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. The manuscripts of many of Clare’s most beautiful poems are written on the backs of old election flyers, letters from admirers, or anything at all. It was almost impossible, too, for someone in that position to read anything very much. His society was one of inconceivable ignorance: an acquaintance of his had a plan to become rich — ‘to beg a penny off each person he met. A penny per person is a trifle’, but ‘now let me see — suppose there’s 20,000 men in England Rich and Poor.’ Clare’s first poems were inspired by the example of the cheap ballads which his father, Parker Clare, seems to have liked, and, all through his early years, he fell upon any kind of book which came his way and absorbed it like a sponge — the inevitable Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress.