Many reforms to better these conditions were proposed, mainly because the English Aristocracy had just seen in a sister nation what a desperate proletariat could do if pushed to extremes of misery. The reform that was adopted goes under the name of The Speenhamland System. In brief, it provided that if a laborer did not receive a certain minimum wage (which was set on a sliding scale to correspond to the price of wheat), he was to be given from the parish relief to make up the set amount. Nothing was done to force the employer to pay this minimum wage; and since he could depend upon the parish having to pay it, he seldom did give the laborer a living wage. The result was that those who were not already paupers speedily became so. The scheme was the culmination of a series of strokes that pauperized an already impoverished nation.
The laborer was separated from the land by the enclosures in a greater degree than can be readily realized. Before the industrial and agrarian revolutions, Arthur Young estimated that out of a population of 8,500,000, the agricultural portion was 2,800,000, or one-fourth of the total number. In the second decade of the nineteenth century the total number engaged of farms and dairies was 1,300,000: that is not half the actual number engaged in the century before; while the proportion had sunk from one person in four to one in twenty-five.
The main features of this land change were; the open field system was abolished; the plow and grazing lands were enclosed; small farms were consolidated into larger ones; new methods and machinery were introduced; and the laborer was separated from the land. It was in this change of rural conditions that the poet John Clare was born and reared—in Northamptonshire, which was a purely agricultural district and felt the misery and universal pauperization that went with the agrarian revolution.
PART II
The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)
John Clare was horn in the little village of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, in 1793. His family, one of the poorest in the village, was enrolled in the parish pauper list. When the poet was seven, his father by the greatest privations sent him to a certain “Dame-School”; but the money could not be spared to keep him there very long, and John was hired out to tend the geese and sheep on the commons. He saved up his few pennies during the next two or three years; and again, at the age of ten, went to school for a few months. This was all the formal education that the poet received; for at twelve he was already working regularly in the fields. With hardly strength enough for the slightest labor, so small and weak-armed that his father made him a special flail to thresh with, he must have endured sufferings of body and spirit those years.
When he was thirteen, the reading of Thomson’s “Seasons” led him to believe that he was a poet himself. He had already showed a poetic temperament: as a very young child he had set out one day to walk towards the horizon, that he might touch it. As he grew older he was unusually credulous of supernatural things, fancying all kinds of ghosts and goblins in the swamps ready to attack him. Then, when he read the “Seasons”, he scribbled down on a piece of paper the lines which were afterwards known as “The Morning Walk.” He wrote other verses on scraps of paper which he would stuff into a hole in the wall. When his mother would find them, she used them for lighting the fires. The poet showed some of his verses to a Mr. Thomas Porter living near Helpstone, and was advised to learn grammar. The attempt to do this kept him from writing any more poems for several years.
During these years, Clare engaged in various forms of day labor to support himself. For a time he worked among the gardeners in Burghley Park, where he acquired the habit of carousing and drinking. He ran away for a few months but after wandering about, went back home to work on a farm. Later he found work at a lime-kiln; where, though the work was hard, he found time to write half a dozen poems in the course of a day. It was at this time, in 1817, that he met Martha Turner, the “Patty” of some of his poems, whom he married after many hesitations and differences.
Between the meeting with Patty and his marriage, three years later, Clare became almost a beggar, and put down his name, as his father did, on the pauper list, claiming relief from the parish. The money he had saved when he worked at the line-kiln had been spent on the printing of a hundred copies of a prospectus, which he called: “Proposals for Publishing by Subscriptions a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Subjects, Religious and Moral, in Verse, by John Clare of Helpstone.” He intended to raise money on this subscription and get married. As the title might indicate, only seven subscribers could be found; and it seemed as if the poems would never be printed. But by good luck they fell into the hands of a Stamford bookseller called Drury, who sent them to London to his relative, Mr. Taylor, a prominent printer. Taylor saw the value of the poems, and announced them in the first issue of his new “London Magazine”. On January 16, 1820, he published the “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire Peasant.” He attached an introduction that was almost an appeal to charity.
The success of the poems was immediate. Praise came from the Quarterly Review that had attacked Keats. Madame Vestris recited some of the poems at Covent Gardens; Rossini set one of them to music. The poet was taken to London under the guidance of his editor, Mr. Taylor, who took him to theatres and dinner parties. There, because of his naive rusticity in dress, manner, and speech, he became as popular as his rural verses. At his first visit, he gained the friendship of two life-long friends, Lord Radstock and Mrs. Emmerson. Subscriptions were raised; the money was invested for him; and Clare found himself with an income of forty-five pounds a year.
On that amount the poet thought he could live without working. In the day he would wander about the commons writing poems; at night he sat in the inn-parlors receiving his admirers. In 1821 he brought out another book, “The Village Minstrel.” Gilchrist and Taylor had fought the battles of the first volume; but Gilchrist at this time was busily engaged in a literary battle between the editors of Pope and Byron and the Quarterly Review. This second volume of Clare’s was left neglected. The next year he made a second trip to London. The poet stayed there long enough to get acquainted with the taverns and gay theatres, and to fall in love with an actress and the young wife of a friend. He met Gifford and Murray, and supped with Lamb.