John Clare | Laboring-Class Poets Online

... at fourteen Clare was ready to be apprenticed. His parents tried to establish him first with a local cobbler and then with a stonemason, but Clare shied away from both occupations. Instead he worked as a ploughboy for Mrs Bellairs at Woodcroft Castle and then in May 1809 was hired for a year by Francis Gregory, the proprietor of the Blue Bell inn next door to his home. At the end of that job he was apprenticed as a garden-boy at Burghley House but ran away with his foreman, George Cousins, to get similar work in Newark. Then followed a series of jobs as labourer, gardener, and lime-burner in his locality. An early attempt to become a lawyer's clerk in Wisbech was doomed to failure, though Clare was sufficiently literate for the work. Finally, the Napoleonic wars caught up with him and he enlisted, along with a neighbour's son, W. Clarke, in the Northamptonshire militia and was stationed at Oundle. He was, by his own account, a poor soldier, and was at home again by May 1813. (ODNB)

Began working at age:

Disability and Illness:

depression

mental illness

other illness

Disability and Illness Description:

Clare spent his later years in asylums in Epping Forest and Northampton. At various times, he may have suffered from epilepsy, depression, sleeplessness, nightmares, and venereal disease; he suffered from delusions and at different times imagined himself to be "Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Lord Nelson, and Ben Caunt, the prize-fighter" (ODNB).

Politics and Religion

Religion:

Church of England

Education

Education Types:

Dame school

Self-taught (autodidact)

Vestry school

"Parker Clare could read a little in the Bible, but his wife was wholly illiterate. Both were none the less anxious that their son should have schooling, and so he was sent, in the down-times of the agricultural year, to Mrs Bullimore's dame-school in Helpston, and later to the vestry school in Glinton run first by a Mr Seaton, and later by James Merrishaw." (ODNB)

References and Sources

References and Sources:

Biblio Texts:

159-168

25-78

121-42

137-42

261-4

61-7

84-5

251-8

nos. 152-153a

item 19

III, 79

47-52

148-71

203 (numerous manuscripts and letters)

Other Digital References:

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The John Clare Page

John Clare Resource Page

John Clare Weblog

John Clare Society Journal and Newsletter

Other Analog References:

The standard modern edition is the nine-volume Clarendon Press edition (1984-2003), ed Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson; there are also good selections available from Oxford, Penguin, Faber, Carcanet, Everyman, and several other imprints.

The standard biography is Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003); see also John Clare: By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996).

Major studies of Clare include:

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (London: Cambridge, University Press 1972)
George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983)
Tim Chilcott, ‘a real world and doubting mind’: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare (Hull: Hull University Press, 1985)
Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987)
Ronald Blythe, Talking About John Clare (Nottingham: Trent Books, 1999, revised and extended as At Helpston, Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2011)
Paul Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Mina Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009)
Sarah Houghton-Walker, John Clare’s Religion (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)
John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2015)
Stephanie Weiner, Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Sarah Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015)
John Goodridge and R.K.R. Thornton, John Clare, The Trespasser (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2016)

Essay collections include:

Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (eds), John Clare in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
John Goodridge (ed), The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition (Helpston: The John Clare Society, 1994)
John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi (eds), John Clare: New Approaches (Helpston: The John Clare Society, 2000)
Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron (eds), New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Selected creative responses to Clare include:

Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex’ (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), and associated film and book by Andrew Kötting, By Our Selves (2015)
Robert Hamberger, Heading North: John Clare’s Journey out of Essex (Pilton, Somerset: Flarestack Poetry, 2007)
Carry Akroyd, ‘of natures powers & spells’: Landscape Change, John Clare and Me (Peterborough: Langford Press, 2009)
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009)
Judith Allnatt, The Poet’s Wife (London: Transworld, 2010)
Hugh Lupton, The Ballad of John Clare (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2010)
Jeanette Lynes, Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems (Hamilton, Ontario: Wolsak and Wynn, 2015)
See also the Clare images by Carry Akroyd (www.carryakroyd.co.uk).

John Clare's Publications

Title	Publication Date	Publisher	Other Editions	Editor	Patron	Dialect	Digitized or Digital Editions
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery	1820	Taylor & Hessey, E. Drury	Edition: 4 Publication Date: 1821 Other Information: "Clare's first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published by Taylor and Hessey in 1820 and reached a fourth edition in 1821, largely owing to the efforts of William Waldegrave, first Baron Radstock, and his evangelical friend Mrs Eliza Emmerson." (ODNB)	John Taylor (1781-1864)	William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock, Eliza Emmerson	Northamptonshire	Archive.org
The Village Minstrel	1821	Taylor & Hessey		John Taylor (1781-1864)		Northamptonshire	Google Books
The Shepherd’s Calendar ; with village stories, and other poems	1827	John Taylor		John Taylor (1781-1864)		Northamptonshire	Archive.org
The Rural Muse	1835	G. & W. B. Whittaker				Northamptonshire	Archive.org

Personal Map

Relationships

Source	Relationship Type	Target	Description	View
James Dacres Devlin	supported, addressed writing to	John Clare	Simon Kövesi has traced Devlin’s notable role in the 1841 campaign to raise support and funding for John Clare, then languishing in an asylum in High Beach, through a series of essays and poems pub. in the English Journal. Kövesi reproduces the poem, ‘A Reflection, on reading the appeal, in behalf of the poet John Clare in the “English Journal” May 15’ (first printed in the Journal, 1, no. 23, 5 June 1841), along with its extended footnote comparing Clare with Robert Burns, Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Chatterton.	View
William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock	patronized	John Clare		View
Eliza Emmerson	patronized	John Clare		View
John Clare	knew	Charles Lamb	Clare "had attended [John] Taylor's soirées, met Coleridge, Hazlitt, Cunningham, Lamb, Cary, and other important literary figures. He had become the drinking companion of E. V. Rippingille, the painter, and had visited several of the great artists of the day. He corresponded with George Darley, Thomas Pringle, James Montgomery, Sir Charles Elton, and others." (ODNB)	View
John Clare	knew	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	Clare "had attended [John] Taylor's soirées, met Coleridge, Hazlitt, Cunningham, Lamb, Cary, and other important literary figures. He had become the drinking companion of E. V. Rippingille, the painter, and had visited several of the great artists of the day. He corresponded with George Darley, Thomas Pringle, James Montgomery, Sir Charles Elton, and others." (ODNB)	View
Allan Cunningham	friends with	John Clare		View
T. Wright	addressed writing to	John Clare	Wright wrote a poem to John Clare in ‘Standard Habbie’ metre, in January 1821, ‘To the Helpstone Poet’ (‘Like Shakespeare, Clare, thou’rt Nature’s child’). He says in it that ‘like thee, I’ve not the art’.	View
Oliver Grindall	addressed writing to	John Clare	Grindall sent a verse-letter to John Clare, beginning "Bard of nature, thee I greet" on 10 February 1821, and wrote to him again on 16 October 1821. These letters are in BL Egerton MS 2245, ff. 283, 370.	View
Robert Bloomfield	read	John Clare	"Bloomfield found some happiness in the final year of his life through a reawakened interest in John Clare's poetry" (ODNB)	View
Edward Bailey Preston	corresponded with	John Clare		View
Allan Cunningham	friends with	John Clare		View
Thomas Pringle	read by, corresponded with, collaborated with	John Clare	Pringle published Clare's poems in the annual Friendship's Offering, which he edited. Clare owned Pringle's Ephemerides or Occasional Poems, written in Scotland and South Africa (London, 1828).	View