NEW ESSAYS ON JOHN CLARE JohnClare(1793–1864)haslongbeenrecognizedasoneofEngland’s foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam – a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himselfintoagrandliterarytradition.Allthewhilehemaintaineda determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare’s many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, RomanticandVictorian literary history, andthe nature ofwork. simon kövesi isProfessorofEnglishLiteratureatOxfordBrookes University. scott mceathron is Associate Professor of English at Southern IllinoisUniversity. NEW ESSAYS ON JOHN CLARE Poetry, Culture and Community Edited By SIMON KÖVESI OxfordBrookesUniversity and SCOTT MCEATHRON SouthernIllinoisUniversity UniversityPrintingHouse,Cambridgecb28bs,UnitedKingdom CambridgeUniversityPressispartoftheUniversityofCambridge. ItfurtherstheUniversity’smissionbydisseminatingknowledgeinthepursuitof education,learningandresearchatthehighestinternationallevelsofexcellence. www.cambridge.org Informationonthistitle:www.cambridge.org/9781107031111 ©CambridgeUniversityPress2015 Thispublicationisincopyright.Subjecttostatutoryexception andtotheprovisionsofrelevantcollectivelicensingagreements, noreproductionofanypartmaytakeplacewithoutthewritten permissionofCambridgeUniversityPress. Firstpublished2015 PrintedintheUnitedKingdombyClays,StIvesplc AcataloguerecordforthispublicationisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary LibraryofCongressCataloguinginPublicationdata NewessaysonJohnClare:poetry,cultureandcommunity/editedbySimonKövesi andScottMcEathron. pages cm Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. isbn978-1-107-03111-1(hardback) 1. Clare,John,1793–1864–Criticismandinterpretation. I. Kövesi,Simon, editor. II. McEathron,Scott, 1962–editor. pr4453.c6z84 2015 821′.7–dc23 2015008281 isbn978-1-107-03111-1Hardback CambridgeUniversityPresshasnoresponsibilityforthepersistenceoraccuracyof URLsforexternalorthird-partyinternetwebsitesreferredtointhispublication, anddoesnotguaranteethatanycontentonsuchwebsitesis,orwillremain, accurateorappropriate. Contents Notesoncontributors pagevii Acknowledgements x Listofabbreviations xi Introduction 1 SimonKӧvesiandScottMcEathron part i: poetry 15 1 JohnClare’scolours 17 FionaStafford 2 JohnClare,WilliamCowperandtheeighteenthcentury 38 AdamRounce 3 JohnClare’sconspiracy 57 SarahM.Zimmerman part ii: culture 77 4 JohnClareandthenewvarietiesofenclosure:apolemic 79 JohnBurnside 5 Ecologywithreligion:kinshipinJohnClare 97 EmmaMason 6 ThelivesofFrederickMartinandthefirstLifeofJohnClare 118 ScottMcEathron 7 JohnClare’sdeaths:poverty,educationandpoetry 146 SimonKövesi v vi Contents part iii: community 167 8 JohnClare’snaturalhistory 169 RobertHeyes 9 ‘Thisisradicalslang’:JohnClare,AdmiralLord RadstockandtheQueenCarolineaffair 189 SamWard 10 JohnClareandtheLondonMagazine 209 RichardCronin Selectbibliography 228 Index 239 Notes on contributors John Burnside teaches at the University of St Andrews. His poetry collections include Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread PoetryAward;andBlackCatBone,(2011)whichwonboththeForward and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2011, he received the Petrarca Preis for poetry. His novels include The Devil’s Footprints (2007), Glister (2008) and ASummerofDrowning(2011).Heisalsotheauthor oftwocollec- tionsofshortstories–BurningElvis(2000)andSomethingLikeHappy (2013),whichwastheSaltireSociety’sScottishBookoftheYear,aswell as the winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His memoirs to date include A Lie About My Father (2006), also a Saltire Book of the Year, andWakingUpinToytown(2010).JohnBurnside’slatestpoetrycollec- tionisAllOneBreath(2014).Anewprosebook,IPutASpellOnYou: Several Digressions On Love and Glamour, was recently published. He was writer in residence at the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst),Berlin,for2014–15. Richard Cronin is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University.HebeganhiscareerasaShelleyscholarbuthassubsequently writtenwidelyonnineteenth-centuryliterature.Hismostrecentbooks are Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824–1840; Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo; and Reading Victorian Poetry. With Dorothy McMillan he has edited Robert Browning for Twenty- FirstCenturyAuthors,andEmmaforCambridgeUniversityPress’snew edition of Austen’s work; he also co-edited a Companion to Victorian Poetry. He is currently working on a biography provisionally entitled GeorgeMeredith:ALifeinWriting. Robert Heyes was born and grew up in Lincolnshire, initially in Grantham and later in the villages of Metheringham and Scopwick. HisfirstdegreeswereinChemistry.Hisprofessionallifewasspentasa vii viii Notesoncontributors schoolteacher, mainly at a village primary school in Kent. Forty years ago he began to collect books and manuscripts by, and about, John Clare; eventually this resulted in what was probably the finest Clare collection in private hands. After taking early retirement, he began to disperse his collection, and the emphasis shifted from collecting to research.ThisresultedintheawardofaPhDfromtheEnglishdepart- mentatBirkbeckCollege,forathesisentitled‘LookingtoFuturity’:John Clare and Provincial Culture. He contributed an essay to John Clare: NewApproaches(2000)andhaspublishedessaysandbookreviewsinthe JohnClareSocietyJournal,EnglishandRomanticism.Formanyyearshe wasthebookrevieweditoroftheJohnClareSocietyJournal. Simon Kövesi is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University. He edited two prefatory collections of Clare’s poetry – Love Poems (1999) and Flower Poems (2001) – and, with John Goodridge,co-editedJohnClare:NewApproaches(2000).Hisstudyof the contemporary Glaswegian writer, James Kelman (2007), was short- listedfortheSaltireScottishFirstBookoftheYearAwardin2008.Heis editor of the John Clare Society Journal and has published essays on Clare,ecology,copyright,editingandRomanticliteraryculture. EmmaMasonisProfessorofEnglishandComparativeLiteraryStudiesat theUniversityofWarwick.HerpublicationsincludeElizabethJennings: The Collected Poems (2012); The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (CambridgeUniversityPress,2010);andWomenPoetsoftheNineteenth Century (2006). She is the editor of Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Re- thinkingReligionandLiterature(2014),anda‘newperspectives’issueof LaQuestioneRomanticaonWilliamWordsworth(withElenaSpandri; 2014).HerbookChristinaRossetti:PoetofGraceisforthcoming. Scott Mceathron is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University. He has written extensively on the relationship between labouring-classpoetryandcanonicalRomanticism,and,morerecently, haspublishedaseriesofessaysonRomantic-erapaintersandpaintings with links to Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats. He is the editor of English Labouring-Class Poetry, 1800–1830 (2006) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of thed’Urbervilles:ASourcebook(2005).Hiscurrentprojectsincludework onthenineteenth-centurylabouring-classelegyandonthetreatmentof labouring-classpoetsbytheRoyalLiteraryFund. Adam Rounce lectures at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers,