Transcribed from the 1922 University of Illinois edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
COUNTRY LIFE IN THE POETRY OF JOHN CLARE
BY
MILDRED M. COEN
* * * * *
THESIS
FOR THE
DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS
IN
ENGLISH
* * * * *
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
1922
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
_January_ 23, 1922
THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY
_Mildred M. Coen_
ENTITLED _Country Life In The Poetry of John Clare_
IS APPROVED BY ME AS FULFILLING THIS PART OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF
_Bachelor of Arts_
_Clarence Valentine Boyer_
Instructor in Charge
APPROVED [Picture: Unreadable signature]
HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF _English_
Table of Contents
PAGE
1. Part I Economic Conditions in the Time of John 1
Clare
2. Part II The Life of John Clare 7
3. Part III Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare 14
4. Bibliography 25
PART I
Economic Conditions in the Time of Clare
About forty years before the birth of the Poet Clare, (1793) there began
in England a land revolution which by the end of the eighteenth century
pauperized a great part of the rural population. Up until 1750 fully
half of the land of England was worked in “common”, or in accordance with
what was known as the open field system. This open field system means
that there were special fields set aside for plow land. These fields
were divided into very small strips which were alternately cultivated and
left unplowed. Besides this plow land, there was a definite area of
grazing land, known as the commons. With the coming of enclosures this
open field system was abolished. (By the term ‘enclosure’ is meant that
all the strips of any one man scattered throughout the holdings of the
village were given to him in equivalent in a single, consolidated
acreage, which he had to fence, ditch, etc. Or again, the term applies
to a large district, as very frequently the commons, that was fenced in
for the wealthy landowner’s sheep-pens.)
An enclosure began with a private bill introduced into Parliament—often
by a wealthy landlord. This bill, showing the advantages of enclosing,
was sent to a committee, whose leader or chairman might have been the
selfsame landlord who had proposed the bill. After being considered and
passed upon by the house of lords, which was in turn composed of wealthy
landowners only, the bill was put into the hands of a commission to be
executed. Such a commission, perhaps headed by the nobleman wanting the
enclosure, descended upon the district and distributed the land according
to their wishes.
Enclosures no doubt increased the national wealth immensely in the long
run. Of course, no modern system of farming could survive in which an
acre was divided into ten or more strips each with a different crop and
different owner. And modern methods were just then being introduced into
England, and were finding an obstacle in the old system that was almost
identical with the Anglo-Saxon system of a thousand years earlier. But
the change was too rapid and altered the character of the national life
of England to such a degree that it wrought untold hardships for more
than half a century. The people of the villages were robbed of the
barest means of making a living. Just as today the small manufacture has
no chance against the big one in his line, so then the small landowner
could not compete against the wealthy ones, especially since new and
expensive machinery and fertilizers were becoming more and more
essential. The wealthy landowners improved their estates so that they
might raise the rent and make a profit that could be compared to the
profit made by the fast-rising merchant aristocracy. The rent on these
improved farms was so high that the small farmer had to give up farming
altogether. The commons were enclosed and in a majority of the cases
went to the wealthy landowners who raised a better grade of sheep with
heavier wool on the pasturage thus afforded: but the small farmer and in
fact all the rest of the agricultural population did not have a place to
graze a cow. The small sum of money given them for the loss of their
rights in grazing stock on the commons and gathering wood from the waste,
was soon spent for the bare necessities of living; and when this was
spent, the economic independence of the laboring population was gone.
The enclosures were thus fatal to three classes of the rural population:
the small farmer, who had at most thirty acres; the cotter or cottager,
who had perhaps five; and the laborer who had less than that or none.
The process of enclosing their allottments after the consolidation
mentioned, was so expensive that it could not be borne except by a man
with some capital to start on. The man who was called upon by the
enclosing committee to promptly ditch and fence his little land, and who
could not do so, was compelled to sell at whatever price he could get.
The small farmer of thirty acres might possibly have borne this expense
but he received no adequate recompense for his rights of common; and such
advantages as he received from the consolidation of his thirty acres
could not make amends for the loss of common rights. For, without
pasture he could not keep sheep; with no sheep he could not fertilize his
land; without fertilizer the land soon wore out. The small farmer then
could emigrate to America, or go to an industrial town, or become a day
laborer. Thus it was that a small, independent farmer in a few years
became a laborer and in another few years was perhaps thrown upon parish
relief.
The effect upon the cottager can best be described by saying that before
the enclosures he was a laborer with land; and after the enclosure he was
a laborer without land. For the inability to fence and ditch his
holdings operated even more sternly in his case than in that of the small
farmer. A great part of the land, moreover, that was enclosed was turned
to pasture by the large owners, and the laborers formerly employed on it
were discharged. Where fifteen men farmed, one man herded. The cottager
and the laborer were thus made dependent on wages alone at a time when
competition for work was beating wages down to a starvation level. The
squatter was a poor alien on the land. He settled on the waste, built a
cottage, and got together a few geese, perhaps a cow and a horse; and
began to cultivate the land. With the coming of the enclosure he lost
his common right; and thus uprooted he could start on a wandering journey
of beggary.
Perhaps we can get an idea of the misery and universal wretchedness of
the rural population if we quote a few words from an eye-witness,
Cobbett, in his PARISH REGISTER:
“Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds; and the looks would
indicate that their food is not nearly the equal of that of a nig.
The wretched hovels are stuck upon little plots of ground by the
road-side where the space was wider than the road demanded. . . .
Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor
creatures digging up their little plots of potatoes. In my whole
life I never saw such wretchedness, not even among the plantation
negroes.”
The laborer, to keep from starving, often turned to poaching and petty
thievery. But the noblemen had their parks enclosed against trespassers.
Spring-guns were set up on the estates. Poaching offenses were made
punishable by death, or at the least by transportation to Australia. The
poor might seek charity from the parish pauper work-house. Or they might
starve.
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.