Both the urban and the country schools have left their mark on the work of the last important writer in the eighteenth-century tradition. George Crabbe was not a polished artist. The long bleak narratives of rural life which make up the greater part of his work are often written in a style as bare as a guide-book; but there is something compelling about them. The patient accuracy with which he observes the world, the unillusioned wisdom with which he judges it, make one listen to his words and forbid one to forget them.
LORD DAVID CECIL: The Heritage of English Literature (1983)
The son of a collector of the salt-tax, Crabbe was born in Aldeburgh. He was apprenticed to a doctor, started writing and published, aged twenty-one, Inebriety, a passionate and slightly derivative poem about the evils of drink. He began to practise medicine in Aldeburgh, but was determined to make a career of writing. The Candidate (1780), however, was not well received by the critics, and Crabbe applied for patronage to a number of celebrities. Edmund Burke finally rescued him from anonymity, received him into his house, introduced him to influential friends and helped him to take holy orders. He became domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, and while there published The Village (1783), his first great success and perhaps his finest poem. In the same year he married Sara Elmy, the ‘Mira’ of his poems. The Newspaper appeared in 1785, after which he published nothing for twenty-two years. This silence was due in part to immersion in domestic life and also to the failing health of his wife. He re-entered the literary scene with The Parish Register and Sir Eustace Grey, a poem of fifty-five eight-line stanzas that takes place in a madhouse. The Borough (1810), a poem in twenty-four letters, depicts the life of a country town (based on Aldeburgh), and includes sections on Ellen Orford (Letter XX) and Peter Grimes (Letter XXII) that form the basis of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945). Tales in Verse followed in 1812. When his wife died in 1813, Crabbe moved away from Suffolk, became rector at Trowbridge, where he spent the rest of his life, renewed his contacts in London and was fêted by figures such as Thomas Moore and Scott. Like Coleridge, he had a taste for opium, which affected some of his later work, such as Tales of the Hall (1819).
Crabbe’s star has now waned, but in the nineteenth century he was a highly popular and greatly revered poet: Byron dubbed him ‘Nature’s sternest painter yet the best’; he was said to have been Jane Austen’s favourite poet; and Sir Walter Scott, a close friend, called him ‘The English Juvenal’. He was one of the first poets whose subject matter was almost exclusively the life of the poor and the destitute. Other poets and dramatists had turned to low life for comedy, but Crabbe depicted their life with great seriousness and a total lack of sentimentality: never once in The Borough or The Village does he give any overt expression of his own feelings. Much of his work is written in heroic couplets, which display little rhythmic variety and can be an obstacle for readers accustomed to the variety, elegance and wit of, say, Alexander Pope. But the best of his poetry displays a wonderful realism, a delight in nature description (he wrote – and destroyed – an authoritative book on botany), a loathing of greed, hypocrisy and cruelty, and an unsurpassed ability to tell a story.
Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,
His wife he cabin’d with him and his boy,
And seem’d that life laborious to enjoy:
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
He left his trade upon the Sabbath-day,
And took young Peter in his hand to pray:
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,
At first refused, then added his abuse:
His father’s love he scorn’d, his power defied,
But being drunk, wept sorely when he died.
Yes! then he wept, and to his mind there came
Much of his conduct, and he felt the shame, –
How he had oft the good old man reviled,
And never paid the duty of a child;
How, when the father in his Bible read,
He in contempt and anger left the shed:
‘It is the word of life,’ the parent cried;
– ‘This is the life itself,’ the boy replied;
And while old Peter in amazement stood,
Gave the hot spirit to his boiling blood: –
How he, with oath and furious speech, began
To prove his freedom and assert the man;
And when the parent check’d his impious rage,
How he had cursed the tyranny of age, –
Nay, once had dealt the sacrilegious blow
On his bare head, and laid his parent low;
The father groan’d – ‘If thou art old,’ said he,
‘And hast a son – thou wilt remember me:
Thy mother left me in a happy time,
Thou kill’dst not her – Heav’n spares the double crime.’
On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
This he revolved, and drank for his relief.
Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarr’d
From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
Hard that he could not every wish obey,
But must awhile relinquish ale and play;
Hard! that he could not his cards attend,
But must acquire the money he would spend.
With greedy eye, he look’d on all he saw,
He knew not justice, and he laugh’d at law;
On all he mark’d, he stretch’d his ready hand;
He fish’d by water, and he filch’d by land:
Oft in the night has Peter dropp’d his oar,
Fled from his boat and sought for prey on shore;
Oft up the hedge-row glided, on his back
Bearing the orchard’s produce in a sack,
Or farm-yard load, tugg’d fiercely from the stack;
And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose,
The more he look’d on all men as his foes.
He built a mud-wall’d hovel, where he kept
His various wealth, and there he oft-times slept;
But no success could please his cruel soul,
He wish’d for one to trouble and control;
He wanted some obedient boy to stand
And bear the blow of his outrageous hand;
And hoped to find in some propitious hour
A feeling creature subject to his power.
Peter had heard there were in London then, –
Still have they being! – workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturb’d by feelings just or kind,
Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind:
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.
Such Peter sought, and when a lad was found,
The sum was dealt him, and the slave was bound.
Some few in town observed in Peter’s trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woollen cap;
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges of his back behold,
None sought him shiv’ring in the winter’s cold;
None put the question, – ‘Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? – What, man! the lad must live:
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’
None reason’d thus – and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’1
Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root,
Here the dull nightshade hangs her deadly fruit:
On hills of dust the henbane’s faded green,
And pencil’d flower of sickly scent is seen;
Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,
Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume;
At the wall’s base the fiery nettle springs,
With fruit globose3 and fierce with poison’d stings;
In ev’ry chink delights the fern to grow,
With glossy leaf and tawny bloom below;
The few dull flowers that o’er the place are spread
Partake the nature of their fenny bed;
These, with our sea-weeds, rolling up and down,
Form the contracted Flora of our town.