Native wood-notes wild

This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers for their own ends. This unusually tactful and sympathetic book tries, for once, not to claim Clare for any particular cause, but to see what he was trying to do in his own terms.

Clare came from the poorest of the agricultural classes, and indeed continued working as a labourer even when he had attained some literary celebrity. The Northamptonshire settlement where he grew up was feudally impoverished, with nothing much between the local marquess and the workers on the land. Everything was against such a background producing any kind of writer. On the simplest level, paper itself was expensive before the invention of woodchip paper later in the 19th century.