The Representation of Popular Culture in the Work'of John Clare 1815-1827 Matthew Redgra Ve Smith Dpidl University of York Depar
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THE REPRESENTATION OF POPULAR CULTURE IN THE WORK'OF JOHN CLARE 1815-1827 MATTHEW REDGRA VE SMITH DPIDL UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE OCTOBER 2000 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DECLARATION 111 ABSTRACT IV ABBREVIATIONS V INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Popular Culture in the Autobiographical Prose 26 CHAPTER 2 'A Right to Song': Popular Culture and Vocation 65 in 'The Village Minstrel' CHAPTER 3 Every-Day Books: Clare and Antiquarian Discourse 114 CHAPTER 4 'Gossip Tales' and 'The Trash of Ballad Singers': 150 Clare as Collector and Adapter of Popular Material CHAPTER 5 Conclusion: 'Old Customs 0 I love the sound': 185 Voice, Culture and Landscape in The Shepherd's Calendar BIBLIOGRAPHY 205 00 11 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the representations of popular culture in the early work of John Clare (1815-1827). It argues that they form a crucial and hitherto neglected strand of his work and that close study of them sheds much light on the fractures and instabilities in his poetry arising from his ambivalent and compromised status as 'Peasant Poet' . The argument begins with an examination of the role of popular culture in the autobiographical prose, an aspect of Clare's work which has previously been largely ignored, and continues with a discussion of Clare's contrasting attempt at creating a poetic genealogy for himself in 'The Village Minstrel'. These chapters bring out the ways in which his writing about popular culture betrays Clare's anxieties about his entitlement to the realm of polite literature, and the following chapter explores this further by setting his work in the context of contemporary antiquarian discourse about popular culture, showing how this discourse created a socially-inflected authorial identity which distorted Clare's sense both of himself and his material. The fourth chapter continues this line of argument to examine Clare's 'collection' of folk songs, an aspect of Clare's work which has been largely ignored since its documentation by George Deacon in 1983. It argues that this body of work is misunderstood ifit is seen as a proto-folkloric exercise, but should rather be read in tandem with the 'gossip tales' of the early-l 820s as an artistic project aimed at rendering the locality of Helpston in all its cultural as well as physical aspects. The fifth chapter serves as a conclusion to the thesis, and draws together its strands in an examination of The Shepherd's Calendar, arguing that in it Clare achieves a fragile and temporary balance between the opposing forces which dogged his representations of popular culture. 111 DECLARATION Some of the material included in this thesis, particularly in the concluding chapter's discussion of The Shepherd's Calendar draws on material from my MA dissertation The Representation ofFolk Culture in John Clare's Early Poetry: 1819-1827 which was submitted as my dissertation for the MA in Romanticism in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York in 1994. IV ABBREVIATIONS Cottage Tales John Clare: Cottage Tales, ed. Eric Robinso~ David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Ashington and Manchester: Mid Northumberland Arts Group and Carcanet Press Ltd, 1993) Critical Heritage Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) Early Poems I The Early Poems ofJohn Clare 1804-1822 Volume I, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) Early Poems II The Early Poems ofJohn Clare 1804-1822 Volume II, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) JCBH John Clare: by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996) Letters The Letters ofJohn Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) Midsummer Cushion John Clare: The Midsummer Cushion, ed Kelsey Thornton and Anne TibbIe (Northumberland: Mid Northumberland Arts Group and Carcanet Press, 1990) Oxford Authors Clare The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) Prose The Prose ofJohn Clare, ed. lW. and Anne TibbIe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1951) Shepherd's Calendar John Clare: The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) v THE REPRESENTATION OF POPULAR CULTURE IN THE WORK OF JOHN CLARE 1815-1827 MATTHEW REDGRA VE SMITH DPHIL UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE OCTOBER 2000 1 INTRODUCTION 2 1: ORIENTATIONS The most important thing to understand about Clare as a poet, despite his debts to Cowper, Thomson, Milton, and the Cavalier Poets, is that he grows out of popular culture - a popular culture not narrowly defined by the professional folklorist but reflective of the wide gamut of popular taste in his period. Ballad and broadsheet, vaudeville and pantomime, poster and woodcut, jig and sailor's hornpipe, neck-verse and bawdy, sermon and moral tale, spelling-book and fairy story, sailor's lies and fairground prattle, all are close to his heart and are reflected in his poetry. The ballad-singer, the ploughman, the quack, the ranting minister, the milkmaid, the foddering boy, the parish clerk, and many others all occur in his cast of characters. Clare creates an all-encompassing world in which one's imagination may journey endlessly, but above all it is a world of the people. l This quotation is taken from the introduction by Eric Robinson and David Powell to the first volume of their edition of the early poems of John Clare, and they continue by suggesting some of the ways in which they think his work can be seen as emerging from popular culture. They point to the close links between Clare's verse-tales and the traditions of story-telling in his village (Early Poems 1, pp. xvi-xvii) and insist that it is impossible properly to appreciate his songs without an understanding of the traditions of popular song with which they link them - 'we should never forget that [Clare's songs] are written by a purchaser of street-ballads, a fiddler at public houses, a lover of gypsies and gypsy music, and a frequenter of concerts and the vaudeville' (Early Poems 1, p. xix). Robinson and Powell give over much of their introduction to this insistence on the importance of the relationship between Clare's work and popular culture, and since this introduction stands at the head of the massive, still incomplete Oxford edition of Clare's poetry, its importance cannot be underestimated. To place such a strongly-worded claim at the gateway of scholarly access to Clare's work amounts to an attempt to establish the terms of critical debate through which Clare's work in its entirety is to be apprehended, and their argument thus takes on a significance far beyond anything it could possess through its intrinsic merits. 1 Early Poems 1, p. xiv. 3 However, Robinson and Powell are not alone in suggesting that the concept of popular culture is crucial to an understanding of Clare's work. For instance, John Lucas represents Clare's beginnings as a writer as a passage from an oral popular culture into a print culture - Clare's purchase of Thomson's The Seasons in 1806 marks his entry into print culture. It is a kind of rite of passage away from the oral culture into which he was born ... Parker Clare [Clare's father] could read a little but he certainly couldn't write. On the other hand, he knew over a hundred ballads by heart, and he would often sing them to his family. Commentators tend to marvel at this and at his son's capacious memory for song, ballad and the Bible. But there is nothing unusual about this among people who have to depend upon memory; it's what oral culture is. Clare drew on this culture and its traditions all his life. He loved the ballads he learned from his father and into which, as he sang them back, he would sometimes introduce verses of his own. 2 This draws heavily on Clare's own account of his childhood in his autobiographical prose work Sketches in the Life ofJohn Clare, but when Lucas goes on to state that 'Clare's deep commitment to this ballad tradition is crucial for a proper understanding of his work' (Lucas, p. 7), he is making a claim for the importance of Clare's background in and debt to popular culture which is of a similar strength to that made by Robinson and Powell in their introduction. In this thesis I will be arguing that both of these passages are right insofar as they draw our attention to the importance of Clare's relation to popular culture. However, like almost every other critic who has touched on this matter, they skirt far too lightly over the key terms in the matter, both in their confidence that they, and we, can know more or less intuitively what a 'popular culture' might consist of, and in their assumption that it is sufficient simply to say either that Clare 'grows out of popular culture' or that he 'drew on this culture and its traditions all his life'. Both of these formulations serve to mask the extreme complexity of that which they seek to explain - neither the nature of popular culture nor the relationship 2 John Lucas, John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), p. 5. 4 between it and Clare's work are sufficiently self-evident for such formulations to do any sort of justice to them. There has been no previous in-depth consideration of these issues, most critics tending either to ignore the subject altogether or to be content with brief formulae like those of Robinson and Powell (who, for all the importance they attach to this concept, do little to provide a framework within which to understand the nature of the relationship between Clare's work and 'popular culture') and Lucas.