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.
The freedom and gaiety of London had done Clare no good when he came back
to Helpstone; the trip had merely made him discontented and lonely.
However, he wrote verses copiously and tried to make better bargains in
selling them. He was not successful at this, and the little money he had
soon dwindled away. Stinting himself in food that his ever increasing
family and old parents might have enough to eat, he became seriously ill.
He went to London again, and receiving medical aid, became better
rapidly.
On this visit, he met all the leading literary men as they gathered for
dinner parties at the home of the editor, Taylor. Mr. Martin, Clare’s
biographer, gives the poet’s naive reaction to the “Lions” on the times.
Like a child he sat spell-bound listening to their talk, while he felt
keenly a disappointment that they were not as he had imagined them in his
day-dreams. At such parties he met Hazlitt, Reynolds, Coleridge, Lamb,
Cary, the translator of Dante, and many others notables.
As soon as he was strong enough and had returned to Helpstone, he got a
job digging ditches and draining marshes; but he was too weak to do the
work. Sickness, poverty, cares, came faster and faster. His thoughts
naturally came to him in verse; but the circumstances of his life
prevented him from developing to the extent he otherwise might.
Sometimes his poverty and his cares, sometimes drink, sometimes
starvation, prevented him from writing at all. Out under the open sky he
felt free. “There was a favorite spot where he delighted to sit, and
where the hallowed vein of poetry flowed freely. This spot was the
hollow oak on the border of Helpstone heath, called Lea Close Oak. Few
human beings ever came to this place; inside this oak the poet used to
sit for hours in silent meditations, forgetting everything about him and
unmindful of the waning day and the mantle of darkness falling over the
earth.” (Martin’s “Life of John Clare.”)
A few years of prosperity relieved the ever-oppressed, poverty-cramped
life of the poet. During these few years there was scarcely a wish left
unfulfilled, save the one of wanting a strip of earth and to be king of
his own land. A poor crop and more sickness brought him back into the
dire want of his former years. The Earl Fitzwilliam gave him a few acres
of land and a small cottage; but the change from the spot where he had
always lived was more than he could bear, and signs of approaching
insanity became more noticeable. The Earl proposed to send him to an
asylum, since it was decided that the poet had lost his mind. Mr. Taylor
with some interested friends arranged to send him to a private asylum
managed by a Dr. Allen, at High Bridge. Homesickness for his wife and
children made him run away, after he had been at High Bridge for four
years, treated with the utmost kindness. His experiences on this
journey, as described afterwards in a letter, were of the most pathetic
kind. For ninety hours he had nothing to eat, save a few tobacco crumbs
he had found in his pocket and the green grass by the roadside. Dying on
the road from hunger, with bruised and bleeding feet, he was picked up on
the roadside by his wife. Two county physicians came and signed the
certificate that was to shut him up in the Northamptonshire Insane Asylum
for the remaining twenty-two years of his life.
At this place Clare was treated with the utmost respect. The officials
placed him in a ward with the private patients, paying honor to him as
well as to themselves by recognizing the poet in the pauper. In a recess
in one of the big windows, he spent the greater part of the years,
writing and thinking. When he became very weak and infirm, he was
wheeled about in the gardens. On Friday May 20, 1864 he died. The
superintendent of the asylum wrote to the Earl Fitzwilliam for the small
sum necessary to carry out the wish of the poet that he be buried in his
native soil. The Earl refused; but some kind friends raised the sum.
Clare now lies under a broad sycamore tree in the little cemetery of
Helpstone, “with nothing above but the green grass and the eternal vault
of heaven.”