1832 Samuel Johnson, who helped Crabbe by suggesting a few emendations to his poetic sequence The Village (1783), got it about right. According to Boswell, he admired the work ‘for its sentiments as to the false notions of rustic happiness and virtue’. Or to put it another way, because it wasn’t Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), of which the following gives a flavour:
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain
That word ‘swain’ gives it away; this is a pastoral vision of the countryside, written by a city boy. (The word would recur ironically in The Village, where the ‘swains’, denied a livelihood on the land, have become smugglers.) By contrast to Goldsmith, George Crabbe was born poor in Suffolk and though no labourer, his training as a doctor and clergyman taught him to pay close attention to the realities of life around him.
He could see for himself that although the countryside abounded in ‘fruitful fields’ and ‘numerous flocks’, the country poor got little of it for themselves, let alone enjoyed ‘health and plenty’. In addition, he picked up a sharp sense of class difference from his three years as chaplain at Belvoir Castle, where the Duke of Rutland treated him kindly, encouraging his poetry, but the servants made fun of him as a rude provincial trying to rise above his station.
But Crabbe’s most astute perception was that sentimentality goes along with – in fact, is usually diagnostic of – cruelty. ‘Peter Grimes’ in The Borough (1810) traces the decline of a violent fisherman into homicide and madness through an almost documentarily objective point of view. Rather than attempt any suppositions about Grimes’ motives and other thought processes, the narrative works through his social and physical environment.
Grimes buys a series of boys from London workhouses to help out on his boat. He beats them, half starves them – in effect kills them through neglect and brutality. To all this the villagers pay scant attention until the third boy appears, ‘of manners soft and mild’, who the seamen’s wives fancy to be:
Of gentle blood, some noble sinner’s son,
Who had, belike, deceived some humble maid,
Whom he had first seduced, and then betray’d—
When this one goes missing, the town pays proper attention, and ‘the mayor himself with tone severe replied,— / “Henceforth with thee shall never boy abide”’. Losing his livelihood pushes Grimes over the edge. When he appears raving mad in the village, the people treat him as a Bedlam exhibit:
‘Look! Look!’ they cried; ‘his limbs with horror shake,
And as he grinds his teeth, what noise they make!’
Then Benjamin Britten re-imported the sentimentality in bucketloads, when his opera of the same name (1945) turned the protagonist into a misunderstood pederast.