John Clare A Literary Life

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John Williams Peter Shillingsburg

MARY SHELLEY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Michael O’Neill David Wykes
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY EVELYN WAUGH
Gary Waller John Mepham
EDMUND SPENSER VIRGINIA WOOLF
Tony Sharpe John Williams
WALLACE STEVENS WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Joseph McMinn Alasdair D. F. Macrae
JONATHAN SWIFT W. B. YEATS
Leonée Ormond
ALFRED TENNYSON

Literary Lives
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John Clare
A Literary Life

Roger Sales
Professor of English
School of English and American Studies
University of East Anglia
sales/97847/crc 6/11/01 11:52 am Page 4

© Roger Sales 2002

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Good Angels be my Guard:
For Sarah and Adrian
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Textual Note and Chronology xii

1. A Cage Glass All Round: Dilettante Patrons and Literary

Philanthropists 1
Mistaken identities 1
Marketable articles 8
The patron’s text 17
Cockneys and peasants 24
2. That Man I Would Have Him To Be: Public Relations
and Peasant Poetry 30
Hot blood 30
London fields 34
The squawk of flattery 49
Good Old Chuckey 66
3. The Importance of Being Earnest: Manly Artisans
and Sincere Sages 76
Our own daily realities 76
All you would wish a poor man to be 88
A backbone of personal experience 94
Missed opportunities 97
4. High, Flighty and Frolicsome: Mad Poets and
Moral Managers 102
Life sentences 102
Scraps of poetry 104
Prying and watching 117
Mischievous children 126
5. A Government Prison where Harmless People are
Trapped: Regency Poets and Victorian Asylums 130
Fight club 130
Boxer Byron 144
To Peterborough Station 158

Notes 164
Further Reading 187
Index 190

vii
Acknowledgements

I am grateful once again to Janet Todd, herself the author of a book on

Clare, for her encouragement and example as far as my own writing of
literary and cultural history is concerned. The pleasure of writing this
book has been mixed with great sadness at the untimely death of Roger
Pipe-Fowler, a close friend and an exemplary colleague who gave me
(and many others) so much good advice over the years. Past colleagues
who have influenced my work on literature and history include David
Aers, Ros Ballaster, Sarah Beckwith, David Lawton, George MacLennan
(who has written well on Clare and madness) and Philip O’Neill. For
this book I am also grateful to Roger Cooter and Tim Marshall, who
gave me some valuable help with medical histories, and to Robert Clark
for discussions of the literary history of the Regency period.
A number of those in what is becoming known as the Clare commu-
nity have helped me in matters great and small and I am very grateful
to them. I acknowledge individual debts to them and others in some of
the endnotes. It will be seen there that some Clare scholars are gener-
ous almost to a fault in sharing the fruits of their own labours.
Jan Fergus’s volume on Jane Austen in this series has been a model and
very often an inspiration. Other Austen specialists who have helped
me to understand this period better include Claudia L. Johnson and
Anne K. Mellor. Editors who have recently asked me write on the
Regency and early Victorian periods include Kate Campbell, Deidre
Lynch, Judy Simons and Frances Wilson. Journals such as Albion and
Literature and History have also kept me up to scratch with requests for
reviews of books about the Regency period.
The endnotes give details of the archives that I have visited and I need
to thank all those who have helped me with this material. In addition to
the Clare collections at Northampton and Peterborough as well as
archives in London, I have worked in libraries at Aberdeen, Chelmsford,
Lincoln, Manchester, Matlock, Sheffield, Stamford and York. The rest of
the research was done in the University Library at Cambridge which, as
always, provided an extremely supportive environment. I just wish, as
Clare once said about London, that we could creep a little closer to each
other. Perhaps we shall, although I suspect that I shall have to do all of
the creeping. Alex Noel-Tod, the subject specialist librarian at East
Anglia, has also been a help. I would like to thank my publishers and

ix
x Acknowledgements

various editors (Charmian Hearne and Eleanor Birne) for being very
patient, and my university for a period of study leave during which the
book was completed. My department kindly provided some extra funds
for travel expenses. A number of people were kind enough to help me
with my career when I had just started working on this book: Isobel
Armstrong, Elizabeth Bronfen, Richard Dutton, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll,
Kelvin Everest, Louis James, David Punter, Michael Robinson and Lorna
Sage. I am grateful to them (and feel a tremendous sense of both personal
and professional loss after Lorna’s death earlier in the year). I am addi-
tionally much indebted to Richard Dutton who, as editor of this series,
has been extremely prompt in offering sound comments and advice. An
important and influential part of my career has been spent teaching in
Germany. In addition to Elizabeth Bronfen, I would like to thank yet
again Elfi Bettinger, Irmgard Maassen and Werner von Koppenfels for
their encouragement and support. It should go without saying, but
never quite does, that while I have received much help with this book
I alone remain responsible for its content.
With a bit of help from Mr Rochester, this book is dedicated with
love to all my good angels, particularly my sister Sarah and her family.
My mother, from whose house back in Yorkshire I was able to visit a lot
of the archives, helped me in so many different ways, not least because
she is herself one of the very best historians that I know. I also read
most of my microfilmed material while back there and would like to
thank the members of the staff of the Doncaster Public Library for their
help. I hope that my children, Will and Jess, will enjoy the book and
appreciate why I felt it was important to spend a number of years
thinking and writing about Clare. I am also grateful to Anne. I realised
it was probably time to finish off the book when I went a few rounds
late one night with a Regency boxer known as the Game Chicken, who
makes a brief appearance in the last chapter. It was a scary experience.
More seriously, I freely admit to having been disturbed at times when
doing some of the archive work on madness that appears in the second
part of the book and some readers may feel the same. It took me to
places and mental spaces that I sometimes wished I was not visiting. It
was however necessary to cover this area in archival depth since, with
important exceptions that are referenced in the argument itself, it was
one of the gaps in Clare criticism. Roy Porter’s work was very influential
here, and I am particularly grateful to him, as will become clear later.
I do not teach Clare on a regular basis, although the students over
the years who have taken my Nineteenth Century Underworld course
will recognise some of the material discussed here. I am grateful to all
 Acknowledgements xi

of them for making this course one of the high points in my teaching
career. I have always done a lot of team-teaching, which I enjoy, and
would like to thank my current partners: Kit Carver, Lynda Thompson
and Kate Webb. Graduate students and others with whom I have
discussed this book include Antje Blank, Graham Caveney, Victoria
Christie, Glen Creeber, Kate Drayton, Karen Harris, Penny Hender, Bill
Hughes, Mia Madey and Himansu Mohapatra. I am also grateful to
Allan Lloyd-Smith. Perhaps this crazy gang can all meet at the Poets
and Peasants Café Bar in Norwich when the book is published.
Textual Note and Chronology

The following abbreviations have been used to make it easier to supply

in-text references and shorter endnotes:

AW John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1986), Eric Robinson (ed.)
B Byron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Jerome J.
McGann (ed.)
BH John Clare By Himself (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), Eric Robinson
and David Powell (eds.)
CH Clare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1973), Mark Storey (ed.)
EG Egerton Manuscripts, Letters Addressed to John Clare, British
Library, 6 vols, 2245–50
EP The Early Poems of John Clare 1804–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989), 2 vols, Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds.)
LJC The Letters of John Clare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Mark
Storey (ed.)
LP The Later Poems of John Clare 1837–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), 2 vols, Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds.)
MP John Clare Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), 2 vols, Eric Robinson et al. (eds.)

All quotations throughout abide by what I and my publishers understand

to be the accepted guidelines for fair dealing in respect of research and
criticism. Most quotations from nineteenth-century newspapers and
periodicals are provided with in-text references. The endnotes are pri-
marily concerned to identify the sources for quotations: full publica-
tion details are given on first citation and thereafter abbreviations are
used. There are, however, some fuller, more descriptive notes particu-
larly in relation to social and cultural history. The notes to the last
chapter, which deals with Byron, also tend towards the full and
descriptive simply because so much has been written about him. As
will become clear, I am mainly concerned to identify the particular
nature of Clare’s ambiguous relationship with him. I found, however,
that in order to do this there had to be some more free-standing work
on Byron and the Byronic. I have also more occasionally thought it
appropriate to show other Clare specialists which sources I am using,

xii
 Textual Note and Chronology xiii

even though a book like this is obviously not intended to be a schol-

arly monograph aimed primarily at them but, rather, at students and
general readers. I very much hope nevertheless that, as they have
worked in some of the same archives as me, I have managed to give
them a reasonably good sense of the research base for some of my
arguments within the confines of a book like this. My third and fourth
chapters on the early Victorian period introduce some archive material
that may not be so familiar to Clare specialists.
This is my third book on Regency England, the others being English
Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (1983) and Jane
Austen and Representations of Regency England (1994/6). The first of these
includes a chapter on Clare which relates his versions of pastoral to
those by writers such as William Cobbett, George Crabbe and William
Wordsworth. It helped to establish an agenda about Clare’s politics. I
did not want, however, to repeat these arguments and was drawn back
to writing about Clare in order to develop some different ones. First,
and probably foremost, I wanted to suggest that the six volumes of let-
ters addressed to Clare, when cross-referenced with his own letters, are
one of the major, central sources for the literary history of this period.
This has not been fully recognised because Clare still has a reputation
as being a marginal figure. Mark Storey has published some of these
letters addressed to Clare in editions listed above. There is still a need
for an edition of them. It would be of great value to all students of this
period, even if they are not particularly interested in Clare himself. I
quote as much as possible in a book of this length from these letters to
try to establish their importance.
My second main objective was to suggest that the term Regency
needs to have a wider currency in Clare studies. Technically, this was
the period from 1811 to 1820. I have nevertheless adopted a broader
definition which sees the period as running from the 1790s through to
the 1820s. I relate Clare’s work and its reception to the Regency period,
and then to the cultural shifts that took place as it was replaced by
early Victorian mentalities. Clare has not been well served, as James
McKusick and others have noticed, by literary histories that privilege
Romanticism as the key term, particularly Wordsworthian or visionary
Romanticism. Conventional definitions of Romanticism have also, as
Anne K. Mellor and others have pointed out, helped to marginalise
important writings by women. I do not want to claim for a moment
that seeing Clare as a Regency writer solves all the problems about con-
textualising his work. I am strongly of the view, however, that the term
Regency is extremely useful in foregrounding his relationship with the
xiv Textual Note and Chronology

London Magazine. I have taken this to be a crucial part of his literary

life, suggesting that even the asylum writings and performances are still
dominated by the Regency agendas of this magazine. I suggest more
particularly that John Scott, the first editor of the London who had also
worked as a journalist in Stamford, needs to be seen as a significant
influence on Clare’s literary life.
A third objective was to place Clare’s literary life in contexts pro-
vided by other working-class writers. Clare was an agricultural labourer,
who eventually achieved some recognition as a published poet. Although
I am in part following up important work done here by John Goodridge
and others, my sense has always been that there are still some critics
who feel that Clare’s achievements are always in danger of being deval-
ued if there is too much discussion of minor and forgotten writers. His
reputation is thought to be best served by relating his work to that of,
say, Byron rather than to that of, say, Robert Bloomfield. My argument
throughout is that it is important to do both. I do not think that it is
possible to understand Clare’s literary life without looking in some
detail at the way in which other peasant-poets and artisan-poets, as
well as working-class Regency boxers, were constructed and marketed.
The point requires emphasis since, unless it is accepted, it might seem
at times that Clare is disappearing from this narrative of his literary
life. Yet the stories of these other figures are an important and indeed
vital way of understanding his own.
I have already indicated that a fourth starting point was the feeling
that there was more to be said about asylum culture and Clare’s place
within it. I reject quite emphatically the view that he was indeed mad
during the early asylum years and wonder just how sane the mad-doctors
might have been. If he did eventually go mad, then this was something
that was probably produced by asylum culture itself. Just as I tell the
stories of other working-class figures in order to illuminate Clare’s liter-
ary life, so I try to recover the lives of others who were deemed to be
mad. This is once again not to displace Clare himself from the narra-
tive but, on the contrary, to suggest that his experiences and writings
need to be read alongside other life stories. The fact that he may not
himself have known these stories is not at all relevant to the way in
which the argument proceeds.
I am using editions that reproduce Clare’s writings with his own
spellings, known as the Clarendon editions. This book would not have
been possible without these editions. When I first started working on
Clare, it was necessary to do a lot of raw archive work before important
literary and historical questions could even be posed. This is no longer
 Textual Note and Chronology xv

the case. Readers may initially experience some difficulty with some
quotations, but after a bit will get used to them, particularly if, as John
Lucas puts it, they read with the ear as well as with the eye. The edi-
tions in question are still expensive ones to be consulted in libraries by
most students. There are, however, a number of good selected editions
available for those who may just be embarking on a study of Clare, such
as Kelsey Thornton’s one in the Everyman Poets series and John
Goodridge’s one in the Wordsworth Poetry Library. There is a more sub-
stantial paperback edition, complete with scholarly notes, by Eric
Robinson and David Powell in the Oxford Authors series. This is the one
recommended for students who are doing detailed research on Clare.
It has not been possible in a book of this length to deal with all
aspects of this long literary life. I say relatively little about the way in
which Clare was edited during his lifetime as I regard this, and some of
the partisan responses that it provokes, as a bit of a blind alley. I never-
theless say enough at the end of the second chapter to give readers a
general sense of the arguments. I am a literary and cultural historian
rather than an editor, and felt that I could employ myself more usefully
elsewhere. Although I reference studies of Clare’s indebtedness to the
folk tradition, I concentrate on his relationships with more mainstream
literary culture (for instance, my work on the London Magazine and
Byron). Here I am following the lead of a number of younger Clare
scholars, who have made me realise just how literary Clare was in a per-
haps old-fashioned sense of the term. I had underestimated this in my
earlier work. This is not to deny the importance of the folk tradition,
and readers who are primarily interested in this aspect of Clare’s literary
life should consult the detailed and scholarly notes in the Clarendon
editions as well as important studies by George Deacon and others,
which as indicated are referenced in my argument. Very much prompted
by others, however, I just felt that it was time to tell a different story.
Lucas refers, as will be seen, to Clare’s great literary expectations,
pointing forward to Charles Dickens’s novel. Although a book like this
one needs to cover as much of the waterfront as possible, it also makes
sense to spend longer at some places on it than at others. My story
about Clare’s literary life is one about the way in which he was driven
by these great literary expectations which, given the class system then,
there was never any real hope of him fulfilling. He was first marketed
in 1820 as a Northamptonshire Peasant and could never shake off this
label or brandname despite the quality and quantity of his work: that
is the literary life in a nutshell. He was not able to join the literary
profession except in this very tokenistic, condescending way.
xvi Textual Note and Chronology

This may, at first glance, seem to be a bleak and depressing story. I

argue nevertheless, explicitly right at the end of the book and more
implicitly throughout, that the opposite may be the case. I see Clare as
a great survivor and suggest that this is why he has become such a
writer’s writer (something which is documented in the endnotes). He
wrote because he had to write: as simple and as complicated as that.
There was a relatively brief period in the early 1820s when his writing
reached an audience. There were also longer periods, when he first
started writing and then again during his imprisonment in lunatic asy-
lums from 1837 to 1864, when almost nobody seemed to be listening.
He just carried on writing, no matter whether there were readers or
not. This is not, then, a depressing literary life but rather in many ways
an uplifting one. It is about the pleasures, or to use one of Clare’s key-
words, the joy of writing. He uses the words joy or joys more than ten
times in a relatively short poem entitled ‘The Progress of Rhyme’. The
asylum poetry often tried to recover the pleasure of writing. The words
joy and joys occur over forty times in a relatively long poem such as
‘Child Harold’. Although it would be easy enough to represent Clare as
being a victim of snobbery and prejudice, I have chosen instead as indi-
cated to see him as a survivor. He is also a survivor in the sense that,
thanks to the diligence of his editors and others, his writings are more
widely known and appreciated now than those of many nineteenth-
century literary professionals. My book is about a survivor, as well as
being itself a part of this process of literary survival.
Clare was an extremely prolific writer, as the Clarendon editions
demonstrate. It has not been possible here to offer detailed readings of
the full range of his work. The openness of some of his texts also often
makes providing short quotations difficult. A literary life needs to
combine readings with biographical details, and yet it is primarily an
exercise in literary history rather than being a work of criticism or
biography. As Jonathan Bate will shortly be publishing a major new
biography of Clare, it was important to try to get the balance right so
that these two books could complement rather than overlap too much
with each other. I have therefore tried to place Clare in the literary
history of the Regency and earlier Victorians periods, relating this
as much as possible to a wider social and cultural history. I have con-
ducted biographical research, largely through the six volumes of letters
addressed to him, but this is still not a biography. I offer readings of
some of his poetry and prose, while remaining aware of how much
more could have been said about them. This is a literary life that is pri-
marily concerned with constructions of literary and social identities,