A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

But of all modern English poets who have had an intimate personal connection with the medical profession, the greatest by far is Crabbe—

"Nature's sternest painter, yet the best."

In 1754 George Crabbe was born in the old sea-faring town of Aldborough, in the county of Suffolk. His father, the collector of salt-duties, or salt-master of the town, was a churlish sullen fellow at the best of times; but, falling upon adversity in his old days, he became the beau-ideal of a domestic tyrant. He was not, however, without his respectable points. Though a poor man, he did his best to educate his children above the ranks of the very poor. One of them became a thriving glazier in his native town; another went to sea, and became captain of a Liverpool slave-ship; and a third, also a sailor, met with strange vicissitudes—at one time enjoying a very considerable amount of prosperity, and then suffering penury and persecution. A studious and a delicate lad, George, the eldest of the party, was designed for some pursuit more adapted to his disposition and physical powers than the avocations of working mechanics, or the hard duties of the marine service. When quite a child, he had, amongst the inhabitants of Aldborough, a reputation for mental superiority that often did him good service. On one occasion he chanced to offend a playmate—his senior and "master," as boys and savages term it—and was on the point of receiving a good thrashing nigh the roaring waves of old ocean, when a third boy, a common acquaintance, exclaimed in a voice of affright:—

"Yar marn't middle a' him; lit him aloone—he ha' got l'arning."

The plea was admitted as a good one, and the future bard, taking his benefit of clergy, escaped the profanation of a drubbing.

George was sent to two respectable schools, the one at Bungay, in Suffolk, and the other (the better of the two) at Stowmarket, in the same county. The expense of such an education, even if it amounted to no more than £20 per annum, was no small undertaking for the salt-master of a fishing-village; for Aldborough—now a handsome and much frequented provincial watering-place—was in 1750 nothing better than a collection of huts, whose humble inhabitants possessed little stake in the commonweal beyond the right of sending to parliament two members to represent their interests and opinions. On leaving school, in his fourteenth year, George was apprenticed to a country doctor of a very rough sort, who plied his trade at Wickham Brook, a small village near Bury St. Edmunds. It is a fact worthy of note, as throwing some light on the state of the profession in the provinces, that the apprentice shared the bed of his master's stable-boy. At Wickham Brook, however, the lad did not remain long to endure such indignity. He was removed from that scene of trial, and placed under the tutelage of Mr. Page, a surgeon of Woodbridge, a gentleman of good connections and polite tastes, and through the marriage of his daughter with the late famous Alderman Wood, an ancestor of a learned judge, who is not more eminent as a lawyer than beloved as a man.

It was during his apprenticeship to Mr. Page of Woodbridge that Crabbe made his first important efforts in poetry, publishing, in the year 1772, some fugitive pieces in Wheble's Magazine, and in 1775 "Inebriety, a poem, in three parts. Ipswich: printed and sold by C. Punchard, bookseller, in the Butter-market." While at Woodbridge, too, his friend Levett, a young surgeon of the neighborhood, took him over to Framlingham, introducing him to the families of that picturesque old town. William Springall Levett was at that time engaged to Alethea Brereton, a lady who, under the nom de plume of "Eugenia Acton," wrote certain novels that created a sensation in their brief day. Amongst them were "Vicissitudes of Genteel Life," "The Microcosm," and "A Tale without a Title." The love-making of Mr. Levett and Miss Eugenia de Acton was put a stop to by the death of the former, in 1774. The following epitaph, transcribed from the History of Framlingham, the work of the able antiquarian, Mr. Richard Green, is interesting as one of Crabbe's earlier compositions.

"What! though no trophies peer above his dust,
Nor sculptured conquests deck his sober bust;
What! though no earthly thunders sound his name,
Death gives him conquest, and our sorrows fame!
One sigh reflection heaves, but shuns excess,
More should we mourn him, did we love him less."

Subsequently Miss Brereton married a gentleman named Lewis, engaged in extensive agricultural operations. However brief her literary reputation may have been, her pen did her good service; for, at a critical period of her husband's career, it brought her sums of much-needed money.

Mr. Levett's romance closed prematurely together with his life, but through him Crabbe first became acquainted with the lovely girl whom he loved through years of trial, and eventually made his wife. Sarah Elmy was the niece of John Tovell, yeoman, not gentleman—he would have scorned the title. Not that the worthy man was without pride of divers kinds, or that he did not hold himself to be a gentleman. He believed in the Tovells as being one of the most distinguished families of the country. A Tovell, by mere right of being a Tovell, could thrash more Frenchmen than any Englishman, not a Tovell, could. When the good man said, "I am nothing more than a plain yeoman," he never intended or expected any one to believe him, or to regard his words in any other light than as a playful protest against being deemed "a plain yeoman," or that modern hybrid, "a gentleman farmer."