John Clare

Did You Know?

• The only Clare essay to appear in his lifetime was 'Popularity of Authorship', which described anonymously his predicament in 1824.
• The thatched cottage where Clare was born was bought by the John Clare Trust in 2005 and restored with Heritage Lottery Fund grants.
• Other essays by Clare published posthumously include 'Essays on Landscape', 'Essays on Criticism and Fashion', and 'Recollections on a Journey from Essex'.

Life

John Clare came into the world on 13 July 1793 in Helpston, a village six miles north of Peterborough. He was the older of twins, but his sister did not survive infancy. At the time, Helpston sat within the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire, and his memorial would later dub him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet"; today it falls under the City of Peterborough unitary authority. Clare started working as an agricultural labourer as a child, though he attended school at Glinton church until he turned twelve. As a young adult, he worked as a potboy at The Blue Bell pub and fell for Mary Joyce, but her wealthy farmer father banned them from seeing each other. He later took a gardening job at Burghley House, joined the militia, lived briefly with Gypsies, and in 1817 labored as a lime burner in Pickworth, Rutland. By the next year, he had to rely on parish relief. Childhood malnutrition likely stunted his growth to five feet and weakened his health for life. After buying James Thomson's The Seasons, Clare began writing poems and sonnets. To stop his parents from being evicted, he showed his work to local bookseller Edward Drury, who passed it to his cousin John Taylor of Taylor & Hessey—the same firm that had published John Keats. Taylor released Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820 to great acclaim, followed by Village Minstrel and Other Poems in 1821. On 16 March 1820, Clare married milkmaid Martha "Patty" Turner at the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Casterton. The Marquess of Exeter granted him an annuity of 15 guineas, and public subscriptions brought his yearly income to £45—far more than he had ever earned. But by 1823 he was nearly broke. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) sold poorly, even when he tried hawking it himself. Earl Fitzwilliam gave him a new cottage and some land, but Clare never managed to feel at home.

Poetry

In his time Clare was commonly known as 'the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet.' His formal education was brief, and his employment and class origins lowly. He resisted the use of increasingly standardised English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing grammar to tyrannical government and slavery, personifying it as a 'bitch.' He wrote in Northamptonshire dialect, introducing local words such as 'pooty' (snail), 'lady-cow' (ladybird), 'crizzle' (to crisp) and 'throstle' (song thrush). In early life he struggled to find a place for his poetry in changing literary fashions and felt he did not belong with other peasants. An absence of punctuation is common in Clare's original writings, though many publishers felt the need to remedy this; he argued with his editors about how it should be presented. He grew up during the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, which saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, fens drained and commons enclosed. This destruction distressed Clare. His political and social views were mainly conservative; he refused to complain of his subordinate position, saying he was content 'with the old dish that was served to my forefathers.' His early work expresses delight in nature and the cycle of the rural year, using forms such as the sonnet and rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more meditative and uses forms similar to folk songs and ballads.

Legacy

Clare was relatively forgotten in the later 19th century, but interest revived with Arthur Symons in 1908, Edmund Blunden in 1920, and John and Anne Tibble's 1935 edition. Geoffrey Grigson edited Poems of John Clare's Madness in 1949. Benjamin Britten set some of 'May' from A Shepherd's Calendar in his Spring Symphony of 1948 and included a setting of 'The Evening Primrose' in his Five Flower Songs. Copyright on much of his work was claimed after 1965 by Professor Eric Robinson, editor of the Complete Poetry, but this has been contested; Robinson died in 2019 and neither his widow nor his literary agent maintain the claim. The largest collection of original Clare manuscripts is held at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery. The John Clare Society was formed in the UK in 1981 and had around 550 members as of 2026; it holds an annual festival in Helpston in July. The John Clare Society of North America has organised an annual session of scholarly papers since 1993.

John Clare and music

Clare’s father was, by his son’s account, a well-known singer. Clare himself played the fiddle—calling himself “a decent scraper”—and gathered folk tunes and songs. He filled two books, the Northampton Manuscripts Nos. 12 and 13, with over two hundred tunes. More folk songs appear in Northampton Manuscript No. 18 and the Peterborough Manuscripts B4 and B7. George Deacon noted that the Northampton manuscript holds “more polished and refined versions” of songs first written roughly in the Peterborough books, which he considered more authentic because they showed less interference from Clare. One of Clare’s poems, “The Meeting,” was set to music during his lifetime. It was sung by Madame Vestris at Drury Lane Theatre on 19 February 1820, worked into the pasticcio opera The Siege of Belgrade. Clare arrived in London just after the performance and wrote that he felt “uncommonly pleas at the circumstance.” After his death, many of his poems have been set to music by classical composers and, more recently, by acoustic and folk singer-songwriters. The Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library lists the two tune books and the song book. One entry describes a small oblong music book of song and dance tunes, inscribed on page one “John Clare / Helpstone / 1818” and titled A Collection of Songs, Airs and Dances for the Violin. It measures 3¾ by 6¼ inches, has 82 pages, and is bound in red quarter-leather with marbled boards.