Clare John - John Clare By Himself

From his birth in Helpston in 1793 to his death in Northampton in 1864, except for four visits to London, some months in Epping Forest and his years in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, John Clare never travelled more than a few miles from his native village. He lived at first under the same roof as his parents in Helpston, moved to another cottage in Northborough only a few miles away in 1832, and then from 1841 spent the remainder of his life in Northampton.

Clares life-story is told against the background of a particular landscape with its fens, its heaths, its sheep-pastures and its villages and market-towns. (It is significant that Clare uses the word town to denote any settlement, however small.) He talks of Will-o-the-wisps (or Jenny burnt-arses), of ghosts and poachers, of spires peeping over stiles, of bird-haunted thickets, of lonely farms, and of the threshers, gleaners and weeders in his native fields. The skies of the Fens always overshadowed him, and there is no writer from whom one gets a better sense of an unbroken horizon or of the scarlet flames of sunset and sunrise. In this landscape he breathed freely: once he left it, he felt suffocated and began to lose touch with reality. He speaks constantly of the lordship, the area under the control of the lord of the manor, or of his world, the locality with which he was familiar. It is not uncommon to this day to find on the edge of English towns a pub called The Worlds End, as though when one reached the boundary of a familiar settlement one dropped over the edge of the horizon. Clares sense of identity is intimately involved with his awareness of his birthplace and of all the living things that he remarked within his locality:

I lovd the meadow lake with its fl[a]gs and long purples crowding the waters edge I listend with delights to hear the wind whisper among the feather topt reeds and to see the taper bulrush nodding in gentle curves to the rippling water and

The Tibbles, in their edition of Clares prose, speak of the Sketches as

the enchanting account of a vanished English childhood and youth, far away from, while yet contemporary with, the French terror and the Napoleonic Wars an account of a country childhood during one of the hardest periods of Enclosure , when rustic activities and customs, now swept away for ever, were still in full swing.

In fact the Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, and even Enclosure are so far removed from Clares preoccupations that they only appear on the scene as part of a local experience in the POW camp at Norman Cross, in the strange antics of the militia, and in the inconvenience of fences. This is the world seen through the wrong end of the telescope but filled with its own strange intensity . In the London episodes, the great wander across the scene Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence and others or Byron, Clares hero, is seen through the eyes of a poor sailor, but most of the characters are purely local. Granny Bains, John Cue of Ufford, old Shepherd Newman, John Billings, George Cousins: these are people who but for Clare would have been entirely forgotten. They and their countryside become the setting for Clares Paradise.

He tells us much about the people of the hardships suffered by poor men, their humiliations and their sense of oppression, but also of their joys, their festivities and their songs. Sometimes, as in his Apology for the Poor, one hears his honest anger:

now if the poor mans chance at these meetings is any thing better then being a sort of foot cushion for the benefit of others I shall be exceedingly happy to hear but as it is I much fear it as the poor mans lot seems to have been so long remembered as to be entirely forgotten

or when he speaks of one rude visitor:

he then asked me some insulting libertys respecting my first acquaintance with Patty and said he understood that in this country the lower orders made their courtship in barns and pig styes and asked wether I did I felt very vext and said that it might be the custom of high orders for aught I knew as experience made fools wise in most matters but I assured him he was very wrong respecting that custom among the lower orders here

Since PiersPlowman there has hardly been an authoritative voice in English literature to speak for the ploughmen, the threshers, the hedgers, shepherds, woodmen and horse-keepers, until Clare began to write. Robert Bloomfield is perhaps the nearest. The farmer-journalist William Cobbett is heard loud and clear, and so, at a later date, is the gamekeeper Richard Jefferies. Joseph Ashby of Tysoe is nearer to Clare in social status, but none of these is his equal. As Edmund Blunden said, Clares autobiographical writings contain

fresh information on the early life and thoughts of a poet of the purest kind: originality of judgment, bold honesty; illuminating and otherwise unobtainable observations on intimate village life in England between 1793 and 1821; a good narrative nearly as good as Bunyan and plenty of picturesque expression. It will be a long time before a voice again speaks from a cottage window with this power over ideas and over language.

The people of Clares autobiography Will Farrow, the cobbler; Hopkinson, one of that increasing number of clerical magistrates who posed a special problem on the bench by their mixing of law and morality; Henson the bookseller and Ranter-preacher; the servants at Milton; the head-gardener at Burghley; the boy, John Turnill are as lively and individualized as characters from TheCanterburyTales, of which Clare was a great admirer. And when we move from individuals to meetings, ceremonies and occasions such as religious holidays, singing and dancing with the gypsies, drilling with the militia or walking Vauxhall Gardens in London, there too all is light and colour, and we may well agree that the year was crowned with holidays.

Clare transformed the people and the fields they roamed by suffusing them with the glow of childhood for Clares autobiography is as remarkable a vision of childhood as the poems of Blake and Traherne. It is a deliberate vision of Eden before the Fall and a realistic appraisal of Eden after it. The Sketches are mostly representative of the former vision and the Autobiographical fragments increasingly reflect the latter as Clares disenchantment grew over the years. The Autobiographical fragments are much more openly critical of the middle classes, revealing Clares aversion to simpering misses and pompous magistrates, to pretentious militia officers and grasping farmers, to overbearing surveyors and interfering ministers.

Like other authors in the same vein, Clares language often has a strong proverbial quality: I was quite in the suds; Send him to Norberrey hedge corner to hear the wooden cuckoo sing; I was in that mixd multitude calld the batallion which they nick namd bum tools for what reason I cannot tell the light Company was calld light bobs and the granadeirs bacon bolters; I was now wearing into the sunshine; Another impertinent fellow of the Name of Ryde who occupys a situation which proves the old Farmers assertion that the vilest weeds are always found in the richest soil. Indeed the same forcefulness of language runs throughout Clares prose as one finds in the newspapers and almanacs of the day.