26 ‘The Mores’ (MP. II.347–50) provides an exemplary instance of this: Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours Free as spring clouds & wild as summer flowers Is faded all—a hope that blossomed free & hath been once no more shall ever be Inclosure came & trampled on the grave Of labours rights & left the poor a slave … Moors loosing from the sight far smooth & blea Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free Are vanished now with commons wild & gay As poets visions of lifes early day … & birds & trees & flowers without a name All sighed when lawless laws enclosure came (ll.15–78)

Of course, it does this in a very obvious physical sense: one cannot maintain a relationship with the departed. But in doing so, it reveals that an absolute separation exists between man and creation; it has simply taken the shock of a disruption to the perceived relationship to realise it. Most importantly, man is estranged from creation, not vice versa. Wandering ‘out of’ his ‘knowledge’ on Emmonsales Heath, Clare complains that ‘the very wild flowers and birds seemd to forget me’.27 In a letter to Taylor of 1832 Clare similarly writes ‘I have had some difficulties to leave the woods & heaths & favourite spots that have known me so long for the very molehills on the heath & the old trees in the hedges seem bidding me farewell’.28 Towards the end of his book, Barrell addresses this habit of expression, writing that Clare ‘is the object of their knowledge, and not they of his: so that for ‘the very wild flowers’ to ‘forget’ him is certainly for him to lose, in some sense, his identity.’29 It is precisely this idiom which can help us to understand Clare’s relationship to nature and how it alters contingent upon the ‘Fall’ of adulthood. The flowers haven’t changed; Clare has, and this has altered 25

27 28 29 26

See Barrell, p. 115. Events other than the enclosure, such as removal, have a similar effect. John Clare By Himself, p. 40. Letters, p. 561. Barrell, p. 181.


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the relationship between the two. This also helps to reconcile the problem Barrell finds in ‘The Lamentations of Round–Oak Waters’: the poem, as it gets better, falls in half; it could only be made whole again if we were made to feel that Clare’s sadness is his personal share of a general sorrow at the enclosure; but this will hardly do. In the first half of the poem the genius of the brook has been emphasising Clare’s apartness from the collectivity of the village’30

The poem remains ‘whole’ if we understand that the ‘general sorrow’ is creation’s, that creation is the general, and that what counts is Clare’s (and the other villagers’) relationship to creation. The physical ‘fall’ of enclosure coalesces neatly with this perceptual fall of growing knowledgeable, of realising one’s distance and isolation from a better state. Predictably, this problematic ‘knowledge’ is also intimately connected to language. Almost obsessively, Clare returns to the idea of a universally communicative language, and this ‘music’, ‘known in every tongue’, is specifically associated with ‘childhood’ (MP.III.229, ll.5–6). In ‘Remembrances’ (MP.IV.130– 34), Clare laments that the ‘raptures’ of ‘boyhoods pleasing haunts’, destroyed by adulthood, cannot be figured through postlapsarian language: ‘O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away / The ancient pulpit trees & the play’ (l.4; l.37; ll.29–30). The hypocritical organised religion of verbose men is a poor substitute for nature’s intimations. ‘Poetry’, however, the purer language of truth found in nature (and unavailable to fallen man), shares much of the character of childhood: in ‘The Mores’, the ‘sweet vision of my boyish hours’ is ‘As poets visions of lifes early day’ (MP.II.348); the ‘poet’ can still perceive the glory in nature. In ‘Emmonsales Heath’ (MP.III.363–7), Clare declares: ‘I thought how kind that mighty power / Must in his splendour be / Who spread around my boyish hour / Such gleams of harmony / Who did with joyous rapture fill / The low as well as high’ (ll.77–82). It is therefore easy to see that this quasi-Wordsworthian preoccupation with the elevation and lapse of childhood becomes so important in the poetry subsequent to the move to Northborough because on a very basic level it can be seen to coalesce with the perceptual ‘falls’ of removal and enclosure. Taken away from his home, Clare’s capacity for rapture is diminished, and with it the grounding of his faith. The intimation of God he is used to receiving is destroyed as the source which had supported it throughout Clare’s life is distanced and placed out of bounds: ‘Each little tyrant with his little sign / Shows where man claims earths glows no more divine’ (MP.II.349, ll.67–8). Clare expounds this sense more fully in ‘Shadows of Taste’:

30

Barrell, p. 116.

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John Clare’s Religion Some in recordless rapture love to breath Natures wild Eden wood & field & heath In common blades of grass his thoughts will raise A world of beauty to admire & praise Untill his heart oerflows with swarms of thought To that great being who raised life from nought … But take these several beings from their homes Each beautious thing a withered thought becomes Association fades & like a dream They are but shadows of the things they seem Torn from their homes & happiness they stand The poor dull captives of a foreign land (MP.III.308–9)

The Helpston of which Clare has ‘knowledge’ is all that is left of Eden to enjoy, thus functioning as a bridge. (These notions are rendered more fertile still when we recall that, as Clare’s prose reveals he is aware, Christ claims the condition of childhood as the proper condition for entry into the biblical apocalyptic kingdom.) So, essentially for the rest of his life, Clare begs to be taken away ‘To the scenes which I loved in the childhood of life’ (LP.I.15).

Eternity One defining aspect of the Heaven-Eden Clare hopes to attain is its eternity. Crossan incisively identifies ‘eternity’ as Clare’s notion of ‘heaven’, where ‘past, present, and future are inextricably fused, and consequently no longer in opposition’.31 As I have discussed, Clare frequently seems to perceive in ‘frozen moments’ which are themselves quasi-sublime.32 Kelsey Thornton essentially notes the same tendency, connecting it to the theme of eternity (albeit with slightly different purpose),33 31

Crossan, p. 66. This apparently Boethian turn to Clare’s thinking (Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy [c.523] probably the most famous investigation of God’s foreknowledge, argues that because God transcends temporal boundaries and dwells in an ‘eternity’ in which all time is always present, the concept of ‘foreknowledge’ is essentially anachronistic, as all divine knowledge is known in the present moment. Thus God can ‘foreknow’ human actions which are yet the result of free choices, and thus the ‘Fall’ can be ‘justified’ as man’s transgression) is present also in Milton’s depiction of God, where it contributes to the complex conditions for God’s exoneration according to the Free Will Defence. 32 See also Schulz: ‘The persistence of Clare’s concentration on a still moment in time, in an almost Blakean effort to perceive there the timeless, is apparent’ (p. 146). 33 See his discussions of ‘The Yellow Hammers Nest’ and ‘Pleasures of Spring’ in ‘The Transparency of Clare’, John Clare Society Journal, 21 (2002), 65–79, especially pp. 73, 76, 79.


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as does Bloom’s and Middleton Murry’s earlier criticism. Away from his native scenes, Clare seems increasingly to connect the experience of rapture not just with an intimation of divinity, but with an intimation of the eternity that is associated with it, leaving him with an Augustinian sense of the experience of eternity in a moment prefiguring the apocalyptic reduction of all time to eternity. ‘The Flitting’ (MP.III.479–89), Clare’s response to his move to Northborough in 1832, claims: Some sing the pomps of chivalry As legends of the ancient time Where gold & pearls & mystery Are shadows painted for sublime But passions of sublimity Belong to plain & simpler things & David underneath a tree Sought when a shepherd Salems springs (ll.73–80)34

Man’s structures are exposed as transient, despite their ornate glory. They will pass away where nature continues. ‘Passions of sublimity’ (here clearly linked to religion) belong to ‘plain & simpler things’. Clare introduces his favourite biblical figure, David. However, he moves on: even David’s ‘crown’ has passed away, yet the moss on which he sat regenerates. Clare recalls Adam and Eve in this trajectory, but it is molehills, ‘Coeval they with adams race’ who are ‘… blest with more substantial age / For when the world first saw the sun / These little flowers beheld him too / & when his love for earth begun / They were the first his smiles to woo’ (ll.131–6). (The image of the sun as the action of God is noteworthy.) Time destroys man’s buildings, but ‘Poor persecuted weeds remains’ (l.212). In later lines, Clare writes: ‘… still loves hope illumes / & like the rainbow brightest in the storm / It looks for joy beyond the wreck of tombs / & in lifes winter keeps loves embers warm’ (LP.I.62, ll.630–33). The rainbow, reminder of God’s promise, subsists beyond man’s crumbling memorials to the dead. If, as is sometimes suggested, God was simply ‘in’ nature for Clare, then his personal relationship with God would be destroyed upon removal to Northborough. However, the reverse would seem to be true. It seems as if the nature that persists separately from the quasi-edenic Helpston is extra-personal, other, divine. To re-employ Žižek’s terms, borrowed from Laclau, the ‘universal’ becomes ‘the symbol of a missing fullness’.35 Thus the movement to recognition of a more generalised nature apparently marks an increasingly personal relationship with God, which involves a reduction if not a renunciation of selfhood (which can be sublime),36 resulting in an increased faith, 34 The resonance of ‘Salem’, with its contemporary connotation of Methodist Chapels, is interesting here. 35 Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London, 1994), p. 147. 36 See above, p. 141.

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a becoming one with God (‘rise above myself oer reasons shrine / & feel my origin as love divine / Older then earth ’bove worlds however high / An essence to be crushed but never die’, MP.IV.259), rather than the more simple communion with nature suggested in Clare’s ‘Know God is every where’ (LP.II.879). The sense of a separation between man and the rest of the world dominates. One extraordinary gap in Clare’s extant library and in other records of his reading (especially taking into account his proposals for anthologies of sixteenthand seventeenth-century verse, and the imitations of earlier verse with which Clare tried to fool James Montgomery37) is the Metaphysical poetry with which Clare’s own work would seem to have much in common. Clare’s perception of eternity is as close to Vaughan’s ‘The World’ (1650), as it is to Shelley’s Adonais (1821), where light comes from the world of the dead: The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!38

For Shelley, ‘time’, or ‘Life’, initiates a prismic separation of the ‘time’ that in eternity will be unified. A similar idea of eternity as ‘timeless’ becomes vital to Clare’s vision. ‘Time’ is irretrievably connected to ‘life’, and ‘life’ is ‘an hour glass on the run’ (‘What is Life?’, EP.I.392). The past is ‘out of time’ for Clare, and in this way comes to be associated with eternity. But this past is not ‘fancy’; it is an alternative and vivid reality. In the asylum period poetry, at least in the posture he adopts, Clare rarely is afraid of death, which he understands to offer release from the time-ordered postlapsarian world of man: Is nothing less then naught – nothing is nought & there is nothing less – but somthing is Though next to nothing – that a Trifle seems & such am I – yet Man no trifle is Born an immortal Soul that cannot die To Nothing – nor yet be nothing That Soul is Man – born not of the Dust Nor yet to dust returns – but born of God

37 See Eric Robinson, ‘John Clare’s Learning’, John Clare Society Journal, 7 (1988), 10–25 (p. 22), and Letters, pp. 314–15, 377 and also pp. 359 and 389. 38 See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London, 1977), pp. 390–406, ll. 460–65.


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Eternal as his Sire – living for ever An immortal Soul (LP.I.250)

Again, ‘soul’ is separate from the body of the dust. ‘Eternity’ is the blessed, timeless state of after-death, edenic and heavenly, modelled upon the natural world of Helpston (hence Clare writes: ‘Ah thus to think the thoughts of death is sweet / In shaping heaven to a scene like this’, EP.II.547).39 Just as it retains Edenic aspects, Earth hasn’t lost its connection with eternity entirely, as the very title of ‘Earths Eternity’ (MP.IV.568) makes obvious. Echoing the sentiments of Herder’s God, Clare reinforces the idea of a Creator always creating on earth, with eternal timelessness. Each leaf falls from the tree, and in this way brings a notion of death and decay and the fickleness of time to Clare. But at the same time, those leaves come again, intimating eternity. (And of course, in Clare’s schema, Eden itself was similarly transient, Clare’s Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise and sent instead to another kind of ‘Heaven’, God’s Helpstonian garden.) This allows for the paradox: creation can be mutable as on earth (eternally regenerating) or timeless as in Heaven. (Fallen) creation can thus retain traces of both of these possibilities, and the reminders of death and Paradise thus offered are a central part of the fallen state. In his reading of ‘The Flitting’, Chirico fails to see that it is precisely the ambivalence of nature, its subsistence with its transience (particularly figured through the image of trees and sun), which is important for Clare: Chirico, following Barrell, understands Clare’s move to Northborough to result in a new appreciation of nature as ‘the same everywhere’, entailing ‘the loss of his celebrated local intensity’.40 Importantly, however, this same move and recognition allows Clare to move from a poetry preoccupied with the vision of sight to one which privileges the vision of insight, because he understands the vision of particularised sight to be ‘fallible’, changed. In ‘Songs Eternity’ (MP.V.3–5), nature is placed as a constant throughout a history which is biblical as well as modern: twice we are reminded that these songs were edenic, ‘Songs once sung to adams ears’.41 As elsewhere, Nature’s own praise (which is ‘true’ language) is represented as ‘music’, which leads the observer to ‘eternity’. Eternity is equated with Heaven, and hence nature with Heaven also: ‘The eternity of song / Liveth here’ (additional stanza). Identical sentiments can be found in one of Clare’s most beautiful poems, ‘The Eternity of nature’ (MP.III.527–31). Leaves are ‘Sublime and lasting’ (l.3) because of the peculiar temporality of nature:

39 Although I do not agree with all of his conclusions, Crossan’s excellent study demonstrates the process of this: see especially his chapter 4. 40 Chirico, ‘Writing Misreadings: Clare and the Real World’, in Goodridge, ed., Independent Spirit, pp. 125–38 (p. 137). 41 Compare for example the ‘literary’ history of MP.IV.227.

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John Clare’s Religion trampled underfoot The daisy lives & strikes its little root Into the lap of time—centurys may come & pass away into the silent tomb & still the child hid in the womb of time Shall smile & pluck them when this simple ryhme Shall be forgotten like a church yard stone (ll.3–9)

Clare repeatedly uses the images most significant of durability for man with which to represent the transience of man-made objects: here, tombstones, memorials of the most sensitive kind, physically are pushed into insignificance by the humblest wildflowers. The poem demonstrates that creation retains a prelapsarian aspect: placing the daisy in the ‘silky grass’ (l.21) of Eden, and echoing Gessner, Clare describes how the flower ‘loving eve from eden followed ill / & bloomed with sorrow & lives smiling still / As once in eden under heavens breath / So now on blighted earth & on the lap of death / It smiles for ever’ (ll.23–7): forever, because Clare’s vision of eternity is Helpston without the blight of man’s evil (or ‘knowledge’). The difference between pre- and postlapsarian creation is, it seems, that on earth the daisy smiles with sorrow, having knowledge of death.42 Its beauty is otherwise unchanged (similarly, the robin’s song is ‘A music that lives on & ever lives’, l.46). Maternal imagery in the poem suggests an inevitable bringing forth. Creation is endowed with mystery, in the ‘five … spots’ (l.32) which mark nature (in folk-law, signs of the five wounds of Christ), recalled from the early part of the poem in lines identifying the ‘mystic power’ of ‘the odd number five strange natures laws’ (l.87; l.77) throughout nature.43 But such ‘mysterys’ signify, by indicating the superior designing hand, himself indicative of eternity: ‘Her ways are mysterys all yet endless youth / Lives in them all unchangable as truth’ (ll.74–5). This is succinctly explained: ‘Tis natures wonder & her makers will / Who bade earth be & order owns him still / As that superior power who keeps the key / Of wisdom power & might through all eternity’ (ll.99–102). ‘Crowland Abbey’ (MP.IV.172) initially appears to be in the picturesque tradition, but Clare’s own experience and imagination overpower convention: Clare’s ‘rank weeds battening over human bones’ (with their alternative 42

Compare St Paul: ‘through one man sin entered the world and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for all that sinned’ (Rom. 5. 12). (This passage has repeatedly featured in theodical debate, being not least the source of St Augustine’s doctrine of Original Guilt. See for example Richard Swinburne’s Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford, 1998), pp. 35–41.) 43 Although I have been unable to find reference to the work itself, it is possible that folkloric emphasis upon the significance of ‘fives’ was reinforced (and re-presented as ‘literary’ knowledge) for Clare by the ‘Quincunx’ of Thomas Browne’s ‘The Garden of Cyrus’; Clare might also have in mind the Quinary system of classification (on the latter, see Bob Heyes, ‘Looking to Futurity’, p. 250).


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‘rubbish mingled thick with human bones’) stray too far from the picturesque ‘contract’ to remain within the classification. ‘Time’ inspires: whilst the sublime is conventionally figured as the result of a spatial (un)awareness, Clare’s poem describes the experience of sublimity when confronted with a sudden awareness of the past. Clare writes: ‘In sooth it seems right awful & sublime / To gaze by moonlight on the shattered pile / Of this old abbey’: by ‘awful’, Clare again suggests a more conventional engagement with the aesthetic (here, of the sublime, rather than the picturesque – as mentioned above, this awe-full character is not always an aspect of his experience). The abbey strains against the passing ages, ‘struggling still with time’. Yet, when it ceases to do so, it is beyond time, and therefore moves into an eternal existence. It will sink ‘more silent still’: further into the silence which is the most significant sound for Clare, into ‘The lapse of age & mystery profound’. As old structures like the Abbey decay, they move away from their man-made form, assuming a quasi-natural form even as they highlight man’s transience, in doing so hinting at the sublime reality of eternity. When, like ‘Crowland Abbey’, ‘The Last of March’ (EP.II.471–6) illustrates the impermanence of human achievement, the very reflection upon such impermanence is displayed as transient: ‘These walls the work of roman hands … / The builders names are known no more / No spot on earth their memory wears / & crowds reflecting thus before / Have since found graves as dark as theirs’ (ll.97–104). When, in ‘The Fallen Elm’ (MP. III.440–43), Clare claims to ‘learn a lesson’ from the ‘destiny’ of another relic from the past, decay becomes as sublime as the glory of life, because it pulls the thoughts towards Heaven. In this cosmic scheme, life (the temporality of existing in the world) needs death for eternal life (the temporality of being). The transience of life is the path to eternity. Max Schulz, in Paradise Preserved, approaches a consideration of this theme. He writes that a ‘cyclical reassurance of the “eternal” does not seem to have moved Clare’s hard peasant mind to quite the easy acceptance it did his fellow Romantics. The thrust of Clare’s imagination is centripetal; but experience has also made it despairing.’44 Because he relies on Todd’s notions (her belief is that Clare’s concept of eternity ‘is always earthly and cyclical, not metaphysical and spiritual’,45) Schulz cannot see the whole picture. Clare seeks for heavenly eternity through nature’s ambivalent temporality. The idea of eternal transience replicated throughout nature (and most evident in the diurnal habit of the Sun) is key to Clare’s perception of time. Just as evergreens are ‘emblems of Eternity’,46 so ‘Nature’s love is eternal’ (LP.I.41). I alluded, above, to a connection between true ‘Love’, and God. The idea of ‘love’ is crucial to Clare’s conception of eternity, and this reified love seems distinctly Shelleyan: it is precisely ‘the bond and sanction 44

Schulz, p. 146. Todd (1973), p. 36. 46 John Clare By Himself, p. 203. 45

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which connects … every thing which exists’.47 Love becomes the emphasis of eternity, which is sometimes defined as love (‘Life without the fear of death / Or dread of Lightening from above / No graves or any loss of breath / Is love’, LP.I.575). Prior to the apocalypse, one can only wait: ‘Love is not here – hope is’ (LP.I.506), but post-apocalypse is a time ‘When earth shall turn to heaven below / And love be lost in love’ (LP.I.568), because ‘Adam’s love for Adam’s kin’ ‘triumphs over death and sin’ (LP.I.490). Thus, entirely in accord with the fundamental assertion of Christian faith (that God is Love), Clare’s eternity is a state dominated by love; the ‘love’ which can be discovered in nature thus becomes essentially heavenly, of God (and it is specifically the ‘diurnal’ course of nature, the fact that it always does ‘blossom again’, that intimates this to Clare), and this provenance is the reason for its splendour and its truth: ‘True love is eternal / For God is the giver / & love like the soul will / Endure – & forever’ (LP.I.41; ll.24–5; ll.38–41). Eternity, then, is a state of love, and ‘God is love’ (LP.II.969), although God is also more than love. To be in eternity is to share in this state, and thus to be one with God’s love.48 What does, to use Schulz’s formulation, move Clare’s ‘hard peasant mind’ to an ‘easy acceptance’ of a ‘cyclical reassurance of the “eternal”’, is the Bible. To illustrate this point, I quote from Paul Chirico’s ‘Writing misreadings’, not because Chirico is particularly to be identified, but because his work on ‘The Flitting’ neatly illustrates a more general error: ‘biblical references seek to express the eternal and unchanging presence of nature, which is surely less than the truth for a poet who has lived through the transformations of enclosure.’49 It is precisely the truth for the poet who knows that God’s promise of delivery accompanies those biblical references, however bad things seem: the Psalms at least have taught him that. That is to say that the experience of David, Adam, Eve and Abel has been swept away by Christ. After their roles at the dramatic beginning of the scriptural narrative, Adam and Eve are absent from much of the Bible. The only biblical interpreter of the Fall is Paul, who renders a typological account of Adam and Eve, making them universal symbols and positing them as one side of a balanced equation, the other side being Christ-the-Redeemer, the ‘last Adam’ (I Cor. xv, 45). Accordingly, for Clare, the experiences recorded in the Old Testament are still there, as an example and a lesson, but tempered now with and interpreted through the fulfilment of God’s promise in Christ’s coming, which in turn reassures him in times of faith that the sublime apocalypse of Revelation, and the subsequent Heaven, will come, as surely as the daisy strikes ‘its little root’ (MP.III.527). Similarly, when Johanne Clare discusses the dependence upon biblical sources of ‘The Lamentations of Round–Oak Waters’, she writes that we find in the ‘enclosure elegies’ little of the melancholy that ‘depends upon the recognition of change and loss as inevitable and irreversible … the changes and losses Clare 47

‘On Love’, in Reiman and Powers, ed., Shelley, p. 473. See also Minor, ‘Clare, Byron and the Bible’, p. 116, on a similar theme. 49 �� Chirico, pp. 136–7. 48


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lamented were far from inevitable. His mourning was always quickened by anger.’50 Maybe so in these ‘elegies’, but we must remember that, convenient though the classification is, it is not Clare’s own. These poems ask to be read in a wider context, in which other poems suggest that Clare was ‘resigned’ to change and loss as inevitable aspects of the progress towards eternity: one can, after all, still become angry at the inevitable. Moreover, Clare is angry at men in the passages Johanne Clare considers; men are the ‘foes’; or, more specifically, the ‘wealth’ or ‘greed’ (attributes of man) of ‘senceless wretches’ is the ‘enemy’, here inflicted by man on nature, not simply on other men.51 (Labourers are notably excused. Rather, they are part of that which is being hurt, forced to work as ‘slaves’: although they may be ‘clowns’, there is also a sense in which they are more nearly ‘natural’ themselves52). The obvious extension of this can be seen as Chirico, following Barrell, describes ‘the poet’s desire for familiar anchoring points’ in ‘I Am’, concluding: The unattainable simplicity of this fixed positioning is in fact dwarfed by the metaphorical landscape of personal failure—‘the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems’. The destruction of identity and of landscape in these poems is mutually assured.53

We must counter that identity is assured, in the very attainable simplicity of death. Earthly existence (life) is definitively dwarfed, if we take Clare’s poetic output as a whole, by the longed-for, promised ‘existence’ in Heaven. It is significant that the main tenor of language available to Clare to write about change is biblical, or inherited from similarly indebted sources. This is convenient, acting as a reminder that Clare’s perception, as becomes clear in the asylum verse, is coloured by the recognition of an existence to come in eternity. Criticism of Clare has been limited because, following the insistence of Barrell upon the importance of ‘knowledge’ for Clare (which is right, in a physical sense), and in view of the immediacy of sight that Clare’s poetry implies, it ignores the lessthan-concrete. What such work must consider is that vision can be both physical and metaphysical; that faith is predicated upon a different kind of certainty to the ‘knowledge’ that is possessed of facts. In Clare’s writing, particularly within the biblical paraphrases, is an evident preoccupation with the end of the world which initiates one’s ‘being’ in eternity. 50

�� Johanne Clare, p. 48. See Johanne Clare, pp. 43–5, and EP.I.228–34. 52 Compare Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (‘the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature [in rural life]’), in Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Oxford, 1952–59), II, 387. See also Phillips, ‘When ploughs destroy’d the green’, on the culpability or otherwise of labourers within the landscape. 53 Chirico, pp. 137–8. 51

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This preoccupation extends beyond the physical location of existence which preoccupied Clare as a child, and into a metaphysical realm, of earth’s ‘secrets’ and ‘Heaven’. Even at the earliest stage of consideration, the fear that commonly attends meditation upon apocalypse often is absent, and the same confident wonder frequently invades the later ‘apocalyptic’ poetry. On occasion, Clare’s vision is terrifying: The cataract whirling to the precipiece Elbows down rocks and shoulders thundering through Roars, howls and stifled murmurs never cease Hell and its agonies seems hid below Thick rolls the mist that smokes and falls in dew The trees and greensward wear the deepest green Horrible mysteries in the gulf stares through Darkness and foam are indistinctly seen Roars of a million tongues and none knows what they mean (LP.II.766)

Such imagery may, as Roger Sales suggests, owe a debt to the opium-induced dreams of Clare’s London Magazine contemporaries, but the impetus here is surely primarily biblical.54 We might note especially the senseless cacophony the lines describe. But this is the moment of apocalypse, rather than the subsequent state, which follows and annuls it: Death breathes its pleasures when it speaks of him My pulse beats calmer while its lightnings play My eye with earths delusions waxing dim Clears with the brightness of eternal day The elements crash round me – it is he And do I hear his voice and never start From Eve’s posterity I stand quite free Nor feel her curses rankle round my heart (LP.I.505)

To be in this state is to be preserved in glory. The central request of Clare’s ‘An invite to Eternity’ (LP.I.348–9) has fascinated critics.55 The poem can best be understood as an example of the crucial ‘testing’ Clare finds in the sections of the Old Testament which he paraphrases: will the maiden accompany him through purgatory? Bloom’s analysis of the poem usefully asks: ‘What 54

Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 44. See for examples and further references Edward Strickland, ‘Conventions and their Subversion in John Clare’s “An invite to Eternity”’, Criticism, 24 (1982), 1–15; William C. Engels, ‘Clare’s Mocking Tone in “An Invite to Eternity”’, John Clare Society Journal, 15 (1996), 57–67; Middleton Murry, Unprofessional Essays, pp. 64–5, and Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca, 1971), especially p. 452. 55


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meaning can the poem’s last line have if eternity is a state merely of non-identity?’56 Elsewhere, I have described Clare’s ‘I am’ as the achievement of sublime selfhood in the moment of its knowing its own being.57 Reason allows the self-conceived status of one’s own identity. Whatever ‘eternity’ is perceived as, self-identity is always eternal from a personal point of view: eternity can only be imagined as it might be through one’s own consciousness. Thus that which critics find so impossible is precisely that which is necessary to achieving the sublime state of being, rather than existing, in eternity. The ‘sad non-identity’ is the necessary stage on the passage to true being in eternity. This is the ‘meaning’ the poem has. The ‘sad non-identity’ is an intermediate state: the invitation is to go ‘through’, not ‘to’, this. That this is the prelude to the state of being glimpsed in ‘A Vision’ is evident from the anonymity: this is a place ‘Where parents live and are forgot / And sisters live and know us not’ (ll.15–16). Clare must shed his transient, linguistically constructed identity, given through name, to reach a superior level of being.58 Moreover, if the voice offering the invitation to this pre-apocalyptic world is understood to be overlaid by that of Adam to Eve, the final stanza gains a deeper and more significant resonance: The land of shadows wilt thou trace And look – nor know each others face The present mixed with reasons gone And past, and present all as one Say maiden can thy life be led To join the living with the dead Then trace thy footsteps on with me We’re wed to one eternity (ll.25–32)

The passage should be considered in the context of the influences upon Clare’s conception of Eden and the Fall (Genesis and Paradise Lost, but also texts such as Gessner’s Death of Abel, feeding in turn on those influences). In their metaphorical terms at least, earth is a land of shadows compared to the glory of eternity. In Clare’s poem, having eaten of the forbidden fruit, ‘Adam and Eve’ do know one another, but their ‘faces’, their interpersonal identity and their knowledge of one another, are completely changed. (I do not find the word ‘maiden’ problematic in this reading, firstly, because Eve, although the original sinner, is also the original maiden; but also because the term frequently is used by Clare as a non-specific epithet, denotative of a young (attractive) girl. Clare refers in his asylum poetry to Patty as ‘the Maid of Walkherd’ (LP.I.18, LP.I.32) when we know that their courtship was far from chaste, and uses the term in other poems, including ‘Kate O’Killarney’ (LP.II.945) and ‘The Invitation’ (LP.II.672), both of which imply 56

Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 453. See ‘Enkindling ecstacy’, pp. 23–5. 58 Clare’s preoccupation with fame is also at play here. 57

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similar relationships.) The infiltration of ‘reason’ to their known ‘present’ causes the Fall, and, cast out of Eden, Adam and Eve must live in a world that evidences its mortality all around. Yet still they are together, ‘wed to one eternity’, a line echoing Adam’s love speeches in Paradise Lost. Strickland calls ‘this insane marriage … the crowning symbol of a confounding rather than communion of identities’.59 He fails to recognise that Clare’s poem inherits the ambivalence of Milton’s Adamic love, in which ‘communion’ is not only cause but also consequence of a ‘reasonable’ Fall. Engels claims that Clare taunts the maiden, because he ‘does not think the maid capable of accompanying him,’ and believes that his use of ‘the question’ ‘points to a possible component underlying the tone: his consciousness of freedom from the bonds of woman’s love, which he apparently saw as an impediment to the attainment of his eternity.’60 If this is true, then we might understand that poetry, nature and woman are gifts from God, lending intimations of ‘eternity’ or ‘God’ in their propensity to indicate the sublime, but that they cannot therefore be the thing, ‘eternity’, or ‘God’ (love) itself, and Clare must go beyond them. Eternity is a timeless place ‘where woman never smiled or wept’ (‘I Am’, LP.I.396–7, l.14). Yet Clare as a man still adores this trinity of woman, poetry and nature. Hence his ambivalence about death: only when he feels deprived of them in the physical world does he desire their metaphysical reality (of which their quasi-Platonic actualities in Clare’s world are substitutes) through death. Thus, the ‘I am’ of Clare’s most famous poem is an integral part of the theme of ‘solitude’, which Clare both courts and rejects. His whole life is made up of irreconcilable contradictions, of delight in things which he must relinquish to get to a more perfect delight, or ecstasy: ‘I fled to solitudes from passions dream’ (‘Sonnet: I am’, LP.I.397–8, l.5). This pluperfect, sublime state is Clare’s Heaven.

59

Strickland, p. 7. Engels, p. 63.

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Chapter 8

‘There is a cruelty in all’: Challenges to Faith

This book has demonstrated the context of Clare’s claims to be an adherent of Christianity. Yet any Christianity must be predicated on a theodicy, and throughout my research into Clare’s faith, I continually have wondered how he reconciles Christian faith with the presence of evil in the world. That there is ‘evil’ in Clare’s world, which would have to be justified in order to balance experience with faith in a just, loving God, is incontrovertible. Precisely what this evil might be, however, is less straightforward. There is of course the ‘evil’ of enclosure, and this, with its obvious connection to a thought pattern admitting of a theological displacement occurring through a fall, is undoubtedly seen as such by Clare. (It is important to remember that ‘evil’ does not invoke one coherent theological phenomenon: in a climate still drenched with the terminology of decades of Dissenting religion, the rhetoric was confusing at the very least, and the gravest evils were understood to come from within ‘Christianity’ itself. Clare was certainly aware of such debates. Furthermore, such ideas attached to the ‘them and us’ formulations of political radicalism. In some contemporary rhetoric, for example, Paine was quite clearly satanic.) However, in assuming man’s culpability in the Fall, Clare is not concerned with evolving an hypothesis for the origin of cosmic evil. As I have discussed, several aspects of his life effectively function as perceptual ‘falls’, but it is not clear that Clare ever deliberately weaves these ideas into an extended theory, and the absence of a true diabolo from Clare’s work is notable.

Evil and Cruelty Despite a plethora of postlapsarian reference in Clare’s poetry, mention of any specific theological evil is extremely limited. When it occurs, it usually functions only as an illustrative comparison to the good of God, in hymnodic style. Evil seems something solely for ‘grace’ to act against, an opposite by which it might be defined. In his prose, Clare refers to mentions of Satan peppering sermon and Scripture, but this devil is generally represented as a kind of severe cleric (and in at least one poem is associated specifically with Catholicism: see EP.II.270, ll.27–8).

See for example LP.I.41; LP.II.932. Keith Thomas discusses devil personification as a necessary balance to God in his Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 476.

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Certainly the concept of a ‘devil’ was deeply familiar to Clare and his contemporaries, yet ‘Satan’ is not the malevolent figure of the village. As the Quarterly Review for January 1820 explains, ‘The legendary Satan is a being wholly distinct from the theological Lucifer … wild caprice and ludicrous malice are his popular characteristics; they render him familiar, and diminish the awe inspired by his name’. In the poetry of the early and middle periods (I follow the Clarendon volumes for these attributions), Clare’s references usually suggest the familiar ‘Old Nick’. This Nick is rather more a rake than a demon, something to terrify the prudish or shock the hypocritical. In ‘The Hue and Cry’ (MP.IV.518–43), Clare goes so far as to portray this folk-demon as a friend of the poor. Whilst remembering that Clare’s admiration of Paradise Lost and his declared repeated readings of that work alone cannot have failed to impress on him a notion of a ‘theological Lucifer’, particularly in the early poetry, where any description of a malevolent supernatural presence does occur, it tends to be in the context of some misdemeanour or mishap in the village, and thus is described in a village frame of reference (like the ‘tother tiny things’ who ‘unpercievd thro keyholes creep / When alls in bed & fast asleep / And crowd in cupboards as they please / As thick as mites in rotten cheese’, MP.I.17, ll.121–98); or the ‘curious stained rings’ (fairy rings) which fascinate Clare. Clare writes to William Hone that ‘On Holy rood day it is faithfully & confidentily believd both by old & young that the Devil goes a nutting’. Here as elsewhere, Clare’s ghosts and ghouls have a decidedly human provenance and form, and their transgressions are generally associated with worldly concerns (like the ‘devil on horseback’ and his connection to a farm fire which killed many animals at the end of 1830); he is also prone to dwell on the unformed, unknown which lurks behind bushes (a fear of the dark, or rather, of what might be hiding in it) rather than formalised fiends. These are primitive, pagan fears, to a large extent conceptually autonomous from Clare’s belief in a biblical ‘God’, even though, as Chapter 3 has demonstrated, they are just as much part of the ‘faith’ of the village. Clare’s exemplars of wickedness are faulty ‘religious’ figures, who repeatedly are portrayed as a significant and terrible bad; canting, hypocritical, greedy, lacking in ‘taste’: for Clare, these are evils of men, not of sprites, and In vol. 22, p. 353; the Quarterly, of course, is using the name ‘Satan’ as I am suggesting Clare would not, but the point is made despite the terminology. For a fuller discussion of these ‘tiny things’ see Owen Davies (1999), pp. 181–4. See MP.IV.230–31; note how these rings are almost sanctified. Cottage Tales, p. 140. See for example Letters, p. 523. Compare Sternberg ‘In the Northamptonshire legends we find but slight traces of the … diabolical phenomena, which shed so horrible a glow over the relations of Scot and Hopkins. In this … we discern traces of an earlier and less repulsive belief; in … the “kingdom of faerie.” The solemn compacts with Satan … are also wanting’ (pp. 146–7). Sternberg, however, is not the most reliable of sources.

‘There is a cruelty in all’

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these are the words he uses for the strongest condemnation. Evil is displaced from inherently theological grounds to the quasi- (and, for Clare, certainly mistaken) theologisers of The Parish. More deeply sad in Clare’s work than this knowledge of the hypocrisy in the world is the sense which periodically emerges of life’s harshness, or rather cruelty. The word seems more appropriate to Clare’s way of thinking than ‘evil’ ever really does. Yet nature’s own cruelty is not an active malevolence, or at least it is a ‘natural’ rather than a ‘moral’ evil (that is, evil independent of human action, rather than originating in human thoughts and deeds), and here, Clare’s notions of Eden again become pertinent. In the previous chapter, I delineated a situation in which nature in her appearance retains characteristics of her prelapsarian state, which humankind has disrupted by rendering the world ‘knowledgeable’. In bleaker moments, however, nature’s action towards herself conflicts with this appearance, and Clare explores the ramifications of nature’s subjection to the Divine Curse more fully. Turning his attention to poems of the ‘Northborough Period,’ John Barrell finds that ‘the attempt to see nature as … impersonal … leads quickly to a re-personification of nature as cruel and without feeling.’10 Whilst I don’t want to suggest that this vision of cruel nature is absent from all earlier verse, or that it is a sense which never leaves the later verse, Barrell’s general conclusion, that the move from Helpston affected Clare in this way, seems fair. Few could disagree that the extremity of his mental and physical situations leads Clare to write as bleakly as he does in many of the sonnets written between 1832 and 1837. We should not completely decontextualise these poems, but Clare’s use of the sonnet form at all times rewards attention, and so the so-called ‘Northborough Sonnets’ will form the basis of this examination of Clare and unfeeling-ness, or ‘cruelty’. Responding to recent critical work on Clare’s ‘Northborough Period’ (1832– 37), Clare’s editors conclude: ‘In most of the Northborough poems Clare is struggling to recover the determinacy lost by the move from Helpston.’11 In the course of this struggle, Clare is led to confront the very harshness that necessitates its effort: There is a cruelty in all From tyrant man to meaner things & nature holds inhuman thrall Against herself so sorrow sings A nightingale had built its nest Low in my weedy orchard hedge The kecks grew up to give her rest Again, I’d want to resist the temptation to suggest any consistency in Clare’s work; what I suggest is a recurring pattern of ideas. 10 Barrell, p. 177. 11 John Clare: Northborough Sonnets ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Ashington and Manchester, 1995), p. xx.

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John Clare’s Religion & safety gave its secret pledge That bye & bye her young should flye But trouble was ordained to come A magpie had her dwelling nigh & like a robber found her home & one by one it took away & murdered musics little heirs (MP.V.62)

The sonnet form here allows Clare concisely to indicate the universal truth which inspires the poem, before he commences the narrative of the nightingale. Usually, Clare’s criticisms of the bad in the world are directed at man, either for his actions or for his crooked abuse of language (which allows linguistic deceptions, in turn initiating a more pervasive corruption). Here, however, ‘man’ is only present, and only briefly, in the early quatrain. Although Clare’s ambiguous diction suggests simultaneously that the ‘cruelty in all’ is extended ‘from’ man (who is, as usual, a ‘tyrant’), and that man is simply the upper limit of an all-inclusive ecosystem of cruel organisms, the end-rhyme of the third line makes a strong sonic connection with the ‘all’ of the first. Thus, despite the fact that man both is and is not separated from the rest of existence in the third line (the metrical stress of the line emphasising a further aural ambiguity between something held ‘in human’, and in ‘inhuman’ thrall) it is clear that all the world, everything in Clare’s community including himself, is involved in this cruelty, and must share its ramifications. Here is the logical negative extension of Clare’s comprehensive notion of ‘community’. Of course, nature is still only ‘against herself’, whereas man expresses tyranny over everything: Clare’s is not an equalising vision, although it is comprehensive in its censure. This leaves the poet without a vantage point, and the lament is thus left to an abstract, personified emotion. That sorrow is left with the song is retrospectively emphasised as Clare’s narrative begins. It should be the poet’s emblem, the nightingale, with all her literary baggage, who is singing. But ‘poetry’ is mute: as the roughly contemporary ‘Decay’ declares, ‘poesy is on its wane’ (MP.IV.114–18). The significance of this encroaching cacophony, which is also, shall we say, dumb (rather than the ‘silence’ which is extremely meaningful to Clare) has already been explained, and I will return to the notion below. For now, let us leave the symbolic for the literal effects in the poem. Clare knits his bird into a protective nest of sound: she is almost sunk out of view with the leisurely, quiet vowels of her ‘Low’ ‘weedy’ place, and barricaded by the gentle consonant sounds of the line (‘weedy orchard hedge’), which link in to one another. Nature protects: the cow-parsley is beneficent, the sound of ‘kecks’ chiming with the later ‘secret’ to suggest security, an impression furthered by the concealment of the hushed sibilants of ‘kecks’, ‘rest’, ‘safety’, ‘its’ and ‘secret’. The subsequent line enacts linguistically a promised liberation, the drawn-out vowels of the repeated ‘bye’ and of ‘flye’ suggesting space and freedom. This lulling, dreamlike line is, however, jerked back to the harshness of the world in the subsequent quatrain, which literally ‘buts’ in to the peace


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of the scene. The fatalistic sense of futility summoned in the word ‘ordained’ (heavily emphasised both metrically and sonically, the ‘ai’ vowels of its stress contrasting strongly with the ‘u’ sounds of ‘But’, ‘trouble’ and ‘come’) leads to a sense of helplessness, which seems to be Clare’s major intention in the poem. The tranquillity of the previous lines is forgotten in a torrent of disaster which it has functioned to heighten, Clare’s lines tumbling over themselves to describe the horror with their repeated ‘&’s, as, in a lonely reversal of Noah’s preservation of creation, the safety of the ark-like nest is plundered. This same ‘one by one’ halfechoes the early dream of the ‘bye and bye’, further highlighting the extent of the destruction, and the despoliation of the future. This is by no means the only poem, or even the only sonnet, in which Clare is concerned with the spoiling of a nest, the removal from a home. However, his terminology here is interesting. As the first quatrain establishes, it is not only man that has become potentially threatening: nature has ominous elements of strangeness about it. Clare’s sentiments here closely resemble those expressed in Keats’s ‘Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds’ (1818) which, although eventually published in 1848, Clare almost certainly never saw.12 Keats recounts a vision, during which he ‘saw / Too far into the sea – where every maw / The greater on the less feeds evermore … / But I saw too distinct into the core / Of an eternal fierce destruction’ (ll.93–7). Keats, like Clare, cries out against the necessary cruel selfishness of the natural world. But Clare insists that the transgression which brought nature to this state was man’s (and for Clare, the state is not eternal). Keats can chase away his images as ‘moods of one’s mind’ (l.106); this is impossible for Clare, although they are certainly symptomatic of his mental state. Whereas elsewhere in Clare’s verse nature remains more naïvely affected by man’s curse, in this sonnet nature knows there is a need to protect and has simultaneously become a threat to herself. In a sinister, autocidal disintegration, she thwarts even her attempts to shelter herself. Clare’s world is tumbling yet lower, further towards apocalypse. Yet the element of threat remains man-made: it seems that nature has been learning from and tainted by man’s badness. The corrupt is figured in human terms: once involved (albeit passively) in a scheme of destruction, the nest is a ‘dwelling’, a ‘home’: only in the second quatrain, where nature is protective, is the nightingale’s place the specifically natural ‘nest’. The magpie is ‘like a robber’, and more horribly, commits ‘murder’: these are human crimes, labelled as such by humans; the bird shares these baser habits of man. Yet even as the simile is made, the magpie is of course really like a magpie, doing what (postlapsarian) magpies do. For the magpie, it is natural, not criminal, to steal the chicks; here it has become unnatural (perhaps Clare’s changed relationship to the land at this time is a factor in this). And this is what Clare provides in the poem: a bleak vision of the world in which man’s corruption has tainted the rest, in which criminalisation has led to a whole world being seen as criminalised. Or, to put it another way, the 12

‘To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.’, in The Poems of Keats, pp. 320–26.

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consequences of the Fall progressively eliminate all innocence. Sin is an infection that only apocalypse can disinfect. The awful thing for Clare about the ‘cruelty in all’ is that it is thus natural. At times, he describes specifically human ‘cruelties’, but this sense, of a far more awful, natural and innate trait, can only be represented when man is taken out of the scene, and thus the equation: only then does nature’s action, rather than appearance, dominate the poem. But this cruelty is not ‘evil’, it is the consequence of evil (the initiation of ‘knowledge’). Of course ‘musics little heirs’ in the sonnet are literally the nightingale’s chicks, but the absence of rhyme from the final couplet reinforces the impression that ‘music’, or ‘poetry’, is far more than words on a page; it is also becoming an impossible contradiction. A contemporary sonnet (MP.V.224–5) depicts an Elsinore ‘world’ of seeming, where ‘rumours’ and shouts distract from the ‘calm & quiet’ of ‘The voice of friendship’. The hypocritical, deceptive potential of such cacophony highlights the worst kind of badness for Clare (the linguistic), which is also the only kind of badness exclusive to man. The consequence of murdering music is seen again in ‘The worlds vain mouth is wide’ (MP.V.217): here a charivari-like ‘clamour’ creates a definite connection between the oral/aural and the badness inherent in man. Clare uses ‘vain mouth’, ‘lies’, ‘slander’, ‘gossips’, ‘ear’, more ‘Lies’, ‘tale’, ‘loud’, ‘clamour’, ‘rings’, and ‘raise’. Only in the final line do we find ‘silence’, and even then, she is leaving.13 Much of this poem’s diction is concerned to amplify these noises. But the depiction the poem makes, of the world of lies obscuring merit, is figured in language of a very specific register. It is almost always possible to find odd words or phrases in a poem which suggest the sexual, but here they are so pervasive that their presence cannot be coincidental, and they make the poem far more than the ‘essay in sententious moralising’ its editors suggest.14 In this sonnet, the ‘world’ is characterised as a wanton. In the opening line, Clare employs the slang of a wideopen mouth, thereby suggesting a voracious sexual appetite. The combination of ‘mischief’ (a euphemism for accidental pregnancy, like the ‘deplorable accident of misplaced love’ which is the conception of Clare’s father,15 or Kate’s ‘slip’ in ‘Martinmass Eve’, EP.II.479–87, l.183), ‘lies’ and ‘tumbles’ in the second line intimate a mistake, the consequence of ‘the world’ spending too much time on her back. ‘Tumbles’ is redolent not only of its slang associations, but also of a lack of agency, just as Parker Clare ‘drop[s] into the world’ as ‘one of fates chance-lings’.16 Here, though, this promotes a sense of inevitability, of self-propagating error, rather than of reluctance. This ‘world’ is specifically designated feminine: ‘She shows her stupid wares at every door’, apparently hawking herself around, as her own mistake ‘shows’: she almost ‘wears’ it (the word suggested by the homophonous 13 Compare the similar register of language in Clare’s account of the reasons for his marrying Patty, John Clare By Himself, p. 28. 14 Northborough Sonnets, p. ix. 15 John Clare By Himself, p. 2. 16 John Clare By Himself, p. 2.


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‘wares’, which simultaneously hints that her body might be for sale). Not only is this loose woman of few morals, then, she is also careless: these physically obvious ‘wares’ are ‘stupid’, wrong (illegitimate?). Because ‘her’ movement from place to place is juxtaposed with the slightly confusing line: ‘Barefaced & evil lumbers ancient store’, this corrupt world seems to move with the clumsy gait of the pregnant woman, visibly marked with her error. The extended metaphor in the poem is continued, as Clare describes this world-whore as providing fuel for ‘eager’ ‘gossips’.17 In the sonnet, familiar notions of sound and cacophony which are threaded throughout the piece begin to overtake the warped, vicious imagery of pregnancy, as Clare employs the polyptotonic deceit/deceive alongside the conveniently rhyming ‘believe’ to insist that corruption has become so deep, that truth can no longer be identified: ‘Lies of all hues so guarded to deceive / That have before in many a tale been tried / Is brought again to make deciet believe … / For with deciet deception has no eye’. This poem is despairing. It is concerned with the way in which (linguistic) corruption is shunting out the honest and good, and it does so through a terminology which subtly suggests both the illegitimacy of this transformation and an alarming sense of the way it is growing: insidiously, uncontrollably, a weed-like rampage, a literal ‘clamouring’. That it does so by sharing in a discourse that should suggest healthy, joyous regeneration is all the more shocking. The most despairing aspect of the sonnets discussed above is the conviction that the cruel traits of the world are ordinary. Even the relatively upbeat ‘Tis pleasant on a sunday path to talk’ (MP.V.352) depicts a harsh world. Elsewhere, men inflict on animals what they in turn have inflicted on themselves; so, a ploughman who must rush his breakfast in turn ‘chucks the boy upon the foremost horse’, who in sequence takes out his rage on the last horse, who ‘hangs & drags along by force / … Till angry boy bawls loud & cuts its head’ (MP.V.245). There is a Punch cartoon from the 1950s which makes the same point: each member of a ship’s crew from the Admiral down shouts at a member of the rank below him, until the boy who sweeps the deck shouts at the parrot.18 That is simply how things are for Clare. In moments when Clare perceives that this normality is uniformly bleak, he believes ‘There is a cruelty in all’.

17 In Chapter 1 of his Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (London, 1998), Barry Reay discusses a vocabulary of female sexuality which supports this reading. The language of this poem is not far distant from that of Clare’s ‘Don Juan’ (LP.I.89–102); any doubts that Clare is capable of such analogy in his sonnet are quickly dispelled through reading that poem, or considering Clare’s (much earlier) stated intention of fooling his more ‘proper’ readers with disguised obscenities (see for example Letters, p. 157). 18 In Punch, the resolution is rather less bleak: the parrot in his turn squawks in the ear of the Admiral.

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Knowledge, Vulnerability and Culpability Another of Clare’s ‘Northborough’ sonnets, ‘As boys where playing’ (MP.V.353), depicts the ‘halloing’ of some children as they go ‘nesting’, and through its imagery the poem partakes in the language of the hunt. Such language is found in many poems from the period, and critics have identified Clare-the-poet with the hunted. Yet the hunted is not always caught. In the ‘fox’ sonnets, the taking of pleasure in inflicting gratuitous pain (laughing, posthumous beating), rather than the attempt to kill (itself understandable in the rural economy), is grotesque. The horrible laugh of the ploughman as he gives chase to a weary (recently hunted?) fox removes the act from the realm of the natural order, which may be harsh but is not wicked, into something else, a precarious battle for control and supremacy. In these unforgettable sonnets, however, a fairer, natural order seems to reassert itself: … The ploughman ran & gave a hearty shout He found a weary fox & beat him out The ploughman laughed & would have ploughed him in But the old shepherd took him for the skin He lay upon the furrow stretched & dead … The ploughmen beat him till his ribs would crack … The old fox started from his dead disguise & while the dog lay panting in the sedge He up & snapt & bolted through the hedge (MP.V.359–60)

Clare’s repeated ‘&’ avoids sensationalism, maintaining rather a sense of reportage. In the subsequent sonnet, the escaping fox is pursued by the ploughman, shepherd and woodman; but the human figures appear as slapstick victims of the fox’s superiority: He scampered [to] the bushes far away The shepherd call[ed] the ploughman [to] the fray The ploughman wished he had a gun to shoot The old dog barked & followed the pursuit The shepherd threw his hook & tottered past The ploughman ran but none could go so fast The woodman threw his faggot from the way & ceased to chop & wondered at the fray But when he saw the dog & heard the cry He threw his hatchet but the fox was bye The shepherd broke his hook & lost the skin He found a badger hole & bolted in They tried to dig but safe from dangers way He lived to chase the hounds another day (MP.V.360)


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These hunters are clumsy, vacant, malcoordinated, late: all the things the fox isn’t. Several of the traditional figures of Clare’s landscapes, like his molecatcher (MP.II.21–9), are there to kill, without being depicted with repulsion or ridicule. But those who attack the fox are moving beyond their role within the landscape: the triumvirate of ploughman, woodman and shepherd should be involved in nonviolent activities, and it is when they transgress these boundaries, taking a vicarious pleasure in the kill, that they are criticised. Many figures intruding into the landscape of the ‘Northborough Sonnets’ are wanderers, alien to it; such figures have no role to play in the countryside they inhabit; they are without the community of The Shepherd’s Calendar and ‘The Village Minstrel’. These three, however, alienate themselves through action. Certainly slaughter for pleasure is despised by Clare. If he at times displays a politic ambivalence towards the blood sports practised by his wealthy patrons,19 his fowler appears as a slaughtering coward: ‘With boots of monstrous leg & massy strength / The fowler journeys on his weary way / With furry cap & gun of monstrous length / He hunts the reedy forrest for his prey’ (MP.V.293). The gun of this incongruous Elmer Fudd reeks of unfair advantage. The reedy jungle in which he hunts makes a mockery of him, the scale suggesting the inadequacy of a man who needs a gun (a hard, man-made intrusion into the natural scene) in this environment.20 Despite the obvious vulnerability of the ‘timid wild duck’ and the protective flocking instinct of the ‘wild goose droves’, this fowler hides behind his horse, tricking those birds who are comforted by the gentle tameness of the animal. Clare employs a maternal verb to describe how the fowler ‘gathers nigh’ to entrap; thus it is the more shocking when we hear that ‘They plop & hurry from the noises loud / The wounded wirl & wirl & fall agen’. The spiralling of birds shot but not yet killed evokes greedy, random shooting, not the search for necessary food; this panic and the subsequent lines suggest the battlefield, bloody, glorious reports of which Clare read in the papers of the day and in the literature of the past. Clare does not need to be told that not all battles involve two armies: ‘They make vast slaughter in the varied crowd / That haunt the watery fen / The others rise & hurry to the clouds / & fly far distant from the haunts of men’. The ducks are displaced by a kind of violence only inflicted by mankind. In another sonnet sequence (or perhaps it is an extension of the same sequence – Jonathan Bate prints it this way in his recent edition of Clare’s poems) the badger becomes the hunted (MP.V.360–62).21 His unfitness to succeed against a human enemy is obvious, but he is dangerously oblivious to their threat, with his ‘scrowed’ nose down, scurrying along, his awkward gait emphasised by the line’s diction. As with the victorious fox, nature seems to be conspiring in a Marvellian 19

See my ‘John Clare and Festivity’, p. 28. Similar intrusions of guns into natural scenes occur at LP.I.251 and LP.I.578. 21 See John Clare: Selected Poems, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, 2004), pp. 225–7 for the printing of the sonnets as a single sequence, and p. xxvii of the same book for Bate’s justification for this presentation. 20

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plot against presumptuous man: the woodman, ‘… hurrying through the bushes ferns & brakes / Nor sees the many hol[e]s the badger makes / & often through the bushes to the chin / Breaks the old holes & tumbles headlong in’. Following as it does this line, the subsequent stanzas render the actions of the men vengeful, and thus all the more wicked. The men operate in a stealthy, calculating manner, as opposed to the black-and-white innocence of brock, and Clare emphasises the age and familiarity of the badger (and of the other startled wild animals present: ‘old fox’ who ‘drops the goose’; the ‘old hare half wounded’), unable to stress too much its artless simplicity. There is an incredible sense that all the world is rushing, apart from the badger, who ambles into the trap which is set for him: ‘When midnight comes a host of dogs & men / Go out & track the badger to his den / & put a sack within the hole & lye / Till the old grunting badger passes bye / He comes & hears they let the strongest loose’. Subsequent to his entrapment, the badger undergoes a torture marketed as a sport: They get a forked stick to bear him down & clapt the dogs & bore him to the town & bait him all the day with many dogs & laugh & shout & fright the scampering hogs He runs along & bites at all he meets They shout & hollo down the noisey streets

The badger is forced to fight back against the dogs through the cruelty of the men; this participation necessitates violence in the badger himself, a horrible, involuntary subversion of his normal behaviour. In this sense, all of the aspects of the world can be ‘cruel’, even if cruelty is not normally manifest in their behaviour. (The ‘touchmenot’, for example, is a plant turned by humankind to a cruel prank in more than one of Clare’s descriptions: see for example MP.I.168, ll.65–70.) God’s curse on Adam and Eve extends to nature, but man is continually an agent in the cruelty of nature. Clare’s badger poems belong to a wider range of works in which Clare deals with the carnivalesque. Festivities, in their proper form, are vital parts of Clare’s ‘community’, and the concept of festive time is pertinent to this study in several ways. It indicates the importance of tradition and ritual to a cyclical mode of life which forms an essential component of Clare’s ‘ideal’. It also demonstrates the way in which the Established Church is both vital to and separate from this mode of living. Tim Chilcott’s Living Year demonstrates quite clearly the extent to which, by 1841, the time of year lacked significance for Clare: the volume is the more poignant for that. But until he is institutionalised, festive traditions and rituals define and shape Clare’s world-view, thus making a pivotal contribution to his faith and belief. This is not to suggest that the elements of scape-goating and mockery embedded in festive practices are not factors in Clare’s bleaker depictions of the cruelty of the world when that is explored; of course they are. We should not forget, however, that in other places Clare portrays these rituals (with their ‘cruel


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characteristics) as joyous.22 This allows us further to understand the way in which apparent ‘cruelty’ in Clare’s world is in some cases, on second glance, necessary to the common good, and thus more ambivalent. Many of the festive practices he records seem harsh or even barbaric to modern sensibilities, and Clare’s declamation of ‘cruelty’ might appear inconsistent with the enjoyment of such barbarism. Generally, however (and while there is certainly a difference in the degree of cruelty involved in different practices), in the earlier poetry, he is reconciled to their cruel aspects as part of the regulatory natural order. This reconciliation, however, is predicated (Clare claims) on a particular ‘unselfconscious’ relationship to the activities, in part connected to his comments on ‘childhood’ and to his statements on the integral role of ‘knowledge’ in culpability.23 Various of Clare’s comments suggest that actions are not simply inherently bad; rather, ‘knowledge’ makes them so, and this is a model entirely contingent with Clare’s understanding of man’s Fall. In the poem ‘O could I feel my spirits beat’, dated 1832–37, we plainly see that in the state of ‘childhood’, bad things can seem good, even things as simple as a sour crab-apple, whereas maturity brings destructive ‘knowledge’: ‘Mans spirits cant imagine how’, he claims, ‘when life a boy / Went every where with dancing feet / Met every thing with joy … / & thought the bitter sweet’ (MP.V.116–17). As Clare writes in ‘The happiness of Ignorance’ (published in the London Magazine in 1822): Ere I had known the world & understood Those many follys wisdom names its own Distinguishing things evil from things good The dread of sin & death ere I had known Knowledge the root of evil—had I been Left in some lone place were the world is wild & trace of troubling man was never seen Brought up by nature as her favourd child As born for nought but joy were all rejoice Emparadisd in ignorance of sin Were nature trys with never chiding voice Like tender nurse nought but our smiles to win The future dreamless—beautiful woud be The present—foretaste of eternity24

22

For a more detailed exploration of this, see my ‘John Clare and Festivity’. See ‘John Clare and Festivity’, pp. 39–40. As Chapter 7 of this book has demonstrated, ‘childhood’ in this sense is more a symbol, a state of being, than a specific age. 24 See Letters, p. 244, and MP.IV.272. 23

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Or, in a letter to John Taylor of April 1824, ‘we cannot do wrong without being conscious of it’.25 This Dostoyevskian sense of ‘artistic cruelty’ is central to Clare’s understanding.26 The distinctive Northborough sense of harsh normality is clear in ‘As boys where playing’ (MP.V.353). In the final line it is as if the rest of the observation has not occurred; the goings on, however cruel they may seem, are so normal that things are essentially unchanged. Clare admits that he has been involved in similar ‘nesting’ scenes, recognising and pitying the panic of the ‘suthying’ duck, whose fear gives her strength to fly against the wind (nature is not assisting here). Yet the poem’s children are not censured: indeed, there is something charming about the wonderment of the pilfering boys. The theft of the eggs has a sense of natural order about it. The children share in the privileged, innocent state of ‘childhood’ outlined in Chapter 7 despite the fact that Clare-the-poet, the man, knows the desecration of the nest is wrong. In one way, then, as long as one remains, thus, an un-‘knowledgeable’, or ‘unselfconscious’ participant in nesting, or any other apparently ruthless game or pastime, one remains essentially blameless; and Clare’s is a preoccupation with culpability rather than with the inherent evil of particular acts.27 (Perhaps this mitigates Clare’s censure of Adam and Eve: that their responsibility is retrospective; but this is mere speculation.) Clare’s attitude has clear doctrinal precedent, for its sentiment is at the heart of John’s Gospel: ‘If I had not come, and spoken unto them, they had not had sinne: but now they have no cloak for their sinne.’28 As John Ashton summarises, ‘darkness is revealed to be darkness by the coming of the light’.29 Clare’s comments concerning culpability thus function as an elision between pre- and postlapsarian imagery of ‘knowledge’, and pre- and post-Christian imagery, superimposed onto the perceptual ‘Falls’ of Clare’s life. Hence, enclosure, which is both a ‘moral’ and a theological evil, is damned for decreasing the ‘innocence’ of sports: ‘There used to be a common custom … inclosure came & destroyed it with hundreds of others—leaving in its place nothing but a love for doing neighbours a mischief & public house oratory that dwells upon mob law as absolute justice’.30

25 Letters, p. 292. The idea of rustic unselfconsciousness remains controversial; here, though, I would like to concentrate on what Clare is claiming to be the case. 26 Dostoyevsky’s Ivan insists that ‘people sometimes talk about man’s “bestial” cruelty, but that is being terribly unjust and offensive to the beasts: a beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically … cruel.’ The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 274. 27 This is not to suggest that this is how things are, but that this is how Clare at this point perceives (or at least represents) them to be. 28 John xv, 22. Modern translations replace ‘cloke’ with ‘excuse’. See also John xii, 46–8 and ix, 41. 29 John Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford, 1991), p. 221. 30 Cottage Tales, p. 141.


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This can help us to understand the apparently radical contradiction in Clare’s disgust at ‘blood sports’, and his attendance at their events, which coexists with his celebration of other apparently cruel tricks and actions: just as he enjoyed nesting in his youth, Clare celebrates the revels even with their ‘cruel’ aspect whilst they are unselfconscious, that is, before man’s self-consciousness of their cruelty renders them ‘cruel’, or rather before his own ‘knowledge’ allows him to see them as ‘cruel’ (though the fact that, for example, childhood ‘nesting’ belongs to a completely different register of ‘cruelty’ to, say, badger baiting – its aim being to gain the spoils rather than maliciously to inflict harm – must also be significant here). However, such an innocent time is only a memory, and he cannot have them in their original form (this has been tainted by the quasi-theological evil of enclosure, and the progressive corruption of man, and his own knowledge), and as their nature is changed so does his relationship to them. Clare often exempts himself from the mass of ‘men’: nature ‘Speakst music to the few & not the crowd’ (MP.II.212). One does not have to be ‘educated’ into this receptivity; it can be possessed without knowledge of ‘books’,31 and distances his own disposition from that of those ‘clowns’ unreceptive to nature’s glories. But Clare never suggests that such men, in their ignorance, retain ‘innocence’. Only childhood partakes of that, and only to a certain extent. Despite his felt distance, Clare’s sense of his humanity is clearly part of his depression, and whilst he depicts himself as one of the truly aware ‘few’, he never forgets that he is fallen too. The presence or otherwise of (adult, fallen) ‘knowledge’ at the end of the badger sonnet sequence is disturbing indeed. Final events are unjust; the fight, almost won by the badger, is re-ignited on impossible terms. The horror is manifest. Innocence has no place here: ‘The frighted women takes the boys away’ (MP.V.361), although perhaps they do not go too far: the boys join in as the men kick the badger immediately before his death. The women are knowing enough to be afraid. Perhaps a maternal instinct for protection (perhaps of innocence) dominates their actions. But the men who, just like the women must, indeed, do, know (their knowledge is implicit in Clare’s disgust), remain as tormentors.32 Is it their continuance despite their knowledge that is so disturbing? Perhaps, but I shall suggest an alternative explanation at the conclusion of this chapter. The badger almost is victorious, only to be literally driven into the ground by the weight of the mass against him. He functions essentially as the scapegoat of the scene, a role which Clare knows should be taken by a member of the community.33 Instead, this scape-goating is displaced onto a helpless outsider, and thus removed from the innocent realm of the festive (MP.V.362). The repeated use of ‘&’, along 31

John Clare By Himself, pp. 37, 38 and 53. Clare’s ambivalent feelings towards women are clearly at play. There are no girl children; the ‘knowledge’ of the women, common to all adults, does not preclude an instinctive turning away from the scene. 33 See for example John Goodridge, ‘Out There in the Night: Rituals of Nurture and Exclusion in Clare’s “St Martins Eve”’, Romanticism, 4.1 (1998), 202–11. 32

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with the hard consonants of the closing couplets, drive the reader on, preventing a voyeuristic dwelling on the horrors of the scene. Even the relative temporal space of ‘leaves’ ‘hold’ and ‘groans’ is chivvied along by the more brutal, disturbing ‘cackles’, leaving a sense of horror without the discomfort (Clare’s own?) of a more vicarious observation. This cruelty can be compared with Clare’s depiction of gypsies eating a hedgehog, in ‘The hedgehog hides’ (MP.V.363–4). Clare often describes vulnerability, as many critics have commented, and the presence of a nest in this poem is especially telling. But there is a sense that the hedgehog is in its ‘proper’ place (under the hedge) and this furthers the impression that the gypsies eat the hedgehog because they are hungry, just as the hedgehog has been eating his vegetarian ‘crabs & sloes’: this is the natural order, a fair provision for need. Keats cannot see it as such: ‘Still do I that most fierce destruction see: / The shark at savage prey, the hawk at pounce, / The gentle robin, like a pard or ounce, / Ravening a worm …’34 Clare is well aware of the laws of natural selection, knowing men often help nature out, with horses, cows and even dogs being killed after their ‘useful’ life; this knowledge is amplified by an astonishing sense of history. He knows the work of Erasmus Darwin, and its embryonic theory of evolution, as well as a far wider range of natural history writing. In this sonnet, Clare engages with the simple truth that life sometimes involves eating each other. Contingent upon this recognition and apparent acceptance, the following lines reveal that it is precisely this truth, which is accepted, that reveals something fundamentally cruel in man: they whove seen the small head like a hog Rolled up to meet the savage of a dog With mouth scarce big enough to hold a straw Will neer believe what no one ever saw But still they hunt the hedges all about & shepherd dogs are trained to hunt them out They hurl with savage force the stick & stone & no one cares & still the strife goes on (MP.V.364)

No one cares, and still the strife goes on. These are sentiments central to many of the ‘Northborough Sonnets’, and more fully expressed in the later poem and sonnet, both entitled ‘I am’. The culpable factor for Clare remains the element of unwarranted cruelty exercised. The harsher behaviour of children and animals, and the need to kill for food, is indicative of the ‘strife’ of life, of the ‘cruelty in all’, but Clare finds the vicious malice of men more appalling. Even as cruelty is exposed, it repeatedly is combined with an overwhelming sense of quotidian life just going on, just as, despite the mini-drama of Clare’s finding a mouse suckling her young in a ball of grass he has ‘proged’, that sonnet ends: ‘The water oer the pebbles scarce could run / & broad old sexpools 34

‘To J.H. Reynolds’, ll. 102–5.


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glittered in the sun’ (MP.V.246). Happenings barely ripple the surface. This acute sense of inevitability is paralleled in the increasing sense of nature as the same everywhere, which, as Barrell, Chilcott and others have noted, grows on Clare during this time. It is also, perhaps inevitably, coincident with a loss of faith in the authority of language. As Clare’s modern editors point out, all of this inevitability takes place in a ‘landscape which is in itself nightmarish … where there is often a sense of impermanence or oddness in places that ought to appear familiar’.35 This weird juxtaposition of normal and abnormal combines to increase the sense of dislocation and strangeness, and contains within it the increasing, discomforting sense of the ‘cruelty in all’. In all of these cases, circumstances and events are known and observed by the watchful eye of the poet. Perhaps this is the root of Clare’s despair: he recognises his own unavoidable complicity. Other poems from the period might be more bleak, or more angry (and we should not ignore that they can also be more joyous), but it is interesting that Clare articulates this drear, occasionally nightmarish inevitability through the sonnet form. The structure allows him to contain the otherwise uncontainable mass of things and feelings that just are: the cesspool is just a random item in a world stuffed with other such. The form cocoons Clare, like the nests which fascinate him. Thus an obvious restraint, which, as such, we might expect to be rejected by Clare (indeed, in a letter to Drury of 1819, Clare writes of a piece he is sending: ‘Tis not a 14 lines Son: I cannot be confined wi’in its narrow bounds Especialy when the Gingling fit attacks me most warmly’36) is in fact embraced, and becomes enabling. Idiosyncratically, then, the representation of ‘evil’ in Clare’s corpus is ambivalent. Clare’s apparent portrayals of ‘evil’ shift confusingly between ‘necessary’ festive cruelty, a bleaker picture of ‘the cruelty in all’, the outright barbarism of which men are capable, the evil of Enclosure, and further contortions of these and other actions, and, as with most things, Clare’s sentiments vary violently from day to day, and from period to period. He is aware that there are many kinds and degrees of badness: in this sense, the conclusion to this section must be disappointingly woolly. However, one sentiment does recur often enough to provide a conclusion of sorts. In this other way, Clare’s picture is relatively straightforward, contingent with the quasi-edenic model in which innocence is lost in a fall of one type or another into ‘knowledge’. The minimal element of badness other than tyranny (including the tyranny of enclosure) and hypocrisy in the early poetry, which tends to have a specific focus, gives way with Clare’s removal to Northborough to a far bleaker world view; this same move initiates a sense of nature as fallible. In Northborough, this sense is dominant because nature, although changed, is still there, on the doorstep. With Clare’s transfer to Epping and Northampton asylums, a new set of concerns arises, and Clare shifts to formalised patterns of good and bad: woman, religion, identity. 35

Northborough Sonnets, p. xix. Letters, p. 22.

36

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This is of course a heavily oversimplified picture, but in a way the objective badness in the world is less important than Clare’s self-conceived relationship to it. Clare’s is certainly a fascination with guilt rather than the intrinsic evil of acts, and the focus of Clare’s internal dialectic of ‘knowledge’ remains within himself. It is always Clare’s situation in relation to the badness (the extent of his own recognition of it) that is problematic. Blame (always more important than the acts themselves) potentially attributable to others is significant only insofar as Clare’s position, both in relation to others and as an individual, is troublesomely ‘knowledgeable’. Consistently, Clare, once able to identify the cruelty of the world, is unable to scramble his own consciousness back into the blessed obscurity of childhood, representative of a previous personal state and of a more general ‘past’. His suckling mouse, for example, is ‘grotesque to me’: ‘to me’, because Clare knows individual perspective, not inherent qualities, identify the good, the bad, and the ugly. Watching a badger being ripped to pieces, Clare’s own sense, ‘knowledge’, of the evil of the scene is confusingly superimposed onto the already complicated picture of culpability that the departing women, the preservation of childhood’s innocence and the participating men present. It is in the coterminous presentation of the subjective personal and the objective general situation that Clare once more falls between the gridlines of a convenient map of ‘evil’, defying attempts to categorise or to define what that ‘evil’ might be, but highlighting the sense of its presence in his world.

Clare’s Theodicy Whatever ‘evil’ is, it must pose the greatest challenge to Clare’s faith in a Christian God. It is possible that Clare read extra-biblical writings addressing theodicy, but I have found little to suggest this: there is no evidence, for instance, textual or otherwise, that Clare had read Constantin François de Volney’s Ruins (1791), which formed one of the major parts of explicit contemporary theodical debate; nor is there any evidence of engagement with other, similar texts (many of them also French) enjoying a reception amongst Clare’s contemporaries in the London Magazine circle (though Clare did of course know Paine’s work, originating in part from the same tradition, avowedly written, as Priestman points out, ‘to stem the tide of French atheism’).37 Yet whilst Clare is not directly part of this tradition, nor concerned with offering an explicit theological apologetic, and thus to speak of his theodicy is in one sense misleading, he does place faith in a benevolent and omnipotent deity, and he does see terrible evil in the world: a theodicy must be present, albeit implicitly, existing as a necessary, reconciliatory part of his belief. This theodicy may be traced to three factors in particular, which are themselves interrelated: Clare’s reading of the Bible and other broadly religious treatises; his 37 Priestman, p. 32. See Priestman’s Romantic Atheism also for a discussion of some of the wider range of texts mentioned here.


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imaginative dependence on and thoughtful attraction to images and motifs of Eden (which are both biblical and literary in a wider sense), and his fidelity to an idea of mystery as central to faith. In Chapter 5, I explored Clare’s attraction to and use of biblical passages, and the conclusions therein drawn form integral parts of Clare’s theodicy. I suggested that Clare finds in the Old Testament a sort of Christian-pre-Christian model for questioning God, and a promise that greater purity arises from trial (in which man has free will). The best known Old Testament meditation on theodicy is the Book of Job; for Clare, Job acts as an exemplary instance of the significance of ‘understanding’ to man, and its implications for Fall and redemption. Clare’s writings suggest that he is not far from the villager in ‘Sunday’, who ‘reads of patient job his trials thrall / How men are troubld when by god forsook / & prays wi david to bear up wi all’ (EP.II.362). Clare’s despair, and any answer he is prompted to demand from God, thus become part of a tradition of legitimate inquiry. This model has for Clare been vindicated in biblical records of the coming of Christ. Christ’s fact (despite the failures of his professed followers throughout history) demonstrates God’s ability to produce a person who, though free to sin, remains pure, justifying Clare’s confidence; and thus the entire span of the Scriptures is incorporated into his theodicy. Clare’s theodicy is predicated upon his faith that Revelation will usher in a second new relationship with God. The Christian God is a good God whose goodness is evident in his promise to reward faithful men at the Last with ‘being’ in the eternal, edenic realm of Heaven. Yet insofar as man is still waiting for the apocalypse (and nature’s slide further into sin reinforces the impression that the world is ‘progressing’ towards apocalypse), Clare’s God retains to some extent the characteristics of the Hebraic God of the Old Testament (the degree to which Clare seems consciously to consider this varies with his mood and state of mind).38 Clare rejects antinomian doctrine, which suggests that the Mosaic law is nullified by Christ’s death, instituting in its stead or even in opposition to it doctrines of free grace, although he does believe that Christ heralded a new and benign element of divinity. In expelling man from Eden and in holding eternity out of reach, God is simply acting according to his promise or Word. Clare accepts that, post-Resurrection, the Scriptures still are being fulfilled, hence his confidence in a coming apocalypse, a ‘dreadfull day’, and his belief that ‘He tells the world of waters when to war / And at his bidding winds and seas are calm / In him not in an arm of flesh I trust / In him whose promise never yet / has failed I place my confidence’ (LP.II.879). All the time that man is waiting for this fulfilment, he is being tested; hence Clare dwells on biblical passages emphasising suffering and endurance. Aside from those found in the Bible, historical confrontations with the problem of theodicy have functioned in a variety of ways. Many apologists stretch the terms of debate (‘goodness’ and ‘omnipotence’ and even ‘evil’) so that they are deprived of their familiar meanings. Others debate divine omniscience, or investigate 38

I shall delineate the characteristics of Clare’s God more fully in Chapter 9.

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monism, or defend a Zoroastrian dualism, or explore the ramifications of the Free Will Defence.39 In one sense, it is gratuitous to attempt to place Clare within or without such prescribed schools of thought, because as I have said he does not seem to engage, in this abstract, philosophical sense, with the concept. Yet whilst Clare is not a conventional part of these debates, he is affected by their terms, and it is certain that he reads more purely literary works preoccupied with the theme. If we can never know the full extent of his reading, we do know that he reads with acute sensitivity and is at the very least highly influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost, the greatest exploration of theodicy in English literature. This text in turn is influenced by and influences others; some of the latter are certainly known to Clare, and in the sense that Clare’s consideration of themes of the Fall involves a (Miltonic) narrative complexity entirely absent from Genesis, he is participating in a wider discourse. Persistently it is tempting to define Clare’s theodical opinions as Miltonic. Milton’s theodicy, as Dennis Danielson summarises, is predicated on the supposition ‘that God … does everything he can for the sake of humankind short of violating free will or the conditions necessary for “the constituting of human vertue”.’40 This Free Will Defence is dependent upon the model of liberty which, essentially (as I have described), Clare and Milton share; the notion of testing here introduced rings also through Clare’s work, particularly through the biblical paraphrases. There are many aspects of Clare’s writing which lend the impression that, consciously or not, he subscribes to the Free Will Defence; indeed, to abandon free will is to abandon theodicy (if there is no free will then God must be the cause of sin) and we have seen that in Clare’s apologetic man consistently is the primary transgressor. Moreover, just as Clare anticipates, as we have seen, a ‘cleansing’ to a pluperfect state, understood through reference to lost delight, so, in M.H. Abrams analysis, Milton’s theodical development (like Wordsworth’s) is ‘a gradual curve back to an earlier stage, but on a higher level’.41 That is not sufficient to conclude, however, that Clare’s theodicy is in any way wholly or purely ‘Miltonic’, partly (needless to say) because Clare’s theodicy is implicit rather than systematic. Furthermore, one conspicuous difference between Clare and the Adam of the Miltonic model lies in Milton’s Adam’s awkward response to the promise of redemption: ‘Full of doubt’ he stands, confused by the possibility that his transgression might be a ‘fortunate fall’.42 39 See for various accounts John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London, 1966); John Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, and Alvin Plantinga, ‘The Free Will Defence’, in Basil Mitchell, ed., The Philosophy of Religion (London, 1971), pp. 92–104; pp. 105–120; Norman Powell Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London, 1927); Peter Green, The Problem of Evil (London, 1920); Barry L. Whitney, Theodicy: An Annotated Bibliography on the Problem of Evil, 1960–1990 (New York, 1993). 40 ‘The Fall and Milton’s Theodicy’, in Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 144–59, p. 157. 41 Abrams, p. 114. 42 Paradise Lost, Bk XII, l. 473.


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Of course, Clare had heard Adam’s doubts, and read their repudiation, but (and whilst in other places he certainly does express varying degrees of scepticism) similar doubt is absent from those accounts asserting his faith: there he is confident of absolute redemption. Man’s separation from Eden is an obvious starting point for any approach to the subject of theodicy, but Clare’s debt to Milton is further relevant because, as Milton’s seems to be, Clare’s theodicy is rooted in the poet’s preoccupation with knowledge and ‘mystery’, terms which have recurred throughout this book. Mystery, both through his approach to science and understanding and through his sublime mode of apprehending God, is deeply connected by Clare to ‘creation’, which is not culpable in, though it is affected by, the events of the Fall. In ‘Helpstone’, Clare accuses Enclosure (or at least its conditions) of the desecration of natural scenes: ‘Accursed wealth oer bounding human laws / Of every evil thou remains the cause … / Thou are the cause that levels every tree / & woods bow down to clear a way for thee’ (EP.I.161). As I have demonstrated, this depiction of a present and tangible evil (Enclosure) is intertwined with edenic imagery, functioning to elide Enclosure with a Fall from divine grace, itself the consequence of problematic knowledge. Clare goes on to list all the things he used to ‘know’, concluding ‘Nor bush nor tree within thy vallies grew / When a mischevious boy but what I knew’. But he prefaces his concluding passages (‘Oh happy Eden of those golden years …’) with ‘Ye well known pastures oft frequented greens / Tho now no more …’ (EP.I.162): the easy relationship wherein Clare ‘knew’ the trees has gone (enclosure is perfectly emblematic of this); the increasing (dangerous) knowledge which assures distance from the familiar by destroying innocence is registered; Clare bleakly recognises his own ‘ignorance’. But in this sense, it is not simply the defeated renunciation which a theodicy predicated on mystery might suggest, but rather a chain of deep personal thought and experience that leads to a situation in which it is only through accepting that ‘mystery’ appertains to God that Clare can reconcile his faith in God. God is apprehended through mystery; so must he be justified through mystery; it is man’s thirst for knowledge which has separated him from God, and only by relinquishing that knowledge and surrendering instead to this mystery might that breach be repaired. Clare, then, sees that there is cruelty in the world, but interprets it as the consequence of man’s sin (which originates in man’s quest for knowledge), and as a necessary trial, to cultivate the faith of (free) man: Clare understands that Christian faith is just that, faith; that God will reward the faithful. In this he is like the woman who comforts her daughter’s ‘Sorrows of Love’, who: ‘read jobs troubles oer & oer again / ‘Then turnd to love & read the book of ruth / … & if said she you trust in god & pray / ‘You may be happy in the end as they’ (MP. I.179–80). If ever Clare asks himself why God is punishing man and subjecting him to suffer terrible abuses, he has a final answer in the belief that the Scriptures have ordained it, and that mystery is an essential part of that ordination. Clare’s statement considered in an earlier chapter (‘My faults I believe to be the faults

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of most people …’43) reinforces Clare’s adherence to the Free Will Defence, that creation had within it the potential to fall, and initially, the failure of ‘wisdom’ to ‘unloose her nott’ appears to deny God’s omnipotence. But although Clare does at times use the word ‘wisdom’ to denote God, here I think he is highlighting the futility of any attempt to reason towards God (the non-exclusivity of his terminology is again important). This sense is bolstered by Clare’s subsequent claim: ‘the mercey of perfection must look on all with many indulgences or the best will fall short of their wishd reward’:44 God is this perfection which must observe the futile ‘wisdom’ of man. Once more Clare adopts a line of conviction which maintains that one must approach ‘mystery’ appropriately in order to approach God appropriately. Accepting that God’s reasons must remain mysterious is precisely what faith entails. Clare’s understanding of the Fall, Eden, and ‘eternity’ is one in which the myth is divorced from the framework of Pauline theology which has often restricted it to explanations justifying a malevolent, retributive God, and attached rather to a (Miltonic) understanding of the Fall as a tragic, rather than a wicked, event (or series of events) in the history of humankind. At the same time, in connecting evil to postlapsarian knowledge Clare (entirely in line with Pauline doctrine) renders creation blameless. In his early depictions nature appears edenic, except in that death is now a presence in the world, and in that man is deprived of the full glory of nature that had been available in Heaven because he is himself no longer pure; as I described above, in such depictions, man is regularly separated from the rest of nature. Increasingly, however, nature is ‘infected’ by the sinfulness of man. These ideas are reinforced by the socio-political situation in which Clare finds himself, and which has been the main focus for scholarship: one in which man destroys and appropriates nature for his own sake, but in which nature remains beautiful, despite being placed off-bounds and becoming infected by the divine curse. Nature is becoming (with Clare) increasingly less ‘innocent’, but man always remains the ultimate ‘Destroyer’.45 As with everything else to do with Clare, one can only ever really speak in broad terms and in generalisations which are always unstable. But the pattern of Clare’s theodicy is discernible. In his Religion and Nervous Disorders J.G. McKenzie writes: ‘Every need … implies the objects that can satisfy … Religion, we must remember, is not merely an idea of God but an experience of God. Alas! the content of the idea of God is not given but acquired and has a determining effect on the experience of God.’46 For Clare, the ‘content’ of the idea of God is one which is lent by a combination of what he has been taught by the Bible and by various religious groups, other literary influences, and by folklore, and the ‘experience’ is what he experiences in the natural world. All of these factors contribute to Clare’s 43

45 46 44

John Clare By Himself, p. 29. John Clare By Himself, p. 30. The Tibbles’s title for MP.V.42. J.G. McKenzie, Religion and Nervous Disorders (London, 1951), p. 150.


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theology, but it is perhaps his capacity for rapture in the presence of nature’s glory which is most constructive of an idea of God and also of his theodicy. As God is the obvious content of the sublime experience, Clare cannot believe for long that there is no God, precisely because he feels that there is. Experience is the strongest of influences, and this strength has been overwhelmingly reiterated by all of these other agents of construal. In his Evil and the God of Love, John Hick challenges the validity of the claim that ‘“The mystery of evil is very great upon the basis of a good God but the mystery of goodness is impossible upon the basis of no God”’, insofar as ‘the atheist is not obliged to explain the universe at all.’47 But (aside from wondering what the Hickean atheist does if he or she wants to explain the universe, despite having no external imperative for doing so) Clare cannot be an atheist because he has this deep (and externally corroborated) spiritual impulse. According to Clare, Poets love nature … Her flowers like pleasures have their seasons birth And bloom through region[s] here below They are her very scriptures upon earth And teach us simple mirth where e’er we go Even in prison they can solace me For where they bloom God is, and I am free. (LP.I.313)

And thus Clare’s theodicy emerges: he has to justify God in the face of evil, because his experience tells him God exists. Whether or not this is a deliberate theodical justification, it is Clare’s often-stated conclusion. His knowledge of the Bible (and indeed of Milton) both directs his interpretation of this experience, and justifies his consequent faith. Simultaneously, he sees evil as man-made, and understands that Man has transgressed in secular and sacred terms. The greatest evil is to aspire to ‘knowledge’; this evil initiated the Fall, and only by accepting ignorance or ‘mystery’ can man be redeemed. Evil is thus man’s not God’s, and God is exonerated. And, ultimately, Clare sees no other way: ‘Go search the Scriptures they will plainly tell / That God made heaven – Man himself the hell’ (LP.I.165).

47 Hick, p. 11. The quotation he refutes is from H.E. Fosdick, Living Under Tensions (New York, 1941), pp. 215–16.


Chapter 9

‘a power that governs with justice’: The Tenets of Clare’s Faith

Clare’s references to God are confusing, because often he couldn’t decide what he thought, because he frequently changed his mind when he thought he could, and because he is not writing theo-philosophical tracts, but (most often) descriptive poetry. But to trace the religious stimuli upon Clare’s work is to unlock an enormous amount of personal and socio-political influence. If the ‘problems’ in the confusions and paradoxes of Clare’s opinions can’t be resolved, then much of the interest of his poetry lies in the tensions thus provoked. Clare was neither a philosopher nor a theologian, and his own belief and religious practice is notably ‘human’: ‘tho I am at heart a protestant, perhaps like many more I have been to church [more] often then I have been seriously inclined to recieve benefit or put its wholsome and reasonable admonitions into practice’. Yet he does explicitly subscribe to the primary contention of Christian faith (‘God is love’), the contents of his library reveal several well-thumbed religious texts, and an intellectual interest in religion is clearly evident in the autobiographical and epistolary material. A preoccupation with theological issues is certainly more explicitly evident in the asylum poetry than in that of the pre-asylum era, but its later prevalence emphasises that issues of theological knowledge were deeply entrenched in his mind. We may therefore take Clare at face value when he writes of religion: ‘I have reflected long on the subject’. There are many obvious pitfalls in considering Clare’s self-declared religious opinions, not least that those for whom they often effectively were written tended on the whole to have very definite and intransigent opinions of their own. In attempting to discern the nature of Clare’s faith, then, we must bear the conditions of its construction (including the spectre of his readership) in mind. Certain ideas, however, emerge with such persistence and through such a variety of sources that they suggest something of Clare’s ‘creed’ and conception of God. I have suggested that Clare interprets the rapture inspired in him by the natural world as intimation of God’s presence, and that the mystery which is an essential part of sublimity leads to a very particular stance in most of Clare’s explicit statements about religion. Clare is strongly within a Christian tradition which holds that the scope and immensity of God’s creation, and especially God’s self, cannot be comprehended by the human mind, which is all too fond of making God ‘after

John Clare By Himself, p. 30; see also Letters, p. 414. The Parish (1985 ed.), p. 21.

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man’s image.’ Just as, despite Clare’s intense fascination with the scholastic side of nature study, he can watch without needing to understand the mechanisms functioning behind what he sees, Clare’s God is ‘known unknown’ (MP.IV.150). But this chapter seeks to identify those aspects of God which are ‘known’, and hence to understand how this knowledge is translated into something which Clare understands to be a personal creed.

Clare’s God Clare’s ‘God’ repeatedly is described as a ‘power’ (‘& sure the power of wisdom only knows’, EP.I.393), supreme and immortal. He is an omnipotent creator, who continues to bless the world; he is ‘power of powers thou king of kings / … By whom all being lives & springs’ (MP.IV.569): God brings forth and causes progression, and in this way is best figured through metaphors taken from seasonal nature. As we have seen, the idea of an eternally transient eternity, seen and foreseen in nature, is key to Clare’s perception of divinity, and his God is eternity: ‘I am but dust—& thourt Eternity’ (EP.II.606). The testing God of the biblical paraphrases retains, as we have seen, characteristics of the Hebraic Adonai. But Clare’s God also ‘suffers’ (both in the sense that he undergoes suffering, and in that he ‘allows’ man freedom); he is merciful (‘But Gods a king of mercy blessing life’, MP.II.243) and he is forgiving: ‘The publicans meek prayer—“Have mercy Lord / “On me a sinner” met unhoped reward / His saviour heard & smiling heard him pray / Sending the sinner justified away’ (MP.II.238). This is evident again in Clare’s ‘Verses Written in Trouble’: ‘& doth religion keep / A pardon free so long … / Repent I will & thus believe / Een I may hope for heaven’ (MP.IV.473–6, ll.33– 48). God remains ‘one grand mystery undefined’, but is righteous and beneficent in his mercy: ‘For thou art truth thy power is kind’. Thus Clare prays, even when he is not certain which ‘God’ to address, ‘Great God by what soever name / Is right let man thy mercy claim’ (‘To the Deity’, MP.IV.569–73, l.7; l.85; ll.11–12). Relatively early on in his asylum poem, ‘Child Harold’, Clare claims that he lives ‘in love sun of undying light’, and asserts that ‘God’s gift is love’ (LP. I.48–51, l.229; l.296): such notions point to Christ, or to God through Christ. In some of his earliest verse (in, for example, ‘Christian Faith’ (EP.I.387), and in ‘So Christianitys enlivening light’ (EP.I.351)), Clare defines Christianity predominantly as a means by which man is saved from the terrors of the grave (terrors initiated, as we have seen, by a cosmic Fall). The ramifications of this eternal salvation can be seen in ‘To Religion’ (EP.I.444–5). Here, ‘religion’ clearly denotes Christianity (the character and properties of the religion described are specifically those of the Christian faith), and Clare resigns himself to this ‘religion’: ‘My end & aim

See also Letters, p. 251. Compare Psalm 27; modern editors point to a comparison with Thomson’s ‘Summer’.

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& guidance must thou be / My crutch to prop me to Eternity’. That it was the Christianity of the New Testament that Clare admired, despite his preoccupation with the Adonai of the Old, is further supported by a passage written upon reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (a book which Clare gave to his father): the sum of my opinion is that Tyrany and Cruelty appear to be the inseperable companions of Religious Power … The great moral prescept of a meek and unoffending teacher was ‘Do as ye would be done unto’ and ‘love those that hate you’ if religious opinions had done so her history had been praiseworthy

Such notions are not confined to orthodox Christianity: Priestman quotes Erasmus Darwin’s ‘unironical comment on the aspect of Christianity most deists accepted: “the sacred maxims of the author of Christianity, “Do as you would be done by”, and “Love your neighbour as yourself”, include all our duties of benevolence and morality; and, if sincerely obeyed by all nations, would a thousand–fold multiply the present happiness of mankind”’. Clare knew this text, but, as the context of his comment makes clear, he is clearly advocating Christ, not just the maxims which represent him. In his passage we again see the drift of Clare’s mind towards ‘anti-priestcraft’, this time prompted by comparison with Christ, whom he thus proposes as a perfect model. Yet, as Chapter 5 has attempted to demonstrate, the influence of the Old Testament never leaves Clare, and in this way, when he refers to ‘God’, we can make no rigid separation between Father and Son: Clare’s God remains Adonai mediated through Christ. Although Clare’s faith is, then, ‘Christian’, explicit mentions of Christ are few. Mentions of the less specific ‘God’, however, occur relatively frequently, and are reciprocally important for understanding the way in which Clare perceives nature. Poetry for Clare is a representation of a set of divine hieroglyphs which lead one towards God. In Clare’s poetry, nature is able to reveal spiritual truths because the divine spirit is manifested in it, and hence Clare repeatedly writes of perceiving God ‘through’ nature: Namless enthuseastic ardour thine That wilderd witching rapture ’quisitive Stooping bent genius oer each object—thine That longing pausing wish that cannot pass Uncomprehended things withou[t] a sigh For wisdom to unseal the hidden cause That ankering gaze as thine that fainly would Turn the blue blinders of the heavens aside To see what gods are doing (EP.I.500–504, ll.44–52)

John Clare By Himself, p. 171. The Temple of Nature, III, 485n, in Priestman, p. 69.

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This habit has extensive biblical precedent: ‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made’ (Romans i, 20); Psalms 19, 97, 104 and 148, which Clare paraphrased, are all concerned to some extent with the idea of being able to discern God through his creation. But Clare doesn’t believe that God purely is ‘in’ nature, because his God retains a transcendent existence beyond the physical actuality of the natural world. God is not divisible from nature, nor is he wholly inherent in it. If nature and God are part of each other, then for Clare, man and God must be similarly combined, because Clare does not privilege man over other elements of creation. Indeed, the reverse; so man must wait to restore the relationship with God that creation (in some of its aspects) still enjoys. (When Greg Crossan discusses Clare’s ‘divinisation’ of nature, he uses the example of Shelley’s seeking ‘the manifestation of something beyond the present & tangible object’, claiming that ‘in the case of Clare the thing sought is a foretaste of immortality, an assurance of permanence in the midst of flux, a communication with God through Nature.’ But Clare differs importantly from Shelley because he does not dynamically seek, as Shelley claims to do, for intimations of immortality and eternity. What Clare inevitably finds is a ‘manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible’, but this manifestation is only and always to be understood in the sense of an intimation; an intuitive and thus in this sense involuntary faith which lends the assurance and ‘communication’ Crossan identifies.) When Clare writes that ‘The voice of nature as the voice of God / Appeals to me in every tree & flower’ (MP.II.212, ll.34–5), the ambiguity of the ‘as’ (is it simile or direct equation?) is peculiarly appropriate. As Clare uses simile and metaphor to associate God and Nature, the very use of those literary devices distances, desociates, because in suggesting likeness, they inevitably suggest difference. God is thus both immanent in nature, and transcendent. Such lines of enquiry have in the past prompted critics to consider Clare’s place within alternative traditions such as pantheism, animism and deism. This latter in particular should not be ignored because, as we have seen, Clare explicitly considered and rejected deism. The letter from Thomas Bennion, quoted in Chapter 1, suggests he was able to take the idea quite lightly when the occasion arose; but this same letter is important here, because the accusation of Clare’s ‘deisem’ (which is Mrs Emmerson’s) occurs during a drunken evening of the London Magazine circle, and in this state, as I have discussed, he has ‘wish’ed the churches where all in ashes and the parson’s sent to beg their bread’. This ‘deism’, then, seems to owe much to Clare’s familiar anti-priestcraft sentiments, and to his disavowal of ‘Christian’ hypocrisy (as we have seen, when the rowdy evening to which Bennion’s letter refers took place, Clare’s mind was vigorously exercised over such issues), rather than to a rejection of the fundamentals of Christianity; this impression is reinforced by Clare’s frank admiration of Christ, expressed in his prose manuscripts, one example of which

Crossan, A Relish for Eternity, p. 182. 21 July 1822, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 88.


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will be discussed, below. It is further supported by the fact that in one prose extract Clare’s speaker rants thus: ‘if we say parsons have great salarys Mr P we are deists & devils & worse’, which would seem to suggest that to wish the parsons be sent begging is not in fact to subscribe to deism at all, even though Clare knows that this is the accusation that will follow (one is reminded again of the letter from Bennion, and prompted to recall that it is Bennion, apparently to antagonise Mrs Emmerson by confirming her fears, and not Clare, who there applies the label to the poet). In a critique of Paine’s writing, Clare insists that Paine ‘could not satisfy himself much less others that the Scriptures were falshoods – all he could was to make superficial readers doubt about some parts & common sense readers reflect upon them & trust that the whole was founded on truth’:10 Clare certainly does not reject the Bible (though he at times doubts the Gospels), and far from denying revelation, it is central to his faith; moreover, the teachings of the Church are admired by Clare; it is the failure of churchly adherents to deport themselves according to that teaching that consistently is problematic (so, for instance, writing in his Journal in 1824 of his conviction of the sacred design of the New Testament, and – in line with the insistence of the books on revealed religion he was reading in roughly the same period – identifying the Bible as a text given by ‘an almighty power’ to ‘benefit the world … that was growing deeper and deeper into unfruitful ignorance like bogs and mosses in neglected countrys for want of culture’, he laments: ‘I am far from being convincd that the desird end is or will be attaind at present while cant and hypocrisy is blasphemously allowd to make a mask of religion and to pass as current characters’11). Clare, then, is no deist, in any conventional or consistent sense, but he certainly seems to count himself as such at times. The example of ‘deism’ is important, because it exemplifies how conventional terminology is never quite adequate to describe Clare’s position. Where attempts are made to apply such terms, they invariably seem inappropriate, partly because Clare was not evolving a system, and none are flexible enough for the purpose, but also because where he himself employs them, his terms are not necessarily precisely or conventionally defined. In Chapter 3, I highlighted the apparent vagueness behind Clare’s use of the word ‘Providence’. One might understand it to be the operation of God, the working out of God’s plan; certainly, Providence is inherently connected by Clare to God: ‘providence will oft appear / From Gods own mouth to preach’ (MP.III.286). In one ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, even as it seems to retain a connection to the natural world (and to some extent with Clare’s own imaginative faculty), Providence seems almost to equate with Christ: I feel a beautiful providence ever about me as my attendant deity she casts her mantle about me when I am in trouble to shield me from itbshe attends me like

A Champion for the Poor, p. 286. A Champion for the Poor, p. 294. 11 John Clare By Himself, p. 178. 10

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John Clare’s Religion a nurse when I am in sickness puts her gentle hand under my head to lift it out of pains way and lays it easy by laying hope for my pillow she attends to my every weakness when I am doubting like a friend and keeps me from sorrow by showing me her pictures of happiness — and then offering them up to my service she places herself in the shadow that I may enjoy the sunshine and when my faith is sinking into despondancy she opens her mind as a teacher to show me truth and give me wisdom when I had it 12

Elsewhere, however, Providence seems more literally ‘provide-ence’, provision, almost a kind of charity, and in this way more connected to the earthly (if occasionally unearthly) reality of village life: ‘O grudge not providence her scant suply / You’ll never miss it from your ample store— / Who gives denial harden’d hungry hound / May blessings crow’d his hated door / But he shall never lack that giveth to the poor’ (EP.I.435). It thus includes a reflection of one’s goodness towards others, hence, according to Clare, one should: ‘neer grudg[e] the wheat / … You might then sow—to reap in vain’. It would seem that the failure of charitableness results in the judgement of God against the uncharitable (Clare here again seems close to the model of Survivalism), or, if not God (though the biblical overtones certainly point that way), then the natural world itself will operate according to a particular justice of charitability, in which meanness is served with meanness, and charity with charity, offering for Clare an incentive to the latter; ‘Thus providence when understood / Her end & aim is doing good’ (EP.I.10). In a letter of April 1824, as Mark Minor points out, Clare concludes that the ways of Providence are beyond human comprehension,13 but in such ways as these God and Providence have practical applications and functions in the world which can be understood. Like God’s, it is Providence’s presence that is sublimely intimated, not its operation. Clare distinguishes Providence from general ‘fortune’ and venerates its operation in ‘Providence’ (MP.IV.269–70). However, in ‘On a Child Killed by Lightning’ (MP.III.285–6), the ‘blessings’ of Providence seem less easy to stomach as such. Clare adds an alternative ending which represents Providence as ‘a friend’ (‘Thus providence did hover near / & turned a friend to each / Would all as willing were to hear / & it appears to teach’). However, Clare’s lines cannot make this ‘friendship’ truly desirable, and the attempt to render the ending so that the death of a baby is a blessing indeed sits uneasily within a poem which exposes the harsher side of evangelical exhortations of acceptance. A similar, if more gentle, demonstration of the perceived connection of faith in Providence with evangelical acceptance of one’s lot in life can be found in ‘the Bounty of Providence’ (MP.IV.112–13), but in the context of ‘On a Child Killed by Lightning’, where ‘providence’ ‘appear[s] / From God’s own mouth to preach’, the actions of Providence at times seem harsh and cruel, and more in line with the world-view of the ‘Northborough Sonnets’, where explicit mentions of God drop away. Nonetheless, in ‘Child Harold’, 12

John Clare By Himself, p. 134. Minor, ‘Clare and the Methodists’, p. 43.

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‘Providence’ is a more conventional, benevolent protector of ‘The Orphan Child without A Friend’ (who, as the poem progresses, becomes elided with Clare’s self): But Providence That Grand Eternal Calm Is With Him Like The Sunshine In The Sky Nature Our Kindest Mother Void of Harm Watches The Orphan’s Lonely Infancy Strengthening The Man When Childhoods Cares Are Bye She Nurses Still Young Unreproached Distress & Hears The Lonely Infants Every Sigh Who Finds At Length To Make Its Sorrows Less Mid Earths Cold Curses There Is One To Bless (LP.I.79, ll.1063–71)

Elsewhere, ‘providence’ is described as ‘some superior power’ that ‘protected the innoscent & brought them safely over the quick sands / of this checkered life’.14 Repeatedly, Clare’s verse suggests that ‘Poetry’ comes from nature in the same way that nature comes from God, and is therefore quasi-divine. Hence, ‘true worship makes the meanest theme divine’ (‘To the Rural Muse’, MP.III.18) where ‘true worship’ is poetry inspired by nature, and Clare attempts poetry as a means to worship: There is a charm which poesy lays hold of nought beside Can ere atta[i]n to—its superior powers Maketh the meanest trifle dignified … Such thrilling minglings in the bosom glows Of soul & song together as it flows Enrapturd sweetness all the frame devours Tis natures essence in its purest state Who … Can echo back the joys such scenes create (EP.II.386)

In his much later ‘Child Harold’, Clare 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’ (LP.I.53). Here, we are back in the familiar landscape of Clare’s mind as it draws analogies between nature and Heaven (and thus divinity). This ‘inmost heart’, which is more than understanding, allows the intimations which lift Clare from his natural surroundings to God. Because he is ‘known’ through this intimation, God must always be ‘Almighty mystery … / Incomprehe[n]s[i]ble’ (EP. II.605–6). The motif of God as mysterious, which has hovered in the background of this book, is absolutely central to Clare’s faith. God’s quasi-immanence in nature redirects Clare’s thoughts, leading to more abstract and transcendent notions of divinity. Clouds and birds are useful in this process: they are often enigmatic aerial presences in Clare’s poetry. But it’s not simply that God is only figured as being in the sky in a simple, childlike way, as in the ‘tender watching sky’ of ‘The Progress 14

�� PMS.A42, vol. 1, p. 16.

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of Ryhme’ (MP.III.495). God is beyond, and spatially, geographically, the sky allows Clare to grasp and express his incomprehension. The sublime vision of the sky leads to an analogy appropriate to the inexpressible: O who can witness with a carless eye The countless lamps that light an evening skye & not be struck with wonder at the sight To think what mighty power must there abound That burns each spangle wi a steady light & guides each hanging world its rolling round What multitudes my misty eyes have found The countless numbers speak a deiety … O power almighty whence these beings shine All wisdoms lost in comprehending thine (EP.II.363)

Discussing Clare’s use of the Sun-image, Crossan demonstrates how ‘the sun symbolizes the presence of the hope, joy, and love which attend Man’s communion with God.’15 Clare often describes the sun in his poetry as a generative force: the Sun ‘brings forth / Creations every hour’ (MP.III.195). In, for example, ‘Sun Rise’ and ‘Sun Set’ (MP.IV.276–7), its vision is also directly evocative of God. In desolation and in confinement, Clare identifies the lack of sun with his situation (and vice versa), and at times identifies the image of the obscured sun with trials, and the setting sun with a (welcome) death: ‘O when lifes voyage in these storms are done / For such a city cloathed in such a sun’ (MP.V.25). But this is Northborough verse: in Helpston, Clare writes of the sun more as a presence in life, and intimations of Heaven as a comfort for life: So sets the Christians sun in glories clear So shines his soul at his departure here No clouding doubts nor misty fears arise To dim hopes golden rays of being forgiven His sun sweet setting in the clearest skies In safe assurance wings the soul to heaven (EP.I.150)

And so we are left dangling, with the same promise of continuance that the sun lends. In the glories and the sublime loss of speech (‘nameless colours’ earlier on in this poem), we have an example of the way nature’s beauty lends intimations to Clare of something transcendent, without itself transcending. Thus the ‘Christians sun’, as it sets in beautiful style, elevates the soul of the perceiver (Clare) ‘to heaven’. We might note the centrality of the sun to the agricultural labourer’s life, the common Platonic representation of the Sun as a quasi-sublime representation of God, and the fact that men have always told the time by the sun. In Clare’s ‘The Harvest Morning’ (EP.I.434–6), the sun literally orders and controls the day, its 15

�� Crossan, p. 152.


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‘sultry’ heat (l.18) dictating not only the pace of work, but also of all other activity: ‘How drives the suns warm beams the mist away’ (l.17); ‘The suns increasing heat now mounted high / Refreshment must recruit exausted power’ (ll.56–7). It does not take too great an imaginative leap to understand that in Clare’s writing the Sun can ‘figure’ God as blinding light, as illumination (and also the obscurity of God’s unknowability, and thus ‘darkness’). As we have seen, mid-day sun can completely overwhelm the poet, and this overcoming is essentially sublime, serving to reinforce the impression of a quasisolar divinity. John Barrell has shown us the way in which Clare’s sense of self is linked to his sense of place: I suggest his sense of God is rooted in the same nature. The certainty of divinity which is inspired in Clare by rapture is constant enough to reinforce faith when Clare is in his ‘knowledge’, in Barrell’s terms. This changes when Clare goes from ‘home’: in ‘The Flitting’ (MP.III.479–89), Clare’s sun ‘een seems to loose its way’ (l.55), and his memory of his brief sojourn in Newark is that ‘in this far land … I even was foolish enough to think the suns course was alterd’,16 and Clare’s relationship to God is similarly changed on his removal. In the asylum, the sun’s continuing presence becomes a source of contradiction: in ‘Child Harold’, Clare’s ‘hopes are all hopeless / My skys have no sun’ (LP.I.41); yet God’s ‘sunny glory’ (LP.I.42) here counters this despair. Yet Clare’s God is always greater than the sun. Nature is not of secondary importance for Clare, partly because it reveals God, and is thus the closest available approximation to God manifest, but it certainly doesn’t equal God: ‘God looks on nature with a glorious eye / & blesses all creation with the sun’ (LP.I.227). At times, Clare skirts close to declaring that the Sun is God, quoting (like Byron) from the Koran: ‘“The Lord of Daybreak” soareth now on high’ (LP.I.215); in ‘Where are the citys Sodom and Gomorrah’, he again sails close to the irreligious wind, writing ‘& but one witness saw that ruin done – / The ever burning bright eternal Sun’ (LP.I.211). Read within the wider context of his work, however, it is obvious that Clare is employing the sun as a metaphor, as the only thing he can use to suggest a perpetual, invincible deity. (This sense is only reinforced by the fact that the history here described as transient is biblical.) Indeed, Clare’s poetry more usually suggests that the Sun cannot be God, because it is created, and as God is the creator, he is beyond the creation: ‘Is he the “Lord of light” / Is he the “great supreme” … / Who scans the author right / Will darker errors shun / And feel that power above more bright, / Can mar that glorious sun’ (LP.I.354).17 Sharing the ambivalent temporality of nature, most evident in the diurnal habit of the sun, the biblical Christ was mortal, and perished ‘As neath approaching tempests sinks the sun’ (MP.I.326, l.21), rose again, and promises to come again. Reading Clare’s work (and encouraged by the homonym), we might well be tempted to identify the sun with ‘the Son’: with Christ, rather than with God, also ‘of’, and yet not, 16

John Clare By Himself, p. 76. Crossan offers an extended examination of Clare’s sun imagery (see Crossan, Chapter 4). 17

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God (indeed at times it does seem as if nature’s healing, persistent power and truth becomes almost Christ-like). Crossan concludes that ‘above all, the sun is an image of love’,18 and this reinforces the impression of Clare’s love of a religion attached to the image of a simple shepherd-preacher. Considering the weight of external influences upon Clare, coupled with his receptivity to rapture, it is unsurprising that, for Clare, God’s existence is both a premise and a conclusion. For much of the time it is simply something he assumes, but he does justify his love of a specifically Christian God, despite the evil he sees. In a more forgiving (and apparently naïve) tone than usual, Clare writes of Christianity: No religion upon earth deserves the epithet of divine so well as the Christian human blood never reeked upon its alters they … have nothing to record but prayers for mercy it owns the history of no wars to inforce or spread its doctrines its beautiful instruction was peace on earth & good will towards men its founder had no power to demand converts for he was of low station he could have no assistance from flattery to persuade & deceive people to favour his opinions for he was poor & flattery was never known so ignorant of self [in]terest to take the side of poverty & therefore his [creed ?] was truth & reason & the very simplicity of truth was his only success need we look for any other instance or proof to show its divinity its motto is do unto others as you would have others do unto you & he who professed this not only professed but pratised it …19

It is inconceivable that this apparent ignorance of the history of Christianity is an example of naïvety, and it does seem an extraordinarily and unusually ill-informed comment; perhaps, then, Clare here uses ‘Christianity’ to refer exclusively to the religion of Christ and his apostles, rather than to any subsequent followers of their faith (and, as I have touched upon at various points in this book, Clare’s disenchantment with contemporary Christianity is always rooted in the lack of worthy followers of the religion, rather than the faith itself). Either way, this is a relatively rare explicit mention of Christ, but that is not to say that Clare usually doesn’t believe in Christ. He feels for Christ’s suffering and humiliation: in ‘The heavier as my burthen grows’ (MP.V.36–39), Clare’s early stanzas evidence the stiffer feel of the ‘inspiration’ of evangelical influence, but as we move through the poem, this stiffness diminishes (although it never vanishes) as Clare attends to the reasons for his more personal attraction, praising the universality and generosity of Christ’s love and suffering. Wherever Christ is mentioned, Clare reveals a deep 18

�� Crossan, p. 154. PMS.A46, vol. 2, p. 75. Alterations written in a different ink above the sentence beginning ‘its founder …’ appear to indicate: ‘its founder had no opportunity to demand converts for he had no power to use them for he was of low station he had used no threats for he could have no assistance …’ 19


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attraction to his figure, centring on precisely those attributes that he identifies as requisites of the best kind of clergy: meekness, mercy, humility, and love. The Shepherd’s Calendar provides an example of the pervasion of images of a traditional and paternalistic mode of life, inseparably incorporating the Christian religion, in Clare’s thought and work. Such markers may be subtle and unobtrusive. For example, his work is littered with glimpsed spires, which provide geographical certainty: ‘I had never been from hom[e] before scarc[e]ly farther then out of the sight of the steeple’.20 Describing the ‘divinity’ of nature, Clare frequently uses the terminology of ecclesiastical architecture and tradition: he describes ‘The arching groves of ancient Limes / That into roofs like churches climb’ (MP.III.497, ll.177–8); birds are ‘choristers’ (MP.IV.414); in ‘The Moorehens Nest’ (MP.III.468–71), Clare is ‘breathing insence from the mowers swaths / Insence the bards & prophets of old days / Met in the wilderness to glad their praise / & in these summer walks I seem to feel / These bible pictures in their essence steal / Around me’ (ll.56–61). Thus, even when ‘religion’ is associated with nature, the terms in which it is described are often those of the very church from which this situation in the natural world ostensibly removes it. Despite his probing thought, the Church and its influence upon quotidian life are so deeply rooted for Clare that he doesn’t have a truly objective perspective. When Janet Todd writes of ‘A Vision’: ‘Since Clare rarely accepted orthodox Christianity and since the stanza recounts the fates of the different loves he has felt, the first line perhaps refers to the loss of Mary’,21 her premise is evidently incorrect, as this thesis has demonstrated. That same premise leads to a similar error when she writes that ‘Although there is in the asylum work much concerning God, few poems are specifically Christian’,22 or, in her discussion of ‘December’, that ‘the absence of any mention of Christ in a section devoted to Christmas perhaps implies that this dark December will not be followed by the resurrection and rebirth of spring’.23 In both of these examples, Todd fails to recognise that the concept of God for Clare was Christian; just as, when Clare thinks of the Old Testament, he considers it through a specifically Christian frame of reference, there is no need to mention Christ in a poem about Christmas because he is inescapably an implicit aspect of the (Christian) village year for Clare. Because and despite of the many influences pressing on Clare, when he has faith (and again I repeat that there are times when he does not), this faith remains essentially, fundamentally Christian. This is not at all to deny the depth of Clare’s consideration of religion and faith, but it is to recognise that at most points this consideration results in a highly personal approach to Christianity rather than an outright rejection of it; that his separation of religion from faith allows him to reconcile his faith in a Christian God, but also that this reconciliation is almost inevitable given the context of his life. 20

22 23 21

John Clare By Himself, p. 76. Todd (1971), p. 182. Todd (1971), p. 186. Todd (1973), p. 24.

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Clare’s Creed According to Clare’s explicit declarations, his ‘creed’ throughout his childhood was broadly orthodox, in line with the Church, parental and village teaching that dominated his religious outlook; this orthodoxy is that of the village, incorporating ‘alternative beliefs’ within the Church’s official patterns. Of course, Clare’s prose accounts of his childhood are retrospective, and to talk of his ‘early’ poetry can be to refer to work up until the early 1820s, when Clare was almost thirty years old. Nonetheless, there is small reason to doubt the broad emphasis of this evidence. In his early work, Clare is frequently conventionally pious in his religious sentiments: So shines the Gospel to the christians soul So by its light & Inspiration given … So did the Saviour his design pursue That we unworthy sinners might be blest So suffer’d death its terrors to subdue & make the grave a wish’d for place of rest (EP.I.385)

In 1820, God is thanked for ‘deliverance’ from a thunderstorm (EP.II.49); in 1819– 20 he is addressed as ‘grand existing soul of life & all’ (EP.II.30). We should not forget that, in the ‘Proposals’ for publishing by subscription printed by Henson in 1818, Clare’s ‘Original Trifles’ are explicitly marketed as ‘miscellaneous subjects, religious and moral’. There are of course many possible reasons for such demonstrations of piety; my point is that the demonstrations are made. Nonetheless, despite their pious overtones, Clare’s comments are occasionally tinged with envy that he does not always share the ability of others to turn to the ‘bibles comforts in the hour of need’ (MP.I.180, l.348): even at this early stage, he is questioning and probing his own faith, and even in such early work, piety and goodness are not restricted to church observance. In ‘Sunday Walks’ (EP.I.645–51), the rapture incited by nature’s beauty (‘lessons learning from a simpler tongue’, l.93) is shown to be of more value that the formulaic, hebdomadal observance of the ‘farmer’. Such outdoor experiences inspire Clare; they fill him with certainty that a benevolent deity exists, and therefore substantiate the lectures Clare knows he is missing from the pulpit. Yet even as Clare admits getting ‘a bad name among the weekly church goers forsaking the “church going bell” and seeking the religion of the fields’, he is nervously keen to qualify that he ‘did it for no dislike to church for I felt uncomfortable very often but my heart burnt over the pleasures of solitude’.24 Amongst the results of Clare’s middle period are relatively few hymnodic pieces.25 Several of those that do occur are scraps obviously originally intended 24

John Clare By Himself, p. 78. See for examples MP.V.36–9.

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for longer poems (‘I Would do …’ (MP.V.391), ‘Penitence’ and ‘Obedience’ (MP. V.410) provide examples), prompting questions about why Clare started, and also why he abandoned, these pieces. Unfortunately, because dating Clare’s work is so complicated, it is difficult to ascertain whether there is any pattern or biographical impetus to his pious outbursts. (Without a doubt, there is a great expansion in the proportion of this type of writing in the later poetry, after Clare has entered into High Beech and Northampton, and ‘God’ becomes much more of an explicit presence in this later verse.) As ‘To the Deity’ (MP.IV.569–73) makes clear, at times in this middle period at least, ‘Religion is a simple task’ which involves honesty, open-mindedness, and ‘A reverence for Godly ways’. Clare implores his God to ‘Impress all hearts to do their best’, and roots his faith in the Bible: ‘Religion is from thy own pen / Prayers nought—when only made to men … / The Bible points the road—& doubt / If true at last shall find it out’. In this middle period, Clare seems to desire religious faith, even when he finds it difficult to maintain: Sweet mystery that comes to bless Like manna falling down Religion—I would fain possess A jewel from thy crown … Somthing within me struggles on & hopes when I complain & if I doubt tis quickly gone Faith breaks the cloud again (MP.II.189–90)

From the same manuscript comes the far more desperate poem, beginning ‘Doubt thourt an ague shock for reasons soul’ (MP.II.190–91), but even this bleaker vision suggests a craving for times (which are explicitly acknowledged) of no doubt; faith-through-abhorrence-of-doubt is a characteristic which begins to emerge in the earlier poetry, and grows throughout this middle period. As we have seen, there is much other relevant extant comment from the 1820s and 1830s in the form of letters, prose and poetry: this material suggests a period of mental turbulence allied with Clare’s efforts to find a religious denomination with which he could feel at ease (supporting as it does so the impression of a former relative peace). Simultaneously, much of Clare’s nature poetry is recording a rapturous experience: ‘Spring’, ‘To the Rural Muse’, ‘Impulses of Spring’ and ‘Shadows of Taste’ have provided good examples. The pictures of what might be termed Clare’s ‘creed’ emerge from this middle period as deeply considered opinions. They do so in some of his best poetry, which is only surpassed in the later, or ‘asylum’, verse in a few ‘visionary’ moments. Certainly, Clare’s later writing continues to be marked by themes recurring in the earlier poetry. God is still ‘in quiet thoughts’ (LP.I.30); honesty is still central to Clare’s ‘creed’ (‘Plain Honesty Still Is The Truth Of My Song’, LP.I.39). Nature is still capable of intimating God (‘& he who studies natures volume through / &

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reads it with a pure unselfish mind / Will find Gods power all round in every view …’, LP.I.42); within the same long poem (‘Child Harold’) the world is still fallen, but God is still ‘Truth’ and ‘love’ (‘Falsehood is here – but truth has life above / Where every star that shines exists in love’, LP.I.44), Christ is still loving ‘Friend of the friendless’, and God still equates absolutely with freedom (‘To make my soul new bonds which God made free’, LP.I.50), even though religion still ‘makes restrictions’ (LP.I.45); this ‘truth’, which is God, is capable of redeeming (LP. I.50). Where, however, in his early verse, Clare dwells on the glory of specifics for illustration, in the later verse he reflects more on abstract ideas, like the sea he probably only saw once.26 Natural images become important more for their metaphoric power than for what they intimate: ‘I love the raving winds, the murky gloom / And I love the sea’ (LP.I.239). Without a doubt, evangelical insistence upon acceptance and patience continues to show itself, indicating a deep and lasting effect: his ‘poor man’ still ‘thinks that wealth will make all trouble even / If not on earth God grants it all in heaven’ (LP.I.529). But despite this falling back on formulised notions, Clare’s creed is peculiarly inclusive, his ‘Prayer in the Desert’ being addressed to ‘Almighty, omnipotent – dweller on high’ who is also ‘God of Mahomet … Alla’ (LP.I.542–3); another poem describes how ‘Jews christian turks and gentle kind / Possest that place above / Redeemed by Gods unbiased mind / And everlasting love’, because there was a time when ‘they were all our kin’ (LP.I.574–5). There are many examples in the volumes of later poetry of ‘hymns’ and ‘prayers’ (either works explicitly entitled, or which effectively function, as such: to what extent this is the result of intervention by Knight, Clare’s scribe for much of the time, is debatable), quite apart from Clare’s treatment of scriptural material. It is incontrovertible that throughout his time in asylums, an Hebraic God, known through the lens of Christianity, was very much in Clare’s thoughts, and the poet was preoccupied with how to approach this God through his writing. We have already seen the way in which, throughout the 1820s, Clare searches for a Christian denomination with which he might share a common creed, and thus true communion. At the same time, he struggles with severe depression, and desperately attempts to come to terms with the badness he sees in the world. In an extract intended for an ‘Essay on Religion’ (an essay whose very existence, albeit in manuscript form, suggests the strength of Clare’s feeling regarding the matter), Clare states: Religion properly defined is the grand aspiration to live well & die happy – Do unto others as ye would others should do unto you was the creed of the divine 26

Compare the Tibbles’s claim that ‘He did not ever see the sea.’ (John Clare: A Life (London, 1972), p. 376), with a description of Clare’s having a single sight of the sea in 1828 in Frederick Martin’s Life of John Clare (London, 1865), pp. 229–30; Jonathan Bate has suggested to me that, as he sent some seaweed to Henderson, Clare had seen the sea at Boston (there is a letter from Henderson thanking him for the gift).


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founder of christianity & this creed is so beautifully simple that it impresses its truth on the slightest mind & so simply true that the weakest capacity can understand & retain it – but the self interested policy the supple hypocrisy & overbearing tyranny of mankind found this happy antidote to sin take too much hold on the consciences of those who aspired to do evil so they invented [ ] dogmas of their own & called them scripture doctrines & mysterys which the[y] named as creed & the world was laid under centurys of slavish darkness that might be felt & mankind was left to grope their way as they could under the superstitions of tyranny & became the willing slaves of the most unwise ambition27

Clare cries out not only at the effect of formalised ‘creed’ (to stifle and manipulate true faith) as, as the ‘Freethinkers’ had insisted, a ‘mystery’ of the worst type, but also at the way in which affiliation to a given creed has become more important than the deportment of its professor: ‘It is not what a mans merit is that affects the hypocritical cant of the false appearances of this religions but the question is what is his creed’.28 Similar messages are evident in Clare’s ‘Autobiographical Fragments’.29 (His statements fit well with the Wesleyan notion of ‘free thought’, in which methods of worship were to be fixed upon by the individual, as long as he was governed by love, and always acted with justice and mercy, and who was answerable only to God. This is a different kind of ‘freethinking’ to that depicted in Rivers’s Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, and suggests another point of attraction for Clare to Wesleyan Methodism.) A valid creed for Clare must be biblical, from the basic elements of Christian faith, not from its crooked ‘practitioners’, but it must also remain deeply and personally considered. Hence, in a letter written from the asylum to his (already long-dead) son, Clare insists & first ‘Know thyself’—& keep the commandments—not like an Hypocrite but a Man—‘Love truth’—‘fear God’ ‘& honour the King’ this is from your bible & not my own Words—they are Plagiarisms from the Scriptures—Read them—& Think Fred30

Clare closes the Sketches in the Life with the proverbial exhortation ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’31 (a quotation recurring in his prose). He defends honesty with vigour in a poem printed in MP.V.80–87; throughout his writings it is clearly central to Clare’s conception of justice (secular or sacred). If God is ultimate ‘Truth’, then dishonesty (and hypocrisy is just that) is the antithesis of true religion. Hence, when Clare claims his own dogma he does so in terms which emphasise 27

�� PMS.A46, vol. 2, p. 68. �� PMS.A46, vol. 1, p. 34. 29 John Clare By Himself, p. 134. 30 Letters, p. 667. 31 John Clare By Himself, p. 31. 28

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the value of honesty: ‘may … the silent prayers of the honest man to a power that governs with justice for [Clare’s country’s foes’] destruction meet always with success. thats the creed of my consience — and I care for nobody else’s’.32 His ‘creed’ is of his ‘conscience’: thus, like his inklings of God, it is quasi-instinctive, that instinct contingent upon received ‘wisdom’. Such is the strength of his feeling, that Clare insists ‘a far more dangerous set of unprincipled people [than atheists] are those hypocrites who asume the cloak of religion to cheat others & enrich themselves they are as destructive in a community to property of all kinds as worms & cockroaches’.33 We have already seen many examples of Clare’s complaints against ‘religious hypocrites’. These are typified in ‘Barnaby’s’ speech (in extracts from PMS.A42): our baker who has turned methodist will not heat his oven on sundays at no consideration yet he has been detected on mondays of using light weights in weighing his flour & his bread … the poor rates & taxes which the clerk gives notice of when the vicar mounts the pulpit would make any man but myself swear over his prayer book34

Through Barnaby’s unselfawareness, indeed throughout his sketch of Mrs Slinkum and her cronies, Clare mocks those ‘Sunday morning Christians’ pilloried in The Parish, insinuating that real faith is something more profound.35 As we saw in Chapter 1, it is always the hypocrisy that is ridiculed, rather than acts themselves: it is not so much the values or principles of sabbatarianism that Clare rejects in those depictions, as the (self?)duplicity of those who profess them. He also posits creeds as enabling conditions of religious hypocrisy: according to Clare, ‘creed’ is implicated in ‘religion’ (rather than ‘faith’), and enables men such as Barnaby to fulfil those things which are set down whilst still behaving according to their own selfishness. Such hypocrisy is so widespread that it almost has turned Clare away from religion: ‘the religious hypocrite is the worst monster in human nature & some of these … led me at first to think lightly of religion’, yet his determination to have faith usually wins through: my opinion Taylor of true Religion amounts to this if a man turns to god with real sincerity of heart not canting & creeping to the eyes of the world but satisfying his own conscience so that it shall not upbraid him in the last hours of life … that man in my opinion is as certain of heaven in the next world as he is of death in this36

32

John Clare By Himself, p. 30. �� PMS.A42, vol. 1, p. 11. 34 �� PMS.A42, vol. 1, p. 22. 35 Mrs Slinkum and her companions are scattered throughout PMS.A42. 36 c.3 April 1824, Letters, p. 292. 33


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Clare rarely finds the ‘religion’ of his time to be humane enough to satisfy his conception of moral rectitude, believing that ‘the basis of all religions ought to be humanity’.37 Well aware that his own behaviour was not always impeccable according to some more puritanical dictates, his generous creed (and his conception of what human ‘goodness’ really is) centres around this idea of a humanity which shuns hypocrisy. In a dialogue written for ‘Two Soldiers’, his speaker complains ‘I cannot think … the reason why such brutes as these should be called christians at the same time such fine gentlemanly fellows as some of the old greeks & romans were should be abused with the epithet of heethens—how is it’. His ‘comrade’ replies: ‘it is strange to besure but religions are mysterys’.38 (Here again is ‘mystery’ used as the Freethinkers used it, to refer to obfuscation very different to the ‘mystery’ which is important to Clare’s faith.) Because of the same sense of humanitarianism, Clare is disgusted at slavery, insisting that ‘they who sanction it cannot be Christians’,39 asking with Cowper that we ‘look at the poor Affrican’ with pity.40 In an unpublished letter to Mary Anne Read, he denounces slavery as ‘an abominable traffic & a disgrace to Mahomedism much more Christianity & they who sanction it cannot be Christians for it is utterly at variance with religion and nature’,41 and elsewhere maintains that anyone believing that ‘a black mans soul cannot be of so much consequence in the registery of heaven as his own’, is ‘no christian’.42 Ironically, Clare’s desire for international humanity may well have been bolstered by the Church he criticises, by the ‘solicitation of alms’ through ‘parish briefs’.43 Wherever his humanitarian sensitivity did come from, Clare’s essentially anti-racist stance fits very well with his self-declared creed: My creed may be different to other creeds but the difference is nothing when the end is the same—if I did not expect and hope for eternal happiness I should be ever miserable—and as every religion is a rule leading to good by its professor— the religions of all nations and creeds where that end is the aim ought rather to be respected then scoffed at … the judge knows the hearts of all things and the sentence may be expected to be just as well as final wether it be for the worst or the best44 37

A Champion for the Poor, p. xlix. PMS.A46, vol. 1, p. 35. 39 A Champion for the Poor, p. lii. 40 A Champion for the Poor, p. li. 41 John Rylands University Library GB–0133–Eng MS 415/158. 42 A Champion for the Poor, p. li. See also A Champion for the Poor, p. 323. 43 See Pounds, pp. 269–70; consider also Clare’s correspondence with Thomas Pringle (Secretary of the Anti–Slavery Society), especially Letters, p. 572. 44 John Clare By Himself, p. 132. See also Tibble, ed., Prose, p. 220, and A Champion for the Poor, pp. 281–2. Compare also the letter (mentioned in Chapter 1) Clare received from the Rev’d Brooks (Egerton MS 2246, fol. 334r–337v), with whose views on religion Clare stated that he was in accord (see Letters, p. 296. 38

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The passage reflects the liturgy for the Burial of the Dead: ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us … thou most worthy Judge eternal.’ God again is the loving Christian God of the New Testament as well as the judging God of the Old. Clare believes that merit lies in living a ‘good’ life, hence followers of other religions are not excluded from eternity. This, particularly considering previous discussion of Clare’s humanitarianism, might at first seem to embrace a multicultural theism. Of course, Clare is rarely consistent, and we might wonder what inspires him to attacks on Catholicism.45 As I suggested in Chapter 2, it may be the stylised nature of the Catholic faith that he rejects, or he may have one eye to a specific political audience. In a sketch for a novel entitled ‘Vicar’s Sermon’, Clare’s mouthpiece contrarily laments: ‘O that people should quarrel oer their creeds Catholics why there are thousands of what men call Heretics who are better men then I who have done more good to their countrys then I can ever do for my cure & who have done more charitys in a day then I could do in a life time’.46 Whatever the cause for the vitriol and contradiction in the case of the Catholics, the majority of prose fragments which concern themselves with the theme suggest that the distinguishing feature of Clare’s considered Christian faith is that it is highly inclusive and liberal.

45 See for example John Clare By Himself, pp. 229–30, and pp. 53, 67, and 212 of this book. 46 A Champion for the Poor, p. xlix.

Conclusion

‘Child Harold’

It is important to point out once more that to attempt to identify recurring aspects of Clare’s belief in God in moments of confidence is not to ignore that Clare’s strength of faith fluctuated widely, nor that at times he produces angry, sometimes delusional outbursts conveying despair with and isolation from God. Nowhere is this more evident than in the extant body of Clare’s poetry from 1841, which includes ‘Don Juan’, the biblical paraphrases, and ‘Child Harold’. I would like here to look more closely at the latter work: I began this study of Clare’s religion and faith by examining a long poem dating from relatively early in Clare’s career as a published poet, and want to conclude by examining his last. There are, of course, only 14 years between the two works in chronological terms, but much more in terms of the weight of experience: the first parts of The Parish date from the early days of Clare’s literary accomplishment, whereas the composition of ‘Child Harold’ follows a huge increase in Clare’s literary knowledge, but also the decline in his publishing success, his ‘flitting’ to Northborough, the anguish of his removal to High Beach asylum, and finally (in the case of some parts of it at least) his escape back to Northborough. Tim Chilcott’s The Living Year displays the variety of poetry produced by Clare at the beginning of the fifth decade of the century, its pagination allowing us to see in a physical and immediate way the radically different modes in which Clare was writing at the time. The editorial complexity (‘perplexity’, as Chilcott would have it) of ‘Child Harold’ is well known: ‘In four different versions of Child Harold, not one of a hundred stanzas is placed in exactly the same numerical position in the sequence.’ Bate identifies Montgomery’s ‘Prison Amusements’ as an important influence on Clare’s asylum verse; Storey notes that ‘in his letter to Knight, 8 July 1850, Clare uses the same title ‘Prison Amusements to describe the verses he would write had he the inclination … It is as though ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Prison Amusements’ have become catch-all titles for anything Clare happened to be writing’. The almost-Spenserian stanzas (Clare differs from the Spenserian– Byronic model here only in that his terminal lines are almost always in pentameter rather than hexameter) of the poem are punctuated with ‘songs’ and ‘ballads’, and it is indeed difficult to suggest any consistency in the pattern in which these arise. Yet, although at times Clare’s rambling poem can be confusing, Byron’s poem is not an arbitrary choice for imitation (of which, more below), and this suggests one

Chilcott, p. x. See Bate, p. 492, and Letters, p. 659, n. 2.

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major way in which ‘Child Harold’ declares its own structural principle. Moreover, there are moments of exquisite beauty, as at ll.699–704: … the mist curls thick & grey As cottage smoke – like net work on the sprey Or seeded grass the cobweb draperies run Beaded with pearls of dew at early day & oer the pleachy stubbles peeps the sun The lamp of day when that of night is done

This, of course, is offered as a memory, rather than as an immediate description, but extended metaphors such as that of the ‘draperies’ within this passage (which often extend through, or recur in, several stanzas) suggest some sort of internal consistency at some points in the piece at least; this sense is bolstered by the repetition of individual words and images. Nonetheless, it is impossible to hear a coherent ‘voice’ in Clare’s poem; that it was written alongside other pieces further problematises any attempt to read the poem as somehow ‘representative’. If, however, we cannot begin to suggest a coherent vision for the poem, we can examine thematic concerns. One early stanza of Clare’s long poem bursts out: My life hath been one love – no blot it out My life hath been one chain of contradictions Madhouses Prisons wh–re shops – never doubt But that my life hath had some strong convictions That such was wrong – religion makes restrictions I would have followed – but life turned a bubble & clumb the jiant stile of maledictions They took me from my wife & to save trouble I wed again & made the error double (LP.I.45–6)

Clare confesses a failure to follow a ‘religious’ life (he would have followed …). Periodically convinced that he had been locked up for bigamy (the logical extension of his conviction that he had married his first love, Mary Joyce), in ‘Child Harold’ Clare’s belief surfaces, convincing him that his crime precludes his ability to call himself a ‘religious’ man (presumably both because it is contrary to the dictates of the Church, and because it would in itself be an hypocritical act). Clare’s poem continues, exploiting the imagery of dirt that had marked, as Elaine Feinstein has pointed out, The Parish. The ‘dirty crew’ of which Clare is now a part is echoed in the deeds which cannot even be recorded: ‘Here let the Muse oblivions curtain draw / & let man think – for God hath often saw / Things here too dirty for the light of day / For in a madhouse there exists no law – / Now stagnant

See Letters, p. 646, for an example of the same convictions. See the ‘Introduction’ to Feinstein’s Selected Poems (London, 1968), pp. 7–8 and 9.

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grows my too refined clay’ (LP.I.46, ll.157–61). Clare places his corruption and incarceration in a self-propagating cycle. His Adamic, Hamlet-like self-portrait initiates a sense of rejection and isolation which both of these figures share. The diction is chthonic, suggesting a primordial and lawless land where God has no place but as a disgusted, distant observer. In the following stanzas, Clare becomes increasingly preoccupied with the inaccessibility of a ‘true’ woman’s love. Throughout, and even as Clare is describing the out-of-doors (what we might understand as more familiar territory than the ‘madhouse’ he must inhabit), his vocabulary insists on images of confinement: Clare is hidden amongst the trees of the forest which is present throughout ‘Child Harold’; the ‘chappel yard’ is ‘enclosed’; it has a ‘little’ and a ‘simple’ bell; the bridge is also ‘little’ and has a ‘guiding rail’, and Clare is led to an image of a natural roomscape, a ‘dell’. In this stanza, also, Clare’s repetition of ‘pleasant’, the triple repetition of ‘sweet’ (especially alongside the ‘curve’ of the road, which is one of the ‘pleasant’ things), and the ‘gentle swell’ of the terrain, suggest a contained, picturesque landscape which cannot offer Clare access to the unspoilt, wilder nature which elsewhere is both comfort and inspiration. Although, then, nature here ‘seems to have her own sweet will’, Clare is aware that this ‘seeming’ is not real (especially as, three stanzas previously, Clare has been denouncing ‘painted beauty’). Just as the bridge’s ‘guiding’ rail ‘leads’ him on, this landscape is not offering Clare any real freedom; he recognises it as to some extent literally pre-scribed, and he turns instead to love as a potential source of liberation. Clare is ‘alone’ and ‘unseen’; Mary is ‘abscent’; yet despite the fact that ‘Child Harold’ is a lament for precisely that absence, ‘These solitudes’ are Clare’s ‘last delights’. Although Clare seems to be reiterating at places in the poem that absolute loneliness and solitude are precursors of heavenly freedom, he introduces a significant ‘Yet’ (l.203), which still longs for an (apparently) earthly woman’s love. Here, this love involves a melding of identities (he longs for a ‘heart to make my happy home in’), a becoming one with the other which is also (as we have seen) characteristic of Clare’s conception of eternity, when earthly identity will be lost; this confusion and preoccupation is present throughout the poem. Throughout 1841, Clare dwells in verse on questions of self-identity. It is impossible to ignore the biographical background of Clare’s personality delusions here, especially as they cast a huge and relevant shadow over his poetic output through the figure of Byron, and in the same year, Clare writes a moving essay on the subject (‘Self Identity is one of the first principles in everybodys life & fills up the outline of honest truth in the decision of character – a person who denies himself must either be a madman or a coward …’), reinforcing the sense of preoccupation with his own ‘being’ in life and in death, but also with (what he describes as) the half-life state of confinement in the asylum, the state of being a ‘living-dead man dwelling among shadows & falshood’.

Compare ‘Things here too dirty for the light of day’ to LP.I.37. Clare’s essay is reprinted in Chilcott, p. 158.

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Although William D. Brewer has suggested that ‘“Child Harold’ does not owe a great deal to Byron’s poetry’, claiming rather that what the Byronic delusion lends Clare is an enabling ‘confidence’, when reading the two poets’ respective ‘Child[e] Harold’ poems (especially Canto III of Byron’s work) concurrently, one cannot fail to be aware of significant and similar thematic preoccupations, and one of the most obvious of these is precisely this exploration of identity. Canto III of Byron’s poem had appeared in 1816. In early 1817, Byron famously wrote of Childe Harold as a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her

Although his tone here is essentially light, the frustrations of ‘metaphysics’ and of ‘love unextinguishable’ are precisely what we find in Childe Harold’s third Canto, and there they are treated with less levity. When Jerome McGann discusses Byron’s text, he finds Byron ‘plunged into a kind of death-in-life in which he can find neither love, nor hope, nor meaning’ (we recall Clare’s ‘living-dead man’, and the preoccupation with ‘meaning’ throughout the asylum period poetry); the opening of the poem is ‘a dramatic presentation of the poet’s immediate sense of spiritual desolation.’10 In Byron’s poem, as in Clare’s, this is explicitly founded in separation, in Byron’s case, he claims, from his daughter, ‘Ada’ (Canto 1); however, in McGann’s biographical reading of the poem, Byron’s ‘immediate desire for forgetfulness is allied to his more fundamental need to recover … a sense of his own vitality.’11 The sixth stanza of Byron’s poem claims that ’Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give

‘John Clare and Lord Byron’, John Clare Society Journal, 11 (1992), 43–56 (p. 53). On Clare and Byron, see Anne Barton’s ‘John Clare Reads Lord Byron’, Romanticism, 2.2 (1996), 127–48; Philip Martin’s ‘Authorial Identity and the Critical Act: John Clare and Lord Byron’, in Questioning Romanticism, pp. 71–91; Minor’s ‘Clare, Byron and the Bible’; and Harriet Schechter’s ‘The Limitations of Imitation’, John Clare Society Journal, 4 (1985), 24–30. Byron to Thomas Moore, 28 January 1817, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London, 1974–1982), V, 165. 10 Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago and London, 1968), p. 114. 11 McGann, p. 114.

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The life we image, even as I do now. What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings’ dearth.12

It is true that Byron’s emphasis on the revivifying potential of creation is not present in the same way in Clare’s poem, but what is similar is this identification of a union with an ‘other’ which in the bleakest moments insists on a particular kind of community, and in doing so, redeems the poet from nothingness. Clare’s ‘Child Harold’ keeps coming back to precisely this point: his (in this poem, usually female) ‘other’ is different to Byron’s more solipsistic, egoistic one, but the faith in the ability of this other to reconstitute selfhood in some way is the same. Later in Byron’s poem, the theme recurs: at stanza 90, immediately preceding the storm (which offers both the poem and the poetic persona the scope for forward movement), Byron writes of ‘solitude, where we are least alone’, which arises from ‘the feeling infinite’, ‘A truth, which through our being then doth melt’. Of course, to read Byron’s poem alongside Clare’s, and thus to recognise shared themes and images, must also be to recognise that Byron remains ultimately more sure than Clare about the potential for continuance of self through the continuance of text.13 But despite this, through the preoccupations with McGann’s love, hope and meaning, Clare’s engagement with his Byronic template is greater than has often been acknowledged. An anxiety about states of being, then, haunts the poem that Clare wrote, and yet it is not this anxiety but rather love which most unsettles Clare’s convictions, and the focus on love constantly pulls the poem away from being purely a meditation on self-identity. At more than one point in ‘Child Harold’, Clare’s love seems distinctly Miltonic: Love is of heaven still the first akin Twas born In paradise & left its home For desert lands … & every heart its doubts or dangers past Beats on its way for love & home at last (ll.1159–67)

Clare’s love here appears close to that of Milton’s Adam and Eve, as ‘They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.’14 12 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: 1980–93), II, 78. 13 See Vincent Newey, Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot, 1995), p. 185. 14 Paradise Lost, Bk XII, ll. 648–9.

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Of course, part of the beauty of Milton’s image (and part of Milton’s theodicy) is that Adam and Eve are precisely not ‘solitary’; ‘hand in hand’ they wander into the world together. Clare’s love also has left ‘its’ home; his singular here is peculiarly reminiscent of the closing vision of Milton’s poem, where the communion of a truly loving relationship belies any sense of genuine solitude. We have already seen how God (and thus ‘eternity’) is love for Clare. As in Paradise Lost, so in ‘Child Harold’, love thus seems to offer an approximation of, as well as connection to, heavenly eternity. Clare’s poem is full of the reverence of love familiar to the reader of his verse: Love is the main spring of existance – It Becomes a soul wherebye I live to love On all I see that dearest name is writ Falsehood is here – but truth has life above Where every star that shines exists in love (ll.116–20)

In the stanza beginning at line 291, Clare’s lines run along a similar theme; here, the problem is that the love in which Clare has lost himself (in which he has dissolved his earthly integrity as an individual) has turned out to be false: ‘… but I can ne’er forget / Oaths virtuous falsehood volunteered to me / To make my soul new bonds which God made free’. And yet, Clare cannot believe that his God, who is a God of love, could possibly object to this melding of souls, even though Clare elsewhere identifies it as something exclusive to Heaven: ‘Gods gift is love & do I wrong the giver / To place affections wrong from Gods decree …’ Again, there is something decidedly Miltonic about all this, and the same recognition of what Clare thinks is necessary to attain the perfection of heavenly eternity, with a reluctance to abandon earthly joys, even as he recognises that such ‘joys’ are ‘in vain’ for the dead, is a recurring emblem in the poem. At line 393, for example, ‘Our lives are two – our end & aim is one’. Yet, and in direct contradiction of the line, mentioned above, where Clare seems to hold out hope in the possibility of a ‘heart to make my happy home in’, at line 434 he insists that ‘Man meets no home within a womans breast’. At various points, it seems that the dissolution of selfhood in eternity (which is perfect) will be with Mary herself: ‘Mary thy name loved long still keeps me free / Till my lost life becomes a part of thee’ (ll.90–91). Thus, in the following, later stanza, which comes after a rehearsal of so many of Clare’s familiar themes (of love and death, of God as love, of Eden, of apocalypse and its conditions, of the past as a somehow sanctified state, of ‘reason’, and even of Sabbath bells), it is difficult to be sure whether or not the ‘Love’ of which Clare writes is heavenly or earthly: A soul within the heart that loves the more Giving to pains & fears eternal life

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Burning the flesh till it consumes the core So Love is still the eternal calm of strife Thou soul within a soul thou life of life Thou Essence of my hopes & fears & joys M—y my dear first love & early wife & still the flower my inmost soul enjoys Thy love’s the bloom no canker worm destroys (ll.1186–94)

Here is the perfect love Clare elsewhere describes: a love which involves a renunciation of selfhood and functions as an instance of ‘eternal calm’. Even though Mary is specifically invoked, she has anyway become quasi-divine by this point in Clare’s poem (‘Mary made my songs divine’ (l.320); ‘Mary is my angel’ (l.676); shortly afterwards, she is ‘divinely fair’ (l.1256); this divinity is specifically connected by Clare to the past-ness of their relationship: ‘Thy beauty made youths life divine / Till my soul grew a part of thine / Mary I mourn no pleasures gone – / The past has made us both as one’ (ll.353–6)),15 and this further confuses the separation between earthly and heavenly love. Of course, in this poem, it is tempting to link the ‘absence’ Clare laments to the places he has loved, as well as to the people he has lost, but Clare’s ‘Child Harold’ is a love poem. Its theme can perhaps best be summarised with Clare’s declaration that ‘Abscence in love is worse than any fate’ (l.864); in this case, even ‘Nature sinks heedless’ (l.868) as Clare loses his inspiration and joy. Within an overall structure which tests and probes a thematic of ‘love’, and which displays a preoccupation with identity, Clare explores other concerns which have recurred in this book. Another of the poem’s great preoccupations is with truth. From the opening stanza, when Clare declares that ‘Real poets must be truly honest men’ (l.3), this anxiety riddles the poem. Clare connects the breaking of ‘Truths bonds’ to the ‘distress’ of his ‘every nerve’ (l.254); it is only ‘truth’ that has been able to ‘undecieve … lifes treacherous agony’ (l.281), and hence he has ‘sought thy quiet truth to ease my cares’ (l.284). He begs God (‘the great & high & lofty one / Whose name is holy’) to give him ‘Truths low estate & I will glad believe’ (ll.375–82). He claims to have ‘gone far / For peace & truth’, yet avers that he has been continually thwarted in his quest (ll.430–32). In this rambling scrutiny 15 This is perhaps an appropriate point to explain the lack of comment on the image of woman in general in this study. My primary reason is that readings which have attempted to place womankind within a trajectory including Clare’s preoccupation with nature, Eden and divinisation have (necessarily, I believe) become forced. The vast amount of Clare’s verse concerned with love of womankind, and the vast amount devoted to her criticism, lacks any underlying general consistency, and despite the obvious connection offered by the name of his first true love, Clare never places the sinful Eve in opposition with the saintly Mary (perhaps this is associated with his anti-catholicism, but almost certainly it is not). Woman may become a venerated image through love, but this is generally distinct from divine love, which must be my focus here.

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of ‘truth’, the juxtaposition of stanzas in the poem is often more productive of unsettling effects than the content of individual stanzas themselves. For example, at lines 517–25 we are offered an image of Clare’s ideal community in action, where ‘Peace-plenty’ has ‘been sung nor sung in vain / As all bring forth the makers grand designs’. The ‘effect’ of ‘the maker’ is then described (‘He hides his face & troubles they increase / He smiles – the sun looks out in wealth & peace’), yet the following line (which follows a stanzaic break) departs entirely from this peaceful image of a well-functioning earthly community, offering us instead an angry rant about the falsity of the world, a rant enacted through vigorous linguistic repetitions within the lines. Clare concludes with a sentiment apparently opposite from the suggestions of the previous stanza: ‘Lies was the current gospel in my youth / & now a man – I’m farther off from truth’. Later, Clare suggests that the heavenly state of eternity is inaccessible because: Honest & good intentions are So mowed & hampered in with evil lies She hath not room to stir a single foot Or even strength to break a spiders web —So lies keep climbing round loves sacred stem Blighting fair truth whose leaf is evergreen

Nonetheless, hope is restored, by the extension of the metaphor in the lines immediately following: ‘Whose roots are the hearts fibres & whose sun / The soul that cheers & smiles it into bloom / Till heaven proclaims that truth can never die’ (ll.795–803). Both love and truth, within this poem as a single entity, as well as in the context of Clare’s other works, are specifically connected to God, in particular through their connection to the theme of eternity. Clare longs for the elements to ‘Bid earth & its delusions pass away / But leave the mind as its creator free’ (ll.235–6). The potential for such freedom to be found in memory is suggested explicitly more than once (l.78, l.1273), but the poem staggers between confidence and doubt, hope and hopelessness, faith and despair. However, just as it is possible to get a sense of Clare’s experimentation with and feeling towards organised religion in the 1820s only by reading the mass of material relevant to the subject that he was working on throughout the decade, Clare’s ‘Child Harold’ is, perhaps, more representative of his attitude in the early 1840s in these very complexities and contradictions. The final of Clare’s preoccupations in his long, asylum poem that I would like to consider here, and one perhaps fitting to the ending of a book, is that of apocalypse. One of the most interesting of Clare’s treatments of a storm, which seems to point to Revelation, comes in a stanza from ‘Child Harold’, ‘The lightenings vivid flashes …’ (ll.804–12). The language Clare uses to describe the elemental chaos is that of battle: thunder is ‘heavens artilleries’ which ‘vollies bye’, and, in an image borrowed from his Byronic pattern, the cloud ‘rides like castled

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crags along the sky’,16 yet man, who is ‘free’, ‘walks unhurt while danger seems so nigh’ (in what is a more conventional depiction of the sublime experience than is usual for Clare). The stanza’s use of the image of the rainbow, a relatively rare one in Clare’s writing, reinforces the connection to redemption (God’s promise): ‘Heavens archway now the rainbow seems to be / That spans the eternal round of earth & sky & sea’. The following stanza goes on: A shock, a moment, in the wrath of God Is long as hell’s eternity to all His thunderbolts leave life but as the clod Cold & inna[ni]mate – their temples fall Beneath his frown to ashes – the eternal pall Of wrath sleeps oer the ruins where they fell & nought of memory may their creeds recall The sin of Sodom was a moments yell Fires death bed theirs their first grave the last hell (ll.813–21)

Here we see the familiar denigration of earthly grandeur and of inadequate ‘creeds’, and also, very clearly, the separation between earthly body (the cold inanimate ‘clod’) and something which might (in those not subject to this theological wrath) go beyond it; yet in this context the conviction uncharacteristically surfaces in Clare that some (and this is not the only place in the writing from 1841 that Clare makes reference to Sodom[y] as an aspect of hell-on-earth) are already beyond the redemption which was so clearly present in the rainbow of the previous stanza. In ‘Written in a Thunder storm July 15th 1841’ (which forms part of ‘Child Harold’, and which owes a clear debt to the storm scene of Canto III of Byron’s poem), Clare again offers us a storm-as-apocalypse. In this piece, whose concluding lines I invoked, above, Clare seems already to be beyond causes of earthly alarm (‘nothing starts the apathy I feel / Nor chills with fear eternal destiny / My soul is apathy – a ruin vast / … My life is hell’, ll.217–23), yet he seems simultaneously to be calling the apocalypse, and the subsequent return to a dwelling in edenic, heavenly ‘nature’, ever on: Roll on ye wrath of thunders – peal on peal Till worlds are ruins & myself alone Melt heart & soul cased in obdurate stone Till I can feel that nature is my throne … Smile on ye elements of earth & sky Or frown in thunders as ye frown on me Bid earth & its delusions pass away But leave the mind as its creator free (ll.225–36)

16

Childe Harold III, stanza 92.

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Clare longs for a continued intellectual survival only, when his body will be beyond the hopeless earthly existence, which is merely ‘a ruin vast’ (l.221). In Chapter 7, I used a quotation from ‘Child Harold’ (in which Clare again makes use of the rainbow image) to illustrate the idea that, at times, Clare clearly invests faith in God’s redemptive power. The context of that passage (‘still loves hope illumes …’, ll.630–33) is interesting, because in the stanzas immediately previous to it, Clare has been indulging in a habitual veneration of memory and childhood (‘Dull must that being live who sees unmoved / The scenes & objects which his childhood knew … / After long abscence how the mind recalls / Pleasing associations of the past’, ll.603–4; ll.612–13), which leads him to dwell on the misery of his present (‘So on he lives in glooms & living death’, l.621) and the lamentable fickleness of fame, and, through it, ‘name’, and thence to his parting ‘from one whose heart was once his home’ (l.629). It is at this desolate point that the stanza already discussed appears: Clare turns the direction of his poem around with the line ‘& yet not parted –’ (l.630), and this initiates the hope of the rainbow. Although this is God’s promise, here Clare hopes for true calm through Mary’s love: The oceans roughest temptest meets a calm Cares thickest cloud shall break in sunny joy O’er the parched waste showers yet shall fall like balm & she the soul of life for whom I sigh Like flowers shall cheer me when the storm is by (ll.634–8)

Here, then, the pattern is reversed: in ‘The lightenings vivid flashes …’, Clare was led from the potentials of apocalypse to hopelessness (the irredeemable Sodomites); in this section of the same poem, and in ‘Written in a Thunder storm’, he is led to hope in freedom and love. It is this vacillation which necessitates that a reading of Clare’s poem should dwell on preoccupations, rather than conclusions: to suggest an over-arching aim beyond the exercise of these preoccupations is rendered futile by such ambivalent suggestions. At one point in ‘Child Harold’, with another dramatic change of tone from previous stanzas, Clare describes his contradictory lunacy: Cares gather round I snap their chains in two & smile in agony & laugh in tears Like playing with a deadly serpent – who Stings to the death – there is no room for fears Where death would bring me happiness – his sheers Kills cares that hiss to poison many a vein The thought to be extinct my fate endears Pale death the grand phis[i]cian cures all pain The dead rest well – who lived for joys in vain (LP.I.48, ll.208–16)

‘Child Harold’

223

Death has assumed an abstract, ‘Grim Reaper’ personification, pushing out Clare’s God. In November 1834, Taylor had written to Clare suggesting changes to the ending of ‘Thoughts in a Churchyard’, complaining: ‘I think it safer & better to give the incorrect religious sentiment than the downright irreligious one.’17 In his new, lonely existence, however, there was no Taylor to direct Clare towards divinity, and in this poem Clare seems to move more closely towards atheism. That is not to say that Clare intentionally omitted God and heavenly eternity from the ending of his piece, but the stanza reminds one of the danger of attempting to ascribe to Clare an immutable system of faith, at any point of his life. Having stressed this qualification, one of Clare’s latest datable pieces is an acrostic addressed ‘To William Peel Nesbitt’, the child of a doctor at Northampton asylum, and the poem neatly summarises what Clare seems to think in later moments of certain faith. Importantly, the notions behind much of its content can be traced through Clare’s work to this point from his earliest extant writing, and they are those which have been explored in this book: William! be honest, tis the wisest plan In childhood lives the promise of the man Love truth: for from that fountain honor springs Lies are but cowards all—and feeble things Inherit common sense & that will teach All man may know, or good men wish to preach Mark well Instructions page in thy young days Prepare thy mind to follow wisdom’s ways. Enjoy thy childhood as the happiest time Ease, innocence, and mirth without a crime Leave lust & sin and up to manhood climb Never afraid of death & hell—sublime Enjoyment then thy happy mind will fill Safe-guard of life and good for every ill Be good, be virtuous, for these are wise Inheritance, of Man that none despise: Take God thy Guide, and thy whole life will be The happy voyage to Eternity! (MP.V.452–3)

I initially was reluctant to introduce so near the end of this book a poem which ignores the complexities, contradictions and confusions of Clare’s religious faith which this whole study has tried to highlight. Nonetheless, I include it because it is a very late example of Clare’s work which delineates what he did believe, when he did believe, demonstrating that, despite all of the pressures upon him, despite desperation, lapses in faith, and shifts in thought, when Clare had faith, he retained in essence the creed and notion of God he had always been writing into 17

12 November 1834, Egerton MS 2249, fol. 233r.

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his verse. Truth, common sense, the privilege of youth, and the guidance of God: these, for Clare, are markers on the pathway to eternity. Following ‘wisdom’s ways’ is something that Clare attempted throughout his life, believing them to be discernable in the sublime joy of observing the natural world, which is interpreted through and decoded within a framework of faith. This discernment is represented throughout Clare’s poetry, through an idea of a vision which is thus both physical and metaphysical, which is both sight and insight, and which forms, and is in turn formed by, belief.

Bibliography

Manuscript sources British Library

Egerton Collection MSS 2245–50

Muniments of Christ’s College, Cambridge

MR33 90

The John Rylands University Library

GB–0133–Eng MS 415/158

Northampton Public Library Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery Manuscripts from these last two collections will be cited according to David Powell’s Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library (Northampton: County Borough of Northampton Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery Committee, 1964), and Margaret Grainger’s Descriptive Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery (Peterborough: printed for the Earl Fitzwilliam, 1973). Note: The British Library Egerton collection of letters is arranged chronologically, but as some letters are gathered out of sequence, references in this book include folio numbers.

Printed primary sources

Clare’s poetry The Early Poems of John Clare 1804–22, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) John Clare: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period 1822–37, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–2003) John Clare: Selected Poems, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Faber, 2004) The Later Poems of John Clare 1837–1864, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)

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The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964) The Parish, ed. Eric Robinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London: printed for Taylor and Hessey, and E. Drury, 1820) The Poems of John Clare, ed. J.W. and Anne Tibble, 2 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935) The Rural Muse, ed. by R.K.R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG and Carcanet, 1982) Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) The Shepherd’s Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson, Geoffrey Summerfield and David Powell, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Clare’s prose John Clare: A Champion for the Poor: Political Verse and Prose, ed. P.M.S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG and Carcanet, 2000) John Clare By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG and Carcanet, 1996) The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) The Letters of John Clare, ed. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) ‘On the Wonders of inventions curiositys strange sights & other remarkables “of the last forty days” in the Metropolis in a Letter to A Friend’, ed. P.M.S. Dawson, John Clare Society Journal, 20 (2001), 21–37 The Prose of John Clare, ed. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951)

Secondary sources Extensive use has been made in this thesis of the books extant in Clare’s own library. For details of these books, please see David Powell’s Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library (Northampton: County Borough of Northampton Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery Committee, 1964), pp. 23–34. These details have not been reproduced in this bibliography. Abrams, M.H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973)

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Index

absenteeism, 16–17 Adam (and Eve), 106, 108, 151, 158, 163, 165, 168, 171–2, 182, 190–91, 184, 217–18; see also Eden Addison, Joseph, 42 Evidences of the Christian Religion, 42 Allen, Dr, 119 alternative belief, 2, 57–84, 198–9; see also ghosts; rituals; superstition Anglicanism; see also Church of England Clare’s Anglicanism, 6, 35 relation to Methodism of, 36–7, 41 apocalypse, 121, 159, 169–70, 177–8, 189, 190; see also Revelation Appleton, Jay ‘habitat theory’, 125 Aquinas, Thomas Summa Theologia, 107 Armstrong, W.A., 38, 38n18 Ashfield, Andrew, 136 asylum, Clare’s escape from, 119 atheism, 58, 59, 88, 98, 106, 188, 193, 210, 223–4 Atkins, James, 54 Bamford, Samuel, 60–61, 71, 86 Barrell, John, 146, 155, 157–8, 159–60, 161, 165, 169, 175, 203 Bate, Jonathan, 1, 25n40, 99, 104, 104n72, 122, 181 Bennion, Thomas, 31–2, 33, 105, 198 Bible, The, 113–29, 120n30; see also Biblical paraphrases and entries under individual books as an aesthetic artefact, 115, 116–17 and alternative belief, 61, 70, 71, 71n49, 72, 73 Clare’s criticism of, 113–14, 115, 115n12, 199 as comfort, 101–2, 115 and education, 87–8, 89, 116–17 and faith, 95, 97–8, 168–9, 189, 191

Hebrew poetry of, 116, 122 as an influence on language, 116–18, 87 misuse of, 97, 117 and natural religion, 99, 99n50 scholarship on, 115–16; see also Lowth, Robert Biblical paraphrases, 118–29, 120n30 apocalypse in, 121, 169–70 and autobiographical resonances, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125 Balaam, 120 Balak, 119 Clare’s divergence from sources, 120, 121 Deborah, Song of, 119, 120–21 Exodus, Book of, 123 Gospels, 119, 128 Habakkuk, Book of, 119, 123 as an influence, 117–129 Job, Book of, 106, 119, 121, 123, 124–5 Lamentations of Jeremiah, 119, 120 and Nature, 126–7 Old Testament focus of, 119, 123, 124, 127–8 Psalms, 103, 122, 124–9, 124n46, 125n51, 126n52, 142–3, 198 Revelation, Book of, 119, 123, 128, 220 Solomon, Song of, 119, 122–3 and tests of faith, 123, 124, 125 Billings, John, 72, 73, 75 Blackley, William, 44–5 Blair, Hugh, 96–7, 116, 133 Evidences of Christianity, 96 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 104, 116, 133 Bloom, Harold, 170–71 Bloomfield, Robert, 74, 133, 162–3 ‘The Fakenham Ghost’, 74 The Farmer’s Boy, 133

246


Book of Common Prayer, 15, 18, 19, 58, 89, 90, 97–8, 106, 113, 115, 118, 120n30, 210, 123; see also Prayer Book Brewer, William D., 216 Brooks, the Rev’d, of Retford, 30, 211n44 Browne, Thomas, 166n43 Brownlow, Timothy, 147 Burke, Edmund, and the sublime, 116, 134–5, 136–7, 138, 140, 146 Bush, E.J., 153 Bushaway, Bob, 60 Byron, George Gordon, 118, 122, 203, 213–14, 215, 216, 217, 220–21 ‘Childe Harold’, 213, 216–17, 221 Hebrew Melodies, 118, 122 Calvinism, 12, 47, 137 Cary, Henry Francis, 31–3, 31n71 Catholicism, 53, 67, 212 and relics, 53, 98 chapbooks, 69, 72, 88–9, 89n11, 113 Cheap Repository Tract Movement, 88 Cherry, J.L., 30, 77 Chilcott, Tim, 182, 213 Chirico, Paul, 146, 165, 168, 169 Church of England, 11–34, 87, 211 and education, 87 sermons of, 17, 32–3, 90, 108–9 Clare, Johanne, 40, 168, 169 Clare, John, works; see also Biblical paraphrases ‘& what is love the sweetest of all pains’, 203 ‘Angels of Earth’,168 ‘Ants, the’, 141 ‘As boys were playing’,180, 184 ‘Author’s Address to his Book’,79, 54 ‘Badger, The’,181–2, 185–6 ‘Bounty of Providence, The’,200 ‘Bushy Close’, 159 ‘Child Harold’,110, 121, 148, 155, 156, 163, 167, 168, 173, 196, 200–201, 203, 207, 208, 213–24 and Byron, 213–14, 215, 216, 217, 221 influences on, 213–17 and love, 215, 217–19

and self–identity, 215, 217, 218–19 structure of, 213–14 and truth, 219–20 ‘Childhood’, 109, 158, 159n22, 161 ‘Childish Recollections’,137, 158 ‘Christian Faith’,196 ‘Cottager, The’, 13, 89, 97, 108 ‘Cress Gatherer’, 108 ‘Crowland Abbey’, 166–7 ‘Decay: A Ballad’, 144, 176 ‘December’, 205 ‘Deity, The’, 96, 98, 99, 142, 196 ‘Description of a thunder Storm’, 206 ‘Don Juan’, 179n17, 213 ‘Doubt thourt an ague’, 207 ‘Dream, The’, 68 ‘Earths Eternity’, 165 ‘Emmonsales Heath’, 158n20, 161, ‘England’, 22–3 ‘Enthusiast, The’, 139 ‘Essay on Landscape’, 145–6 ‘Essay on Political Religion’, 21 ‘Essay on Religion’, 208–9 ‘Eternity of Time, The’, 165 ‘Evening Bells’, 145 ‘Evening’ (‘It is the silent hour’), 137, 149 ‘Fairey Rings, The’, 174n5 ‘Fallen Elm, The’, 134–5, 134n5, 167 ‘Farmer and the Vicar, The’, 62–3, 66, 71n49 ‘Fate of Amy, The’, 59 ‘Flitting, The’, 39, 45, 148, 163, 165, 203 ‘Flowers’, 118 ‘Fountain of Hope, The’, 141 ‘Fragment’, 170 ‘Gipseys Camp, The’, 81, 82 ‘God looks on nature with a glorious eye’, 203 ‘Happiness of Ignorance, The’, 158, 183–4 ‘Harvest Morning, The’, 200, 202–3 ‘Haunted Pond’, 59, 76 ‘hedgehog hides, The’, 186 ‘Helpstone’, 7, 152–4, 155, 191, 202 ‘Holiday Walk (b), The’, 110 ‘Hue and Cry, The’, 86, 86n2, 174

Index ‘Hymn to Spring’, 157 ‘I am’, 169, 170, 171, 172, 186 ‘I found a ball of grass among the hay’, 187 ‘I long to forget them’, 162 ‘I love thee nature with a boundless love’, 168, 170 ‘I sigh with the wind’, 155 ‘I’ve seen the mid night morrice dance & play’, 74, 76 ‘I would do…’, 207 ‘Impulses of Spring’, 141, 202 ‘Infants are but cradles for the grave’, 193 ‘Instinct of Hope, The’, 143 ‘Invitation, The’, 171–2 ‘invite to Eternity, An’, 170–72 ‘Is nothing less than naught’, 164–5 ‘Journey out of Essex’ 119 ‘Kate O’Kilarney’, 171–2 ‘Know God is every where’, 149, 164, 189 ‘Lament, A’, 168 ‘Lament of Swordy Well, The’, 52 ‘Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters, The’, 88, 147, 161, 168, 169n51 ‘Last of March, The’, 167 ‘Lifes passing bell wakes not a deeper sigh’, 158 ‘Lines on the Death of Mrs Bullimore’, 117 ‘Lines Written while Viewing some Remains of a Human Body inLolham Lane’ 66 ‘Look at the Heavens, A’, 106, 107, 202 ‘Love’, 168 ‘Love and Memory’, 158 ‘Love of Liberty’, 168 ‘Love of Solitude’, 208 ‘Love of the Fields’, 139 ‘Lovers Journey (b), The’, 66, 269 ‘Maid of Jerusalem, The’, 159 ‘Maid of Walkherd, The’, 171 ‘Martinmass Eve’ (‘Michaelmas Eve’), 69–70 , 70n42, 178 ‘Molecatcher, The’, 181 ‘Moon, The’, 206

247 ‘Mores, The’, 152, 158n.20, 160, 161 ‘Mystery’, 111 ‘Nature’s Melodys’, 96, 141 ‘Natures Hymn to the Deity’, 141n28, 148 ‘Night Mare or Superstitions Dream, The’, 68 ‘Nightingales Nest, The’, 147 ‘Now winter inhis earnest mood begins’, 118 ‘O could I feel my spirits beat’, 183 ‘Obedience’, 207 ‘On a Child Killed by Lightning’, 199, 200 ‘On Taste’, 139 ‘On Visiting a Favourite Place’, 140, 156 ‘Opinions inReligion’, 104–5 Parish, The, 11–18, 20–21, 22, 23–5, 26, 27–8, 30, 35, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48–51, 59, 80, 86, 90, 111–12, 117, 214 ‘Pastoral Fancys’, 205 ‘Peasant Poet, The’, 85 ‘Penitence’, 207 ‘Petitioners are full of prayers’, 54 ‘Pleasures of Spring’, 139, 155 Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, 1 ‘Prayer, A’, 206 ‘Prayer inthe Desert’, 208 ‘Progress of Ryhme’, 143, 201–2, 149, 205, 144 ‘Providence’, 200 ‘Ramble, A’, 197 ‘Reccolections after a Ramble’, 139 ‘Remembrances’, 141, 158n20, 161 ‘Rivals, The’, 71–2 ‘Rustic Fishing’, 144 ‘Sabbath Bells’, 144–5 ‘Sand Martin’, 148 ‘Satyr & Faun & Driads shadows all’, 82–3 ‘Say not whom all your scanty stores afford’, 119 ‘Setting Sun, The’, 202 ‘Shadows of Taste’, 109, 110, 111, 161–2

248

John Clare’s Religion Shepherd’s Calendar, The, 13, 15, 45, 59, 68, 77, 104, 140, 158, 174, 205 ‘Sighing for Retirement’, 143 Sketches inthe Life of John Clare, 35, 45n45, 46, 51, 64, 73, 86, 88, 113, 152, 156–7, 178, 178n13, 192, 195, 209, 210 ‘Slander’, 143 ‘So Christianitys enlivening light’, 196 ‘Solitude’, 147n47 ‘Song Last Day’, 121 ‘Song’ (‘The daiseys golden eye’), 111 ‘Song’ (‘The spring comes on daily’), 181n20 ‘Song’ (‘Swamps of wild rush beds’), 55 ‘Songs Eternity’, 51, 165, 165n41 ‘Sonnet’ (‘How sweet the wood shades’), 165 ‘Sonnet: I am’, 172 ‘Sonnet’ (‘Poets love nature’), 193 ‘Sonnet’ (‘There is a charm’), 201 ‘Sorrows of Love, The’, 65–66, 70–71, 182, 191, 206 ‘Spring’, 142 ‘Spring comes & it is may’, 111, 181n29 ‘Spring Day, A’, 155 ‘Spring’ (‘How beautiful is Spring’), 118 ‘Spring’ (‘In every step we tread’), 155 ‘Stanzas’, 159 ‘Stanzas’ (‘There is a land of endless joy’), 158n20, 159, 208 ‘Summer Evening’, 200 ‘Summer Images (b)’, 159 ‘Summons, The’, 16 ‘Sun Rise’, 156, 202 ‘Sun Set’, 202 ‘Sunday’, 89, 189, 18 ‘Sunday Evening’, 50 ‘Sunday Walks’, 206 ‘Superstitious Dream’, 203 ‘Sweet mystery that comes to bless’, 207 ‘The badger grunting’, 181–2, 185–6, 188 ‘The Eternity of Nature’, 165–6, 168 ‘The Fountain of Hope’, 117, 141, 164

‘The glory from the earth hath passed away’, 159 ‘The healthfull mind that muses & inhales’, 155 ‘The heavier as my burthen grows’, 204, 206n25 ‘The Moorehens Nest’, 205 ‘The ploughman hurrys up by crow of cock’, 179 ‘The publicans meek prayer’, 196 ‘The shepherd on his journey’, 180 ‘The Sun’, 203 ‘The sunset even of a winters day’, 202 ‘The Widow or Cress Gatherer’, 108 ‘The worlds vain mouth is open wide’, 178–9 ‘There is a cruelty inall’, 175–8 ‘There is a thought inevery human breast’, 208 ‘This leaning tree with ivy overhung’, 142, 143n35, 185, 198 ‘Thou power from whom all pleasure springs’, 148 ‘Thoughts ina Churchyard’, 223 ‘Tis pleasant on a sunday path to talk’, 179 ‘To a Methodist Parson’, 49, 80, 81 ‘To Mystery’, 111 ‘To Religion’, 196 ‘To the Deity’, 196, 201, 207 ‘To the Memory of James Merrishaw’, 87 ‘To the Rural Muse’, 142, 158n20, 201 ‘To The Snipe’, 147 ‘To William Peel Nesbitt’, 223 ‘True Spiritual Worship, The’, 142 ‘Twilight’, 155 ‘Two Soldiers’, 211 ‘Universal Goodness’, 110 ‘Up honesty a vote of thanks’, 209 ‘Verses Written inTrouble’, 196 ‘Vicar, The’, 11 ‘Vicar’s Sermon’, 53, 212 ‘Village Doctress, The’, 90 Village Minstrel, The, 13n13, 30, 134 ‘Village Minstrel, The’, 13, 13n13, 17, 30, 63, 64, 66, 68, 72, 74, 77–8, 80, 117

Index ‘Vision, A’, 205 ‘What is Life? (a)’, 164, 196 ‘What power again bids grasses grow’, 149 ‘Where are the citys Sodom & Gomorrah’, 203 ‘Who am I’, 122, 122n39 ‘Winter (a)’, 87 ‘With boots of monstrous leg’, 181 ‘Woodman, The’, 18, 30, 90, 89 ‘World friendship thou art often but a garb, 178 Clare, Parker, 178 Clare, Patty, 94, 171 Clare’s creed, 4, 28, 97, 98, 206–12 clerics, 14, and alternative belief, 62–3, 65, 80–82 Anglican, 15–18, 20–21, 23–5, 28, 29, 30–33, 50, 62–3, 89; see also Brooks of Retford; Cary, Henry Francis; Crabbe, George; Lavington, Bishop; Mossop, Charles; Paley, William; Plumptre, James; Polwhele, Richard; and Twopenny, Richard, as supporters of Clare, 30–31, 33 of other denominations, 29, 30, 33, 41, 45, 49, 50–51, 52, 61, 62; see also Blackley, William; Holland, Isaiah Knowles; and Wesley, John Cobbett, William, 21, 86, 89 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 135, 140–41, 144n38 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 143 Colls, Robert, 37 community, Clare’s ideal, 13 Corbet, Richard ‘A Proper New Ballad, intituled The Fairies Farewell’, 69, 69n40 Cowper, William, 22, 29n58, 44, 103 ‘The Timepiece’, 22 Crabbe, George, 25 The Borough, 25 creation, 95–6, 119, 123, 126, 135, 156, 157, 139, 141, 148, 159–60, 161, 165, 166, 191, 192, 198, 203, 217

249

creed, 4, 28, 33, 46, 47, 53, 82–3, 97, 98, 101, 106, 195–6, 204, 206–12, 221, 223–4 Crossan, Greg, 106, 109, 135–6, 148, 151, 156, 162, 198, 202, 203 cruelty, 173–88 curiositas, 107, 108, 123, 146, 157 Danielson, Dennis, 190 Darley, George, 42, 43, 103 Errors of Ecstasie, 42, 96 Darwin, Erasmus, 58–9, 98, 186 Davies, Owen, 62, 63–4, 72 Dawson, P.M.S., 146, 175 de Bolla, Peter, 136, 140 death, 45, 48, 164, 167, 172 and identity, 169, 170–71 deism, Clare and, 32, 97, 104–5, 106, 198–9 Dennis, John The grounds of criticism inpoetry, 138 devil, see Satan Dissent, 22, 29, 35–6, 40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 55, 87, 95, 173; see also Methodism and Dissent divination rituals, 60, 70–72, 71n49, 81 Drury, Edward, 47–8, 125 Eden, 120, 108, 151–62 and knowledge, 157–62 education, 2, 16, 30–31, 86–7, 89, 90, 103, 107, 116 Emmerson, Eliza, 6, 13, 31–2, 79, 109, 198–9 Enclosure, 13–14, 17, 21, 26, 109, 152, 153, 155, 159–61, 168–9, 173, 184, 185, 191 Enclosure Act (1809), 152, 153 Engels, William C., 172 enthusiasm, 3, 35, 40–45, 49, 67, 68, 95, 137–9, 141, 145, 148, 153 Erskine, Thomas, 97, 98 Evidences of Revealed Religion, 93–4, 97 eternity, 162–72, 196–7, 198, 212, 218, 220 Eucharistic host, 82n88

250


Evangelical Revival, 41, 44, 48, 48n54, 52, 52n66, 68, 79–80, 81, 138, 148 Eve, see Adam and Eve evil, 3, 93, 106, 151, 166, 173–5, 183, 184, 185, 191, 192, 177–8, 187–8, 189, 193 faith, as separate from religion, 2, 18, 21–2, 148–9 Fall, The, 106, 124, 125, 151, 153, 157, 158, 158n21, 159, 160, 161, 162n31, 165, 168, 171, 172, 173, 178, 183, 184, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196; see also Adam and Eve; Eden; and Milton, John, Paradise Lost farmers, 12, 13–14, 25n40, 41, 62–3, 206 fate, 81 Feinstein, Elaine, 14–15, 214 festivities, see rituals Fox, George Book of Martyrs, 197 Free Churches, 49, 51, 54 Free Will Defence, 162n31, 190, 191–2 freethinking, 59, 67, 94, 95, 209, 211 genius, ‘original genius’, 136n12, 137 Gessner, Salomon, Death of Abel, 108, 166, 171 ghosts, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 73–9, 75, 76, 80, 81–2, 83, 111, 174; see also superstitions Gilchrist, Octavius, 7, 30 God, 94, 95–6, 109, 119, 142, 149, 168, 189–90, 191, 193, 195–206, 213 and nature, 126, 149, 196, 197, 198, 201 and Sun imagery, 163, 202–204 and the sublime, 136–7, 192–3, 201–2, 203 as ‘known unknown’, 142, 201–2 as truth, 141, 143, 196, 208–9, 220 Goldsmith, Oliver, ‘The Deserted Village’, 28, 28n57, 153 Gospels, The, 83, 93n23, 97–8, 100, 101, 101n61, 114, 115, 119, 128, 134, 184, 206; see also New Testament Grainger, Margaret, 110

gypsies, 52, 80–81, 186 Heaven, 155–6, 168, 169–70, 189, 201, 210; see also eternity Helpston Church (St Botolph’s), 25n40, 26–28, 96 Helpston (Helpstone), 52, 72, 78, 82, 151n3, 152–5, 153–6, 157–8, 162, 165, 166, 175, 191; see also Clare, John, ‘Helpstone’ Hempton, David, 37, 38, 48, 61 Henson, J.B., 29–30, 33, 38, 46, 206 Hessey, James, 30, 43, 79, 99, 100–103 High Beech Asylum, 119, 207 Hobbes, Thomas, 76 Hogarth, William Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, 68n37 Holland, Isaiah Knowles, 30, 33, 90 Hone, William, 25, 174 Every Day Book, 70 Hoopes, Robert, 107 Horne, George, 125, 125n51, 126n52, 142–3 Commentary on the Psalms, 142–3 Houghton, Sarah, 133 Hume, David, 104 Hutton, Ronald, 65 hymns, 41, 51, 52, 125, 208, 206–7 hypocrisy, 11, 12, 18–20, 22, 23, 31, 43, 94, 134, 148, 198–9, 209, 210–11, 214 identity, 154, 159–61, 169, 215, 216–17, 170–71; see also reason; The Sublime; and death ignorance, 93, 98, 110–11, 127, 145, 147, 157, 158, 159, 183, 185, 191, 193; see also knowledge immortality, 158, 164–5, 198 innocence, 158, 158n21, 159, 185, 191 inspiration, 3–4, 45, 111, 115, 127–8, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 152, 156, 167, 195, 201, 203, 206, 215, 219 Jacobinism, 38 Jasper, David, 116, 118

Index Jesus Christ, 17, 20, 23–4, 98, 168, 189, 197, 199–200, 203–5 Job, 124–5, 189 Job, Book of, 68, 71, 106, 113, 119, 121, 123, 124, 189, 191; see also Biblical paraphrases Joyce, Mary, 94, 214, 215, 219n15 justice, 66, 200, 209–10 Keats, John, 71, 71n48, 82 ‘Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds’, 177 ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 71, 82 ‘The Eve of St Mark’, 71 Knight, Richard Payne, 85, 208, 213 knowledge, 157–62; see also reason of adulthood, 158, 158n21 and cruelty, 182–3 and curiositas, 107, 108, 123, 146, 157 relinquishing of, 191 of self, 140–1, 171, 159–60 Kövesi, Simon, 147 Lamb, Charles ‘A Quaker’s Meeting’, 53 ‘The Sabbath Bells’, 144–5, 144n38 language, apprehension beyond words, 126, 134, 141, 142, 143–4 Clare’s use of, 5, 14, 39, 118n26 as a communal structure, 15 inadequacy of, 141 as universally communicative music, 134, 161, 165 Lavington, Bishop, Enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists Compared, 42 Lewis, C.S., 124 literacy, 72, 73, 78, 86–90, 91, 117 London Magazine, 170 London Magazine circle, 31–3 Longinus, 136 Lonsdale, Roger, 28n57 Lowth, Robert, 116, 122 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 116 Lucas, John, 39 Lyotard, Jean–Francois, 136

251

Marsh, Marianne, 107, 110, 125, 159 McGann, Jerome, 216, 217 McKenzie, J.G. Religion and Nervous Disorders, 192 memory, 28, 119–20, 158–9, 158n21, 220 communal memory, 64, 58, 77–9, 90, 176 Methodism, 35–52, 48n54; see also Wesley, John and Calvinism, 47 and Dissent, 35–9, 46, 47, 48–51, 87 and education, 87–88 and enthusiasm, 40–44 Primitive Methodism, 35, 38, 39, 41, 48–9, 52 and Ranters, 37–9, 38n18, 42, 43, 44, 46–7, 49, 50, 52, 103 and superstition, 61–2 Wesleyan, 35, 36–7, 38–9, 40–42, 45–6, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 61–2, 88, 97, 209 Methodist Magazine, 96 Milton, John, 23, 191, 217–18 Paradise Lost, 21, 23, 106, 107–8, 109, 123, 153, 155, 171, 172, 174, 190–91 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 23 Minor, Mark, 13, 35–6, 47–8, 118, 49, 2n4, 168n48, 200 Montgomery, James, 99, 114 ‘Prison Amusements’, 213 More, Hannah, 79, 80–81 Tawney Rachel, or, The Fortune Teller, 80 Mossop, Charles, 6, 30 Mullan, John, 12 Murry, John Middleton, 42, 104, 148, 163 mystery, 103, 111–12, 145–6, 166, 166n43, 191–2, 53, 93, 94, 95, 147, 201, 209, 211 natural religion, 67, 94, 95–6, 98, 99, 99n50, 105, 139, 138 nature, and community, 20–21, 62, 68 as cruel, 175–8, 180, 182 destruction of, 21, 107 as divine or quasi–divine, 2n4, 51, 111, 139, 141, 148, 149, 163, 166, 172, 197, 198, 201, 203, 204, 205

252


as fallen, 152–5, 156–7, 158, 160, 165, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 185, 189, 192 and knowledge of God, 95–6, 97, 98, 110, 121, 126, 139, 141, 142–3, 145, 147, 148, 161, 164, 167–8, 193, 195, 197, 198, 203, 207–8 and poetry, 3–4, 73n56, 142, 145, 201 as prophetic, 144 and Providence, 199–201 as separate from man, 96, 106, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 166, 169, 177, 178, 192 and sublimity, 68, 133, 134–6, 137, 138, 139, 142, 145, 147, 148, 195, 206, 224 New Testament, 71n49, 113–14, 119, 127, 128, 197, 199; see also Gospels; and Revelation Newlyn, Lucy ‘Questionable Shape’, 146 Northampton Asylum, 119 nostalgia, 13–14, 20–21, 69–71, 104n71 Nugent’s Travels, 53 Obelkevich, James, 30–31, 61 Old Testament, 83, 106, 114, 116, 118–29, 168, 170, 189, 197; see also Biblical paraphrases oral tradition, 77, 78, 116, 117 paganism, 58–61, 61nn11–12, 65 Paine, Tom Age of Reason, 105 Clare on, 86, 94, 104–5, 114, 199 Paley, William (1711–99), 28 Paley, William (1743–1805), 96, 97, 98 Natural Theology, 97 Picturesque, The, 152, 152n10, 166–7, 215 Plumptre, James, 29, 48, 48n54, 80, 81, 82, 91 poetry, Clare’s conception of, 133, 141–3, 145, 147, 172, 201 politics, 21–6, 37–40, 86–90 Polwhele, Richard, 62, 64, 65 Pope, Alexander ‘Essay on Man’, 149 Pound, N.J.G., 16

Powell, David, 119, 175 Prayer Book, see Book of Common Prayer Prickett, Stephen, 116, 118 priestcraft, 94 anti–priestcraft, 197, 198 Priestman, Martin, 98, 197 Romantic Atheism, 98 Pringle, Thomas Autumnal Excursion, 118–19 Proverbs, Book of, 139 Providence, 67, 80–81, 199–201 Psalms, 95, 113, 120n30, 124–9, 142–3, 196n4, 198; see also Biblical paraphrases Punch, 179 Quakers, 53 Quarterly Review, 38, 42–3, 87, 92, 138, 174, 174n3 Queen Anne’s Bounty, 17, 27 Quinary system, 166n43 Radstock, Lord, 6, 79, 92, 109, 144n38 Ranters, see Methodism and Ranters rapture, 3, 133, 139, 141, 148, 203 reason and reasoning, 41, 94, 97, 98, 102, 104–12, 146, 148–9, 156, 157, 158, 159, 171–2; see also Paine, Thomas and alternative belief, 76 definitions of, 104, 106–7 and enthusiasm, 41 and faith, 192, 94–8 and identity, 171 ‘right reason’ (recta ratio), 107–8, 146, 157 and the Bible, 97–8, 102 and triumphant rationalism, 107 and understanding, 95, 97–8, 105, 106, 109, 110, 125, 126, 139, 189 Reay, Barry, 179n17 redemption, 190 Reid, Christopher, 12 religious literature, 86–9, 90, 96, 97–8, 117 religious tolerance, 40, 44 revealed religion, 139, 93, 94, 95–6, 127–8, 199; see also revelation

Index revelation, 41, 44, 53, 95, 129, 145, 199; see also revealed religion Revelation, 123, 125, 168, 189, 220 Revelation, Book of, 94, 119, 123, 128, 220; see also Biblical paraphrases rituals, 15, 58, 60, 62, 63–4, 63n23, 65, 77–9 dumb cake ritual, 70–71, 71n48 scapegoating, 63, 185 Rivers, Isabel, 94, 95 Reason, Grace and Sentiment, 94, 209 Robinson, Eric, 11, 27n52, 28, 30n62, 46, 54, 108, 119, 151, 175 Rogers, Samuel The Pleasures of Memory, 81 Rule, John, 61–2 Ryan, Robert, 1, 21 Sales, Roger, 170 Satan, 123, 173–4, 174n3 scapegoating, 63, 185 Schulz, Max Paradise Preserved, 167 science, 111, 106, 110, 146, 97, 98–9, 107–8 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Adonais, 164, 198 Simpson, Frank, 13n10 slavery, 211 Smith, Thomas, 26, 27, 28 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), 88 solitude, 145, 147, 147n48, 148, 215 Solomon, 159, 114–15 Song of Solomon, 71, 153, 114–5; see also Biblical paraphrases soul, 154, 156, 164–5 St Botolph’s Church, Helpston, 25n,40, 26–8, 96 Stephenson, William, 38 Sternberg, Thomas, 72–3, 78–9, 174n8 Storey, Mark, 29n58, 48, 81, 81n82 Strickland, Edward, 172 Sublime, The, 3, 58n2, 133–50, 136n12, 202, 221 and alternative belief, 58, 67, 140 Burkean model of, 116, 134–5, 136–7, 138, 140 and eternity, 151, 154, 162, 162n32, 165–6, 167, 172

253

and identity and meaning, 140–41, 146–7, 163–4, 171, 203 and mystery, 145–6 and nature, 126–7, 126n52, 134–5, 137, 139, 141–2, 147–9, 165–6, 172, 191 and poetry, 141–2, 145, 172 and religious enthusiasm, 137–9, 141 and the Bible, 98, 115, 116, 119, 126 and the divine, 67, 98, 133, 136, 137, 140, 142, 147, 156, 172, 195–6, 203 Summerfield, Geoffrey, 151 Sunday School Movement, 87 superstitions, 57–84; see also ghosts and alternative belief Biblical sanction of, 68, 71–3 and divination, 70–72 Will O’ the Whisp, 67, 74–6 Survivalism, 13, 200 Taylor, John, 1, 2, 6, 30, 43, 44, 45, 47–8, 77, 79, 80, 99, 100, 125, 223 testing of faith, 119, 124–5, 125, 170–71, 196, 189, 123 Thompson, E.P., 12, 38, 39, 40, 53–4, 87 Customs inCommon, 40 Thomson, James The Seasons, 143, 196n4 Thornton, Kelsey, 14, 162–3 Tibble, J.W. and Anne, 35, 48 tithes, 17, 24–5, 25n40 Todd, Janet, 2n4, 123, 151, 167, 205 Toleration Bill, 38 Twopenny, Richard, 29 Vagrancy Act (1824), 62, 65, 80 Vardy, Alan, 24, 40, 99 Vaughan, Henry, 96 ‘The World’, 164 ‘village faith’, 58–65, 77–9, 174 Weiskel, Thomas, 136 Wesley, John, 36, 45, 46, 61; see also Methodism Wesleyan Methodism, 41, 42, 50, 52, 54, 88, 95–6; see also Methodism White, Gilbert

254


The Natural History of Selborne, 98 Williams, Raymond, 13 Wilson, Thomas Maxims of Piety and of Christianity, 95 wisdom and knowledge, 107, 110, 157, 192, 210 and God, 148–9, 166, 192, 224 Witch of Endor, 63

witchcraft, 2, 60, 61, 63–4, 63n23, 65, 81 Witchcraft Statute (1736), 61, 62n12, 80 Wordsworth, William, 82n88 Young, Edward Night Thoughts, 103 Žižek, Slavoj, 163

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