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    John Clare: Voice of Freedom
    John Clare: Voice of Freedom
    John Clare: Voice of Freedom
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    John Clare: Voice of Freedom

    By R.S Attack

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    John Clare (1793-1864) was born at a time of great social upheaval, just months after the beheading of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war with France which was to last till the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. He also lived through the upheavals of the land enclosure movement and agricultural revolution which changed the face of the countryside and the way of life in rural England.His father was a farm worker who managed to pay for his son’s schooling, though this was cut short as conditions worsened, but at least Clare had by then learnt to read and write so he could continue his own education, reading whatever books he could lay his hands on. At the age of sixteen he witnessed the social dislocation caused by the local enclosure Act and observed how the landscape was gradually transformed. Drawing on Clare’s writing, this extensively researched study gives the modern reader an appreciation of the divisive effects of these policies. Structured chronologically, this exploration of John Clare’s life highlights the socioeconomic and environmental aspects of his observations and includes his reports on an insidious revolution taking place in the English countryside. Parliament, dominated by landowners, authorised the enclosure of large tracts of common land by private acts without considering the effect on those who had enjoyed rights of use and pasturage for centuries. Land enclosures, and the improved agricultural techniques which this permitted, was important in increasing food production at a time when the population of England was growing rapidly. While additional work was initially provided for agricultural labourers in the fencing and walling needed, this was temporary. The introduction of new, labor saving machinery further reduced the opportunities for work. Insufficient attention, the author argues, has been given to the consequences. Those driven out of their homes in the country were left with no option but to migrate to the towns and sell their labour to whoever would pay for it. In effect, land enclosure created a market in land; landlessness created a market in labour. These are the foundations of our modern market economy. The author asserts that the harshness of the early years of the industrial revolution were the product of land enclosure which the welfare state has to some extent mitigated, although at the cost of creating a dependency culture in contrast to the sturdy independence of Clare’s parents’ generation of farm workers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherM-Y Books
    Release dateAug 8, 2012
    ISBN9780856833298
    John Clare: Voice of Freedom

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      Book preview

      John Clare - R.S Attack

      encouragement.

      ‘The means of reviving a language lie in the heart of the poet and upon

      his lips and between his fingers. The poet is the mediator between the

      creative power and the people. He is the wire that transmits the

      news of the world of spirit to the world of research …’¹

      KAHLIL GIBRAN

      Introduction

      THERE WAS no better contemporary than John Clare (1793-1864) to give the English a first-class and first-hand overview of their time and its momentous social and economic changes. These changes mostly adversely affected the mass of society consisting of those who lived and worked in the rural communities. According to one of his many biographers, David Powell, Clare ‘was an astute chronicler of provincial England at the dawn of the industrial revolution’. The industrial and agricultural revolutions both came about as a result of land enclosures and the gradual introduction of new labour-saving machines and devices. In agriculture and in the factories, these changes had the effect of causing a decline in the need for men’s labour at a time when population growth was accelerating.

      John Clare’s qualifications for this surveillance job were in the first instance a very adequate primary education in the vestry of his local church where he learnt to read and write. With these skills Clare became one of the best educated people for many miles around and possibly in the country. Having become well acquainted with all aspects of popular culture, including the oral tradition of popular songs and stories and ballads, he was the first documenter of such English folk material as village customs and pastimes, ballad singers and morris dancers. He has left us in his poetry, most notably The Parish, a vivid record of the rustic characters of his neighbourhood and the effects upon them of the social changes brought by the local Enclosure Act in 1809, at which point Clare was just sixteen. The Parish has been compared to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

      Robert Burns (1759-1796) and John Clare were both found at the plough by their muse, and Clare at practically every other job in agriculture. Who dares to suggest that mud on the boots interferes with the job of the poet except to give him less time in which to write. Mud was an element well known to men and women of all classes in those days and Clare, once asked ‘how he had contrived to write his pretty poetry’, replied that he had ‘kicked it out of the clods’.²

      Clare was widely read in natural history and was also a keen botanist who gleaned his highly specialised knowledge from ‘patient fieldwork’.³ This immersion in the natural world was to make him one of England’s foremost nature poets. He wrote as he felt – as part of his particular natural environment and not as an external observer. He was averse to cruel sports such as badger-baiting (see the extract from his poem ‘Badger’ on page 75) and the collecting of insect specimens, a practice which he termed ‘the fashionable folly to gibbet butter-flyes & strangle beetles’.⁴

      Clare lost his first love and muse, Mary Joyce, at the age of fifteen when he felt that her father did not consider him a suitable match for his daughter. This event affected him deeply and his poems on the subject are heart-stirring and heart-breaking. Patty ‘Martha’ Turner, whom he married in 1820, at the same time as the publication of his first volume of verse, Poems Descriptive, loved and cared for him faithfully and was in fact the real love of his life.

      His friends were such as the Turnill brothers, the sons of the Mayor of Stamford; Octavius Gilchrist, who had returned from Magdalen College, Oxford on the death of his father; Lord Radstock, whom Clare considered ‘one of his best’ friends; and Mrs Emmerson⁵ who had been introduced to him by Lord Radstock, together with Lord Milton and Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam, who were his well-meaning patrons. Mrs Marsh, the Bishop of Peterborough’s wife, was also a good friend. He visited London four times, the first in 1820 to see his publisher, John Taylor (who also published Keats), for the publication of Poems Descriptive. Whilst there he met others of the literati: artists and writers such as William Hazlitt, the literary critic, and Edward Rippingille, who also became a good friend. He met William Hilton who painted the portrait on the front of this book and which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

      As says David Powell, John Clare stands as a ‘self-educated genius’. It was this self-education that grew organically out of his own nature and unique situation and also produced his highly individual grammar and spelling. Certainly key poets such as John Clare by definition fashion their own language, as did Chaucer and Shakespeare. They arise at a time in history when their own particular voice seems to need to be heard. Language is always evolving in everyday use as people speak: accents change, different styles of expression arise and words come to mean something quite opposite to their original meaning. At any time the same word may mean one thing in one context and something else in another. In fact, Clare’s peculiar self-directed education produced his highly original and individual style of expression. He stood alone, and still does, as a self-made man who emerged naturally from his background with his own particular message for mankind.

      ‘Civil and natural history, the history of art and literature, must be

      explained from individual history, or must remain words …

      the true poem is the poet’s mind …’⁶

      RALPH WALDO EMERSON

      Youth

      1793 to 1820

      JOHN CLARE was born on 13th July in 1793 at Helpstone in Northamptonshire at the edge of the low, flat, marshy fens where the boundaries of the three counties of Rutland, Lincoln and Cambridge met. The rich soil had provided whatever was needed for human life for centuries. Clare was born six months after war was declared on England by the French Revolutionary government, in spite of Pitt the Younger’s efforts to avert it. In England the size of the

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