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Rural Life in English Poetry of the Mid-Eighteenth Century

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Rural Life in English Poetry of the Mid-Eighteenth Century Rural Life in English Poetry of the Mid-Eighteenth Century John Goodridge Thesis presented for the degree of Ph.D. University of Newcastle upon Tyne September 1990 For my mother, Gill Goodridge and in memory of my father, Frank Goodridge, 1924-1984 CONTENTS Abstract 5 Preface 6 Abbreviations 7 Conventions 8 Texts 8 Introduction 9 Part I. Hard Labour we most chearfully pursue: three poets on rural work (Thomson, Duck, Collier) 17 1. Introductory 18 i. The Seasons, The Thresher’s Labour, and The Woman’s Labour 18 ii. Poetry, labour and realism 24 2. Labour (1) 31 i. Going to work 31 ii. Haymaking 36 iii. Harvests 40 3. Labour (2) 48 i. Stephen Duck on threshing 48 ii. Mary Collier on charring 51 iii. James Thomson on shearing 55 4. Compensations 60 i. Respites 60 ii. Gleaning 63 iii. Charity 69 5. Homecomings 73 i. The cottage door 73 ii. Behind the cottage door 76 ii. The homecoming reversed 79 Notes 88 Part II. A pastoral convention and a ruminative mind: agricultural prescription in John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) 129 1. Introductory 130 i. Re-reading The Fleece 130 ii. Engagement and disengagement in mid-eighteenth century poetry 135 iii. The agricultural revolution 137 iv. The poet as researcher 141 v. Two models of agriculture 144 2. Variables (1) 148 i. Soil 148 ii. Clime 165 3. Variables (2) 169 i. Environments 169 ii. Mountains 173 iii. Lowlands 175 iv. ‘Siluria’ 182 4. The Care of Sheep 189 i. The art of preserving health 189 ii. The shepherd’s calendar 197 5. The Rewards of Labour 206 i. Winter feeding 206 ii. The shepherd’s harvest 211 Notes 224 Textual Note 279 Bibliography 282 ABSTRACT ‘Rural Life in English Poetry of the Mid-Eighteenth Century’ John Goodridge This thesis examines several mid-eighteenth century poems, assessing their portrayal of rural life, its literary and historical significance, and the aesthetic and ideological issues it presents. An introductory essay on developments in rural poetry sets the scene for two extended essays. The first essay is a comparative reading of the subject of rural labour in three poems: James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-44), Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730, 1736) and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739). The viewpoints of a professional poet (Thomson), a farm labourer (Duck), and a working woman (Collier) are compared in relation to kinds of work all three address as well as to individual labouring subjects. The responses of the three poets to such related issues as folk traditions, forms of charity and other ‘compensations’, are also compared. Some surprising similarities as well as instructive differences are located; and an interesting picture of idealistic and realistic, male- oriented and female-oriented attitudes to labour and labour-related themes emerges. The second essay analyses the subject of agricultural prescription in John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757). Drawing on interdisciplinary information, the essay makes a sequential reading of the first book of the poem, whose subject is ‘the care of sheep’. It traces the historical and poetic significance of Dyer’s advice on land use and environment, breeding and types of sheep, husbandry and veterinary practice. The poet’s theoretical models, his use of topography and of epic and pastoral, didactic and popular styles is examined. Dyer is found to make a substantial engagement with contemporary agricultural developments, but also to draw on idealising models of agricultural history and economic development, uniting the contrasting imperatives of the ‘practical’ and the ‘poetical’. Dyer’s belief that shepherding provided an important model for society; and his intense engagement with agriculture, inform a complex pattern of mixed motivations. PREFACE The study of eighteenth-century poetry has experienced major advances in the past decade, and the present work is offered as a small contribution to a much larger process of rediscovery and reassessment. Thousands of poems about rural life were written between 1700 and 1800, and I have chosen to look closely at a small number of examples, rather than embarking on a comprehensive survey. The poems I have selected for attention may be seen as representing wider trends, as well as being of individual interest. I have concentrated on the related themes of rural labour (Part I) and agricultural prescription (Part 2). Rural labour seems to me to have been the most important aspect of rural life in the period, for the rural population as well as for the more thoughtful of the poets; while agricultural prescription was a central preoccupation of the eighteenth century, one which tells us a great deal about the period and its psyche. The help and encouragement of others has been essential, and I would like to thank some of them here. My postgraduate supervisor Claire Lamont has constantly encouraged and helped me. My wife Alison Ramsden has read numerous drafts, checked many references and quotations, and supported me in too many other ways to catalogue. I am deeply grateful to both of them. I am fortunate in having a supportive family, and would like to thank Pete Goodridge for extensive help with agricultural and shepherding matters, Meggie Goodridge for help on textiles, and Gill Goodridge for help on ‘Dyer’s Workhouse’, and with checking references. Helen Boden read and offered valuable comments on drafts of the thesis. Carolyn Williams kindly supplied ideas and references on the background to John Dyer’s anti-French sentiments. The librarians at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, in particular Robert Firth and Dr Lesley Gordon, have patiently tolerated my demands on their time and resources, as have the staff of the British Library. C. M. Cowan of the Gilchrist Library in the Faculty of Agriculture at Newcastle University very kindly sought out early agricultural books for me. I should like to thank the Dean and Chapter Library, Durham, and its Librarian, Roger Norris, for kindly allowing me to transcribe and quote from Dyer’s ‘Commercial Map’ MSS, in the library’s Longstaffe Collection. I have received encouragement and support from many people, often over a number of years, and I would like to thank Ann and Karen Antonelli, Rowena Burrell, David Fairer, Don Feasay, Liz Goodridge, Desmond Graham, David Hewitt, Ernst Honigmann, Peter V. Jones, Kaye Kossick, Ken Robinson, Iris Rogers, Barbara Rosenbaum, Peter Sampson, Quentin Seddon, Neil Sedgwick, Peggy Smith, Kelsey Thornton, Bob White, Richard Wilson; my undergraduate students and postgraduate contemporaries. Errors of fact and judgement are my own. I have allowed myself to be led by the interdisciplinarity of the eighteenth-century poets into areas and disciplines in which I am, at best, an enthusiastic amateur; and I shall be especially grateful to have my shortcomings in these areas drawn to my attention. University of Newcastle upon Tyne September 1990 ABBREVIATIONS ‘Commercial John Dyer, [unpublished manuscript notes, plan and related Map’ notes materials for a ‘Commercial Map of England’+, Longstaffe MSS, Dean and Chapter Library, Durham. Defoe Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6), ed. G. D. H. Cole (2 volumes, 1968) DNB The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen, Sidney Lee et al (reissued edition, 21 volumes, 1908-9; Supplement, 1909; Second Supplement, 3 volumes, 1912; Corrections and Additions, 1966) Drayton Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion. or A Chorographicall description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Greate Britaine (1613-22), in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. William Hebel, IV (Oxford, 1933) GM The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731-1907) OED The Oxford English Dictionary (compact edition, 2 volumes, 1979; Supplement, 1987). CONVENTIONS Citations are usually given within the text using the formula (surname, date: page), varied as appropriate. Letters are cited, where they are available in standard editions, using the formula (Sender- Recipient, date). Longer citations are removed to endnotes. Quotations from poems under discussion normally have specific references in brackets after the text. Quotations from the ‘Commercial Map’ notes are based on my own transcription of the MSS, and are cited by folio number. Where two leaves are mounted on one folio, the additional sigla ‘*a+’, ‘*b+’, are used. Angle brackets <> indicate deleted text. All texts cited, quoted, or drawn on in the thesis are given in the Bibliography, p. 295. TEXTS For the major texts cited see Textual Note, p. 293 Biblical references are to the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) Shakespeare references are to the text as edited by Peter Alexander (1951). INTRODUCTION Thou wilt not find my Shepherdesses idly piping on oaten Reeds, but milking the Kine, tying up the Sheaves, or if the Hogs are astray driving them to their Styes. My Shepherd gathereth none other Nosegays but what are the growth of our own Fields, he sleepeth not under Myrtle shades, but under a Hedge, nor doth he vigilantly defend his Flocks from Wolves, because there are none, as Maister Spencer well observeth. (John Gay, ‘Proeme’, The Shepherd’s Week, 1714) There are, as Gay says, no wolves in the English countryside. [1] The Scottish poet James Thomson had to let his muse wander as far as the mountains of southern Europe, to find wolves for the machinery of sublime terror in his poem Winter (1746 version, 389-413). Nor was their absence from the British Isles of merely literary significance. It played a part in the nation’s history; for the wealth on which the rise of England as an economic power was based came above all from wool; and the first condition for successful sheep husbandry is the absence of Canis lupus, the most destructive predator of sheep in temperate and subarctic areas.
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