English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

(1781-1783)

Thus far I have followed the guidance of Crabbe's son and biographer, but there is much that is confused and incomplete in his narrative. The story of Crabbe's life, as told by the son, leaves us in much doubt as to the order of events in 1780-1781. The memorable letter to Burke was, as we have seen, without a date. The omission is not strange, for the letter was written by Crabbe in great anguish of mind, and was left by his own hand at Burke's door. The son, though he evidently obtained from his father most of the information he was afterwards to use, never extracted this date from him. He tells us that up to the time of his undertaking the Biography, he did not even know that the original of the letter was in existence. He also tells us that until he and his brother saw the letter they had little idea of the extreme poverty and anxiety which their father had experienced during his time in London. Obviously Crabbe himself had been reticent on the subject even with his own family. From the midsummer of 1780, when the "Journal to Mira" comes to an end, to the February or March of the following year, there is a blank in the Biography which the son was unable to fill. At the time the fragment of Diary closes, Crabbe was apparently at the very end of his resources. He had pawned all his personal property, his books and his surgical implements, and was still in debt. He had begged assistance from many of the leading statesmen of the hour without success. How did he contrive to exist between June 1780 and the early months of 1781?

The problem might never have been solved for us had it not been for the accidental publication, four years after the Biography appeared, of a second letter from Crabbe to Burke. In 1838, Sir Henry Bunbury, in an appendix to the Memoir and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer (Speaker of the House of Commons, and Shakspearian editor), printed a collection of miscellaneous letters from distinguished men in the possession of the Bunbury family. Among these is a letter of Crabbe to Burke, undated save as to the month, which is given as June 26th. The year, however, is obviously 1781, for the letter consists of further details of Crabbe's early life, not supplied in the earlier effusion. At the date of this second letter, Crabbe had been known to Burke three or four months. During that time Crabbe had been constantly seeing Burke, and with his help had been revising for the press the poem of The Library, which was published by Dodsley in this very month, June 1781. The first impression, accordingly, produced on us by the letter, is one of surprise that after so long a period of intimate association with Burke, Crabbe should still be writing in a tone of profound anxiety and discouragement as to his future prospects. According to the son's account of the situation, when Crabbe left Burke's house after their first meeting, "he was, in the common phrase, 'a made man'—from that hour." That short interview "entirely, and for ever, changed the nature of his worldly fortunes." This, in a sense, was undoubtedly true, though not perhaps as the writer meant. It is clear from the letter first printed by Sir Henry Bunbury, that up to the end of June 1781, Crabbe's future occupation in life was still unfixed, and that he was full of misgivings as to the means of earning a livelihood.

The letter is of great interest in many respects, but is too long to print as a whole in the text[[1]]. It throws light upon the blank space in Crabbe's history just now referred to. It tells the story of a period of humiliation and distress, concerning which it is easy to understand that even in the days of his fame and prosperity Crabbe may well have refrained from speaking with his children. After relating in full his early struggles as an imperfectly qualified country doctor, and his subsequent fortunes in London up to the day of his appeal to Burke, Crabbe proceeds—"It will perhaps be asked how I could live near twelve months a stranger in London; and coming without money, it is not to be supposed I was immediately credited. It is not; my support arose from another source. In the very early part of my life I contracted some acquaintance, which afterwards became a serious connection, with the niece of a Suffolk gentleman of large fortune. Her mother lives with her three daughters at Beccles; her income is but the interest of fifteen hundred pounds, which at her decease is to be divided betwixt her children. The brother makes her annual income about a hundred pounds; he is a rigid economist, and though I have the pleasure of his approbation, I have not the good fortune to obtain more, nor from a prudent man could I perhaps expect so much. But from the family at Beccles I have every mark of their attention, and every proof of their disinterested regard. They have from time to time supplied me with such sums as they could possibly spare, and that they have not done more arose from my concealing the severity of my situation, for I would not involve in my errors or misfortunes a very generous and very happy family by which I am received with unaffected sincerity, and where I am treated as a son by a mother who can have no prudential reason to rejoice that her daughter has formed such a connection. It is this family I lately visited, and by which I am pressed to return, for they know the necessity there is for me to live with the utmost frugality, and hopeless of my succeeding in town, they invite me to partake of their little fortune, and as I cannot mend my prospects, to avoid making them worse." The letter ends with an earnest appeal to Burke to help him to any honest occupation that may enable him to live without being a burden on the slender resources of Miss Elmy's family. Crabbe is full of gratitude for all that Burke has thus far done for him. He has helped him to complete and publish his poem, but Crabbe is evidently aware that poetry does not mean a livelihood, and that his future is as dark as ever. The letter is dated from Crabbe's old lodging with the Vickerys in Bishopsgate Street, and he had been lately staying with the Elmys at Beccles. He was not therefore as yet a visitor under Burke's roof. This was yet to come, with all the happy results that were to follow. It may still seem strange that all these details remained to be told to Burke four months after their acquaintance had begun. An explanation of this may be found in the autobiographical matter that Crabbe late in life supplied to the New Monthly Magazine in 1816. He there intimates that after Burke had generously assisted him in other ways, besides enabling him to publish The Library, the question had been discussed of Crabbe's future calling. "Mr. Crabbe was encouraged to lay open his views, past and present; to display whatever reading and acquirements he possessed, to explain the causes of his disappointments, and the cloudiness of his prospects; in short he concealed nothing from a friend so able to guide inexperience, and so willing to pardon inadvertency." Obviously it was in answer to such invitations from Burke that the letter of the 26th of June 1781 was written.

It was probably soon after the publication of The Library that Crabbe paid his first visit to Beaconsfield, and was welcomed as a guest by Burke's wife and her niece as cordially as by the statesman himself. Here he first met Charles James Fox and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through the latter soon became acquainted with Samuel Johnson, on whom he called in Bolt Court. Later in the year, when in London, Crabbe had lodgings hard by the Burkes in St. James's Place, and continued to be a frequent guest at their table, where he met other of Burke's distinguished friends, political and literary. Among these was Lord Chancellor Thurlow to whom Crabbe had appealed, without success, in his less fortunate days. On that occasion Thurlow had simply replied, in regard to the poems which Crabbe had enclosed, "that his avocations did not leave him leisure to read verses." To this Crabbe had been so unwise as to reply that it was one of a Lord Chancellor's functions to relieve merit in distress. But the good-natured Chancellor had not resented the impertinence, and now hearing afresh from Burke of his old petitioner, invited Crabbe to breakfast, and made him a generous apology. "The first poem you sent me, Sir," he said, "I ought to have noticed,—and I heartily forgive the second." At parting, Thurlow pressed a sealed packet containing a hundred pounds into Crabbe's hand, and assured him of further help when Crabbe should have taken Holy Orders.

For already, as the result of Burke's unceasing interest in his new friend, Crabbe's future calling had been decided. In the course of conversations at Beaconsfield Burke had discovered that his tastes and gifts pointed much more clearly towards divinity than to medicine. His special training for the office of a clergyman was of course deficient. He probably had no Greek, but he had mastered enough of Latin to read and quote the Latin poets. Moreover, his chief passion from early youth had been for botany, and the treatises on that subject were, in Crabbe's day, written in the language adopted in all scientific works. "It is most fortunate," said Burke, "that your father exerted himself to send you to that second school; without a little Latin we should have made nothing of you: now, I think we shall succeed." Moreover Crabbe had been a wide and discursive reader. "Mr. Crabbe," Burke told Reynolds, "appears to know something of every thing." As to his more serious qualifications for the profession, his natural piety, as shown in the diaries kept in his days of trial, was beyond doubt. He was well read in the Scriptures, and the example of a religious and much-tried mother had not been without its influence. There had been some dissipations of his earlier manhood, as his son admits, to repent of and to put away; but the growth of his character in all that was excellent was unimpeachable, and Burke was amply justified in recommending Crabbe as a candidate for orders to the Bishop of Norwich. He was ordained on the 21st of December 1781 to the curacy of his native town.

On arriving in Aldeburgh Crabbe once more set up housekeeping with a sister, as he had done in his less prosperous days as parish doctor. Sad changes had occurred in his old home during the two years of his absence. His mother had passed away after her many years of patient suffering, and his father's temper and habits were not the better for losing the wholesome restraints of her presence. But his attitude to his clergyman son was at once changed. He was proud of his reputation and his new-formed friends, and of the proofs he had given that the money spent on his education had not been thrown away. But, apart from the family pride in him, and that of Miss Elmy and other friends at Parham, Crabbe's reception by his former friends and neighbours in Aldeburgh was not of the kind he might have hoped to receive. He had left the place less than three years before, a half-trained and unappreciated practitioner in physic, to seek his fortune among strangers in London, with the forlornest hopes of success. Jealousy of his elevated position and improved fortunes set in with much severity. On the other hand, it was more than many could tolerate that the hedge-apothecary of old should be empowered to hold forth in a pulpit. Crabbe himself in later life admitted to his children that his treatment at the hands of his fellow-townsmen was markedly unkind. Even though he was happy in the improved relations with his own family, and in the renewed opportunities of frequent intercourse with Miss Elmy and the Tovells, Crabbe's position during the few months at Aldeburgh was far from agreeable. The religious influence, moreover, which he would naturally have wished to exercise in his new sphere would obviously suffer in consequence. The result was that in accordance with the assurances given him by Thurlow at their last meeting, Crabbe again laid his difficulties before the Chancellor. Thurlow quite reasonably replied that he could not form any opinion as to Crabbe's present situation—"still less upon the agreeableness of it"; and hinted that a somewhat longer period of probation was advisable before he selected Crabbe for preferment in the Church.

Other relief was however at hand, and once more through the watchful care of Burke. Crabbe received a letter from his faithful friend to the effect that he had mentioned his case to the Duke of Rutland, and that the Duke had offered him the post of domestic chaplain at Belvoir Castle, when he might be free from his engagements at Aldeburgh. That Burke should have ventured on this step is significant, both as regards the Duke and Duchess, and Crabbe. Crabbe's son remarks with truth that an appointment of the kind was unusual, "such situations in the mansions of that rank being commonly filled either by relations of the family itself, or by college acquaintances, or dependents recommended by political service and local attachment." Now Burke would certainly not have recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in his protégé any such defects of breeding or social tact as would have made his society distasteful to the Duke and Duchess. Burke, as we have seen, described him on their first acquaintance as having "the mind and feelings of a gentleman." Thurlow, it is true, after one of Crabbe's earlier interviews, had declared with an oath (more suo) that he was "as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen." But Thurlow was not merely jesting. He knew that Fielding's immortal clergyman had also the "mind and feelings of a gentleman," although his simplicity and ignorance of the world put him at many social disadvantages. It was probably the same obvious difference in Crabbe from the common type of nobleman's chaplain of that day which made Crabbe's position at Belvoir, as his son admits, full of difficulties. It is quite possible and even natural that the guests and visitors at the Castle did not always accept Crabbe's talents as making up for a certain want of polish—or even perhaps for a want of deference to their opinions in conversation. The "pampered menials" moreover would probably resent having "to say Amen" to a newly-discovered literary adventurer from the great metropolis.

In any case Crabbe's experience of a chaplain's life at Belvoir was not, by his son's admission, a happy one. "The numberless allusions," he writes, "to the nature of a literary dependent's existence in a great lord's house, which occur in my father's writings, and especially in the tale of The Patron, are, however, quite enough, to lead any one who knew his character and feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding the kindness and condescension of the Duke and Duchess themselves—which were, I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with gratitude—the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many painful circumstances, and productive in his mind of some of the acutest sensations of wounded pride that have ever been traced by any pen." It is not necessary to hold Crabbe himself entirely irresponsible for this result. His son, with a frankness that marks the Biography throughout, does not conceal that his father's temper, even in later life, was intolerant of contradiction, and he probably expressed his opinions before the guests at Belvoir with more vehemence than prudence. But if the rebuffs he met with were long remembered, they taught him something of value, and enlarged that stock of worldly wisdom so prominent in his later writings. In the story of The Patron, the young student living as the rich man's guest is advised by his father as to his behaviour with a fulness of detail obviously derived from Crabbe's own recollections of his early deficiencies:—

"Thou art Religion's advocate—take heed.
Hurt not the cause thy pleasure 'tis to plead;
With wine before thee, and with wits beside,
Do not in strength of reasoning powers confide;
What seems to thee convincing, certain, plain, They will deny and dare thee to maintain;
And thus will triumph o'er thy eager youth,
While thou wilt grieve for so disgracing truth.
With pain I've seen, these wrangling wits among,
Faith's weak defenders, passionate and young;
Weak thou art not, yet not enough on guard
Where wit and humour keep their watch and ward.
Men gay and noisy will o'erwhelm thy sense,
Then loudly laugh at Truth's and thy expense:
While the kind ladies will do all they can
To check their mirth, and cry 'The good young man!'"