John Clare: The Peasant Poet
Posted by Pete on 13th Jul 2020
Today in 1793, John Clare was born in rural Northamptonshire. He emerged from a peasant world to become a national poet, and his poetry was marked by the worsening inequalities and injustices in Britain at the beginning of the industrial age.
"I am, as far as my politics reaches, ‘King and Country’ – no innovations in religion and government say I”
Hardly the words of a radical…
They belong to John Clare (1793-1864), the 'Northamptonshire Peasant Poet'.
Active when the industrial revolution was really starting to kick into gear, Clare’s been described as
"The greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced"
And, while Clare certainly didn’t see himself as a radical in the sense of Tom Paine or the Chartists, his life as a poet was an especially eloquent type of opposition to the violent changes being wrought against 19th century England by our ruling class.
It’s too often overlooked just how violent and destructive the industrial revolution was for the majority of people in Britain.
An overwhelmingly rural population was uprooted from villages lived in for centuries and thrown into dank and dangerous cities to work for dirt-cheap, making profits for fat-cat factory owners.
To feed these growing cities, an agricultural revolution was imposed on the countryside, including the forcible enclosure of common land, widespread deforestation, and draining of fens.
Food production rose, but small farmers were also driven off their land as the holdings of the established aristocracy grew and grew.
John Clare's political turn
Living through this hell as a peasant from Helpston in Northamptonshire, John Clare’s poetry acquired an inevitable political edge.
Gathered in collections like Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Rural Muse (1835), his works mourned the English peasant’s world which was being destroyed.
"O lead me onward to the loneliest shade,
The darkest place that quiet ever made,
Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold
And shut up green and open into gold."
Poems like The Shepherds Calendar and I Am! in effect condemned the greedy and violent industrialisation of Britain by cherishing a pre-industrial countryside and charting the bitter alienation being suffered by the peasantry, in this case John Clare himself.
On which point, it wasn’t just Clare’s poems, but the experience of publishing them which stands as his legacy on the more radical side of the 19 th century.
Tom Paine was a radical social reformer, often considered one of the founding fathers of the US.
Clare's fight against the establishment
A peasant in London, Clare often had to battle with his publishers over the exact text of his poems.
His snobbish, upper-class editors saw as 'errors' the spellings and grammar which were a proper and established part of Clare’s rural Northamptonshire dialect.
He did his very best to stand up to them, memorably writing that:
"Grammar in learning is like tyranny in government"
In these struggles to have his poems published as he wished, Clare was battling the elite effort to homogenise language in the British Isles during the 19 th century, whether he knew it or not.
The languages spoken for centuries by the masses, from Gaelic and Welsh to regional English variants like Clare’s from Northamptonshire, were being bulldozed from the top-down in an effort to regulate working-class culture in the British Isles (a process often linked to violent oppression by the state, as in Ireland).
Considered one of the greatest female poets of the 19th century, Christina Rossetti was opposed to slavery, animal cruelty and the prostitution of under-age girls.
Unlikely radicals
We should never forget that the 19 th century was one torn between violent change imposed by and for the elites on the one hand, and radical heroism which stood up for the people on the other.
The Peterloo martyrs challenged political plutocracy, the Irish Home Rule movement stood up to colonial domination.
John Clare would never fit unambiguously into this conflict. Like his fellow 19th century poet, Christina Rossetti, he did not identify as a radical or a revolutionary.
But his masterful poetry and his troubled life (he died in a Northampton asylum in 1864), navigating and contesting the layers of injustice inflicted on the people of the British Isles during the Victorian era, made a distinctive contribution to the archives of radicalism.
After all, it’s not just radicals who make radical history!