The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry 0874137470, 9780874137477

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The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830

William J. Christmas

Associated University Presses

The Lab’ring Muses

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Stephen Duck, frontispiece to Poems on Several Subjects, 7th ed. (1730), engraver unknown. Reproduced by permission of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

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The Lab’ring Muses Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830

William J. Christmas

Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

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䉷 2001 by Associated University Presses, Inc.

All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-747-0/01 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press.)

Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses 16 Barter Street London WC1A 2AH, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Christmas, William J., 1965– The lab’ring muses : work, writing, and the social order in English plebeian poetry, 1730–1830 / William J. Christmas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87413-747-0 (alk. paper) 1. Working class writings, English—History and criticism. 2. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 3. Literature and society— Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. English poetry—19th century— History and criticism. 6. Duck, Stephen, 1705–1756—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Jones, Henry, 1721–1770—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Social classes in literature. 9. Work in literature. I. Title. PR508.U6 C47 2001 2001027011 821⬘.509920693—dc21 printed in the united states of america

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For Maggie, and our Eamon

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Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Note on the Text Introduction

9 13 15 17

1. Terminology and Methodology 2. Stephen Duck and Plebeian Poetry in the 1730s

39 63

Work Writing Before Duck 66 The Discovery, Publicity, and Commodification of Stephen Duck 73 The Flight Up Parnassus: Bancks, Dodsley, and Tatersal 95 The Buzzing of Mary Collier’s Bees: Resistance and Assimilation in The Woman’s Labour 115

3. ‘‘A Muse unknown’’: The Career of Henry Jones 4. Writing as Work in Mid- to Late-Century Plebeian Poetry

130 157

A Rural Maid’s Posthumous Success 161 James Woodhouse: ‘‘Unpension’d Poet-Laureat, of the Poor’’ 183 Brimble, Bennet, Lucas, and Bryant: Writing for Alms 210 Elizabeth Hands Answers the Polite Critics 228

5. Class Dialogue: Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and the Power of Print

235

Epilogue: Ensconced in the ‘‘muses seat’’: Bloomfield, Clare, and the Plebeian Tradition Appendix 1: Henry Jones Bibliography Notes Bibliography Index

267 297 302 337 353

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Acknowledgments WHEN

I READ MARY COLLIER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ROBERT

Markley’s graduate seminar in 1990, eighteenth-century literature suddenly became enormously interesting to me. Not many professors in the field were teaching Collier then, so I would like to thank Bob for his pedagogical foresight, and also for reading countless drafts of the chapters that follow. Thomas Lockwood, who directed the dissertation version of this study, also provided invaluable commentary and sound advice at every turn. Tom’s hearty refrain of ‘‘Carry on!’’ has lingered in my ear long after departing the University of Washington. I would also like to acknowledge another member of that dissertation committee, Evan Watkins, for his important help with the theoretical and methodological aspects of my work. I only hope that all three recognize this book as the one they thought I might one day produce. Many individuals and institutions assisted me in conducting the research and procuring materials for this project. Madeline Copp, now the Instructional Services Coordinator at the United States Naval Academy, and Glenda Pearson, Head of the Microform and Newspaper Collections at Suzzallo Library, University of Washington, performed numerous RLIN searches that made it possible to track down the primary sources for this study. I remain grateful for their research expertise, and the interest they showed in my work. The University of Washington funded a trip to the Houghton Library in the early days of collecting texts. Rebecca Merrens, Daryl Ogden, and Hans Turley deserve special mention for selflessly transcribing and photocopying material from Cambridge University Library and the British Library. The later stages of research and revision were funded by two Summer Stipends from San Francisco State University which allowed for several glorious trips to the Huntington Library. I would like to thank the staff there for indulging my manic book requests. Elizabeth Dunn, Research Services Librarian at Duke University, Margaret Foley, Archivist at McMaster University, Adam Grummitt, of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Alan Jutzi, Avery Chief Curator of rare books at the 9

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Huntington, were instrumental in helping me collect the pictures for the book. And Dean Nancy McDermid found cash at a crucial juncture so that I could hire a most able assistant, John Witek, who helped me prepare the manuscript for publication. Other friends, colleagues, mentors, and students have provided support less material, but no less substantial. Steve Alexander, Bruce Avery, Kirk Branch, Kathy King, Thomas Marshall, Amy Michaels, Jonathan Middlebrook, Talia Schaffer, Dana Shiller, Meg Schoerke, Larry Sisson, and Loretta Stec have been constants over the years, always ready with a word of support or the right question to spur me on. Two anonymous readers offered important criticism and revision suggestions in the early stages of the dissertation-intobook process, and Donna Landry and Bridget Keegan did the same in the later stages. Jo Keroes also read the entire manuscript when I needed a non-specialist’s perspective, and an editorial eye better than my own. I give my heartfelt thanks for their time and effort spent on the task. Peter Seybolt inspired a generation of rural Vermonters to the academic life; I’ll always be grateful for the example he set. Robyn Warhol tried to teach me that a simple word is always preferable to a complex one, a writing principle I have attempted to follow ever since. I consider myself lucky indeed that the better part of my professor’s labors consist of talking about poetry with willing students. Undergraduates at the University of Washington and San Francisco State University have eagerly engaged with the work of Duck, Bancks, Collier, Leapor, Jones, and Yearsley, often creating energetic classroom discussions that have shaped my readings of texts by these poets in many ways. I feel blessed to have become acquainted recently with other scholars in the eighteenth-century and Clare communities who have provided a wellspring of advice and support. I owe a tremendous debt to the Elsie group—Tim Burke, John Goodridge, Bridget Keegan, Kaye Kossick, and Scott McEathron—for their collective generosity, talent, and goodwill. Together they have shared their expertise, insights, and discoveries concerning over two-hundred years of laboring-class poetry. That they have saved me from many errors is understatement; that this is a better book because of them can hardly be overstated. Any remaining errors of fact or judgment are, of course, my own. I would also like to single out Donald Mell for his support and understanding during the long revision process. Christine Retz and Brian Haskell at Associated University Presses have been models of editorial professionalism, providing me with pointed and prompt replies to even my most ill-conceived queries. All have made the

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

business of book-making easier and more pleasurable than I had imagined it would be. Finally, I thank my parents, William and Maribeth Christmas, for their undying support, and for simply letting me find my own way in the world. I’m grateful that my wife, Maggie Miller, has lived with me longer than she has with this project. So often over the last ten years she interrupted her own labors to lend her intellect and skills to mine. This book is dedicated to her and all we’ve made together.

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List of Abbreviations CO

William Duff, Critical Observations on the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (London, 1770; reprint, Delmar New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1973). Correspondence Selections from the Correspondence of Robert Bloomfield, The Suffolk Poet, ed. W. H. Hart (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1870; facsimile reprint, Surrey: Robert F. Ashby, 1968). CR The Critical Review; or Annals of Literature (1756–1817). DNB Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, [1921–22]). EOG William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767; facsimile reprint ed. John L. Mahoney, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1964). EP John Clare, The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822, 2 vols., ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). FS The Female Spectator: English Women Writers before 1800, ed. Mary R. Mahl and Helen Koons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and The Feminist Press, 1977). GM The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907). GSJ The Grub-street Journal (1730–37). Letters The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). LM The London Magazine (1732–75). 13

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14 ML MP

MR MW OED PD PMW POSO POSS POVS WL WM Works

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Robert Dodsley, The Muse in Livery: or, the Footman’s Miscellany (London, 1732). John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, 2 vols., ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal (1749–1845). John Bancks, Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London, 1739). Oxford English Dictionary, compact ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London, 1820). John Bancks, Proposals for Printing by Subscription, Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose, of Mr. John Bancks (London, 1737). Various, Poems on Several Occasions/Poems upon Several Occasions. Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1730). Ann Yearsley, Poems, on Various Subjects (London, 1787). Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour (London, 1739). John Bancks, The Weaver’s Miscellany (London, 1730). The Works of Hannah More (London, 1834).

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A Note on the Text QUOTATIONS FROM PRIMARY SOURCES, BOTH PRINT AND MANU-

script, have been rendered exactly as they appear in the original. In addition to orthographic variance and other irregular printing conventions practiced by eighteenth-century bookseller/publishers, especially early in the century, the printing of many volumes, occasional poems, or broadsheets by laboring-class authors was often a hurried affair. I have used ‘‘sic’’ sparingly and made no silent changes to any of the poems. Issues involving the selection of working texts, or substantive emendations to those texts, are discussed in the main text or the notes. For my handling of the relevant textual problem raised by the standard Oxford edition of John Clare’s poems, see note 36 to the ‘‘Epilogue.’’ For manuscript sources, square brackets are used to indicate conjectural readings, and to provide the complete names of letter writers and addressees where needed.

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Introduction THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WAS THE FIRST PERIOD IN ENGLISH LITERary history to see the ranks of published plebeian poets increase dramatically. Although previous generations could boast an established writer or two of plebeian origin—like Ben Jonson, whose bricklaying experience was well known in the early seventeenth century, or John Taylor, who parlayed his background as a Thames bargeman into a career as ‘‘the King’s Water-Poet’’ some years later—far more self-taught poets from an array of laboring backgrounds began appearing in print from 1730 onward. This was a cultural phenomenon that generated widespread interest among eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century readers as it also elicited a wide range of criticism and support from middle- and upper-class literati throughout the period. Samuel Johnson, for one, gave earnest, writerly advice to the shoemaker-turned-poet James Woodhouse at his first visit to Mrs. Thrale’s table in 1764. ‘‘ ‘Give nights and days, Sir . . . , to the study of Addison, if you mean either to be a good writer, or what is more worth, an honest man,’ ’’ Johnson intoned.1 Woodhouse’s subsequent poems must not have measured up to Addisonian standards, for Boswell records Johnson’s dismissive contempt six years later: ‘‘He may make an excellent shoemaker, but can never make a good poet. A school-boy’s exercise may be a pretty thing for a school-boy; but is no treat for a man.’’2 Earlier in the century, the celebrated thresher-poet Stephen Duck had endured the satiric venom of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift for being, in their minds, an imitator of polite poetic discourse and a pretender to the laurel. But each was also supportive in his own way. Even as Pope privately laments to John Gay in 1730 that there is ‘‘no one thing worth reading, or seeing; the whole age seems resolv’d to justify the Dunciad,’’ he also notes that the ‘‘honest industrious Thresher not unaptly represents Pains and Labour.’’3 And Swift’s name appears among the list of over 600 subscribers to Duck’s Poems on Several Occasions in 1736. Polite response to plebeian authorship was thus characterized by a complex mixture of criticism, admira17

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tion, and guilt. Within this context of overt—often class-based— criticism and muted support, the number of laboring-class poets and the number of subscriber-readers grew steadily over the course of the century. Though John Clare may indeed represent the end of one cultural model of plebeian literary production (as Raymond Williams and others have argued), working-class literatures of many kinds have emerged on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. However, it is the model that spans roughly one hundred years of English literary history, bookended by Duck’s rise to fame and fortune in 1730 and Clare’s initial success in the 1820s, on which this study is focused. My analysis of these poets is motivated by several convictions that inform my argument for the significance of their contributions to English letters. First, I shall argue that Duck, Woodhouse, and many others were not mere blips (or blights) on the literary/cultural map in their own historical moment, nor should they be considered as such in our own. Documentary evidence shows that plebeian poets, both men and women, were a popular, uninterrupted feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary culture. Yet ‘‘wave’’ theories have dominated broad critical overviews of plebeian publishing in the period. H. Gustav Klaus argues that there were ‘‘two waves of plebeian poetry’’ in the eighteenth century: Duck and his followers in the 1730s, and a second wave ‘‘occurring in the last quarter of the century.’’4 More recently, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli has extended the wave theory by locating ‘‘three phases in the history of marketing working-class poetic identity from 1730 to 1830’’: the ‘‘first wave’’ begins with Duck; the ‘‘second wave’’ begins with Woodhouse in the 1760s and extends through Robert Burns; and the ‘‘third wave’’ commences in the early nineteenth century with those poets attempting to capitalize on the Burns legend.5 However useful wave theory might be to local arguments about plebeian poets and their work (and, given Cafarelli’s focus on marketing trends, it makes good sense), the descriptive power of the theory ultimately collapses under the weight of historical evidence. Several laborer poets produced at least one monograph, and very often other occasional poems, in every decade following Duck’s emergence in 1730. In addition, the specter of Stephen Duck continued to haunt the literary landscape long after his death. For example, an anonymous reviewer contributing to The Critical Review in 1774 counts the poet under question, the shoemaker John Bennet, ‘‘in company with the most renowned poetasters of the present century, under the banners of the late illustrious Stephen Duck.’’6 Ten years later, when the milkwoman Ann Yearsley became the object

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of Bluestocking patronage, Horace Walpole deadpanned to Hannah More that ‘‘when the late Queen patronized Stephen Duck . . . twenty artisans and labourers turned poets and starved.’’7 Hyperbolic irony aside, such invocations of Duck suggest not only a continuity to the movement, but also the degree to which it had become ingrained in the collective consciousness of literate eighteenth-century people. By the early nineteenth century, as we shall see, comparisons to Duck waned in favor of connections to Burns, who, as Cafarelli notes, typified the new model of ‘‘peasant hero’’ as far as rural poets like Robert Bloomfield and Clare were concerned.8 Simply stated, my second conviction is that these poets are worth reading. Twenty or more years ago this would have been a radical claim, but even in our own moment of cultural studies, when ‘‘popular’’ culture is increasingly valorized as worthy of serious academic analysis, this assertion of value still requires some justification. Plebeian poets have always been represented in literary criticism, marginalized in specific ways, but visible nonetheless. Robert Southey provided the first scholarly account of English plebeian poetry in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets. Southey’s essay was meant to introduce a volume of poems by the servant John Jones, Attempts in Verse (1831), but, at 180 pages in the first edition, subsumed it instead. Moreover, Southey’s effort to be charitable was muted by his less-than-enthusiastic assessment of Jones’s poetic powers—‘‘Upon perusing the poems I wished they had been either better or worse’’—and by his focus on the ‘‘low breeding and defective education[s]’’ of the subjects he takes up in the biographical vignettes that make up the bulk of the essay.9 Usually discussed in passing or relegated to mere footnote mention, and almost always disparaged, eighteenth-century plebeian poets were rarely the subjects of serious study in the nineteenth century after Southey. By the twentieth century, critics shifted the focus to the poets’ ‘‘primitivism,’’ loosely defined as their closeness to nature, their perceived ‘‘peasant’’ origins, or some combination of these traits.10 However, since the mid-1980s, work by Roger Lonsdale, Moira Ferguson, Donna Landry, Richard Greene, and John Goodridge has rehabilitated many of these poets as poets—particularly the women—to the point that they are now appearing in recent anthologies of the period’s literature, just as they were also represented in eighteenth-century miscellanies.11 Each of these critics in his or her own way has contributed to establishing new models of value, with new criteria for defining the significance of these traditionally marginalized poets. I share with them the general conviction that there is much still to be gleaned about eighteenth-century

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culture from recovering some of the period’s forgotten poetry. As a recovery project, this study not only offers critical discussion of several unknown poets, but also provides a reassessment—both historical and theoretical—of this plebeian poetic tradition. Specifically, I am interested in the ways that cultural assumptions about work, writing, and social rank were interconnected and articulated by polite literati, and contested by their plebeian counterparts over the course of the century. As Clifford Siskin has persuasively argued, writing came to be viewed as a form of work in the eighteenth century, and ‘‘as with other kinds of work,’’ Siskin points out, ‘‘the act of writing was subject to conflicts over who could and should use the technology, in what ways, and with what consequences.’’12 Plebeian poets, I suggest, were key commentators in this cultural dialogue about writing-as-work largely because many were aware that the assumptions that informed the debate and the reconfiguration of work and social hierarchy that (they hoped) would ensue concerned them directly. Of course, in terms of the numbers of interlocutors on each side and their relative social power, this was an unequal dialogue. But plebeian voices nevertheless were vented on the public stage. Throughout the period many laboring-class poets saw their writing as a means to social advancement, and many used their access to print culture to better themselves economically and socially. Duck may have given up his flail, but as Swift pointed out, ‘‘thresh[ing] his Brains’’ for suitable panegyric verse to please his royal patrons proved but another form of labor, although more lucrative—and (potentially) socially disruptive.13 As a group, these poets faced stiff opposition from authors of the gentlemanly classes who often voiced their concerns in the periodical press. Immediately following Duck’s meteoric rise from the fields of Wiltshire to Caroline’s court, a sustained critique of the plebeian poet phenomenon began to emerge in the pages of The Grub-street Journal. In the number for 21 January 1731, an anonymous contributor argued that of all the various employments and amusements in which mankind is daily engaged, none has so much increased the numbers of our Society as Poetry. We are all taught promiscuously at school to make verses: and those who never went to school at all, are generally persuaded in their own minds that they are born Poets.14

In an effort to curb this movement of ‘‘new Poets’’ inspired by ‘‘the late extension of the Royal bounty to stephen duck,’’ the writer tw-

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ists the cultural assumption of innate, God-given vocation—the notion that one could be born a poet (which eighteenth-century people read forward from classical antiquity in the Latin proverb Poeta nascitur, non fit)—into a socioeconomic argument against these laborer-poets: ‘‘But to have the fields lie neglected, and the loom forsaken, is a melancholy prospect; and looks as if we should in time have neither bread to eat, nor cloaths to put on’’ (GSJ, no. 55). The references are to Duck and a ‘‘poor Weaver’’ from Spitalfields, John Bancks, who were born, so the argument goes, not to scribble verses, but to perform the manual labor necessary to keep the country running smoothly—not to mention maintaining the material bases of upper- and middle-class existence. The underlying premise of this argument, which is also its primary ideological component, is that Poeta nascitur, non fit applies to the learned and the great and not to the servile and the low. The author of this piece attempts to mystify this contradiction by establishing as natural the notion that social rank and work are inextricably linked. The poor are born manual laborers, not poets, and Duck’s example is thus viewed as dangerous in terms of diminishing laboring-class productivity, and opening up the doors of the ‘‘Society’’ of gentlemanly writers to all sorts of riffraff. This argument, and the class-based assumptions it perpetuates, are characteristic of a society intent on policing the borders of polite discourse and protecting the dividing lines of social rank. Not surprisingly, such rhetoric appears in many published forms over the course of the century. Consider, for instance, Johnson’s rendition at mid-century which appeared in The Adventurer: The present age, if we consider chiefly the state of our own country, may be stiled with great propriety the age of authors; for, perhaps, there never was a time, in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardour so general to the press. The province of writing was formerly left to those, who by study, or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable to the busy part of mankind; but in these enlightened days, every man is qualified to instruct every other man; and he that beats the anvil or guides the plough, not contented with providing corporal necessities, amuses himself in the hours of leisure with providing intellectual pleasures for his countrymen. . . . [H]e would deserve well of his country, who . . . could replace the tradesman behind his counter, and send back the farmer to the mattock and the flail.15

In his effort to protect and maintain the republic of letters, Johnson argues that the uneducated members of the lower social orders

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ought to remain productive in the trades to which they were bred. He reproduces this rhetoric, with more specific referents in mind, in his second number of The Idler: At the time when the rage of writing has seized the old and the young, when the cook warbles her lyricks in the kitchen, and the thrasher vociferates his heroicks in the barn; when our traders deal out knowledge in bulky volumes, and our girls forsake their samplers to teach kingdoms wisdom, it may seem very unnecessary to draw any more from their proper occupations, by affording new opportunities of literary fame.16

In the context of drumming up correspondents for his latest periodical venture, Johnson not only reiterates his protectionist stance by deploying class-based assumptions about ‘‘proper’’ work, but also links those assumptions explicitly to the plebeian poet phenomenon. Johnson’s readers would have recognized his warbling ‘‘cook’’ as Mary Leapor, who worked for a time as a kitchen maid near Brackley and whose second volume of poetry had appeared in 1751, and his rhyming ‘‘thrasher’’ as the ubiquitous Stephen Duck. As Johnson’s examples show, issues of class and gender were deeply embedded in arguments surrounding work and writing in the period. Johnson well knew that there were many ‘‘new opportunities’’ at mid-century for literary fame and fortune, even for those traditionally marginalized by print culture. His campaign against this trend suggests the degree to which elements within polite society sought to limit—or at least control—those opportunities in order to maintain existing power relations. Johnson is not only seeking to disarm any potential competitors for patronage or sales; like his Grub-street Journal counterpart, he is also involved in reproducing a conservative class-based ideology that represents the connection between work and social position as obvious and natural. My third conviction is a logical extension of the second: many (but certainly not all) plebeian poets were culturally aware and intelligent enough to combat this ideological program in (some of) their published texts. The parenthetical qualifiers are necessary, but do not diminish the fact that in what strike me as their most interesting poems, plebeian poets were capable of articulating ideological resistance against the dominant culture within poetic discourses that were both publishable and marketable in the period. The most significant of these discourses I will refer to as the discourse on work,17 defined by the circular logic of work, writing, and writing about work that characterized the lives of these plebeian poets in

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various ways. Hard work, oppressive working conditions, and lousy pay often produce the desire to write in these poets, and writing thus becomes a new form of productive labor that depends upon the depiction of, or the cultural capital of, the earlier manual occupation. In its most overt incarnation, this poetic discourse forms the basis of an extended, occupation-specific poem about a poet’s particular labors. Stephen Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ is the prototype of this kind of poem, one that was popular with some polite readers (like Pope) and imitated by many fellow plebeians with literary aspirations. The ways in which work figures in the publications of plebeian authors shift significantly over the course of the century, however. For instance, the practice of producing occupation-specific poems focused on the minutiae of one’s daily labors disappears almost entirely in the last half of the century. In 1785, Ann Yearsley does not use her life as a milkwoman in print in the same ways that Duck had used his threshing experience in 1730. Polite poetic tastes evolved and a changing, complex web of social relations dictated very different opportunities and potential markets for these two poets. That Yearsley never wrote ‘‘The Milkwoman’s Labour’’ speaks to her immersion in a literary and cultural climate distinguishable from Duck’s. Yet both Hannah More and Yearsley herself exploited her laboring status in print, usually in the form of title page advertisements and direct addresses to the reader. By the turn of the century, rural ‘‘peasant-poets’’ Robert Bloomfield and John Clare invoke and reinvent a Duckian poetic discourse on work to meet both the requirements of public taste, and the needs of their own socio-critical perspectives. In different ways, then, all the poets in this study sought to use their writing as a productive means to replace the drudgery of their previous tasks and many hoped to climb the social ladder by doing so. Economic and artistic independence—that is, earning a living from writing (without patronage) and reaching the status of poet-atlarge—came to very few who published, but the desire for different forms of success as writers entered into their poetic discourse in significant ways. Thus the discourse on work in this body of poetry is not simply relegated to realistic discussions of manual labor, but is complicated by the uses these poets make of their laboring lives to get into print and sustain a career in letters. As the targets of a repressive discourse on work, one that we have seen produced in The Grub-street Journal and Johnson’s periodical essays, and as the creators of a critical counter-discourse, these plebeian poets were engaged in a process we might describe as the critique of ideology.

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Terry Eagleton has argued that there is a meaningful difference between ‘‘criticism’’ and ‘‘critique’’: criticism describes the act of pointing out problems in any context from an external vantage point; critique, by contrast, assumes the vantage of the inside, that is, a subject speaking from the position of one subjectified by a specific ideology ‘‘in order to elicit those ‘valid’ features of that experience which point beyond the subject’s present condition.’’18 Ideology critique assumes the possibility that individuals are never completely mystified by ideology, and so are possessed of the potential to recognize those values and practices which define their situation in the world and keep them from attaining their desires and goals. My conviction is that many plebeian poets—Duck, Mary Collier, Henry Jones, Leapor, Woodhouse, Yearsley, and Clare are the best examples—were not simply duped by the class-based ideologies they were up against, and their surviving texts often represent examples of ideology critique in the period. In between layers of poetic imitation and popular convention, deferential humility and outright sycophancy, these versifying plebeians found ways to articulate their desires and interests publicly within the context of specific social problems they faced. Perhaps more than any other genre, poetry was a primary forum in the eighteenth century for such cultural debates. This is not to say that poetry should be read as revealing authentic truths about the period, or that we should extrapolate eighteenth-century social history only from the countless pages of verse published throughout the century.19 Both are reductive methods that can lead to errors of all sorts. And yet, it is worth recalling Thomas Warton’s contemporary assessment of poetry’s import: [Poetry] is an art, whose object is human society: as it has the peculiar merit, in its operations on that object, of faithfully recording the features of the times, and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive representations of manners: and, because the first monuments of composition in every nation are those of the poet, as it possesses the additional advantage of transmitting to posterity genuine delineations of life in its simplest stages.20

While Warton’s brimming confidence with regard to poetry’s authenticity might strike us as naı¨ve, it would have been perfectly acceptable to eighteenth-century readers. Poetry held an interesting paradoxical position in this period of English literary history: it was the highest generic form (hence the need for plebeians to express themselves in couplets, and not in novels or plays), and it was con-

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sidered an important mass medium. As an eighteenth-century art form, poetry was both highbrow and popular—and it was also the proving ground for writerly genius. Versifiers of every rank recorded the serious and the mundane, the sacred and the profane, and sold their wares to reputable booksellers, the periodical press, and street-corner hawkers. I aim to recover some of the cultural dialogue taking place within this important medium, and examine its implications in terms of plebeian authorship and social movement for a society often thought to have frowned on both. While these convictions form the focus of this study, the topic itself necessarily raises broader contextual issues. The first of these has to do with the vogue throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for ‘‘natural genius.’’ As it relates to poetry, the history of the concept of natural genius is largely a record of the relationship between the notion that the vocation for poetry is innate, and ideas about bookish learning and ‘‘art’’ to improve the poet born. From Greek and Roman antiquity through the seventeenth century, the ‘‘classical view’’ of natural genius, that an education is essential to the innately-gifted or divinely-inspired poet, dominates poetics.21 But from the mid-eighteenth century, a ‘‘radical’’ concept of natural genius emerges based on the premise that formal education impedes innate genius, and this radical view prevails in various mutated forms—most notably as ‘‘original genius’’ in the treatises of Edward Young and William Duff—into the next century.22 Prior to Young and Duff, Joseph Addison popularized this radical view, almost in spite of himself, by making a distinction between two classes of geniuses: those ‘‘great natural Genius’s that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art,’’ such as Homer and Pindar, and those ‘‘great Genius’s . . . that have formed themselves by Rules, and submitted the Greatness of their natural Talents to the Corrections and Restraints of Art,’’ as did Plato, Virgil, Milton, and Bacon.23 Although Addison seeks to avoid favoring one kind of poetic genius over the other, noting explicitly that ‘‘the Genius in both these Classes of Authors may be equally great,’’ his rhapsodizing on the natural variety early on (‘‘There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural Genius’s, that is infinitely more beautiful than all the Turn and Polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit’’) and the rhetorical organization of the essay (placing the natural geniuses in the first class, and the educated geniuses in the second) implicitly marks the radical view as the foremost form of poetic genius.24 The influence of Addison’s Spectator essays on polite society was substantial and, in the dec-

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ades following his delineation of poetic genius, the hunt for the next Homer was on. This search was spearheaded by Joseph Spence, poetry professor at Oxford from 1728, who followed up reports of Duck’s natural genius and eventually brought him to court. Spence believed, as did Duck’s many eminent admirers, that the natural poet simply intuited the fixed rules of art inherent in Nature. Duck was a living example of the early-eighteenth-century radical view of natural genius, but at this time it was felt that the primitive poet could be improved by classical learning. As every one of Duck’s commentators has noted, the thresher-poet was subjected to a battery of tutorials in Latin and the classics after arriving at court so that he might improve his verses. Duck’s progress as a scholar eventually led to his taking Holy Orders in 1746. What might seem a gross contradiction—educating the natural genius—was in fact consistent with early-eighteenth-century views on the subject. Poetic originality was not one of the essential components of natural genius in this period, and Duck was spurred to improve his innate talent by imitation, copying classical masters and following specific rules of art. By the end of the century, however, it was no longer fashionable to cultivate poetic natural genius with book learning. Although Hannah More did provide Yearsley with some books, notably Ossian, Dryden’s Fables, and ‘‘the most decent of the Metamorphoses,’’ she and Elizabeth Montagu, along with their unofficial adviser Horace Walpole, argued against the practice, believing that by educating their prote´ ge´ e they were doing more harm than good.25 The radical view of natural genius thus reached its apex in the years leading up to the Romantic movement, as Yearsley’s patrons and many later Romantics believed that natural poetic genius spontaneously expressed itself in fantastic strains above the rules of art. But this is not to say that these same late-eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century readers thought that a living example of natural genius was worthy the title of ‘‘poet.’’ By the 1820s, radical natural genius, as expressed by a member of the lower classes, was ultimately as much a hindrance to a poetic career as it was a help in generating interest and support for a first volume. John Taylor, the publisher of Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, (1820) introduces Clare to the reading public by downplaying the ‘‘intrinsic merit’’ of the poems in favor of the fundamental tropes of radical natural genius: The following Poems will probably attract some notice by their intrinsic merit; but they are also entitled to attention from the circumstances

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under which they were written. They are the genuine productions of a young Peasant, a day-labourer in husbandry, who has had no advantages of education beyond others of his class. . . .26

Taylor’s advertisement links Clare to notions of creative authenticity (‘‘genuine productions’’), youth (Clare was twenty-seven), laboring-class origin (‘‘a day-labourer in husbandry’’), and the lack of a formal education. Taken together, these attributes deployed in the first two sentences of Taylor’s lengthy introduction position Clare as yet another boy-wonder poet27—as they also open the floodgates for criticism aimed specifically at the natural genius of the self-taught poet. The following is a typical example: ‘‘It requires an educated mind to make the true estimate of itself, and feel the deference due to the talents and to the common sense of society. . . . The Northamptonshire peasant is simply a tolerable versifier. He has hitherto exhibited nothing of the spirit, feeling, or original views of genius.’’28 As a ‘‘tolerable versifier,’’ Clare is deemed worthy of relief from penury, but the purpose of this sort of review is to define Literature through Romantic ideas of poetic originality and, once again, to police membership in the profession of letters. Although the study of natural genius became a kind of amateur science and extended beyond the realm of literature in the eighteenth century, as evidenced by the numerous appearances of Jedidiah Buxton and Robert Hill in the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine, poets were nevertheless the most common examples of such genius and remained the most marketable. The stories of Buxton, a self-educated mathematician who could perform difficult calculations in his head using his own method, and Hill, whose genius manifested itself in his ability to learn archaic languages, are suggestive of a burgeoning cultural interest in the varieties of natural genius.29 The lack of formal education and the hardships of poverty thus became cultural tropes which authors from plebeian backgrounds could invoke in order to sell themselves to a reading public predisposed to support them—or at least tolerate them as curiosities. Given this marketing process, it is not surprising that, by the end of the century, literary interest in poor, uneducated natural genius seems to take a backseat to humanitarian interest. Though the fanfare generated by Duck in 1730 was largely literary, and though both More and Montagu aided Yearsley’s development as a poet, humanitarian interest—that is, the upper- and upper-middle-class desire to relieve the deserving poor—figures in the natural genius equation in profound ways by the end of the century. It has often

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been noted by critics from Johnson on down that polite patrons used their plebeian prote´ge´s to mirror their own superiority as they also projected a public image of benevolent philanthropy. What has gone largely unexamined, I suggest, is the plebeian poets’ countermanipulation of the cultural tropes surrounding natural genius to serve their own interests. Eighteenth-century literary taste for natural genius is also closely tied to another significant cultural development that fostered plebeian publishing in the period: the expansion of the literary marketplace and the concomitant professionalization of eighteenthcentury letters. It is by now commonplace to assert that print culture expanded exponentially during the long eighteenth century, and that this expansion affected the traditional dividing lines of a rigid social hierarchy. That a sustained movement in plebeian publishing occurs in the eighteenth century seems to me no accident of history; rather, the literary careers of many of these plebeian authors were largely determined by specific developments within print culture. Brean Hammond has recently argued that ‘‘the decades following 1660 [form] a period of English cultural history in which a relatively rapid shift from patronage to marketing as the primary way of financing imaginative writing was accomplished; a period of growth and demand for . . . literary products.’’30 The effects of this shift reverberated throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, as Hammond and others have noted, subscription publishing became the modus operandi for financing book publishing for many authors, booksellers, and residual patrons alike. Publishing by subscription functioned as a ‘‘transitional phase’’ between aristocratic patronage and the anonymous market because the author along with friends had the power to increase the subscription list, and so could guarantee the bookseller an income for producing the edition.31 The artistic independence and financial success Dryden and Pope initially achieved was based on subscription publishing, and the very appearance of many plebeian poets in the literary marketplace was as well.32 And much to the chagrin of educated professionals like Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, their pathbreaking made possible other kinds of literary careers. The lengthy subscribers’ lists that preface many plebeian volumes throughout the century are suggestive of a synchronous overlapping of cultural trends relating to the production of literary texts (like subscription publishing) and their consumption (like readerly interest in natural genius). By 1800, Bloomfield’s patrons were able to dispense with the formality of a subscription altogether and simply plug Bloomfield into the right niche of an established literary marketplace—and The Farmer’s

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Boy did not disappoint. These contexts of literary production and consumption are central to my analysis of plebeian poets and their work. I have, of necessity, limited the number of poets I take up in this study. Contemporary evidence suggests that there were far more ‘‘geniuses of the street’’ than we can recover today.33 John Langhorne, chief poetry reviewer for The Monthly Review at mid-century, provides a glimpse of the now almost invisible context of plebeian publishing in the period: ‘‘We have ever made it a rule not to censure the performances of those who have declared themselves illiterate, and appear to have been destitute of the common advantages of education: we wish, however, that there were fewer of these unlettered candidates for fame.’’34 This general application to the readership speaks to the deluge of print by unlettered hands that apparently crossed Langhorne’s desk in the early 1760s. But the flood hardly subsided, leading to Langhorne’s satiric ‘‘proclamation’’ in 1778 against would-be laboring muses who have ‘‘intoxicated themselves with porter and poetry.’’35 A. J. Sambrook was only slightly exaggerating the plebeian poet phenomenon when he opined that, following Duck’s appearance in 1730, ‘‘hardly a year had passed without some peasant poet being brought forward and hailed as a ‘natural genius.’ ’’36 Other critics have asserted that there were anywhere from fifty to one hundred published plebeian authors in the eighteenth century. While ongoing research is likely to push the number of known plebeian poets even higher, John Goodridge is right to note that ‘‘much printed poetry has been lost, and we therefore cannot be statistical about self-taught poets.’’37 Statistics aside, one need only spend a few days with a good archive collection to generate raw numbers that quickly dash any hopes of providing a comprehensive guide to the subject. In order to limit the field of relevant poets, locate the cultural argument in a specific geographical setting, and define the primary themes of the movement (as I see them), I have had to employ specific inclusionary criteria. My analysis includes both male and female poets who published in London, or in those provincial cities with direct connections to the London book trade, such as Bristol and Salisbury. Following the thematic focal points suggested by my title, I also narrow the definition of ‘‘plebeian’’ to include only those poets who have some form of laboring experience in their background. In addition, these poets must have produced at least one substantial volume of verse, written explicitly about their laboring life (or at least publicized it to market the volume in some way), and revealed a

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sense of self-consciousness in their poetry for the cultural issues involved in writing as potential plebeian vocation. With these criteria in mind, I take up sixteen case studies that establish chronological continuity over yet another redefinition of the ‘‘long eighteenth century.’’ Duck, whose publishing career lasted from 1730 until 1755, and the poets who followed him into print in the 1730s are examined together in chapter 2. These include the weaver/footman/bookseller Robert Dodsley (1729, 1732); the weaver/bookseller John Bancks (1730, 1734, 1738); the bricklayer Robert Tatersal (1734, 1735); and the washerwoman Mary Collier (1739, 1762). Chapter 3 is devoted to Henry Jones, the Irish bricklayer brought to England in 1748 under the protection of Lord Chesterfield. Poetic work by Jones appeared regularly in London and Dublin from 1745 until 1782, twelve years after his death. Chapter 4 takes up a series of mid- to late-century plebeians who did not enjoy the career longevity of Jones. These include the gardener’s daughter and domestic servant Mary Leapor (1748, 1751); the ‘‘poetical shoemaker’’ James Woodhouse (1764, 1766, 1788, 1803); the carpenter William Brimble (1765); the cobblers John Bennet (1774) and John Lucas (1776); the pipemaker John Fredrick Bryant (1787); and ‘‘the wife of a blacksmith’’ and former servant Elizabeth Hands (1789).38 Chapter 5 includes an in-depth look at the work of the milkwoman-turned-poet Ann Yearsley, who published consistently in the turbulent years from 1785 through 1796. Like Duck and Jones before her, Yearsley managed to fashion an extraordinary literary career despite the paternalism of her patron, Hannah More, and the increasing social friction that characterized the last decade of the eighteenth century. The epilogue briefly treats the early careers of Robert Bloomfield (1800) and John Clare (1820, 1821). Clare especially stands out as an important transitional figure in the long tradition of plebeian poetic endeavor that extends well into the twentieth century. Still, for every poet whose work will be given serious consideration, there are many others in the public record who do not fulfill my inclusionary criteria for one reason or another. For example, John Bancks makes reference to a John Rollo, ‘‘the Writer of several anonymous Pieces in Prose and Ryme’’ who used to keep ‘‘a Victualling-house’’ in Spitalfields, in his Miscellaneous Works, published in 1738.39 Bancks identifies Rollo as the author of a poem on the death of George I that appeared in The Weekly Journal; or, The British Gazetteer for 24 June 1727. There is nothing remarkable about the verses, and there is no effort made to advertise the author’s natural genius, plebeian penury, or literary aspirations.

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Rollo may in fact have been the owner of the victualling house he is identified with, and so he would not qualify for inclusion on the grounds that he was of a somewhat higher social rank than the average laboring poet. Rollo also never compiled a book of poems and he did not write about his working life in what little poetry he did publish. Problems of a similar nature are found in the examples of Mary Masters and Mary Chandler, though their life circumstances seem to set them up for inclusion. Masters was of ‘‘humble birth,’’ and her lack of formal education is described in the preface to her Poems on Several Occasions (1733): ‘‘The Author of the following Poems never read a Treatise of Rhetorick, or an Art of Poetry, nor was ever taught her English Grammar.’’40 Though she is advertised as an uneducated poet whose ‘‘Genius to Poetry was always browbeat and discountenanc’d by her Parents,’’ it is remarkable that she is not publicly linked to Stephen Duck, given that her volume appears when pirated editions of his poems were circulating and his celebrity value was still strong (POSO, np.). But no reference is made to Masters’s laboring life on the title page, if indeed she had any real work experience, and the poems themselves do not provide any gloss on this subject. She apparently knew Johnson, and remains known for her later religious hymns, which were published in 1755.41 Mary Chandler was the daughter of a dissenting minister who, after the family settled in Bath, opened a milliner’s shop around 1705 when she was eighteen years old.42 Chandler read poetry and scribbled verses in her spare time, and soon came to the attention of the local gentry. In 1733 she published a prospect poem titled A Description of Bath, which she inscribed to the ‘‘Princess Amelia,’’ but did not include her name on the title page. The poem sold well, going through four editions by 1738, and eight by 1767. From the third edition on, Chandler added other poems, eventually forming a handsome volume. Though Chandler considered herself a tradeswoman, as was the case with Masters, she neither writes about her laboring life nor uses it to advertise her poetry. Although both women might have made good use of Duck’s example in marketing their own volumes, they seem to have self-consciously distanced themselves from the plebeian insurgence of the 1730s. William Newton presents an interesting case in the late-century period. A carpenter by trade, he was pushed onto the literary scene by Anna Seward, who provided an account of him in the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Seward attempted to popularize Newton by highlighting his natural genius, plebeian origins, lack of formal education, and the rigors of his workaday life: ‘‘[He is] a being

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in whom the lustre of native genius shines through the mists which were thrown around him by obscure birth, the total absence of all refined instruction, and by the daily necessity of manual labor.’’43 However, very few of Newton’s poems have survived. Seward actually did little to help Newton to a career in letters beyond sponsoring several sonnets addressed to herself and to Peter Cunningham for periodical publication. She apparently had more direct plans for Newton’s relief as she ‘‘finally helped him to become partner in a cotton mill in Cressbrook-dale, and he thus realised a fortune.’’44 As was the case with Rollo, Newton published only a few poems in the periodical press, and like Masters and Chandler, he neither aligns himself with a plebeian poetic tradition nor writes explicitly about his working life. Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Bard and ploughman poet, created the sort of sensation in the late 1780s that recalled Duck’s career trajectory. There is, in fact, much to recommend Burns to this study. The preface to the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems, the first to appear in 1786, contains many of the trappings associated with publicizing a plebeian phenom. Penned by Burns himself, this text calls attention to his lack of formal education, the fact that the poems were produced ‘‘amid the toil and fatigues of a laborious life,’’ noting explicitly that ‘‘none of the following works were ever composed with a view to the press,’’ and closes with a standard apologia for the poet’s deficiencies in education and politeness.45 And, in the dedication prefixed to the first Edinburgh edition published the following year, Burns further constructs himself as a primitive, natural poet: The Poetic Genius of my Country found me as the prophetic bard Elijah found Elisha—at the plough; and threw her inspiring mantle over me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes and rural pleasures of my native Soil, in my native tongue: I tuned my wild, artless notes, as she inspired.46

Early reviewers took these cues to heart. The writer for The Monthly Review begins by acknowledging the truth of the maxim ‘‘Poeta nascitur, non fit’’ before mentioning Burns’s ‘‘low station,’’ ‘‘laborious employment,’’ and lack of social refinement, but interestingly without linking his poems to an English tradition of plebeian poetry, a standard feature in the reviews of previous English laborer-poets.47 In 1788, however, The Edinburgh Advertiser did not hesitate to contrast Burns’s career to Duck’s: Burns . . . is now enjoying the sweets of retirement at his farm. Burns, in thus retiring, has acted wisely. Stephen Duck, the Poetical Thresher,

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by his ill-advised patrons, was made a parson. The poor man, hurried out of his proper element, found himself quite unhappy; became insane; and with his own hands, it is said, ended his life. Burns, with propriety, has resumed the flail—but we hope he has not thrown away the quill.48

What is significant in this reviewer’s comparison of Burns and Duck is the way in which Duck’s career example, specifically the impropriety of removing him from his ‘‘proper element’’ and the assumption that this deracination precipitated his suicide, provides the foil for polite acceptance of Burns-as-poet. That is, Burns returns to farming (though grudgingly, as he was in fact waiting for an Excise commission to come through) and so wins the reviewer’s support to continue writing. Nobody outside of Duck’s patronage circle ever allowed as much for him. All of this evidence suggests that Burns represents the ultimate fulfillment of plebeian literary success in that he achieved a poetic career that was both economically viable and blessed with public approbation. To a certain extent this interpretation is plausible, but a curious thing happens after Burns’s untimely death: the qualities that link him to an eighteenth-century plebeian poetic tradition are effectively erased. Francis Jeffrey, the famous anti-Wordsworthian, is most responsible for establishing this critical foundation that has been, by and large, passed down to us. Jeffrey begins a lengthy review of Burns’s collected works by singling Burns out from other eighteenth-century versifying plebeians: Burns is certainly by far the greatest of our poetical prodigies—from Stephen Duck down to Thomas Dermody. They are forgotten already; or only remembered for derision. But the name of Burns, if we are not mistaken, has not yet ‘‘gathered all its fame;’’ and will endure long after those circumstances are forgotten which contributed to its first notoriety.49

Indeed, Jeffrey waxes prophetic here, as Burns is an established canonical figure—the great Scottish poet everybody knows—while other poets of similar ‘‘circumstances’’ are only now cracking the anthologies that define literary canons and readerly accessibility. In his effort to elevate Burns, Jeffrey goes on to debunk the contemporary characterization of Burns as a rural prodigy: So much indeed are we impressed with a sense of his merits, that we cannot help thinking it a derogation from them to consider him as a prodigy at all; and are convinced that he will never be rightly estimated as a poet, till that vulgar wonder be entirely repressed which was raised

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on his having been a ploughman. It is true, no doubt, that he was born in an humble station, and that much of his early life was devoted to severe labour, and to the society of his fellow-labourers. But he was not himself either uneducated or illiterate; and was placed perhaps in a situation more favourable to the development of great poetical talents, than any other which could have been assigned him.50

Jeffrey is quite right in pointing out that Burns was in fact an ‘‘educated’’ poet, having attended a parish school and been tutored privately at home when the school closed. Jeffrey goes to some length to prove that Burns’s laboring life did not hinder his poetic development; in his estimation, to consider Burns a rural prodigy is to do his poetic reputation a disservice. Burns-the-poet, one who writes about ‘‘rural scenes’’ and his previous working life in specific ways, ironically transcends his plebeian origins and laboring life through Jeffrey’s polemical re-construction of him. Other commentators followed suit, particularly on the point of Burns’s education. In a London Magazine review of John Clare’s first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, John Scott notes that ‘‘Clare cannot be put forth as the rival to Burns, for the latter, as has been remarked of him by others, is misrepresented when described as an unlettered peasant. The intellectual powers of Burns were aided by education almost as far as education can aid.’’51 Hence, literate culture succeeded in elevating Burns above the delimiting connotations associated with radical natural genius—plebeian origin, a laborious life, and no formal education—and fixing him, eventually, in the canon of English Romanticism. It is worth noting in this context that a recent Penguin edition of Burns’s poems prominently continues this process of disassociation: ‘‘Burns was not, however, as he is sometimes portrayed, an unlettered peasant.’’52 The facts of a laboring life were often marshaled for pejorative purposes in the cases of Duck and his fellow plebeians; but for Burns, those facts were simply buried in the myth of the ‘‘Heaven-taught ploughman’’ constructed around his emergence. And yet Burns’s plebeian signifiers were not completely erased from the minds of certain of his readers, particularly those laboringclass poets who followed his lead. In fact, Burns comes to replace Duck as the point of origin, so to speak, for a laboring-class poetic genealogy. Subsequent plebeian poets ‘‘found in the Burns legend a usable hero as they began to construct the peasant hero in place of the unlettered curiosity.’’53 Burns’s career was not encumbered with royal patronage, as Duck’s had been, and the combination of his success in the literary marketplace with his acceptance into lit-

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erate culture (as evidenced by Jeffrey’s criticism, for example) made him a powerfully inspiring figure for later laboring-class poets. Indeed, both Bloomfield and Clare paid explicit homage to Burns in many forms, and the Scottish tradition includes other wellknown figures like James Hogg, lesser-known poets like John Learmont, and extends well into the nineteenth century with the likes of Alan Cunningham, who corresponded with Clare. Thus a thriving Scottish tradition of plebeian poetry comes to influence an English tradition, and vice versa, in important ways by the end of the eighteenth century. Although I do not intend to diminish the import or influence of these Scottish poets (and perhaps many as yet ‘‘undiscovered’’ Irish and Welsh counterparts), it is beyond the scope of this study to do them justice. At the risk of misrepresenting its subject as a self-contained cultural narrative, this study remains firmly focused on an English tradition of laboring-class poets. However, I hope that the occasional glance at poets from other, culturally distinct traditions is enough to remind us that the English tradition extends beyond the borders of England and Englishness. Those related traditions are certainly deserving of a monograph all their own, but that is perhaps the subject for another day. I have assembled, then, a representative (but by no means comprehensive) group of English laboring-class poets who, in varying degrees, used their entrance into a literary world traditionally reserved for the learned and the polite to speak their experience. As E. P. Thompson noted a long time ago, ‘‘if we are concerned with historical change we must attend to the articulate minorities.’’54 My titular phrase, ‘‘the lab’ring Muses,’’ borrowed from a poem by Duck, defines just such an articulate minority. Taken together, this group of poets does not form an organized working-class movement, even when they do speak in unison on a specific social issue, such as the exploitation of agricultural labor. These laboring poets did, however, carve out a niche for themselves in a culture which, often confusingly, both sanctioned and repressed their literary endeavors. Although plebeian poets produced many excellent poems, this study is not concerned solely with arguing issues of aesthetic value; rather, it tends toward the social and ideological content of their poetry, and attempts to champion these ‘‘voices from below’’ as important interlocutors in the ongoing cultural dialogue on work, writing, and social class taking place in preindustrial England.

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1 Terminology and Methodology THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION IS DEVOTED TO CLARIFYING KEY TERMS and mapping the theoretical underpinnings of my method. Broadly speaking, I see this task as elucidating how I read literary texts, and shedding some light on what I am reading for when I do. It is, emphatically, not my intention to rehearse every theoretical issue that is raised by the many critical schools brought to bear on the analysis of plebeian poetry in subsequent chapters. A measure of coherence, not resolution, is my aim. Yet even this lesser goal of coherence leads inevitably to defending certain positions and connections among theoreticians and their ideas. This chapter, then, is devoted to achieving three related goals: establishing working definitions of important terms, clarifying my own brand of materialist analysis, specifically as it relates to the problem of ‘‘class’’ as a heuristic category in eighteenth-century studies, and exploring the potential for self-conscious ideology critique issued from plebeian pens in the period. The first issue of nomenclature centers on the problem of what to call this eclectic group of poets. The impulse to name, to identify, is difficult to resist, as evidenced by the many terms that have been proffered by a wide range of commentators since the eighteenth century. At a fundamental level, collecting any group of writers under a general rubric is a function of issues of legitimation and control, or more precisely, a combination of both. With his 1831 essay, The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets, Robert Southey produced the first serious and sympathetic discussion of English plebeian poets under the identifying banner of ‘‘uneducated.’’ As Kurt Heinzelman has recently argued, Southey sought both ‘‘to inscribe a place for the laborer within the culture of belleslettres’’ and ‘‘to maintain the uneducated writer, the laborer-poet, as a self-educable amateur’’ outside the profession of writers.1 The paradoxical discourses of legitimation and control are contained, for Southey, within the contemporary implications of the term ‘‘un39

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educated,’’ which signifies both a prototypical romantic conception of the poet, as Heinzelman also points out, and the limits to which such a conception can (or should) be taken. Southey’s essay is ostensibly an introduction to the poetic work of the servant John Jones, whose verses abound in ‘‘natural images’’ and ‘‘natural feeling,’’ eliciting a kind of pleasure in Southey and his test audience (his family and ‘‘a lady’’ friend) that justifies publication (8). But, in linking Jones to a series of earlier ‘‘uneducated’’ poets, whom Southey never credits with any form of self-authorizing or independent capacity, he effectively closes off the realm of professional letters not only to Jones, but to any past or future versifier from the lower classes. It was Thomas Carlyle who first registered a stinging critique of the restrictive function of Southey’s descriptor. In ‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ a review essay that champions the Chartist poet Ebenezer Elliott, Carlyle attacks Southey’s use of ‘‘uneducated’’ with typical rhetorical flair: Here too be it premised, that nowise under the category of ‘Uneducated Poets,’ or in any fashion of dilettante patronage, can our Sheffield friend be produced. . . . There are unhappy times in the world’s history, when he that is the least educated will chiefly have to say that he is the least perverted; and with the multitude of false eyeglasses, convex, concave, green, even yellow, has not lost the natural use of his eyes.2

Carlyle sees Southey’s critical identification for what it is: a form of ‘‘dilettante patronage’’ whose strategy is containment. The passage continues by moralizing against this repressive function by invoking historical context—the ‘‘unhappy times’’ would no doubt register with his readers as the social upheavals surrounding the recently passed Reform Bill (1832)—and positing that lower-class writers like Elliott might see things more clearly than others. Carlyle further questions, in more mundane terms, whether ‘‘uneducated’’ is even an accurate historical description, for ‘‘what, after all, is meant by uneducated, in a time when Books have come into the world; come to be household furniture in every habitation of the civilised world?’’3 Indeed, the plebeian voices that Carlyle heard, and those that had been singing for generations before, were rather ‘‘differently educated’’ than ‘‘uneducated,’’ and it is attending to what that difference creates in poetry that interests Carlyle most. More recent critics, following Carlyle’s lead, have succeeded in replacing ‘‘uneducated’’ with designations meant to reflect the different experiences and subject positions represented by plebeian

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poets. Brian Maidment was the first to revive the term ‘‘self-taught’’ as a collective descriptor in his critical anthology, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (1987). As an anthologist, Maidment finds the ‘‘political, economic, or geographical determinant[s]’’ embedded in terms like ‘‘workingclass,’’ ‘‘industrial,’’ and ‘‘regional’’ limiting; hence he uses ‘‘selftaught’’ to emphasize ‘‘the literariness, the linguistic and formal self-consciousness, which is characteristic of writing by self-taught working men.’’4 Following Maidment, John Goodridge adopts the terms ‘‘self-taught’’ and ‘‘autodidactic’’—both of which gained currency in the mid-nineteenth century—to identify the poetic tradition to which John Clare belongs in order to offset ‘‘the negative and restrictive connotations of labels like ‘peasant poet’ and ‘uneducated poet.’ ’’5 While Maidment and Goodridge share an analytical focus on the literary elements of the self-taught tradition, they remain aware that much writing produced by self-taught poets is laden with political and economic meaning. What is significant about terms like ‘‘self-taught’’ and ‘‘autodidactic’’ is that they are positive descriptors that foreground valuable cultural context, and the critical self-awareness of commentators like Maidment and Goodridge keeps these identifying terms from becoming overly reductive. But because my analysis of this self-taught poetic tradition seeks to foreground specific political and economic determinants, while at the same time avoiding the ahistoricism embedded in terms like ‘‘working-class’’ or ‘‘proletarian,’’ I employ a different set of identifying terms. Following Thompson, I have adopted the word ‘‘plebeian’’ as a general, inclusive descriptor, despite its shortcomings, and following Donna Landry and others, I use ‘‘laboring-class’’ as a kind of preindustrial compromise to the specifically industrial, Marxist connotations of ‘‘working-class’’ and ‘‘proletarian.’’ ‘‘Plebeian’’ is decidedly not a poetic word, though some poets did use it in their published verse to describe a group, or class, of people with whom they self-identified. James Woodhouse, for example, uses the term often in his lengthy autobiographical poem, Crispinus Scriblerus, and wrote to his employer and patron, Elizabeth Montagu, that ‘‘I could enter into a Dissertation on the Uses of Reading; what is well adapted to the Gentleman & what to the Plebeian,’’ placing himself, of course, in the latter group.6 However, the term is fraught with negative connotations that have survived from the eighteenth century into our own. Nobody, I think, wants to be labeled a ‘‘pleb.’’ But, of the many possible descriptive terms, ‘‘plebeian’’ remains the most historically accurate and useful within an eigh-

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teenth-century context. According to Thompson, neoclassicism manifested itself for the ruling classes in the eighteenth century by looking to the classical world for ‘‘the most coherent sociological and political model against which they measured their own problems and conduct’’; Thompson adds that ‘‘in moments of self-reflection and self-dramatization, the rulers of eighteenth-century England saw themselves as patricians and the people as plebs.’’7 I imagine that the laboring poor of eighteenth-century England did not like being called ‘‘plebs’’ either, but because of its classical connotations (borrowed from ancient Rome) the term was current in the period and it accounted for a wide range of disenfranchised people: tenant farmers, agricultural laborers, servants, shoemakers, weavers, bricklayers, and so on. This broad inclusiveness I take to be a strength in that ‘‘plebeian’’ covers the often difficult problem of accounting for both the rural poor and their urban, artisan counterparts. ‘‘Peasant,’’ with its specifically rural and agricultural connotations, does not allow for the many city-dwelling artisan poets, such as the bricklayers Robert Tatersal and Henry Jones, who were self-consciously part of a plebeian poetic tradition. In fact, despite a revival in the early nineteenth century when Bloomfield and Clare were brought before the public (Clare is ‘‘the Northamptonshire peasant’’ on the title page to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery), ‘‘peasant’’ was not a historically accurate term. Roger Wells notes that it is ‘‘an elementary fact in English agricultural history’’ that, ‘‘if by peasant we mean a subsistence, or neo-subsistence farmer, England had relatively few peasants in 1700 and virtually none by 1800.’’8 ‘‘Laboring-class,’’ which I use interchangeably with ‘‘plebeian,’’ serves to highlight my analytical focus on work because it reminds us of the dominant view in the period equating labor and social rank—without raising the theoretical and historical problems associated by imposing nineteenth-century terms like ‘‘working-class’’ or ‘‘proletarian’’ on eighteenth-century writers. There is, in fact, a long-running and complex social-historical debate about conceptualizing class in preindustrial England; scholarship extends back forty years which argues against simply viewing the eighteenthcentury social hierarchy through the lens of Marxist class theory.9 Importantly, it was Thompson who, in the late 1970s, issued the following admonition about employing class as a heuristic category in the eighteenth century: If class was not available within people’s own cognitive system, if they saw themselves and fought out their own historical battles in terms of

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‘estates’ or ‘ranks’ or ‘orders,’ etc., then if we describe these struggles in class terms we must exert caution against any tendency to read back subsequent notations of class.10

More recently, historians examining the social order in early modern England have advanced compelling evidence that a vocabulary of class was indeed emerging in the eighteenth century, but the familiar caution remains: ‘‘Working class is anachronistic in implying a stage in class formation and consciousness which had hardly been reached even by 1815.’’11 And, in the most significant study to date, Gareth Stedman Jones has been outspoken in calling for an end to the ‘‘essentialist conception of class.’’12 The word ‘‘class’’ can thus be used in a strictly descriptive sense consonant with eighteenthcentury usage, provided that we guard against casually appropriating nineteenth-century conceptual developments such as class consciousness and class conflict. Samuel Johnson’s primary definition of ‘‘class’’ as ‘‘a rank or order of persons’’ reveals that the term itself was merely another synonym in the predominant language of rank and order in the eighteenth century.13 And Johnson himself uses ‘‘class’’ in this manner quite often, as in two numbers of The Rambler where he inveighs against a particular ‘‘class’’ of authors, and where he explains that ‘‘every class of society has its cant of lamentation, which is understood or regarded by none but themselves.’’14 Social historians and literary critics alike have long been engaged in intra- and cross-disciplinary debates about using a Marxist concept of class to describe historical persons who did not think of themselves in those terms. John Rule has pointed out that ‘‘the debate which most persists, which is most likely to continue to do so and which arouses the greatest degree of antagonism among protagonists, is that over class and class consciousness’’ in the early modern period.15 His statement provides both summary and prophecy. Other prominent social historians had approached the problem of class in the eighteenth century by describing a ‘‘classless society’’ and ‘‘a one class society.’’16 However, Raymond Williams emphatically states that the ‘‘development of class in its modern social sense . . . belongs essentially to the period between 1770 and 1840, which is also the period of the Industrial Revolution and its decisive reorganization of society.’’17 Yet Williams, Michael McKeon, and John Richetti provide linguistic and other literary documentation of ‘‘class criteria’’ prior to 1770.18 Williams and McKeon, for example, look to Defoe for uses of the term ‘‘class’’ not simply as another synonym for ‘‘rank’’ or ‘‘order’’ but as a specific description

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of one social group delineated from another in terms of financial income, occupational identity, or both. McKeon goes so far as to claim that ‘‘the socioeconomic terminology of ‘class’ begins to be used before the middle of the eighteenth’’ century, a statement supported by the work of social historians P. J. Corfield, Keith Wrightson, and others mentioned above.19 The general direction of this work seems correct in the main; that is, the careful use of textual evidence suggests the emergence of languages of class that predate the existence of a specifically working-class consciousness. I would add, however, that these early languages of class are not dependent on the actual use of the term itself. Defoe’s often-quoted characterization of the eighteenth-century social hierarchy from the Review provides an illustrative example: The People are divided into; 1. The Great, who live profusely. 2. The Rich, who live very plentifully. 3. The middle Sort, who live well. 4. The working Trades, who labour hard but feel no Want. 5. The Country People, Farmers, &c, who fare indifferently. 6. The Poor, who fare hard. 7. The Miserable, that really pinch and suffer Want.20

Although the actual word ‘‘class’’ is not present in Defoe’s language, the foundations for specific class criteria are. Defoe’s classifications single out occupation and relative material wealth over the traditional markers of social status: birth, blood, and honor. This emphasis on work and wealth would become, by mid-century, a central feature of the middle-class critique of an eighteenth-century social hierarchy that, in Defoe’s day, was still entrenched in oldworld distinctions. In the emerging industrial economy of eighteenth-century England, as trade and technology develop and profoundly effect the organization of human labor and social groupings, what one does (or does not do) for work increasingly defines one’s position within the social hierarchy. In 1743, Henry Fielding effectively (if also jokingly) streamlines Defoe’s classifications while maintaining the focus on work: ‘‘Mankind are first properly to be considered under two grand divisions, those that use their own hands, and those who employ the hands of others. The former are the base and rabble; the latter, the genteel part of the creation.’’21 Previously Fielding had offered this description of a two-class system in Joseph Andrews, as the narrator dissertates on

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high people and low people: ‘‘Be it known then, that the human species are divided into two sorts of people, to wit, high people and low people. . . . High people signify no other than people of fashion, and low people those of no fashion.’’22 Implicit in Fielding’s oversimplified distinction based on ‘‘fashion’’ is the consciousness of the increasing influence of money and material wealth on definitions of social rank. This process of historicizing the languages of class and the emergence of new class criteria is important to our understanding of the eighteenth-century social hierarchy as a dynamic rather than a static entity. The existence and relative significance of such class criteria thus depend on specific historical contexts, and not a priori on some transhistorical category of class. In so far as this study is interested in locating and explaining the emergence of class criteria—that is, of specific literary representations of laboring-class resistance to a traditional, dominant, repressive order of things—it employs a cultural materialist methodology. Without delving into all of the theoretical, practical, and disciplinary issues that cultural materialism aims to revise, it is worth reiterating the suppositions put forth by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature (1977) where he formulates a definition of cultural materialism as ‘‘a theory of the specificities of material culture and literary production within historical materialism.’’23 In arguing against the tendencies of ‘‘idealist cultural thought,’’ Williams poses the categories of language and culture as ‘‘constitutive’’ elements of material social life (19). As Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean effectively summarize Williams’s position, ‘‘language . . . is . . . a way of thinking and acting in the world that has material consequences’’; he considers ‘‘the study of culture to be as important for grappling with material reality as the study of economics’’; and he ‘‘strives to put human subjects as agents of culture back into materialist debate.’’24 In their influential Political Shakespeare (1985), Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield describe cultural materialism as a critical practice pitched against the traditional approaches to literary texts that (they felt) were on the way out in the mid-1980s. For Dollimore and Sinfield, cultural materialism offers a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis. . . . Historical context undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text and allows us to recover its histories; theoretical method detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeks only to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commitment confronts conservative categories in which most criticism has hitherto been conducted; textual

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analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored. . . . Cultural materialism . . . studies the implication of literary texts in history.25

Traditional belles-lettres criticism has little use for poetry produced by eighteenth-century plebeian pens because it does not (often) measure up to the standards of aesthetic and technical value set by high culture. In short, cultural materialism provides alternative ways for conceiving of literary value, and a hermeneutic for measuring traditionally marginalized literary texts. Within the many versions of materialist criticism, the concept of ideology has become a key analytical tool. Ideology is a vexed and often vexing term,26 but a useful materialist definition appears in post-Marxist thought in the work of Louis Althusser. Althusserian theory has served as a benchmark for studies which require a more sophisticated notion of ideology than is provided by classical Marxism. The traditional Marxist conceptions of ideology as false consciousness, defined as the distorted representations of material conditions, or as conscious struggle, as the way in which people become conscious of their real interests and respond by fighting it out, do not provide much for literary critics to do: texts either become examples of false consciousness themselves or they show us what we already knew before reading them. The fact that Althusser’s concept of ideology is cited so often in current literary and cultural studies suggests that his formulation offers a more significant role for literature within the cultural matrix, and hence, a more interesting job for critics to undertake in explicating its nature and effects. In ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),’’ Althusser extends standard Marxist conceptions of ideology and effectively enables ideological analysis in materialist literary/cultural studies. He notes that, for Marx: Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud.27

Therefore, in the classical Marxist formulation, history exists outside of ideology. Althusser seeks to put history back into the concept by positing complementary theses: his ‘‘ideology in general’’ thesis and his ‘‘ideologies’’ thesis. In the former, Althusser argues that, like Freud’s unconscious, ‘‘ideology is eternal’’ and has ‘‘no

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history’’ in the sense that ‘‘it has no history of its own.’’28 Ideologies, by way of contrast, do have histories of their own and Althusser’s theory ‘‘depends in the last resort on the history of social formations, and thus of the modes of production combined in social formations, and of the class struggles which develop in them.’’29 For ‘‘ideologies,’’ Althusser differentiates between repressive state apparatuses (RSA), which control citizens directly through such social institutions as armies, police, courts, and prisons, and ideological state apparatuses (ISA), which control indirectly by means of culture, communication, and ‘‘specialized institutions’’ such as churches, schools, and the family.30 Literature is a key feature of what Althusser terms ‘‘the cultural ISA’’ and it is here that literary critics, even those working in earlier historical periods, can seek out both the ways in which the state subtly disseminates and sanctions as valid certain ways of representing reality, and the ways in which certain people resist those dominant or hegemonic representations.31 In his reformulated definition of ideology, Althusser advances the notion that ‘‘ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of existence,’’ a statement which leads to two more significant shifts in the concept that, in effect, enable ‘‘ideology’’ as a heuristic category in literary and cultural exegesis.32 With respect to ‘‘ideologies’’ at least, which can be represented in various cultural forms, Althusser’s definition brings the concept of ideology much closer to Foucault’s notion of discourse formation. Foucault’s objections to the term ideology are well known; but it turns out that his productive model of ‘‘power,’’ and the role discourse plays in it, share significant features with Althusser’s conception of ideology. Both theorists, however, have come under fire for the totalizing effects each accords to ‘‘power’’ and ‘‘ideology’’ respectively. Though, as Eagleton notes, ‘‘Althusser inherits [his] notion of ideology as habitual behaviour rather than conscious thought from Gramsci,’’ he does not allow much room for individual agency resistive to ideology.33 In light of this aspect of Althusserian thought, Gramsci has become the key figure for theorizing the potential for individual and/or collective resistance to dominant, repressive social forces. With characteristic ease, E. P. Thompson makes this point clear in a passage worth quoting in full: The concept of hegemony is immensely valuable, and without it we would be at a loss to understand how eighteenth-century social relations were structured. But while such cultural hegemony may define the limits

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of what is possible, and inhibit the growth of alternative horizons and expectations, there is nothing determined or automatic about this process. Such hegemony can be sustained by the rulers only by the constant exercise of skill, of theatre and of concession. Second, such hegemony, even when imposed successfully, does not impose an all-embracing view of life; rather, it imposes blinkers, which inhibit vision in certain directions while leaving it clear in others. It can co-exist (as it did coexist in eighteenth-century England) with a very vigorous self-activating culture of the people, derived from their own experience and resources. This culture, which may be resistant at many points to any form of exterior domination, constitutes an ever-present threat to official descriptions of reality. . . .34

In Customs in Common, his last major contribution to the historiography of eighteenth-century popular culture, Thompson reveals his heavy debt to Gramsci for theorizing plebeian resistances to dominant, ‘‘patrician’’ social forces. Thompson’s earlier critique of Althusserian theory is well documented, but it remains that, for Althusser, Foucault, and those other theorists who influenced or were influenced by their work, ideology is an active social force, a constitutive element of any social reality; it is what is true or real—as opposed to false or illusory—for a given society.35 This materialist notion is what ultimately makes Althusser’s conception of ideology (read with Gramsci’s ‘‘hegemony’’ still firmly in mind) so enticing for those disciplines concerned with examining textual sources. Istva´n Me´sa´ros observes that ideology is not mere illusion but a ‘‘materially anchored and sustained’’ form of social consciousness that is ‘‘objectively constituted (and constantly reconstituted) as the inescapable practical consciousness of class societies, concerned with the articulation of rival sets of values and strategies that aim at controlling the social metabolism under all its major aspects.’’36 Language and the various historically-bound textual forms language takes provide both a ‘‘material anchor’’ and the means for ideological ‘‘articulation’’ and counter-articulation that are then recoverable, in some sense, by critics of a different age. The questions this theoretical foundation raise, then, become the challenges of historical recovery: what ideological representations were produced and reproduced in textual forms in the eighteenth century that were intended to keep men and women of the laboring classes in their appointed places in the social order? Given the historical scope of this inquiry, how did these ideological representations change (or not change) over time to meet the demands of different social conditions? And, most importantly, in what ways did plebeian poets contest or counter these representations in their

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own published texts? Within the full spectrum of eighteenth-century plebeian literary production—that is, in terms of both what was expected of them by their mostly polite patrons and readership, and what they actually produced—there are three key values whose representations are ideologically charged most often in the service of the dominant culture: honesty, industry, and piety. Most plebeian poets made it into print through the course of the century in part because their lives could be represented profitably as positive examples of these values. But many of these same poets show significant critical knowledge of the ideological implications of honesty, industry, and piety, and of the complex cultural processes that sanctioned their literary endeavors while restricting their access to literary careers. This triumvirate of values is also central to arguments surrounding labor and what to do about the poor throughout the eighteenth century. Defoe, for instance, provides this meditation on ‘‘Industry’’ in a number of the Review devoted in part to ‘‘some serious Enquiries into the Case of employing, settling and providing for the Poor’’: There will be rich and poor; the Diligent will improve, and the Slothful will decay; the Sluggard will be clothed in Rags, and the Good-Wife will be array’d in Purple; the Waster will starve, and the Good-Husband will be rich. This is what we call Industry; and this Industry, as in private Affairs, so in publick, is still bless’d; this makes Nations populous, Kingdoms powerful, great Towns rise, others decay; brings Crowds to this Place, and leaves that bare of Inhabitants, as Opportunities present themselves to encourage and imploy the Hands of those that seek it.37

More than a century before the measured rantings of Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, work shows up as a key category for recovering contemporary responses to the early stages of the reorganization of English society under capitalism. The plebeian poetic discourse on work functions both as a discourse of containment, through which various poets simply reproduce dominant social values and attitudes, and as a discourse of possibility, through which many poets describe social oppression and imagine social change. Over the last few years, criticism of working-class imaginative writing in general has tended to emphasize the complex nature of class-based resistances produced by plebeian pens. If we understand full-blown resistance to mean the refusal to be dominated, then of the many poets I discuss below, only James Woodhouse,

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Ann Yearsley, and, to a certain extent, John Clare ultimately measure up to the definition at some point in their respective careers. But if we take a more nuanced approach and see resistance in terms of public responses to perceived injustices or social problems, and recognize that these responses were often couched in the forms and terms of the dominant culture, then it is possible to locate many more examples of subcultural resistance. Yet even in the context of this wider definition of resistance, so-called progressive theories which maintain an ideal of smash-the-state rebellion set against its opposite, capitulation or resignation to dominant social structures and values, usually fail to see much in between. These analytical methods tend to obscure or devalue the desires of marginalized social groups if those desires simply reproduce existing power relations. In her effort to revise this practice, Constance Coiner points out that ‘‘Leftist criticism must try to account for the conscious and unconscious movement of working-class writing ‘between complicity and critique’ and view working-class writing relationally, gauging which of its forms oppose, which strategically adopt, and which unconsciously borrow the forms of ‘high’ and mass culture.’’38 I would emphasize that eighteenth-century laboring poets were quite capable of consciously borrowing those high culture forms, as we shall see. Complicity and critique coexist in many plebeian texts of the period, and a more progressive view of resistance does not require the wholesale rejection of mainstream cultural values or discursive practices.39 Thus, in my account, the significance of earlymodern plebeian poets and their work is located in social criticism often buried underneath layers of poetic imitation, personification, and characteristic lower-class deference. These poets were not (nor should we expect them to have been) pipe-wielding workers taking to the streets of London, Bristol, or Coventry; rather, they used language to reproduce what was expected of them by their high culture readers and patrons, as they also imagined and, in some cases, created alternatives to the ‘‘real’’ limitations of their historical moment. At the risk of sounding the notes of an old historicism, which Marjorie Levinson has described as the practice of ‘‘restor[ing] to the dead their own living language, that they might bespeak themselves,’’ we must try to view the cultural formations of the past as fundamentally different from our own, as we also attempt to understand a given historical moment’s peculiar way of working in its own terms.40 If the category of class and examples of laboring-class resistance are to be understood as in any sense genuinely historical, then it is necessary to remember that there is a ‘‘before’’ to concepts

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like class consciousness and revolutionary praxis. However, in trying to come to terms with this ‘‘before,’’ my goal is not to ferret out or explain some more accurate Truth about the past. Instead, I seek to identify a range of discursive currents within eighteenth-century English print culture, and within English plebeian poetry in particular, that become the raw material out of which ‘‘class’’ would be explicitly articulated and defined in the nineteenth century. My interest in recuperating eighteenth-century vocabularies of social conflict has led me to examine the period term ‘‘Custom’’ as an earlymodern conceptualization of what we understand as ideology critique. By the late seventeenth century, Custom emerges in imaginative writing as a site of gender- and class-based contestation. Polite, predominantly male authors most often used the term in its established capacity to mean habitual social behavior or established fashion. Yet many eighteenth-century plebeian and women writers (and even a few sympathetic male authors) recognized the socially repressive function of Custom when internalized by individuals. Their use of the term provides these writers with a language to express a critique of ideology, and an opportunity for us to historicize ideological resistance to specific forms of social oppression. In the eighteenth century, Custom carried several definitions which, taken together, relate to a single, sociological field of meaning. The first three definitions provided in Johnson’s Dictionary are bound together by their sociological connotations: ‘‘Habit; [or] habitual practice . . . fashion; [or] common way of acting’’ and ‘‘established manner’’ all describe, with an increasing degree of severity, popular social rules and practices.41 Within the context of law, Johnson notes, custom indicates ‘‘a law or right not written, which, being established by long use, and the consent of our ancestors, has been, and is daily, practiced. . . . Custom is either general or particular: general, that which is current through England; particular, is that which belongs to this or that county.’’ To be granted the quasilegal status of a custom, however, an unwritten social code must be proved to have been in use for one hundred years, or through three generations, depending on the kind of evidence available. Although Johnson distinguishes this definition as existing ‘‘in law,’’ it forms a logical extension of the first three sociological definitions: certain long-standing social practices retained the force of law in eighteenth-century courts. Social historians working on the politics of the ‘‘ancient constitution’’ in the seventeenth century, and those—like Thompson— chronicling the emergence of class identities in the transition from preindustrial to industrial society have focused on custom in this

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legal context. In Elizabethan England, custom emerged as the basis for common law within debates about individual rights and the nature of law. By the early seventeenth century, as J. G. A. Pocock notes, ‘‘English lawyers were prepared to define common law as custom and to defend custom against written law.’’42 The majority of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have appealed to the rationality and immemorialness of custom to establish consensus and settle disputes.43 Similarly, in examining the conflicts surrounding custom in the eighteenth century, Thompson argues that ‘‘many of the classic struggles at the entry to the industrial revolution turned as much on customs as upon wages or conditions of work.’’44 Thompson focuses on specific customs or customary rights—some codified or written, others less visible over the course of the century, like the annual trade processions that lost their trade endorsements by the nineteenth century due to the potential for mass uprising—in order to establish that these struggles were tinged with class interests. Thompson couches this discussion within the division he sees in the period between patrician and plebeian cultures, and provides a suggestive generalization for describing what custom meant to eighteenth-century people. ‘‘In the eighteenth century,’’ Thompson writes, custom was the rhetoric of legitimation for almost any usage, practice, or demanded right. . . . So far from having the steady permanence suggested by the word ‘‘tradition,’’ custom was a field of change and of contest, an arena in which opposing interests made conflicting claims.45

Thompson’s formulation is useful in materialist literary study precisely because it elevates the discussion of custom beyond the historian’s traditional concern for analyzing specific ritualized customs, such as annual trade processions and calendar festivals, and the overtly economic customary rights of the lower orders, such as gleaning, hunting, and wood-gathering. Like Althusser’s distinction between ‘‘ideology’’ and ‘‘ideologies,’’ Thompson’s opening essay, titled ‘‘Custom and Culture,’’ suggests a distinction between specific customs and something larger, more general and pervasive, like ‘‘Custom.’’ Indeed, Thompson’s statement above sounds a lot like a carefully streamlined, post-Marxist definition of ideology. If, in the late twentieth century, we might understand ourselves as subjected by various ideological apparatuses, eighteenth-century people could see themselves regulated and, in some cases, oppressed by identifiable customary practices or, as they would have been more likely to represent it at an ideological level, by that ‘‘tyrant

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Custom’’ himself. Both ideology and Custom constitute a ‘‘field of contest,’’ where opposing factions with opposing socioeconomic interests, for example, can make conflicting claims in an effort to maintain or acquire social power. Thompson’s concern with class struggle hovers just beneath the surface of his language, and his statement is instructive not only with regard to recovering historical instances of people ‘‘fighting it out’’ over specific customary rights, but also for establishing ‘‘Custom’’ as a potentially oppositional discourse functioning at the level of ideology. Following Thompson, Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers emphasize Custom itself as a significant heuristic category. For Hay and Rogers, in the first half of the eighteenth century, Custom was part of the natural social order, the observance of which was viewed as the key to collective well-being. By 1820, however, the social reciprocities between patrician and plebeian factions that characterized that society were greatly weakened, having been largely replaced by civil laws designed to protect the free market and the interests of industrialists.46 Custom was regularly invoked in this period of social transition by the disenfranchised in their attempts to maintain rights perceived to be theirs from time immemorial. Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth (particularly within the popular political movements leading up to and including Chartism), custom was a central feature of a plebeian culture that was increasingly ‘‘rebellious, but rebellious in defense of custom.’’47 Custom, then, ‘‘was certainly a ‘good’ word in the eighteenth century,’’ in Thompson’s view, because it often marked the ideal ends of laboring-class agitation, and it also provided a sort of justification for such rebelliousness.48 Yet socially marginalized groups like laboring-class poets and women writers, particularly in the eighteenth century, also participated in the process of demonizing Custom writ large. If we look at literary uses of the term throughout the century, both polite and plebeian authors rarely invoke Custom—with a capital ‘‘C’’—in the context of maintaining specific social rights or rituals. Instead, Custom emerges as an abstract concept, pitched at an ideological level and usually personified as a ‘‘tyrant,’’ to signify a range of social practices or normative values of which a given author is critical. Personifying Custom is effective in producing connotations of agency, suggesting that Custom, like ideology, is an active social force. Its personification as a ‘‘tyrant’’ not only renders Custom visible in the cultural field, the predominant use of the convention in poetry and prose suggests that eighteenth-century writers were cognizant of its negative or limiting function on human subjects. The

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category of Custom itself thus becomes a site of contest in imaginative writing, and, significantly, it is decidedly not a good word when invoked by female and plebeian authors—two groups marginalized in specific ways ‘‘time out of mind’’ by Custom. In effect, I am proposing nothing less than a disciplinary shift in the examination of Custom in the eighteenth century, though I see this shift as complementing social historical work like Thompson’s. Whenever Custom becomes manifest, this study is concerned less with specific customs than it is with Custom as a discourse with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic uses. Though I share with Thompson the general desire to situate eighteenth-century plebeian culture ‘‘within its proper material abode,’’ the fact remains that the evidence that we take up, indeed the evidence that counts, differs significantly in the business of establishing this material dimension.49 What Thompson devalues as ‘‘the thin air of ‘meanings, attitudes, and values’ ’’ becomes the raw material out of which materialist arguments in literary/cultural studies emerge.50 The rest of this chapter, then, is devoted to establishing a textual genealogy for understanding the concept of Custom as it was used by several plebeian poets in the period. The contrast between Mary Astell’s use of ‘‘Custom’’ in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Bernard Mandeville’s use of the term in The Fable of the Bees (1714) serves as a paradigmatic example for illustrating how Custom could be deployed in the service of ideology critique. This juxtaposition reveals a significant difference in the uses to which Custom, as an analytical concept, could be put. In her tract, Astell argues that ‘‘Ignorance and a narrow Education lay the Foundation of Vice’’ for women, and that ‘‘Imitation and Custom rear it up.’’51 The distinction Astell draws between ‘‘Imitation,’’ as in imitating others’ behavior, and ‘‘Custom’’ is important in her ensuing analysis of women’s compliance with traditional gendered social roles. Instead of viewing Custom simply as habitual practice, Astell extends the term conceptually: Custom, that merciless torrent that carries all before it, and which indeed can be stem’d by none but such as have a great deal of Prudence and a rooted Virtue. . . . For Virtue without question has on all accounts the preeminence of Vice, ‘tis abundantly more pleasant in the Act, as well as more advantageous in the Consequences, as any one who will but rightly use her reason, in a serious reflection on her self and the nature of things, may easily perceive. ‘Tis Custom, therefore, that Tyrant Custom, which is the grand motive to all those irrational choices which we daily see made in the World, so very contrary to our present interest and pleasure, as well as to our Future. (10–11)

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If ‘‘Imitation’’ describes the actual act of ‘‘complyance with an unreasonable Fashion,’’ then ‘‘Custom’’ serves conceptually as a way for Astell to describe the process itself (11). That is, Custom becomes a means for theorizing ‘‘the grand motive’’ which influences women to act against their ‘‘present interest[s].’’ Custom is a ‘‘Tyrant’’ in Astell’s view precisely because it works like ideology in representing a complex of social practices as if it were simply common sense, obvious, and natural. Astell astutely points out that when the practices of Custom are internalized by women, they dictate interests and pleasures that are congruent with existing social relations, rather than interests and pleasures as they might be represented ‘‘in a serious reflection on herself and the nature of things.’’ In Astell’s view, Custom is tyrannical because it amounts to an education in someone else’s interests (read men) which has been internalized by women. Whereas Astell theorizes an explanation for women’s subjection using Custom as her basis, Mandeville maintains the traditional focus of the term to describe the perpetuation of popular fashion. Mandeville observes: ‘‘In what concerns the Fashions and Manners of the Ages Men live in, they never examine into the real Worth or Merit of the Cause, and generally judge of things not as their Reason, but Custom direct them.’’52 Thus Mandeville restricts his definition of Custom to ‘‘Fashions’’ and ‘‘Manners,’’ yet he shares a putatively pejorative understanding of the term with Astell. In language that echoes Astell’s, Mandeville notes ‘‘this Tyranny which Custom usurps over us,’’ but the social context of Mandeville’s pronouncement differs greatly (173). If not for ‘‘Custom,’’ Mandeville argues, ‘‘men of any tolerable Good-nature could never be reconcil’d to the killing of so many Animals for their daily Food, as long as the bountiful Earth so plentifully provides them with Varieties of vegetable Dainties’’ (173). For Mandeville, Custom explains the dearth of vegetarians in the early eighteenth century; for Astell, Custom explains why women subject themselves to social behavior which does not serve their interests. The difference in the level of implied social criticism, and the obvious difference in their respective positions of social and gender power within their shared culture, might explain why Astell pushes the term conceptually beyond its standard definitions. Further evidence for both Mandeville’s and Astell’s use of Custom is readily available in both fictional and nonfictional writing throughout the eighteenth century. A brief look at a number of representative examples shows that, in general, the divisions of gender and relative social power that inform the contrast between Mande-

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ville and Astell hold up over time. For example, in Spectator no. 447, Addison argues that ‘‘Custom’’ possesses a ‘‘wonderful Efficacy in making every thing pleasant to us.’’53 Much like Mandeville, Addison views Custom in terms of habit and common social practice, pointing out to his readers that ‘‘not only such Actions as were at first Indifferent to us, but even such as were Painful, will by Custom and Practice become pleasant’’ (181). Interestingly, Addison evens out his working definition of the term across all ranks of society with the observation that ‘‘we often hear in the Mouths of the Vulgar, that Custom is a second Nature’’ (180). This observation reveals that Custom was indeed discussed among the lower orders of society, and, according to Addison, he and the ‘‘vulgar’’ share a common understanding of the term. But published work by Henry Jones, Ann Yearsley, and Robert Bloomfield which I will discuss below suggests that the ‘‘vulgar’’ could also reconceptualize Custom to create a discourse of social criticism. Following Addison, Pope’s use of Custom in several of his minor poems underscores the gender bias inherent in the concept in eighteenth-century society. The opening lines of ‘‘To a Lady with the Temple of Fame’’ concisely illustrate the gendered double standard of Custom: ‘‘What’s Fame with Men, by Custom of the Nation, / Is call’d in Women only Reputation.’’54 Pope’s discerning observation, however, does not amount to a critical view of the cultural uses of Custom. In his ‘‘Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture,’’ Pope professes that ‘‘Custom, grown blind with Age, must be your Guide’’ (63). Although Custom is figured as ‘‘blind with Age,’’ suggesting a sense of useless, outdated social rules, it nevertheless must be a woman’s ‘‘guide’’ in her social life. Custom assumes a dubious but ultimately positive role in Pope’s view in defining the boundaries of femininity. It is only when he adopts the poetic persona of a woman in his ‘‘Epilogue to Jane Shore’’ that Pope openly criticizes Custom: ‘‘Our sex are still forgiving at their heart; / And did not wicked custom so contrive, / We’d be the best, good-natur’d things alive’’ (113). As part of the epilogue to Nicholas Rowe’s play, Jane Shore (1713), spoken by Anne Oldfield, these lines are in fact consistent with Pope’s gendered use of Custom. Indeed, Pope seems to seize the opportunity provided by Jane Shore to chastise women for not only failing to follow the dictates of Custom, but also for self-servingly blaming their social transgressions on it. The work of a number of other established male authors in the period reveals that the Johnsonian definitions of Custom predominated throughout the century. When describing the latitude af-

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forded tradesmen in point of honesty, Defoe notes that ‘‘by the custom and usage of trade’’ there are situations when a tradesman is allowed to lie.55 Thus Defoe uses Custom to define those established business practices—such as a tradesman asking for more money than he is willing to take—necessary to his professional success. Fielding echoes Defoe’s use of Custom in a passage on the subject of trade in general: Nothing hath wrought such an alteration in [the] People as the introduction of Trade. This hath indeed given a new Face to the whole Nation, hath in a great measure subverted the former state of affairs, and hath almost totally changed the Manners, Customs, and Habits of the People, and more especially of the lower Sort.56

For both Defoe and Fielding, Custom is not necessarily an immutable set of social practices and ‘‘laws’’ to live by. ‘‘Custom . . . has driven us beyond the limits of our morals in many things,’’ writes Defoe in The Complete English Tradesman (1726), a statement which suggests, along with Fielding’s, that Custom is a historically contingent field of change and contest, constantly being redefined in the face of various sociohistorical developments (165). But with regard to legal definitions, it is the notion that Custom is firmly rooted in the past which leads writers such as Oliver Goldsmith and later Edmund Burke to argue for ‘‘the superiority of custom to written law’’: Custom partakes of the nature of parental injunction; it is kept by the people themselves, and observed with a willing obedience. The observance of it must, therefore, be a mark of freedom. . . . [T]he benefits of new written laws are merely confined to the consequences of their observance; but customary laws, keeping up a veneration for the founders, engage men in the imitation of their virtues, as well as policy.57

Thus we find the sociological and legal definitions of Custom reproduced in a myriad of ‘‘polite’’ texts of the period, and in each case, Custom is decidedly a ‘‘good’’ word when the connotations cut toward the common law. Against this tradition, however, there are many examples in which Custom is figured as tyrannical, partial, or generally oppressive. It is not surprising that such examples issue from the pens of writers whose very entrance into print culture goes, in some measure, against the traditional practices of authorship in the period. The anonymous (apparently) female author of An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) notes ‘‘the Tyranny of Custom (here in

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England especially)’’ which works to keep women from gaining the sort of education which would qualify them as writers.58 Custom was emphatically not a good word for women in the early-modern period, and many women writers used the term to articulate their dissatisfaction with prevailing social norms. Aphra Behn’s Isabella in Sir Patient Fancy (1678) has this to say about the practice of arranged marriages: Custom is unkind to our Sex, not to allow us free choice; but we above all Creatures must be forced to endure the formal recommendations of a Parent; and the more insupportable Addresses of an Odious Foppe, whilst the Obedient Daughter stands—thus—with her Hands pinn’d before her, a set look, few words, and a mien that cries—come marry me; out upon’t.59

Although the context of Isabella’s speech is a specific social practice, Behn pushes the term Custom to mean more than a mere representation of the practice itself. Behn has Isabella blame ‘‘Custom’’—and not her father—for the repressive treatment of unwed daughters. Custom, then, takes on the active force of ideology for Behn, providing her with a language of ideology critique, and allowing her to identify and indict the overarching process by which oppressive social practices become established and perpetuated as simply natural. In this context, Behn figures Custom as an enemy to women who seek ‘‘free choice’’ in marriage. This pronounced critique of Custom is articulated by many other women writers in the eighteenth century, but Catharine Trotter Cockburn will serve here as a representative example. In the dedication to her tragedy, The Revolution of Sweden (1706), addressed to Lady Harriot Godolphin, Cockburn continues the print assault on those social customs which circumscribe a woman’s limited opportunities in the world: [T]here are so great difficulties, and such general discouragements to [women] who would improve their minds, and employ their time in any science or useful art, that there cannot be a more distinguishing mark of a free and beneficent spirit, than openly to condemn that ill-grounded custom, by giving countenance and protection to those, who have attempted against it.60

Cockburn publicly challenges the custom of denying women education in this epistle designed to recruit Lady Godolphin, a woman of high social standing, to the cause. And, like Behn and Astell before her, Cockburn also invokes Custom on a larger conceptual level as

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the process which conditions people to think and act in a certain way. The following lines published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737 show Cockburn seeking Queen Caroline’s aid in combating the effects of ‘‘partial custom’’: Oh! wou’d the mighty queen once more descend, The low to raise, the fearful to defend! Whom yet nor fears, nor malice cou’d avert From daring injur’d merit to assert. Tho’ not the flayl and sickle cou’d retard, Or cares discourage, more, the rural bard, Than those restraints, [which] have our sex confin’d, While partial custom checks the soaring mind.61

Caroline’s well-publicized patronage of Stephen Duck provides Cockburn with the context to argue that women suffer under more severe conditions, particularly because of Custom, which functions on an ideological level to limit female education, and so deserve royal favor more than Duck. For Cockburn, Custom is ‘‘partial’’ in the sense that it serves the interests of men, and so of patriarchal society in general, and not the interests of women living within that society. By the mid- to late-eighteenth century, the critical discourse on Custom was more fluid across both gender and genre lines. Many more male writers, and many more novelists, periodical essayists, and poets were jumping into the fray of social commentary, brandishing the weapons that the discourse on Custom provided. Perhaps poaching the personification of Custom as ‘‘tyrant’’ found in so many texts by women earlier in the century, James Thomson’s Autumn includes pastoral, golden-age rhetoric that describes ‘‘ancient uncorrupted times, / When tyrant custom had not shackled man, / But free to follow nature was the mode.’’62 And later in the century, through what amounts to a dizzying series of gendered displacements, Fanny Burney has Reverend Villars write to Evelina that ‘‘we are the slaves of custom, the dupes of prejudice, and dare not stem the torrent of an opposing world, even though our judgments condemn our compliance!’’63 Burney’s sense of the power of Custom echoes Astell’s, and both share a similar understanding of the debilitating effects of Custom on a woman’s movement in the world. It is, however, another of the many ironies of Burney’s novel that Villars, Evelina’s distant, male moral guide, voices this sentiment with such an air of defeatism: ‘‘. . . [S]ince the die is cast, we must endeavour to make the best of it,’’ he says (164). In fact, as

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the novel progresses, Evelina will not simply ‘‘make the best of it’’ and internalize the dictates of Custom; rather, she will follow the trajectory of the fairy-tale plot and begin to trust her own conscience and act for herself. In Evelina, Burney provides a fictional, dramatic rendering of one of the more explicit diatribes against Custom published in the century, a poem by Theodosius Forrest entitled ‘‘Custom. A Satire.’’ The poem was published in 1747 with a London imprint, but also appeared in the October 1747 number of The Universal Magazine. It is, in fact, less a satire in the Augustan tradition than it is an earnest, didactic piece suited to mid-century cultural and poetic expectations. Instead of making his subject look ridiculous, Forrest levels a straightforward condemnation of Custom early on: Instead of conscience—CUSTOM we obey, That o’er our wills usurps tyrannic sway. Custom for liberty is still mistook, And virtue for the fashion, is forsook. Custom, what art thou but an empty name, That checks our inclinations and our fame? To reformation few the path pursue, Custom’s a law for every thing we do. Th’ excuse is so convenient on our side, We safely err while custom is our guide.64

Though not personified as a ‘‘tyrant,’’ Custom is nevertheless ‘‘tyrannic,’’ a demonized figure that causes individuals to act against their own best interests, defined here as ‘‘liberty’’ and ‘‘virtue.’’ In Forrest’s use of ‘‘conscience,’’ we can read the same sort of social critical move made by Astell who, in a different context, called for every woman to engage ‘‘in a serious reflection on herself and the nature of things’’ (10). ‘‘Conscience’’ and self-reflection are two versions of the same language, a language of internal reckoning that amounts to a publishable discourse of ideology critique. Forrest, however, extends his argument across gender lines, calling for every ‘‘Youth,’’ ‘‘tinsel’d coxcomb,’’ and ‘‘idle Fair,’’ to do battle with the internalized dictates of Custom: Deluded age, confin’d in Custom’s chain, Reflect—and soon your liberty regain; That (once regain’d) this maxim will protect, Let each man act as conscience shall direct. (233)

Ultimately, these concluding lines show that Forrest’s argument lacks the radicalism in Astell’s because his call for individual re-

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flection to break free from Custom’s ‘‘controul’’ is inherently tied to reproducing existing social relations, with reforming his ‘‘deluded’’ society in the face of the corrupting influence of ‘‘fashion’’ and ‘‘taste’’ proliferated by Custom (233). Forrest does not speak as a woman oppressed by patriarchy, or as a laborer oppressed by a nascent capitalism. Though pitched through a poetic discourse which rails at Custom, Forrest’s rather pedestrian reformist social criticism places him firmly in the center, working to accommodate him to the status quo. Poets, novelists, dramatists, and essayists throughout the century thus invoke Custom in many contexts to create a publishable discourse of social criticism. The most radical of these writers are successful in defamiliarizing Custom, in effect using the term against itself by extending established usage to create a rhetorical and ideological position that is, in one context, antithetical to patriarchy. Eighteenth-century people did not talk about their hierarchical social relationships—or the injustices inherent therein—in terms of class, class consciousness, and the means of production. Many did, however, raise the issue of ‘‘Custom’’ and engaged quite self-consciously in the production and critique of social values, trading in the realm of ideology. And it is possible to see, in the language of ‘‘conscience’’ and self-reflection for example, specific keys for recognizing a complex genealogy that lies behind and informs concepts like ‘‘class consciousness.’’ The discourse on ‘‘Custom’’ suggests a mode of historically specific ideology critique—of a ‘‘consciousness’’ that may be different from Marxian notions of ‘‘class.’’ Of course, gender and social distinctions are important here: Behn and Cockburn are not oppressed in the same ways Duck and Jones are, and neither are the authors of each gendered pair constrained in the same way, due to subtle differences in both historical context and social standing. What I am suggesting with this discussion of Custom is that we can recognize and recover different discursive forms of early-modern ideology critique, and that these forms cannot be reduced to way stations on a path to ‘‘true’’ class consciousness or diminished as ‘‘primitive’’ forms of full-blown, Marxian revolutionary praxis. Of the plebeian poets discussed in the chapters that follow, only Henry Jones, Ann Yearsley, and Robert Bloomfield mobilize the concept of Custom in their published poetry to fashion a critical discourse aimed at exposing upper-class interests and debunking class-based strategies of social containment. This is ideology critique in full bloom, as Jones, for example, uses his experience from within, as a subject of the discourse on Custom, to create a counter-

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discourse of protest and possibility. While it is the case that, outside of these examples, other laboring-class poets in the period did not raise the issue of Custom in their work, nevertheless many did mold other available poetic forms and discourses to articulate their interests. Throughout this study, I conceive of eighteenth-century plebeian resistance as a primarily discursive activity, one in which plebeian poets did not simply reject mainstream cultural values or discursive practices. As I have noted above, determining the nature of plebeian resistance in the period is a more complicated affair because plebeian desires and interests were always spoken within the poetic forms and discourses that were available to them, sanctioned by the dominant culture. The critical task, as I see it, is to embrace this limitation and situate these poets and their work within relevant cultural/historical contexts in order to come to terms with the extent of their participation in counter-hegemonic practice.

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2 Stephen Duck and Plebeian Poetry in the 1730s Whether Peers, Porters, Taylors, tune their reeds, And measuring words to measuring shapes succeeds; For Bankrupts write, when ruin’d shops are shut, As Maggots crawl from out a perish’d Nutt. His Hammer This, and That his Trowel quits, And wanting Sense for Tradesmen, serve for Wits. By thriving men subsists each other Trade, Of every broken Craft a Writer’s made: Thus his Material, Paper, takes its birth, From tatter’d rags of all the stuff on earth.1

EDWARD YOUNG LAMENTS THE SAD STATE OF POETRY PUBLISHED IN

1730 in his ‘‘Epistle to Mr. Pope,’’ and so provides an instructive focal point to begin a discussion of the decade. Though Young in the poem as a whole is most concerned with the proliferation of dull political pamphleteers—those ‘‘labouring wits’’ who produce ‘‘heavy, huge, repeated, flat, Essays’’—he nevertheless points to laborer poets as members of ‘‘the black militia of the Pen’’ who are gaining ground in the scribbling professions (16). Young explicitly calls attention to tradesmen who cross the print line, but in so doing, he figures writing itself as a trade with its own distinct materials and tools. Of course Young is critical of this characterization, venting his spleen against lowly pretenders to the poet’s craft, yet his poem repeatedly undercuts his protectionist stance. The fictional ‘‘Lico,’’ for instance, who lacks ‘‘Learning, Humour, [and] Thought profound,’’ writes because ‘‘He wants twenty Pound’’ (8). Young shows, therefore, that he is living in the midst of a changing publishing economy, where aspiring writers could make a living hiring themselves out or selling their copy to bookseller-publishers. Developments in print technology, the lapse of the repressive 1695 Licensing Act, and expanding literacy conspire to render Young’s critique a conservative wailing against the winds of change. Not only does ‘‘Lico’’ want twenty quid, but by 1730 he could get it, too. 63

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Young’s reflective lines, then, document specific aspects of print culture in the 1730s out of which the laborer-poet phenomenon emerged. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, writing for money was most commonly associated with Grub street and the political factionalism of the Walpole era. Most hacks could make a living by hiring their pens to one political camp or another, and most of them were engaged in endless literary battles, always trying to out-rival each other with satiric abuse.2 Laborer poets entered the public stage during this market boom in books and print. Looking back from 1740, Henry Fielding records that ‘‘this the whole Age is sensible of: That there never were more Adventurers to Parnassus than at present.’’3 Indeed, poetry was the ‘‘thriving Branch of trade’’ that Fielding describes, as booksellers’ advertisements for poetical miscellanies and monographs of all sorts filled the back pages of countless periodicals. Aspiring poets from the lower orders of society no doubt received a huge lift when Queen Caroline rewarded the thresher Stephen Duck with court preferment and a living at Kew. Unlike the hacks of Grub street, Duck was not self-consciously writing for money, but his public success created a powerful model that would influence English print culture well into the next century. Almost immediately after the appearance of the first pirated edition of Duck’s poems in 1730, poetical miscellanies by other versifying plebeians began appearing. John Bancks, at one time a Spitalfields weaver; Robert Dodsley, a footman; and Robert Tatersal, a London bricklayer, all published substantial volumes of poetry before 1735. Mary Collier’s now well-known response to Duck, The Woman’s Labour, did not appear until 1739 in London, although it was probably written some years earlier. By Collier’s own account, The Woman’s Labour ‘‘lay by [her] several Years’’ before it became known to her social superiors, and their favorable response induced Collier to publish.4 These are the prominent plebeian texts of the 1730s and, along with the odd poem published in the periodical press by a fellow laborer, pseudo-laborer, or established wit, will make up my subject matter in this chapter. I shall argue that this body of poetry reveals a distinct discourse on work articulated, significantly, for the first time by workers in this period. Agricultural and artisanal work experiences appear as explicit subjects of poetry produced by plebeian pens throughout the 1730s. The three men who published immediately after Duck not only advertise themselves as manual laborers and write explicitly about their respective work experience, but they also attempt in their poems to refigure themselves as professional writers. That is, Ban-

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cks, Dodsley, and Tatersal attempt to represent themselves as true writers, capable of producing good poetry—if not for the burden of their material conditions—and so project themselves as worthy subjects of high-culture patronage. Poaching on the very terms that defined Duck’s example, these three poets created themselves as laboring-class natural geniuses who were also model citizens. For would-be poets of the laboring classes, getting into print required that each one meet ideological standards specific to their shared plebeian social status. These standards for plebeian authorship were given a form in 1730 and were reinforced throughout the century in the example of Stephen Duck. Duck’s polite advocates trumpeted his honesty, industry, and piety—a trinity of values that can be described as the ideological foundation upon which subsequent aspiring plebeian poets must build. Plebeian poets who represent these values in their life and work are useful to polite society in ideological terms precisely because an honest, industrious, and pious worker, satisfied in her station, is far more socially manageable than a dissatisfied, rabble-rousing worker who wants what her social betters have. But, as their published verse shows, imagining social change and expressing social criticism were also possible within this trend toward ideological accommodation. Following Duck’s unprecedented success, the status of laborer served as a form of symbolic capital in the literary marketplace. The plebeian poets who published in the 1730s trade on this symbolic capital to achieve social advancement, as in the cases of Bancks and Dodsley, or to articulate significant social criticism, as in the case of Mary Collier. At a fundamental level, this argument is pitched against belles lettres critical standards employed in traditional readings of these almost forgotten poets. It will be self-evident that plebeian poetry rarely measures up to the classical standards of the discipline of English—the legacy of which informs numerous critical histories of eighteenth-century literature. Witness the following statement about Duck from The Cambridge History of English Literature: Stephen Duck . . . was a ‘‘silly shepherd,’’ who, in his own life showed forth a truer and a sadder moral than is to be found in all the fables and pastorals which have dealt with his kind. There was no more harm in Duck himself than there was good in the verses because of which they took him from the Wiltshire downs and made him a shepherd of souls. But he knew, if the others did not, that he was in the wrong place, and committed suicide when barely fifty. His poems were dead before him; and nobody has ever attempted to revive them.5

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Such rhetoric lends credence to Roger Lonsdale’s claim that we know very little about the subject of eighteenth-century poetry because traditionally much of it has been considered not worth reading.6 And in not reading carefully the coterie of poets who published alongside the Popes and Swifts, we risk misrepresenting important aspects of the culture within which they all wrote. For example, one modern critic erroneously notes that Bancks, after publishing The Weaver’s Miscellany on the heels of Duck’s success, was ‘‘laughed at and forgotten.’’7 Bancks was indeed lambasted in the pages of The Grub-street Journal, as I have already shown, but his career as a poet and miscellaneous writer subsequently flourished. Condescending, dismissive statements such as these are indicative of a critical history, operating under traditional notions of literary value writ large, that has consistently failed to account for the cultural contexts which allowed writers like Duck, Bancks, and Dodsley—each in his unique way—to enter the literary mainstream, find a niche, and earn a decent living. Work Writing Before Duck Humankind has always worked in various ways to subsist and persevere; yet, as Lillian Robinson has pointed out, ‘‘work is the aspect of our lives from which official literature, writing by writers, is the most alienated.’’8 This is clearly not the case, however, if we venture from the path of ‘‘official literature.’’ Moreover, critics who have noted the emergence of work in the plebeian poetry of the 1730s tend to view Duck as an originary force: ‘‘Any consideration of eighteenth-century plebeian poetry must begin by acknowledging the enormous influence which Stephen Duck yielded over his fellow-workmen.’’9 Duck’s unprecedented social climb did have a profound effect on subsequent laborer-poets of the period, but Duck’s work-writing had its own cultural precedents. Stephen Duck did not introduce the subject of work into English letters, nor was he the first poet to advertise his laboring status in print. John Taylor, the seventeenth-century Thames waterman who published ‘‘above fourscore Books’’ between 1612 and his death in 1653, is probably the first laboring-class author in Britain to fashion a writing career for himself.10 Taylor was, by all accounts, a roughand-tumble waterman who developed an interest in literature. He possessed a modicum of poetic genius and the knack for self-promotion.11 Taylor’s trade status often appeared on the title pages of his early published works as ‘‘the King’s Water-Poet,’’ though the

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moniker had no basis in fact, and details of his working life are easily detected in his poems. For example, Taylor writes in ‘‘A Very Merrie Wherrie-Ferry-Voyage. Or, York for my Money’’ that: I rouzed my men, who Scrubbing, stretching, yawning Arose, left Gravesend, Rowing doune the stream, And neere to Lee, we to an Ancker came. Because the Sands were bare, and Water low, We rested there, till it two hours did Flow: And then to travell went our Galley foyst, Our Ancker quickly weigh’d, our sayle up hoyst, Where thirty miles we past, a mile from shore, The water two foot deepe, or little more.12

Vignettes such as this are not uncommon in Taylor’s prolific output. Descriptions of a waterman’s labor constitute one of the more serious strains in Taylor’s poetry, as he champions the industry and skill of watermen against the popular stereotypes of drunkenness and combativeness. In addition, Richard Greene has shown that Edward Ward, a tavern-keeper and famous Grub-street hack, wrote ‘‘vividly’’ about ‘‘labouring-class life,’’ including a long poem about tavern-keeping itself.13 Greene also calls attention to one Henry Nelson, a bricklayer, who published a series of occupationally-specific poems in the decade prior to Duck’s emergence. From 1725 to 1729, Nelson published seven poems concerning various trade guilds. These poems appeared first in Dublin (five of the seven bear the imprint of a Dublin bookseller) and form a series of type-poems celebrating the annual guild procession and dinner ‘‘at the King’s Inns.’’ Nelson is identified as author on all of these poems and, what is of more importance, is designated as ‘‘a bricklayer,’’ or ‘‘one of the Brethren,’’ or ‘‘a Member of the Society,’’ or some combination of these, on six of the seven poems.14 Taylor the Water-Poet notwithstanding, this is the earliest instance of an author’s original trade being advertised in print that I have been able to locate, a practice that would continue with Duck and the laboring-poets of the 1730s, and beyond. We know almost nothing about Nelson himself, but his poems reveal that realistic depictions of contemporary work experiences were entering poetic discourse in the early eighteenth century. Other poems have been attributed to Nelson based upon evidence of titular similarities, but he seems—if indeed one person is responsible for these poems—to have been the chief chronicler of the an-

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nual Dublin trade guild activities in verse. The first poem concerns ‘‘the Ancient and Loyal Society of Journey-Men Taylors’’ and sings the praises of guild members in general. The taylors are: Wrapt in close Union by the Laws they’ve made, Superior be to any other Trade; For in conjunction altogether they, In Grandeur meet upon St. JAMES’s Day: Where every Man most Decently appear, Then all to church a Sermon for to hear,15

The collective piety of guild members, illustrated in their marching off to church, is designed to cast them in a positive light for the reading public. Indeed, the only allusion to actual work in the poem is couched in biblical imagery. The taylor’s ‘‘Art’s as Ancient as since the Creation / ADAM himself ‘twas he begun the TRADE, / And for Himself and EVE both APRONS made.’’ Although Adam worked in the Garden prior to the Fall, as God ‘‘formed man of the dust of the ground’’ because ‘‘there was not a man to till the ground’’ in Eden, the Fall from Paradise is, in one sense, a fall into labor, and Nelson effectively uses the clothing of Adam and Eve to suggest the cultural importance of tailoring.16 This first poem functions as a prototype for the series to follow as Nelson’s annual revisions provide progressively more work-specific imagery. The 1726 poem refigures the clothing of Adam and Eve as follows: ‘‘Then straight they sewed Fig Leavs & Aprons made / To Cover them, and thus began the Trade.’’17 In 1727, the reference to sewing is removed to emphasize work: ‘‘Then straight they went to work, & Aprons made / To Cover them, and thus began the Trade’’; and by 1729, in the last poem of the tailor progression, the couplet is tightened to emphasize both work and the quality of the sewing: ‘‘To hide their Shame, of Leave, they Aprones made, / Fast Sew’d together: Thus begun the Trade.’’18 The specific language of tailoring thus enters into Nelson’s poetic discourse with more vigor as the series progresses. Nelson does not provide his reader with an insider’s view of the minutiae of a tailor’s workaday life, but he does use the products produced by tailors, and other tradesmen, to ground his panegyric verse. Nelson’s praise of tailors must have caught the attention of other guilds as he produced poems of a similar vein for ‘‘Journeymen Builders, Plaisterers, Painters and Free-Masons’’ and for ‘‘Journeymen Smiths.’’ In the former, Nelson calls attention to the human labor often taken for granted behind the world’s great structures:

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And Bricklay’rs were, who built the Walls of Troy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And many noble Structures more there be, Which Time records, and bears in Memory, Of Cities, Towers, and of Temples fine, Which from the Hands of artful Builders shine.19

This exposition is continued in the poem celebrating journeymen smiths as Nelson details the basic products that are made by ‘‘the Smith’s ingenious Hand’’: No Clothes, no Corn, no Plants, nor yet no Fruits, Could be produc’d in form, all must allow, Without the Spade, the Pruning-Hook and Plough. What Craft on Earth of which it may be said, They can subsist without this God-like Trade? Besides, its they, do us in safety keep, Locks, Bolts and Bars, secure us while we sleep.20

Thus, by the end of Nelson’s occasional trade-guild series, his poetic diction reveals more specific details about the work performed and the everyday products produced by tradesmen of many guilds. One anonymous copycat poet wrote earnestly that these were ‘‘Subjects the Laurrel ought to Crown,’’ suggesting that Nelson’s example inspired other tradesman-poets to sing the praises of other guilds during this period.21 Indeed, Robert Ashton published two poems, in 1725 and 1726, ‘‘in honour of the loyal society of Journeymen Shoemakers,’’ becoming something of a rival to Nelson.22 In addition, Nelson’s extended celebration of journeymen tailors provided the impetus for at least three anonymous broadsheet satires, one by an ‘‘R. A., Shoemaker’’ whom Foxon identifies as Ashton. These satires tend toward the lowest form of abuse by simply attacking all tailors directly in bawdy verse: ‘‘I needs must Satyrize a vicious Band, / Of Hungry Prick-lice, who in Pomp appear, / Like crawling Maggots each Revolving year.’’23 This practice reappears in 1730 after Duck’s early poems gained public attention, but unlike the personal hits that Duck would endure throughout his career because of his surname and his laboring status, neither Nelson nor his writing skills come under direct fire. A public, poetic discourse on work appears again in Robert Dodsley’s first edition of Servitude: A Poem, published in 1729 with an introduction and ‘‘Postscript’’ attributed to Defoe.24 The title page trumpets the piece as ‘‘written by a Footman. In Behalf of Good Servants, and to excite the Bad to their Duty.’’25 In sharp contrast

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to Nelson, Dodsley is far more self-conscious in his writing about his status as ‘‘one of the brethren’’ largely because it relates to the overt didactic purpose of his poem: Brothers in Servitude attend the Song, To you its Precepts and its Rules belong. Wholesome Advice the friendly Muse indites, And for your Good your Fellow-Servant writes. (15)

Not content with simply celebrating an annual guild procession, Dodsley aims to teach his fellow servants how to act properly and perform their various duties well. The efficacy of the poem’s didactic purpose turns on the fact that the author is himself a footman, and the effects of advertising this fact are potentially twofold: other footmen might be more inclined to buy Dodsley’s text and to heed his words. Both effects seem well planned for by Dodsley and those responsible for the publication and distribution of Servitude. We learn in the preface, for example, that the piece is written in verse the better to reach its target audience: Another Objection which I expect will be made against this Performance, is its being written in Verse. ‘Tis true the Subject is too low for Poetry a great deal, and I hope the Meanness thereof will be attributed to that Cause. But I thought its being a Poem might perhaps induce some of my Brethren to buy it, who otherwise would not; and by that Means the good Advice, if there be any such contain’d in it, would be more generally communicated. [4]

Dodsley’s statement suggests the ways in which the economics of print culture in the period were influencing authorial decisions. Dodsley acknowledges that his ‘‘Subject is too low for Poetry,’’ but chooses verse anyway because his intended audience—fellow footmen—apparently prefers poetry over prose and therefore would be more likely to purchase the product from a bookseller. Dodsley’s didacticism is organized around eight ‘‘Precept[s]’’ which he takes up in an orderly fashion throughout the poem (15). Together these precepts—‘‘Honesty . . . Carefulness . . . Obedience . . . Diligence . . . Submission to Rebukes . . . Neatness . . . Receiving and Delivering Messages . . . [and] Discretion’’—form the basis of an ideology whose purpose is unabashedly to create human subjects of a certain sort (16–24). A discourse on work is central to the articulation of these precepts and hence the formation of an ideology surrounding servants’ work and proper conduct. To illustrate the import of ‘‘Carefulness,’’ Dodsley uses the example of ‘‘Daniel

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Decant an honest Butler’’ who mistakenly leaves his key in the door to his master’s wine cellar which results in a ‘‘thirsty Coachman’’ and his companion, ‘‘Tom,’’ drinking ‘‘three or four of the largest Bottles’’ (18). Daniel has access to the cellar because he is responsible for ‘‘tap[ping] a Cask, or fill[ing] a Glass,’’ and because of his ‘‘Neglect,’’ Daniel has inadvertently cheated his Master out of some of his property (18). One small aspect of Daniel’s daily working life, then, provides the occasion for Dodsley to impose ‘‘Carefulness’’ as a standard of conduct: servants must ‘‘be careful then as well as just, / So shall our Masters safely us intrust’’ (18). These standards are ideologically productive precisely because they codify a socially acceptable set of practices and values to be cultivated by footmen. While Dodsley’s Servitude prefigures the circulation of social values such as honesty and industry from plebeian pens in the 1730s, perhaps no poem better illustrates the fact that actual work experience was entering eighteenth-century poetic discourse than the anonymous ‘‘Poem descriptive of the Manners of the Clothiers, written about the year 1730.’’ This poem figures as evidence in social histories that concern eighteenth-century work because it provides such a detailed, non-idyllic account of a clothier’s laboring life.26 The speaker is a clothier and begins by geographically locating the trade in this period, providing a brief glimpse of the work itself, and describing the workers on break: Seated some hundred yards from Leeds, Crowded with those industrious breeds, Turning my bobbin wheel among The merry Clothiers’ greasy throng, With wooden platter, bowl and ladle, All seated round a scowered table; Hard oaten cakes, some two or three, In pieces fly, with fist and knee, Tho’ hard, it in an instant doth Eat like soft Munchet in the broth.27

Although these clothiers are pictured here as ‘‘merry,’’ they are also a ‘‘greasy throng’’ who work in a domestic manufacturing system ‘‘crowded’’ within the burgeoning industrial landscape of north England. There is no overt discontent, yet these are no happy shepherds gladly laboring in the fields. After their break, the clothiers ‘‘thro’ the Web the Shuttle throw, / Thus they keep time with hand and feet / From five at morn till Eight at neet!’’ (275). These laborers do real work with real equipment, and the poem emphasizes the

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specifics of their trade, sometimes bordering on jargon: the clothiers ‘‘teem cloth at tenters,’’ ‘‘squeeze out swine muck,’’ deal with ‘‘a swinging truss,’’ and ‘‘the hartshorn which from that did rise’’ (277, italics mine). Given that ‘‘Munchet’’ is probably a Yorkshire variation on ‘‘manchet,’’ a type of white bread made from the finest flour, this poet’s diction is highly specialized, but appropriate in providing an accurate, intimate portrait of working life in the earlyeighteenth-century Yorkshire woolen trade. James Thomson’s Autumn, which first appeared in 1730 as the final piece of the quartet known as The Seasons, shows that this discourse on work was not merely confined to obscure verses composed by laborers. A passage from the 1730 text, later dropped in 1744 in one of Thomson’s many revisions, serves to align his poetic diction with that of the anonymous clothier-poet: ’Twas nought but labour—the whole dusky group Of clustering houses and of mingling men— Restless design and execution strong; In every street the sounding hammer plied His massy task, while the corrosive file In flying touches formed the fine machine. (137 n. 118)

In his language, Thomson reveals that ‘‘the fine machine’’ was formed through human labor and with specific tools, a ‘‘hammer’’ and a ‘‘file.’’ This six-line deletion from the 1730 poem represents one of the largest omissions in Thomson’s revision, and one suspects that changing poetic tastes and Thomson’s fear of criticism in 1744 for such low diction led to its removal. Although Johnson supported Thomson’s ‘‘subsequent revisals’’ in general, he also noted a loss which might be ascribed to Thomson’s cutting or rewriting such ‘‘low’’ passages: ‘‘They are, I think, improved in general; yet I know not whether they have not lost part of what Temple calls their ‘race’; a word which, applied to wines in its primitive sense, means the flavour of the soil.’’28 Autumn is certainly less earthy for its loss of rural language. Thomson’s poetic discourse on work, however, is not simply confined to a vocabulary of rural working life. Like Dodsley’s Servitude, Thomson’s poetic discourse is informed by an ideologicallybound discussion of social values, particularly ‘‘Industry.’’ Thomson figures ‘‘Industry’’ early in the poem as a ‘‘rough power’’: Whom labour still attends, and sweat, and pain; Yet the kind source of every gentle art And the soft civility of life: Raiser of human kind! (135)

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Rightly-tuned ‘‘Industry’’ allows man to mine ‘‘lavish Nature’’ for the resources to remove his ‘‘blood-polluted fur’’ and replace it with ‘‘woolly vestment warm’’ or ‘‘glossy silk’’ (136). Man’s industry thus leads to technological and material gain, the result of which, according to Thomson’s argument, is an idealized social world in which ‘‘Industry,’’ ‘‘Uniting all, / Society grew numerous, high, polite, / And happy’’ (137). The ethos of Thomson’s invocation of ‘‘Industry,’’ then, defines a set of distinctly middle-class values highlighting work, material gain, social harmony, and even pullyourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism: ‘‘As for themselves alone themselves have raised’’ (137). The laboring-poets who follow Thomson in the 1730s will provide high-profile examples of such ‘‘Industry’’ from within the lower orders of society. Yet Thomson’s poetic discourse often retreats into more traditional pastoral conventions, specifically on the subject of rural life: Here too dwells simple truth, plain innocence, Unsullied beauty, sound unbroken youth Patient of labour—with a little pleased, Health ever-blooming, unambitious toil, Calm contemplation, and poetic ease. (178)

The laboring poets publishing in the 1730s similarly will uphold the social values of honesty, industry, and piety; but, in the hands of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier in particular, a poetic discourse on work emerges to counter Thomson’s idyllic images of rural life and labor. The Discovery, Publicity, and Commodification of Stephen Duck Of all the plebeian poets in the century, the details of Stephen Duck’s life have been best preserved by his contemporaries and are most often chronicled in modern scholarly work.29 A few of these details regarding Duck’s rapid rise from the threshing room floor to Caroline’s court will be recounted here. According to evidence from surviving correspondence between Dr. Alured Clarke, prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, and Mrs. Charlotte Clayton, a ladyin-waiting to the queen, the machinery for Duck’s advancement was set in motion in late August of 1730. Rose Mary Davis notes that Mrs. Clayton ‘‘acted as a go-between for Duck and the Queen to a considerable extent’’ but it seems that the Earl of Macclesfield

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was responsible for reading Duck’s work to the queen at Windsor on the eleventh of September.30 A supposedly spurious account of Duck’s life and presentation at court, published in the seventh pirated edition of his poems, gives credit to a different set of patrons, noting that ‘‘A Copy [of Duck’s verses] was sent to the Right Honourable the Earl of Tankerville at Windsor, where the Honourable Mrs. Clayton, of her Majesty’s Bedchamber, happening to see it, that Lady immediately presented it to the Queen.’’31 This second scenario seems to accord with Duck’s own rendition in the ‘‘Preface’’ to the authorized Poems on Several Occasions of 1736, where he says a gentleman of Winchester ‘‘presented my first Essays to a Lady of Quality, attending on the Queen, who made my low Circumstances known to Her Majesty.’’32 Both scenarios are plausible, and taken together, suggest the degree to which Duck’s early patrons competed to serve his interests—and perhaps their own as well by pleasing the queen. Caroline was in fact quite taken with the thresher-poet and immediately offered an annual pension of £30 to Duck along with a small house in Richmond. As Betty Rizzo has argued, Caroline was predisposed to support Duck because he served her ongoing quarrel with Pope. Duck was useful precisely because, as a poetic natural genius, he represented the antithesis of Popean art and education, and so the queen could score a clean hit by granting the thresher court preferment.33 Duck arrived at Windsor around October 15, only a month after his poems were read, and the publicity mill began turning almost immediately.34 Both his life and, to a certain extent, the insular literary world of authors and books would never be the same again. Modern critics, sympathetic to Duck’s plight or not, are indebted to the work of Joseph Spence, who spent six days with Duck in Winchester in September 1730, including ‘‘Four Evenings entirely to my self.’’35 During these interviews Spence collected material to write his pamphlet, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, which was first published, apparently without Spence’s authorization, in March 1731. Spence was on the Continent when his account of Duck appeared, under a Grub-street title, and there is much speculation that both its timely publication and Spence’s convenient absence were planned.36 Whatever the marketing plans of 1731 may have been, this tract was subsequently revised by Spence and appeared prominently in various forms in all of Duck’s subsequent authorized editions of Poems on Several Occasions. So even as Spence and Duck enjoyed conversations that would cement their friendship over the next quarter century, Duck’s poetry was already being brought before the court. Spence, therefore, cannot be cred-

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ited with having any part in Duck’s initial installment in Caroline’s favor, but he is responsible for effectively ‘‘packaging’’ Duck for public consumption. Following his Essay on Pope’s Odyssey (1726–27), Spence was recognized by being unanimously elected to the post of professor of poetry at Oxford. One of Spence’s chief hobbies in this position was to travel the country following up reports of natural genius. A recent biographer notes that Spence’s interest in such types did not stem entirely from the instinctive compassion of his nature; together with many others in his age, he was intrigued by the idea of the ‘‘force of nature’’ coming to light in the form of original genius in men whose meager education was inadequate to explain their intellectual development. This was of course a familiar neoclassic idea, and Spence doubtless looked upon Duck, as well as upon Blacklock, Hill, and others later on, partly as subjects for scientific study, observing their reaction to certain intellectual stimuli, inquiring into the circumstances of their mental experience, analyzing their views upon carefully selected topics.37

Before Duck, Spence was involved with another ‘‘wonderful Phaenomenon of Wiltshire,’’ the deist Thomas Chubb, and later he popularized Thomas Blacklock, a blind Scottish poet and miscellaneous writer, and Robert Hill, the tailor with a knack for ancient languages, among others.38 That Spence’s work with these so-called natural geniuses was chiefly scientific is well-observed, but Spence also wrote accounts of these men that appeared in pamphlet form or in the periodical press. Spence’s primary goal may have been to unlock the secret of inborn poetic genius, but he also hoped to gain material support for his subjects so that their talents would be allowed to flourish. In these popular accounts, Spence showed a keen awareness for those values and character traits that would pique polite interest and sympathy—and potentially secure their patronage. The notes recorded by Spence during his interviews with Duck suggest he was testing Duck’s social values as part of his scientific inquiry.39 Not only does Spence solicit Duck’s opinions of various authors he has read, but he also reads passages from Shakespeare out loud to him, noting Duck’s reactions in some detail: ‘‘He trembled at ye Ghosts’ Speech wn I read it to him, & admired ye Speeches & turns in ye Mob abt Caeser’s body more (he said) than ever he had done.’’40 Such experiments continue as Spence records Duck’s ‘‘change of countenance & sharp look sometimes’’ as well as the ‘‘Applause . . . in his face’’ (128). This is hard science indeed.

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Yet his notes also indicate that Spence was curious about whether or not Duck measured up to the norms imposed upon a person of Duck’s low social position by polite society. In this respect, Spence records that Duck ‘‘chooses a life of labour,’’ ‘‘spoke with surprizing plainness & modesty of himself,’’ possesses ‘‘an obedient mind,’’ and holds ‘‘ye Fear of God’’ which ‘‘he has long resolved to make ye Rule of his life’’ (128). This is the picture of a docile, ‘‘obedient’’ man, resigned to his position in the world, who cultivates a proper degree of humility and piety. These notes provide Spence with the basis for producing Duck publicly as one of the deserving poor. Spence would eventually refine these notes, together with his reading of Duck’s poetry, to feature the trinity of social values— honesty, industry, and piety—which function ideologically with regard to polite control of plebeian literary production. Spence, in effect, sells Duck ideologically to his polite readers and subscribers. Spence’s authorized ‘‘Account of the Author, In a Letter to a Friend. Written in the Year 1730’’ provides numerous examples of Duck’s industry. In order to acquire books, Duck ‘‘us’d to work more than other Day-labourers, and by that means got some little matter added to his Pay’’; Duck would work ‘‘all Day for his Master; and, after the Labour of the Day, set to his Books at Night’’; and he would also ‘‘frequently carry [Spectators] with him to his Work.’’41 Of course, Duck’s ‘‘Method was to labour harder than any body else, that he might get half an Hour to read a Spectator, without injuring his Master’’ (xiv). This narrative leads Spence to reflect to his reader on ‘‘the Pleasure of so strong an Instance of Honesty and Industry mix’d together’’ (xiv). He focuses on Duck’s religious piety less explicitly here, but notes that Duck gained his taste for music by attending ‘‘a Country Chancel’’ and judges Duck’s best poetic performance to be his ‘‘Shunammite,’’ which is based on biblical history (xiv, xv). Duck’s actions, reading, and writing are thus interpreted in the context of a value framework that is ideologically tuned to appeal to the polite subscribers of Duck’s poems in 1736. However, the many pirated editions of Duck’s early poems present a number of problems for modern scholars in determining which texts to analyze. During the latter months of 1730, seven editions of Poems on Several Subjects appeared in London which contained versions of ‘‘The Shunamite,’’ ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ and ‘‘On Poverty.’’42 The question is whether these pirated texts represent accurate or ‘‘authentic’’ reproductions of Duck’s first public poems. Can we consider these poems as Duck’s own early

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work? Or, must we rely on the heavily revised, authorized texts of 1736? Until recently, modern reprints of Duck’s poems have been made exclusively from the 1736 text.43 But E. P. Thompson’s 1989 edition of Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour bucks this trend by reproducing the pirated 1730 text of Duck’s poem. Thompson argues that ‘‘the 1730 edition which we have used may have been pirated, but there is no reason for doubting its authenticity’’ and further asserts this text ‘‘to be a true copy of the poem in its original state.’’44 However, Thompson seems to think these statements are self-evident and does not offer any new historical evidence for his claims. We cannot now recover the text of the poem that Lord Macclesfield might have read to Caroline, nor is there any 1730 manuscript extant which would serve as a foundation for these early pirated editions. But Peter McGonigle points out that, in the case of ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ there is no reason to assume that the printed text differed to any significant degree from the manuscript as far as substantives are concerned. The printing of the pirated edition was obviously a hurried affair, so it is unlikely that a printer would delay the work by making emendations to the text. Secondly, comparison of the 1736 text with that of 1730 makes it quite clear that the latter is a line-by-line revision of the former, an observation which implies compositorial fidelity in the earlier edition.45

Based on internal evidence generated by comparing both editions, McGonigle continually finds ‘‘reasonable grounds to assume a fair degree of compositorial fidelity.’’46 I agree with McGonigle’s textual argument; yet a further question remains: if the pirated poems more or less accurately represented Duck’s early work, why did he often vehemently deny his authorship publicly in the years after their appearance? Most critics point to Duck’s statement in the ‘‘Preface’’ to Truth and Falsehood (1734) as evidence of Duck’s conscious effort to distance himself from the pirated poems. Here Duck writes: I thought it necessary to inform the Reader, that (except for a few Lines on His Royal Highness the Duke’s Birth-Day) this is the first Contract I ever made with a Printer, and consequently the Thresher’s Labour, the Shunamite, &c. were never publish’d with my Approbation.47

Prior to this statement, in the midst of the public din over Duck’s poems in October 1730, Duck (or one of his polite advisers) printed this advertisement in The Daily Post, which was picked up two

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months later by The Grub-street Journal in order to mock Duck’s earnestness: Whereas a spurious Copy of some of my Verses has been printed, (to my great prejudice) in which are above an hundred errors: this is to advertise the Publick, that in due time a genuine and correct Copy of what I have written will be published by me. October 8. 1730. Stephen Duck.48

With the death of the poet laureate Laurence Eusden on September 27, Duck became a popular figure in the pages of The Grub-street Journal as the wits speculated upon a successor. After a scathing review of Duck’s poems by one ‘‘Simple Simon,’’ a letter by ‘‘L. M.’’ appeared in the number for December 17 defending Duck on the grounds that the poems ‘‘Simon’’ criticized were pirated: [T]he Verses that bear the name of Stephen Duck which, tho’ undoubtedly his own in the main; yet being printed without his assent or approbation, cannot be call’d genuine, or expected to be correct. Which may serve as an answer to all the present objections: especially those of your Kinsman [Simon], who, before he had pretended to criticise, ought in point of good manners, to have been sure of the very words and expressions of the Author, and not have carp’d at False Prints, Interpolations, &c., wherewith almost every Page abounds.49

Whoever ‘‘L. M.’’ was, he clearly recognizes that the piracy of Duck’s poems provides a rational way of answering the vitriolic criticism Duck was facing in the periodical press. But even as he suggests that the verses are not ‘‘genuine’’ or ‘‘correct,’’ he corroborates the notion that these early texts are Duck’s ‘‘in the main.’’ We know that Dr. Alured Clarke, for one, was concerned about how Duck would be treated by the wits, and advised that ‘‘it would be prudent not to expose [Duck] to the malice of the Dunciad Club.’’50 We do not know who leaked Duck’s poems to the booksellers, but the procedure of ambiguously authorized publication was common among established polite poets of the period, too. Publishing Duck’s work, apparently without his ‘‘approbation,’’ provided a double-edged weapon for his advocates: his poems were popularized via the pirated texts and criticism could be deflected while Duck was prepared to enter the life of public letters. Immediately after being taken from the fields of Wiltshire and installed at Kew, Duck became the project of Clarke and others. A classical education, it was thought, would improve Duck’s natural genius. Between the years 1731 and 1736, Duck was educated into Augustanism, studying Latin and embarking on a classical and contempo-

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rary reading list that would profoundly influence revisions of his early poems.51 Classical allusions in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ for example, increased significantly in the authorized edition. Thus, there seem to be expedient political reasons for not wanting to publish Duck’s unrefined early poems if he was going to become one of the queen’s chief panegyrists. Although Colley Cibber received the laurel, Duck remained in the service of the Crown for the rest of his life. There is, then, enough internal and external evidence to treat the pirated texts as Duck’s early work, although the many printings prior to 1736 were (at least publicly) unauthorized by him. These were, after all, the versions of the poems that inspired Bancks, Dodsley, Tatersal, and Collier to respond in print and therefore warrant a careful reading in the context of this study.52 Although ‘‘On Poverty’’ is the last poem to appear in the pirated editions, it was written before the others. According to Spence, the 1730 text is a revised version of ‘‘some scatter’d Verses’’ on the subject Duck had made before his meeting with Macclesfield, and, as Spence further notes, ‘‘Wn. he wrote Poverty t’was his own case.’’53 Given this context, we might expect a poem exposing the rigors of poverty and the social forces which keep the poor in such a miserable state. But Duck in fact puts forth a conservative argument in the poem that would have appealed to his polite readers: poverty is determined by God’s will, and Duck argues that ‘‘Contented Poverty’s no dismal Thing.’’54 In this respect, Duck ventriloquizes a standard cultural argument regarding poverty: Was Poverty so hideous as they make it; That steady Man is worthy of our Praise, Who in Distress, or pinch’d with Hunger, says, Let Poverty, or Want, be what it will, It does proceed from God, therefore’s no Ill. (27–28)

It is Duck’s low social position, and the reader’s explicit knowledge of this fact, that lends force to these lines. Because it emanates from Duck’s pen, this fatalistic argument regarding divine will and a lower-class man’s steadfast resignation to his lot in life is all the more useful to a class-based ideology of privilege. Duck provides an example of rightly-tuned plebeian submission to the social order that is useful to polite society ideologically because it reinforces their claim to social superiority. Contemporary evidence in support of this ideologically-productive reading of Duck’s early verse emerges in certain poetic performances clearly not written by fellow plebeians. One such poem

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appeared in the ‘‘Poetical Essays’’ section of The Gentleman’s Magazine for July 1735, under the title ‘‘Drake upon Duck. A Poem. On Stephen Duck’s celebrated Poetry. By Benjamin Drake, Yeoman.’’55 The poet’s name is suspicious considering his subject, and in fact was not that original: two pieces containing satiric allusions to Duck had been published previously under the name ‘‘James Drake’’ in 1730 and 1734 respectively.56 The designation ‘‘yeoman,’’ however, is a significant detail that seems conscious on the part of the poet and crucial to understanding the poem. ‘‘Yeoman’’ was still a current social designation in the seventeenth century, denoting a ‘‘fairly substantial owner of land which he had to work himself,’’ or hire out the labor to seasonal agricultural workers like Duck.57 By the eighteenth century, this designation had lost some of its social currency but nevertheless still represented a farmer who either owned or rented his lands.58 A yeoman farmer could therefore be precisely the sort of ‘‘Master’’ Duck characterizes in his poetry, specifically in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ so this fictitious ‘‘Drake’’ constructs an authorial persona with economic and social power over Duck. On the subject of poverty, ‘‘Drake’’ writes: ‘‘What mortal can at poverty repine, / When dress’d by thee, and in thy graces shine’’ (383). Given ‘‘Drake’s’’ interpretive support, it would seem that Duck’s portrayal of poverty in ‘‘On Poverty’’ accords with polite sensibilities on the subject. This anonymous writer explicitly brings the fact of his constructed social position to his interpretation of Duck’s verse, thereby issuing an ideologically-charged reading designed to maintain traditional class distinctions and social harmony. That is, instead of seeing the poverty which attends the life of a seasonal wage laborer, which Duck represents as a life of ‘‘endless Toils’’ in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ ‘‘Drake’’ sees the very values which uphold the social system, for Duck has ‘‘waddl’d thro’ the country dirt: / With honest labour, and industr’ous care’’ (POSS, 15; GM, 5:383). The ideological tunnel vision of this pseudonymous reader / writer is evident in that he sees only ‘‘honesty’’ and ‘‘industry’’ in Duck’s chronicle of low-culture rural life, and thus perpetuates these controlling mechanisms in his own text. In the early stages of the capitalization of agriculture, a ‘‘yeoman’’ farmer would have every reason to celebrate Duck’s poetry because Duck can be read and publicized as a fine example of an honest, industrious laborer, content in his station performing seasonal work for low wages. But that ‘‘true Content’’ that Duck apparently represents is also complicated in the final lines of ‘‘On Poverty’’:

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Since Wealth is but imaginary Fame, Since Poverty is nothing but a Name; Since both from God’s unerring Hand are sent, Lord, give me neither, give me but Content. (29)

Throughout the poem, contentment and poverty have been consistently figured together as a diptych. However, this final plea to the ‘‘Lord’’ separates contentment from both ‘‘Wealth’’ and ‘‘Poverty,’’ suggesting an opening in the argument that Duck has been featuring. Because Duck asks for contentment independent of wealth or poverty, the reader is left wondering what the terms of ‘‘true Content’’ entail. Such an opening is not laden with overt social criticism, but does suggest a gap in the seemingly tight ideological focus of the poem. However, this fissure was significantly altered in 1736 by removing just one letter: ‘‘Lord, give me either; give me but Content,’’ effectively closing off the critical opening available in the argument of the 1730 version (POSO, 9). The early published version of ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ represents Duck’s command over a poetic discourse on work at the same time it reveals his focus on the value of human industry. The poem has been categorized prominently as a kind of ‘‘anti-pastoral,’’ while other commentators argue that it is generically unique.59 Though hardly sharing the subject matter of earlier examples like Rochester’s ‘‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’’ or Behn’s ‘‘The Disappointment,’’ ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ I would argue, is most profitably described as a ‘‘counter-pastoral.’’60 The contrast with ‘‘anti-pastoral’’ amounts to more than just semantic hairsplitting; the sense of countering the pastoral adds a complexity that, in my reading, extends beyond the connotations of oppositional hostility implied by ‘‘anti.’’ In ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ Duck shows that he intends something more than simply writing against the grain of classical models. By both negating and rewriting pastoral and georgic conventions, Duck creates something new: a poetic alternative and ideological counter to the many neoclassical versions of pastoral and georgic poetry circulating in the early eighteenth century. Speaking as a thresher himself, creating a poetic discourse on work, and pitching a critique of rural labor relations, Duck pushes his poem beyond the generic confines of both the pastoral and georgic traditions. These are unique ‘‘rural Lays’’ in which Duck invokes the traditional pastoral world of joyful, singing shepherds and deftly undercuts this idealization with details of his contemporary agricultural environment and a thresher’s working conditions:

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The Shepherd well may tune his Voice to sing, Inspir’d by all the Beauties of the Spring: No Fountains murmur here, no Lambkins play, No Linets warble, and no Fields look gay; ‘Tis all a dull and melancholy Scene, Fit only to provoke the Muses Spleen. When sooty Pease we thresh; you scarce can know Our native Colour, as from Work we go; The Sweat, and Dust, and suffocating Smoke, Make us so much like Ethiopians look: (17)

While ‘‘Shepherds’’ can ‘‘tell a merry Tale’’ while they work, for threshers, ‘‘The Voice is lost, drown’d by the noisy Flail’’ (17). To be sure, Duck’s importation of images of real toil and sweat into the agricultural setting of his poem aligns it with a Virgilian georgic tradition. But Duck extends his poetic revision of rural labor beyond pastoral and georgic convention by emphasizing its permanent, cyclical nature: ‘‘Week after Week we this dull Task pursue,’’ and therefore ‘‘as the Year’s revolving Course goes round, / No respite from our Labour can be found’’ (17, 25). Despite such difficult conditions and little prospect for a better life, Duck’s threshers maintain a vigorous work pace, sometimes engaging in ‘‘a sportive Race’’ to see who can cover the most ground with a scythe (19). In this respect, Duck represents his threshers as hardworking, selfless laborers who embody polite definitions of ‘‘Industry,’’ as he also implies the effects the capitalization of agriculture has on the workers. Hence Duck counters the pastoral with a thoroughly modern poetic rendering of a thresher’s experience. E. P. Thompson has argued that the 1730 poem ‘‘is closer to the labourer’s experience’’ than the revised, authorized version of 1736, but there is more than documentary evidence to Duck’s discourse on work in both of these poems.61 In his careful comparative reading of the two texts, Thompson shows that ‘‘a Scythe wellsteel’d’’ had become simply ‘‘a crooked Blade’’ in the revised version, and that the thresher’s blades are ‘‘well-whet’’ in 1730, and only ‘‘sharpen’d’’ in 1736.62 While these changes might have been advised because of the low diction in the original phrases, it is more likely that they represent only a tightening of the sense desired in the respective lines. Many other so-called low words remain throughout both versions of the poem, which contribute, on one level, to Duck’s poetic discourse on work. For instance, a thresher carries a ‘‘Whetstone, Scrip, and Beer’’ along with his ‘‘Scythe’’ into the field, as Duck names specific tools of the trade and provides

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a class-based term—‘‘Scrip’’—for the worker’s ration of food (POSS, 19). This vocabulary carries over into the authorized version along with the following description of the laborer’s fitful sleep: Nor, when asleep, are we secure from Pain, We then perform our Labours o’er again: Our mimic Fancy always restless seems, And what we act awake, she acts in Dreams. Hard Fate! Our Labours ev’n in Sleep don’t cease, Scarce Hercules e’er felt such Toils as these. (POSS, 24)

Thus Duck’s poetic discourse on work enters another realm we have not seen previously: work is shown to have lasting psychological effects that the worker cannot simply escape from when the day is ended. Though ostensibly removed from work, Duck shows that the work is not so easily removed from the laborer. Indeed, Duck realizes a sense of hopeless inevitability with regard to labor that is achieved within a poetic language that is both familiar and new. Even this early version of the poem contains stock neoclassicisms that would serve as road signs for his earlyeighteenth-century readers. Early on, Duck ends a lengthy description of threshing with a series of classical references: Divested of our Cloaths, with Flail in Hand, At a just Distance, Front to Front we stand; And first the Threshall’s gently swung, to prove, Whether with just Exactness it will move: That once secure, more quick we whirl them round, From the strong Planks our Crab-Tree Staves rebound, And echoing Barns return the rattling Sound. Now in the Air our knotty Weapons fly; And now with equal Force descend from high: Down one, one up, so well they keep the Time, The Cyclops Hammers could not truer chime; Nor with more heavy Strokes could Ætna groan, When Vulcan forg’d the Arms for Thetis’ Son. (16)

The lines show Duck engaged in a process of molding available poetic discourse to meet his individual thematic ends. Commenting on this passage, John Goodridge has noted that Duck’s picture of threshing elicits ‘‘the elements of skill, pride, and excitement in the work.’’63 Indeed, the description of threshing is detailed and engaging, building as it does to the classical simile in the last lines— which seems carefully chosen to parallel and inform the less

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familiar vocabulary of rural farm labor that is the mainstay of Duck’s poetic discourse on work. The vignette ends with a couplet emphasizing the pathos of the poem—‘‘No intermission in our Works we know; / The noisy Threshall must for ever go’’—and thus Duck combines his own language of rural labor with popular classical allusions to form a publishable poetic discourse that allows him to call attention to certain oppressive conditions under which the laboring-poor live and work (16). To ‘‘Benjamin Drake,’’ yeoman farmer, however, these lines represent Duck’s ‘‘graceful strains’’ and are the product of ‘‘pure nature’’ (GM 5:384). But for Duck, the naturalism inherent in his poetic discourse on work offers an opening for the articulation of a counter-ideology, as his poem represents the constant, difficult labor agricultural workers were subjected to. The poor must always work in order to survive, and Duck links this notion to neoclassical imagery that supports his counter-ideological purposes. For instance, the final classical simile in the poem speaks to the tension in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ between acceptable poetic discourse and social criticism. Duck notes that: Like Sysiphus, our Work is never done, Continually rolls back the restless Stone: Now growing Labours still succeed the past, And growing always new, must always last. (25)

Such a neoclassicism is again indicative of Duck’s desire to write aesthetically acceptable verse and to justify himself as a poet to his genteel readers. But this image does not glorify or idealize the work that Duck describes, and the tone is more of resignation than excitement. Indeed, Duck’s exposition of the rigors of rural, seasonal farm labor throughout the poem is highlighted at the end by this carefully chosen classical image. ‘‘Sysiphus’’ serves both as a polite reference point and as an image of eternal labor which Duck sees as an accurate portrayal of life in the lower orders of English society. Whether this portrayal is historically ‘‘authentic’’ or not is another question; the point is that Duck represents it as such for specific ideological reasons. The strength of ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ lies in Duck’s self-conscious use of traditional poetic conventions and languages in the service of something new, a poetic discourse on work which gives public, plebeian voice to rural laboring life. In this respect, ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ can be read as speaking against the ‘‘Benjamin Drake(s)’’ of his world—as we shall see more fully below.

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The influence ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ exerted in the 1730s is further evidenced by the fact that it was the only one of Duck’s early productions to spawn earnest imitations. An interesting collection of poems by ‘‘J. M.’’ titled The Country-mans Miscellany, published in 1732, provides an illustrative example.64 Even a cursory reading of the volume’s long lead poem, ‘‘On the Sun,’’ suggests that the poet was at least intimately familiar with Duck’s poem, if not with rural labor itself. Of harvest reapers, the poet writes: The noble Heroes of the rural Train, Are now Resolv’d, t’undress the fruitful Plain. Armed with Scythe, and Bottle, Stone and Ripe, Each in his Mouth, a curtail’d ‘Bacco-pipe; Like Janizaries march, with Weapons steel’d, To try their Valour in the Champion Field, Pull off their Ruffet Doublets, and begin To whet their Scythes, and boldly all set in; With violent Motions, and with steady Hand, They cut their Passage thro’ the gleebing Land. (5)

Much of the diction echoes Duck’s, in particular the trade vocabulary of agricultural tools and their use. But if this passage smacks of the sort of idealizing of rural laborers—‘‘noble Heroes’’ in ‘‘the Champion Field’’—that Duck writes against, it is only because it functions as a setup for the lines that follow describing the effects of ‘‘Sol’’: But now the Sun by his Reflexion gains, A total conquest of their early Pains; With labour and fatiguing Heat o’ercome, Under the shady Trees they all sit down; To Taste the Vertues of their Bottle-Beer, To raise their Hearts, and drooping Spirits chear. (5)

These threshers are human laborers who, like Duck’s, work hard, feel the effects of the sun, and break to enjoy a reviving repast. Though ‘‘On the Sun’’ shares other details found in Duck’s poem, including accounts of a ‘‘Master’’ who oversees the workers, and ‘‘Female Tattlers’’ who gossip more than they work, it does not contain the sort of underlying social critique we have seen in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ (6, 7). This anonymous poet, perhaps a fellow plebeian, saves his venom for a later poem in the volume, ‘‘Secret Musings, or Reflections on the Times’’:

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Next I beheld the rich and mighty follow, The separate Interests of their private gain, And gripe and gape as tho’ they meant to swallow What e’er by force, or fraud, they could obtain: By strange inclosures, they oppress the Poor, They rack their Tenants, and must still have more To add to their ill-got, increasing store. (33)

Reading Duck has given way to ‘‘secret musings’’ sharply critical of enclosure, a subject Duck never broaches. The lines anticipate Goldsmith in The Deserted Village forty years later, but the tone here is more active and angry, bringing to mind Clare’s enclosure poems, as ‘‘the rich and mighty’’ are exposed as oppressors of the poor who ‘‘rack their Tenants’’ in the service of increasing their power and wealth. In stark contrast to contemporaries like ‘‘Benjamin Drake,’’ some reader / writers were tuned in to the radical potential of Duck’s poetry—especially with regard to its subject matter—even in the 1730s. The last of Duck’s early poems to appear in 1730 is ‘‘The Shunamite,’’ the poem which opens all seven pirated editions and the one most celebrated by Duck’s contemporaries. ‘‘The Shunamite’’ was initiated by one of Duck’s early patrons in Wiltshire, and Spence records that the poem ‘‘is generally reckon’d the best Thing he has wrote’’ (POSO, xvi). The poem is based on the biblical story, told in II Kings (4:8–37), of a Shunammite woman whose child was raised from the dead by the prophet Elisha. Duck chose to tell the story largely from the woman’s point of view, creating a female speaker in the poem which Spence calls ‘‘a new Cast of his own’’ (POSO, xvi). For Duck, ‘‘The Shunamite’’ represents ‘‘the Æra of his rising in his Character and Circumstances. Upon this it was that Persons of Distinction began to send for him different ways’’ (POSO, xv). Despite its initial success, and a meager revival during the evangelical movements of the early nineteenth century, the poem apparently holds little interest for readers today. This is the case largely because we have not asked the right questions of it. Given the evidence available regarding the poem’s popularity, it is worth asking why polite readers were so taken with this particular composition. My sense is that Duck achieves two things in this poem that strengthen his foothold in polite drawing rooms: the ‘‘Heavenly Theme’’ of the poem illustrates Duck’s personal religious piety, and the story itself is one of virtue rewarded—a subject sure to appeal to polite sensibilities even in the decade before Richardson’s windfall with Pamela. Whereas ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’

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could be taken to depict Duck, the thresher, as an industrious, working cog in the machinery of an agricultural wage-labor system, ‘‘The Shunamite’’ illustrates Duck’s piety, another central feature of his character that must be established for him to be worthy of polite patronage. In Althusserian terms, the poem as a whole continues the process of producing Duck as an ideally interpellated low-order figure, perpetuating the notion that he is ideologically useful to polite society in upholding traditional social values and social boundaries. Duck’s religious piety and knowledge of Christianity are also evident in the opening invocation and the closing prayer of the poem. In these two sections, the poet speaks in his own voice, invoking the ‘‘Heavenly Muses’’ for their assistance: Deign, Heavenly Muses, to assist my Song: To Heavenly Muses Heavenly Themes belong. But chiefly Thou, O GOD, my soul inspire And touch my Lips with thy Celestial Fire: If Thou delight’st in flow’ry Carmel’s Shade, Or Jordan’s Stream, from thence I crave thy Aid: Instruct my Tongue, and my low Accents raise, To sing thy Wonders, and display thy Praise; And make th’ Inhabitants of Judah’s Land Give Ear, and Israel to my Voice attend. (3)

Given his subject, Duck adopts the proper degree of poetic humility while at once showing his readers that he possesses enough biblical knowledge to be credible. Mount Carmel, for instance, will play a role in the story to follow, for this is where the Shunammite woman makes a pilgrimage to seek Elisha’s help. The closing lines of the poem further heighten the reader’s sense of Duck’s pious nature: Righteous and Good art Thou, Lord God of Host, And all thy Works are wonderful and just; Both Life and Death are in thy powerful Hand; Both Life and Death obey thy great Command: By Thy great Power the Heavens and Earth are aw’d, Then let the Heavens and Earth adore their God. (14)

‘‘The Shunamite’’ also shows a powerful example of virtue rewarded, but with an interesting class twist which Duck translates into his own historical moment with some important embellishments. In the biblical story, the woman who feeds and offers Elisha lodging is described only as ‘‘a great woman’’ who is able to pro-

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vide not only bread, but also ‘‘a little chamber’’ complete with ‘‘a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick’’ (II Kings 4:8, 10). Duck no doubt noticed this material wealth in the original, and constructs his Shunammite woman as a benevolent middling-sort within the eighteenth-century English economy: My Lord and I, to whom all-bounteous Heaven His Blessings with no sparing Hand had given, Like faithful Stewards of our wealthy Store, Still lodg’d the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor. (4)

Duck seems careful to indicate that their ‘‘affluent Store’’ is in no way linked to property, but is rather the result of honest ‘‘Labour’’ and divine will (4). However, the couple lacks a child, and in return for their unconditional generosity, Elisha decrees that: thy pious Cares Are not forgot, nor fruitless are thy Prayers: Propitious Heav’n, thy virtuous Deeds to crown, Shall make thy barren Womb conceive a Son. (6)

The Shunammite woman’s virtue, then, is rewarded with the one thing that will effectively give the family’s wealth meaning: a son to inherit the ‘‘Store.’’ The fact that this miracle child inexplicably expires in his fourteenth year—while attending ‘‘the Harvest . . . / To view the bearded Sheaves erect in Rows’’—is doubly tragic to an eighteenth-century reader because the line of patrilineal descent is, once again, nonexistent (7). That the boy is with his father not to work but ‘‘to view’’ the completed harvest solidifies their class position as clearly above Duck’s but somewhere below those who populated the aristocratic circles to which Duck was beginning to gain access. It is therefore possible to understand Duck as a complex figure, as more than a mere simpleton struggling to function outside of his social sphere, and more than the simpleminded court panegyrist that he is often characterized as in modern scholarship. Duck’s reading of, and engagement with, his own social world is evident in his writing. The packaging of Duck’s pirated poems in 1730 further underscores the tension between Duck’s former working life as a thresher and his current position as court poet. From the first edition, James Roberts and other ‘‘Booksellers of London and Westminster’’ use the subject of work to advertise and sell Duck as a literary curiosity. In addition to playing Duck’s rural origins off against his recent court preferment on the title page, a verse epistle appended to the

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poems, signed ‘‘Stephen Duck,’’ calls attention to Duck’s laboring status in the form of an apology for not writing better poetry: ‘‘Think on th’ illiterate Soul that guides the Pen; / Ill suit such Tasks with one that holds the Plow, / Such lofty Subjects with a Fate so low’’ (30). There are no ‘‘finish’d Ode[s]’’ or ‘‘sacred Song[s], made to the Praise of God’’ because of Duck’s deficiencies in learning and wit; yet the reader is meant, I think, to understand something different by these lines (30). In fact, ‘‘The Shunamite’’ is about a ‘‘lofty Subject’’ and full of pious sentiment. Thus, in a backhanded manner, this sham-epistle trumps up Duck-the-poet by creating positive tension between Duck’s previous laboring life and his poetic works. The bookseller, we might imagine, hopes that the reader will be duly impressed with such high poetic strains produced from someone of Duck’s low social station. The copperplate which appears opposite the title page beginning with the seventh edition also trades on this tension.65 For example, the plate depicts a figure meant to represent Duck standing between a writing table in the foreground and a barn in the background. The paradox suggested by the overall scene—writing in a barnyard—is in fact played out at every turn. The figure holds a copy of a book in one hand—inscribed with the name ‘‘Milton’’—and carries a threshal, or flail, in the other. There are two other laborers in the background, one working in the field with a sickle, the other standing, idly observing Duck while holding his rake. These tools of Duck’s rural labor, all featured prominently in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ are offset by the tools for writing neatly laid out on the table: pens, ink, paper, and books. Duck is represented, then, as a figure living in labor limbo between the mutually exclusive worlds of writing and threshing; he is turned toward the Milton text, leaning out to the viewer, but his flail seems to be tugging him back into the fields to work. Duck’s attire reinforces this tension by providing no clear indication of his vocation. He is dressed in a three-quarter length coat, with stockings and shoes, yet he wears a worker’s brimmed hat and sports a neckerchief much like the other two rural laborers in the background. As one anonymous correspondent to The Grub-street Journal noted, Duck is ‘‘the first Modern who has happily invoked the Muses in a Barn,’’ and this plate aims to commodify Duck in precisely these terms.66 Many versifying critics in 1730 also exploited the paradoxical tension in Duck’s working lives. Laurence Eusden, the poet laureate, had died at the end of September, setting off much public speculation about his successor. Because of his recent preferment, Duck was considered a serious candidate for the laurel. Until Colley Cib-

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ber was chosen in early December, Duck became an easy whipping boy for the wits, and his name appeared often in the London newspapers. The editors of The Grub-street Journal received so many lines and letters about Duck that they inserted the following rejoinder to their readership: ‘‘Our President, who is no Friend to Printers, desires our Correspondents, if they write any more upon Stephen Duck, to forebear all witticisms upon his name, flail, &c. they being anticipated in one of these poems.’’67 Jonathan Swift’s ‘‘Quibbling Epigram,’’ which also appeared in 1730 at the height of the laureate craze, serves as perhaps the most biting of a type-poem satirizing Duck’s work history and his uncommon success as a writer: The Thresher Duck, could o’er the Q—— prevail. The Proverb says; No Fence against a Flayl. From threshing Corn, he turns to thresh his Brains; For which Her M——y allows him Grains. Though ‘tis confess’t that those who ever saw His Poems, think them all not worth a Straw. Thrice happy Duck, employ’d in threshing Stubble! Thy Toil is lessen’d, and thy Profits double.68

In the movement from ‘‘straw’’ to ‘‘stubble,’’ Swift plays on the radical change in Duck’s working life and the attendant rise in Duck’s economic standing. The satire thus belittles Duck’s poems while at once publicizing the laboring-poet’s market potential. The final line posits two circumstances appealing to any low-order scribbler: there is less work and more money in writing poetry. In this sense, the satire seems less directed at Duck, who must have seemed a harmless sort to the Swifts and Popes of the world, than it is directed at polite poetic tastes of the period. That Duck was considered a poet worthy of preferment was not Duck’s fault, or even his own doing, and Swift, ever grinding the Scriblerian axe, pointedly satirizes a society that elevates a plebeian phenom to the status of poet. Though he criticizes Duck’s efforts here, Swift himself contributed to Duck’s coffers by subscribing to the 1736 authorized edition.69 If we are not to mistake patronage for hypocrisy, Swift must have respected Duck’s poetic abilities on some level. The tension between Duck’s former toils as a thresher, and his current ones as a court-poet, is decidedly mitigated in a new frontispiece introducing the authorized edition of Duck’s poems in 1736. This new portrait presents Duck as a serious writer and erases any direct linkage with rural agricultural labor.70 In this plate, Duck ap-

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pears seated and holds a quill in one hand over an open book; his brimmed hat has been replaced with a stocking house cap, much like those worn by Pope in several of his early portraits. The best example of these is Sir Godfrey Kneller’s earliest known portrait of Pope, the 1716 type, dated 1719.71 The visual parallels are obvious, but perhaps more important are the contextual parallels: Pope holds a copy of The Iliad, open to Book IX (Iota), the book which begins the third volume of his Iliad translation. The first volume had appeared in June of 1715 and Kneller’s portrait captures Pope ‘‘emerging as the champion Homeric poet of the English Augustan age.’’72 Bickham’s 1736 frontispiece projects an image of Duck writing because his substantial authorized edition contained corrections of previous poems as well as forty-two new ones. Like Kneller’s Pope, Duck is dressed simply, in a linen shirt with vest and waistcoat, looking the quintessential stereotype of a working writer. Pope was deeply concerned throughout his life about his public image, and whether or not Bickham cut his engraving of Duck under the influence of Kneller’s work, it is clear that the public intention of both portraits is quite similar. By 1736, Duck’s supporters are attempting to market him exclusively as a writer. Indeed, the title page of the 1736 Poems includes no information regarding Duck’s previous working life, or his former wages, as the title pages of the many pirated editions had. The booksellers in 1730, by contrast, marketed Duck using every available method to emphasize his low social station and previous laboring life. This process of turning the laboring-poet into a salable literary commodity by advertising laboring-status is reproduced in the poets who followed Duck into print after 1730. But 1736 marks a significant shift in the commodification process by selling authorial legitimacy over laboring origins. After 1736, all of Duck’s authorized publications follow the model of Poems on Several Occasions and indicate only that the work is ‘‘by Stephen Duck.’’ Even one prominent pirated edition published in 1738 follows suit by advertising that the poems are ‘‘All newly Corrected, and much Amended, By the Author Stephen Duck.’’73 No details of Duck’s social rank or former workaday life are given. Duck provides some useful commentary on his transition from farm laborer to poet in a 1741 poem titled Every Man in his Own Way. An Epistle to a Friend. In this poem, Duck answers an imaginary interlocutor who argues that he should ‘‘quit the Muse before her Spirits sink, / Forsake [his] rhymes, and wash [his] Hands of Ink.’’74 But writing, Duck says, ‘‘clings about my Heart,’’ and in his strongest published answer to his critics, Duck effectively

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Stephen Duck, frontispiece to Poems on Several Occasions (1736), George Bickham. Reproduced by permission of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada.

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Alexander Pope, oil painting dated 1719, Sir Godfrey Kneller. Reproduced by kind permission of Lord Barnard, from his Collection at Raby Castle, Durham. Print supplied by the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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poaches the argument most often put forth by his social betters for why he should return to the plow: that rural labor is his fate and to write is to contradict nature (1). Duck applies this argument as justification for his career as poet instead: When urgent Nature calls, I write for Ease, The Call of Nature ev’ry one obeys. Alike the Learn’d, and those who never learn, Whether ‘tis in a College, or a Barn; Whether on Mincio’s Banks, or in the Mint: When Nature bids us write, we write and print. (14)

By 1741 this is a man who sees himself primarily as a writer who has, because of Caroline’s benevolence, achieved a degree of independence which allowed him to pursue poetry as his true vocation. The cultural model which Duck presents, then, is one that signifies the professionalization of poetry in the literary marketplace of the 1730s. By writing and publishing poetry, Duck gained court favor, money, and ease from the daily grind of manual labor. Just prior to the publication of Poems On Several Occasions, Caroline rewarded Duck with the position of ‘‘Keeper of the Queen’s Library in Merlin’s Cave,’’75 a promotion which prompted the following lines in The Gentleman’s Magazine: Thrice happy Thresher! now exert thy force, Whilst all incitements join to urge thy course; Sweet are thy labours there, thy toils refin’d, With arts to cultivate the fallow mind; 76

This author, Catharine Cockburn, sees Duck as a ‘‘daring bard,’’ worthy of patronage, but she writes to press Caroline for the extension of her favors to aspiring female poets as well: ‘‘Favour a muse, who tho’ she weakly soars, / With glory fir’d thy patronage implores’’ (308). Caroline, so far as we know, never did raise another plebeian poet as she did Duck, and yet this did not stop many ‘‘Ducklings’’ from seeking her favors, or those of other sympathetic aristocrats eager to appear fashionable. A correspondent in The Grub-street Journal mockingly warned that ‘‘ ‘tis well known that very few wealthy men give due encouragement to Letters, when they have no other recommendation than mere merit.’’77 If Duck’s writing served as a viable example of social advancement for his fellow versifying laborers, Caroline’s patronage of such a worthy character must have served to complete the model by influencing aristocrats with money

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and supposed literary taste. The seven pirated editions of Duck’s early poems produced and sold within a twelve-month, and the extraordinarily long subscriber’s list for the 1736 edition no doubt influenced London booksellers to be on the lookout for another plebeian poet to exploit. There was money to be made for all parties involved, and this fact was often openly discussed. For instance, in a letter written in 1748, Mary Jones figures her ‘‘vast quantity of Friends’’ as so many ‘‘Guineas and half Crowns’’: ‘‘I assure your Ladyship, I never had the least design upon their Pockets till now. But having been at great expence of Pen, Ink, and Paper for their various Amusement and Entertainment . . . as Gold is my ruling Passion at present, I should rather prefer the half Guineas.’’78 Some years earlier, in the decade following Duck’s discovery and subsequent commodification, John Bancks, Robert Dodsley, and Robert Tatersal were equally as pragmatic with regard to the cash-nexus of print culture.

The Flight Up Parnassus: Bancks, Dodsley, and Tatersal The image of the fledgling poet taking wing and ascending Parnassian heights was a popular one in the early eighteenth century. The anonymous poet of ‘‘Drake upon Duck,’’ for instance, describes Duck’s ‘‘curious wing’’ and ‘‘his tow’ring flights,’’ exhorting the poet to ‘‘Parnassus climb, whilst fame is on the wing’’ (GM 5:383, 384). For the laborer-poets who followed Duck into print in the early 1730s, the climb must have seemed less an effortless ‘‘flight’’ from bottom to top than an arduous ascent up the mountain. At issue was economic success and how to achieve it. One poet suggested that Caroline would: No longer let true Merit lie conceal’d, As soon rewarded, as to Her reveal’d; Produce your Labours on the public Stage, And She shall raise a new Augustan Age.79

These lines celebrate Caroline’s benevolence in supporting ‘‘true Merit,’’ and thus reveal a model for writing for money that, by 1730, exists outside of the traditional definitions (and barriers) of duncehood. This powerful appeal to plebeian writers argues the inevitability of material success with the publication of labor-specific poetry. Yet, by 1733, the argument had changed significantly:

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Write you for Pensions?—you’ll have none— For fame ‘tis vain to quarrel; Consider—Stephen Duck’s but one, And Cibber wears the Laurel.80

This rhetorical about-face did little, however, to quell the rise of what William Dowling has called ‘‘a literature of Augustan aspiration.’’81 Bancks, Dodsley, and Tatersal all published significant volumes of poetry between the years 1730 and 1735 in which they all seek ‘‘pensions’’ or other material gains on par with Caroline’s support of Duck. These poets all address Duck specifically in verse and, though none gained the lottery-like success Duck enjoyed, they show a keen awareness of current trends in literature by attempting to capitalize on the model of plebeian literary endeavor provided by Duck. John Goodridge has pointedly cautioned against reading the works of Duck’s immediate followers simply as the produce of literary opportunism: ‘‘Firstly, it is inadequate to see in the desire to emulate Duck merely the eighteenth-century equivalent of winning the pools. The struggle that clearly went into the literary work these writers produced speaks of a genuine impulse to write, and to give meaning to their lives in doing so.’’82 The ‘‘cynical’’ view of these poets-as-opportunists, and the progressive view (expressed by Goodridge) of taking them seriously as writers, need not be mutually exclusive. My contention is that the desire to cash in on Duck’s celebrity is inextricably linked to each poet’s desire to become an established, working writer. For Bancks, Dodsley, and Tatersal, their collective opportunism is characterized by creating themselves as literary commodities, ones that both reproduce and revise the criteria for success established by Duck. In this respect, these three poets also represent a displacement of the poetic discourse on work into a distinct material economy. All three use their laboring status to sell themselves and their writing; but in their collective desire for material gain, they shift the discussion of work from their respective trades to the issue of writing as a profession. Labor, both in terms of authorial experience and poetic discourse, figures as symbolic capital with potential exchange value in this period. A plebeian poet could use his or her laboring life in print as an attempt to escape from it, and in this way, plebeian publishing after Duck figures prominently in the professionalization of poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century. John Bancks represents a curious case of plebeian inauthenticity coupled with aggressive manipulation of popular literary trends, all in the service of writerly ambition and self-promotion. Bancks was

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in fact born well enough to have been placed in a private school by an uncle when his father died. According to ‘‘The Life of Mr. John Bancks,’’ which appeared in 1753 penned by someone who knew Bancks well, ‘‘[his] schoolmaster, so far from encouraging young Banks to make a great progress in classical learning, exerted his influence with his relations to have him taken from school, and represented him as incapable of receiving much erudition.’’83 The schoolmaster, one Mr. Belpene, was apparently jealous that Bancks would complete his education and ‘‘be preferred to him as minister of the congregation of Anabaptists’’ because of his father’s influence (310). So Bancks was accordingly removed from school and apprenticed to a weaver in Reading, where he broke his arm and was soon discharged because he was unable to perform a weaver’s tasks. With the proceeds of a small legacy bequeathed to him by a relative, he set up a bookstall in Spitalfields around 1730. Undoubtedly eager to cash in on Duck’s success, Bancks brought out his own volume of poems in 1730, titled The Weaver’s Miscellany, using his brief stint as a weaver’s apprentice to win public approbation and patronage. Although Bancks’s plebeian origins are disputable, given his schooling and inheritance, he nevertheless advertises himself as a laboring-class poet, using his truncated work experience to enter the lottery of unpatronized laborer poets in the 1730s. Bancks published The Weaver’s Miscellany only a few months after Duck’s pirated editions began appearing in London in September 1730. Unlike most publications inspired by Duck at that time, Bancks’s volume of poems was published in earnest; the modus operandi was not satire but solidarity: ‘‘Thy Fortune, Duck, affect my kindred Mind.’’84 Bancks seeks to capitalize on Duck’s example, and he does so by constructing himself as a plebeian laborer, with experience in the weaving trades, and as one who has suffered penury in this station: ‘‘In dire Machine, of quadrant Figure, / Expos’d to all the pinching Rigour / Of Hunger, Poverty, and Cold’’ (9). The title page pitches Bancks as being ‘‘now a Poor Weaver in Spittle-Fields’’ which, as Cibber’s ‘‘Life’’ suggests, he was certainly not in late 1730. A close look at the title page reveals Bancks’s hoax. Unlike the books of other plebeians, his is ‘‘Printed: And Sold by the Author at John Knotts at the Queen’s-Arms in Dorset-Street Spittle-Fields,’’ a detail that indicates Bancks has prepaid the bookseller/publisher to print an agreed upon quantity of the volume, which he will then sell at his own stall. Bancks’s plebeian status may be questionable because of his family money, but he does have manual work experience which, in light of Duck’s example, he is savvy enough to use to his advantage in print.

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Bancks’s capacity for self-promotion, however, does not end with his self-serving use of his previous laboring experience. He further complicates the labor issue in a poem entitled ‘‘The Wish,’’ a popular type-poem in the early to mid-eighteenth century based on classical models.85 The Horatian wish for ‘‘health, peace, and competence’’ was perverted in many ways by neoclassical poets in the first half of the century, not least by lower-class versifiers who desired a comfortable poetical retirement complete with the material trimmings they associated with middle-class ease.86 Bancks’s version is largely patterned on John Pomfret’s The Choice (1700), but, unlike Pomfret, Bancks has to deal explicitly with his laboringclass status. Early in the poem, Bancks laments that he is ‘‘Branded with Weaver’s odious Name, / Thro’ all the World, a Mark of shame’’ (9). These lines give a reader pause to ask why Bancks asserts this ‘‘fact’’ so boldly on the title page. The answer lies in recognizing his business sense. Bancks knew his experience as a weaver would attract attention in this historical moment as a laboring fellow of Duck’s, but unlike Duck, Bancks explicitly aspires to rise socially above this ‘‘mark of shame’’: In this forlorn, neglected Station, For me to think of Alteration; And, like a true son of Apollo, To wish for what will never follow; Must be, I think, by all allow’d A Project highly just and good. (9)

Thus, the status of ‘‘weaver’’ becomes a form of symbolic capital which Bancks attempts to exchange in the literary marketplace for material success and social mobility. Bancks is mindful of the ‘‘many Helps the Poet needs; / And must possess, if e’er his Muse succeeds’’ and he solicits such ‘‘helps’’ throughout his poems (4). Bancks is also reflexively aware that in order to achieve his goals he must align himself with current trends in literature. For example, he appeals to the contemporary idea of natural genius in The Weaver’s Miscellany and attempts to mold himself to fit the definition. Echoing radical notions of natural genius articulated by Addison and others, Bancks argues that ‘‘A Genius is Divine, and must be Born’’ and qualifies himself for the title by showing that ‘‘The Love of Verse, in [him] despotick reigns’’ (4, 1). The ‘‘Poetic Rage’’ or ‘‘Will to Numbers’’ is thus constructed as innate and uncontrollable, but Bancks adds a twist to the argument in an attempt to show that he is a poet more worthy of preferment than Duck (3, 2). A

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handwritten addendum to the title page—probably penned by Bancks himself—indicates that ‘‘These poems were written when the author was very young, and had read little that would contribute to form his taste’’87—a standard plebeian apologia for the level of learning available in the verses to follow. But Bancks also indicates that he has received some education, though he attempts to downplay it, lest it should interfere with his plebeian self-construction: Scarce had I learn’d my Concords out of Book, When, from the Grammar, I to Plow was took; There, in the Furrow, all my Grandsire’s Cost Was quickly bury’d, and forever lost. Too Young I was, too small my Progress made, Either t’increase, or cherish, what I had. ([iii])

If this early education was indeed ‘‘lost,’’ Bancks shows that his desire and appreciation for learning returned ‘‘When Judgement dawn’d, and Infant Fogs dispell’d / With greater Justness all things I beheld: / In dazzling Lustre Learning then appeared’’ ([iii]). Bancks’s duplicity is once again self-serving because ‘‘Learning,’’ as we have seen, was not only an acceptable aspiration for those who possessed natural genius, but also a necessary component for writerly success: By Learning we must regularly rise; By that, move forwards to the wish’d for Prize. Who would succeed, as well as greatly think, Must sing by Rule, and ne’er in Language sink. (3)

The shining example of this argument is of course ‘‘Immortal Pope!’’ who ‘‘whilst a God-like Genius warms his breast, / Of universal Learning is possest’’ (5, 4). Pope, who combined his gift for numbers with a rigorous classical education, serves as the consummate image of the professional writer for Bancks. In effect, Bancks is trying to have it both ways, representing himself as a plebeian natural genius whose knowledge of the rules of poesy establishes his literary superiority over Duck: ‘‘If real Genius, moves me thus to write; / (The Thing I wish, but scarcely dare to speak) / Ev’n I may hope a nobler Flight to take’’ (4). Bancks’s argument that ‘‘real Genius’’ combined with bookish learning will lead to higher things perhaps keeps him from writing a poem about his working life as a weaver. Bancks does not produce his labors on the public stage in The Weaver’s Miscellany the way Duck had in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ and his use of a poetic dis-

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course on work—defined in terms of weaving—is confined to one significant verse paragraph in the autobiographical lead poem, ‘‘The Introduction’’: Weary’d at length with rural Exercise, I to some new Employment turn’d mine Eyes: When rigid Fate condemn’d me to the Loom; Of all she utters, sure the hardest Doom. Here tho’ I think, my Thoughts will still be low; My Numbers still will move on dull and slow: Dull, as the Prospect which before me lies, Slow, as the Wages of the Weaver rise. No Subject here that’s worthy of a Song; All mean Ideas rise, a dusky Throng, Whilst thro’ the opening Warp the Shuttle flies along. ([iv])

Although Bancks represents weaving as ‘‘the hardest Doom,’’ he uses a trade-specific diction ironically to argue that weaving is not a worthy subject for poetry. However, in 1733, with the publication of his second volume, Bancks does write explicitly about the daily hardships of a bookstall hawker: Blow Boreas, Foe to human kind! Blow, blustering, freezing, piercing Wind! . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tho’ close begirt with Garments three, Not Garments can defend from thee; Thy penetrating force will find Or Hole before, or Slit behind! . . . . . . . . . . . . . Full in my Face is always driv’n, By thee, whate’er descends from Heav’n; Or Snow, or Rain, or Sleet, or Hail— Nor can the Penthouse aught avail!88

This overblown image of his bookselling life is meant to elicit sympathy from polite readers inclined to support a suffering ‘‘natural’’ poet. In contrast to Duck, Bancks is not concerned with representing the travails of his trade; he is intent upon securing subscribers and bettering his economic and social positions through his writing. Though Bancks fails to devote an entire poem to his menial labor experiences, he does self-consciously figure his work as a writer as a form of labor. Through the course of his poems the reader is privy to details of his writing life that serve to portray Bancks as an industrious writer/worker. We learn that Bancks keeps ‘‘Secure in

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Pocket . . . / Pen, Ink, and Paper bound in Sheep’’ to record his ‘‘Instant Labours’’ (POSO, 10). The poetry in this commonplace book is described further on as a kind of material wealth: All my immense poetic Store! A Pocket-Book, in Vellum bound, Fill’d with good Verse, and Sense profound! The Labour of full three Years past, Design’d eternally to last! (POSO, 106)

The poetry which makes up Bancks’s ‘‘Store’’ is clearly the product of his labor, which he has every intention of selling. Bancks also provides some insight into how this product is produced: My Candle’s out, and I’m in Bed; Yet, since ‘tis popt into my Head To send you Verses half a Sheet, I’ll write ‘em now— (POSO, 111)

And, in ‘‘The Diurnal. An Epistle to Mr. B. G.,’’ Bancks relates details of a typical work day. After a late breakfast, Bancks says: I go and write Whate’er I study’d over Night— If Muse flew high, with limping Feet, I fill about a Farthing Sheet. (POSO, 125)

In the evening, Bancks will submit his work for criticism at John Rollo’s tavern: This safely kept ‘till Night, it follows, I read it o’er to Friends at Rollo’s, Who praise or blame, as they think fit; For Rollo is himself a Wit. (POSO, 125)

Though Rollo was indeed a published poet, this was no Kit-Cat Club. Yet Bancks shows himself to be serious about following his Muse and working at his craft. The reasons for writing are never far below the surface in Bancks’s published work. For Bancks, ‘‘the bold Muse attempts to rise,’’ both economically and socially.89 In the persona of a poor weaver, Bancks makes a direct plea in his ‘‘Wish’’ poem for three things: ‘‘heaps of Cash,’’ ‘‘a Wife,’’ and ‘‘a pleasant Country Seat’’ (10, 11, 13). Bancks views success in distinctly material terms, for

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even ‘‘Woman was for Man design’d’’ and is therefore only one more thing ‘‘among the rest’’ (11). Bancks’s description of his ideal house also contains a Defoean sense of material detail: My House should be of comely Size, I think the Ground should round it rise: It’s little Front shold [sic] meet the Morn, And that, a Dial should adorn: A Court, before you could arrive at The Door, should make it Safe, and Private: (13)

In his desire to gain ‘‘sufficient store,’’ Bancks deploys a distinctly middle-class notion of upward mobility based on economic success and material gain. Financial remuneration, rather than fame, is the sort of success that Bancks most covets as a writer: Immortal Fame, the Bard’s Reward, Fate has not join’d it with Success: The Gods will have their Bounty shar’d; And very rarely doubly bless. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Her Praises may increase my Chains, But not contribute to my Ease. (POSO, 158–59)

Given a choice between posterity and pounds, Bancks would no doubt opt for the latter, and to achieve such ‘‘success’’ Bancks overtly projects his poetry and prose as products of his labor to be exchanged for money within a material economy. Of the laboring poets publishing in the 1730s, Bancks is the most self-reflexive about his entry into the print marketplace and about the rules which govern success in the period. It is not surprising that he ended up as the most completely professionalized writer of the plebeian poets of his era. Bancks knows that ‘‘a rising Poet always writes / To Dukes, Lords, Ladies, ‘Squires, or Knights’’ and he moves chameleon-like between roles: a weaver in 1730, and aspiring writer thereafter (POSO, 12). Unlike Duck, who assures his polite readers in 1736 that he has not ‘‘been so fond of writing, as might be imagin’d from seeing so many Things of mine as are got together in this Book,’’ Bancks’s Poems on Several Occasions was ‘‘composed on Purpose to be published.’’90 After 1730, Bancks strategically advertises himself as ‘‘J. Bancks’’ or ‘‘Mr. John Bancks’’ and thus leaves the failed path of manual labor behind as he selfaffirms the title of author. Still, poems that appeared in 1730 in The Weaver’s Miscellany turn up again later in the decade in the first

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volume of his Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose, published in 1738, with a second edition appearing in 1739. It is an interesting collection in that Bancks produced a number of Proposals in 1737 to be ‘‘left at the Places where Subscriptions are taken in, that every one may be enabled to judge of the Nature and Merit of what he is desired to subscribe to’’ (PMW, [ii]). This marketing strategy was further enhanced by the ‘‘Conditions’’ that Bancks outlined, promising ‘‘about twenty Copper-Plates’’ and offering a seventh edition ‘‘Gratis’’ for those who subscribed for six—both consumeroriented ploys one can easily find in operation today (PMW, [i]). One of the plates in the finished edition of Miscellaneous Works is significant because it reveals Bancks repackaging the same material desires that characterized his earlier forays into print. The engraving appears as the frontispiece to ‘‘The Progress of Petitioning,’’ a series of four ‘‘Epistles’’ addressed to Pope, and depicts a likeness of a poet (perhaps Bancks), alone in a poorly furnished garret, seated at his writing table looking forlorn and beaten.91 The image itself is loosely based on Hogarth’s ‘‘The Distress’d Poet,’’ which circulated in print form in 1737, the year before Bancks came out with Miscellaneous Works. In contrast to the didacticism of Hogarth’s engraving, which comes at the poet’s expense, every detail of this print is designed to elicit sympathy from the reader by revealing the poet’s strained circumstances. It functions as a complement to the poem in which Bancks chronicles his working poverty: the bed has ‘‘neither Tester, Post, nor Head’’; there is but a single curtain ‘‘strung upon a Cable’’; a few wooden chairs have ‘‘some Members lacking’’; and the list goes on (MW, 2:40). This image, then, is yet another method by which Bancks attempts to elicit support from potential polite patrons. However, he does temper his material desires slightly in a footnote addressed to Pope: The three Things for which our Author petitions his Patron, are, 1st. That he would give an impartial Judgement of his Writings; 2ly. That he would recommend him to the Town; 3dly. That he would help him to a Place. Each of these Requests our Poet has made the Subject of an Epistle. (MW, 2:5–6)

But the poem itself again illustrates Bancks’s bold pleas for social ascension (to be a ‘‘Poet’’) and monetary gain: Observe the Manner, Stile, and Spirit; Whence form your Judgement of his Merit:

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Frontispiece to ‘‘The Progress of Petitioning,’’ in John Bancks, Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose, 2d ed., vol. 2 (1739), engraver unknown. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

And fix his Character, at once, For Life—A Poet—or, A Dunce! . . . . . . . . . . . . My Muse hath multiplied Petitions, And still advance’d [sic] in her Conditions: Sure ‘tis so plain, there’s nothing plainer, She begs for Somewhat to maintain her? To speak her Care the shortest Way, This was the whole she had to say, ‘‘Sir, help Me into present Pay!’’ (MW, 2:13, 26)

Bancks’s requests apparently began to have some effect, as the concluding footnote reveals: A Copy of these Epistles having been sent to Mr. Pope, he was pleased to return them with Subscriptions for two Sets of the Author’s Works, and the following Couplet: May these put Money in your Purse, For I assure you, I’ve read worse. A. P. (MW, 2:42–43)

We cannot now recover whether or not Pope actually wrote these lines. Yet, supposedly coming from the author of The Dunciad and

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the Epistle to Arbuthnot—which begins, of course, with Pope’s servant protecting him from a throng of would-be poet petitioners— the couplet seems at once appropriate (Pope had no doubt read worse, and Bancks was never one of those cruel dunces who attacked Pope’s physical shortcomings) and absurdly at odds with what we know of Pope’s public feelings about dealing with struggling writers in the 1730s. Pope indeed may not have considered Bancks a dunce at all; or, this may be another example of Bancks’s strategic duplicity in the service of writerly self-promotion. In 1730, Bancks wrote that ‘‘Nor is’t in vain that this discerning Age / Prescribes so strictly to Poetic Rage’’ (WM, 3). He might well have substituted ‘‘subscribes’’ for ‘‘prescribes’’ and carried the sense of the line one step closer to contemporary consumer trends in literature, and to his own thinly veiled goal of material success as an author. For Bancks, poetry was a means to an end, but he also maintained a high sense of his ‘‘Duty’’ as an author: ‘‘For tho’ all who subscribe to a young Author, may not expect an equivalent Return for the Money they advance; yet, it is certainly his Duty, in Point of Gratitude, to make them a Return as nearly so as he is able’’ (PMW, [iii]). The overt economic language is striking in this passage for it refigures the writer/reader relationship as that of the producer/consumer. In displacing a poetic discourse on work into a distinct material economy, Bancks contributes significantly to both the commercialization of print culture in general, and the professionalization of writing as a ‘‘middle-class’’ trade in particular. While The Weaver’s Miscellany did not fare well, his Poems on Several Occasions gained praise from Pope in 1733, and Bancks’s reputation subsequently flourished in his own time. Although Miscellaneous Works went to two editions and, as Bancks tells it, also earned Pope’s approbation and financial support, the economic success he sought finally came with the switch to prose. Once again displaying his awareness of market trends in literature, Bancks notes in 1738 that ‘‘To seek a Livelihood from Rymes / Suits ill with these prosaic Times’’ (MW, 2:27). Not surprisingly, Bancks commenced producing prose tracts on national and international political figures almost immediately. Beginning in 1739, seven editions of A short critical review of the political life of Oliver Cromwell were published in Bancks’s lifetime, and Bancks followed that piece with other prose histories of Peter the Great and King William III.92 It is remarkable that Bancks could represent himself as a laboring-class pleb, brazenly publish his material wants and his desire to commence author-at-large, and still, so far as we know, achieve his goals. Bancks understood both the advantages and the

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liabilities that came with publicly identifying himself as a ‘‘laborer poet’’ in the period, and, unlike many of his peers, he succeeded in circumventing the ideological and practical constraints embedded in the construction. Robert Dodsley’s career in labor and letters reveals many significant parallels to that of Bancks. Dodsley was raised in a large family in Mansfield, where his father kept a school, and, like Bancks, the young Dodsley probably gained a small degree of education while in his family’s care. As was the case with Bancks, Dodsley’s plebeian roots are questionable,93 but his laboring life is easier to track after he left home. Dodsley was apprenticed to a stockingweaver who apparently starved and mistreated him. Dodsley left Mansfield and weaving, which his father considered tantamount to desertion, and thus received no financial help from his family again. Dodsley never wrote about weaving, however, because his primary laboring experience came in the form of domestic work in London as a footman to Charles Dartiquenave, and later to Mrs. Jane Lowther. The Lowthers boasted many literary connections and it was in their service that Dodsley began to write with the encouragement of his employers. A Muse in Livery was published in 1732 by subscription, which went to a second edition within the year. In the dedication to the first edition, Dodsley pays tribute to the Lowthers’ benevolence by noting that ‘‘few in my Station are able to find Leisure for Employments of this Nature.’’94 With the profits from the sale of his poems and a highly successful play, The Toy-shop, and a timely £100 contribution from Pope, Dodsley set up shop as bookseller in Pall Mall in 1735, eventually becoming one of the most influential bookseller/publishers of the eighteenth century.95 Like Bancks’s The Weaver’s Miscellany, A Muse in Livery is consciously fashioned to gain a share of the market created by Duck’s publicity and success. Dodsley is advertised as ‘‘a Footman to a Person of Quality at Whitehall’’ on the title page of the second edition.96 The volume also includes a poem about the daily toils of a footman, an epistle addressed directly ‘‘to Stephen Duck,’’ and his own ‘‘Wish’’ poem, the pathos of which imitates Bancks’s poem of the same title almost to a point. More generally, Dodsley also foregrounds the theme of ‘‘natural genius’’ and constructs an image of himself as an honest, industrious member of his station in an attempt to prove himself worthy of polite patronage. A discursive and thematic pattern thus emerges in the poets immediately following Duck which is suggestive of plebeian resistance to the social limitations of the period, ironically in the form of accommodation to so-

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cial and literary norms. Both Dodsley and Bancks successfully transform their social status by manipulating the terms of their public image, adhering to polite ideological standards, and exploiting their respective accommodations to those standards in the burgeoning literary marketplace. Dodsley is explicit with his poetic references to Duck, using ‘‘An Epistle to Stephen Duck’’ as a vehicle for defending Duck against his critics and constructing himself as a fellow laborer-poet. Dodsley writes to Duck, ‘‘ambitious for the title of thy friend,’’ celebrating Duck’s freedom from ‘‘slavish toil’’ and ‘‘low distress’’ (10, 11). He does not address Caroline seeking similar reward, but instead maintains a stance of selfless admiration: ‘‘Henceforth let his lov’d pen employ his hands, / Pity so long degraded with a flail’’ (11). Dodsley also attempts to censor the critics who faulted Duck’s poems for being low and unpolished by arguing that they should be judged according to the context of their production: ‘‘Think what could be expected from a barn: / ’Tis that exalts the merits of his cause; / And which ought to give your fury laws’’ (11). Such ‘‘laws’’ Dodsley wants applied to his own texts as well. Dodsley sees himself singing in unison with Duck, for although he writes ‘‘from a pantry’’ not ‘‘a barn,’’ they both seek poetic ‘‘perfection’’ and the ‘‘sublime’’ (13). In the final image of the poem, Dodsley links himself to Duck in an extended metaphor that figures both poets scaling Parnassian heights: So you and I, just naked from the shell, In chirping notes our future singing tell; Unfeather’d yet, in judgment, thought, or skill, Hop round the basis of Parnassus’ hill: Our flights are low, and want of art and strength, Forbids to carry us to the wish’d-for length. But fledg’d, and cherish’d with a kindly spring, We’ll mount the summit, and melodious sing. (14)

Dodsley confidently elaborates the popular image of the fledgling poet to suggest that both he and Duck are poised for poetic careers. Just as the awkward ‘‘hopping’’ of the newborn songbird will develop into flight, so too will ‘‘chirping notes’’ give way to ‘‘melodious’’ song. Following Duck’s example, Dodsley employs a poetic discourse on work in publicizing his workaday life as a footman. In ‘‘The Footman. An Epistle to my Friend Mr. Wright,’’ Dodsley presents a catalog of domestic service labors, from ‘‘cleaning glasses,

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knives, and plate / And such-like dirty work as that’’ to ‘‘the only pleasant hour’’ of serving dinner where Dodsley can ‘‘unregarded stand’’ and soak up the polite conversation at table (18, 19). Here Dodsley can ‘‘mark the courtly phrases, / And all the elegance that passes,’’ educating himself about proper language and polite modes of conduct (19). Dodsley’s reader can mark this learning in action as the footman-poet transposes the low subject of his labor into verse. For example, in discussing his work at teatime, Dodsley relates that ‘‘I strait engage / The Lilliputian equipage / Of dishes, saucers, spoons, and tongs’’ coloring the mundane with a Swiftian allusion that breathes life into the scene (20). Much like Duck’s use of neoclassicisms, Dodsley’s contemporary literary imagery reveals his intellectual cultivation, which serves to raise his subject and project his personal merit on a public stage. Through this description of his labor, Dodsley presents an image of himself that is in line with the ideological argument of his earlier effort, Servitude. He successfully parlays his labor experience into an image of honesty and industry that should be rewarded. Dodsley wants to be taken seriously as a writer and, like Bancks, he must address the fact that his ambitions are incongruous with his social rank. In the dedication to the first edition, Dodsley adopts the traditional stance of self-deprecation and humility with regard to his verses: I will seek no other Excuse for them than the Candour and Good-nature of my Readers, when they recollect that the Author lies under all the Disadvantages of an uncultivated Mind; nay, even his natural Genius depressed by the Sense of his low Condition; a Condition from which he never hopes to rise, but by the Goodness of Providence influencing some generous Mind to support an honest and a grateful Heart, which will ever be found in the Breast of the Author. ([iv–v])

Dodsley, of course, has every hope of rising both socially and economically as the frontispiece to both editions indicates.97 One hand of the male figure is chained by ‘‘Poverty’’ to ‘‘Misery, Folly, Ignorance’’ while the other reaches skyward, his wings ready to carry him toward ‘‘Happiness, Virtue, Knowledge.’’ These wings are fully feathered, the poet ready to fly to Parnassian heights, but for the chains of poverty which hold him down. That the engraving serves as an allegory for Dodsley’s own position is made clear in ‘‘Effigies Authoris: or the Mind of the Frontispiece,’’ where the poet admits that ‘‘in vain I strive to rise’’ due to the chains of poverty (1). To rise as a poet, Dodsley requires economic relief. And,

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Frontispiece to Robert Dodsley, A Muse in Livery (1732), Pierre Fourdrinier. Reproduced by permission of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada.

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as Bancks had done earlier, Dodsley goes so far as to voice his desires in verse: ‘‘The Wish’’ represents the same material wants—a ‘‘small estate,’’ ‘‘a happy rural seat,’’ and ‘‘a wife young, virtuous, fair, and kind’’—that Bancks had articulated (15, 16). In publishing his own ‘‘Wish’’ poem, Dodsley also employs the popular neoclassic model for articulating ambition in an attempt to seek release from the chains of want. Dodsley and Bancks thus show their intelligence in building a case for plebeian advancement in a form that was both popular and largely accepted by the middle- to upper-class readers they could expect. Taken together, Dodsley and Bancks are examples of plebeian authors who used their poetical talents, their laboring status and experience, and print culture acumen to fashion careers that moved them up the social hierarchy. Their success is based on pushing the right buttons in the right ways, even if that means creating odd paradoxes in their work. Witness Dodsley’s comment about potential criticism of his poems: Methinks I would not have it said, As all my praise, when I am read, ‘‘The Lines, considering whence they came, ‘‘Are well enough, nor merit blame. Such cold encomiums won’t suffice; A fame with such restrictions I despise. (84)

Here Dodsley criticizes the very argument he used earlier in ‘‘An Epistle to Stephen Duck’’ to censure Duck’s critics. However, he is willing to exploit his laboring background to advertise the volume and write poems which explicitly link him to a plebeian publishing tradition on the subject of work. Again, this sort of duplicity characterizes a plebeian print strategy designed to move the author up the social ladder. In an age when labor (or its absence) was a key criterion for defining social position, the careers of Dodsley and Bancks amount to significant opposition to this cultural argument. Such opposition cannot be characterized as collective ‘‘class’’ resistance, but Dodsley and Bancks represent important individual examples of plebeian social ascent achieved within a burgeoning literary economy, without the royal patronage Duck received. Dodsley’s epitaph records his ‘‘uncommon Industry and Merit’’ as well as the fact that he ‘‘as an author raised himself much above what could have been expected from one in his rank of life.’’98 Dodsley achieved his career and material ‘‘wishes,’’ proving that ideological accommodation could, ironically, disrupt the traditional social order.

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However, the career of Robert Tatersal shows that the flight of the fledgling poet also could be quite short. As a London bricklayer by trade, Tatersal falls closer to Duck in terms of social position, and his published verse is more overt in its references to the thresher at court than that of Bancks or Dodsley. The Bricklayer’s Miscellany, published in 1734 with the help of Lord Richard Onslow’s patronage and a long list of subscribers, includes the following couplet on the title page linking Tatersal’s poetic production to Duck’s: ‘‘Since Rustick Threshers entertain the Muse; / Why may not Bricklayers too their Subjects choose?’’99 As was the case with Bancks and Dodsley before him, Duck’s social rise provides the impetus for Tatersal to take up his quill, and the prospect of personal financial gain incites Tatersal ‘‘to sing’’ publicly. In the dedication to his patron, Tatersal paints himself as one ‘‘obliged to attend the laborious Employ of a Bricklayer’’ (vi), and shows that he is aware of the ingredients necessary to obtain public recognition and reward: I therefore commit [my poems], as they are, to your Lordship’s judicious Censure, humbly praying you will pardon all Deficiencies, as proceeding from so servile a Capacity, and so mean a Mechanick; and as the Poetical Performances of a Country Thresher hath been so universally applauded, so I hope these of a Country Bricklayer, may also meet in the World some favourable Reception; as they are the true and genuine Productions of a Mechanick Fancy and Genius. (vi)

Tatersal thus attempts to construct himself as the rural type Duck epitomizes, exuding a strong sense of humility, ample ‘‘Genius,’’ and exploiting his supposed ‘‘Country’’ background. But despite his efforts to adhere to the terms of the cultural model provided by Duck, Bancks, and Dodsley, Tatersal’s career in letters was comparatively short: he published only this miscellany, which went to two editions, and the short Second Part in 1735 before disappearing from sight. We know nothing of Tatersal’s biography and his poetry received no critical attention in the period, so we must rely on his published work to determine possible reasons for his failure. Tatersal, it would seem, makes a number of miscalculations in his poetry which work to subvert his desire for literary success and his overall plan to gain ‘‘some bless’d Retirement’’ (25). The first of these miscues appears in ‘‘The Bricklayer’s Labours,’’ Tatersal’s tightly woven, intimate chronicle of a bricklayer’s toil. Following Duck’s successful portrayal of the workaday lives of threshers, Tatersal provides his own pared down version: a day in the life of a

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single working bricklayer. Unlike Duck, who was careful to maintain an inclusive but vague ‘‘we’’ throughout his poem, Tatersal opts for the more specific (and perhaps damning in this context) firstperson narration. ‘‘The Bricklayer’s Labours’’ takes the reader deep into the private realm of the laborer who rises at ‘‘Six o’Clock,’’ dresses, eats a poor ‘‘Repast’’ of bread and cheese, and quaffs ‘‘a Dram of Gin’’ before heading off to work (27). Like Duck’s poem, however, Tatersal’s is punctuated with the specific details and vocabulary of his trade: When Bricks and Mortar eccho’s from on high, Mortar and Bricks, the common, constant Cry; Each sturdy Slave their different Labours share, Some Brickmen call’d, and some for Mortar are; With sultry Sweat and blow without Allay, Travel the Standard up and down all Day; And now the Sun with more exalted Ray, With glowing Beams distributes riper Day, When amidst Dust and Smoke, and Sweat and Noise, A Line, a Line, the Foreman crys, my Boys; When Tuck and Pat with Flemish bound they run, Till the whole Course is struck, compleat, and done; Then on again, while two exalts the Quoin, And draws the midmost Men another Line. (28)

This is, as Goodridge has noted, a unique firsthand account of Tatersal’s specific labors, brought to life with both ‘‘sound and movement.’’100 Within this portrait, though, it is also possible for us to read Tatersal reading the poetic trends of his own historical moment. Tatersal assumes that his readers are familiar with ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ and his poem contains a strikingly similar topography: images of sweat and the ever-present ‘‘Sun’’ repeat, the workers break and eat their miserable victuals and consume ale, gin, or both, and continue to work, though ‘‘parched with Heat, and almost choked with Dust,’’ through the afternoon to dusk (29). Whereas Duck had used every opportunity to elicit sympathy from a polite readership by emphasizing the Sisyphean nature of agricultural work, Tatersal ends his poem with curious stoicism: the hardships of piecemeal work in the winter—‘‘Sometimes, by Chance, I have a Grate to set, / To hang a Copper, or a Hole repleat;’’—give way to the notion that the good days of hard labor will return again in the spring, when ‘‘all the joyous Scene revolves again’’ (30). But Tatersal’s stoic labor poem is actually in keeping with his underlying purpose to show that bricklayers can work harder and

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write better than lowly threshers, thus exploiting a poetic discourse on work in a negative argument against Duck. In ‘‘To Stephen Duck,’’ Tatersal figures this competition as an imaginary hand-tohand combat between the poets who wield the tools of their respective trades: A Flail, a Trowel, Weapons very good, If fitly us’d and rightly understood; But close engag’d, beware the useless Flail; The Trowel then can terribly prevail: (24)

Tatersal’s tool imagery reveals his own peculiar use of a poetic discourse on work to carry an argument that is critical of Duck’s ‘‘trade.’’ Following the example set by John Frizzle,101 Tatersal continues his efforts to elevate himself over Duck by transferring this argument into the realm of writing: Yea, modern Times afford a Rustick Flail, Whose threshing Lays cou’d over Queens prevail; And why not Bricklayers exercise their Quill, Whose Art surmounts a Country Thresher’s still: (24)

Tatersal is quick to claim that his poetry is better than Duck’s, and he invokes a historical precedent in Ben Jonson, another ‘‘Trowel’’ who was ‘‘some Ages past . . . in Praise’’ (24). The criticism becomes more specific and biting as Tatersal concludes by calling Duck to task for not writing enough panegyric verse for Caroline: O, Stephen, Stephen! can you silent be? Or cease to sing her grateful Clemency? Who brought thee from the Field to better Cheer, Enlarg’d thy Bottle, and enrich’d thy Beer. (25)

Tatersal’s overt denigration of Duck, however, lacks evidence and is ill-timed at best. Duck, in fact, had recently published two poems celebrating royal subjects: ‘‘On the Queen’s Grotto’’ and A Poem on the Marriage of his serene Highness the Prince of Orange.102 In 1734, Duck was still quite popular at court, having recently been promoted to Yeoman of the Guard in 1733, and still to be promoted again in 1735 to Keeper of the Queen’s Library. Tatersal errs again in his version of the neoclassic ‘‘Wish’’ poem, ‘‘The Author’s Wish,’’ in which he publicizes his social and material desires. Tatersal follows the model provided by Bancks and Dodsley—he wants money, a country house, and ‘‘a Wife good-

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natur’d, fair, and neat’’—but he no doubt put off his social betters by pushing the limits of the genre in imagining a life for himself which mirrors that of a gentleman from the propertied classes (31). In extending his argument for social and material gain beyond acceptable limits, Tatersal alters traditional class deference to produce a degree of class confusion in the poem. Unlike Bancks and Dodsley before him, Tatersal names his price explicitly in the form of an annuity: ‘‘One hundred Pound should my Request fulfill: / Could I each Year this Stipend once receive’’ (30). He also desires a ‘‘little Horse’’ and ‘‘one Maid’’ (31), details which suggest to an earlyeighteenth-century readership definite class connotations which extend beyond merely creating a comfortable space for Tatersal, as he writes in ‘‘The Introduction, to Mr. Stephen Duck’’ of The Second Part, to ‘‘lay down the Trowel and to resume the Pen’’ (1). For Tatersal, it is his proficiency with ‘‘the Pen’’ which allows him to imagine himself living within a higher social sphere, and thus Tatersal seizes upon the radical potential in the act of writing by reinventing himself as one of his social betters.103 The actual effects of doing so, however, seem ironically to undermine Tatersal’s stated wishes in the poem. Tatersal’s most revealing error—or most radical move—comes in his bringing labor into the argument of his ‘‘Wish’’ poem: No more these Hands the Trowel shou’d employ, Mortar and Bricks no longer wou’d I chuse, But cleanse those Limy Badges from my Muse. (32)

Unlike Bancks and Dodsley, Tatersal announces that success in poetry would mean an end to bricklaying—a point which disrupts the cultural argument that defines labor and social position as one’s allotted fate. Both Bancks and Dodsley fashioned successful careers in print, in effect opposing this argument, but Tatersal explicitly raises the issue of choice, arguing that ‘‘Bricks and Mortar were my Fate to chuse’’ and reiterates his desire to opt for a career in writing over bricklaying, if the circumstances of success are possible (23). Bancks and Dodsley both entered the bookselling trades on the wing of poetic success, but Tatersal makes no such ‘‘trade’’ provision. He affects an internalized, idealized sense of high-culture life for himself which serves, ironically again, to undermine his stated desire for material gain and social ascent. Tatersal thus provides an important foil for understanding plebeian publishing in the decade following Duck’s meteoric social rise. Tatersal attempted to capitalize on Duck’s success, but his earnest

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criticism of Duck earned him little in the way of fame or fortune. Yet, within the historical context of its production, we can recover a sense of Tatersal’s oppositional politics through his poetic discourse. Indeed, The Second Part of The Bricklayer’s Miscellany includes a poem entitled ‘‘The Way of the World,’’ which contains an astounding critique of social values in the period. Whereas Bancks and Dodsley had written—in unison with Duck—to uphold honesty, industry, piety, and the social order, Tatersal unmasks ‘‘the modern Way to live’’ with a series of pointed examples (11). On the subject of religious piety, Tatersal notes: Thus, as some wanton Ladies do Attend the Church for only Shew, To view who’s fine, and who is mean, Fashions to see, and to be seen, Devotion finds but little Share, (13)

In darts aimed directly at his social betters, Tatersal asserts that ‘‘so vain the modern Age is grown, / That Truth and Modesty is flown,’’ ‘‘Honesty is rarely seen,’’ and ‘‘Gold can counterpoize the Scale, / Which over Justice will prevail’’ (13, 12). Though Tatersal stops short of calling for a radical restructuring of society in his published work, the personal criticism of Duck, his purposeful confusion of social rank through the act of writing, and his moralizing against prevailing social practices suggest a plebeian author with an ideological agenda at odds with both his polite readers and his canonized brethren. No wonder, then, that Tatersal was never heard from in print again. The Buzzing of Mary Collier’s Bees: Resistance and Assimilation in The Woman’s Labour If, as one contemporary noted, Mary Barber succeeded in the mid-1730s in ‘‘prov[ing] that Females can with judgment write’’ on ‘‘lower subjects,’’ then she helped pave the way for public reception of Mary Collier’s poetic reply to Stephen Duck.104 The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher’s Labour appeared in London in 1739, and the title page trumpeted Collier as ‘‘now a Washer-woman, at Petersfield in Hampshire.’’105 So far as we know, Collier is the first laboring woman to publish poetry in England—no small feat when we consider the dual constraints of class and gender under which

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Collier worked. Mary Jones’s comments about the appearance of Barber’s poems in 1735 are instructive on this point: I was highly delighted at the sight of so pompous an Edition from a Person of my own Sex; and very glad to find she had met with such Encouragement from so many persons of Distinction, who have honour’d her Subscription. . . . I am always pleas’d with any Attempts of this nature among my own Sex; and could be glad, if the Exercise of our Heads were a little more in Fashion: since it too often happens, that that is the only uncultivated Part about us. But Custom, and (what is more discouraging) the Lords over us, determine against us; and we must do as our Neighbours and They would have us, no matter whether right or wrong.106

Much like Behn, Astell, and Cockburn, both Barber and Jones felt the oppressive weight of ‘‘Custom’’ and patriarchal control over women’s education, writing, and publishing, but their respective social positions—being higher than Collier’s—created opportunities they could seize upon to get into print. Collier, we imagine, had fewer opportunities and no such ambitions, but her plebeian status ironically figures to her advantage in the 1730s. As the last of the direct poetic responses to Duck, and the only one published by a plebeian woman, Collier’s single poem represents the strongest oppositional plebeian voice of the decade. Because of its novelty, angry voice, and explicit social commentary, Collier’s poem has generated much interest within feminist critical circles. Recovery projects such as Moira Ferguson’s have tended to champion Collier’s ‘‘feminist’’ stance, noting that Collier’s ‘‘argument that the work and lives of laboring women deserved respect was unprecedented in feminist literature. . . .’’107 Ferguson continues along these rhetorical lines in her Augustan Reprint edition of Collier’s poem by asserting that Collier is ‘‘a pioneer in charting laboring women on the new feminist map. . . .’’108 And finally, in her most substantial piece on Collier to date, Ferguson has argued that ‘‘Collier’s poems comprise a sustained feminist manifesto’’ linked to issues of class, gender, and nationhood in the first half of the eighteenth century.109 Ferguson’s terminology— ‘‘feminist literature,’’ ‘‘feminist map,’’ and ‘‘feminist manifesto’’— underscores the operational assumptions she brings to bear on a historical text from the critical perspective of twentieth-century feminism. However important this perspective (in its many forms) has been to literary studies in general, and to the recovery of Collier in particular, by overprivileging such assumptions we risk misrep-

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resenting the significance of a given text within the context of its production and subsequent circulation. Writing with this admonition in mind, Donna Landry points out the ‘‘protofeminist traces’’ in Collier’s texts as she seeks to understand the poet’s work more fully within the contexts of eighteenthcentury gender and class dynamics. However, her critical perspective creates another set of assumptions which she seems less reflexive about imposing on Collier’s poems. These assumptions are informed by Landry’s materialist-feminist position from which she reads for social criticism in Collier’s poems that is not ‘‘circumscribed’’ or ‘‘localized,’’ but ‘‘radically programmatic’’ in a Marxist sense; that is, ‘‘open rebellion’’ is privileged over lesser forms of social resistance.110 Landry’s first essay on Collier, carefully titled ‘‘The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History,’’ was aimed to counter the unreflective feminist embrace of Collier. In it Landry argues that ‘‘there are significant limits to the radical potential’’ of Collier’s poetry, and concludes, then, that Collier presents significant ‘‘textual resistance,’’ but little in the way of speaking out for real historical change.111 Landry softens her position somewhat in her revision of the article that appears, under the same title, as chapter 2 in The Muses of Resistance. In this revised piece, Landry maintains the ‘‘significant limits’’ aspect of her argument, but actual ‘‘resignation’’ seems to have dropped out: In the vigor and wit and forceful arguments of Collier’s verse lies strong evidence for reconstructing, from the available traces, a plebeian female subjectivity and sense of historical agency in this period that are socially subject and politically subjugated, but by no means incapable of resistance.112

It is difficult to reconcile this statement to an argument still under the titular banner of ‘‘resignation.’’ Indeed, given the overarching title of her book, Landry now seems more concerned to portray Collier as a potential ‘‘muse of resistance.’’ Landry’s later work on Collier suggests that the scale balancing resignation and resistance in Collier’s poetry, especially in The Woman’s Labour, is tipped in favor of the latter if we attempt to read ‘‘historically’’—that is, without imposing a set of theoretical assumptions about what can count as ‘‘radical social transformation’’ onto Collier’s texts—and we remain open to the ‘‘nuances’’ of Collier’s often richly layered writing.113 In my discussion of The Woman’s Labour to follow, I would like

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to refigure what can count as ‘‘resistance’’ in more specific terms. Neither Ferguson nor Landry examines Collier’s poem within the full historical contexts of plebeian print culture and agricultural practice of the 1730s. Like the male plebeian poets who published before her, Collier exploits her laboring background and work experiences in The Woman’s Labour, in which she self-consciously writes from within, and, when we consider the intertextual resonances with Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ about a plebeian poetic tradition. Both Collier and Duck call attention to the economic exploitation of plebeian rural labor in the period through their poetry, though Collier is more far-reaching and explicit in her critique than Duck had been. Collier also shows her awareness of entering the literary marketplace in 1739 as a ‘‘laborer’’ and reveals the economic exploitation felt there as well. I argue that Collier raises a significant social problem—the economic exploitation of the laboring poor—in her poetic response to Duck. This problem was no doubt rampant in early- to mid-eighteenth-century agriculture, as it was also evident in the commericalization of print culture in the 1730s. Given that Collier was both of plebeian origin and a woman, the significance of her social critique appearing in print at all should not be underestimated. Collier uses a poetic discourse on work to articulate her views, a discourse which is safe and publishable because it borrows from and is aligned to a tradition of published plebeian poetry in the period. From apparent literary and ideological assimilation, then, breathes substantial social criticism and the symbolic impulses for radical social change. The ‘‘Advertisement’’ which prefaces the first edition of The Woman’s Labour reveals an attempt by an anonymous polite hand to accommodate Collier to the norms of plebeian print culture in the period. The text, signed by ‘‘M. B.,’’ includes a characteristically deferential gesture directed toward Duck, while highlighting Collier’s own laboring status: Tho’ She pretends not to the Genius of Mr. Duck, nor hopes to be taken Notice of by the Great, yet her Friends are of the Opinion that the Novelty of a Washer-Woman’s turning Poetess, will procure her some Readers. (3)

This set piece also contains the standard references to Collier’s humility—‘‘she is ready to own that her Performance could by no Means stand a critical Examination’’—and calls attention, a priori, to the ‘‘Faults and Imperfections’’ inherent in the text (4). Implicit throughout is the sense that ‘‘putting a small Sum of Money in [Collier’s] Pocket’’ is not out of the question, given Collier’s humil-

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ity and submission, and her uncommon poetic ‘‘Capacity’’ (4). The fact that the desire for material gain is not in Collier’s own voice is an added bonus, effectively distancing Collier from previous poets such as Tatersal who exceeded proper plebeian decorum on the subject. As an epistolary reply to Duck, Collier’s poem begins by invoking her absent addressee in terms both playful and serious: Immortal Bard! thou Fav’rite of the Nine! Enrich’d by Peers, advanc’d by Caroline! Deign to look down on One that’s poor and low, Remembering you yourself was lately so; Accept these Lines: Alas! what can you have From her, who ever was, and’s still a Slave? (5)

The opening apostrophe works by elevating Duck with an over-thetop description that matches his amazing rise from working poverty to the queen’s court. The satiric irony in casting Duck as ‘‘immortal Bard’’ is echoed later in the poem with the witty, oxymoronic—if also more direct—‘‘great Duck’’ (7). Collier means to have some fun at Duck’s expense as she also raises the more serious points of Duck’s deracination and her own status as a laboring-class ‘‘Slave.’’ The opening lines, then, set the tone for the poem as a whole, as Collier is angry enough at Duck for his inexplicable misogyny to make fun of his status as a current favorite at court and to answer him point for point in her own poem, but she never allows that anger to blind her from the long view. That is, Collier seems to recognize—as she reminds Duck himself at the outset—that they are both of a kind, that they have more in common as rural wage laborers than Duck was apparently willing to acknowledge publicly. It is significant in this context that Collier does not stoop to the sort of sweeping, wholesale denigration of male workers in her poem that Duck makes of their female counterparts in his. Duck’s representation of female agricultural laborers as gossipy and lazy has been well-documented, but remains difficult to account for. In the midst of describing the work of the hay harvest, Duck suddenly shifts his focus to ‘‘another Scene’’: Our Master comes, and at his Heels a Throng Of prattling Females, arm’d with Rake and Prong: Prepar’d, whilst he is here, to make his Hay; Or, if he turns his Back, prepar’d to play. (21)

Duck’s categorical dismissal of the women workers as a ‘‘tattling Croud’’ more likely to engage in ‘‘noisy Prattle’’ than productive

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work continues for almost forty lines, before he returns to his overarching theme of the eternal labor suffered by the men (21, 22). The degrading vignette ends with a lengthy simile, set off from the previous complaints, figuring female agricultural laborers as ‘‘a Flock of Sparrows’’: Thus have I seen on a bright Summer’s Day, On some green Brake a Flock of Sparrows play; From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly, And with continu’d Chirping fill the Sky; But on a sudden, if a Storm appears, Their chirping Noise no longer dins your Ears; They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush, There silent sit, and all at once is hush. But better Fate succeeds this rainy Day, A little Labour serves to make the Hay; Fast as ‘tis cut, so kindly shines the Sun, Turn’d once or twice, the pleasing Work is done: Next Day the Cocks appear in equal Rows, Which the glad Master in safe Reeks bestows. (22)

Duck’s somewhat cliche´d analogy belittles women as it also works to erase their labor entirely from the field, as well as from the reader’s field of vision. As Duck would have it, at the first sign of bad weather the women retreat ‘‘to the thickest Bush,’’ and he simply leaves them there as he moves on to describe the subsequent two days’ work. With a ‘‘little Labour’’ the men finish the mowing, someone (or some force) turns the hay ‘‘once or twice’’ to dry in the sun, the haycocks self-generate overnight, and next day the ‘‘glad Master’’ orders the building of the larger, protective ricks. It should be noted that the process of ‘‘tedding,’’ of raking and turning the newly mown grass to dry in the sun, is traditionally women’s work during the hay harvest. Duck’s lines purposefully obfuscate agency on this point: do the men perform that ‘‘pleasing Work’’ or does the ‘‘Sun,’’ as Goodridge suggests?114 Either way, the effect of this confusion over just who or what is doing the work serves Duck’s argument against the female agricultural laborer. Though the sun returns, the women workers do not, as Duck completes his erasure of women’s contribution to harvest work by having the haycocks magically ‘‘appear in equal Rows,’’ as if by fairy hands. Duck should know better, of course, and without responding to his belittling epic simile tit for tat, Collier explains that women are responsible for the important work of raking and cock-building: ‘‘we must get up again, / And nimbly turn our Hay upon the Plain; / Nay, rake

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and row it in, the Case is clear; / Or how should Cocks in equal Rows appear?’’ (8).115 Although Collier does not carry her counterargument to the task of rick-building, she does use Duck’s image of self-generating haycocks against him—and her rhetorical question as rejoinder is ultimately a gentle hit even as she clarifies women’s work roles in the hay harvest. Collier is thus able to answer Duck, to refute his representation of female laborers without denying his experience, or men’s labor experiences in general. Even as she chides Duck, she seems to want to believe that he was suffering from a momentary lapse of reason when he wrongs women to ‘‘adorn’’ his verses: ‘‘In this, I hope, you do not speak your Mind,’’ (7, 8). Collier continues her refutation of Duck’s apparent misogyny by providing a detailed account of women’s work during the harvests of other staple grains. For the wheat harvest, Collier writes: When Harvest comes, into the Field we go, And help to reap the Wheat as well as you; Or else we go the Ears of Corn to glean; No Labour scorning, be it e’er so mean. (9)

According to Collier, not only do the women perform the customary work of gleaning after the harvest has been carried, but they aid in the actual reaping of the wheat as well. In the early eighteenth century, the long-handled scythe was used to mow the primary grains, including wheat, which contributed to a ‘‘male mowing monopoly’’ based on ‘‘greater male strength and physical stature.’’116 With this reference to reaping wheat, and a further reference to the pea harvest—‘‘We cut the Peas, and always ready are / In ev’ry Work to take our proper Share’’—Collier seems to be calling this traditional division of labor in the fields into question (11). Duck had been explicit in his poem with tool references to support an argument for the gendered division of labor in agriculture: the men swing ‘‘noisy Threshall[s]’’ at various times (16), and they wield ‘‘Scythes’’ at the two peak harvests (19), while the women are always figured with ‘‘Rakes and Prongs’’ (21). Collier avoids direct references to tools, preferring instead to call her readers’ attention to the acts of using them: her women workers are shown ‘‘throwing, turning, making Hay’’ (8), though we are left to infer that this is accomplished with rakes and pitchforks. As we have seen, they also ‘‘rake and row’’ the cut grass, ‘‘help to reap the Wheat,’’ and ‘‘cut the Peas.’’ It is unclear whether the references to reaping and cutting involve Collier using implements traditionally gendered male,

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like the long-handled scythe. When she says she ‘‘help[s] to reap the Wheat’’ it could be that she functioned as a gatherer, and it is possible that her reference to cutting peas cleverly obfuscates the fact that she would have used the smaller, less-cumbersome sickle, or reaping hook, for such work.117 While it is the case, as Michael Roberts has shown, that ‘‘the effect of the corn-scythe was gradually to push women into less well-paid jobs as followers and rakers,’’ Collier seems less concerned with challenging Duck on this point or issuing a critique against this structural change in agrarian labor practices, than she is with correcting Duck’s denigration of women workers and thereby providing a fuller view of harvest work in general.118 As far as her direct dialogue with Duck goes, Collier’s ultimate purpose is to champion the women working in eighteenth-century agriculture who shouldered equal, if not greater, labor-related responsibilities in the field. For example, Collier pushes the envelope beyond actual harvest labors by pointing out that, ‘‘To get a Living we so willing are, / Our tender Babes into the Field we bear,’’ thus raising the added burden of child care (and, by implication, birth) that was a woman’s lot (10). Indeed, for Collier and ‘‘poor Womankind,’’ there is hardly an hour in a day free from work (6). Collier’s female laborer not only spends ‘‘many a Summer’s Day / . . . throwing, turning, making Hay,’’ (8) but is also responsible for performing a variety of domestic chores: When Ev’ning does approach, we homeward hie, And our domestic Toils incessant ply: Against your coming Home prepare to get Our Work all done, our House in order set, Bacon and Dumpling in the Pot we boil, Our Beds we make, our Swine we feed the while; (9)

Thus, even as Collier attacks the gendered pathos of Duck’s poem, she also positions herself alongside Duck by reproducing key elements of the counter-pastoral. Like Duck, Collier brings labor figured as ‘‘Drudgery’’ back into the rural scene, and specifically notes that the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of classical ‘‘sweet-tongu’d Poets’’ is past (6, 7). Collier goes on to explode Duck’s tunnel vision in figuring only men’s work as wage-earning labor with an impassioned account of a washerwoman’s labors in the second half of her poem. Again, Collier employs a poetic discourse on work which mirrors Duck’s in the articulation of the simple, servile, cyclical struggle of wage slavery. Of ‘‘charring,’’ Collier writes:

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Heaps of fine Linen we before us view, Whereon to lay our Strength and Patience too; .............. For several Hours here we work and slave, Before we can one Glimpse of Day-light have; .............. Then comes our Mistress to us without fail, And in her Hand, perhaps, a Mug of Ale .............. Lays her Commands upon us, that we mind Her Linen well, nor leave the Dirt behind: Not this alone, but also to take care We don’t her Cambricks nor her Ruffles tear; And these most strictly does of us require, To save her Soap, and sparing be of Fire; Tells us her Charge is great, nay furthermore, Her Cloaths are fewer than the Time before. Now we drive on, resolv’d our Strength to try, And what we can, we do most willingly; Until with Heat and Work, ‘tis often known, Not only Sweat, but Blood runs trickling down Our Wrists and Fingers; still our Work demands The constant Action of our lab’ring Hands. (13–14)

Within this testimony to the strength and resolve of the female laborer is a firsthand account of the appalling working conditions these women faced. The ideological doublespeak, evident in Collier’s acquiescent ‘‘willingly,’’ coupled with the image of the worker’s bloody hands, forms the mainstay of Collier’s class-based social critique. Though the women work under such oppressive conditions, Collier subtly records the hypocrisy of the ‘‘Mistress’’ they work for. The ‘‘Mistress’’ watches over her workers to ‘‘inform / Herself, what Work is done that very Morn,’’ and at the same time scolds them for using too much soap and fire, the very resources necessary to ensure that the work is completed (13). Because the line is italicized, either by Collier or her bookseller/ publisher, it underlines the absurdity of the situation and raises the issue of the economic relationship under which the washerwomen suffer. Duck’s criticism of the exploitation of manual laborers was also masked in a similar manner in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour.’’ At the close of the harvest, the traditional harvest dinner takes place at the expense of the farmer, and Duck uses this occasion of rural mirth to expose an agricultural worker’s sense of his exploitation:

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Our Master joyful at the welcome Sight, Invites us all to feast with him at Night. A Table plentifully spread we find, And Jugs of humming Beer to cheer the Mind; Which he, too generous, pushes on so fast, We think no Toils to come, nor mind the past. But the next Morning soon reveals the Cheat, When the same Toils we must again repeat: (25)

The cash-nexus relationship that conjoins worker to master and vice-versa is imaged here in the feast culminating the harvest season. Duck’s version of this pastoral set-piece emphasizes the issue of exchange, and he uses this scene to reflect on the illusory nature of the worker’s reward and the omnipresent, cyclical nature of the work itself. This economic relationship serves as a basic social foundation, upholding and maintaining a hierarchical system which seeks to keep workers like Duck and Collier in their respective places as productive, working cogs in society. However, Duck must present any critique of the inequity inherent in this system within a publishable poetic discourse that will not offend his polite patrons. It is clear that Duck is aware of ‘‘the Cheat,’’ but we must infer that it is the ‘‘Masters’’ who are the agents and the workers who are being acted upon and therefore exploited. Earlier in the poem, when Duck speaks of ‘‘the Master’s Curse’’ to which ‘‘the Threshall yields,’’ he positions the masters above and the workers below, thus incorporating the workers collectively, as a proto-class, into his poem: [The master] counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day, Then swears we’ve idled half our Time away. Why look ye, Rogues! D’ye think that this will do? Your Neighbors thresh as much again as you. Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools, To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools; But wanting those, we just like School-boys look, When th’ angry Master views the blotted Book: They cry their Ink was faulty, and their Pen; We, The Corn threshes bad, ‘twas cut too green. (17–18)

The subtext of these lines focuses on money, and the dialogue Duck reproduces suggests a sense of conflict between workers and masters over the issue of wages earned for labor already performed. To be sure, in likening the threshers to ‘‘School-boys’’ Duck stops short of casting rebellious stones at the ‘‘Masters,’’ but he does in-

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corporate a subtle—and publishable—critique into his poem. Our understanding of the ideological counter-production in Duck’s text requires a recognition of the ‘‘We’’ which moves beyond Duck’s own subject position to encompass the other threshers who worked in the fields with him as a group of laborers whose interests are decidedly in opposition to the masters who employ them. Collier carries this critique of the economic relationship between workers and employers farther than Duck. She, unlike Duck, includes specific wage figures in her poem: And after all our Toil and Labour past, Six-pence or Eight-pence pays us off at last; For all our Pains, no Prospect can we see Attend us, but Old Age and Poverty. (15)

Collier provides explicit documentation of her low wages119 and is unequivocal in this statement illustrating the workers’ poor remuneration for their labor. Moreover, she not only historicizes gender oppression in response to Duck, but also positions herself to speak with Duck in expanding the critique of the economic exploitation of the working poor. Collier’s class- and gender-based poetic discourses thus intersect and reinforce each other in the movement between her discussion of gender-specific forms of labor and her more general critique of the relationship between laborer and employer. The poetic connection binding Collier and Duck in proto-class terms is also evident in the neoclassical image Collier chooses in response to Duck’s ‘‘Sysiphus.’’ In her final intertextual reply to Duck, Collier writes: While you to Sysiphus yourselves compare, With Danaus’ Daughters we may claim a Share; For while he labours hard against the Hill, Bottomless Tubs of Water they must fill. (17)

For Collier, the image of ‘‘Danaus’ Daughters,’’ doomed in the underworld perpetually to fill waterbasins with holes in the bottom, serves the dual purpose of maintaining thematic integrity while producing culturally acceptable poetry. Collier succeeds in feminizing Duck’s ‘‘Sysiphus’’ with a neoclassicism that exquisitely recalls her own labor as a washerwoman, but also parallels (if not one-ups) Duck’s image of constant plebeian toil. The Danaides murdered forty-nine of the fifty sons of Aegyptus on their wedding night, thus committing a crime against domesticity which their punishment reflects, in a kind of Dantesque contrapasso, by their having to per-

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form domestic labor for eternity. And unlike Sisyphus, who apparently gets a brief reprieve from his toil while the stone rolls back down the mountain, the Danaides are always stooped over, trying to fill their basins. With these mythic images, Collier and Duck not only assimilate themselves to publishable neoclassical poetic discourse, but also together record the injustices inherent in the working lives of plebeian laborers in general. But it is Collier who again extends the argument against plebeian exploitation in the agricultural setting beyond Duck’s efforts. Whereas Duck’s final stanza implies worker resignation to the Sisyphean labors which ‘‘must always last,’’ Collier’s provides the rationale for future worker retaliation (POSS, 25). In the last stanza of The Woman’s Labour, Collier breaks the conversational nature of her poem and speaks in the third-person for the first time: So the industrious Bees do hourly strive To bring their Loads of Honey to the Hive; Their sordid Owners always reap the Gains, And poorly recompense their Toil and Pains. (17)

Collier’s bee metaphor is both culturally and historically apt. Honey bees are indigenous to the British Isles, and beekeeping is an ancient food-producing art, one that was most often performed by women among the lower classes in the eighteenth century. There is also a classical connection as the figure of the bee symbolizing human toil extends back to Virgil’s moralizing on the subject in the fourth georgic. The figure remained popular through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a representation of labor or laborers in literary and philosophical texts, and it appeared as the title of at least three eighteenth-century periodicals.120 Collier trades on this cultural image, on one level, to align her poetic discourse with acceptable Augustan norms, and perhaps, as E. P. Thompson has suggested, to draw her readers’ attention to ‘‘the underside of luxury’’ in the context of the economic and moral debates raised by Mandeville’s provocative Fable of the Bees.121 But I would add that Collier further adapts the image to serve her own ideological purposes in her text. In posing rural laborers as ‘‘Bees,’’ Collier in effect de-genders the workers and allows for a reading of her laborrelated complaints that includes the plight of both sexes by the end of her poem. Collier forcefully describes those who wield power over the workers as ‘‘sordid Owners,’’ which is significant because Collier has progressed from a gendered description of her employer as ‘‘Mistress’’ earlier in the poem to the term ‘‘owner,’’ with its spe-

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cific connotations of property and power, by the end (13). With her careful diction in this last stanza, Collier constructs a propertyless group of rural laborers in conflict with the owners of the land which they work. Following Collier’s generalized bee metaphor, these rural laborers work hard to complete their tasks, and are ‘‘poorly recompense[d]’’ for their toil, while the owners ‘‘reap the Gains.’’ Collier thus implies a basic recognition of the commodification of labor and couches this recognition within a poetic discourse which effectively recoils the ideological punch from the polite readers she could expect. By the 1730s, British apiculture had reached an important apex as new scientific work on the subject had been appearing steadily since 1609.122 In Collier’s day, scientists had finally reached a consensus regarding the sex of what the ancients erroneously called the ‘‘Rex’’: scientific observation proved that he was a she, and the king of the hive was now the queen. It seems unlikely that Collier would have known about these scientific arguments, specialized as they were, and in any case Collier’s gendered argument against Duck is superseded by a sense of class solidarity in the final stanza of The Woman’s Labour. However, Collier might well have been familiar with a common practice in British apiculture that had come under scrutiny by the 1730s. The process of fumigating the straw hive, which meant destroying the bees in order to harvest their honey, was still practiced by beekeepers in the 1730s, though productive improvements were being introduced.123 Thomson, in fact, includes a lengthy description of the practice in Autumn, a poem Collier likely knew: Ah, see where, robbed and murdered, in that pit Lies the still-heaving hive! at evening snatched, Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night, And fixed o’er sulphur—while, not dreaming ill, The happy people in their waxen cells Sat tending public cares and planning schemes Of temperance for Winter poor; rejoiced To mark, full-flowing round, their copious stores. Sudden the dark oppressive steam ascends; And, used to milder scents, the tender race By thousands tumbles from their honeyed domes, Convolved and agonizing in the dust. (175)

The fact that entire swarms of bees were regularly sacrificed by their keepers to reap ‘‘their copious stores’’ seems important contemporary cultural knowledge to bring to Collier’s final stanza. It

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lends another dimension to her complaint about the commodification of rural labor, one that implies a grim but logical conclusion— death—for laborers such as herself and Duck due to overwork and underpay. Collier, of course, cannot explicitly blame the untimely deaths of workers on the ‘‘sordid Owners,’’ but the implication remains available nonetheless for her eighteenth-century readers. If Collier were to make the revolutionary transgression that we, as twentieth-century readers, might want her to, if her bees were to sting instead of blindly work (and die), Collier’s poem might never have been published. The substance of Collier’s critique of the exploitation of rural labor is found in the double-voiced nature of her text, in recognizing the ways she uses acceptable poetic vocabularies and the cultural standards of plebeian authorship in the service of a social critique significantly articulated from a plebeian pen. It was not until 1762 that Collier could look back on the publication of The Woman’s Labour, her first foray into print culture, and note the exploitation of her labor in the literary marketplace as well: ‘‘[the poem] soon Became a Town Talk, which made many advise me to have it printed and at length I comply’d to have it done at my own charge, I lost nothing, neither did I gain much, others run away with the profit’’ (POSO, iv). Although Collier does not name names, she once again is explicit in charging her social betters with exploiting her labor for ‘‘profit.’’ These readings of Duck and Collier, positioned together within the contexts of plebeian print culture and agricultural practice of the 1730s, lend credence to Ferguson’s statement that ‘‘for Collier, . . . Duck was no class enemy.’’124 Duck and Collier successfully invert the idyllic pastoral form to include the sweat and blood of the workers, and expertly walk the delicate tightrope strung between using appropriate, publishable poetic discourse and producing social criticism. A poetic discourse on work is the foundation on which Collier in particular builds an important early critique of the exploitation of plebeian agricultural labor. Such a critique does not measure up to Marxian standards of class rebellion, a point which one does not have to read far into either writer’s poetic output to note. In Hints to a School-Master, for instance, Duck celebrates Britain’s power structure, arguing for unequivocal loyalty to ‘‘King’’ and ‘‘State’’: Our Fathers wisely dar’d to raise Their Fabric on the triple Base Of Commons, Lords, and King; And hence Britannia’s happy Fate,

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Hence all the Music of our State, Hence all our Blessings spring.125

Collier similarly acquiesces at times, though on a different level, to the prevailing cultural argument about birth and work. In a poem from her 1762 volume, ‘‘An Epistolary Answer To an Exciseman, Who doubted her being the Author of the Washerwoman’s Labour,’’ Collier allows ‘‘Tho’ my Extraction was so low, / And I to labour bred’’ without explicitly calling this relationship between social rank and labor into question through her subsequent work as a writer (POSO, 31). Though neither Duck’s nor Collier’s later texts extend the social criticisms begun in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ and The Woman’s Labour respectively, we should not let their shared sense of the oppressive, exploitative practices surrounding early eighteenth-century rural labor pass unnoticed.

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3 ‘‘A Muse unknown’’: The Career of Henry Jones Unnumber’d suppliants croud Preferment’s gate, Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great; Delusive Fortune hears th’ incessant call, They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.1

JOHN

SITTER’S POINT THAT ‘‘THE STUDY OF MID-EIGHTEENTH-

century poetry has been shaped far too greatly by the happenstance of twentieth-century editing’’ is still valid.2 Editions of Collins and Gray dominate our sense of the mid-century poetic landscape at the expense of lesser poets who can teach us something about this significant transitional period. Although Sitter had in mind the recovery of such ‘‘minor’’ but important figures as the Wartons, Mark Akenside, and Edward Young, a similar case can be made for the Irish bricklayer-turned-poet, Henry Jones. While some of the works by the poets Sitter mentions ‘‘live only by anthological respiration,’’ Jones’s extensive poetic output remains quite dead to modern scholarship.3 From 1745 to 1770, a career equal in longevity to Duck’s, Jones published one substantial volume of verse, a play that went to six editions, and at least twenty separately issued poems.4 Perhaps no eighteenth-century poet, plebeian or otherwise, who wrote and published as much as Jones did has evaporated more completely from our critical discussions of the period. But Jones did ‘‘shine’’ before his ‘‘fall,’’ and an assessment of Jones’s life and contribution to mid-century letters is currently lacking in eighteenth-century studies. The crests and troughs of Jones’s biography cause one eighteenth-century commentator to note that ‘‘it would be difficult to trace Jones through all the labyrinths of his fortune.’’5 Jones was born in Beaulieu, near Drogheda, on the northeast coast of Ireland in 1721. His family was probably of low circumstances, for Jones 130

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was bred a bricklayer. He began writing while working at his trade in Drogheda and some of his verses came to the attention of town officials. But it was through his bricklaying that Jones found work in Dublin repairing the parliament house, and there he celebrated the arrival of Lord Chesterfield as the newly appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland with some verses. The poems caught Chesterfield’s attention, and by 1748, Chesterfield had his own natural genius under his protection in England. The publication of Poems on Several Occasions by subscription in 1749 brought Jones both money and reputation, but his career as author-at-large was made when The Earl of Essex was finally produced on 21 February 1753, at the Covent Garden Theatre.6 According to one contemporary, the play ‘‘went off with great Applause’’ and continued to fill the house during an initial run of eleven consecutive nights, a run that included three author’s benefits.7 In a letter to William Shenstone, Lady Luxborough commented favorably on the text of the play: ‘‘The Bricklayer’s performance is a surprizing one in him, and has to be sure infinitely more spirit than the other tragedy called also The Earl of Essex.’’8 The combination of poetic style and sentiment in Jones’s Essex appealed mightily to mid-eighteenth-century audiences, and the success of the play, both on the stage and in print, raised Jones to a level of fame and fortune that would eventually be his downfall. But from 1753 until his death in 1770, Jones published new work steadily, and the income from subsequent editions of Essex and various occasional poems kept him in drink and mostly out of debtor’s prison. An early reviewer of Essex calls attention to Jones’s ‘‘personal merit’’ which ‘‘render[s] him worthy of that patronage and favour he has met with,’’9 but later in life, ‘‘the great eye of the public was no censor for him: it might observe, but it observed in silence; and Jones estimated his pleasures . . . above his reputation.’’10 Within ‘‘personal merit’’ we can read the ideological standards of honesty, industry, and piety imposed on the plebeian poet by polite society, standards to which the poet must adhere in manners and in print. Jones lived this model early on, and it is in one sense a measure of his success in the literary marketplace that he could subsequently live on his own terms, however debauched they were, without jeopardizing his status as poet. Yet if Jones successfully achieved the rank of poet in his own lifetime, why has his extensive published work been so completely neglected? My sense is that Jones has been victimized, at least in part, by several critical appraisals of his poetry that have been passed down to us. Thomas Cooke found in Jones’s life story an entertaining (and instructive) diversion for the readers of ‘‘Table

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Talk’’ in The European Magazine, but, after pronouncing Jones ‘‘no inconsiderable dramatist,’’ says that: Of his lighter pieces of poetry we cannot say as much. They are mostly written upon occasional and perishable subjects ‘tis true, but then there is little of that point and general reflection which preserve such trifles from oblivion.11

Cooke’s biography is the primary source for the DNB entry on Jones in which the author (following Cooke’s lead) refrains from commentary on Jones’s poetry altogether.12 But Cooke at least notes that Jones ‘‘must be considered as a very extraordinary genius’’ given his mechanic origins and the fact that he fashioned a career using ‘‘those talents which nature originally gave him.’’13 Another early critical evaluation echoes Cooke on this point of natural genius: His poetical Worth . . . is certainly not in itself contemptible, yet is far from being of the first rate Kind—In short, it is pretty nearly on a Par with that of another rustic bred Bard of this Century, whom the royal favour having given a sanction to, it became a Fashion to admire his Writings; tho’ the greatest Value that either that Gentleman’s Poems or those of our Author, possessed to call them into Notice . . . was their being produced by Geniuses entirely uncultivated; so that, the wonder was not how Men of a poetical Turn should produce such Verses as theirs, but how any Verses at all should be the Produce of a Thatcher or Bricklayer.14

As was the case with Stephen Duck before him, eighteenth-century readers were attracted to Jones’s poetry largely because of the period fascination with living examples of natural genius, and this judgment of Jones’s poetical worth was reproduced in subsequent editions of Biographia Dramatica in 1782 and 1812.15 What is most striking about these general appraisals of Jones’s poetic output is the utter lack of specifics, of detailed evidence from the poems themselves, in reaching the negative critical conclusion.16 It is as if the critic has not read the works, and so generalizes along safe and culturally acceptable lines. Natural genius is commendable, but always produces second-rate poetry. At least in 1730, when the Society of Grub Street attacked Duck and John Bancks, we know exactly why. It should come as no surprise, then, that Jones is a thoroughly unknown entity in modern eighteenth-century poetry criticism. Jones does not appear in Southey’s 1831 study of ‘‘the uneducated

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poets,’’ although he qualifies for inclusion but is presumably absent because he is Irish by birth. To the best of my knowledge, Jones has never been the subject of extended critical study, and he is not represented in Lonsdale’s revisionist, canon-breaking New Oxford anthology. When Jones has been mentioned in passing by critics, the comments follow familiar lines: C. B. Tinker notes that Jones’s poetry was ‘‘instantly forgotten when the novelty of a brick-layer turning poet had worn itself out;’’ and most recently, Richard Greene sums up Jones’s long career with one line: ‘‘Whatever talent Jones had was largely spent in sycophancy.’’17 While Greene’s assessment is not entirely unjustified, especially in light of Jones’s penchant for panegyric and his often fawning anglocentric patriotism evident throughout his career, nevertheless it does not account for the complexity and the more subtle undercurrents of his work. I have located only one modern critic who grants Jones a measure of literary value. In an annotated appendix of notable volumes of poetry published in 1749, Eric Rothstein observes that ‘‘this bricklayer-turned-poet wrote literate, refined poems in celebratory modes,’’ several of which ‘‘make one think of Pope and Johnson.’’18 Rothstein’s assessment is apt, and bears further looking into. Recovering Jones from a critical past of selective reading and dismissive statements is one reason why I devote a chapter to him in this study. Singling out Jones is also useful because his long career provides a significant bridge between the group of poets publishing in the 1730s and those who emerge throughout the last half of the century. I shall argue that Jones manipulates the familiar categories of labor and natural genius to establish his niche in mid-century print culture. Like Bancks, Jones is a self-conscious reader of his cultural moment and, in his published verse, he adheres to prevailing mid-century views of a poet’s purpose and the proper themes for poetry. But Jones’s contribution to mid-century poetics is best understood in his use of ‘‘Custom’’ as a concept for criticizing contemporary social ills. Jones is not unthinkingly prone to sycophancy, but in fact both reflects and resists the poetic trends of the 1740s and 1750s, embodied by the likes of Young, Gray, Collins, and Johnson. In this respect, Jones looks back to the historical topicality inherent in the poetry of the early eighteenth century, and ahead to aspects of Romanticism. Jones is not the ‘‘sensitive fugitive from his society’’ that many mid-century poets were, and it is because of this that he can write about social problems in ways that recall his plebeian forbears.19 Like other laborers-turned-poets before him, Jones uses his trade to advertise his poetry, but he refrains from writing about the work-

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aday toil of bricklaying itself. The titles of Jones’s first published poems, two occasional pieces presented to Chesterfield in Dublin, emphasize his status as a bricklayer. The Bricklayer’s Poem. Presented to His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. On His Arrival in this Kingdom (1745) and The Bricklayer’s Poem to the Countess of Chesterfield, on Her Ladyship’s saving the Soldiers from being shot (1745) call the reader’s attention immediately to the poet’s working life and low social position. Chesterfield was known as a friend to the ‘‘mimic arts,’’ and by advertising himself as a bricklayer, Jones was making a calculated move in an effort to gain Chesterfield’s favor. By 1745 the titular reference to the author’s laboring status provides the necessary symbolic capital Jones hopes to exchange for preferment under Chesterfield’s protection. That Jones does not go on to write verses about bricklaying, or refer in any way to his working life, suggests that he is writing in a literary-cultural climate different from the 1730s, with a different set of values regarding acceptable poetic norms, even for plebeian upstarts. The first poem, addressed to Chesterfield himself, however, shows that fundamental categories of plebeian authorship could still be invoked with purpose. For example, Jones writes that: To thee a Muse, unskill’d in Latian Lays, Or Grecian style, her Voice obscure would raise, Her wond’ring voice, to sing thy matchless praise; Wrapt in the theme sublime, would proudly soar, And sound thy welcome to her native shore.20

Jones thus constructs himself as a natural, uneducated poet and effectively distances himself from poetic failure by his use of the subjunctive. What Jones ‘‘would’’ do (and in fact attempts) is to celebrate Chesterfield’s arrival ‘‘wrapt in the Theme sublime’’ rather than produce labor-specific lays. After the positive impression Duck’s rendition of a thresher’s labors had made in Caroline’s court, all of the plebeian poets who followed him in the 1730s at least make references to their daily labor in their verse if they do not write an occupation-specific poem of their own. As we have seen, a poetic discourse on work contributed significantly to the plebeian poets’ public successes in the 1730s. For Jones, however, writing in the mid-1740s, labor as a subject for poetry does not measure up as a ‘‘theme sublime’’ and he categorically rejects a poetic discourse on work. In a letter written in 1753, Chesterfield shows that his interest was piqued by Jones’s self-advertisement as a natural genius, for he describes Jones as ‘‘a poet I have discovered in Dublin, who

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was a bricklayer and who did not know a single word of Greek, or of Latin, but to whom God alone had given a truly poetic genius.’’21 Natural genius, then, survives as the cultural trope which attracts attention and patronage, but labor is clearly deemphasized, a point which Jones is careful to consider and reflect in his writing. In contrast to Jones’s efforts to emphasize natural genius over labor experience, we have The Cobler’s Poem. To a certain Noble Peer. Occasioned by the Brick-layer’s Poem, (1745) by James Eyre Weeks, a sometimes cobbler of Dublin. Weeks may not write about the daily minutiae of eighteenth-century cobbling, but his poem relies on labor analogies and imagery to achieve its sense. For example, the opening lines reveal that Weeks uses a ‘‘poetic mortar’’ from an earlier age: While Brick-layers hail thee, in the throng Oh!——hear a Cobler’s Song, For there are Coblers at the MUSE, As well as Coblers at Old Shoes, And oft ‘tis found upon comparing, The former want the most repairing, Tho’ ‘tis a question worth demanding, Which have the better understanding, As ‘tis as hard a question whether, More’s got by Paper, than by Leather,22

Weeks goes on to compliment Jones using diction which equates writing and bricklaying: Jones ‘‘Excells in Building as Composing’’ and ‘‘He builds as well in Verse as Bricks’’ (5). Weeks not only uses a vocabulary of labor, but also figures poetry writing itself as a form of labor. And, unlike Jones, Weeks explicitly links his own poetic production to that of Stephen Duck: Oh!——hear a Cobler Sing, Nor mind what Art or Learning bring, Tho’ rude my Voice my Theme is Noble, So Stephen Duck thresh’d Grain from Stubble, More Musick in a Duck was found, Than all the Swans that Sung around, My Lord, a Cobler claims degree, Tho’ at the foot of Quality. (4)

In these lines, Weeks glosses over the category of natural genius and recalls Duck’s success by rewriting Swift’s well-known satire on Duck. Swift had criticized Duck for ‘‘thresh[ing] his brains’’ in-

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stead of ‘‘Corn’’ and producing mere ‘‘Stubble’’ for poetry, thus upholding traditional polite attitudes about social rank and proper vocation.23 Weeks, however, refigures Swift’s argument by noting that Duck metaphorically ‘‘thresh’d Grain from Stubble’’ in his poetry, and celebrates the fruit of Duck’s new labor as ‘‘Musick.’’ Imbedded in Weeks’s poem, then, is an implicit critique of the fixed relationship between labor and social station. That Weeks never gained the patronage of Chesterfield or any other aristocrat24 can be attributed in part to his counter-hegemonic tendencies, and to his misreading of what would sell in the literary marketplace of the 1740s. Throughout the epistle addressed to Chesterfield, Jones makes the requisite references to his ‘‘weak numbers’’ and ‘‘unpolish’d lays’’ penned by his ‘‘unletter’d hand,’’ which have the collective effect of reminding the reader of Jones’s lowly status even as he trumpets Chesterfield’s accomplishments and virtues (46). The poem is successful because Jones is able to lay claim to the category of natural genius by reiterating his lack of traditional learning as he, at once, communicates his knowledge of Chesterfield’s service to his country. Of Chesterfield’s role in the affairs of state, Jones writes: Patron of arts! whose happy wisdom’s known, To Belgian councils, as to British throne; Whose tongue determin’d unresolving states, Genius of Albion’s, and of Europe’s fates: (46)

Jones’s ‘‘Belgian councils’’ are likely a reference to Chesterfield’s diplomatic work at The Hague just prior to his coming to Ireland. Chesterfield was charged with inducing the Dutch (one of the ‘‘unresolving states’’) to join the war of the Austrian succession on the British side, a mission he successfully completed. Though a mere bricklayer, Jones thus shows himself to be a student of international politics (as read through periodical reports) and accurately celebrates Chesterfield’s role in the affairs of state. Despite paying lip service to the goal of achieving a poetics ‘‘wrapt in the theme sublime,’’ Jones ends up writing verses which are grounded in specific details of contemporary history. The topical nature of this poem to Chesterfield continues in Jones’s rendition of recent Irish literary history, concluding with a touching tribute to Swift: Tho’ Congreve, Steele, Rosscommon, are no more; Tho’ Morris, silent hide his heav’nly strains,

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And Britain’s senate noble Boyle detains; Tho’ Swift be dumb; for Swift Ierne weeps, The pride, the pillar, of his country sleeps. His clouded soul emits no dazling ray, But faintly warms the animated clay. Not Rome’s sad ruins such impressions leave, As reason bury’d in the body’s grave. (46)

Together with the second poem, an epistle addressed to Chesterfield’s wife chronicling her effort to obtain a royal pardon for two soldiers condemned to die for desertion, we can see that Jones in part imagines his role as poet to be that of a historian of the times, a definition shared by the central figures—Dryden, Pope, Swift—of an earlier age. Both poems address a specific audience and underscore the social engagement of the poet himself in not only being aware of such issues and events, but also communicating an opinion of them. Again, Jones’s name-dropping and commentary on Swift shows a degree of learning and historical acumen uncommon for a bricklayer. Chesterfield counted Swift among his friends and so Jones’s choice of subjects and the sentiments he expresses here no doubt would have pleased his would-be patron. Indeed, Chesterfield brought Jones to England in 1748 and provided his living while Jones polished his verses and prepared a volume for publication. Once in England, working under the protection and influence of Chesterfield, Jones’s previous laboring life was no longer a central feature of his public persona. The last poem to advertise Jones as a ‘‘Bricklayer’’ was a Dublin publication of Philosophy, dated 1746, which also appeared in The London Magazine the following year advertised as ‘‘by the Irish Bricklayer.’’25 Polished versions of the 1745 epistles to Chesterfield and his wife opened Jones’s Poems on Several Occasions (1749), but the references to Jones’s laboring origins were excised from both titles. Moreover, the respective title pages for the English and Irish editions note each volume to be ‘‘by Henry Jones’’ which replicates the form of Duck’s authorized edition of 1736. However, Jones is careful to deploy the familiar tropes of natural genius in the ‘‘Advertisement’’ included in both editions: It may be proper to inform the Reader, that the most Part of the following Pieces were wrote without any Design of their ever appearing in Print; the Author’s Consciousness of the Disadvantage he lay under, hindering him from aspiring to the Rank of a Poet: But the generous Encouragement he met with from some Persons of Distinction, to whom he had the Honour of being made known, determined him to offer his

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Productions to the Public. It will be needless, perhaps, to declare, that he has had no Assistance from Learning.26

Because Jones does not advertise himself as a bricklayer on the title page, it is in fact necessary that he make this declaration of ignorance. After the deluge of versifying laborers in the previous decade, and the satirical commentary many of them attracted, Jones was justifiably cautious in marketing his debut volume in England. In fact, the poems that follow are consistent with the strategy of the title page and the ‘‘Advertisement’’: the references to Jones’s selftaught status remain, but a new reader could never know that Jones was formerly a bricklayer. Only once does Jones come close to giving himself away, describing himself as ‘‘Jones in forma pauperis,’’ but the reference is only vaguely economic and not specifically occupational (POSO, 33). Perhaps because of a reading public saturated with and tired of laborers-turned-poets, by mid-century a laboring-class poet could make only limited use of his or her work experience in print. Jones illustrates this changing cultural climate with his early publishing strategies in England which met with both critical and financial success. For example, The Monthly Review for March 1753 notes that Jones ‘‘gained great reputation by his poems, printed by subscription a few years ago . . . which has deservedly raised him from the obscurity of a mechanical employment, as little suited to mr. Jones’s natural talents, as the same calling was to his great predecessor, Ben Johnson.’’27 Notice, too, that the reviewer goes to great lengths to avoid explicitly naming Jones’s previous trade, relying instead upon the cultural knowledge of his readers by linking Jones to Jonson. The London edition of Poems on Several Occasions also boasted a subscriber’s list of over 740 names, including the ‘‘Rev. Mr. Stephen Duck’’ himself, with many subscribers ordering multiple copies. Given the sheer numbers accounted for in the London edition and the additional revenue from the Dublin publication, Jones’s 1749 volume of poems was one of the more economically successful books by a plebeian author in the century. Jones’s apparently self-conscious decision not to exploit his laboring background, but rather to fashion a public image of himself as a working poet, in fact accorded with mid-century poetic sensibilities. Like Bancks and Dodsley before him, Jones does aspire to ‘‘the Rank of Poet’’ and he actively seeks to sell his authorial status over his laboring origins. Bancks and Dodsley, after a series of misfires, achieved public and financial success in the 1740s by representing themselves as writers. Jones follows suit in Poems on

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Several Occasions, which is rife with self-descriptions which construct him as a true poet. For example, Jones begins ‘‘Lines to Lord Chief Justice Singleton’’ by describing the sources of his poetic inspiration: With love of lasting Fame inspir’d, I hung o’er Swift’s immortal Page; His matchless Energy admir’d, And kindl’d with poetick Rage. (POSO, 12)

Although Jones’s ‘‘poetick Rage’’ does not share Swift’s seething critique of English imperialism, Jones is explicit about linking his own poetic ambitions to a desire for ‘‘Fame’’ and his reading of Swift’s poems. Jones’s confidence in his poetic talent is apparent in another poem eulogizing Pope: ‘‘These Lines to Pope for ever sacred live, / The best a grateful mourning Muse can give’’ (POSO, 17). Not only does Jones construct himself as a ‘‘Muse,’’ he also holds a high view of his own poetic effort. It is, of course, both ironic and appropriate that Jones should link himself explicitly to the poetic ‘‘energy’’ of Swift and Pope. Much Scriblerian satire in the 1720s was pitched against would-be authors like Jones, but twenty years later, Jones strategically pays homage to the best poets of the age as he at once describes ‘‘[his] future Lays’’ and ‘‘[his] future Strains,’’ indicating to his audience in all earnestness that writing will be his new vocation (POSO, 89, 177). Figuring writing itself as a form of labor is important to offset criticism based on idleness, and Jones is careful to continue this practice as his career progresses. For example, he describes his own ‘‘lab’ring breast’’ as he sits and composes verses in Merit (1753), a poem celebrating Chesterfield’s virtues.28 Despite his mechanic origins, readers seem to have approved of Jones’s career change. John Hill noted ‘‘the marks of genius, the true and genuine fire of poetry’’ in Jones’s early work.29 And, The Critical Review for October 1767 remarked that ‘‘All this author’s publications prove . . . that he has a vein for poetry.’’30 Clearly, Jones’s capacity to understand and then negotiate the ideological terrain surrounding authorship in the period was substantial. As a professional poet writing in mid-eighteenth-century England, after the collective reissue of Young’s Night Thoughts (1747), the publication of Joseph Warton’s influential Odes on Various Subjects (1746), and Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (1746, dated 1747), Jones attempted to assimilate himself to the poetic concerns and themes popular in this pe-

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riod. It is well known that, in his ‘‘patriotic odes,’’ Collins sought to spur a new generation of patriots to public action,31 a purpose which Jones seeks to imitate. In ‘‘To Cleon, on his Arrival at his Villa,’’ a poem championing ‘‘Cleon’s’’ merits as a public figure, Jones defines the public duty of a poet in parallel terms: to ‘‘[sing] in Concert with the public Voice, / A Patriot’s Deeds such high Encomiums claim’’ (POSO, 122). Jones’s sense of inspiring his generation of English ‘‘patriots,’’ however, involves celebrating contemporary examples of moral virtue and public sacrifice in print, a practice which critics quick to dispense with Jones attribute to mere sycophancy. As a moral writer, Jones preferred example over precept. The bulk of the poems in Poems on Several Occasions catalog ‘‘Each publick Worth, each letter’d Grace’’ of political figures such as Lord Chief Justice Singleton, the duke of Cumberland, and, of course, Chesterfield (13). Jones describes his method for instilling ‘‘moral Wisdom’’ in his readers as ‘‘When Precept fails, Example’s Pow’r [he] tries’’ (POSO, 89). Jones held fast to this view of the poet’s duty throughout his career, reiterating in his last published poem, Shrewsbury Quarry (1769), that ‘‘The Poet’s strains should Patriot-deeds inspire; / To virtue consecrate her moral lay, / And public worth and public love repay.’’32 The thematic focus on general moral subjects meant that ‘‘virtue’’ was a central feature of mid-century poetic discourse. In seeking ‘‘Vice to lash’’ and ‘‘Folly to expose,’’ Jones enters English print culture singing in unison with the more well-known poetic responses to the ‘‘degen’rate Days’’ which he (and others) perceive as their sociohistorical moment (POSO, 73, 124). ‘‘Virtue,’’ as a model of idealized personal values and proper social conduct, realized a pinnacle of popularity in the early 1740s in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, and the poets of the decade waste little time in taking up the slogan as well. Young declares in the seventh night of Night Thoughts that ‘‘Virtue, and Vice, are at eternal War;’’33 and Johnson laments that ‘‘Virtue’’ is losing ground to ‘‘Pride’’ and ‘‘Prudence’’ at the conclusion of The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749): With distant voice neglected Virtue calls, Less heard and less, the faint remonstrance falls; Tir’d with contempt, she quits the slipp’ry reign, And Pride and Prudence take her seat in vain.34

Like that of his more illustrious predecessors, Jones’s work is riddled with references to ‘‘virtue,’’ both public and private. In a poem

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which clearly echoes Johnson’s, titled ‘‘On the vain Pursuits and imperfect Enjoyments of Human Life,’’ Jones argues that ‘‘Virtue’s strangely out of Fashion grown’’ (POSO, 31).35 Here Jones provides examples of private and public virtue in figures such as Chesterfield, and, in the following epistle addressed ‘‘To the Hon. Mr. Baron Mountney,’’ he also discusses virtue and women in terms which recall the conduct manuals of the period: His Mira there in Virtue’s Form is seen, Peace in her Smile, and Pleasure in her Mien; Winning Attraction, and connubial Grace Breathe in the Air, and brighten in her Face: Accomplish’d thus to chear and temper Life, To Pride a Stranger, and unknown to Strife; (POSO, 35)

The anonymous ‘‘Mira’’ is an idealized example of private virtue to which women are meant to aspire. For Jones, private virtue is useful only in that it is a necessary precursor for working toward public or ‘‘social Virtue’’ (POSO, 201). If, as Jones himself states, ‘‘Virtue’s Pow’r commands these feeble Lays,’’ it is always in an effort to affect wider social and moral change (POSO, 82). Jones’s moral didacticism is also concerned with the subject of religion, and he clearly champions the cultivation of Christian piety and religious values in a contemporary cultural setting. In this respect, Jones closely follows Young, whose nine ‘‘nights’’ of Night Thoughts represent a sustained apology for Christian dogma in verse. According to Stephen Cornford, ‘‘Young intended to show what could still be done in poetry to speak in an heroic strain of the sublime theme of Christian salvation’’ and, in this sense, the entire poem is ‘‘a moral dissertation’’ for living a Christian life in order to achieve salvation.36 Indeed, the Christian priest recommends a life of virtue throughout the poem to the Christian poet who finally sees God early in the ninth night: ‘‘Heav’n’s KING! whose Face unveil’d consummates Bliss’’ (IX, 272). Before this revelation, Young rails against wit, which produces ‘‘fashionably fruitless’’ poetry, and argues for ‘‘Numbers’’ imbued with religion and moral worth (II, 63). Jones follows Young’s lead, arguing in ‘‘To the Reverend Dr. Mann’’ that: An odd Experiment for once be try’d, Inlist a Poet on Religion’s Side. Let Verse with all her youthful Train appear, And Wit to Virtue serve a Volunteer (POSO, 74)

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Jones asks further on, ‘‘Why rolls the Force of Fashion’s Tide / So smoothly swift against Religion’s Side,’’ and answers by recognizing the many worldly temptations which lead individuals to indulge their natural passions (POSO, 75). Jones’s poetic pedagogy is based, then, on teaching ‘‘Wisdom’’ in the form of Christian values. In ‘‘To a Young Gentleman,’’ a poem which imitates Chesterfield’s advice to his son, human industry is figured in Christian terms as a necessary quality to achieve final salvation: ‘‘Go on, my Friend, th’ exalted Palm secure; / Who seeks a Crown must gen’rous Toils endure’’ (POSO, 44). Jones also admonishes against the superficial grandeur of the material world in ‘‘On the vain Pursuits and imperfect Enjoyments of Human Life,’’ and reminds his readers that true piety is based on the desire for earthly transcendence: What here we reap is for Refreshment giv’n; Convenient Stages in our Way to Heav’n: What Taste of Happiness we find below, Must from Religion’s sacred Fountain flow; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This Soul-felt calm can ev’ry Ill remove, And gives an Earnest of the Joys above, Draws the bright Scene, Unfolds the Gates of Bliss, A Life celestial, and begun in this. (POSO, 32)

Not only does Jones tune his poetic voice to the concerns of his age, but these very concerns serve Jones in defining his public worth as a plebeian poet. He does not have to announce blithely his honesty, industry, and piety as many poets in the 1730s did; rather, the overriding assumption throughout Jones’s poetry is that he lives those values. The poems, in effect, reveal a poet who embodies the ‘‘moral Wisdom’’ he proselytizes, and this fact makes Jones not only an ideologically acceptable writer, plebeian roots or not, but also defines his social and commercial value as a working poet. Jones continues this process of appropriating contemporary poetic discourse and justifying his position as a didactic poet in his discussion of ‘‘Ambition.’’ Politically and morally speaking, ‘‘ambition’’ amounted to a dirty word in eighteenth-century discourse because its invocation usually served to explain the civil disturbances and political misadventures of the past and present. For example, Dryden’s Achitophel (a portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury) was led by ‘‘wilde Ambition . . . / Against the Crown’’ in his effort to secure a Protestant succession.37 Similarly, Gray’s use of ‘‘Ambition’’ in his Elegy calls our attention to public, political history,

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through ‘‘The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,’’ which spurs men such as Cromwell and Shaftesbury into action.38 Jones maintains a similar view of ‘‘Ambition’’ in ‘‘Tempe, a Poem, inscrib’d to Solitude,’’ arguing that: Happy the Man who seeks not Pow’r, or Praise, And with such meek Associates spends his Days; From Envy safe, and wild Ambition’s Sway, No Camps allure him, and no Courts betray: (POSO, 125)

But Jones is left to resolve the problem of his own ambition as a poet, and the fact that he spends some days in the company of aristocrats such as Chesterfield. In his effort to confront apparent hypocrisy, Jones links himself to the positive, socially acceptable aspects of ambition. In the 1740s and 50s, the only contexts in which human ambition was considered laudable were those of art and industry. Young in Night Thoughts argues that ‘‘Ambition’’ is a ‘‘powerful source of Good and Ill’’ (VI, 159), but also supplies ‘‘Proof’’ that ambition is a natural part of being human: ‘‘In vain we strive to pluck it from our Hearts; / By Nature planted for the noblest Ends’’ (VII, 188). Thus Young describes an opening in the moral conceptualization of ambition which Jones exploits in The Invention of Letters and the Utility of the Press (1755), arguing that ‘‘Ambition’’ in literature ‘‘is virtue.’’39 Ambition in letters is acceptable because writing falls under the rubric of human art, and also because it can potentially increase ‘‘public virtue’’: . . . th’ important Press; That Source of patriot strength, when pure it runs Unstir’d by fraud, and faction’s furious sons; To truth, to public virtue, ever dear, For ever copious, and for ever clear: May healing wisdom from that fountain flow, And Wealth, and Concord, all around it grow. (1)

Because ambition in any material sense usually is not considered a ‘‘noble end,’’40 it seems odd that Jones would include the term ‘‘Wealth’’ in this poetic context. However, this single-sheet poem was published two years after the public and financial successes of Jones’s tragedy, The Earl of Essex, a time when Jones might have felt the sting of public criticism for his material and social gains. This poem succeeds in justifying Jones’s aspirations to the ‘‘Rank of Poet’’ in socially acceptable terms—trumpeting the patriotism,

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‘‘truth,’’ ‘‘public virtue,’’ ‘‘healing wisdom,’’ and ‘‘Concord’’ all available, we are led to believe, in his own poetry. That Jones wants to add ‘‘Wealth’’ to the mix is a signal of his self-consciousness regarding his plebeian origins and desire to raise himself socially by his pen. The final method by which Jones forges a poetic link with his English contemporaries is based in the changing views of nature and the poet’s relationship to the natural world in the period. Prominent mid-century poets considered human society tainted and artificial, and imagined the natural world as a place of retreat, a place where one could find solace in solitude and peaceful meditation. Many of these poets used these occasions to describe the natural beauty of the environs to which they escaped. True poetry at midcentury, according to the standards of the day, ‘‘should be about a lonely poet surrounded by ‘nature’.’’41 Early in his career, Jones makes the ‘‘local Beauties’’ of various places the subject of poetry—‘‘Yet Hampton’s copious Lawns demand my Song,’’—and inscribes one such poem ‘‘to Solitude’’ (POSO, 34). In this, the poet is alone, wandering through an edenic natural world which he catalogs with sensual detail: Here, Twilight Groves my Ev’ning Fancy woo; The Rook high cawing, while the Woodquests coo; The colour’d Cloud enrich’d with golden Dyes, To crown yon blue-rob’d Hill which props the Skies; The winding Vale that spreads her mantl’d Bloom, The Lake that glimmers through the verdant Gloom; Here, pendant Lawns the limpid Mirrors grace With blooming Blushes, and with vary’d Face: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . With Breast elate, I climb the shapely Mound, An Eden smiling, where a Chaos frown’d; (POSO, 128–29)

Jones made this sort of loco-descriptive writing the mainstay of his later poetic career, as evidenced by the titles of his longer pieces published in the 1760s: Kew Garden (1763), The Isle of Wight (1766), Clifton (1767), and Shrewsbury Quarry (1769). The Monthly Review both praises and pans Jones’s efforts in this subgenre. Of The Isle of Wight, the reviewer notes that: Poetical paintings, when executed with any degree of merit, have a charm for the imagination, which is founded in the love of nature;—that love is very powerful, particularly in sensible hearts and cultivated

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minds; and Mr. Jones’s descriptive poem cannot fail of giving pleasure to readers of that cast.42

The following year, the same reviewer (John Langhorne) is not so kind with regard to Kew Garden: In all descriptive poems a simplicity of sentiment and perspicuity of manner and expression are indispensibly necessary: but the poem before us can boast of neither. Forced and foreign sentiments, in a fustian style, are substituted for simple painting and easy description.43

The emphasis on simple, easy description and the pointed criticism of Jones’s ‘‘fustian style’’ prefigure—in broad strokes—important aspects of Wordsworth’s guiding principles in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The Critical Review was kinder to Jones on this point in its commentary on Kew Garden, observing ‘‘how great an adept Mr. Jones is in this province of poetry.’’44 Clearly Jones demonstrated strengths and weaknesses in this preromantic vein of loco-descriptive verse. But what is of more importance is that, as his career went forward, Jones continued to show his poetic versatility, writing the moralistic, meditative, and descriptive poems popular through the mid-century decades. Still, Jones’s real contribution to our understanding of mid-century poetry, in my estimation, is not found in his assimilation techniques (which were substantial) but in his resistances to popular poetic trends. Such resistances, both large and small, provide Jones with the poetic space to identify specific social problems and articulate significant social criticism. Sitter has argued that if the poetry of Swift and Pope can be described as a ‘‘literature of Opposition,’’ because of its deeply political nature and embeddedness in contemporary history, then the poetry most commonly associated with the mid-century period, with its characteristic ‘‘flight from history,’’ could be described simply as oppositional literature. The poets of the 1720s and 1730s opposed a specific cultural politics while the mid-century poets opposed all politics, speaking about social ills, as we have seen, in large, abstract moralistic terms such as ‘‘Virtue’’ and ‘‘Ambition.’’45 Sitter’s formulation is useful for understanding how Jones breaks rank with his contemporaries, poaching upon an ‘‘Augustan’’ poetics to infuse his own poetry with a more specific sociopolitical edge. We have already seen Jones writing the sort of verse epistles that recall an earlier age because they are addressed to specific audiences and exhibit a strong sense of historical topicality. On one level, Jones used this form to illustrate his worth

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as a plebeian poet and impress Chesterfield. But on another level, it is clear that Jones maintains his investment in past models of poetry because they allow him to discuss current social issues and to maintain a political stance in his writing. Jones does not look back to Swift and Pope for elements of style; rather, he seeks the resources of form and poetic purpose. Social problems are inherently topical, embedded in history, and Jones sees in his poet-heroes of the immediate past a conviction regarding the power and purpose of poetry that he wants to carry forward into his own period. Jones was an outsider in England both in terms of nationality and social rank, and this dual marginality provides the distance and perspective from which to observe well the society in which he found himself. Given his personal history, it is not surprising that Jones gives prominence in his writing to issues involving social inequity and power. In ‘‘To Cleon,’’ Jones outlines a series of demands for change that highlight social problems in the period: No more should Luxury licentious roam, To waste abroad the Wealth we want at home; No more should Wretchedness and Want prevail, Nor Hunger tempt the starving Hand to steal; Nor should Corruption with her gilded Claws, Debauch our Senates, and debase the Laws; Each wealthy Chief would then a Patriot be; Who for his Country lives, must live like thee. (POSO, 123)

The sentiments which Jones expresses here (and elsewhere) in his poetic work are part of a nascent critique of capitalistic tendencies taken up by moralists in the period. His diction connects the discussion to contemporary problems exacerbated by capitalistic trends in the period. In order to address issues of ‘‘Hunger,’’ ‘‘Wretchedness,’’ and ‘‘Want,’’ presumably among the less fortunate lower classes, political ‘‘Corruption’’ and wanton ‘‘Luxury’’ among the higher ranks must be brought into check. Jones sees the economic resources to combat such problems being wasted ‘‘abroad’’ because of the licentiousness of the wealthy and powerful. What drives Jones’s politics is a clear sense of the haves versus the have-nots; he argues for a more egalitarian distribution of ‘‘Wealth’’ by maintaining a conservative stance on trade. Jones’s view of international trade will shift later in his career, but in ‘‘To Cleon’’ he is content to argue that true ‘‘Patriots’’ should keep their wealth within English borders and help their countrymen achieve social harmony through what amounts to alms giving. ‘‘Cleon’’ proves a didactic example

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of upper-class charity, for he ‘‘spreads his Bounty with unsparing Hand’’ and thus becomes ‘‘A People’s Parent’’ (POSO, 122, 123). Although he might not have agreed with Jones’s answers here, Johnson characterized the problems facing ‘‘mankind’’ using a similar capitalistic vocabulary: ‘‘The world is full of fraud and corruption, rapine and malignity; interest is the ruling motive of mankind, and every one is endeavouring to increase his own stores of happiness by perpetual accumulation. . . .’’46 Jones’s early views concerning the social problems which result from an economic system based on competition are echoed at midcentury by Robert Dodsley in a poem appropriately titled Public Virtue. Dodsley planned ‘‘three books’’—‘‘Agriculture,’’ ‘‘Commerce,’’ and ‘‘Arts’’—but only succeeded in completing the first on agriculture in 1753.47 The Monthly Review praised this first part as a ‘‘truly useful and laudable undertaking . . . those who may think they have reason to condemn the poet, will find ample cause to commend the patriot.’’48 Like Jones before him, Dodsley’s ‘‘Patriotism’’ is evident in his recommendations for increasing the general public good: From Cultivation, from the useful toils Of the laborious hand, the streams of wealth And plenty flow. Deign then, illustrious Youth! To bring th’ observing eye, the liberal hand, And with a spirit congenial to Your birth, Regard his various labours thro’ the year: So shall the labourer smile, and You improve The happy Country You are born to rule. (2–3)

The capitalization of agriculture leads inevitably to the oppression of the laborers by the landowners, a process which Dodsley recognizes and warns the landowners against. The argument may be simplistic, but Dodsley points out that it is in everyone’s best interests, and the nation’s in particular, for the landlords to ‘‘reward / The poor man’s toil’’ because ‘‘Benevolen[ce]’’ will lead to greater ‘‘Industry’’ and social harmony (4). Jones would agree, and he later provides a specific example which illustrates Dodsley’s precept. ‘‘Goldney,’’ a landowning husbandman in the loco-descriptive poem Clifton, ‘‘acts the meek, the moral part’’ of the benevolent philanthropist: ‘‘His well-spent gold a two-fold transport gives, / The garden gladdens, and the labourer lives.’’49 However, the identification of social problems exacerbated by a growing market economy and the courses of action proposed by

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both Jones and Dodsley, do not involve an explicit critique of the system of social hierarchy and economic inequality. Neither Jones nor Dodsley call for a radical restructuring of society by questioning the foundational assumptions of the social order. To do so, in fact, would be tantamount to blasphemy in the eighteenth century in so far as one’s birth, and the system of social order itself, were considered God’s work. Dodsley illustrates this notion deftly by noting that his young landowning farmer in ‘‘Agriculture’’ is ‘‘by Fortune fix’d’’ (4). That is, his birth and social position are the result of God’s will, and Dodsley argues that, for the landowning farmer, this combination carries with it the social responsibility— the public duty—to help his fellow man in need. Jones is more explicit on these points in his work, arguing in ‘‘Rath-Farnham, a Poem’’ that the ‘‘social Chain, / Whose Links in regular Gradation fall, / Whilst all on one, and each depends on all’’ (POSO, 44). The natural world provides providential justification for man’s system of social order: ‘‘Wise Nature, thus, proportions her Degrees, / From Shrubs to Cedars, and from Brooks to Seas;’’ and so it follows that ‘‘All, all, one aptest Harmony combine, / And speak the Author of their Frame, Divine!’’ (POSO, 45). In order to achieve such social ‘‘harmony,’’ Jones seeks to ‘‘Make man to man in social office kind,’’ arguing for a Christian sense of public duty based on charity and good works (Clifton, 31). Though neither Jones nor Dodsley provides a pre-Marxist critique of class oppression, each offers social criticism aimed at the self-interested, tyrannical abuses of power evident in the upper echelons of society during the mideighteenth century. Whether the poetic focus is the unjust exploitation of labor in agriculture, or the misuse of power by aristocratic statesmen, both writers imagine a society where harmony between the ranks is the norm. Of all the poets writing in the mid-century period, Jones carries this critique of social power furthest in his use of the term ‘‘Custom’’ throughout his work. It is true that Jones was fond of echoing and imitating fellow poets such as Young and Johnson as he tried to establish a niche in mid-century print culture. But Jones was also capable of original thinking in verse, and his contribution to the critique of moral values and the attendant social problems of mid-century English society emerges in his use of Custom. Although Young, Johnson, and others certainly took part in criticizing public and private abuses of power, no other poet writing in this period retains Jones’s focus on Custom as a point of departure.50 In Jones’s ‘‘To a Friend,’’ however, the poet asks plainly ‘‘Or is it Custom has the World abus’d?’’ (POSO, 152). Invoking ‘‘Custom’’ provides

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Jones with a poetic language to shift his moral argument from people to the realm of received social norms, or, to put it another way, to engage in the critique of ideology. Custom is always figured as a limiting, negative social force in Jones’s work and thus parallels both those invocations of the concept by women writers earlier in the century as well as our own modern use of ‘‘ideology.’’ I have already established how, in the decades prior to Jones’s emergence, Custom carried the conceptual weight of ideology in eighteenth-century discourse. This argument will be developed further here with regard to its most substantial plebeian component. As early as 1749, in Poems on Several Occasions, Jones refers to ‘‘Custom’s Snares’’ and describes unwise, or immoral, men as a ‘‘Throng / Of Custom’s Captives’’ (125, 163). This trend is continued in subsequent publications, such as The Relief (1754), in which ‘‘Ambition . . . and Luxury’’ are ‘‘With Custom link’d, with fell Corruption join’d,’’ and ‘‘Bigot Blasphemy’’ is ‘‘by Custom fix’d!’’51 For Jones, as for Behn, Astell, Cockburn, and many others who preceded him, ‘‘Custom’’ is clearly not a good word, and his one attempt at a working definition of the term is worth quoting in full because it adds much to our understanding of the eighteenth-century discourse on Custom: Custom, that Reason’s Foe, so oft appears, Strengthen’d by Age, and rev’rend made by Years: The hoary Sorceress with Magick Hand, Inchants whole Millions to her wide Command. Lo! gaping Multitudes her Nod attend, Revere her Dictates, and her Laws defend. Where Truth dethron’d, to silent Shades must fly, And Reason close her clear discerning Eye; The Goddess, banish’d from this peopl’d Ball, By few is worship’d, and prophan’d by all. Ten thousand various Shapes her Vot’ries wear; The Shapes as various as the Vot’ries are. Yet each with partial Pride his own surveys, ‘Tis Reason’s Liv’ry, and must Reason please He vainly thinks: For so Self-love descries The tinsel Trappings with extatick Eyes, Whose dazzl’d Rays imagin’d Splendors find, Where Fancy glitters, and where Sense is blind. (POSO, 153)

Thus Jones defines ‘‘Custom’’ in opposition to ‘‘Reason,’’ but also as always presenting itself precisely as ‘‘Reason,’’ and uses the term to conceptualize received social norms, which are ‘‘Strengthen’d by

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Age, and rev’rend made by Years.’’ Jones personifies ‘‘Custom’’ as a ‘‘hoary Sorceress’’ in this passage, an image abounding with negative connotations but apt because it illustrates the notion that Custom, like ideology, is more an abstraction than a tangible thing. But if Custom is imaged abstractly as a sorceress’s ‘‘Magic,’’ powerful enough to ‘‘inchant whole Millions,’’ then it does have real social effects, specifically in creating governable, ‘‘gaping Multitudes.’’ Jones’s critique of Custom as an abstract social force which creates governable human subjects suggests an eighteenth-century example of the critique of ideology. Jones recognizes the mutually constitutive force of ideology-as-interpellation,52 and demostrates that knowledge by showing that this abstraction, this magical force of Custom, is sustained as natural and reasonable by the very subjects it ‘‘creates.’’ Jones’s lengthy definition of Custom ends with the notion that, without the guiding influence of ‘‘Reason,’’ people are ruled by ‘‘self-love’’ and material desire. In this context we can identify specifically an ideological construction Jones seeks to expose with his use of Custom. In The Earl of Essex, Jones argued that self-love is a primary cause of the ‘‘Eternal Discord’’ which disrupts social harmony.53 And, in An Epistle to the Right Honourable The Earl of Orrery, Jones differentiates between rightly tuned self-love and that corrupted by Custom: Self-love, in Man, wise Nature’s Purpose shews, Springs in the Soul, and with his Reason grows; Awakes each Movement of the exerted Will; His Guide thro’ Dangers, and his Guard from Ill: Yet taught by Custom’s Hand too oft contends With Reason’s Dictates, and defeats her Ends.54

If ‘‘self-love’’ is corrupted in this scenario ‘‘by Custom’s Hand,’’ how can we define the characteristics of ‘‘Custom’’ which do so? The answer lies, I think, in recognizing the connection Jones makes between Custom and the effects of a burgeoning capitalistic system on English society. In his conceptual definition of Custom above, Jones criticizes a ‘‘self-love’’ based on acquiring ‘‘the tinsel Trappings’’ of modern life, in effect linking Custom to the materialistic tendencies inherent within capitalism (POSO, 153). In other words, Jones extends his critique of material ‘‘Pride’’ to the level of ideology, arguing that Custom disrupts true self-love based on ‘‘Reason’’ by fixing an alternate set of moral values to self-love. Instead of a natural self-love, which is good because it nurtures and guides,

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Jones sees around him a self-love transformed by Custom into a vice based on individual profit and gain. This transformation is part of an ideological discourse which reproduces the values of a nascent capitalism for the social subjects living them out in the midcentury period. Jones’s critique of this social discourse, then, figures as a surviving plebeian response to eighteenth-century economic and social change. Jones also draws a similar connection between capitalism and Custom in addressing the imperialistic tendencies of British trade practices. In Shrewsbury Quarry, a poem ostensibly about the physical beauties of Shrewsbury, Jones holds up Lord Robert Clive as a positive model of social virtue: Let Clive, exalted by his virtue, stand Distinguish’d; Clive, who open’d wide his hand; With giving heart, and kind congenial smile, He bade his Indian treasures raise the pile; Treasures dear bought, the price of health, and blood, Yet cheaply purchas’d for his Country’s good; To her high worth he consecrates his gains, His wealth shall circulate through all her veins, His flowing gold shall warm her vig’rous heart, And health and plenty visit ev’ry part; (22)

Clive does the right thing with ‘‘his gains,’’ and so we notice that Custom is not invoked, its very absence in this context as revealing as its presence elsewhere in the argument surrounding social problems and the individual’s public duty to resolve them. Clive’s service to the public is the building of a hospital (hence Jones’s reference to ‘‘the pile’’ and the medical language which follows) with money earned from trade with the East. Jones is not critical of British imperialism, so long as those who gain by it give something back in the public sphere. Indeed, providing public funds for hospital building is enough to rationalize the ‘‘crimes’’ of imperialism: His patriot deeds shall cancel Britain’s crimes, Avert the thunder, and redeem the times; His public worth shall public vice atone, Who makes the welfare of mankind his own; (22)

The irony we can read in ‘‘the welfare of mankind’’ in this imperialist context would not have occurred to most readers living in mideighteenth-century England because a ‘‘patriot’s’’ concern was exclusively for his own people. It is evident, likewise, that Jones does

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not make a wholesale indictment of colonialism or international commerce—overseas trade is useful in providing the necessary capital for public works (an allowance Jones would not have made earlier in his career)—but he is critical of the potential effects ‘‘Treasures dear bought’’ can have on the people who procure them. Jones distrusts an economic system where the personal desire for profit and material gain can run rampant over individual sacrifice for the greater public good. If Custom provides Jones with a way to conceptualize how human beings are formed as subjects by prevailing social norms and practices, its absence in this instance suggests that Jones develops Clive’s story as an example to counteract those norms or values—self-love and materialism, for example—that he sees as root causes of society’s ills. Jones’s critique of Custom is also woven with a distinctly political thread, particularly when he invokes the term in conjunction with his critique of the abuse of power. In The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson satirically describes the workings of state politics by noting that ‘‘pow’r advances pow’r,’’55 a notion that Jones extends with the addition of ‘‘Custom’’: Go then, bless’d Youth! expand thy curious Mind, Go, and remark the Wiles of Humankind: How Custom sways, how Pow’r supports Applause, How slavish Yokes are sanctify’d by Laws; (POSO, 55)

‘‘Custom’’ in this context is more slippery, as Jones notes with the verb ‘‘sways,’’ because it becomes a tool used by those in power to get what they want. The final couplet is complex because Jones argues that Custom plays a significant role in the political process by which oppression is ‘‘sanctify’d’’ by the State. To combat this process, Jones provides only examples of the proper ‘‘use of riches, and the use of power,’’ which, in Shrewsbury Quarry, amount to celebrations of those aristocratic individuals ‘‘Who sanctify these gifts, by giving more / To worth well weigh’d, to merit, and the poor’’ (21). But Jones’s contribution to mid-century discussions about private and public morality can be measured by his conceptualization and critique of Custom. Although the term is general and often imprecise, like modern usage of ideology, Jones uses it consistently in his writing to describe the social process by which real contradictions are masked by those in power—how, for example, the ‘‘slavish Yokes’’ of wage labor are ‘‘sanctify’d by Laws.’’ Jones seeks to expose the social workings of Custom, or in our terms ideology, and this unmasking characterizes the oppositional politics of his verse.

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As we piece together evidence from his poetical work to reconstruct the terms of his social critique, it becomes clear that Jones was an opportunist when it came to poetic conventions. For example, much of Jones’s later loco-descriptive poetry, titled and purposefully written after current poetic fashion, devotes more lines to topical social issues than to descriptions of the natural world. If Clifton is a place where ‘‘nature leads the soul along,’’ it always leads the poet to moralize about social problems: The moral here and natural world we see, In wise gradation, and in just degree: Where all constructed for one system’s sake, A happy, heterogeneous prospect make: Where reason’s scale from class to class can fall, And measure equal bounty dealt to all; Each lot can justly prize, in fortune’s wheel, But not from what we have, but what we feel. (Clifton, 1, 5)

It is ironic, too, that the poet in ‘‘Tempe, a Poem, inscrib’d to Solitude’’ spends his time walking alone in nature meditating upon man in his ‘‘social State’’ (POSO, 129). Still, Jones closes the volume with an obvious gesture toward convention, celebrating the poet’s solitary retreat: To thee in Tempe’s blissful Shade, From Bolesworth’s Brow I write; A happy Place, by Nature made For Pleasure and Delight. (POSO, 202)

Thus Jones uses popular poetic conventions to serve his local purposes. Solitude is useful in providing the poetic space to discuss social issues, or simply to idealize the poet’s retreat ‘‘From London far, and State affairs’’ (POSO, 203). In fact, his paradoxical invocations of solitude are indicative of Jones’s constant manipulation of convention throughout his career, making gestures toward mid-century poetic norms, yet maintaining a strong personal poetic voice. But Jones’s manipulative stategies could also give way to a more direct critical approach. His distinctive voice is heard most clearly in The Relief; or Day Thoughts: A Poem. Occasioned by the Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1754) railing against mid-century poetic conventions. As the title indicates, the poem is pitched against Young’s popular poem, but also includes obvious references to Gray and Collins, who together constitute the ‘‘asylum of dark-

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ness’’ of mid-century poetry.56 Early in The Relief, Jones parodies much of Gray’s imagery in the Elegy: The awful Temples, Tombs, and tolling Clocks; The midnight Damps that drop from weeping Yews, Beneath th’ eclipsed Moon, (the Scriech-Owl’s Haunt) Drenching the Locks of some night-watching Pilgrim, Who sits, in dismal Meditation wrapt, And brainsick Horror, o’er yon mould’ring Grave, (4)

Fed up with the melancholic gloom and doom that characterizes the work of his contemporaries, Jones provides a brighter poetics— ‘‘day thoughts’’—to describe a similar scene, noting images of light within darkness: The radiant Gems of Heav’n, that nightly burn In golden Lamps, and gild th’ ætherial Space; That smiling Vault, that Canopy of Stars, Those cluster’d Constellations! Mark, yon Moon Serenely shine; (her borrow’d Lustre full;) (5–6)

Though Jones apparently lionized Young early in his career, imitating his views on ‘‘Ambition’’ for instance, he too comes under fire later in this poem for his ‘‘horrid Scenes’’ and ‘‘ghastly Images’’ (11). And, instead of imagining death as the great social leveler, as both Gray and Young had in their respective poems, Jones sees in death only an end to worldly toil, pain, and grief. Thus Jones distances himself from the core members of the mid-century asylum, positioning himself as something of an outpatient. Jones could not have won much applause for calling the best poets of the day ‘‘croaking Ministers of midnight Dreams,’’ explicitly criticizing their work as ‘‘brain-sick Rant,’’ and calling for an end to ‘‘the dismal Pageantry of Death,’’ but he defined his opposition by more than mere stylistic invective (11, 26, 27). For instance, in The Relief Jones also challenges one of the more substantial poetic assumptions of the period: the idealization of nature as a perfect system without the ‘‘strife’’ and ‘‘discord’’ inherent in human society. Against this view, Jones describes the natural world in a language that recalls his descriptions of the social world of humans and their interaction: Behold all Nature in one gen’rous Strife, The War of Amity, and Discord sweet; The Strife of strong Benevolence, behold,

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The universal Agents all at work, From diff’rent Quarters, with contending Pow’rs; In hostile Harmony, (17)

The passage works by using a series of oxymorons such as ‘‘gen’rous Strife,’’ ‘‘Discord sweet,’’ and ‘‘hostile Harmony’’ to imagine a natural world teeming ‘‘with Life’’ instead of death (17). The antithesis evident at the level of language symbolizes Jones’s direct opposition, in this poem, to prevailing poetic fashion. By 1754, then, Jones had gained enough public attention and artistic independence to stand on his own ground as a poet. The success of Essex had established Jones favorably in the public eye the year before, and so, Jones’s pointed criticisms of his popular contemporaries in The Relief did not lead to public censure. The Monthly Review in fact lauded the poem on account of the many excellent sentiments it contains, and the spirit it breathes. The poet’s design is to call off the thoughts of his readers from tombs, church-yards, tolling midnight clocks, from sable hearses, nodding plumes, and all the pageantry of death, to the contemplation of such objects as are naturally adapted to gladden the human heart, and which the kind hand of our beneficent creator has spread around us with such rich profusion.57

Thus Jones was increasingly viewed as a contributor to contemporary arguments about poetry. The review describes him only in terms of his published work, as the ‘‘author of the earl of Essex, a late new play, and other poetical pieces’’ (MR, 10:304). There is no reference to either his former mechanic employment or his lack of education, signaling once again that Jones had achieved the ‘‘Rank of Poet’’ in the eyes of the reading public. However, it remains unclear whether Jones was personally satisfied with this achievement, as his private actions from this time forward are discordant with his public poetic voice. Two colorful anecdotes from Cooke’s biography of Jones paint the picture well. The liberal monetary rewards Jones received for his Poems on Several Occasions and Essex led him into a life of drink and dissipation which quickly exhausted his funds. Jones maintained his intimacy with Chesterfield, no doubt putting on his best behavior at Chesterfield’s table, until the patron learned of the prote´ge´’s indiscretion in borrowing money from Chesterfield’s footman. Chesterfield banished Jones from his house ever after.58 According to Cooke, like Esau, Jones ‘‘sold his birthright for a mess of pottage’’—in this case, a mere eight guineas.59 The second story in-

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volves Jones ‘‘raising money under false pretences’’ and probably occurred after his break from Chesterfield.60 Apparently, Jones’s plan to raise some quick cash involved duping booksellers by selling a manuscript to one, and then returning to borrow it under the supposition of ‘‘show[ing] it to a friend,’’ only to make another deal and receive money again from a different bookseller.61 Cooke provides strong evidence of this in the form of a letter ‘‘To the Editor of The General Advertiser,’’ signed by ‘‘Jo. Cooper,’’ a bookseller describing himself as one of Jones’s victims.62 Jones wrote in Essex that ‘‘The man that in his public duty fails, / On private virtue will disdainful tread,’’ and one wonders if Jones saw only failure in his career as a moral writer (3). If he sincerely expected social change because of people reading his poetry, evidence of failure was everywhere around him in mid-century London. But recovering and reading Jones’s poetic work within the dual contexts of an eighteenth-century plebeian publishing tradition and mid-century poetic sensibilities is arresting because of his clear understanding of his own historical moment and the pointed social commentary he provides. Like Stephen Duck before him, and Ann Yearsley who followed, Jones established himself as a working poet within a higher, literary social milieu. Jones’s career itself amounts to an active challenge to the central principle defining the social hierarchy in the period. One’s social position was deemed God’s will, and was by Custom fixed, but Jones successfully exposed the limitations of Custom (read as ideology) by his own example. For Jones, art became his labor, and, in an effort to uphold the responsibilities that came with being a published poet at mid-century, he dedicated his writing to the improvement of individual and social ‘‘Virtue.’’

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4 Writing as Work in Mid- to Late-Century Plebeian Poetry Nor is it thinking much, but doing, That keeps our Tenements from Ruin. And Hundreds eat, who spin, or knit, For one that lives by Dint of Wit. The sturdy Thresher plies his Flail, And what to this doth Wit avail? Who learns from Wit to press the Spade? Or thinks ’twou’d mend the Cobler’s Trade?1 No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.2

RICHARD JAGO’S VERSES AND JOHNSON’S DOGMATIC STATEMENT DE-

scribe conflicting cultural attitudes about work, writing, and the prospect of social mobility through writing for money that were circulating at mid-century. Jago’s poetic fable, appropriately titled Labour, and Genius, moralizes on the value of manual labor over writing. ‘‘Doing,’’ Jago argues, is better than ‘‘thinking,’’ but only for certain people within the social hierarchy. Jago is not making a case for universal labor; rather, his poem participates in the policing of social boundaries by deploying the category of work. Threshers, cobblers, and other laboring people, according to Jago, ought to accept their allotment in life, avoid the ‘‘Dint of Wit,’’ and earn their living by plying their respective trades. The fable ends with the specious conclusion that manual labor brings ‘‘Bread’’ but writing only provides ‘‘Praise’’ (18). On one level, then, Jago’s argument attempts to maintain traditional productive social relations by mystifying the fact that there were more opportunities to make money by writing and publishing at mid-century, even for laborers who could scribble verses. Johnson, of course, knew firsthand the opportunities mid-century print culture afforded, and his statement suggests a sense of economic individualism that seems paradoxical, given that we know 157

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Johnson would have supported the moral of Jago’s poem. Johnson was usually a severe critic of trade, ‘‘luxury,’’ and the effects of commercialism on society in general. But he did support the increasing commercialization of print culture, as his comments to one Dr. Watson indicate: ‘Why, sir, as trade is now carried on by subordinate hands, men in trade have as much leisure as others; and now learning itself is a trade. A man goes to a bookseller, and gets what he can. We have done with patronage. . . . With patronage, what flattery! what falsehood! While a man is in equilibrio, he throws truth among the multitude, and lets them take it as they please: in patronage, he must say what pleases his patron, and it is an equal chance whether that be truth or falsehood. . . . I wonder however, that so many people have written, who might have let it alone.’3

If the early eighteenth century can be seen as the first period in English history when it was generally possible (though difficult) to earn a living with one’s pen, then by mid-century it is possible to see writing emerging as a trade itself, delivering diverse products to a public willing to pay for what it reads. Johnson knew both the suffering of a Grub-street hack and the experience of going to a bookseller to get what he could for his work. His own successes in the field, beginning with Edward Cave in the late 1730s, no doubt inform his more tolerant, individualistic view of commercialism in print culture. But Johnson’s views on the subject of just who should get published complicate his laissez-faire stance; authorship was becoming a trade, but Johnson wanted to restrict membership in the guild. Idler number 2 reveals that one group Johnson seeks to bar is made up, ironically, of other tradespeople: I should be indeed unwilling to find that, for the sake of corresponding with the Idler, the smith’s iron had cooled on the anvil, or the spinster’s distaff stood unemployed. I solicit only the contributions of those who have already devoted themselves to literature. . . . 4

Johnson does not embrace learning as a trade for the unlearned. And, as we have seen, he criticizes those former tradesmen, such as James Woodhouse, who had ‘‘devoted themselves to literature’’ with some success. Boswell records that: [Johnson] spoke with much contempt of the notice taken of Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker. He said, it was all vanity and childishness: and

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that such objects were, to those who patronised them, mere mirrours of their own superiority. ‘They had better (said he,) furnish the man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems. He may make an excellent shoemaker, but he can never make a good poet.’5

Johnson’s dismissal of Woodhouse perpetuates a prevailing cultural attitude which attempts to maintain traditional social boundaries through the category of labor, an attitude that renders a poetical shoemaker one of those ‘‘who might have let [writing] alone.’’ Johnson’s support for the commercialization of print culture is thus tempered by the corrupting effects of rampant commercialism on English society as a whole. Johnson believed in the efficacy of a hierarchical society based on birth, and was suspicious of the social trends discernible at mid-century as wealth replaced birth as the standard for defining social rank. But, if learning was becoming a trade, then for Johnson it was to be learning by and for the learned, those impoverished but educated men who, like himself, could benefit from the structural economic changes taking place in English society. Despite Johnson’s reservations, authors of many persuasions, including laboring poets, were earning good money in this period by collecting impressive subscription lists or selling their ‘‘copy’’ to booksellers outright. Fielding received a total of at least £600 for the six volumes of Tom Jones in 1749, and even more—probably £800—for the copyright of Amelia in 1751. Tom Jones sold extremely well, and Fielding’s bookseller, Andrew Millar, no doubt turned a tidy profit on that venture, though he may have overpaid for Amelia, anticipating an even greater demand.6 For his pains, Johnson ended up earning almost £1,600 for his Dictionary (1755), William Robertson pocketed a walloping £4,500 for his Charles V (1769), and Adam Smith was £500 richer for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).7 There was more money to be made in writing and publishing by mid-century than ever before. Among the laboring poets active in this period, Henry Jones, as we have seen, ‘‘was liberally rewarded’’ for his Poems on Several Occasions (1749), and received ‘‘no less than five hundred pounds’’ for the production of Essex (1753) which played to ‘‘very great houses’’ during a highly successful run of eleven consecutive nights.8 Mary Leapor’s benefactors found almost six hundred subscribers for her first volume of poems, Poems upon Several Occasions (1748), and Elizabeth Hands’s Death of Amnon (1789) contains a subscribers’ list of almost twelve hundred names.

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To be sure, long lists of subscribers did not necessarily translate into large sums of ready cash in a poet’s pocket, but these figures represent a tremendous difference in potential earning power, especially when compared to the average earned income of workers from the low to middling ranks of society during the same period. Unskilled laborers working in agriculture or in the streets of London at mid-century could expect to earn little more than ten shillings per week, which would produce an annual income of under £20, and usually more like £10–12 per annum, given the seasonal and unsteady nature of the work itself. In agriculture, the wages earned per family averaged from nine to twelve shillings per week, and each family’s yearly expenses exceeded their earnings by an average of £3 2s. prior to 1765.9 London craftsmen such as bricklayers and carpenters could expect to earn one-third more than unskilled laborers—in the neighborhood of £25 to 35 a year10 —but this was not always the case. Dorothy George notes that at midcentury, few laborers earned over ten shillings a week, and skilled journeymen rarely earned above fifteen shillings per week.11 Higher up the social ladder, annual incomes could reach three figures: merchants and traders of various sorts earned between £200 and 800, and shopkeepers as much as £100 to 200 per year.12 In ‘‘The Author’s Apology,’’ which opens the second edition of his Poems on Several Occasions (1766), James Woodhouse calls his readers’ attention to the fact that his ‘‘original occupation seldom brought me in more than 10l. per annum.’’13 As a journeyman shoemaker, Woodhouse was a skilled artisan, yet he could barely support his growing family on what he earned by his trade in the early 1760s. For a useful comparison, Robert Dodsley paid Johnson ‘‘10 guineas’’ for the publishing rights to London in 1738, the equivalent of a year’s wages for a large segment of the working population in mid-eighteenth-century England.14 It is not surprising, then, that laborers who could make rhymes would want to find a way into print in this period so that they might capitalize on their natural genius, relieve their poverty, and raise themselves from their menial labors. This chapter examines a series of such poets who published between 1748 and the turn of the century. In general, their texts reveal a significant shift in the plebeian use of a poetic discourse on work. The plebeian poets of the 1730s wrote about work as if it was a subject worthy of poetry. Mid- to late-century versifying plebeians, however, are more apt to consider their writing itself as a form of work. Vestiges of the labor realism evident in the 1730s poets remain, of course, as Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and others shed some light on their various daily

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tasks. But the visceral workaday detail which characterized the poetry of Duck and Collier is not to be found here. Instead, the poets publishing at mid-century and after revise an earlier plebeian discourse on work—one that I have located in the 1730s that was characterized by class-specific vocabularies of labor and plebeian testimonies to the hardships of various manual toils—to foreground writing itself as a legitimate form of labor. In this they were reacting to the ideological ramifications of ‘‘idleness’’ still operative in the period, as they also sought access to an expanding literary marketplace. As the following case studies will show, mid- to late-century plebeian poets found themselves caught up in the midst of what amounted to a significant cultural transition in the business of literature: the shift from patronage to market economics. For the aspiring literary plebeian at mid-century, the road to publication inevitably passed through some form of patronage which paradoxically relieved financial distress as it also restricted social mobility and the possibility of a career in letters. As we shall see, the strongest of the plebeian literary voices in the mid- to late-century period criticize the negative cultural attitudes directed toward laborers who could now write their way out of their former workaday toil and, hence, their proper station. A Rural Maid’s Posthumous Success It is tragic that Mary Leapor did not live long enough to enjoy the solitude and leisure that her published poetry surely would have brought her. Unlike other plebeian poets in the century, Leapor was beginning to be canonized shortly after her work appeared, achieving what Richard Greene has described as a ‘‘deuterocanonical status.’’15 For example, as Greene points out, the largest section of the 1755 anthology, Poems by Eminent Ladies, is devoted to Leapor, and the revised edition of 1785 still includes more pages of Leapor’s poetry than any other female poet.16 The account of Leapor prefixed to her first volume of poems in 1748 notes that: Had she lived to correct and finish these first Productions of a young unassisted Genius, certainly they would have been greatly improved, tho’, as they now appear in their native Simplicity, they cannot surely but afford an agreeable Entertainment to the Reader, and serve as a convincing Proof of the common Aphorism, Poeta nascitur, non fit.17

In one sense, Leapor’s untimely death makes this public characterization of her as a natural-born poet an uncomplicated one. When

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she was alive, Leapor struggled against the debilitating views of her superiors, most notably those of her father and her employers, who tried unsuccessfully to control her itch for writing. Because she was dead before her poems could be prepared for publication, questions about Leapor’s doing productive work and knowing her proper place in the social hierarchy were rendered moot. Still, contemporary published accounts of Leapor consistently present her as a model of lower-class virtue; yet, as I shall argue, her poetry undercuts such a neat package of humility and deference. Though not openly rebellious, Leapor was deeply critical of the social limitations imposed on her from above. In her poems she represents ideological resistance against these limitations through her use of satire, a revised poetic discourse on work, and a radical critique of Pope’s class-based moral in the ‘‘Epistle to Burlington.’’ Most of what we know about Leapor comes to us in a letter written by Bridget Freemantle, addressed ‘‘To John *****, Esq.’’ and dated 21 February 1749, which was prefixed to the second volume of Leapor’s poems in 1751. Freemantle was the daughter of a rector, and so came from one of the educated classes above Leapor’s rank, but she nevertheless cultivated a friendship with Leapor in earnest ‘‘about fourteen Months before her Death.’’18 Leapor was born at Marston St. Laurence in Northamptonshire in 1722, where her father worked as a gardener before the family moved to Brackley, in the same county, in 1727. Leapor spent the rest of her days working and writing in this neighborhood. As an adolescent she performed the duties of a domestic servant for the Jennens family at Weston Hall, situated six miles north of Brackley. Leapor also worked for some time, probably before her mother’s death in 1742, as a cook-maid in Edgcote House, the setting for one of her most accomplished poems, ‘‘Crumble-Hall.’’19 After 1742, Leapor ‘‘was engaged in her Father’s Affairs, and the Business of his House, in which she had nobody to assist her’’ (POSO, II, xxii). Leapor died of measles on 12 November 1746 at the age of twenty-four, just as plans for publishing her work by subscription were getting underway. Freemantle was instrumental in this process, and her letter not only provides key biographical information but also constructs Leapor as a palatable plebeian poet for the tastes of her polite readers. Many characteristics noted in the public statements by or about the 1730s poets are still part of the formula for success at mid-century. Freemantle emphasizes Leapor’s natural genius throughout: her honesty—‘‘Deceit and Insincerity of all Kinds she abhorred’’ (xxv); her piety and ‘‘Greatness of Soul’’ (xxii); and her industry,

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especially in that Leapor ‘‘always chose to spend her leisure Hours in Writing and Reading’’ (xxx), and so did not compromise her more productive labor around the house. But, as was the case with Henry Jones, Leapor’s name, and not her former occupation, appears on the title page to each volume. The 1748 address ‘‘To the Reader’’ also emphasizes that Leapor is a member of the deserving poor, and argues that she was ‘‘contented in the Station of Life in which Providence had placed her’’ (POSO, I, [ii]). In a statement which perfectly mutes upper-class objections to plebeian social elevation achieved through writing for money, Freemantle notes: Her chief Ambition seem’d to be to have such a Competency as might leave her at Liberty to enjoy the Company of a Friend, and indulge her scribbling Humour (as she call’d it) when she had a mind, without Inconvenience or Interruption. (POSO, II, xxii–xxiii)

Freemantle effectively writes around the issue of Leapor’s performing the productive labor required of one in her station. Leapor’s ‘‘Ambition,’’ according to Freemantle, is merely to gain the time to write, which she justifies by invoking the subject of Leapor’s innate natural genius—her ‘‘scribbling Humour.’’ Leapor’s parents tried to break her of this writing habit, but found ‘‘it impossible to alter her natural Inclination’’ (xxx). Leapor does not represent a threat to her social betters both because she is dead and because of the fact that the subscription money will go to support her father who, after Leapor’s death, was alone in his old age. That her two subscriptions were so successful can be attributed to the terms of her advertisement, as reflected in Freemantle’s texts, for the first volume, and the influence in the literary world of her editor, Isaac Hawkins Browne, and her publisher, Samuel Richardson, for the second. A letter seeking subscribers was circulated in January 1747, its case for support no doubt augmented by the first appearance of Leapor’s poetry in print in the January number of The London Magazine. We can assume the timing was no mere coincidence; the poem itself seems carefully chosen from Leapor’s extensive work because it presents an argument soliciting upper-class support from Leapor’s own pen. The poem was titled ‘‘The Rural Maid’s Reflexions’’ for periodical publication, but, oddly enough, given its apparent value in popularizing Leapor, it was left out of the 1748 volume, an omission that also seems purposeful. However, with a few minor changes, it was retitled ‘‘To Lucinda’’ and included in the 1751 volume of Leapor’s verse. Critics have noted that this second volume contains Leapor’s more strident, socially conscious poems. The fact

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that ‘‘The Rural Maid’s Reflexions’’ was chosen to introduce Leapor to a polite reading public, but was withheld from the 1748 volume, suggests a complexity to the poem that has not been fully explored.20 Either its novelty was considered faded by periodical publication, or perhaps Hawkins Browne (who may also have edited the 1748 volume)21 thought the poem more thematically in tune with the protest poems which predominate in the second volume. As it appeared in The London Magazine, this epistle is indeed a strong example of Leapor’s manipulation of the cultural norms that govern the appearance of plebeian poetic genius at mid-century. The poet addresses a woman of higher social standing, ‘‘Lucinda,’’ and essentially compares her own condition to Lucinda’s. In this comparison, Leapor must handle the problem of potentially giving offense as she articulates her desire for patronage. The opening compliment therefore includes an implied acceptance of the hierarchical social system under which both women live: Lucinda, favourite of indulgent heaven, To whom its blessings are profusely given, By nature with each useful talent grac’d, In an exalted sphere by fortune plac’d, ............................ Accept this tribute of a rural maid Who longs, assisted by thy friendly aid, To noblest themes her artless voice to raise And strives to sing her great Creator’s praise;22

The difference in social rank between the poet and Lucinda is ordained by God, but Leapor also knows that Lucinda holds the earthly power to provide material ‘‘aid’’ to a struggling laborerpoet. With such support, Leapor would be better able to write poetry which celebrated their mutual ‘‘Creator,’’ whose laws Leapor shows she understands. Leapor, however, comes close to rejecting those divine laws in describing her current situation: While in laborious toil I spent my hours, Employ’d to cultivate the springing flowers: Happy, I cry’d, are those, who leisure find With care, like this, to cultivate their mind; But partial fate to me this bliss denies To search for knowledge with unwearied eyes, To turn, well pleased, th’ instructive volume o’er, The secret springs of science to explore, (45)

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Working in her father’s garden places severe limitations on the poet for she has no time to read and ‘‘cultivate’’ her mind. This burdensome toil Leapor blames on ‘‘partial’’—not natural—fate. Fate’s partiality is implicitly unacceptable to the poet, and so reads as a critique of the theological argument that is central to the maintenance of a rigid social hierarchy. But, lest her envy of ‘‘leisure’’ be misinterpreted, Leapor connects the issue of her own education to divine law in a remarkable passage: ’Tis not your pomp, your titles, or your state, That move my envy, O ye rich and great; The noblest gift God can on man bestow, Is teaching him his sacred will to know; Th’ Almighty’s sacred will’s to you reveal’d, But from the ignorant in clouds conceal’d; The chains of want forbid my soul to rise When she would soar to reach her kindred skies. (45)

This is a far more sophisticated argument than we saw in the ‘‘Wish’’ poems of Bancks and Tatersal. Leapor effectively distances herself from any vain and inappropriate aspirations for wealth and social rank while at once communicating the desire for monetary relief to free her ‘‘soul.’’ The ‘‘chains of want’’ can only be broken with money which, once secured, will allow Leapor to emerge from the clouds of ignorance and assume a place in the ‘‘kindred skies’’ of poetic genius. These skies, she points out, are ‘‘her[s]’’ and not those of her potential polite patrons; her desire is not to challenge her social betters, but to cultivate her innate poetic gifts. This is deft handling of the tension between writing to appease readerly expectations, and writing to voice personal desire—especially because Leapor’s desire can be viewed as socially disruptive by the class of people she is addressing. The final section of the poem features a disembodied voice which addresses the poet as a ‘‘rash impious maid,’’ and the lines, composed of course by Leapor herself, serve in a backhanded way to restore her piety in the reader’s eye: One little book the mighty sum contains, To all alike their Father’s will explains: To all, who with sincere and humble hearts, Resolve to seek them, God his laws imparts. (45)

The ‘‘little book’’ is the Bible, and thus Leapor in this poem couples a deferential piety with her socially critical edge. She effectively

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critiques the theological argument for justifying social distinctions by desacralizing ‘‘fate,’’ but this does not include a wholesale indictment of ‘‘God’’ and his ‘‘laws.’’ Ultimately, the poem is successful in presenting Leapor in culturally acceptable terms as a plebeian poet, with one residual contradiction that emerges from the preceding discussion. We have seen Leapor discuss ‘‘partial fate’’ and ‘‘the chains of want’’ which together keep her engaged in menial labor and stymie her poetic imagination. These are two aspects of her life which render Leapor neither happy nor content. Yet, she also states emphatically that ‘‘Tho’ different stations are assign’d by heaven, / Virtue and happiness to all are given’’ (45). These lines appear in the last section of the poem, and, knowing that Leapor does not simply accept her fate, they read as an ironic ventriloquizing of polite dogma. We do not see Leapor-the-poet invested in this sentiment, on the contrary in fact, and so there remains an important internal contradiction in a poem in which Leapor otherwise meets the expectations of her polite readers. It is difficult, of course, to know if eighteenth-century readers would have understood this as a contradiction. Most readers would have been looking for precisely the sort of resignation this couplet implies as an appropriate resolution to the problems a disadvantaged poet faced. But it does seem that Leapor is a crafty enough poet—her mentors in the trade being Pope and Swift23 —that she could be leveling a critique aimed at readerly expectations, satirizing a common argument made by polite society to justify a social system which seeks to keep uneducated servants in their proper place. Leapor is quite capable of flying the banners of plebeian deference, humility, and piety, but she does not necessarily remain standing underneath them. Leapor’s desire to get into print is in fact less muted than her first published piece indicates, and so the tension between her workaday tasks as a domestic servant and her work as a writer is a dominant theme in her poetry as a whole. Evidence that Leapor was serious about her writing as an alternative career must be read against the many direct statements she makes which seem to indicate the contrary. Leapor makes the expected references to her artlessness, and, in letters appended to her second volume, describes her poems as ‘‘only a Parcel of chequer’d Thoughts, scarce tolerable when together; but, if we part them, they make a sad Figure,’’ and further on characterizes her work as ‘‘unprofitable Invention’’ (POSO, II, 315, 323). Such self-deprecating remarks are made, in part, to satisfy her polite readers that she does not harbor inappropriate degrees of self-love or literary ambition. But there are opportunities

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for reading between the lines. Freemantle records the following observations when the subject of a subscription was broached between them: My mentioning a Subscription, I believe, occasioned her Poem, call’d Mopsus, or, The Castle Builder; and I indulg’d my Curiosity in calling upon her often, to see how she carried it on. It was really amazeing [sic] to see how fast she advanc’d in it; her Thoughts seeming to flow as fast as she could put them upon Paper; and I am persuaded, that many beautiful ones have been lost for want of Leisure to write them. (POSO, II, xx)

Mopsus is Leapor’s longest poem, taking up thirty-two pages in the second volume, and it appears that the thought of publishing drove Leapor to turn out more substantial work. By suggesting that ‘‘many beautiful [poems] have been lost for want of Leisure to write them,’’ Freemantle indirectly supports Leapor’s vocation for poetry. Both Leapor and her primary handlers are wrestling with the opportunities offered by a burgeoning literary marketplace, and traditional cultural attitudes regarding social rank and proper vocation circulating in the period. The values that inform these attitudes, as we have seen, form a conservative class-based ideology that attempts to enforce old relationships between social rank and work. Ultimately, it is Leapor herself who will articulate more substantive resistance against the restrictive features of that ideology in her published verse. The division of labor—between work, defined as socially productive and socially acceptable endeavor, and writing, defined as idle and generally unproductive work, especially for a plebeian woman—is a recurrent issue for Leapor throughout both volumes of her published verse. On every occasion, Leapor uses her talents as a poet to expose the injustices inherent in the class-based arguments about work she faced. The force of Leapor’s critique is more easily felt in her second volume, but does emerge even in what seem to be the most benign poems of the 1748 collection. For example, in ‘‘The Ten-Penny Nail,’’ Leapor describes a vision which came to her after she nodded off trying to compose a poem about ‘‘Amanda’s Riddle of the Nail’’ (POSO, I, 125). In its lengthy monologue which follows, the nail chronicles a life of industry and use-value: ‘‘ ‘Yet many Ages I have known, / ‘And double with my Labours grown’’ (127). This speech ends, however, with the following reproach directed at the poet herself: ‘Now if a proper Post I knew, ‘I’d gladly be of use to you;

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‘But you resolve to hide no Pelf, ‘And choose to walk abroad yourself: ‘But, Mira, these are dang’rous Times, ‘I’d have you fasten up your Rhymes; ‘And ‘tis the best thing you can do, ‘To nail up Pens and Paper too: ‘Do this and get thee gone to spinning, ‘Or wisely dearn your Father’s Linen.’’ (130–131)

Thus Leapor is upbraided for her independent spirit and for writing when she should be performing more productive labor, such as ‘‘spinning’’ or mending her father’s clothes. But we would do well to recall Leapor’s propensity for satire, and the fact that these words issue from the mouth of a talking ten-penny nail. Leapor notes that it is ‘‘A Nail of more than common Size; / ’Twas one that nails our Garden Door,’’ and so it appears as a substantial but quite normal object (126). In diminishing the speaker of this passage as a tenpenny nail, Leapor provides a fissure through which we can read her critique of the ethos of its monologue. Much like John Philips’s burlesque in The Splendid Shilling (1705), Leapor’s satire in this poem turns on the fact that an inanimate object is responsible for communicating views which the poet satirizes.24 The nail finally disappears, the poet wakes, and Leapor in fact will not nail up her pens and paper because the actual writing of the poem itself takes place after the vision has ended. Leapor thus constructs herself as ‘‘Poet’’ despite the predominate contemporary view of her as merely a ‘‘rhyming Sinner’’ (125). ‘‘The Ten-Penny Nail,’’ then, is yet another of those conventional poetic forms through which a plebeian author speaks desires that are potentially disruptive to the existing social order.25 A subsequent poem in the same volume entitled ‘‘The Proposal’’ shows Leapor actively presenting herself to her readership as a serious poet. The poem recreates the advice of her ‘‘Muse,’’ given appropriately as Leapor trudges home ‘‘to her own good Sire’’ after talking with one of her supporters, probably Freemantle, about printing her work (173). The poet notes that her Muse was ‘‘much offended / (It seems) at what was there intended,’’ (173) specifically in terms of the proposal for Leapor’s printing some verses in the periodical press: ‘But, Mira, if you want a Muse, ‘To grace the Page of weekly News, ‘The Task is much too low for me, ‘Yet I’ve a Maid of less Degree,

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.................. ‘Whose Voice, tho’ hoarse, is loud and strong, ‘An Artist at a ranting Song, ‘Can chaunt Lampoons without much straining, ‘Or Epigrams with double Meaning, (174)

The Muse’s speech concludes with an open question for Leapor the poet: ‘Perhaps you’ll prosper in the End, ‘I’ll say no more: But ask your Friend, ‘Here ends the Muse—Dear Madam, say, ‘Shall I reject her or obey? (175)

Leapor is aware of the various opportunities to ‘‘prosper’’ in the literary marketplace at mid-century, but her Muse advises her to avoid ‘‘the safest way’’ into print—the ‘‘dirty Gazettes’’—because they represent an ignoble medium for any true poet (175, 174). Thus Leapor will obey her Muse, but the poem is silent (as it should be) on the subject of Leapor’s higher ambitions to publish. Given that her second volume contains those poems deemed by the subscription organizers as potentially offensive to polite readers, it is not surprising that its pages reveal Leapor taking more risks and standing her ground more forcefully with regard to her ambitions as a poet. The satire evident in ‘‘The Epistle of Deborah Dough’’ on the division of work and writing is, for example, more specific and incisive than the satire noted in ‘‘The Ten-Penny Nail.’’ In the former poem, Leapor characterizes her own situation through the persona of Deborah Dough in a letter to her ‘‘beloved Cousin’’ (POSO, II, 68). In a detailed argument in which she values domestic labor over writing, Deborah Dough compares Leapor (in the figure of ‘‘Neighbour Mary’’) to her daughter Cicely: But I forgot our Neighbour Mary; Our, Neighbour Mary,—who, they say, Sits scribble-scribble all the Day, And making—what—I can’t remember; But sure ’tis something like December; A frosty Morning—Let me see— O! now I have it to a T. She throws away her precious Time In scrawling nothing else but Rhyme; Of which, they say, she’s mighty proud, And lifts her Nose above the Croud; Tho’ my young Daughter Cicely

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Is taller by a Foot than she, And better learnt (as People say): Can knit a Stocken in a Day: Can make a Pudden, plump and rare; And boil her Bacon, to a Hair: Will coddle Apples nice and green, And fry her Pancakes—like a Queen. (68–69)

Leapor is roundly criticized by Dough for her idleness and useless scribbling, which produces only ‘‘Rhyme,’’ while Cicely is championed, somewhat ironically for her learning, but more importantly because she can make real things with her labor: stockings, pudding, and other delectable foods. Greene argues that Leapor’s satire in this passage ‘‘is directed against a standard of value, indeed, a division of labour, based on class and gender.’’26 This statement rings true as far as it goes, but Greene leaves out of his analysis the character Leapor creates to speak these lines. Leapor is satirizing a ‘‘standard of value’’ which places simple domestic labor above writing for a woman of her social station, but she is also mocking the lower-class simpleton who so wholeheartedly accepts this view. The story about ‘‘Neighbour Mary’’ is one of a series which make up the epistle that present Dough, ironically, as an idle gossip. The direction of Leapor’s satire is a complex issue precisely because Dough is, like the poet, a lower-class rustic. Through Dough, Leapor shows the profound ideological thrust of the cultural attitudes about work and writing we have seen in circulation in the period as Dough (but not Leapor) perceives as natural a predominantly class-based view of proper work for a ‘‘rustic’’ woman. Thus far Leapor has discussed productive domestic work as an abstract concept in her poetry, avoiding explicit mention of her own former workaday experience. But in one of her most striking poems in the second volume, ‘‘Crumble-Hall,’’ Leapor breaks this pattern and uses a poetic discourse on work recognizable as a development from the labor poems of Duck and Collier in the 1730s. Both Duck and Collier used this poetic discourse to transform established poetic kinds, the pastoral and the georgic, and so too does Leapor, who rewrites the country house poem27—or more precisely, the aberration of the genre that is Pope’s ‘‘Epistle to Burlington.’’ As agricultural workers, Duck and Collier had the real work experience to disrupt a specific tradition of poetry—the pastoral—which consistently misrepresented the sweat and toil of harvest laborers as shepherds and shepherdesses lolling by a stream. It follows that

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Leapor likewise should use her experience as a domestic servant in a great house near Brackley to achieve similar ends in a different, but equally fitting poetic form. Who better to disrupt the model of country house panegyric than one exploited to keep the house clean and prepare food for its occupants? And, who better to confront the class-based moral of Pope’s ‘‘Epistle to Burlington’’ than one subjectified by its implications? ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ reveals Leapor engaged in the process of ideology critique because her critical voice rests on her intimate knowledge, her view from the inside, of country house working arrangements in the period. The country house poem, or ‘‘estate poem’’ as Alastair Fowler has recently argued it should be labeled, flourished throughout the seventeenth century.28 Ben Jonson’s ‘‘To Penshurst’’ (1616), ostensibly celebrating the Sidney family home, is perhaps the best known of the kind, but the genre also attracted efforts from Carew, Herrick, Marvell, and a wide range of lesser talents. While there is no classical tradition these poems emerge from, ‘‘To Penshurst’’ defines the central attitudes and characteristics of the genre as a whole at this time. In it Jonson handles a new form of ‘‘deflected praise’’ popular in the early seventeenth century; his poem is literally addressed to a house, but its purpose is foremost to praise its owners. Thus Jonson praises his patrons with more grace than sycophancy in addressing a poem to their house.29 G. R. Hibbard notes that: There is nothing ‘‘patronizing’’ in the patronage of Sir Robert Sidney or Lord Fairfax, and nothing servile in the gratitude of Ben Jonson or Andrew Marvell; both poet and patron are parts of an organic whole, each recognizes the importance and place of the other in the life of the community.30

These poems, then, are both born out of this social milieu and seek to uphold its values. Country house poems of this period value positively a hierarchical society based on birth and property, the organic whole in which every member has and knows his or her place. Jonson achieves this sense by imagining Penshurst as a perfect product of this society; the house is symbolic of the ideal productive relations between gentlemen and laborers, with the power to obliterate social distinctions: And though thy walls be of country stone, They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; There’s none that dwell about them wish them down; But all come in, the farmer and the clown,31

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As a former bricklayer himself, we might expect Jonson to expose the realities of low wages and difficult work characteristic of the trade. But Jonson is writing not as a former groaning bricklayer, but as a professional poet fulfilling his duty to his patron. Raymond Williams has observed that Jonson mystifies the laborers responsible for the house’s very existence, as he does above, and for its daily operation, as he does elsewhere in the poem. According to Williams, while the products of their labor enter the poem, the producers themselves do not as ‘‘their work is all done for them by a natural order.’’32 However, there is a reference in ‘‘To Penshurst’’ to one worker who remains outside of the organic social world Jonson celebrates in the poem, despite a strained attempt to include him. This worker is, appropriately enough, a male domestic servant in the Sidney house. Jonson introduces him during the scene in which poet, patron, and other guests are dining at table: Here no man tells my cups, nor, standing by, A waiter, doth my gluttony envy, But gives me what I call, and lets me eat; He knows below he shall find plenty of meat, (90)

The waiter performs his tasks as he should, and Jonson incorporates him into the happy social framework by noting that he will find sustenance enough after his work is done. But the fact remains that the waiter, unlike the poet, is not eating at the same table; indeed, he must eat his meat ‘‘below’’ in the kitchen or in the area set apart for the servants. If Jonson’s poem on one level seeks to obscure the inequalities of social power which inform this distinction, then Leapor’s ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’—written from the perspective of the servant below—makes them painfully clear. It is quite possible that Leapor was not familiar with the poets who wrote country house poems in the early seventeenth century, but she no doubt came to the genre in a roundabout way through Pope’s ‘‘Epistle to Burlington.’’33 Hibbard observes that, despite a lack of generic equivalents after Marvell’s ‘‘Upon Appleton House’’ (wr. 1651), the view of life on which it rests is still present in Pope’s Epistle to Burlington, where the scale of values stated with such strength and conviction in To Penshurst is used as a standard of sense and taste against which to weigh the aberrations and excesses of Timon.34

‘‘ ‘What sums are thrown away!’ ’’ cry out the poet and others who view ‘‘Timon’s Villa.’’35 This imagined great house is the occasion

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for Pope’s venting at the Brobdingnagian proportions of modern country estates—‘‘To compass this, his building is a Town, / His pond an Ocean, his parterre a Down’’ (147)—and so the conspicuous consumption of their aristocratic owners. Whereas the house was the poetic vehicle for praise in the seventeenth-century poems, it has become in Pope’s poem a vehicle for a series of satiric blows, leveled specifically at men of the highest rank who abuse their wealth in Timonesque fits of vanity. Pope takes care, however, to show that certain aristocratic arbiters of good taste and ‘‘Sense’’— Bathurst and Burlington—are not the subjects of his satire (154). Thus Pope’s critical view is limited to the Timons of his day and he does not question the social values and ideological underpinnings of a society which sustains such people. Leapor rewrites Pope’s version of the country house poem and effectively turns his satiric mode into a significant ideological critique of the productive social relations which support the existence of elaborate country houses and their families. Leapor answers Pope’s ironic moral of the ‘‘Epistle to Burlington’’ from within. Pope argues that ‘‘a bad Taste employs more hands, and diffuses Expence more than a good one’’: Yet hence the Poor are cloath’d, the Hungry fed; Health to himself, and to his Infants Bread The Lab’rer bears: What his hard Heart denies, His charitable Vanity supplies. (153)

Timon’s excesses have an ironic trickle-down effect, according to Pope, because it takes laborers to raise the piles and plant the gardens, and so aristocratic vanity becomes a form of charity. But Pope, like Jonson before him, erases the hardships of the work itself, and takes as axiomatic the social distinction between those who toil and those who do not. As a former domestic servant at Edgcote House, Leapor speaks from the sort of internal vantage unavailable to a Pope or a Jonson. Her experience inside the walls allows Leapor to use a poetic discourse that is qualitatively different from the panegyric of Jonson or the satiric instruction of Pope— both of which place the poet on the outside looking in at his subject. Pope can criticize certain country houses in his poem, but Leapor can level a more serious and far-reaching critique in hers because of this difference in perspective. Leapor’s internal view is established in ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ through a series of details at the beginning of the poem which show the poet’s intimate knowledge of the house from the perspective of one

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who works within it. Landry terms these details ‘‘incongruous disclosures’’ because they undermine the house’s ‘‘pretensions to awesome gentility,’’ but such disclosures are entirely congruent with the servant’s view which structures the entire poem.36 For instance, Leapor describes the cavernous entryway just inside the front doors of the house with a servant’s eye for detail: The Roof—no Cyclops e’er could reach so high: Not Polypheme, tho’ form’d for dreadful Harms, The Top could measure with extended Arms. Here the pleas’d Spider plants her peaceful Loom: Here weaves secure, nor dreads the hated Broom. (POSO, II, 113)

The observation that the spider’s web is safe from ‘‘the hated Broom’’ is possible, we infer, because the poet herself once tried, or was ordered, to remove it. That we ‘‘step within’’ the great house and see a lowly spider along with the ‘‘oaken Pillars’’ and strange carvings with ‘‘Some Mouths that grin, some smile, and some that spew’’ suggests further that we see the hall through a servant’s eyes (113). Leapor refrains from providing images of material splendor, inserting instead more workaday details of the house with which she would have been familiar: she notes that a heraldic piece in the hallway needs to be ‘‘furbish’d once a Year’’ (114); that mice often run ‘‘safely’’ through a hall just off this main entry because ‘‘the dim Windows ne’er admit the Sun’’ (114); and that one needs to bend down when climbing the back stairs, otherwise, ‘‘you may break your Head’’ (117). Leapor therefore constructs her internal view not only through details she would have seen, but also through things we expect she might have done or experienced as a domestic servant. Hence she describes a material world within the great house that is defined largely by labor, her labor of having to clean the house and its stuff, rather than presenting (or even celebrating) a world defined by the emblems of consumption, status, and inherited wealth. From the entry way, we then embark on a tour of the house distinctive for its obvious contrasts in tone, perspective, and descriptive sense to Jonson’s ‘‘To Penshurst.’’ Jonson affects a controlled but celebratory tone in his poem—‘‘These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and not yet all’’ (91)—while Leapor’s tone is casual, even pedestrian, as she describes the ‘‘rude Palace’’: ‘‘We count the Stairs, and to the Right ascend’’ (112, 115). The speaker of ‘‘To Penshurst’’ also seems to have a bird’s-eye view of the house and grounds, as if he were flying over all and presenting what he sees

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to the reader. Perhaps taking her cue from Pope, who at times records the defects of Timon’s Villa in terms of his reader’s physical presence—‘‘And when up ten steep slopes you’ve dragged your thighs’’ (150)—Leapor actually walks her reader through Edgcote House from room to room.37 Thus Leapor brings the great house down to human level, its rooms notable only for their ordinariness: See! yon brown Parlour on the Left appears, For nothing famous, but its leathern Chairs, Whose shining Nails like polish’d Armour glow, And the dull Clock beats audible and slow. (114)

Those things within certain rooms which might merit a poet’s aesthetic notice are merely named and the description consciously muted by Leapor: Gay China Bowls o’er the broad Chimney shine, Whose long Description would be too sublime: And much might of the Tapestry be sung: But we’re content to say, The Parlour’s hung. (115)

The combined effect of glimpsing but not singing the praises of the material beauties of Edgcote House is to disrupt the generic standards of country house poems, and criticize by negation a segment of society that overvalues its material wealth. Not only is the stuff of Edgcote House both there and not there in the poet’s descriptive tour, so too its aristocratic owners, whose presence is everywhere implied but nowhere seen. The guided tour continues until we reach a small door which opens onto a parapet that affords a cascading view of the magnificent grounds. Yet Leapor once again thwarts the generic standards of the country house model: Here a gay Prospect meets the ravish’d Eye: Meads , Fields, and Groves, in beauteous Order lie. From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl’d, And drags down Mira to the nether World. (117)

Leapor devotes a mere two lines to this grand view of the estate, and then plunges below to the kitchen where the important work of the house takes place. This is the part of the house that exists only outside of Jonson’s ‘‘To Penshurst,’’ where the waiter will go and eat after serving his social betters, but Leapor actually includes a description of what Greene has called ‘‘the specialized cookery’’ of

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this kitchen.38 Here we meet ‘‘Sophronia,’’ who will ‘‘keep her Station, tho’ in Mira’s Rhyme’’ (118). It is difficult to know just who Sophronia represents for Leapor, but in all likelihood she is not the matriarch of the house because she actually engages in kitchen work: Sophronia sage! whose learned Knuckles know To form round Cheese-cakes of the pliant Dough; To bruise the Curd, and thro’ her fingers squeeze Ambrosial Butter with the temper’d Cheese: Sweet Tarts and Pudden, too, her Skill declare; And the soft Jellies, hid from baneful Air. (118)

Leapor’s reference to Sophronia’s higher station indicates only that she was above Leapor in the hierarchy of servants in the house, and Leapor probably received orders from her.39 Though we never meet any of the aristocratic residents of Edgcote House—Valerie Rumbold notes ‘‘the gentry seem to have evaporated’’—the poem is, however, peopled with mechanics once we enter the kitchen (72). One domestic named ‘‘Urs’la’’ provides a detailed catalog of her labors, spoken to her unconscious fellow, ‘‘Roger,’’ who lies sprawled on the kitchen table: ‘‘For thee these Hands wind up the whirling Jack, ‘‘Or place the Spit across the sloping Rack. ‘‘I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart, ‘‘Because I know my Roger will have Part.’’ Thus she—But now her Dish-kettle began To boil and blubber with the foaming Bran. The greasy Apron round her Hips she ties, And to each Plate the scalding Clout applies: The purging Bath each glowing Dish refines, And once again the polish’d Pewter shines. (119–20)

These are the daily tasks we expect Leapor herself to have performed during her time in service. Although she displaces this description of work into the mouth of a character in her poem, Leapor nevertheless uses a poetic discourse on work that further establishes her internal perspective, as it also subverts the conventions of the country house genre. According to Fowler, ‘‘estate poems’’ fall within the broader mode of the georgic, not the pastoral, and in keeping with the elements of that tradition, they can include the treatment of husbandry and seasonal labor.40 Leapor’s treatment of kitchen work thus represents a form of labor that stands outside of

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both the georgic and country house traditions. These details, however, are but the building blocks for the severe ideological critique the poem levels at its conclusion. The final section of ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ reveals that Leapor’s critique, her muse’s ‘‘Vengeance,’’ is aimed specifically at a classbased ideology which values artifice over nature, or more precisely, artifice at the expense of nature (121). Pope had satirized bad taste in building houses and planting gardens in the ‘‘Epistle to Burlington,’’ but Leapor extends the critical vein and takes on the social values which support the entire process, no matter what the end result looks like. The question of ‘‘good’’ versus ‘‘bad’’ taste, which drives Pope’s poem, is not a coherent one for Leapor. Instead she calls into question the effects of a new economic order, and voices a lament at the loss of a traditional way of life: But hark! what Scream the wond’ring Ear invades! The Dryads howling for their threaten’d Shades: Round the dear Grove each Nymph distracted flies (Tho’ not discover’d but with a Poet’s Eyes): And shall those Shades, where Philomela’s Strain Has oft to Slumber lull’d the hapless Swain; Where Turtles us’d to clap their silken Wings; Whose rev’rend Oaks have known a hundred Springs; Shall these ignobly from their Roots be torn, And perish shameful, as the abject Thorn; While the slow Carr bears off their aged Limbs, To clear the Way for Slopes and modern Whims; Where banish’d Nature leaves a barren Gloom, And aukward Art supplies the vacant Room? (121)

Leapor’s invocation of Philomela, who was deceived, raped, and silenced by Tereus, effectively represents a parallel process the poet sees taking place with Nature around Crumble-Hall. The pastoral tropes which appear in this passage—nymphs, groves, and ‘‘the hapless Swain’’—symbolize for Leapor an older, natural world which is passing, displaced by the progress of capitalist enterprise, ‘‘the slow Carr’’ and its ‘‘modern Whims.’’ These whims are the backbone of luxury and the scourge of the land, and, in this sense, Leapor’s sentiment would not have offended a Johnson or a Goldsmith. It is worth noting Leapor’s emphasis on life and movement in every aspect of her tour of the inanimate pile that is Crumble-Hall. From the beginning, the poet relates a nostalgic image of the house teeming with life-sustaining food (112); the house itself seems

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alive, given the personified carvings in the entryway (113); a spider ‘‘weaves’’ her ‘‘Loom’’ and mice ‘‘run’’ about the passageways (113, 114); ‘‘steaming Odours’’ from Sophronia’s kitchen ‘‘fly’’ about the house, interrupting the tour even before we reach the kitchen (114); Urs’la berates her sleeping Roger in the kitchen (119); and the poet finally lets her ‘‘frolick Fancy rove’’ to the (threatened) natural environs around the house (120). This is not a static poem, and the progression of details that convey a sense of life and activity is central to Leapor’s argument championing Nature. Those details take on an ironic feel when viewed in the context of the poem’s culminating image of new construction: ‘‘Their newbuilt Parlour shall with Echoes ring: / And in their Hall shall doleful Crickets sing’’ (122). Country house panegyric is undermined, finally, by the sounds of destroyed Nature, and the dirge of mournful crickets. For Leapor, there is no celebration of human artifice, ‘‘aukward Art,’’ constructed at the expense of ‘‘Nature,’’ as her earlier engagement in the plebeian pastoral tradition bears out. In ‘‘The Month of August,’’ ‘‘Sylvanus’’ attempts to woo ‘‘Phillis’’ with promises of Penshurstian splendor: But Art shall teach us to evade [Orion’s] Ray, And the forc’d Fountains near the Windows play; There choice Perfumes shall give a pleasing Gale, And Orange-flow’rs their od’rous Breath exhale, While on the Walls the well-wrought Paintings glow, And dazzling Carpets deck the Floors below: (POSO, I, 36; italics mine)

To which Phillis replies: Believe me, I can find no Charms at all In your fine Carpets and your painted Hall. ‘Tis true our Parlour has an earthen Floor, The Sides of Plaster and of Elm the Door: Yet the rub’d Chest and Table sweetly shines, And the spread Mint along the Window climbs: An aged Laurel keeps away the Sun, And two cool Streams across the Garden run. (36; italics mine)

I have highlighted these passages to show how Sylvanus woos with a language of artifice, and how Phillis refuses with a language of nature. Through this juxtaposition of diction, Leapor attacks the positive cultural value placed on ‘‘art’’ as progress, and goes on to

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demystify the notion that such progress is made without costs in terms of human labor and the loss of natural resources. In lines reminiscent of those describing the game giving itself up for human consumption in ‘‘To Penshurst,’’ Sylvanus argues that ‘‘The ransack’d Earth shall all its Dainties send, / Till with its Load her plenteous Table bend’’ (37); an image which Phillis counters by highlighting the human labor which provides the plenty at her table: ‘‘This Night to feast with Corydon I go: / To Night his Reapers bring in the gather’d Grain’’ (37). Leapor, in effect, revalues the dominant Enlightenment values associated with art and nature to attack a predominant class-based ideology which makes Crumble-Halls and Timon’s Villas possible. ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ ends with the notion that the ‘‘new-built Parlour’’ will be haunted by the ghosts of ravaged nature, the fallen and now dead resources that went into its building (POSO, II, 122). To be sure, Leapor does not share in Pope’s ironic moral of the ‘‘Epistle to Burlington.’’ She does not speak as one of those laborers enfranchised through aristocratic bad taste and vain spending. Whereas Pope throws his satiric darts at specific features of Timon’s Villa (and the people responsible for them), Leapor attacks the value system on which the whole rests. The key to understanding this difference in magnitude between their protests is found in their respective definitions of Nature. Pope, in one of his more earnestly didactic moments in ‘‘Burlington,’’ argues that Nature should serve as a model for human imitation: To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend, To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot; In all, let Nature never be forgot. (142)

Pope means for his readers to take this maxim to heart, as Burlington and Bathurst apparently have. As a model for human endeavor, especially in terms of the proper pursuit of artifice, Pope’s ‘‘Nature’’ is valued positively, but is subordinated to art, to man’s progress, none the less. Pope thus glosses over the paradox inherent in hacking down oaks to build a natural house, with destroying Nature to produce or clear the way for natural art. Leapor’s ‘‘Nature’’ does not share Pope’s Enlightenment assumption of value. Indeed, Nature for Leapor is not a foil for human art; it is distinctly other and it is hurting, ‘‘Scream[ing],’’ she notes, under the weight of modern development (121).41 ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ can be read, then, as a critique of the sort of progressivist class-based ideology that Pope still

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supports despite his satire of certain country houses and their owners. Leapor uses her internal perspective to push beyond Pope’s moral criticism and challenges the value system of her society by issuing a sharp critique directed at its ideological foundations. Leapor’s poetic protests, however, do not always demand the intertextual reading required to make sense of ‘‘Crumble-Hall.’’ Often Leapor simply speaks her views directly by representing herself as a character in her own writing. The issue of writing as useful work comes to a head in ‘‘An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’’ in which Sophronia, her superior in the servant hierarchy at Edgcote House, upbraids Leapor for her writing. Leapor records the exchange between Sophronia and herself-as-servant with remarkable dramatic detail: Then comes Sophronia, like a barb’rous Turk: ‘‘You thoughtless Baggage, when d’ye mind your Work? ‘‘Still o’er a Table leans your bending Neck: ‘‘Your Head will grow prepost’rous, like a Peck. ‘‘Go, ply your Needle: You might earn your Bread; ‘‘Or who must feed you when your Father’s dead?’’ [Mira] sobbing answers, ‘‘Sure, I need not come ‘‘To you for Lectures; I have store at home. ‘‘What can I do?’’ ‘‘—Not scribble.’’ ‘‘—But I will.’’ ‘‘Then get thee packing—and be aukward still.’’ (POSO, II, 52)

Sophronia argues that Leapor should give up her pen and ‘‘ply her needle’’ to earn the money needed should she outlive her father. Significantly, Sophronia does not accuse Leapor of writing when she was supposed to be working in the house; Sophronia’s concern is with Leapor’s use of her leisure time. A correspondent to The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1784, who apparently knew Leapor, wrote (Johnson-like) that ‘‘[Leapor’s] fondness for writing verses [at Edgcote House] displayed itself by her sometimes taking up her pen while the jack was standing still, and the meat scorching.’’42 We cannot know who is telling the truth, but both Sophronia’s and this correspondent’s criticisms are the products of a hierarchical society attempting to maintain the traditional borders on its productive relations. Leapor disrupts those boundaries with her defiant answer to Sophronia’s dictum to ‘‘not scribble.’’ Her ‘‘but I will’’ apparently gets her fired, but eventually leads to her turning poet: Thus wrapp’d in Sorrow, wretched Mira lay, Till Artemisia swept the Gloom away:

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The laughing Muse, by her Example led, Shakes her glad Wings, and quits the drowsy Bed. (53)

‘‘Artemisia’’ is Bridget Freemantle,43 the friend who effectively managed Leapor’s early public presentation. As she prepares for poetic flight, Leapor’s muse could very well be laughing at the Sophronias in her life who tried to control her desire to write. In addition, Leapor describes her actual writing of verses as laborious in the ‘‘Epistle to Artemisia,’’ which suggests an internal contradiction to Freemantle’s account of her published in the same volume. Freemantle creates a picture of Leapor-the-writer which obscures any sense of labor in her producing rhymes: She always call’d it being idle, and indulging her whimsical Humour, when she was employed in writing the humorous Parts of her Poems; and nothing could pique her more than Peoples imagining she took a great deal of Pains, or spent a great deal of Time, in such Composures; or that she set much Value upon them. (xxvii)

Perhaps to quell the fears of potential subscribers, Freemantle notes that Leapor thought her writing ‘‘idle,’’ easy, and without intrinsic value. However, Leapor’s own commentary on composing poetry in the ‘‘Epistle to Artemisia’’ causes significant cracks in Freemantle’s picture: Yet some Impertinence pursues me still; And so I fear it ever must, and will. So soft Pappilia o’er the Table bends With her small Circle of insipid Friends; Who wink, and stretch, and rub their drowsy Eyes, While o’er their Heads Imperial Dulness flies. ‘‘What can we do? We cannot stir for Show’rs: ‘‘Or what invent, to kill the irksome Hours? ‘‘Why, run to Leapor’s, fetch that idle Play: ‘‘ ‘Twill serve to laugh at all the live-long Day.’’ Preferment great! To beat one’s weary Brains, To find Diversion only when it rains! (53)

In this vignette, Leapor shows that she considers her writing more than entertainment for dull ladies who require amusement in inclement weather. Writing is not idle or easy; it requires Leapor to ‘‘beat [her] weary Brains,’’ and Leapor clearly wants this fact legitimized by society-at-large. The irony dripping from ‘‘Preferment great!’’ suggests further that Leapor feels her poetry deserves a more significant form of remuneration from the ladies of this polite

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salon. Her desire for legitimation as a working writer—both in terms of the work of writing and the potential to earn money by it—marks Leapor’s achievement in the history of plebeian publishing in the eighteenth century. Greene argues that when compared to the complaints against their respective ‘‘masters’’ lodged by Duck and Collier, Leapor’s verses on her treatment as a domestic servant ‘‘take on the force of explicit protest.’’44 Her muse is characterized by more ‘‘saucy Airs,’’ as both her comment to Sophronia on her dismissal and her standing her ground, at least in print, against ‘‘Pappilia’’ and her ‘‘insipid Friends’’ indicate (54). But Leapor could also sing the familiar notes of resignation: Look not at Joys that dazzle from afar, Nor envy Glaro on his gilded Car; For all Degrees their Days of Anguish know, And the most happy have a taste of Woe: Then calmly take what Providence ordains, He swells the Load who murmurs and complains, (POSO, I, 172)

Yet Duck, Collier, Jones, and Leapor all murmured, complained, and protested, and we must recognize the sociohistorical differences which circumscribed the various openings for these poets to do so. If the poetic discourse on work was a marker for plebeian status in the 1730s, and thus a way to get into print, by the 1750s it was more. That is, at mid-century, we can read Leapor transforming this poetic discourse into a means to reject manual labor as she aspires to the uncertainty (and the opportunities) of writing as an alternative career. Leapor is far more explicit than Jones in depicting this rejection, in large part because she did not work under the same limitations of aristocratic patronage that Jones did in the period. When Leapor writes about defying Sophronia and rejecting the cultural arguments about proper work for one of her social standing, she does so from a safer position than Duck or Collier could find in the 1730s. Less concerned with pleasing individual patrons, Leapor could write to please herself and her educated friends, such as Freemantle, though she always kept an eye toward the larger commercial literary market. Unlike Leapor, Duck felt pressure to please his royal supporters, and Collier was still working for those mistresses who people The Woman’s Labour. Although Collier chronicles the drudgery of charring for them, to offend those mistresses might have meant a loss of work and income she could ill afford. Comparatively speaking, Leapor could offend at will, or at least speak her

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mind in a more direct manner, as her later poems show. In ‘‘Advice to Sophronia’’ the poet even advises her former adviser on the subject of fading beauty and controlling her ‘‘wanton Mind’’ (POSO, II, 55). Leapor therefore represents a unique plebeian case, and she writes under a different range of possibilities and constraints than the poets of the 1730s did. Though Greene’s championing of Leapor is justified in many ways, it remains important that we attempt to understand each plebeian voice within the specific contexts of its articulation.

James Woodhouse: ‘‘Unpension’d Poet-Laureat, of the Poor’’ When James Woodhouse’s celebrity began, he was working as a shoemaker in the village of Rowley Regis, near Birmingham, some two miles from William Shenstone’s estate, The Leasowes. In 1759, at the age of twenty-three, Woodhouse addressed an elegy to Shenstone, and both Shenstone and his publisher, Robert Dodsley, were impressed by the ‘‘poetical Shoemaker.’’45 Woodhouse’s career as yet another poet of mechanic origins was underway. By 1762, Dodsley and his brother James were providing Woodhouse with books and employing him in distributing magazines in the region.46 They also published Woodhouse’s first poem, ‘‘To William Shenstone, Esq.; in his Sickness,’’ which appeared in Shenstone’s Works in Verse and Prose (1762). Before his death in 1763, Shenstone himself did much to assist and promote Woodhouse: he opened both his estate and his library for Woodhouse’s unlimited use; he brought Woodhouse to dine with him; he acted as friend and critic; and he began the process of collecting a subscription toward publishing Woodhouse’s poems. The Dodsley brothers took over the subscription after Shenstone’s death and executed the final product, Poems on Sundry Occasions (1764), which sold well. With the help of Elizabeth Montagu, a second edition appeared in 1766 as Poems on Several Occasions, with several additions, under Lord Lyttleton’s name. Though Lyttleton did read and comment on Woodhouse’s new poems, and Woodhouse refers to him as his ‘‘beloved Patron’’ in this edition, Lyttleton was merely a figurehead (POSO, 161). Montagu reveals in a letter to her sister, Sarah Scott, that it was she who was behind organizing the new subscription for Woodhouse: ‘‘I have laid ye foundation for a large subscription for him next year: when he is to publish a new edition of his works

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[and] I have got some subscribers from whom I shall gather about 71. yearly which I shall make up 151. myself.’’47 Edward and Elizabeth Montagu employed Woodhouse in various ways over the next two decades. He was appointed land bailiff to their Berkshire estate, Sandleford, in late 1767, and, after a breach in 1778 that lasted three years, he returned to Mrs. Montagu’s service as house steward in London and Sandleford until a final break occurred, probably early in 1788.48 Woodhouse provides some insight into his responsibilities during his years at Sandleford in letters he wrote to Mrs. Montagu that have survived among her papers. In one, he meditates upon the utility of reading history, concluding that such knowledge is of little use to a ‘‘Husbandman’’ such as himself; and in another, Woodhouse provides a detailed accounting of land and labor management on the estate, noting that ‘‘the Ploughmen, were forc’d to put Weights upon their Ploughs to keep them in the Ground,’’ that ‘‘our Horses are all employ’d in ploughing for Barley,’’ and that ‘‘the Rest of the People are employ’d in thrashing, & many miscellaneous Employments.’’49 As early as 1769, less than two years into his job as bailiff, Woodhouse was worried about what he called, in another letter to Mrs. Montagu, ‘‘an Abatement of your Confidence & Esteem towards me; & . . . a Sharpness & Harshness in your conduct toward [my wife],’’ and requests the opportunity ‘‘to vindicate our Conduct properly.’’50 According to both Woodhouse and Montagu, Sandleford prospered under his oversight, yet there was still palpable friction between them throughout his tenure. Montagu did not approve of Woodhouse’s extravagant wife, his lax child-rearing, or what she perceived as his prideful manner.51 For his part, Woodhouse was fast becoming disillusioned with working for a so-called patron. Katherine Hornbeak has pointed out that, as bailiff of Sandleford, Woodhouse ‘‘had hoped . . . he would have leisure to read and study,’’ and, I would add (most importantly), to write—a notion supported by Woodhouse’s own reflections on this period of his life in his substantial autobiographical poem, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: ‘‘[I] wish’d, with ardour, to resume, agen, / The pristine callings of [my] tools, and pen.’’52 By November 1778 the simmering relationship between poet and patron boiled over, and Woodhouse abruptly left Sandleford and returned to Rowley with his large family. We do not know if a single controversy or dispute triggered the break; Woodhouse only notes later that he ‘‘was turn’d adrift, / For Self—worn Wife, and Family, to shift’’ (I, 104). However, in a letter written four months later addressed to Edward Bridgen, Woodhouse’s bookseller/publisher,

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Mrs. Montagu reveals something of her own character that just may have contributed to Woodhouse’s departure: I heartily wish him & his family well, had he served me with friendly zeal I w[oul]d have been even extravagantly generous to him. I hope if he ever finds another Person disposed to treat him with confidence and liberality he will for the sake of his family make a suitable return. Mr. Woodhouse is forgetful when he says he made only one mistake in his accounts. He did also charge twice one year my Brother’s House Rent, but on my shewing his error he [rectified] it. This was but a trifling sum, merely 12l. but is another proof that tho his intentions were upright yet from carelessness his accounts stood in need of examination & revision.53

Given that the sum in question is certainly ‘‘trifling’’ to a woman of Montagu’s means, this statement reads as sour grapes justification for the rift between them. Judging by what each has said to the third party (Bridgen), Woodhouse seems to feel that his efforts as bailiff have been honest and upstanding, and, though she recognizes that ‘‘his intentions were upright,’’ Montagu seems determined to prove Woodhouse a careless, error-prone account keeper. It is difficult to tell who is the more prideful party, employer or employee, and the force of this shared character trait likely disrupted an otherwise successful working relationship in 1778. Though dissatisfied with Woodhouse, Mrs. Montagu was not vengeful; she continued to pay his £15 annuity, insuring that the family would not be destitute. After his retreat from Sandleford, Woodhouse supported his family by farming and taking in piecemeal cobbling work. No evidence has survived that adequately explains the reconciliation that took place in 1781, but Montagu asked and Woodhouse accepted a return to her service as house steward.54 Woodhouse’s new duties included the organization and upkeep of the family’s new Portman Square house during the London seasons, and the maintenance of the great house at Sandleford. Woodhouse performed these duties diligently for roughly seven years, until differences in religion and politics finally precipitated an end to his relationship with Mrs. Montagu in 1788. Throughout his employment by the Montagus, Woodhouse wrote little and published no poetry. But, freed from Mrs. Montagu’s chains of servitude, he embarked on his most prolific period of writing and publishing. A new Poems on Several Occasions appeared in 1788, and the poems for two subsequent volumes, Norbury Park and Love Letters to My Wife; written in 1789, were composed in the same period, though neither appeared until 1803

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and 1804 respectively, several years after Elizabeth Montagu’s death. By his own account, throughout the 1790s Woodhouse was at work on his magnum opus, The Life and Lucubrations oc Crispinus Scriblerus, an autobiographical ‘‘Novel, in Verse’’ (I, 8). This unique (and largely unread) poem spans seventeen chapters and contains over twenty-seven thousand lines of heroic couplets. Woodhouse only published excerpts from this work in his lifetime, under the titular pseudonym ‘‘Crispinus Scriblerus,’’ in which he seems to have withheld the most vitriolic material on Mrs. Montagu, and the more inflammatory digressions on religious, moral, and political subjects.55 Most likely this was Woodouse’s attempt to protect his children from any potential repercussions56 at the hands of Montagu’s heirs. The poem finally appeared in full in 1896 as the lead piece in the two-volume set The Life and Poetical Works of James Woodhouse, edited by a grandson, making Woodhouse the only eighteenth-century plebeian poet whose complete works have been collected and reissued in a modern edition. During his most productive writing period at the end of the century, Woodhouse operated a bookseller’s shop located at No. 10, Lower Brook Street, Grosvenor Square. Timely financial backing from James Dodsley helped Woodhouse stock his shelves, and insured the success of the business. A posthumous recollection, penned by a former customer, paints a vivid portrait of Woodhouse at this time: I can fancy I see James Woodhouse,—tall, erect, venerable, almost patriarchal, in his appearance—in his black-velvet cap, from beneath which his grey locks descended upon his forehead, and on each side of his still fine face,—his long, black, loose gown,—and his benignant air—issuing from his little parlour with a stately step, as the tingling bell which hung over the shop door gave notice of a customer, when it opened. And then his cordial greeting, and his kind smile, and his clear, sonorous voice—and his primitive haths and doths, and his hast thous and wilt thous—and the pleasing, to my ears, at least, mixture of a provincial accent, which he still retained in his speech. . . .57

This is clearly the image of a man who has succeeded in raising himself above his former place as a shoemaker, though his accent and lingering habits of speech still provide traces of his provincial origins and, perhaps, his Methodist affiliation. Woodhouse lived out the rest of his life in London and, though he never enjoyed the same degree of literary celebrity or success that he had in the 1760s, his business apparently thrived. Indeed, Woodhouse’s administrative

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will shows that his estate at his death in 1820 was worth ‘‘£5000,’’ which was bequeathed to his wife, ‘‘Ann.’’58 Woodhouse presents an interesting case study for my argument about textual representations of plebeian ideological and social protest in the eighteenth-century because there are essentially two Woodhouses to account for. One is the sycophantic poet hoping to better his lot in life, writing and publishing under the protection of Shenstone, Lyttleton, and the Montagus in the 1760s; the other is the poet influenced by ‘‘a rude presumptuous muse, uncheck’d,’’ who begins to see beyond himself (POSO, 10). Rizzo has argued that ‘‘Woodhouse, after a long submission, openly rebelled,’’ but I would add that the actual public expression of his rebellion in writing was by and large suppressed by the poet himself.59 The prefatory ‘‘Address to the Public’’ that appeared in the 1788 Poems does represent a more critical attitude toward patronage than Woodhouse espoused in the 1760s, but the aspiring poet is still carefully managing his public image in the late 1780s. The ‘‘Address’’ and the poems that follow offer only veiled references to Woodhouse’s hardships in service for the Montagus when compared to the critique Woodhouse unleashes in Crispinus Scriblerus. I shall argue that the later ‘‘unpublished’’ Woodhouse provides us with a powerful example of an emerging plebeian class consciousness in latecentury England. Though concerned largely for himself early in his career, Woodhouse is also the first plebeian poet to speak self-reflexively for a larger group, in effect, an entire segment of poor, disenfranchised workers in English society. Against the corruption he sees as inherent in ‘‘Wealth,’’ Woodhouse—deeply influenced by his Methodist beliefs late in life—imagines a society that is based on more egalitarian principles. As a struggling laborer-poet in the 1760s, Woodhouse was victimized by the debilitating cultural attitudes concerning writing and proper vocation for plebeian authors, attitudes which he grew to resent and challenge more openly in print by the end of his career. Woodhouse’s benefactors in the 1760s found it necessary to address these cultural attitudes explicitly, even as they adhered to a familiar formula for popularizing plebeian poetic talent. The ‘‘Advertisement to the First Edition’’ portrays Woodhouse as ‘‘an honest, sober, industrious man’’ (POSO, xii), and mentions his lack of formal education: ‘‘he had no other learning than what was sufficient to enable him to read and write, being taken from school at seven years old’’ (xii–xiii). The author emphasizes Woodhouse’s ‘‘uncommon genius’’ and presents the following image of the poet negotiating the division of labor that entails in his daily life:

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He generally sits at his work with a pen and ink by him, and when he has made a couplet he writes them down on his knee; so that he may not, thereby, neglect the duties of a good husband and kind father; for the same reason his hours for reading are often borrowed from those usually allotted to sleep. (xiv)

Read in the context of prevailing cultural attitudes about work and writing for plebeian upstarts such as Woodhouse, this portrait amounts to good advertising. Woodhouse’s ‘‘duties’’ as a husband and father include, of course, the economic support of his family, which he achieves through ‘‘application to his business’’ and teaching children to read and write on the side (xiii). Through all of this, including very little sleep, Woodhouse manages to write verses, too. Woodhouse is thus presented as ‘‘an object worthy of . . . notice’’ in large part because he does not neglect his manual labor in order to write; he is represented as a member of the deserving poor, and so a worthy recipient of upper-class patronage (xiv). The final section of the ‘‘Advertisement’’ therefore includes a long list of booksellers where ‘‘benefactions for the use of the author’’ are being taken (xv). There are a total of ten booksellers on the list from London, Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, and Birmingham, indicating that the increased commercialization of print culture is presenting new career possibilities for versifying natural geniuses. But the product must be presented effectively to a polite reading public, attracted paradoxically to plebeian prodigies and plebeian servitude. The success of the first edition probably occasioned Woodhouse’s own piece, ‘‘The Author’s Apology,’’ which was prefixed, along with the original ‘‘Advertisement,’’ to the 1766 edition of Poems on Several Occasions. ‘‘The Author’s Apology’’ is in every way a companion piece to the ‘‘Advertisement’’ as Woodhouse attempts to soothe the apprehensions of his polite readership with an account of his ‘‘unambitious views’’ (vi). Woodhouse had previously downplayed his ambitions privately in a letter to Mrs. Montagu: You seem very solicitous, Madam; about my continuing in my present Occupation; but you may be assured, Madam; that I shall never leave the certain Profits of my Labour, for the tantalizing Condition of a Hackney Writer; which I have prudence enough to perceive is so capricious a state, that I can never rely on it; nor hope, from such uncertainty, a supply of the certain Wants of a Family.60

Writing poetry, of course, is tantamount to idleness for one of Woodhouse’s condition—an equation Woodhouse is careful to

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maintain in his response to a new patron. Woodhouse’s public rendition of this argument in ‘‘The Author’s Apology,’’ however, indicates that patronage has somewhat altered his working life: Notwithstanding I have in the title page continued the appellation of a Shoemaker, I am happy in being able to inform my readers, that by the great and unexpected generosity of my Patrons, I am now enabled to apply my time chiefly to the duty of my little school, which I hope will offend no one of my Benefactors, especially as my original occupation seldom brought me in more than 10l. per annum, though I followed it with all diligence, even to the prejudice of my health. (vi–vii)

The subscription money allowed Woodhouse to give up his original trade, but he is careful not to renounce real work in order to follow his muse. His ‘‘little school’’ provides Woodhouse with hard evidence that success in poetry will not render him ‘‘a useless member of the community’’ (vii). The review literature that accompanied Woodhouse’s poems in the 1760s suggests that his patrons were handling well general public misgivings about plebeian social mobility achieved through writing. The Critical Review first admonished Woodhouse’s benefactors by invoking the paradigm of Duck’s experience: That Mr. Woodhouse is incomparably a better poet than Stephen Duck must be readily admitted; but we shall be really sorry if the encouragement and patronage Stephen met with should tempt this author to forego an honest, though painful, employment, in hopes of meeting with the like fortune: or to exchange the tripos of his stall, in hopes of being seated, like another Homer, on that of Apollo.61

The reviewer acknowledges a measure of poetic worth in the volume, but quickly moves to compass the possibility of Woodhouse’s pursuit of poetic fame by alluding to his original employment. Woodhouse, it seems, should know his place by keeping to his proper seat. Subsequent notice of the 1766 edition celebrates the patrons more than the poet on this count: All we have to add is, that we congratulate his generous and judicious patrons, who have not deprived society of a useful member by the encouragement they have given him. We most heartily wish him all manner of success in his change of situation to a school-master. We should have been sorry, even for his own sake, if the liberality of the public had erected him into a poet by profession.62

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This reviewer places the burden of maintaining the boundaries of the social order directly on Woodhouse’s patrons, who are lauded as ‘‘generous,’’ but more to the point, ‘‘judicious’’ in keeping Woodhouse a working member of society. The Monthly Review sounded a more forgiving note by first acknowledging that Woodhouse ‘‘is the industrious father of no small family,’’ and later that poetic natural genius is ‘‘generally accompanied with a delicacy of mind which is superior to servile employments.’’63 However, Woodhouse’s rustic muse would languish for the next twenty-two years because of the so-called preferments extended by the Montagus. This exploitation of his labor under the banner of patronage is a central theme of Woodhouse’s social criticism in his later poetry. In 1803, after so long grief, a reviewer in The British Critic acknowledges that Woodhouse brings forty years of experience to his craft, finally earning him the ‘‘name of poet.’’64 Much like every other plebeian poet who published in the century, Woodhouse wanted to use his writing to free himself from the chains of toil and poverty. Finding a patron was a necessary first step, and Woodhouse’s early poems reveal a sustained effort to show himself the humble model of a patronized poet. In the 1759 ‘‘Elegy’’ to Shenstone, Woodhouse succeeds in representing himself as an ideal subject of those polite attitudes about work and writing circulating in the period. The poem opens with Woodhouse asking for Shenstone’s ‘‘pardon’’ that he not ‘‘blame the boldness of a village swain, / Who feels ambition haunt the lowliest cell’’ (POSO, 1). Although Woodhouse acknowledges a vague sense of ‘‘ambition,’’ the rest of the poem works to convince Shenstone (and other potential polite readers) that this rural poet knows his place. For instance, in the context of explaining why he cannot read all the Greek and Latin inscriptions scattered throughout The Leasowes, Woodhouse presents a straightforward image of his domestic cares and dual-working life: I feel no Grecian, feel no Roman fire; I only share the British muse’s lyre; And that stern penury dares almost deny; For manual toils alone my wants supply: The awl and pen by turns possess my hand, And worldly cares, e’en now, the muse’s hour demand. (7)

He follows this up immediately with a disclaimer regarding his intentions in addressing Shenstone: ‘‘Think not I write for hire!—My gen’rous muse / Has no such mean, such mercenary views!’’ (7).

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Woodhouse’s lack of classical knowledge solidifies his status as a ‘‘British’’ natural genius, and he is careful to note that he makes his living, however meager, by shoemaking. Woodhouse intends this arrangement to continue: ‘‘I ask no pay; let all my wages be / My mind’s improvement, while I wait on thee’’ (8). Woodhouse thus petitions Shenstone merely for his favor, to gain special admittance to The Leasowes, which had been recently closed to the public because the grounds were being mistreated. The anonynous author of the ‘‘Advertisement’’ to Poems on Sundry Occasions sheds some light on the vandalism that occurred at The Leasowes, which occasioned a change in Shenstone’s opendoor policy on Sunday evenings: [Shenstone’s] benevolence was such, that he permitted the lowest of his neighbours the benefit of those delightful scenes; amongst whom was poor Crispin, our author; but his happiness was not of long continuance, for the liberty Mr. Shenstone’s good-nature granted, was soon turned into licentiousness; the people destroying the shrubs, picking the flowers, breaking down the hedges, and doing him other damage, produced a prohibition to every one without application to himself or principal servants. This was originally the cause of our poet’s being known to Mr. Shenstone, he sending him, on that occasion, the first poem in this book; which not only gave him the liberty of passing many leisure hours in those charming walks, but introduced him to Mr. Shenstone himself. (ix–x)

Certainly Shenstone was a good-natured and benevolent man, but both he, and later Oliver Goldsmith, confirm that it was, in large part, Shenstone’s desire to garner praise of his improvements to The Leasowes that kept him from completely closing off its verdant walks and alcoves to public view.65 Whether self-consciously or not, Woodhouse exploits Shenstone’s vanity well in this ‘‘Elegy’’ for the bulk of the poem is given to detailing the natural beauties of The Leasowes. Witness the following description of ‘‘the dusky twilight cell’’ (2): Where tow’ring trees assail the sapphire sky, While on their tops the panting breezes die, Whose deep-entwined branches all conspire To banish Sol, or damp his parching fire. In vain! their efforts but endear the blaze, While thro’ the shade his penetrating rays Between the quivering foliage all around In circled dances gild the chequer’d ground. (3)

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The way to Shenstone’s heart was through his estate, and, as Woodhouse’s poetic flight through its ‘‘fragrant shrubs,’’ ‘‘limpid streams,’’ ‘‘tear-hung flowers,’’ and ‘‘gloomy grottos’’ continues, he shows at every turn that his experience of The Leasowes affected him deeply (4–5). In this, Woodhouse implies that he is one of those low neighbors who possesses the sentimental capacity to be emotionally touched by Shenstone’s natural landscape designs. Woodhouse’s implicit appeal to the cult of sentiment works to distinguish him from the destructive rabble, as does his explicit claim to have been a respectful visitor: ‘‘My joyful feet explor’d the mazy road; / Whence not a sacrilegious footstep strays, / Nor, lawless, seeks to tread forbidden ways’’ (3). Though Woodhouse’s suit was doubly successful in that he gained both an introduction to the great man as well as access to his property, and though Shenstone seems to have grown increasingly fond of his charge—inviting him to dinner, opening his library, and sharing his own poetry—he was not in a strong position financially to provide for Woodhouse against the penury that he says ‘‘opprest’’ him (37).66 According to Shenstone himself, in Woodhouse’s eyes, he was a ‘‘great Mæcenas,’’ but notes only that he has, ‘‘for these two or three years past, . . . lent him Classics, and other books in English.’’67 There is no mention of money, and Woodhouse would later intimate in Crispinus Scriblerus that Shenstone did not have the money to provide direct relief: ‘‘[Shentone] wish’d to help, but had not wherewithal, / For Heav’n’s kind sprinklings were, with Him, but small’’ (I, 50). Dodsley records that Shenstone ‘‘was no œconomist’’ and that ‘‘he exceeded . . . the bounds of his paternal fortune,’’ and Shenstone’s letters repeatedly confirm his lack of ready money, most of which went to improving his estate when he had any.68 Yet Shenstone recommended Woodhouse to men like Sherrington Davenport and his neighbor Lord Lyttleton (‘‘betterfortun’d Friends’’), as well as Dodsley, who must have seen something of himself in the poetical shoemaker (I, 50). By 1764, with the subscription well underway, Woodhouse gives thanks to those ‘‘kind friends’’ who wish to remain anonymous, ‘‘Dispensing bounty from behind a veil’’ (POSO, 172). Importantly, it was Shenstone who provided Woodhouse with opportunities to increase his poetic output in the five years leading up to Poems on Sundry Occasions, in which Woodhouse’s ‘‘lab’ring breast’’ would everywhere heave with ‘‘gratitude’’ because he was now gaining more than praise for his writing (93). Both the 1764 and the 1766 editions reveal Woodhouse as a sycophant extraordinaire. These are all ‘‘thankful lays’’ as every poem

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pays homage to the friendship and kindness extended by Shenstone, Lyttleton, and others (169). In ‘‘Palemon and Colinet; a Pastoral Elegy,’’ Shenstone is figured as ‘‘Damon’’ and celebrated for his ‘‘matchless bow’rs,’’ his own sweet poetic strains, and his indulgence of low-born ‘‘tuneful swain[s]’’ (132). But Woodhouse’s sycophancy is best illustrated in a scene from the longest poem in the volume, ‘‘The Lessowes,’’ in which the wayfaring Woodhouse imagines the harvest dinner taking place on Shenstone’s estate: See, underneath yon oak’s refreshing shade, With snowy cloth the pleasing verdure spread; With smoaking cates in earthen dishes stor’d, Such cates as swains admire, as cots afford; The pious master sanctifies the treat, And while clean beechen trenchers bear the meat, Blythe nymphs and swains, encircled on the ground, The viands share, or lift the goblet round; Now, o’er the harmless tale they chearful smile; Now, stretch’d beneath the shade, they nod awhile, And now, with glee, resume their wonted toil. (87)

Such a scene is not out of place, given that The Leasowes was also a working farm, which Shenstone described as his ‘‘ferme orne´e.’’69 But this harvest dinner set piece contrasts sharply to a similar scene in Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour.’’ Whereas Duck had exposed the feast as a master’s ruse because more toil awaited the laborers, Woodhouse idealizes both the master who provides for his workers and the workers who return to their labor ‘‘with glee.’’ Given Woodhouse’s own claims to be ‘‘a poor plebeian swain’’ who knows too well the backbreaking work of agricultural labor, this idealization reads both as a rewriting of Duck’s vision of rural plebeian labor, and as a significant compliment paid to Shenstone (59). But the sycophancy evident in Woodhouse’s early work would have been expected of him, to some degree, by readers in his own day. No reviewer of his early poems, for example, accuses Woodhouse of overflattering his patrons in print. If Woodhouse flattered his benefactors more than other plebeian poets in the century, he did so within the decorum of the patron-poet relationship characteristic of the mid- to late-century period. One aspect of this decorum was that the poet mute any desire for money and social elevation achieved by writing. Although Woodhouse never praises Shenstone for giving him money, ‘‘The Lessowes’’ contains a significant revelatory moment where the poet’s unsanctioned material desires

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emerge, only to be reinscribed into the general framework of Woodhouse presenting himself as a worthy plebeian. In a passage that invokes the tradition of classical ‘‘Wish’’ poems as it also echoes earlier plebeian renditions, Woodhouse argues that if all poets could gain ‘‘their favour’d wish’’ as Horace had, then their lives would be easier and more time could be devoted to writing (71). Woodhouse imagines himself as another Horace: No longer, then, I’d pine a landless boor, Nor trudge, thro’ sloughs, around a rented door, In russet garb, whose ragged rent-holes grin, An ill conceal the skeleton within: Nor heavy hours in listless labour waste; Nor pall, with viands coarse, my blunted taste; Nor ken unornamented murkey walls; Nor join the chorus of domestic brawls; Nor lend an ear to leaden senseless chat, Or the shrill clamours of each squalling brat: Nor wish I sceptre, diadem, and throne, But, Horace-like, a vill and farm my own; To range among my lawns, my streams, my trees, Such as he wish’d; or, rather, such as these: Or, in deep meditation stretch’d along, I’d court the muses with a sylvan song; (71–72)

In his wish for aristocratic solitude, Woodhouse attempts to disassociate himself from the stereotypical material trappings of his social position. The many negatives describe Woodhouse’s current living situation, from which he desires escape. Property—‘‘a vill and farm my own’’—is the key acquisition which would allow Woodhouse respite from labor and the time for contemplation and writing. Woodhouse seems uncharacteristically lax in voicing his desire to be a gentleman-poet; he specifies that he would no longer waste ‘‘heavy hours in listless labour,’’ and imagines himself another Shenstone: ‘‘Would bounteous heav’n my whole petition give, / Like thee, O Shenstone! would I wish to live’’ (73). But before the reader has time to question Woodhouse’s disruptive desire for social mobility, a deep resignation to polite expectations follows: But since our wishes ease not present smart, But sink misfortunes deeper in the heart; Nor can my warmest hopes my mind beguile, To fancy here an end of care and toil; I’ll live resign’d to my depress’d fate, And wing my wishes to a future state. (73)

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Work, not ‘‘wishes’’ (and not writing), is required of Woodhouse to ease any ‘‘present smart[s]’’ he and his family feel. Thus the strong, socially-disruptive desires for property and personal independence Woodhouse voices in ‘‘The Lessowes’’ are ultimately dissembled by the poet’s resignation to subservience—his ‘‘depress’d fate.’’ Woodhouse seems unsure in this early poem how to frame his ‘‘warmest hopes’’ for writerly support and an independent living. He layers poetic convention, importing aspects of ‘‘Wish’’ poetry into a loco-descriptive poem that aims to celebrate his patron and his park, without realizing the subversive potential available in those forms, especially as issued from a plebeian pen. Except for casting those wishes ‘‘to a future state,’’ the only opening (however prophetic) that is offered, the poem simply closes off the power of Woodhouse’s poetic ‘‘fancy.’’70 ‘‘The Lessowes,’’ then, ends up reinforcing the image of Woodhouse as an ideal subject of an ideology that defines a social hierarchy based on property and labor. By 1788, however, Woodhouse is actively engaged in a critique of this ideology in his writing. In the ‘‘Address’’ prefixed to the 1788 Poems on Several Occasions, Woodhouse reflects on the last two decades of his life and offers a scathing conclusion: ‘‘I have long been growing grey in servitude, and poorer under patronage’’ (II, 139). This is the statement of a man with a clearer view of how he has been subjectified by the class-based ideologies that drive the patronage practiced by the Montagus. It also reveals Woodhouse exercising a more independent voice, his words no longer circumscribed by the limitations of that patronage. But there is a larger social power dynamic that keeps Woodhouse from speaking out more directly against those whom he feels have wronged him. He has no intention of angering his social betters because he wants to sell his poems: I have been secluded, through this long and tedious period of time, in different modes of employment, to which I have been enticed, or from which I have been expelled, for reasons too tedious to relate, and too uninteresting for the world to wish the relation. They are such as have rendered myself, and my family, twice the outcasts of society, without the conviction, or even the specification, of a crime. Time and opportunity may, possibly, unravel the causes, let the blame, or the shame, fall wherever they may. (II, 140)

This is a suitably vague and passive statement, except Woodhouse is clear that he has been the victim of injustice. A full discussion of these events and the failings of the principal people involved takes

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place in Crispinus Scriblerus, in which Woodhouse names names in an effort to clear his own. The boldest aspect of the 1788 ‘‘Address’’ is Woodhouse’s characterization of his writing as useful work, providing diversion and amusement for his readers while procuring money for himself to support his family: My view, in the present publication, is to select a few flowers from my cottage-garden, offering them in nosegays to the unprejudiced part of the Public, hoping they will not disgust by their humble origin, offend by any disagreeable scents, or injure by any deleterious qualities. If my present collection should escape these deprecated effects, and produce any desirable consequences, I may, hereafter, as God shall enable me, be encouraged to cultivate my little garden anew, to make it afford a recent assemblage; for the laudable purposes of contributing to the public an innocent amusement, and to a dependent family worldly necessaries. (II, 140)

Woodhouse wants to support himself and his family with his pen, and the fact that he veils the sense of this desire in an elaborate garden metaphor suggests that the cultural constraints regarding writing as work were still flourishing in the late 1780s. Woodhouse answers these constraints with a counter-argument grounded in what he terms ‘‘inclination’’: ‘‘It may be asked why I attempt a business so foreign to all my former experience. Without inclination nothing essential is ever achieved: the want of that inclination prevented me making any great proficiency in my original employment’’ (II, 141). Woodhouse was born and bred a shoemaker, but his ‘‘inclination’’ lies in poetry: ‘‘If I can flatter myself with having any ability at all, it lies in literary matters’’ (II, 141). While most of the burden falls upon his readers to judge him worthy of the rank of poet, Woodhouse is explicit in relating that his ‘‘views are virtuous’’ and that he is deserving of ‘‘a place among polished society’’ (II, 141). Andrew Becket of The Monthly Review was convinced, observing in his review of this volume that Woodhouse ‘‘is not a poet of the very lowest order’’ and that he ‘‘possesses a respectable private character.’’71 Woodhouse’s self-presentation in this ‘‘Address’’ suggests a conscious effort to escape the condescending support that defines polite patronage of natural genius. A man might be born a poet as well as a shoemaker, but a born shoemaker who is also a natural poet poses problems in a rigidly ordered social world. Implicit within eighteenth-century conceptions of natural genius is the opportunity for social mobility based on innate, God-given talent—Woodhouse’s ‘‘inclination.’’ By 1788, Woodhouse under-

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stands how this opportunity was controlled by those same benefactors who seemed to offer so much earlier in his life. His previous experience shows in this public appeal for support of his true vocation, his labor as a poet. Woodhouse appropriately ends his address with an advertisement for his latest volume at his own bookshop, further evidence that he is now ‘‘sutor ultra crepidam,’’ a shoemaker beyond making shoes (I, 8). The poems included in the 1788 volume, and those written around the same period, show Woodhouse taking on a poetic role we have previously seen Jones embody—the poet as moral guide and arbiter of truth. In the opening poem, ‘‘Ridicule,’’ Woodhouse humbly acknowledges his poor talents and low social status, but emphasizes his higher moral purpose as a poet: A bard obscure, with eloquence unfit To cope with cunning, or to war with wit, Unfledg’d with fortune, and unflush’d with fame; Unbless’d by learning, and scarce known by name; .............. But dares attempt true virtue’s cause defend, In highest potenate, or humblest friend: Dares hated vice decry, false fame disown, Tho’ found with friends, or foster’d by a throne; (II, 143)

This passage reflects a very different tone and sense of poetic purpose from those which characterized Woodhouse’s poetry published in the 1760s. There are no panegyrics celebrating past or current patrons in this volume; Woodhouse—speaking for himself as a poet—is now addressing a wider reading public with a more independent voice ready to do battle: And tho’ the simple bard be found so low, He shuns no shaft discharg’d by bastard bow; Nor fears, nor flies, its force, its point or speed, While leagu’d with truth and seeking moral meed; But boldly battles all the ribald rhymes, The lawless libels of licentious times; (II, 144)

Like Jones before him, Woodhouse imagines his work as a poet on a grand social scale, teaching ‘‘Truth,’’ ‘‘Wisdom,’’ and moral integrity to a deviant public that is sunk in luxury, the desire for pleasure, and is ‘‘by pure affections led’’ (II, 147, 146). Unburdened of patronage, Woodhouse’s lyre will now be strung to teach virtue,

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and plucked in hopes of reforming his wayward upper-class readers. None of Woodhouse’s later published works shows the effects of this development of poetic purpose better than Norbury Park, written in 1789 and finally published with a few other shorter pieces in 1803. Though ‘‘inscribed to W. Lock, Esq.,’’ who owned and maintained Norbury in Surrey, Woodhouse launches a long, all-encompassing critique of patrons and the poets who write for them. Woodhouse ‘‘contems those hollow lays, / Which puff with foolish lies a Patron’s praise,’’ and paints patrons in general as ‘‘Dolts’’ and ‘‘Despots’’ full of ‘‘Pomp’’ and ‘‘tyrant Pride’’ (II, 164). He justifies his own lays because he has opted out of the system: I court no compliment—I seek no bribe— I scorn to mix with Mammon’s sordid tribe; No fame solicit—seek no selfish dow’r, From Flattery—Falsehood—Riches—Pomp—or Pow’r. .............. Would rather rank with hordes of human race, Than seek a Pension, or accept a Place. Would sooner stock the turnpike for poor bread, Than reap rich harvests where his Virtue bled— (II, 164)

Woodhouse can now level such critical views because he is no longer wielding a mercenary pen. We know nothing of Woodhouse’s relationship with Lock, but it is clear from the opening of the poem that he is not writing to gain notice or to repay a debt. He merely dedicates the poem to Lock under the banner of his ‘‘Virtue’’: ‘‘Wilt thou, O gentle Lock! my Muse forgive, / And let my Verse beneath thy Virtues live?’’ (II, 163). Woodhouse has thus become, in his later years, an ‘‘unpensioned Laureat for the Poor,’’ writing not only for himself, but also—as we shall see in Crispinus Scriblerus—for a larger disenfranchised segment of society with which he identifies (II, 164). It is this mature consciousness of his poetic purpose that informs the whole of Crispinus Scriblerus, making it one of the most important literary records of plebeian social and ideological critique of the late eighteenth century. The poem’s title, however, requires some commentary. It is easy enough to decode: the first two terms—‘‘Life’’ and ‘‘Lucubrations’’—define its autobiographical quality and provide some insight into its creation; and the Latinate phrase, ‘‘Crispinus Scriblerus,’’ calls attention to the author and his project. ‘‘Lucubrations’’ was a popular term in the eighteenth cen-

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tury that described the products of nocturnal study and meditation; in a literary context, it was usually associated with a work that showed signs of careful elaboration. At over twenty-seven thousand lines, Woodhouse’s poem was certainly elaborate, and it was no doubt the product of much late-night labor. However, the OED notes that this term is ‘‘now somewhat derisive or playful, suggesting the notion of something pedantic or over-elaborate.’’ The OED is not clear on when this connotation became predominate, but it seems Woodhouse wants the term to mean just the opposite, otherwise his title undercuts the serious, often didactic, purpose of the poem. As an allusion to St. Crispin, a patron saint of shoemakers, Woodhouse’s self-construction as ‘‘Crispinus’’ serves to recall the specifics of his laboring origins, as the surname, ‘‘Scriblerus,’’ serves to align his poem to the Scriblerus project of Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, and other writers of an earlier generation. Woodhouse’s choice of pseudonyms is not, however, uncomplicated. It is well known that ‘‘Martinus Scriblerus’’ was an ironic figure for the Scriblerians, created as a vehicle for their satiric abuse leveled at perceived follies in learning and letters of the period. Much like Swift’s Gulliver, Martinus is the object of Scriblerian satire, a fictional character who illustrates the pretentions and errors in earlyeighteenth-century artistic and scientific endeavor the Scriblerians aim to expose.72 Woodhouse is likely unconcerned with the implications of the ‘‘Scriblerus’’ name as it relates to the construction of a satiric persona. My sense is that he simply means to adopt the connotations of ideological and social criticism associated with the Scriblerus project itself, even though the generally conservative social and literary commitments of the Scriblerians do not always match his own. Given that Woodhouse does not create an ironic character to build the poem around, and given its explicit autobiographical nature, it seems safe to assume that Woodhouse does not want his readers to think of him as another Martinus; rather, we are to see the poem as linked (however superficially) to the venomous exposition that characterized the best work of the Scriblerians. Crispinus Scriblerus is of epic length and shares some thematic parallels with earlier English epics such as Milton’s Paradise Lost. But if Milton sought to justify the ways of God to man in his epic poem, Woodhouse’s poem is perhaps best summarized as seeking to expose the ways of men to men. Woodhouse’s subtitle, ‘‘a Novel, in Verse,’’ considered within the context of the generic qualities of novels written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, invites us to read the text for its social and political concerns. And Woodhouse’s apparently oxymoronic generic designation was not

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considered so by his contemporaries, nor was it entirely unique. For example, Anna Seward published Louisa, a Poetical Novel in 1784, which received favorable notice from The London Magazine. In fact, the reviewer notes that ‘‘the poetical novel may be considered as a new species of composition that promises an ample field for the exercise of poetical genius’’ and that this species can comprehend ‘‘every incident of life.’’73 Crispinus Scriblerus is also autobiographical and so shares certain generic similarities with Wordsworth’s Prelude, begun interestingly in the same period. Both are personal histories which share the same sense of poetic voice, of the poet describing the events of the past not as they seemed to him at the time, but as interpreted in retrospect, from the vantage of poetic maturity. But Wordsworth’s poem is a spiritual autobiography of crisis, on the order of St. Augustine’s Confessions or Dante’s Divine Comedy, that turns on the poet’s psychological straits and subsequent recovery. Woodhouse’s poem, by contrast, reads as a social autobiography of crisis that chronicles the poet’s life of servitude and his evolving social and moral consciousness. Woodhouse probably did not set out to write another English verseepic, and indeed the poem he produced contains none of the conventions that would define it as such. It is, ultimately, a poem of epic proportions that chronicles roughly the first sixty years of Woodhouse’s life, as it also offers significant insight into plebeian social criticism emerging at the end of the eighteenth century. Because Woodhouse never intended to publish the full text of Crispinus Scriblerus in his lifetime, he speaks plainly about his experiences in service for the Montagus and his desires to become a poet. He addresses a reader whom he doubts will ever read his work—‘‘But, pardon, Reader, (should this e’er be read,)’’—but still writes with a profound sense of social and historical purpose (I, 80). In the long section of chapter four that appears under the subheading ‘‘Patroness,’’ Woodhouse unleashes all the anger he previously had to hide from public view. His characterization of Elizabeth Montagu in this section—and throughout the poem as a whole—is pointed and unfavorable. Woodhouse provides her with two pseudonyms, ‘‘Vanessa’’ and ‘‘Scintilla,’’ and tells us exactly how to read them: the former calls attention to ‘‘her pompous Spirit,’’ the latter, to her ‘‘sparkling wit, and wish for praise’’ (I, 67). According to Woodhouse, Montagu was ‘‘the vainest of the Vain,’’ and possessed ‘‘the hypocritic skill / To make Self-love resemble pure Good-will’’ (I, 68). The patronage the Montagus provided hardly seems like patronage—or even charity—at all, given Woodhouse’s description of the work and his responsibilities as land steward:

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In sunshine hours his six days’ labour sped, While countless projects occupied his head; To plan improvement, or contrive defence— To heighten profit, or reduce expense— To mark each wood and field; each mound and mead— Fair herds and flocks that batten—milk—or breed— And reconnoit’ring Teams, and Hinds, the while, To help their purpose, and appoint their toil. (I, 77–78)

There was, of course, no time to write, and Woodhouse, always under pressure to turn a profit and produce ‘‘fair Success’’ for his employers, refers to his time in the Montagus’ service at Sandleford as ‘‘bondage,’’ a fate worse than poverty itself (I, 77, 68). Although, as land steward or bailiff, Woodhouse was at the top of the rural servant hierarchy, the work was difficult and time-consuming. A land steward was responsible for manag[ing] his master’s estate, leasing the farms, collecting the rents, surveying the boundaries, settling disputes between tenants and keeping a detailed record of receipts and expenses. He was also expected to superintend the cultivation of the land his master retained in his own hands and to supervise the tenants in their practice of husbandry, giving advice and acquainting them with the latest improvements in agricultural method.74

Woodhouse did all this and more in his years at Sandleford. Yet, even if he could find the time, Woodhouse tells us he would not have written the flattering poems Mrs. Montagu especially might have expected: He might have brandish’d, bold, the Poet’s pen— Have gain’d his Patronesses proud regard, Have borne the honour, still, of household Bard; Transform’d into a Lyre his rustic Reed, And merited far more than Laureat’s meed— But he must then have modelled Mind anew, And turn’d his Heart from all things right and true— Made his tame Conscience truckle, like the tribes Of Sycophants, that fawn, and bow, for bribes— (I, 122)

Woodhouse is forgetful of at least one celebratory poem he penned for Mrs. Montagu while in her employ at Sandleford: the fair copy of ‘‘Ode to —— on her Birth Day,’’ signed by ‘‘J. W.’’ and dated ‘‘1767,’’ is no doubt Woodhouse’s work.75 Nevertheless, Elizabeth Montagu was no William Shenstone, and this passage further re-

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flects Woodhouse’s sense that the poems he had written for Shenstone did not constitute base sycophantic verse—his mind had never been ‘‘modelled’’ for such tasks and he never bowed for ‘‘bribes.’’ Once out of Montagu’s service, Woodhouse is free to write for his bread, to ‘‘Turn sounds, and cyphers into drink and meat’’ (II, 40). Although ‘‘cruel Scintilla’’ shows up repeatedly through the course of the poem, Woodhouse moves beyond personal invective to level more substantial social criticism at the landed gentry in general (II, 15). Perhaps working as a land steward for the Montagus, in effect acting as middleman or ‘‘Agent’’ between landowner and the laborers who work the land for them, raised Woodhouse’s consciousness in terms of how the ‘‘great Little’’ maintain the ‘‘little Great’’ (I, 168, 73): Behold! Ye Rich! the wretch’d brood around! Who dig your dismal mines, and work your ground— Ply countless curious Arts, that You may ‘scape All want, in real, or unreal, shape! (I, 58)

Woodhouse goes on to provide a catalog of labors that men and women on this fictional estate perform: ‘‘They fence Your Gardens—force Your fruits to grow— . . . / They dress Your meadows—fertilize Your field . . . / They clear the plains—They pulverize the clod—’’ and ‘‘They brew Your beer—press pear, and apple, wine’’ (I, 58). In these lines Woodhouse makes use of a poetic discourse on work to highlight the inequality inherent in contemporary productive social relations: Princes and Peers, for Horses, or for Hounds, Expend, in mansions, twice ten thousand pounds; While those that furnish all, yield all defence, Crowd kraals that ne’er cost half ten thousand pence! (I, 58)

Here Woodhouse deftly uses contrasting images of living quarters, ironically linking plebeian laborers to aristocratic ‘‘horses’’ and ‘‘hounds’’ to cinch his critical point. The labor of ‘‘kraal’’ dwellers—that is, those that live in poor huts or hovels—are the ones who ‘‘furnish all’’ for the great ‘‘mansions’’ built by aristocrats for their animals. And the money spent on a laborer’s hut pales against the wealth laid out even for aristocratic stables and doghouses. Once this unequal distribution of work and wealth has been established, Woodhouse addresses those responsible with a combined sense of anger and moral superiority:

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What! ostentatious Monsters! shall your Beast Better than Brethren sleep! than Sisters feast! Shall sterile Strumpets live more costly Lives Than fond, affianced, pure, productive Wives? Shall clam’rous Broods, for bread, ’midst plenty, cry, And skill’d Mechanics, prest with penury, die? While You, with Pomp and Luxury, still devour What wise Heav’n meant for all Men’s dow’r! (I, 58–59)

This is an incendiary poetics, pitching landless laborers against propertied gentry, publishable in 1896 because the social world it describes has been subsumed by the more complicated class formations evident at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Although Woodhouse did not (and perhaps could not) publish this sort of poem in the late eighteenth century, it was largely written in the 1790s, and the ideas Woodhouse develops reflect the increasing social agitation and labor activity in England after the French Revolution.76 Specific class criteria—imagining the workers as a group whose interests diverge from the interests of the landowners, and imagining a more egalitarian distribution of wealth—are more boldly underlined in Woodhouse’s Crispinus Scriblerus than in any other plebeian text written in the century. The social criticism expressed in Crispinus Scriblerus is, however, entangled in complex ways with Woodhouse’s dissenting religious views. Indeed, a large percentage of the poem involves long digressions of a moral, and often explicitly evangelical, nature. Woodhouse does not identify himself specifically as a Methodist (we should recall that the term was used by scoffers in the period), but he does name and celebrate the work of John Wesley and George Whitefield—the two most prominent leaders of the evangelical Revival which began in 1739 and led, eventually, to several denominations of Methodism by the end of the eighteenth century (I, 231). A careful look at the religious ideas Woodhouse develops in the poem reveals his own brand of Wesleyan Methodism, as we shall see. It is unclear precisely when Woodhouse’s conversion took place, if he even experienced one; his early poems do not suggest any religious views that press the limits of the natural piety that was expected of him as a publishing plebeian. If Woodhouse’s lengthy autobiographical poem contains a description of his spiritual awakening or conversion, I have not been able to locate it. The poem is, however, saturated with the perspective of the end, of the deeply religious (and righteous) poet retrospectively telling the story of his life. Most likely, Woodhouse was attracted to Wesleyan Methodism

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during his years of service to the Montagus.77 Methodism was in fact on the rise, particularly in the late-century period. Available historical data confirm that ‘‘Methodism underwent a period of sustained rapid expansion from 1740 to about 1840,’’ peaking at that time, though, with a membership that ‘‘accounted for only 4.5 per cent of the adult English population.’’78 Yet this figure is misleading with regard to Methodism’s influence among the lower orders of English society, particularly ‘‘artisan occupational groups.’’79 It is well known that Wesley set out to convert the laboring poor, and so Woodhouse presents himself as an ideal potential proselyte. At times, Woodhouse’s theological views, and their relationship to his social criticism, are difficult to pin down. However, there is ample internal evidence throughout Crispinus Scriblerus that Woodhouse espouses Wesleyan theological, moral, and social ideas. In chapter 8, Woodhouse describes what appears to be a Wesleyan ‘‘Crowd’’ made up of ‘‘Millions of the meanest—lowest—least! / The friendless—poor—forlorn—compose the Throng,’’ (I, 153) and, according to Wesleyan doctrine, all are equal! not one Soul would claim Superior place, or favour—pow’r, or fame— Nor would one christian heart, while kept sincere, Expect pre-eminence, for Merits here. Merit’s no word, with God, in sense, or sound In faithful nomenclator never found. True Christians know God gave them all they have— That faith must justify—and Grace must save. (I, 153)

Wesley, like his counterpart Whitefield, emphasized faith over works, but unlike Whitefield, who preached the Calvinist doctrine of predestination that restricted salvation to a chosen few, Wesley disseminated an ‘‘open’’ theology: the simple faith that Christ died for your sins was all that was necessary for salvation, anyone’s salvation. Woodhouse clearly subscribes to Wesley’s democratic views on this point, which he reiterates throughout the poem, exhorting his readers, missionary-like, to follow ‘‘The way to earthly peace, and heav’nly bliss!’’ (I, 236). One of the more significant moral points that connects Woodhouse to Wesley, as it also sheds some light on Woodhouse’s deteriorating relationship with Mrs. Montagu, concerns the issue of smuggling. In 1767, Wesley had published a pamphlet entitled ‘‘A Word to a Smuggler’’ in which he decried that ‘‘ ‘every smuggler is a thief general, who picks the pockets both of the king and all his

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fellow subjects. He wrongs them all; and, above all, the honest traders, many of whom he deprives of their maintenance.’ ’’80 Woodhouse ends chapter 12 of Crispinus Scriblerus with a lengthy vignette detailing Mrs. Montagu’s embarking on a scheme to purchase smuggled coffee: A female Relative, to save her Pelf, Disclos’d a scheme she realiz’d herself; And, with a Sister’s feelings, fondly taught Where smuggled goods, with profit, might be bought— But, chief, pure Coffee, might be purchas’d thence, Fresh, as in shops, at greatly less expence. (I, 237)

Ever the spendthrift, it does not take much convincing for Mrs. Montagu to send her house steward, Woodhouse, out to procure the contraband. The situation presents Woodhouse with a difficult moral dilemma: Wesley inveighed mightily against smuggling and those who purchased smuggled goods, but he also held duty to authority—be it to God, King, country, or even employer—to be a primary moral imperative. Woodhouse explains the pressures he felt succinctly, noting that ‘‘supreme Authority compell’d; / Which, for a moment, silenc’d moral saws/To fit him for the breach of binding Laws’’ (I, 238). After ‘‘several Seasons’’ of guilt-ridden participation in the scheme, Woodhouse finally reasons that ‘‘The Laws of Heav’n, and of his native Land’’ supersede his ‘‘duty to obey’’ his mistress, and he thus resolves to ‘‘all commands, with fortitude, refuse, / Which robb’d Society of social dues; / And firmly now defy a Despot’s nod, / Who bade him thus wage war with Man— and God!’’ (I, 239). Through is own interpretation and ordering of Wesleyan moral imperatives, Woodhouse comes into open rebellion with Montagu, insubordination that no doubt contributed to their final break. His own moral issues notwithstanding, his eventual refusal to act as Montagu’s agent in this scenario shows Woodhouse to be concerned for others—and ultimately for what he perceives to be the greater social good. Wesley was not a social or political radical, indeed, he was a lifelong Tory who held deeply conservative views. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, both Wesley and Whitefield ‘‘disapproved violently of revolution’’ and did not support radical social reform or labor activities of any sort.81 Yet the class dynamics of Wesleyan Methodism—its movement to raise laboring-class literacy, to develop a broad-based social consciousness, and to support an individual’s right to better oneself—suggest a progressive function. Gertrude Himmelfarb puts the case well:

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But if Wesley so often and so vigorously affirmed his loyalty to established authorities, it was partly because his teachings were insidiously subversive in other respects. By beseeching the poor to behave, work hard, and save, he was enjoining them to improve their conditions and stations. It has often been observed that the Methodists produced a disproportionate number of people who rose out of the lowest ranks to become skilled artisans, masters, even men of wealth. The ethos was, in fact, a powerful stimulus to social mobility, and affirmation of the right and duty to better oneself—morally and spiritually in the first instance, but also materially and socially.82

Not only has Woodhouse internalized this Wesleyan ethos, he also carries it to several radical extremes before ending Crispinus Scriblerus with the typical Wesleyan refrains of duty and order. With regard to the monarchy, however, Woodhouse is less blindly loyal than Wesley might have wished: ‘‘Kings are but Creatures, ruling years, or hours, / And draw, from Equals, but deputed pow’rs—’’ (I, 109), and further, the earthly king is figured as ‘‘a greedy, dangerous, regal, Dunce’’ who, amongst other things, ‘‘Makes Penury poorer to enrich the Rich’’ (II, 61). That Woodhouse harbored social-leveling notions, tinged with an antimonarchical strain that extended beyond the bounds of Wesleyan teaching is evident in the following rhetorical questions: Why should He ride in pomp, o’er ridge and rut While poor Supporters trudge thro’ filth on foot? Why shine so fat, and fair, on sumptous Throne, While equals work till worn to skin and bone? (II, 61)

Woodhouse’s evangelical extremism thus leads to a radical critique of monarchy and the oppression of ‘‘equals’’ upon which such a system of government is based. Chafing under repressive patronage that dampened his spirit and quelled his muse, Woodhouse finds in Wesleyan Methodism significant justification for his individualistic concerns, especially the freedom to write and so (potentially) to raise himself and family above their station. On another level, Crispinus Scriblerus shows that Woodhouse has matured as a poet. By the 1790s his social and political consciousness has widened to include a radical critique of the exploitation of laboring ‘‘plebeian Trains’’ by their propertied ‘‘Masters’’ (I, 168). The sense that Woodhouse is speaking for a wider ‘‘class’’ of people in this period is further evidenced by a series of verse epistles composed in the late 1780s which eventually became Love Letters to My Wife when they appeared in 1804. Here Woodhouse mirrors the terminology of

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Crispinus Scriblerus, lashing out against ‘‘the titled Brood’’ who own property, live in great houses, and exploit the ‘‘Plebeians, rude,’’ who live ‘‘In shops, or garrets; cellars, stalls, or cells; / Where Ignorance, Poverty, or Penance dwells’’ (II, 213). Woodhouse’s consciousness of upper-class tyranny and social oppression does not, however, lead to a revolutionary poetics, as the final chapter of Crispinus Scriblerus makes clear: Yet think not, Ye, possest of temporal Pow’r, Who with the Beast and Dragon, reign your Hour, Crispinus aim’d to rouze the abject Breed, Provok’d with Insult, and opprest with Need, From Duty to withdraw—to storm your Doors— Attack your Persons, or purloin your Stores— But o’er their Lusts, and Passions, to prevail, Performing Compacts, tho’ You, Courtiers, fail— And sooner suffer wrong, from Fraud, or Force, Than Conscience wound, or quit their Christian Course, Still tendering all that Law decrees as due, To righteous Heav’n, and to unrighteous You! (II, 76–77)

At least for Woodhouse, religion wins out over politics, as the dictates of ‘‘Duty’’ and ‘‘Law,’’ momentarily lost in flights of passionate antiestablishment rhetoric, return in full force to quell any possibility of incendiary action. It is worth noting that the important ‘‘class conscious’’ sense in which Woodhouse speaks for a larger social group whom he terms the ‘‘plebeians,’’ is matched—even extended—by a lesser-known laboring poet of the period, John Learmont, a Scotsman whose Poems: Pastoral, Satirical, Tragic, and Comic appeared in Edinburgh in 1791. Learmont, ‘‘a gardener by profession, and a poet . . . by propensity,’’ includes two politically-charged poems in his collection that parallel Woodhouse’s social groupings and plebeian sympathies.83 In ‘‘The Petition of the Journeymen Gardeners of Scotland,’’ addressed to ‘‘the Nobility and Gentry of these Realms,’’ Learmont speaks out for the economic interests of gardeners as a group: O! A’ ye Lords, Dukes, Princes, king, In whase side-pouches guineas ring, An’ wha owr claret sit an’ sing, Sae blyth and canty, Hear the Petition whilk we bring Now to present ye. (176)

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The purpose of the petition is to secure better wages for gardeners who ‘‘pantin’ toil ‘neath heat o’ noon’’ for only ‘‘tenpence a-day’’ (177, 179). But if the argument made in ‘‘The Petition’’ does not succeed in loosening the side-pouch strings of the masters, Learmont imagines an alternative we have not yet seen issued from a plebeian pen. ‘‘An Address to the Plebeians’’ marks the introduction of a recognizable revolutionary class politics in plebeian poetry published in the eighteenth century: Yet ye’re the sceptre o’ the land, Wha put kings, lairds, unto a stand; Gif ye but gather on the strand Unto a head, Ye’ll either hae yeu’re boon i’ hand, Or ding them dead. (4–5)

Learmont thus advocates plebeians taking their grievances to the streets and fighting it out with their upper-class oppressors. Instances of mob combinations and violence pitting laborers and masters against one another were not uncommon in the century, as many social historians have noted.84 However, Learmont’s image in this poem is distinctive because he is not simply talking about gardeners—or weavers, or bricklayers, for that matter. Learmont imagines a ‘‘plebeian’’ combination; that is, a larger group of workers that crosses traditional labor or guild boundaries. This plebeian labor solidarity includes all those workers who are exploited, made ‘‘subject tools’’ in Learmont’s terms, by a class of propertied masters (4). Thus Learmont’s poem strongly suggests that, by the 1790s, the cognitive organization of plebeian culture was shifting from the ‘‘vertical consciousness’’ of a rank and order society to the ‘‘horizontal consciousness’’ which characterizes a class society.85 This development of horizontal consciousness is spurred by a growing collective awareness of upper-class exploitation, significantly recorded in the texts of plebeians who experienced it firsthand. If Woodhouse does, finally, mute the threat of actual class violence in Crispinus Scriblerus, throughout the poem he also sings a consistent critical refrain against a class-based ideology used to justify plebeian exploitation. Echoing Fielding’s oversimplified construction (though without Fielding’s satiric humor), Woodhouse raises the category of work to identify two major social groups: one group enjoys ‘‘the products of a procreant Soil, / Exempt from every study—care—and toil’’ while another group must ‘‘think, and

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work, each waking hour, / With scarce one scrap of property, or pow’r’’ (I, 172). Woodhouse then questions how mankind can rationalize the injustices that are manifest in this arrangement: ‘‘With heavenly Justice will such scheme accord? / One starve, a Labourer—while one struts, a Lord?’’ (I, 172). Woodhouse argues further that a social system which breeds such inequality could never be sanctioned by God: ‘God ne’er could sanction such a partial Pact, Nor will His Word confirm so foul an Act! ‘Twas the vile Offspring of the human Mind, The base, the monstrous, birth, of curs’d Mankind; That One should rule thus insolent, and rash, While crowds sustain the labour, and the lash! (I, 172)

Thus Woodhouse demystifies a significant ideological foundation of a hierarchical social system based on birth and divine fate as merely a ‘‘base’’ and ‘‘monstrous’’ human construction. Woodhouse’s life experience, coupled with his religious enthusiasm, led him to believe that a truly Christian God would never ‘‘sanction’’ the world late-eighteenth-century England had become. If human society, with all of its arbitrary distinctions that define social power, is constructed by the humans who live them out, then it follows that they can also affect social change for themselves. This must have been the spark that lit the fire of Woodhouse’s ‘‘practical Christianity,’’ as Methodism was often described in the period. In boldly stating that ‘‘needy Brethren rarely, now, engage / State’s least attention in this iron Age!,’’ Woodhouse makes an explicit political statement geared to promote real social change (I, 126). He asks, in proto-socialist terms, ‘‘Why will proud Wealth expend in pompous Domes, / What would erect a hundred rustic homes?’’ and imagines several egalitarian alternatives in the course of his poem (I, 55). Despite the antiradicalism inherent in Wesleyan Methodism, turning Methodist radicalized Woodhouse. But Woodhouse suppressed his most significant contribution toward effecting such change, Crispinus Scriblerus, in particular those sections of the poem chronicling plebeian servitude, upperclass oppression, and his own version of religious and moral truth. Like Jones before him, Woodhouse is critical of ‘‘Wealth’’ gained at the expense of others, and his consistent characterization of such wealth as ‘‘pelf’’ in Crispinus Scriblerus informs his understanding of how the rich get their money and maintain their social power. The later ‘‘unpublished’’ Woodhouse thus presents a remarkable ex-

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ample of plebeian awareness of social-historical trends and a sense of a developing plebeian consciousness regarding political change in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Brimble, Bennet, Lucas, and Bryant: Writing for Alms Throughout the later eighteenth century, natural genius was still something to be searched for, and when found, to be encouraged and preserved. When John Fredrick Bryant asks, in one of his poems published in 1787, ‘‘What frenzy urges my aspiring soul, / That aims among the tuneful spheres to roll?,’’ he is (self-consciously) posing what remained a scientific question for many throughout the century.86 As we have already seen, the search for the causes of the ‘‘frenzy’’ Bryant abstractly names inspired Joseph Spence much earlier to travel the countryside following up reports of natural genius amongst the lower orders of society. The same impetus inspired William Duff to publish two treatises in the late 1760s, one especially concerned with the expression of ‘‘original genius’’ in poetry. Addison had given Homer and Shakespeare as examples of ‘‘great natural Genius’s that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art,’’ and, in Spence’s day, it was thought that studying versifying mechanics might reveal not only the causes of such genius, but also lead to the discovery of another Homer.87 Despite limitations of classical knowledge, a rude apprehension of current ideas, and defects in the ‘‘rules of art,’’ a mechanic poet was thought to be attuned to those simple, primitive impressions that characterized the poetic geniuses of the past. In the 1730s, poetic natural genius was still augmented with classical education. But by the 1760s, perhaps because Duck, with his subsequent training, had failed to assume the impossible mantle of becoming the next Homer, the radical view of natural genius explicitly advised against bookish learning for the primitive poet: ‘‘a Poet of original Genius has very little occasion for the weak aid of Literature: he is selftaught. He comes into the world as it were completely accomplished. Nature supplies the materials of his compositions . . . [and he] has no use for that which is derived from books. . . .’’88 The radical view of natural genius was also expanded to include the notion of imagination. Following Edward Young’s lead in Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Duff uses the term ‘‘original genius’’ throughout his work, and aligns it conceptually with ‘‘an inventive and plastic Imagination:’’

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Original Genius is distinguished from every other degree of this quality, by a more vivid and a more comprehensive Imagination, which enables it both to take in a greater number of objects, and to conceive them more distinctly; at the same time that it can express its ideas in the strongest colours, and represent them in the most striking light. (EOG, 89)

For Duff, the term ‘‘imagination’’ conceptualizes poetic originality. It is significant that Duff’s second tract, Critical Observations on the Writings of the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (1770), does not examine, mention, or even allude to the laboringpoets publishing in Duff’s own century. One of Pope’s many assessments of Duck, told to Spence, oddly prefigures both the conceptual development of imagination-as-originality in mid-century theories of genius, and hence the omission of laboring-poets from Duff’s work: ‘‘Duck [has] no imagination, all imitation.’’89 How are we to account, then, for the continued appearance and encouragement of plebeian natural geniuses in this period? William Brimble, John Bennet, John Lucas and Bryant are the most obscure laboring-poets in this study, yet they all published work in the period when Duff’s ideas were circulating. The fact that their texts appeared at all is, for the most part, no fault of their own. Certainly Duff’s disregard of contemporaneous examples of natural genius did not discourage the public’s fascination with, and continued support of, such people. Indeed, Duff’s tracts leave plenty of openings in particular for the support of those who exhibit ‘‘superior abilities’’ but ‘‘languish in the cell of obscurity, and feel the rigours of adversity and want.’’90 Oliver Goldsmith, however, was concerned with just how literary genius was being rewarded in England at mid-century. In An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), Goldsmith asserts that subscriptions were being so abused by unworthy authors that the resources of patronage were drying up: When first brought into fashion, subscriptions were conferred upon the ingenious alone, or those who were reputed such. But at present, we see them made a resource of indigence, and requested not as rewards of merit, but as a relief of distress. If tradesmen happen to want skill in conducting their own business, yet they are able to write a book; if mechanics want money, or ladies shame, they write books and solicit subscriptions. Scarce a morning passes, that proposals of this nature are not thrust into the half-opening doors of the rich, with, perhaps, a paltry petition, shewing the author’s wants, but not his merits.91

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Subscriptions, according to Goldsmith, had become a form of charity, based on an author’s ‘‘wants’’ rather than his ‘‘merits.’’ The definition of ‘‘merit’’ is relative, of course, but Goldsmith holds that there is little to recommend the primitivism or natural genius of mechanics who could write. Their subscriptions usurp funds required by real geniuses—such as Goldsmith himself—who contribute to the advancement of learning. Unlike Johnson’s staunch support for the commercialization of print culture, Goldsmith’s argument seeks to maintain the traditional productive relations of patronage by setting specific limits on just who merits the support of the great. Brimble, Bennet, Lucas, and Bryant emerge out of these cultural arguments concerning genius and its just rewards as living examples of Goldsmith’s complaint: they are the beneficiaries of the latecentury enthusiasm for philanthropy. These poets share an identifiable need for benefactions beyond the general poverty and distress of their station, and their respective afflictions were all publicized in order to stimulate public support for their subscriptions. By the 1770s and 1780s, examples of mechanic natural genius were increasingly circumscribed by the notion of patronage-as-charity. Subscribers were, in effect, giving alms in exchange for a volume of curious poetical effusions. This sort of patronage does not encourage continued Parnassian flights of fancy so, as if accepting of the terms of this unwritten contract, these poets make little effort to imagine their writing as an alternative form of labor. Bryant is the only poet of the four to use his chance in print to make a case for his genius in terms that parallel Duff’s theory of ‘‘original genius.’’ But neither he nor Brimble were ever heard from in print again, and the cobblers, Bennet and Lucas, only managed to publish a single poem apiece—in each case some time after their original volumes appeared.92 To the best of my knowledge, William Brimble represents an addition to the ranks of plebeian poets known to have published in the eighteenth century. The title page to his Poems, Attempted on Various Occasions (1765), published by subscription in Bath, advertises Brimble as a ‘‘Carpenter’’ by trade.93 Brimble hailed from Twerton, a small town near Bath, and his ‘‘circumstances of distress’’ were told in the pages of The Monthly Review: It seems [Brimble] was, some time ago, obliged, through unavoidable misfortunes, to leave his business, and a large family, in the country; and came to work in London, ’till his affairs could be accommodated: but since his residence in the capital, a series of misfortunes hath befallen him; the last of which was his falling from a scaffold, while at

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work, and breaking his collar-bone; in consequence of which, he has been, for some time, disabled from earning his subsistence by his labour.—We therefore beg leave to recommend this honest but unfortunate person, not as a poet, but as an object of benevolence.94

This reviewer notes that Brimble’s volume was published two years earlier, and has been ‘‘lately advertised in the London papers’’ (MR, 36:241). His review clearly relies on the information from these advertisements to paint Brimble as a victim of fortune, but also seeks to clarify the limits of patronage: Brimble is to be supported as an ‘‘object of benevolence,’’ but not as a ‘‘poet.’’ The Monthly Review provides only a four-line sample of Brimble’s verse, and notes that a pastoral ballad, entitled ‘‘Strephon and Celia,’’ shows ‘‘a degree of elegant simplicity, beyond what could be expected from the uninstructed pen of a poor mechanic’’ (MR, 36:241). Thus Brimble’s ‘‘honest’’ character, his simple, unlettered muse, and—most importantly—his disability caused by a work-related accident, make him a worthy cause for upper-class charity. Brimble’s own preface to his work reveals that he is aware of the standard cultural terms for plebeian self-presentation. He writes for ‘‘private amusement only’’; he is in ‘‘want of education’’; and his poems appear in their natural state, without the ‘‘assistance of any person whatever; either in composition or correction’’ (i, iv, iii). Moreover, Brimble answers those detractors who would point out the apparent neglect of his ‘‘business’’ for the sake of writing verses: Whence I am aware of another objection, that for that my business might have been sufficient, had it been properly attended to; and that I might have employ’d the hand-saw to more advantage, than the pen: But I would have such as make the objection consider, that there is no mind, however intent on business, but requires a relaxation of some kind or other at times. . . . False however is the surmise that has been propagated, that my circumstances are worsted by my paying too great attention to writing; for tho’ I own strong has been the impulse thereto, and tho’ I have sometimes attempted it, yet I never could write (even such as it is) if business was in the least neglected thereby. . . . (i–ii)

Brimble’s statement achieved the desired effect with The Monthly Review, which observed that ‘‘he never quitted the hand-saw, but by way of relaxation’’ (MR, 36:241). The Critical Review, however, was less magnanimous, arguing that Brimble’s benefactors could better display their generosity by becoming ‘‘his customers instead of subscribers,’’ and that Brimble could ‘‘make more money by

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keeping to his original profession, than by going a-whoring after the muses, who will most certainly jilt him.’’95 The tone and lack of specific biographical information in The Critical Review piece suggest that the reviewer did not know about Brimble’s personal distress. Brimble sheds no light on his accident or other misfortunes in his preface or his poems, but the public advertisement of Brimble as a charity case by his primary supporters clearly had a profound effect on the reviewer who penned the notice in The Monthly Review. By the 1760s, then, support for plebeian publishing is being defined primarily as a laudable form of charity, designed to relieve the distress of those needful individuals who measure up to polite standards of decency, but this support is not intended to develop the poetic genius of these new laborer poets. Brimble adheres to the terms of this charity model in his poetry because his chief concern is achieving a ‘‘ponderosity’’ in his compositions that will complete the exchange, that will please (and reward), and not simply celebrate, his benefactors (i). Toward this end, the volume includes a series of descriptive riddles in verse, called ‘‘enigmas,’’ long meditations on death and other lofty themes, and rhapsodies on natural subjects like flowers and idealized pastoral landscapes (15). Brimble makes no pretensions either to being a poet—‘‘O! indulgent hear, / Tho’ not a poet’s, yet a friendly prayer’’—or wanting to be one in the future (9). Although he makes reference to a ‘‘native impulse’’ which guides his muse, Brimble does not discuss his genius or use the term to argue that the office of poet is his original fate (72). Brimble thus accepts the social limitations imposed on his ‘‘plebeian pen,’’ and aims only to provide a suitable product for the alms he is receiving (70). Brimble’s support of the customary hierarchical social relationship between master and the laborer is especially apparent in ‘‘Collin and Strephon,’’ a dialogue between two rustics. As ‘‘Strephon’’ answers the charges put forth by ‘‘Collin,’’ Brimble mediates and defends his own ideas in Strephon’s voice. For instance, Strephon is aware (as Brimble would have been) that ‘‘Oppression whence must aid the swelling store, / And fierce rapacious gripings wring the poor,’’ and goes on to argue that ‘‘heaven still mindful of the low distress’d, / Has to relieve their wants its stewards plac’d’’ (78, 79). The misguided pursuit of ‘‘wealth’’ generates the oppression of the poor Brimble describes, and he places his faith for correcting this social problem in the charity of rich, right-minded ‘‘stewards.’’ It should come as no surprise, then, that the only patrons Brimble names in his poetry are celebrated as examples of such selfless stewardship:

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Near their abode behold the grateful poor, With smiles surround the hospitable door; From whence the needy ne’er unsuccor’d went, Whence labour well repaid diffuse content; Whose conscience while refreshing alms they deal, In peaceful whispers tells them all is well; Of such Heaven (patterns for th’ aspiring few) Gave a Carnarvon, and a Montagu!96 (81–82)

Thus Brimble presents an argument for general relief of the laboring poor that Woodhouse might have accepted in the 1760s as well, but was disillusioned with by 1788. In contrast to Woodhouse, Brimble possessed no desire to raise himself by his pen, so his support of a system of social welfare based on a charitable gentry and a deserving poor reads simply as a resignation to the prevailing social order. Brimble no doubt received his alms—his subscribers list includes a modest 138 names—which leads ‘‘Strephon’’ to close the poem with a statement that emphasizes a static social world with which both Leapor and Woodhouse would have been uncomfortable: ‘‘Then patient let’s our destin’d lot sustain, / Nor here expect what none can here attain’’ (84). Perhaps as a result of Woodhouse’s notoriety, the following decade saw two shoemaker-poets, John Bennet (1774) and John Lucas (1776), enter the literary marketplace under the auspices of upperclass charity. The former was born and bred in Woodstock, a small town about eight miles northwest of Oxford, where the retired professor of poetry, Thomas Warton, acted as curate. Bennet’s Poems on Several Occasions is dedicated first ‘‘To My honourable Benefactors and worthy Subscribers’’ and second to the most important of them, ‘‘To The Rev. Thomas Warton.’’ In this second dedication, Bennet relates that his poetic propensity emerged from his early acquaintance with ‘‘the charms of music,’’ specifically, ‘‘the pious strains of Sternhold and Hopkins under that melodious psalmodist, my honoured Father, your much-approved Parish Clerk.’’97 It would seem from this statement that Bennet’s father not only supported his versifying, but also brought his son to the attention of his employer, Warton, who assisted Bennet with his compositions: ‘‘I have not been inattentive to the excellent Instructions, with which you have so kindly favoured my humble endeavours’’ (vi). The connection with Warton was no doubt useful when the time came to solicit subscription commitments toward publishing Bennet’s poems. Indeed, the lengthy list of subscribers to Bennet’s volume includes many names associated with the colleges at Oxford, and

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Warton appears to have been primarily responsible for bringing Bennet before the public. However, Warton did not pen any of the prefatory material introducing Bennet. That office is left to one James Green, who is identified in the subscriber’s list only as being from ‘‘Fenchurch-street, London’’ (xxiii). In his poem addressed ‘‘To the Author,’’ Green calls attention to Bennet’s dual working life—‘‘A Shoemaker and Poet? / True Again’’—and, alluding to Woodhouse, asks further: ‘‘Where is the wonder? If you look around, / You’ll find some Poets—Coblers most profound!’’ (ix). Green’s effort is remarkable for its disparaging remarks on ‘‘heathen authors’’ from ‘‘Aristotle to poetick Pope,’’ and for trumpeting Bennet as a Christianized natural genius: Give me the Bard who nobly does aspire To that divine, that true poetick fire, Which glows and warms within each sacred page, The glory and delight of ev’ry age; Who knows no muse but that great Spirit’s aid, Which o’er the whole creation is display’d; Who frames his faith and conduct to those laws, And lives the lively picture which he draws; Whose faith is fix’d, depending on that word Which has reveal’d the Sovereign God and Lord: Where such I find, I’m not asham’d to tell My heart goes with him and I wish him well. (xiii)

Although Bennet did not suffer the sort of debilitating accident Brimble had, his prefatory dedications and the poems that follow provide some insight into his status as a charity case. In a statement characteristic of laboring-class deference and acknowledgment of prevailing cultural attitudes about work and writing, Bennet writes to Warton ‘‘that these shrubs of poesy, which I presume to inscribe to you, are the amusements only of my relaxation from the more laborious duties of the day. And if by the indulgence of the generous Public, I can make such innocent amusements instrumental towards the support of a numerous family, I hope to plead some claim to your countenance in so laudable an attempt’’ (v–vi). Bennet’s need to provide for ‘‘a numerous family’’ serves as a rhetorical marker which defines his entrance into print culture as a form of charity. The statement successfully deflects any sense of individual poetic ambition; Bennet is not writing for himself, but for the support of his family. The first dedication, explicitly addressed to his ‘‘Benefactors’’ and ‘‘Subscribers,’’ makes the terms of the exchange clear: money for poetry. And that money, Bennet notes, will be

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used ‘‘to enable me to rear an infant offspring, and to drive away all anxious solicitude from the breast of a most amiable wife’’ (iii). Bennet continues his accounting of the exchange inherent in the patron/poet relationship in a poem entitled ‘‘Sent to his Grace the D—— of——, on receiving a Bounty for his Poems’’: My Lord,

A Mind quite free from adulating lays, In the most humble sense returns his praise For that kind, gen’rous bounty to him sent, Such works reward! too great the compliment. Could I but speak one half the tender joys That flow’d from my dear wife and lisping boys, And pleasing satisfactions that I felt, A flinty soul would in compassion melt. (124)

Here Bennet is careful to emphasize the effects of this lord’s ‘‘gen’rous bounty’’ on his family before calling attention to his own ‘‘pleasing satisfactions,’’ thus displacing the perceived effects of such benefaction from an economy of class to an economy of charity. That is, Bennet’s subscriber-readers are meant to take notice of the fact that the author has no intentions of raising himself by his writing: ‘‘I mean ever to strive to render myself (according to my station) a useful member of the community’’ (iii). Embedded in this statement is a wholesale acceptance of the prevailing cultural equation linking writing to idleness, especially for one of Bennet’s social position. The money, Bennet makes clear in his final poem of the volume (appropriately titled ‘‘An Epilogue of Thanks’’) is ‘‘to cheer Distress,’’ not to set himself up as poet-at-large (153). Taken together, Bennet’s poems present a classic case of ideologically sound plebeian self-presentation, as he methodically develops the reader’s sense that he embodies the social values of honesty, industry, and piety. The Critical Review rather facetiously claimed that, with the publication of Poems on Several Occasions, Bennet was now completely qualified to become the poet-laureat of his native town, to sing the humours of Woodstock-fair, and the festivities of Christmas; to compose a panegyric on ‘the balmy sweets’ of his favorite alehouse, the Rose and Crown; to furnish the players, who occasionally perform at Woodstock, with prologues and epilogues; to write epitaphs for the wooden monuments, which may be erected, during his life, in the church-yards of all the neighboring parishes; and finally to sail along the stream of time, in company with the most renowned poetasters of

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the present century, under the banners of the late illustrious Stephen Duck.98

While it is true that Bennet’s poetic subjects are often frivolous, the reviewer’s connecting Bennet rhetorically to other plebeian ‘‘poetasters,’’ and to Duck in particular, is significant. Duck, we should remember, was presented to the reading public in the 1730s as an ideal representation of honesty, industry, and piety—the social values which defined lower-class virtue in the service of maintaining existing social relations. And Duck’s example provided a model for plebeian marketability for more than one generation of poets in the century. In view of this reviewer’s comment, it appears there is more to the process of Bennet’s commodification than merely naming himself ‘‘a journeyman Shoemaker’’ on the title page. Indeed, Bennet’s poems present a picture of a sober Christian fellow, who measures up to the ideal established by Duck and others who came before. And he achieves this despite poems that celebrate his favorite beer, ‘‘Bowley’s Ale,’’ and his favorite place to drink it, ‘‘The Rose and Crown’’ (127, 112). In a poem addressed ‘‘To a Kinsman,’’ Bennet discusses the import of ‘‘Honesty’’ (144). References to Bennet’s industriousness abound, but the issue comes to a head in a long dialogue entitled ‘‘Industry and Sloth,’’ which ends appropriately with the following lines spoken by ‘‘Industry’’: An humble poverty, with will resign’d, Oft brings forth virtues of the brightest kind. To see man conquer, when by odds opprest, A scene discovers worthy of the blest: But when with Sloth sad Poverty is found, When nought but rags and laziness abound, Her I disown, nor will assistance give, While she with thy vile train attempts to live. (94)

The sentiment reflects a strong sense of ideological harmony between Bennet and his polite patrons, subscribers who desire to relieve industrious poverty rather than the slothful variety. Moreover, perhaps as a result of his close contact with the church, Bennet explicitly promotes churchgoing and the cultivation of Christian values. ‘‘Hampton-Gay’’ concludes with the following prayer that God send a new pastor to the parish who will reform the wayward flock: Deign then, Supreme, in pity to this place Involv’d in folly, to restore thy grace, And send a pastor, to all truth ally’d,

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To preach (like Paul) Christ Jesus crucify’d! Then shall the swains make thee their only stay, And true devotion reign in Hampton-Gay. (65)

His pious verses, scattered throughout the volume, must have been a particular selling point to Warton. In addition, Bennet issues requisite support for the notion that the present system of social hierarchy is the result of divine justice. The opening poem, ‘‘Woodstock,’’ concludes with the following sentiment: Shall I a Providence in question call Because thy portion’s fair and mine is small? His gifts he suits to every degree, And none so mean but may contentment see, And taste the joys of heav’n in low adversity. (7)

Bennet’s resignation to suffer material inequity because it represents the will of God, and his emphasis on the possibility of feeling ‘‘contentment’’ and tasting ‘‘the joys of heav’n’’ despite ‘‘low adversity,’’ completes the picture he presents of himself as an ideallyinterpellated plebeian subject worthy of polite patronage in 1774. The sentiments that Bennet expresses in these pious verses also read much like those issued from the pens of socially-minded evangelical Christians in the 1790s. In fact, Bennet himself resurfaces in that decade with a poem titled Redemption (1796) in which he continues his Christian theme. Although Green writes that ‘‘leather is his daily theme,’’ Bennet does not broach the subject of his working life as a shoemaker in any of his poems (155). In fact, he seems careful not to voice any overt desire to take up an alternative career in letters. It is ironic, if also appropriate given the standards that defined plebeian authorship in this period, that the final poem in the volume is entitled ‘‘Crispin,’’ and is also by James Green. The final lines of the poem provide accurate summation of the cultural situation Bennet found himself in (and reproduced in his writing): So may our cobler rise by friendly aid, Be happy and successful in his trade; His awl and pen with readiness be found To make or keep our understandings sound. (156)

Though Bennet can still write while he works at his trade, his only ‘‘rise’’ will be in the form of ‘‘friendly aid’’ bestowed upon him

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from alms-giving patrons, hoping to help a member of the deserving poor remain ‘‘happy’’ in his trade. John Lucas was also a charity case, more in the mold of a Brimble than a Bennet, though he was not advertised with quite the same philanthropic zeal Brimble had been. The title page of Lucas’s Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1776) identifies him as a ‘‘Cobler,’’ and further, as ‘‘a Pensioner in Trinity Hospital, Salisbury.’’99 In the eighteenth century, to be a ‘‘pensioner’’ attached to a hospital probably meant that Lucas was a resident there, the institution being responsible for his lodging and board. It is unlikely Lucas was receiving an actual pension from the hospital, though he might have enjoyed plenty of leisure time there to compose rhymes.100 Lucas’s volume of poems and odd prose pieces reveals very little about the man and his circumstances. The only relevant information the poet divulges about his current situation occurs in ‘‘Address to a Friend,’’ in which Lucas says he ‘‘now presume[s] in life’s last stage, / In flights poetic to engage’’ (61). To be ‘‘in life’s last stage’’ would indicate Lucas was an older man and dependent upon Salisbury hospital for support, perhaps because he had no family to care for him. No notice of Lucas’s volume appears in the London review journals of the period, and no supporters wrote celebratory verses, rendering Lucas all the more obscure a figure. Despite being advertised as a mere charity case, Lucas makes some effort to show that his poetic effusions, though produced by a ‘‘feeble hand,’’ are the work of a pure, unassisted genius (8). In ‘‘The Author to his Muse,’’ Lucas accounts for his ‘‘uncouth’’ numbers and ‘‘wild’’ poetic strains by highlighting his self-taught status: For me, I cannot boast the rules Which learned masters teach in schools; The useful rules of grammar clear, Alas! they never reach’d my ear, Yielding instruction how to write Correctly, elegant, polite, Whence I might gain the curious art To please the ear, or charm the heart. (43)

This is characteristic plebeian humility, but not self-denigration. ‘‘Correct,’’ ‘‘elegant,’’ and ‘‘polite’’ constitute three central principles of Augustan poetic taste which Lucas cannot reproduce;101 but he can provide something different and not altogether inferior to those cultural standards: the musings of his poetic genius. Toward

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this end, Lucas argues that true genius is innate and heaven sent— ‘‘That sacred fire from heav’n descends, / ’Tis God the precious gift extends’’—and goes on to assert that when genius is present, ‘‘all human arts / Serve but to form a fool of parts’’ (4, 5). Lucas thus adopts the current radical definition of original genius for himself and claims that his work is deserving of readerly attention because it is uncorrupted by standardized Augustan rules of art. This claim is supported by an editorial footnote included with a piece entitled ‘‘A Wish’’: Though the foregoing mixture of Poetry and Prose has a very singular appearance, the Editor rather chose to present it to the public in its genuine state, than to make an alteration, which would not only exceed the limits of his commission, but would also deprive the reader of being an immediate witness of the Author’s manner. He desires only to observe, that every piece is printed from the Author’s words, except a few grammatical corrections, and that he has reason to believe, from the appearance of these mixed copies, that neither the prosaic nor poetical parts have received much improvement from revisals, but are now nearly the same as when first dictated by the Author’s genius. (26)

As an editorial voucher for the text’s authenticity, this footnote works to support Lucas’s stature as an original genius and his implicit argument that his poetic ramblings are as worthy of readerly attention as those productions which can boast the rules of art and classical knowledge. Lucas’s volume is certainly more marketable in 1776 when presented in this light. However, a close look at Lucas’s ‘‘Wish’’ poem suggests that his claim to have been completely ignorant of classical poetic models and conventions is duplicitous at best, and an outright lie at worst. In the opening verse section, Lucas reproduces the Horatian wishes for health and contentment: Come, sweet Content, with rosy Health, Ye real blessings! real wealth! Without you, life’s a gloomy scene, And grandeur but an empty dream! (25)

Lucas’s description of ‘‘sweet Content’’ and ‘‘rosy Health’’ as ‘‘real wealth’’ also suggests a familiarity with eighteenth-century permutations of the genre. The poem, in fact, works as a response to those by plebeian authors of the 1730s who invoke wealth as a primary wish, often with potentially subversive connotations. Lucas’s argument in these lines seems pitched decisively against earlier perver-

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sions of the Horatian ideal that subordinate the standard wishes for health, peace, and contentment to the desire for material wealth. Not only does Lucas know that this maneuver is inappropriate, but he would seem to know something of the long tradition of ‘‘Wish’’ poems, too, knowledge he likely tries to cover up by shifting to prose halfway through the piece. Lucas, then, manipulates his selfpresentation as a poetic genius in order to fit contemporary views on the subject, in particular the notion that original genius could be stilted by bookish learning. Whatever the extent of Lucas’s educational development, he still found it necessary to try to defuse the negative cultural attitudes directed toward plebeians who abandon their respective trades to venture into print. In the poem which opens the book, ‘‘A Dialogue, by way of Apology,’’ Lucas provides a conversation on this subject between the ‘‘author’’ and a ‘‘friend.’’ The friend begins by admonishing the author for his reading and writing: Philo, forbear, not waste your time In reading, or composing rhyme; Think on the low, the abject sphere You are ordain’d to act in here, Nor hope to raise on wings of fame From dark obscurity your name. But granting this, that you succeed, Does any gain from it proceed? Will fame content the hungry Muse, Or give the naked wretch some cloaths? If not, what folly ‘tis to write, Since you, my friend, get nothing by’t! Your trade, though mean, will these supply; If you with diligence apply, (1–2)

This is a familiar argument, positing that industriousness in one’s trade, however ‘‘mean,’’ will provide the material necessities for basic survival. Again, the fact that there was real money and not simply abstract ‘‘fame’’ to be gained by publishing in this period is mystified by the speaker. Poetry, he argues, will not alleviate ‘‘hunger’’ or provide protection from a chill ‘‘north wind’’: ‘‘Your real wants you may remove / By means which God and man approve’’ (2). Lucas resists the ideological implications of this statement by arguing, as we have seen, that his genius is granted by God. But Lucas does not argue that turning poet will provide him with the necessary wealth to live and continue writing; instead he notes plainly that ‘‘Wisdom’s my wish, my soul’s desire, / To her I ar-

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dently aspire’’ (3). For Lucas, it is ‘‘Celestial Wisdom’’—not temporal education—that constitutes ‘‘real wealth,’’ and thus the poet effectively opts out of the material economy described by his friend in order to pursue higher goals (25). Are we to infer, then, that this lofty pursuit of wisdom will require more leisure time, and so mark an end to cobbling for Lucas? Other internal evidence suggests that we are. In ‘‘The Cobler,’’ Lucas describes the economic limitations of his former trade: Me did the Muses nine employ, Their shoes to cobble, buskins mend; Tho’ long this place I did enjoy, Small was the gain which did attend. They paid me all (sad pay!) in rhyme; I thought that it was wond’rous hard That I on such light food must dine.— Can it suffice a hungry bard? (65)

But like other mid- to late-century plebeian poets, Lucas uses a poem ostensibly about his former workaday life to comment on his writing and his apparent desire to earn money by it. The language of this passage reveals Lucas using a poetic discourse on work metaphorically to point out the shortcomings of working for the ‘‘Muses.’’ On one level, Lucas’s career as a cobbler produced only ‘‘small gain,’’ and on another, cobbling for the muses produced only ‘‘rhyme.’’ A ‘‘hungry bard’’ requires money for his verses, but Lucas is silent on the subject of becoming a professional poet. Lucas offers only the following lines in a poem addressed to ‘‘Mr. T—s W—s,’’ indicating his desire for patronage: ‘‘My Muse shall at your service be, / If you can with her rules agree’’ (63). But this is as close to a patron/client relationship as Lucas apparently ever got. Like Brimble’s, Lucas’s ‘‘success’’ in print seems to have been made possible by a form of patronage defined exclusively as charity. For Brimble, Bennet, and Lucas, their writing is a form of work that can generate alms, though not enough economic support to fashion a career as a poet. John Fredrick Bryant, a former clay-pipe maker, presents a slightly different case because we know his patrons set him up in a ‘‘Stationary, Book, and Print-selling business’’ in response to the hardships of his original trade (xxxiii). Yet, like Brimble and Lucas before him, Bryant publicizes his specific affliction, and though the benefactions he received altered his working life, they did not allow him to turn poet. The lengthy autobiographical narrative prefixed to

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Bryant’s poems provides us with more information concerning his entrance into print culture than we have for the previous three poets. Bryant was born in London, but spent most of his life in and around Bristol. The narrative chronicles the details of Bryant’s laboring life. He was bred a pipe-maker, but in hard times worked as an itinerant laborer, bearing ‘‘a hod’’ for bricklayers, digging foundations for new buildings, working as ‘‘a jobber in some rope-grounds,’’ and ‘‘attend[ing] on the quays’’ (xviii, xvi, xvi). His poetical talents gained public notice when Bryant was traveling the countryside alone selling pipes. When he was without ready cash to pay his way, he would sing and entertain his hosts. Finding himself without money for passage across the Severn on one occasion, Bryant had the good fortune to meet a gentleman who carried him in his boat for the price of a song. Bryant sang and recited some poems of his own making, and so piqued this gentleman’s interest that he and some friends followed up on the meeting, eventually advertising a subscription for a volume of Bryant’s productions.102 A close examination of this narrative and Bryant’s volume as a whole reveals that both texts are carefully constructed to establish Bryant’s ‘‘genius’’ and present him as a subject worthy of patronage. Bryant and his handlers seem reflexively aware of contemporary theories of ‘‘original genius’’ circulating in the period because many details evident in both texts parallel key points made by Duff in his tracts on original genius in poetry. For example, Duff notes that ‘‘one who is born with a Genius for Poetry, will disclose a peculiar relish and love for it in his earliest years; and . . . he will be naturally led to imitate the productions he admires’’ (EOG, 37). Bryant describes his early encounters with ‘‘Mr. Pope’s and Mr. Dryden’s translations of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil,’’ which inspired him ‘‘to make verses’’ when he was ‘‘about ten years old’’ (vi). One of Duff’s key points in his second book, Critical Observations, is that the temper and passions of a genius are unlike those of other men; a genius is more sensitive to pleasure and pain. Bryant goes to some length in his narrative to define his difference from others precisely in these terms: From the first of my remembrance, I discovered in myself a sort of sensibility different from what I observed to actuate the generality of children with whom I was acquainted. The sight of cruelty particularly affected me; nor could I be a witness to the destruction even of noxious animals (commonly the sport of boys) but with extreme pain. (ii)

‘‘Genius,’’ according to Duff, ‘‘hath a natural tendency to produce a humane, compassionate and devotional temper of mind’’ (CO, 350).

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While it could be coincidental that Bryant follows the above statement with an account of his ‘‘proper ideas of the power and goodness of the Deity,’’ it appears he is following Duff’s criteria fairly closely (ii). In more general terms, Duff argues that genius ‘‘disdains to offer to any one the incense of flattery,’’ and Bryant does not celebrate or even name his primary patrons in his volume (CO, 355). Finally, using Milton as his test case, Duff asserts that genius matures with age, a principle Bryant’s publishers seem to have taken to heart (EOG, 37–38). The book is organized chronologically, from Bryant’s first to latest compositions. This fact prompts The Monthly Review to note that ‘‘it is curious to observe the growth and progress of his abilities. His later productions are not unworthy the public notice, or the patronage they have gained.’’103 This evidence suggests that Bryant and his handlers are out to capitalize on his ‘‘original genius’’ in ways reminiscent of Duck’s early career. If Bryant was deemed worthy of upper-class support because of his genius, he was also treated—in accordance with the times—as a charity case. Pipe-making was indeed a ‘‘miserable trade,’’ as the reviewer for The Monthly Review observes, and Bryant plays this card throughout his text (MR, 77:160). Bryant’s affliction stems from ‘‘one part of the process in manufacturing [pipes]’’ where ‘‘the eyes are much exposed to the fire,’’ causing the loss of sight (xxxiii). His poem on the subject, entitled ‘‘On a Piece of Unwrought Pipe-Clay,’’ begins by showing the poet at work: Rude mass of earth, from which with moiled hands (Compulsive taught) the brittle tubes I form, Oft listless, while my vagrant fancy warm Roves (heedless of necessity’s demands) Amid Parnassian bow’rs, or wishful eyes The flight of Genius, while sublime she soars Of moral truth in search, or earth explores, Or sails with Science through the starry skies:— (33)

Bryant thus uses a poetic discourse on work simply to direct his readers’ attention to his mental flights of poetic ‘‘Genius.’’ Unlike Woodhouse, Bryant does not write and work at the same time, but his ‘‘vagrant fancy’’ leads him to meditate on the sublime subjects for poetry. The clay, however, reminds the would-be poet that he needs to make a living: ‘‘Yet must I own (unsightly clod) thy claim / To my attention, for thou art my stead’’ (33). But the poem ends by describing the danger this poetical genius is exposed to in practicing his trade:

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And in the furnace thy last change I speed: Ah! then how eager do I urge the flame, How anxious watch thee mid that glowing fire, That threats my eye-balls with extinction dire! (33)

Bryant’s ploy to elicit reader sympathy apparently was successful, for even the normally vitriolic Critical Review relented: ‘‘we sympathize too much with his past adversity to disturb his future repose by any critical remarks.’’104 But the extent of Bryant’s ‘‘future repose’’ was limited under the terms of patronage in this period. Bryant apparently wanted more than to be shuffled off to a stationer’s shop in London, though he does not complain about this specifically. In ‘‘The Author on his Own Situation,’’ however, Bryant divulges his desire to become a sycophantic poet, in effect, singing for pay: O! would some gen’rous patronising friend My murth’ring woes and dire vexations end; Dismiss each threat’ning dun, each anxious care, And bid me eat and sing, devoid of fear! Loud should my grateful song proclaim his praise, Whose fost’ring hand does friendless genius raise; His kind commands my future themes should name; His friendly counsel guide my flight to fame. (35)

But Bryant would never write such lays, due in large part to the confines of the patron/poet relationship into which he entered. Indeed, the crude plate which serves as a frontispiece to Bryant’s Verses depicts the author as a simple rustic; there is no effort to present this tradesman as a writer.105 Even as a stationer, and later as an exciseman, Bryant apparently found little time to write, perhaps because of ill-health, or perhaps because his later productions were suppressed by watchful benefactors before his death in 1791. For Brimble, Bennet, Lucas, and Bryant, then, writing poems becomes merely another form of itinerant labor; each produced a volume which generated enough support to offset their respective pains. But it appears that the effects of Johnson’s exclusionary views regarding print culture are taking hold by the 1770s and 1780s. Except for a cry or two for an older, fading patron/client model, these four poets do not combat in print the class-based limitations to which they were being subjected. It would take Woodhouse and perhaps the most unlikely of souls, the lowly milkwoman Ann Yearsley, to expose publicly the oppression inherent in this form of patronage-as-charity.

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John Fredrick Bryant, frontispiece to Verses (1787), signed ‘‘J. G.’’ and dated 1786. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Elizabeth Hands Answers the Polite Critics Before engaging with Yearsley’s substantial poetic output, however, Elizabeth Hands’s single volume, The Death of Amnon. A Poem. With an Appendix: Containing Pastorals, and other Poetical Pieces (1789), requires some attention in the context of my argument in this chapter. This text includes several important poems where Hands reveals a deft, satirical vein, explicitly mocking polite criticisms of plebeian female authorship. Hands makes almost no pretenses in her poetry to fulfill polite expectations for a poet of her station; she effectively constructs herself as a poet, yet never published again, despite the apparent success of this volume. In Hands, we find the poetic fulfillment of plebeian resistance to polite censorship, but this textual resistance is, in some respects, undercut by the realities of a publishing trade which still requires polite sponsors, if not direct patronage. It is difficult to reconstruct the chronology of Hands’s life because she did not write an autobiographical sketch or provide many details of her life in her poems. We do not even know when she was born or when she died. Still, we do know that Hands lived and worked in Bourton, a small town near Rugby, Warwickshire, in the 1780s. For many years she was a domestic servant for the Huddlesford family of Allesby, but internal and external evidence suggests that Hands had married ‘‘a blacksmith’’ and was pregnant by 1785, and so perhaps left service at this time.106 Roger Lonsdale notes that Hands published poems in Jopson’s Coventry Mercury under the name of ‘‘Daphne,’’ but it was her lengthy blank verse poem, The Death of Amnon, which earned Hands the notice of Philip Bracebridge Homer and other influential men at the Rugby School.107 Homer and his father, the Reverend Henry Homer, rector of Bridingbury, were ‘‘instrumental in bringing these poems to light, by promoting a subscription of not fewer than 1200 names’’ (GM, 67:540). Writing in The Monthly Review, George Ogle called this an ‘‘uncommonly numerous list of subscribers,’’ one that included Anna Seward, Thomas Warton, and many other ‘‘persons of rank, and consideration’’ in its pages.108 Ogle attributes this remarkable support to the good character of the author herself: ‘‘There could be no motive for extraordinary patronage, but a benevolent regard to merit—of some kind’’ (MR, 3:346). That Ogle does not know how to describe Hands’s ‘‘merit’’ suggests that Hands, and those responsible for publishing her work, are not following the traditional formula for popularizing plebeian poetic talent. Indeed, the only prefatory statement to the poems,

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Hands’s dedication ‘‘To Bertie Greatheed, Esq.,’’ contains few of the familiar rhetorical markers of plebeian self-promotion: The difficulties which an Author, under my circumstances, has to contend with—born in obscurity, and never emerging beyond the lower stations in life—must have been an insurmountable bar to the publication of the following Poems, had not the approbation and zeal of some particular friends to serve me, been exerted in a manner which demands my most thankful acknowledgments, and with a success which I had little reason to expect. Nothing could have added more to the satisfaction which I have felt from their flattering efforts, than the permission which I have obtained of prefixing your name to them. This honour from a Gentleman so distinguished for literary, as well as every other polite accomplishment, will, I trust, ensure me the candour, if not the attention of the Public.109

Although Hands acknowledges her plebeian roots and low social position—‘‘born in obscurity, and never emerging beyond the lower stations in life’’—she makes no reference to her lack of formal education, never mentions or apologizes for the flights of her unassisted genius, and does not describe suffering under the weight of penury and a life of labor. She does graciously recognize the help of ‘‘particular friends’’ in publishing her poems, and realizes that Greatheed, who had literary and aristocratic ties, serves an important purpose in legitimizing the work of her plebeian pen for a polite reading public.110 Neither Hands nor her primary benefactors trumpet her honesty, industry, or piety anywhere in the volume, and Hands refers to her muse in consistently positive, not self-deprecating, terms—as in ‘‘my generous muse’’ (82). Hands’s apparent rejection of earlier plebeian models carries over into her poems as well. She does not write about her former working life as a domestic servant in a rural setting, and thus casts the georgic mode aside in favor of what Landry has termed a ‘‘repastoralization of the countryside.’’111 The predominate image Hands creates of herself throughout the volume is of a poet sitting atop ‘‘a Cock of Hay’’ and writing about idealized rustic characters, Corydons and Pastoras, Strephons and Daphnes, Damons and Therons (97). Instead of working, these characters meditate and argue about the nature of love and the value of true virtue in poems which make up over half the volume. The only instance in which Hands shows herself working is in the throes of childbirth: ‘‘My tongue did almost ask for death, / But thou dids’t spare my lab’ring breath, / To sing thy future praise’’ (123). Significantly, Hands imagines her future in terms of her writing.

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Lonsdale has called Hands’s pastorals ‘‘insipid’’ and, despite Landry’s argument connecting them to a (doomed) retrenchment of traditional values in the wake of ‘‘the last phase of eighteenth-century agrarian capitalism,’’ they remain Hands’s least interesting poems.112 The unique strength of Hands’s writing lies in another form of social realism. Instead of chronicling the labors and sufferings of the working-poor, Hands is adept at recreating specific social situations in her poetry. Take, for example, a short poem entitled ‘‘On an Unsociable Family’’: O what a strange parcel of creatures are we, Scarce ever to quarrel, or ever agree; We are all alone, though at home altogether, Except to the fire constrain’d by the weather; Then one says, ‘tis cold, which we all of us know, And with unanimity answer, ‘tis so: With shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire, And shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher; Then quickly, preceded by silence profound, A yawn epidemical catches around: Like social companions we never fall out, Nor ever care what one another’s about; To comfort each other is never our plan, For to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can. (113)

This is a candid and scathing look at the dysfunctions of one family, neatly captured in a single scene by the fire. Hands has a knack for dramatic rendering in verse, a poetic vein she makes use of in two important poems which satirize polite attitudes toward plebeian female authorship in the period. Whereas Leapor mocked the critical attitudes of polite society through fictionalized low-culture forms—a ten-penny nail, a Deborah Dough, and a Sophronia—Hands poetically imagines a realistic polite salon, peopled with the sort of ladies and gentlemen whom she wants to satirize. ‘‘A Poem, On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant Maid’’ and ‘‘A Poem, On the Supposition of the Book having been published and read’’ reveal Hands involved in the process of marking out cultural space for plebeian literary achievement by criticizing the social constraints under which plebeian poets work. In the former, Hands creates a series of polite type-characters, whose names reflect their views on the subject of proper work for a servant who can write. An ‘‘old lady Marr-joy’’ argues that ‘‘A servant might find herself other employ: / Was she

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mine I’d employ her as long as ’twas light, / And send her to bed without candle at night’’ (48); ‘‘Miss Rhymer’’ counters with the standard protest that ‘‘Tis pity a genius should be so deprest!’’ (48); and ‘‘Miss Prudella’’ points up the socially disruptive nature of plebeian writing: if servants can tell How to write to their mothers, to say they are well, And read of a Sunday the Duty of Man; Which is more I believe than one half of them can; I think ‘tis much properer they should rest there, Than be reaching at things so much out of their sphere. (48)

Writing verses, then, belongs to the realm of polite endeavor, and is not to be pursued by Hands because of her low social station. However, a ‘‘Mrs. Domestic’’ argues that if Hands is going to write, she should put her talents to some more useful purpose: Had she wrote a receipt, to’ve instructed you how To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragou, Or to make a cowslip wine, that would pass for Champaign; It might have been useful, again and again. (49)

Mrs. Domestic’s concern for use-value echoes the negative cultural attitudes about plebeian publishing we have seen from Jago, Johnson, and others earlier in the century. Hands is acutely aware of these attitudes, it seems, in ending the poem with an image of these ladies sitting at the game table: ‘‘The card-tables brought, and the cards laid thereon, / The ladies ambitious for each others crown, / Like courtiers contending for honours sat down’’ (50). These polite women, and not Hands, are in fact the ones who produce nothing, and thus they bear the brunt of the poet’s satire because she effectively turns their own arguments back onto them. Hands’s ironic look at the idle, gossiping world inside polite drawing rooms continues in the next poem, ‘‘On the Supposition of the Book having been published and read,’’ but here Hands takes on the measures by which polite society judges literary work. One ‘‘Mr. Fribbello’’ announces that ‘‘ ‘Tis pity the girl was not bred in high life’’ to which his wife replies ‘‘yes,—then . . . / She doubtless might have wrote something worth notice,’’ to which there is general assention from the company: ‘‘ ’Tis pity, says one,—says another, and so ‘tis’’ (54). Because Hands is lowborn, these wouldbe critics present an ad feminem argument that her poetry contains nothing ‘‘that’s polite,’’ and so dismiss it outright based on their

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class prejudices (53). Hands exposes this crew by showing that they do not know how to discuss literature: ‘‘They look at each other,—a general pause— / And Miss Coquettella adjusted her gauze’’ (54). However, there is one member of the group who does, and Hands leaves him to voice his judgment on her work to close the poem: The Rector reclin’d himself back in his chair, And open’d his snuff-box with indolent air; This book, says he, (snift, snift) has in the beginning, (The ladies give audience to hear his opinion) Some pieces, I think, that are pretty correct; A stile elevated you cannot expect: To some of her equals they may be a treasure, And country lasses may read ‘em with pleasure. That Amnon, you can’t call it poetry neither, There’s no flights of fancy, or imagery either; You may stile it prosaic, blank-verse at the best; Some pointed reflections, indeed, are exprest; The narrative lines exceedingly poor: Her Jonadab is a —— the drawing-room door Was open’d, the gentlemen came from below, And gave the discourse a definitive blow. (54–55)

In one sense, Hands’s rendition of the Rector’s criticisms serves to show her supporters that she does not harbor too high an estimation of her own poetical powers. Yet Hands also closes off his barbed critique, inserting a blank for his view of ‘‘Jonadab,’’ and shows that she in fact controls the critical discourse, the ‘‘gentlemen’’ entering just at that moment the Rector is about to descend into invective. We are left wondering why these gentlemen dealt ‘‘the discourse a definitive blow’’; perhaps these are meant to be the gentlemen supporters of Hands’s own neighborhood, like P. B. Homer, who thought highly of Hands and her poetry. It is impossible for us to recover the effects publishing her work had on Hands. Neither she nor any of her supporters have left such a record. However, internal evidence in this volume suggests that Hands harbored no desire to remain a working poet, though she does create an image of her future ‘‘bliss’’ that echoes the standard Horatian wish for contentment and ease. In ‘‘On Contemplative Ease,’’ Hands imagines herself Excluded from the ranting crew, Amongst these fragrant trees

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I walk, the twinkling stars to view, In solitary ease. (100)

And further, in the poem ‘‘Contentment’’: Whilst I beneath this silent shade, Contented sit and sing, I envy not the great their joys, That from their riches spring. Let those who have in courts been bred, There still in splendor shine; Their lot of bliss may not surpass, Perhaps not equal mine, (103)

These are not the sentiments of a poet oppressed by labor and worldly cares. Hands never mentions a desire for wealth, but the money she made from The Death of Amnon could very well have provided the ease and contentment she imagines here. In his review published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Richard Gough in fact sanctioned these effects of a well-placed philanthropy: ‘‘We sincerely wish her poetical talents, if they do not draw her out of obscurity, may make the remainder of her life comfortable to herself and family’’ (GM, 67:540). In contrast to the earlier cases of Brimble, Bennet, Lucas, and Bryant, this philanthropy is based entirely on perceived literary merit, and Gough leaves open the possibility that Hands’s poems might ‘‘draw her out of obscurity’’ and into the public realm of letters. Even this slight opening represents a move away from the restrictive cultural attitudes about plebeian authorship advanced by Johnson and others and satirized by Hands in her best poetic efforts. But the fact remains that all of these versifying plebeians publishing in the mid- to late-century period were dependent initially on polite patronage and sponsorship to gain access to print culture. Either Brimble, Bennet, Lucas, and Bryant did not grasp the limitations of this patronage, or they merely accepted them. By contrast, the more socially conscious of these poets—Leapor, Woodhouse, and Hands—often questioned the cultural assumptions and values of their social betters. Their surviving poems reveal a distinctive plebeian hostility to what Thompson calls ‘‘the marketing of primary values,’’ especially those values concerned with defining social position in terms of work and divine fate.113 As we have seen, these values inform the ideological limitations imposed upon plebeian poetic geniuses who published throughout this period. The expression of these debilitating cultural attitudes forms a recognizable

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class-based ideology in which the direction of flow is always from high culture to low culture, from polite to plebeian. It would be wrong to conclude that these poets respond to the effects of this ideology as a ‘‘class,’’ but more specific class criteria do emerge from their published work after 1750.

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5 Class Dialogue: Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and the Power of Print Slow rises worth, by poverty depress’d1

IN THE WINTER OF 1784, ANN YEARSLEY AND HER FAMILY WERE MOST definitely suffering under the weight of poverty. Hannah More wrote to Elizabeth Montagu that

in the severity of last Winter, herself, husband, babes, and her aged Mother all got together into a Stable—to die of hunger!—the Mother actually perished; the rest were saved by a gentleman accidentally looking into the stable; they are now in a flourishing way, have nine Pigs and a Cow.2

Thanks to this gentleman, one Mr. Vaughn, and More herself, a desperate situation was transformed into a scene of rustic plenitude. More was spurred into action by her desire, as an evangelical Christian, to perform good works, and a genuine interest, as an author herself, in Yearsley’s untutored poetical genius. More’s letters over the next ten months show her tireless effort to ease Yearsley’s pains and promote her poems among her wide circle of polite friends. In addition to rescuing the family from starvation, More hired a ‘‘little Maid’’ for Yearsley to ‘‘soften the rigours of the approaching Winter,’’ and notes that she has ‘‘spent above eight months’’ and ‘‘written above a thousand pages’’ for the purpose of collecting a subscription toward publishing Yearsley’s poems (FS, 280, 284). More’s efforts did not escape the notice of Samuel Badcock, who reviewed Yearsley’s Poems, on Several Occasions (1785) in The Monthly Review: ‘‘This rustic Poetess is under great obligations to Miss More, for bringing forward her productions to public notice, and for placing them and herself in the most advantageous light.’’3 Perhaps no plebeian poet in the century owed a patron so much, only to rebel so forcefully. 235

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And rebel Yearsley did, with a sense of moral authority and purpose we have hitherto seen only in the ‘‘unpublished’’ Woodhouse of Crispinus Scriblerus. In June 1785, More wrote to Montagu, with some pride, about the finished product and overall success of Yearsley’s subscription: Were you not surprised, dear Madam, to see so magnificent a book? Really, the Crown subscribers have a bargain, to my great regret. We printed 1250 copies, and are obliged to sell the supernumerary copies at six to indemnify us a little; I paid near fourscore pounds all expenses, have lodged 350 in the Five per Cents which will produce about £18 a year, and shall take her down about £20 to cloathe her family and furnish her House. As I wished to have the honour of your name to sanction my own, I have laid out the money in your name, madam, and mine, having first had an instrument drawn up by the Lawyer signed by Yearsley and his wife, allowing us the controul of the money, and putting it out of the Husband’s power to touch it. (FS, 282)

No previous record of the relationship between plebeian poet and patron provides so much detail about how the subscription money earned by the poet was disbursed or, in this case, controlled by the patron. The first edition garnered enough ready cash to pay off the publishing expenses and still realized a nice sum for investment in the ‘‘five per cent’’ stocks. But neither Yearsley nor her husband had access to this money, having signed over control to their benefactors, and Yearsley was thus beholden to the handouts More deemed appropriate. It seems safe to assume that this elaborate plan was not common practice in late-century patron/poet relationships because More brings in a lawyer to draw up a special contract and wants Montagu’s name to ‘‘sanction [her] own’’ in the business. More’s best laid plans, however, would come back to haunt her within a month of the contract signing. On 21 July 1785, More wrote to Montagu complaining that Yearsley had treated her ‘‘with the blackest ingratitude’’ by accusing her ‘‘of a design to defraud her of the money’’ (FS, 283, 284). Over the next two years, Yearsley would successfully make her case against More in print through her controversial ‘‘Narrative’’ and the other prefatory material included in the fourth edition of Poems, on Several Occasions (1786), and reprinted in her second volume of poetry, Poems, On Various Subjects (1787). Because the dispute between these two women is so well documented in contemporary historical records, there is a rich critical history on the subject. More’s biographers, of course, sympathize with her in the affair, describing Yearsley’s ‘‘bad conduct’’ and as-

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cribing ‘‘the violent rupture’’ to Yearsley’s unrefined nature.4 Robert Southey affects an objective stance and terms the situation an ‘‘unfortunate difference’’ but he also notes that More’s ‘‘benevolent intentions ought not to have been misunderstood.’’5 J. M. S. Tompkins also sides with More in her account of ‘‘the Bristol Milkwoman,’’ arguing that ‘‘prosperity had made [Yearsley] arrogant, and nature, it appeared, had made her malicious, since she was devising and spreading impossible slanders about Miss More.’’6 Recent scholarship, however, has looked to justify Yearsley’s claim to the subscription money and argues the strength of her commitment to resist the classist forces of polite culture.7 In contrast to the tenor of this work, Mary Waldron, Yearsley’s most recent (and most exhaustive) biographer, is more concerned with questioning received assumptions about Yearsley’s status as a laboring-class woman than she is with taking sides in the dispute.8 And Patricia Demers presents a balanced argument, noting that ‘‘it is as important to recognize Yearsley’s expressions of gratitude as it is to note her corrosive anger; similarly, More’s zeal and tirelessness in Yearsley’s cause must be remembered as well as her miscalculations and intransigence.’’9 Whether or not More acted with prudence in the affair, and whether or not Yearsley was justified in her criticism, their dispute went far beyond the confines of any drawing room walls. In a letter to Weller Pepys, More writes, ‘‘There is hardly a species of slander the poor unhappy creature does not propagate against me, in the most public manner, because I have called her a milkwoman, and because I have placed the money in the funds, instead of letting her spend it.’’10 It is Yearsley’s ‘‘public manner’’ in this dispute, and More’s apparent reluctance to respond in print, that interest me most. When their normal dialogue ended, each woman in her own class-based way appears to have entered into a textual dialogue with a potentially supportive larger community: More with her polite friends and Yearsley with her reading public. Yearsley’s intended audience was polite society, especially her subscribers (many of whom were friends of More), and so there was, no doubt, significant overlap between these two groups of readers. But Yearsley, the milkwoman-turned-poet, made her case in print while More, privileged and well-connected, confined herself to private letters. More’s indefatigable work to promote Yearsley ironically provides the prote´ge´e with the means to combat her patron’s contractual financial arrangement. Money, however, is not the only, or even the most important, issue at stake in their dispute; it also concerns issues of work, artistic autonomy, and control over public representation. For

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Yearsley, despite her plebeian social status, crossing the print line ultimately meant gaining control over her texts, her public image, and her ‘‘living.’’ Yearsley effectively uses her access to commercial print culture to win the local battle with More between 1785 and 1787. But, in an ideological sense, she loses the war by the 1790s, when More begins her assault on the laboring classes, publishing imaginative texts intended to reform their increasingly incendiary politics. My purpose in this chapter is not to recap every aspect of the dispute that arose between Yearsley and More or to discuss all of their textual output. Rather, I will concentrate on the ways these two women manipulate dominant social values in their poetry and use the influential power late-eighteenth-century print culture offers to serve their respective agendas. The correspondence between More and her set of polite friends shows that, from the beginning, Yearsley was subjected to the negative cultural attitudes about writing as work that were circulating in the late-century period. Yearsley’s first benefactors genuinely wanted to relieve her penury, but were wary of indulging her poetical fancy, lest she should leave her appointed station and her Godgiven labors. Writing to More just after her discovery of Yearsley, Horace Walpole advises that Yearsley ‘‘must remember that she is a Lactilla, not a Pastora, and is to tend real cows, not Arcadian sheep.’’11 Walpole’s classical name for Yearsley—‘‘Lactilla’’— succinctly captures the view that one’s social position is a fixed condition based on work; labor itself is both a defining feature of that condition as well as a restrictive boundary. Concerned about the potential for social climbing because Yearsley has published poetry, Walpole upholds this view throughout More’s ordeal with her: ‘‘I am sick of these sweet singers, and advised that when poor Mrs Yearsley shall have been set at her ease by the subscription, she should drive her cows from the foot of Parnassus and hum no more ditties’’ (33:475). In his contempt for female poets in general, Walpole is even more specific on the subject of proper women’s work : ‘‘Am I in the wrong,’’ he writes to Lady Ossory, ‘‘for thinking, that these Saphos had better be bound ‘prentices to mantua-makers, than be appointed chambermaids to Mesdemoiselles the Muses!’’ (33:538). Although Walpole complimented Yearsley as a poet early on, pointing out ‘‘the dignity of her thoughts and the chastity of her style,’’ and lauding her ‘‘real talents,’’ he is set against ‘‘encouraging her propensity lest it should divert her from the care of her family’’ and her productive labor as a milkwoman (31:219, 220, 220). Walpole’s operative assumptions about how social rank is defined indicate that he never considered his purchase of Yearsley’s poems

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more than charity, and his view of her as a poet shifted remarkably when Yearsley’s dispute with More deepened: Yearsley and other ‘‘harmonious virgins, have no imagination, no novelty,’’ he wrote (33:533). Given the import of imagination, defined as originality, in late-century views of original genius, Walpole’s criticism reads as a wholesale dismissal of Yearsley’s status as one. For her own part, More reproduces Walpole’s class-based views in her letters and, more importantly, in the ‘‘Prefatory Letter to Mrs. Montagu’’ which appeared in print, prefixed to the first edition of Yearsley’s poems. In an earlier letter to Montagu, written during the planning stages of their venture to support Yearsley, More states plainly: ‘‘I am utterly against taking her out of her station. Stephen was an excellent Bard as a Thrasher, but as a Court Poet, and rival of Pope, detestable’’ (FS, 279). More and Montagu concur that Yearsley ‘‘shou’d not be corrupted by being made idle or useless’’ by devoting herself to writing (FS, 280). It is clear that More’s ‘‘Prefatory Letter’’ was written to be published in Yearsley’s volume,12 and so More uses the pretense of private correspondence to introduce Yearsley and her poetry to the subscribers. In the ‘‘Letter,’’ More confidently assures Yearsley’s polite readers that they are doing the right thing in supporting her: Pressing, as her distresses are, if I did not think her heart was rightly turned, I should be afraid of proposing such a measure, lest it should unsettle the sobriety of her mind, and, by exciting her vanity, indispose her for the laborious employments of her humble condition; but it would be cruel to imagine that we cannot mend her fortune without impairing her virtue.13

Thus More defines Yearsley’s ‘‘virtue’’ in a class-specific way, in terms of her industry in performing her ‘‘laborious employments,’’ and, given Yearsley’s low social position, More’s charity has its limits. The subscription, More continues, is ‘‘not intended to place [Yearsley] in such a state of independence as might seduce her to devote her time to the idleness of Poetry’’ (xi). Of course, writing poetry would interfere with Yearsley’s proper work as a milkwoman and her responsibilities as wife and mother raising six young children. According to More, ‘‘it is not fame, but bread, which I am anxious to secure for her,’’ yet the means for securing this ‘‘bread’’ is Yearsley’s poetry (xii). That is, Yearsley worked for her bread by writing, a point she will use to her advantage in making her case for control of the money earned. More’s text, then, reproduces a common paradox evident throughout the century

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regarding plebeian literary talent: Yearsley’s laboring status makes her poetry a marketable commodity, but her success in print cannot raise her socially. A milkwoman, even one who is virtuous and exudes natural poetic talent, must remain a milkwoman. Yearsley’s early poems, however, show signs that she is not satisfied with the social limitations inherent in this view imposed upon her from above. As one would expect, the 1785 volume is rife with gratitude and high praise for her primary benefactors, More and Montagu. Yearsley acknowledges that ‘‘sunk in humble state, / With more than needful awe I view the great’’ (71). In the poem ‘‘To Stella,’’ Yearsley’s classical pseudonym for More, she thanks both women openly: With deathless glories; every ardent prayer Which gratitude can waft from souls sincere, Each warm return to generous bounty due, Shall warm my heart for you and Montagu. (68)

But characteristic deference and gratitude aside, there are occasions when Yearsley voices her personal desires: Unequal, lost to the aspiring claim, I neither ask, nor own th’ immortal name Of Friend; ah, no! its ardors are too great, My soul too narrow, and too low my state; Stella! soar on, to nobler objects true, Pour out your soul with your lov’d Montagu; But, ah! shou’d either have a thought to spare, Slight, trivial, neither worth a smile or tear, Let it be mine; . . . (65–66)

Yearsley’s plea for any Bluestocking intellectual table scraps seems heartfelt. Though she is careful to disown ‘‘the immortal name of Friend’’ because she is acutely aware of their differences in birth, she casts her desire (and claim) for her patrons’ companionship in intellectual terms: ‘‘Quick let me from the hallow’d spot retire, / Where sacred Genius lights his awful fire’’ (66). In positioning herself, and not More or Montagu, on that ‘‘hallow’d spot’’ where ‘‘Genius’’ resides, Yearsley suggests she is at least worthy of their intellectual friendship. Yearsley does have a mind of her own, despite her lack of formal education, evidenced by her answer to More about proper poetic compliments:

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For mine’s a stubborn and a savage will; No customs, manners, or soft arts I boast, On my rough soul your nicest rules are lost; Yet shall unpolish’d gratitude be mine, (72)

The terms of Yearsley’s self-description—‘‘stubborn,’’ ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘rough soul[ed]’’—serve, in one sense, an apparent accommodating function as Yearsley seems to acquiesce to the expected polite descriptions of a lower-class rustic poet. Yet, read with the benefit of hindsight in the context of the dispute with More that was about to erupt, this apparently self-deprecating image begins to look more socially disruptive. In other words, it is precisely Yearsley’s ‘‘stubborn and savage will,’’ her refusal to resign herself to polite patronly containment, that earns Yearsley her independence, and her ‘‘rough soul’’ will continue to sell poetry. Despite Yearsley’s private confrontation with More over control of the money, More continued with her investment plan and, as a testament to her love of good works, continued to promote Yearsley’s interests by meeting the demand for a second edition. By September 1785, however, More notes that ‘‘they have put me in the Papers’’ and so the affair with Yearsley became a subject for gossip in Bristol (FS, 286). This prompted More’s only public comment (as far as we know) on the dispute. It is merely a one-sentence, earnest statement of the facts appended to the ‘‘Advertisement’’ for the second edition of Poems, on Several Occasions: ‘‘The Editor has raised a very handsome sum of money which is placed in the Public Funds, vested in Trustees hands for the benefit of the Author’s Family’’ (FS, 286). Still, More chooses to hide behind the role-defining appellations of ‘‘editor’’ and ‘‘trustee,’’ even though most readers would have known who was performing these duties. As she relates to Montagu, her confidante throughout the affair, More did her best to maintain a stiff upper lip through the public din: ‘‘I take not the least notice of any of their Scurrilities (for she has a low fellow, one Shiells, a Gardener in London, who assists her)’’ (FS, 286). That More did not defend herself explicitly against the ‘‘scurrilities’’ appearing in the press suggests that, for her, appealing to public opinion and defending herself in such a forum was itself scurrilous. Instead, she maintains her private correspondence throughout the affair with her polite friends—Montagu, Walpole, Pepys, and others—and refuses epistolary dialogue with either Yearsley or Shiells, her social inferiors. ‘‘Nor shall I answer any of their letters,’’ More writes in a letter to Montagu (FS, 286).

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While More closed her polite ranks privately and refused to respond to Yearsley either by letter or in the periodical press, for her part Yearsley seized the opportunity to reach the wider audience that print culture afforded. As Walpole succinctly observed: ‘‘Hannah will not write, and Lactilla will’’ (31:331). For Yearsley, publishing also provided the opportunity for upward mobility, and so it is not surprising that she produced the most significant public proclamation during the affair. Her ‘‘Narrative,’’ addressed ‘‘to the Noble and Generous Subscribers’’ of her first book of poems, is an effort to control her public image and to win supporters to her cause. And, as Linda Zionkowski has pointed out, the ‘‘Narrative’’ also shows Yearsley using ‘‘her access to print to further subvert More’s authority.’’14 Indeed, Yearsley’s text was strategically placed after More’s ‘‘Prefatory Letter’’ and before the poems in the fourth edition of Poems, on Several Occasions which Yearsley was responsible for bringing out in 1786. It also appeared, in exactly the same position, as part of the prefatory apparatus introducing Yearsley’s second collection of poems, Poems, on Various Subjects, in 1787. The ‘‘Narrative’’ is often examined as a measure of Yearsley’s individual mettle, but overlooked as the deft performance that it is in terms of her manipulation of class-based cultural values and her calculated appeal to garner the support of polite readers. Yearsley’s skill in constructing an image of herself that both caters to polite expectations and promotes her desire for independence serves her well in this text. For example, after the initial interview with More about the money, Yearsley describes her subsequent conduct in terms of labor, noting that she still ‘‘went daily to [More’s] house for the dish-washings’’ in her effort to support her family.15 On one level, the passage shows Yearsley to be submissive, not haughty. But in a footnote to this statement, she apologizes to her readers—‘‘I am greatly hurt in obliging my readers to descend to this poor circumstance’’—and intimates that More was irritated by the continued practice (xviii). Why does Yearsley go to the trouble of playing out this seemingly insignificant detail? The answer lies, I think, in the received cultural definitions of social rank that Yearsley both ventriloquized and tried to resist in her poetry. It is important that Yearsley collects More’s hogwash because this is an aspect of her allotted vocation (More calls her ‘‘a milker of Cows and a feeder of Hogs’’), the work she is supposed to do according to the classist biases we have seen expressed by More, Walpole, and many others throughout the century (FS, 281). But Yearsley’s text also has the potential to make any polite reader uncomfortable with this occupation-based definition of social rank.

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The ‘‘Narrative’’ is Yearsley’s first public performance free of More’s editing and influence, and it showcases her rhetorical talents and her refined manners. This text, together with the new poems that follow, problematize typical polite views of Yearsley’s proper vocation: should Yearsley, an established natural genius, be subjected to such low manual toils as collecting hogwash when her true vocation is writing verses? Yearsley provides a good deal of evidence in her ‘‘Narrative’’ to promote the view that she is worthy of the title ‘‘poet.’’ In one instance, she presents herself as an easy target for the well-connected More, but not without complicating the issue: Shielded by popular opinion, the ungenerous Stella aims at a defenceless breast—her arrows are of the most malignant kind—yet her endeavours to crush an insignificant wretch need not be so amazingly strenuous; for I should have sunk into obscurity again, had not my reputation been so cruelly wounded. (xxiv)

Yearsley’s use of personal ‘‘reputation’’ here shows both her manipulation of mainstream constructions of lower-class ‘‘virtue’’ and her appropriation of upper-class ‘‘honor.’’ As a milkwoman, to be deserving of patronage or even upper-class charity, Yearsley must exhibit good character. But in this passage, she is not simply trying to prove her virtue; rather, Yearsley is showing that in her own personal value system ‘‘character’’ is much like aristocratic ‘‘honor’’: ‘‘Character is more precious than life itself,’’ she emphatically states (xxiv). Thus Yearsley appeals to her polite readers by suggesting that her values are like theirs; she also holds personal reputation in high regard. As always, even as she manipulates the cultural definitions of ‘‘reputation’’ to her advantage, Yearsley is careful to provide the basic road signs her polite readers would expect from a writer of her station. On the subject of her second volume of poems, for instance, Yearsley says she ‘‘will complete them with as much expedition as the more important duties of my family will permit’’ (xxiv). This double-voiced movement of the ‘‘Narrative’’ is central to understanding how Yearsley uses the print medium to her advantage throughout her conflict with More. Yearsley, for instance, consistently seeks to combat the marginalizing social strictures placed upon her by More and late-eighteenth-century society in general, but she also continues to publish her laboring-class status. Early in the dispute, More wrote to Montagu that Yearsley complained openly ‘‘that it was the height of insult and barbarity to tell that she

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was poor and a Milkwoman’’ in the ‘‘Prefatory Letter’’ to her poems (FS, 284). In view of this statement, one might reasonably expect that Yearsley would discard these designations in the texts she published after gaining her autonomy. This was not the case, however. Yearsley herself controlled the production of Poems, on Various Subjects in 1787, and this volume maintains the bold reference to the author as ‘‘a Milkwoman of Clifton, near Bristol’’ on the title page. The opening address to Fredrick Augustus Hervey also reproduces the familiar tropes of ‘‘labor’’ and ‘‘disadvantage’’ she had criticized More for using: ‘‘On perusing them, you will remember, that they were written in the short intervals of a life of labour, and under every disadvantage which can possibly result from a confined education’’ (vi). These conditions of her authorship advertised Yearsley as a poetic natural genius—a form of identification she well knew still helped sell books. Later, in a ‘‘Billet’’ addressed to Lord Courtdown, dated 24 July 1788, Yearsley refers to herself as ‘‘One who has had Nature only for her Tutor.’’16 The title page to Stanzas of Woe shows that Yearsley was still using the ‘‘milk-woman of Clifton, near Bristol’’ advertisement as late as 1790.17 She abandoned this practice in 1796 in her last volume of poems, The Rural Lyre, but Yearsley’s statement in the ‘‘Dedication’’ to Hervey in this book reveals her understanding of the social limitations she was subjected to by More and her circle in the mid-1780s: Ten years are now elapsed, since in my cottage I was honoured by the presence of your Lordship. Through the cloud which then covered my confused spirit you had the goodness to discern an impatient desire for attainments so remote from my humble station, that by many they were deemed unnecessary, by most superfluous; and though by some a share of discrimination was allowed me, yet mental accomplishments were considered as incompatible with my laborious employment. This, my Lord, was not your opinion. You inspired me with hope, encouraged me to persevere, and enabled me to divide my domestic cares with the pleasures of meditation.18

This is a remarkable retrospective statement because it reveals Yearsley’s sense of the protracted battle she fought against the restrictive, classist ideologies circulating in the late-century period. Yearsley purposefully distinguishes Hervey’s view of her desire to indulge in ‘‘the pleasures of meditation’’ from the views of the ‘‘many’’—including, we imagine, More’s. In fact, Hervey was instrumental in assisting Yearsley after her break with More, providing the £50 she needed to bring out the controversial fourth edition

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of Poems, on Several Occasions (1786). If More was an enforcer of rigid social order, Hervey is presented here as an enabler of fluid social movement, at least in terms of labor. Unlike More, Hervey supports Yearsley’s freedom to pursue Parnassian heights and, by extension, the life changes that might ensue. Perhaps because Hervey was a wealthy, titled aristocrat whose high social position was less tenuous than More’s, he harbors little anxiety over Yearsley’s removing herself from her normal workaday labor in order to write and publish. Or, perhaps Hervey subscribed to more progressive ideas concerning political economy. It is instructive to view the differences in More’s and Hervey’s ‘‘patronage’’ of Yearsley through the lens of Adam Smith’s influential Wealth of Nations (1776), specifically his notions regarding ‘‘the system of natural liberty.’’ Gertrude Himmelfarb puts the case regarding the differences between ‘‘the old ‘moral economy’ ’’ and Smith’s political economy succinctly: The [old moral economy] depended, at least in principle, on a system of regulations derived from equity, tradition, and law, a system prescribing fair prices, just wages, customary rights, corporative rules, paternalistic obligations, hierarchical relationships—all of which were intended to produce a structured, harmonious, stable, secure, organic order. The ‘system of natural liberty,’ on the other hand, prided itself on being open, mobile, changeable, individualistic, with all the risks but also all the opportunities associated with freedom.19

Himmelfarb goes on to note that the contrast between the two systems is complicated in various ways; nevertheless, the terms of her description here resonate with Yearsley’s very different experiences with patronage in the 1780s. As the representative of the old moral economy, More’s benevolent paternalism certainly hindered Yearsley’s freedom, especially her ability to earn her bread by her writing and so take advantage of the opportunities afforded by an expanding literary economy. Yearsley’s construction of Hervey’s patronage, quoted above, reads like a blueprint of Smith’s ideas. Significantly, according to Yearsley, Hervey allows his charge her individualism; that is, the freedom to develop her talents and to take advantage of any and all opportunities available to her in a free society. While Hervey may well have seen his gift of £50 simply as an act of charity, it is Yearsley who represents the gesture in progressive political economical terms in print. In addition to the ‘‘Narrative,’’ Yearsley includes ‘‘an exact copy’’ of the legal document in dispute, the ‘‘Deed of Trust,’’ along with

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her counterproposal for ‘‘the consideration of the public’’ in her 1787 volume (xxv). Yearsley recounts in her ‘‘Narrative’’ the difficulty she had in obtaining a copy of this deed for herself, a detail which implicitly suggests the absolute power More wielded over her prote´ge´e. Providing this material to a waiting public produced the desired effect: both The Monthly Review and The Critical Review came down on Yearsley’s side. Andrew Becket lauded Yearsley’s rhetorical strategy throughout the prefatory material: ‘‘She defends herself with courage, but at the same time moderation; with a temper, in short, which would do honour to any cause. There is no retort, no recrimination whatever. It is simply a justification of, or apology for, her conduct.’’20 The Critical Review reported that ‘‘the deed of trust’’ was ‘‘a very extraordinary one,’’ in particular because it invested the trustees with ‘‘the power of disposing the principal and interest . . . in what manner they shall think proper.’’21 ‘‘Miss More,’’ the reviewer argues, ‘‘cannot escape the imputation of improper partiality, or unjust censure’’ and, after quoting Yearsley’s counterproposal in full, observes that ‘‘surely a mother had reason to expect that some power would have been granted her in the disposal of that property her own abilities had acquired’’ (CR, 64:435). It is interesting how quickly More’s efforts in securing Yearsley a successful subscription are forgotten in favor of acknowledging Yearsley’s own labors in composing poetry. In this reviewer’s eyes, Yearsley is a legitimate working poet who, despite her lowly social position, has every right to the money earned by her published work. By late century, the commercial trade in literature allowed Yearsley (and others) to see the treatment by her patrons as repressive, especially in light of newly established laws governing literary property.22 Not content to rest on these laurels, Yearsley’s counterproposal reveals her continued effort to exploit specific class-based social values to her advantage. More enacted her investment plan not only as a way of keeping Yearsley’s husband away from the money, but also as a way to provide for Yearsley’s children in the future. After the first confrontation with Yearsley, More asks Montagu, rhetorically, ‘‘Is such a Woman to be trusted with her poor Children’s money?’’ (FS, 284). Later, when the trouble over the money reached a peak, More confided to Elizabeth Carter that ‘‘my conscience tells me I ought not to give up my trust for these poor children, on account of their mother’s wickedness.’’23 In the mid- to late-eighteenth century, there was an increasing concern among the upper and middling classes regarding motherhood and the proper methods for raising children.24 Lawrence Stone observes that ‘‘there

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is no evidence’’ that this concern for children ‘‘penetrated much lower down the social scale’’ than the ‘‘high professional or bourgeois classes.’’25 However, Yearsley writes in her ‘‘Narrative’’ that the deed More had her sign in fact makes no provision ‘‘whereby my children might have an undeniable claim in future’’ in the event of Yearsley’s death (xvi). In effect, Yearsley argues that the deed usurps her ‘‘rights as a mother’’ (xvii). Her counterproposal, written pointedly ‘‘in Behalf of her Children,’’ is an obvious attempt to rectify this problem while keeping within the boundaries of plebeian decorum: The money to continue in the future disposition of Mrs. Montague and Miss H. More, allowing Ann Yearsley to be admitted as a joint trustee, the money to be equally divided according to the number of her children, and subject to their demand on their arrival at the age of twentyone years. Ann Yearsley, her present, or any future husband, never to have the least demand on the principal sum, but wishes to receive interest without controul. (xxx)

Significantly, Yearsley does not demand exclusive control over her invested earnings, but makes a judicious claim on the principal for her children in future, and seeks to use only the interest as she sees fit. In addition, the ‘‘Narrative’’ everywhere shows Yearsley to be a capable and caring mother. Yearsley, then, effectively neutralizes More’s ‘‘family values’’ argument by using it against her, eventually securing control over her own earnings. Yearsley’s onslaught in print against More in particular26 indeed brought her power over the funds in the trust by 1787, though it is difficult to ascertain exactly when Yearsley had the money at her disposal. More wrote to Montagu that she had ‘‘prevailed on a gentleman . . . to receive the trust’’ by October 1785, the handle already becoming too hot even before Yearsley’s ‘‘Narrative’’ was in circulation.27 But this capitulation to gendered authority did not mean that Yearsley controlled the funds—the situation was unchanged as far as she was concerned—and hence she went ahead with the publication of the ‘‘Narrative’’ and other prefatory material over the next eighteen months. This unnamed Bristol gentleman finally did make the money over to Yearsley, probably just prior to the publication of Poems, on Various Subjects, for More wrote to Walpole when that volume appeared to join her ‘‘in sincere compassion . . . for a human heart of such unaccountable depravity, as to harbour such deep malice for two years, though she has gained her point, and the money is settled to her wish.’’28 Public support for Yearsley

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had been building for some time in the Bristol neighborhood. In a letter to Lady Ossory, dated the first of December, 1786, Walpole provides a glimpse of the support Yearsley had gained: I am not surprised that there should be a great party for the milkwoman. The wise people of Bristol have taken it into their heads that they have a manufacture of original genius chez eux, and the less foundation they have for their credulity, the stronger their faith is, as always is the case of fools. (33:550)

Walpole’s contempt for the Bristol folk suggests that Yearsley had used the print medium to advantage and availed herself in the quarrel with More quite well. Indeed, by 1787, Yearsley enjoyed a level of control over her writing and public image that few plebeian poets in the century ever attained. Her readers could now rest assured that her verses were the effusions of an untutored genius, now clearly uncorrupted because her work was uncorrected by More. We cannot recover the extent of More’s editing of Yearsley’s early poems because More had the manuscripts burned by her bookseller, a point which Yearsley also uses in her ‘‘Narrative’’ to illustrate the tyrannical power More held over her. Still, Yearsley used her wealth to remake herself in More’s image, as evidenced by a portrait executed and published in 1787.29 Wilson Lowry’s engraving titled ‘‘The Bristol Milk Woman and Poetess’’ shows Yearsley dressed in the garb of a gentlewoman. This obvious change in Yearsley’s dress is representative of those changes in material circumstance that More found socially disruptive in a patronized laboring-class poet: ‘‘I hear she wears very fine Gauze Bonnets, long lappets, gold Pins, etc.,’’ More gossiped to Montagu (FS, 284). Similarly, Walpole noted that ‘‘[Yearsley] is grown extravagant and ostentatious’’ (33:538). The plate shows that, although the ‘‘gold Pins’’ might be absent, fine gauze is evident under Yearsley’s hat, and ‘‘long lappets’’ are distinctly present. She appears dressed much as More is in a portrait of the same period,30 and the whole is ornately framed, signifying the successful poet More no longer controls. The full caption continues Yearsley’s practice of advertising her former workaday life in print, but the term ‘‘Poetess’’ best fits the image presented in the portrait. I have been arguing that Yearsley achieved her independence as a poet by making a calculated appeal in print to her reading public. She successfully plays upon a series of dominant social values to show the public she is not, quoting More, the ‘‘ ‘base,’ ’’ ‘‘ ‘sav-

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Ann Yearsley, The Bristol Milk Woman & Poetess (1787), Wilson Lowry. Reproduced by permission of The British Library.

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Hannah More, engraving for Lord Orford’s Works (1798), James Heath, after a portrait by John Opie dated 1786. 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.

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age,’ ’’ ‘‘ ‘bad woman’ ’’ that More and her circle say that she is (POVS, xix, xx). But there is another aspect to Yearsley’s appeal to an anonymous reading public that remains largely unnoticed in discussions of her battle with More. After their break, Yearsley was taken on by the Robinsons, of Paternoster Row, when More’s publisher, Thomas Cadell, would have nothing more to do with her. George Robinson, his son George, and his brother John were at the top of their profession in the mid-1780s; they had ‘‘the largest wholesale trade in London’’ and published many popular periodicals including The Critical Review and The Town and Country Magazine.31 Robinson also ‘‘paid his authors well, believing that in this he was carrying out the true spirit of bookselling,’’ and did not shy away from controversy.32 The Robinsons published the controversial fourth edition of Poems, on Several Occasions and all of Yearsley’s work until her death in 1806. Ferguson notes that they later advanced £200 to help Yearsley open a circulating library at Bristol Hotwells.33 In this respect, aligning herself with such eminent and benevolent booksellers must have had a positive effect on both Yearsley’s public image and her fortune. And the Robinsons knew a good business opportunity when they saw one, perhaps seeking to capitalize on Yearsley’s notoriety at the time. They were no doubt rewarded for their risk because Yearsley’s 1787 volume boasted another lengthy list of prepaid subscribers. Yearsley’s new poems, written during the height of her public quarrel with More, reflect an angry, less fettered critical voice. Although there are no overt references to ‘‘Stella’’ in this volume, More hovers everywhere over it.34 For example, in ‘‘To Those Who Accuse the Author of Ingratitude,’’ Yearsley challenges the worldview of her polite detractors and implicates More in the process: You, who thro’ optics dim, so falsely view This wond’rous maze of things, and rend a part From the well-order’d whole, to fit your sense Low, groveling, and confin’d; say from what source Spring your all-wise opinions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What are your boasts, ye incapacious souls, Who would confine, within your narrow orbs, Th’ extensive All? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A wish to share the false, tho’ public din, In which the popular, not virtuous live;

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A fear of being singular, which claims A fortitude of mind you ne’er could boast; (POVS, 57–59)

Beginning the poem with a generalized, second-person ‘‘You’’ suggests that Yearsley is addressing several ‘‘incapacious souls’’ who see the world through narrow lenses and ‘‘optics dim.’’ As Landry has convincingly argued, Yearsley’s use of ‘‘optics dim’’ and her focus on the ‘‘false’’ and ‘‘confin’d’’ worldviews of her polite critics suggests a class-specific sense of Yearsley’s ideology critique.35 Yet, as Yearsley continues to vent her spleen, her poem conjures up More as the primary addressee. This assertion is supported by the fact that ‘‘To Those Who Accuse . . .’’ represents a toned-down version of an unpublished poem titled ‘‘To Stella’’ penned by an angry Yearsley after her break with More, and before the publication of the 1787 volume of poems.36 Yearsley’s references to ‘‘narrow orbs’’ and the charges leveled in the last stanza above call attention to More’s growing adherence to a dogmatic evangelical Christianity in the 1780s. Yearsley accuses More of finding comfort in numbers, amongst like-minded evangelical social and moral reformers ‘‘popular’’ in the period, and Yearsley claims a singularity and ‘‘fortitude of mind’’ for herself that her former patron lacks. In another poem, ‘‘Addressed to Ignorance, Occasioned by a Gentleman’s desiring the Author never to assume Knowledge of the Ancients,’’ Yearsley uses the verse epistle form to assert her right to ostensibly privileged categories of knowledge. The ‘‘gentleman’’ to whom Yearsley is responding in this piece apparently wanted Yearsley to discontinue her use of classical allusions, to which Yearsley responds by unleashing her ‘‘Fancy’’ in the face of forced ‘‘Ign’rance’’ (94). The final fifteen stanzas include no less than thirty-three references to ancient Greek figures and places, forming a wide survey of important warriors, writers, and philosophers from ‘‘Achilles’’ to ‘‘Zeno’’ (95, 96). At times, Yearsley seems content simply to show her reader that she possesses a surprising degree of classical learning for a milkwoman: Fond Paris, three changes with sighs has gone through, First a Goat, then a Monkey compleat; Enrag’d, to the river Salmacis he flew, Wash’d his face—and forgot his fair mate. (95)

Yet this earnest display of classical knowledge more often ventures into ironic play:

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There’s Virgil, the Courtier, with hose out at heel, And Hesiod, quite shoeless his foot; Poor Ovid walks shiv’ring, behind a cart-wheel, While Horace cries, ‘‘sweep for your soot.’’ (97)

One way to read Yearsley’s zealousness with neoclassical imagery is to see her using the occasion of this gentleman’s criticism to ironize a particular aesthetics of poetry which values finely turned classical allusions over anything else. In a moment of sharp defiance, Yearsley notes at poem’s end: ‘‘this age I defy, / And the next cannot wound me, I know’’ (99). ‘‘Addressed to Ignorance’’ is both an angry response to literary criticism inspired by class difference, and also, in its very indulgence of classical references, an ironic dismissal of neoclassical poetics to make way for something different. For Yearsley, this new poetics is deeply tied to what we now identify as the romantic—or more accurately preromantic37—ideal of personal self-expression in poetry. Samuel Badcock summed up his review of Yearsley’s first volume of poems with the following statement: ‘‘On the whole, these Poems present us with a very striking picture of a vigorous and aspiring genius, struggling with its own feelings’’ (MR, 73:221). Badcock judges the strength of Yearsley’s poetry by linking her ‘‘genius’’ to her ability to write about her internal struggles of feeling and emotion. Not only does Badcock’s statement suggest a distinct shift from the 1730s in terms of the criteria for judging ‘‘good’’ poetry (plebeian or otherwise), but it also shows that Yearsley was writing the sort of poetry that appealed at least to contemporary critics, if not the reading public as well. Looking back to her poem answering the charge of ingratitude, Yearsley aptly exhorts her narrow-minded polite readers to ‘‘scan the feelings of Lactilla’s soul’’ (POVS, 60). In another poem in the same volume, this one addressed ‘‘To Mr. ****,’’ a fellow ‘‘unletter’d poet,’’ Yearsley links their shared natural genius to preromantic notions of self-expression in poetry: ‘‘Deep in the soul live ever tuneful springs, / Waiting the touch of Ecstasy, which strikes / Most pow’rful on defenceless, untaught Minds’’ (81). For Yearsley, the reasons for and the subjects of poetry lie within the individual ‘‘soul,’’ and she turns the category of natural genius into an argument championing an unlettered poet’s ability to produce this poetry of ‘‘artless Rapture’’: I’ve patient trod the wild entangled path Of unimprov’d Idea. Dauntless Thought

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I eager seiz’d, no formal Rule e’er aw’d; No Precedent controul’d; no Custom fix’d My independent spirit: on the wing She still shall guideless soar, nor shall the Fool, Wounding her pow’rs, e’er bring her to the ground. (80)

Again, More shows up in a negative light as the ‘‘Fool’’ steeped within the limitations of tradition and poetic ‘‘precedent,’’ but Yearsley defines herself and her work outside of those constrictions. It is not surprising, then, that those poems in which Yearsley enacts the poetic precepts she contends in ‘‘To Mr. ****’’ have been recently reprinted in anthologies which seek to widen the boundaries of English Romantic verse.38 ‘‘To Mr. ****’’ is significant also because it reveals Yearsley’s superb self-management of her public image as a poet. Waldron notes that it is ‘‘a poem about poetry’’39 —which it is—but there is more going on within it that suggests what is at stake for Yearsley with the publication of Poems, on Various Subjects. While it may be true that Yearsley ‘‘sought success as a writer rather than a ‘natural genius,’ ’’ she was not above using the period fascination with primitivism in poetry to her advantage.40 ‘‘Mr. ****’’ has not been identified, and he could very well be an imaginary addressee, one that allows Yearsley to broach the subject of natural genius herself: Ne’er hail the fabled Nine, or snatch rapt Thought From the Castalian spring; ‘tis not for thee, From embers, where the Pagan’s light expires, To catch a flame divine. From one bright spark Of never-erring Faith, more rapture beams Than wild Mythology could ever boast. (78–79)

We should remember that by 1787, after her break from More and Montagu, Yearsley no longer has patrons to trumpet her natural genius in print, so she seems to construct an opportunity for herself to do so in the course of her new volume. She makes it clear in this dogmatic passage that poetic genius emerges from within the poet; ‘‘one bright spark’’ of this is better than all that classical learning can provide: ‘‘the pen, / Tho’ dipp’d in awful Wisdom’s deepest tint, / Can never paint the wild extatic mood’’ (77–78). By placing untaught natural genius like hers at the top, Yearsley hierarchizes poetic genius in a way that Addison tried to avoid earlier in the century, as she also slyly reminds her readers of her status as one. As a verse epistle explicitly (if also ironically) addressed to someone else, the poem reveals more about Yearsley to her readers than it

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does about ‘‘Florus,’’ the unknown addressee. It is not simply that Yearsley wants it both ways—to be recognized as a true, working poet and as a natural genius. The crucial point is she understands that defining the unique power of natural genius, and popularizing herself under its rubric, is the key to fashioning public success as a laboring-class poet. Yearsley thus embarks on her career as poet in her second volume without leaving the original signifiers of her popularity behind. By 1787, Yearsley sees herself as a poet whose work is based on a conception of poetry which we understand as preromantic, and which Yearsley no doubt saw as contemporary and liberating: ‘‘What are the Muses, or Apollo’s strains, / But harmony of soul?’’ (79). Like other late-century versifying plebeians, Yearsley does not make explicit use of a poetic discourse on work in her social criticisms. She never wrote a poem chronicling a milkwoman’s labors, but she does maintain the designation ‘‘Lactilla’’ in her 1787 volume, perhaps as a critical gesture in the sense that she transforms the class-prejudice of her social betters into an ironic self-description by keeping it alive in her writing. When Yearsley does employ a poetic language of labor, she confines her use to the figures of metaphor and personification, as in the ‘‘Ode, to Miss Shiells’’: Last, Industry, with features coarse and strong, Rises behind, shaking his blister’d hand; The slow unwilling plough he drives along; The dews of Labour on his forehead stand. (71)

And, ‘‘Winter’’ is an ‘‘unwelcome guest! / I hate his freezing toils,’’ states Yearsley-the-poet, who nevertheless reminds her reader of her provincial roots: ‘‘But Rapture fills my rural breast’’ (75). Yearsley, however, does not need a poetic discourse on work to communicate her social critique; hence her criticisms are aesthetically and qualitatively different from those articulated by the 1730s generation of plebeian poets. By 1787, Yearsley enjoyed a degree of independence as a publishing poet that neither Duck nor Collier ever achieved, and she is writing at a time when the expression of personal feeling in poetry was in vogue. Yearsley does not need to mask her thoughts as a plebeian woman struggling against the classist forces of her society the way that Collier did in the 1730s. For example, in ‘‘On Being Presented with a Silver Pen,’’ Yearsley uses a bold poetic strategy to criticize the class-specific ideology that seeks to limit her options in the world. The poem includes the following passage, one-half of a dialogue between imaginary polite society-types:

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‘‘ ‘Tis to relieve Distress—this is the sum, ‘‘But let your Prudence point out what’s to come. ‘‘Keep wretches humble, for when once reliev’d, ‘‘They oft-times prove our Charity deceiv’d: ‘‘Therefore be cautious, not their merits trust; ‘‘They may have very few—if poor—they must. ‘‘Think not a savage virtuous—but confine, ‘‘His future acts by obligation’s line: ‘‘He surely must be humble, grateful, true, ‘‘While he’s dependent—the superiour you.’’ (88)

These are the sentiments of ‘‘the cooly wise’’ who speak condescendingly ‘‘with self-applauding glance, / And taunting air’’ (88). Yearsley intends to show that these are the words of a particular class of people, however indistinctly defined as those who patronize poor ‘‘wretches’’ (read poets), and not simply the words of More, though we know that More voiced similar ones to Yearsley. But here one member of ‘‘the cooly wise’’ is clearly addressing another, and Yearsley is imagining the tenor of their discussion (no doubt based on her own experience) when the subject is the patronage of poor ‘‘wretches.’’ In her use of quotation marks and italics, Yearsley marks this speech as an intrusion into her own poetic discourse and distinguishes its ideological emphases: the goal in this passage is to ‘‘keep wretches humble’’ by controlling the potential long-term effects of patronage, that is, to raise the quality of life of the poor without raising them socially. The notion of confining ‘‘his future acts by obligation’s line’’ reverberates with Yearsley’s contractual arrangement with her patrons as well as the Montagus’ plan to employ Woodhouse, who was just about to relieve himself of such ‘‘patronage’’ in 1787. Whereas Duck and Collier used a poetic discourse on work to describe the oppression enforced by their ‘‘Masters’’ and ‘‘Mistresses,’’ Yearsley actually incorporates the polite dogma she wants to criticize into her verse, and will go so far as to respond with anger and purpose throughout this volume: ‘‘Independent, I smile at controul’’ (33). Yearsley continues to air her independent voice in A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade, published by the Robinson brothers in 1788. The longest of her pamphlet-style occasional poems, this is an angry and graphic dramatic verse narrative that tells the story of Luco, an African slave torn from his ‘‘humble home,’’ his ‘‘mourning father,’’ and his beloved ‘‘Incilanda’’ by hypocritical Christian slave traders.41 It is a powerful piece, full of Yearsley’s characteristically exhortative and emotive blank verse. Andrew

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Becket judged the poem to be ‘‘a very affecting tale of a poor negroe, inhumanely butchered under the forms of law,’’ though he goes on to laud Hannah More’s poem on the same subject, Slavery, which also appeared in 1788, as ‘‘more philosophic’’ and ‘‘more elegant’’ than Yearsley’s effort.42 But, in calling attention to Yearsley’s handling of ‘‘the forms of law’’ that sanction the exploitation of African slaves, Becket’s language suggests that, though More’s is the better poem, Yearsley’s contains a stronger, more far-reaching political critique. Indeed, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade is the one poem in which Yearsley extends the concept of ‘‘Custom’’ in a critical poetic discourse aimed at exposing the hypocrisy of upper-class involvement in the slave trade and the unequal distribution of power within her society that enforces it. Early in the poem, Yearsley asks rhetorically, ‘‘Custom, Law / Ye blessings, and ye curses of mankind, / What evils do ye cause?,’’ and follows with a grim reminder of Custom’s sway: ‘‘We feel enslav’d, / Yet move in your direction’’ (2). For Yearsley, as for Jones before her, Custom is problematic because it represents a complex of contradictory social practices—in this case attending church and enslaving fellow human beings—as simply natural and socially acceptable. Yearsley’s critique is explicit in this regard: Custom, thou Wilt preach filial piety; thy sons Will groan, and stare with impudence at Heav’n, As if they did abjure the act, where Sin Sits full on Inhumanity; the church They fill with mouthing, vap’rous sighs and tears, Which, like the guileful crocodile’s, oft fall, Nor fall, but at the cost of human bliss. Custom, thou hast undone us! led us far From God-like probity, from truth, and heaven. (2–3)

Yearsley’s imagery underscores the hypocrisy of Bristol merchants, those ‘‘grov’ling souls’’ who trade in human beings and attend church, seeking Christian salvation (1). And Custom in these passages is meant to represent what we might term the ideological apparatus behind the slave trade in the late eighteenth century. Yearsley thus exposes the process by which Custom, in this context, is internalized in the name of ‘‘Commerce’’ or, more precisely, economic prosperity and the maintenance of existing social relations (26). No doubt confident in her critique, at several points Yearsley baits her enemies to respond:

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Advance, ye Christians, and oppose my strain: Who dares condemn it? Prove from laws divine, From deep philosophy, or social love, That ye derive your privilege. (25–6)

The writer who advanced the most published work to counteract the radical potential of Yearsley’s arguments was of course Hannah More. When More began writing again in earnest in the late 1780s, she saw a role for herself as a moral reformer, specifically in formulating and establishing the social codes for men, women, and children from all ranks of society. More’s essays, poetry, and especially the Cheap Repository tracts—a collection of inexpensive ballads, broadsides, and chapbooks produced by More and her evangelical friends to combat the social unrest of the 1790s—show that she made ‘‘a vital contribution to the stabilizing of English society in the difficult years after the French Revolution.’’ 43 More involved herself in the process of codifying domestic, religious, and social ideologies through her writing, she was a social ideologue extraordinaire, defining the proper place, the proper values, and the proper pursuits for working people in England in this contentious period. Village Politics (1793) and the Cheap Repository tracts (1795) were consciously written for a laboring-class audience, deploying mechanic caricatures and the simple language of the poor to appeal to the literate elements of this wide audience. In these texts, More commodifies the plebeian discourse on work to influence her intended audience. When More finally reenters print culture after the episode with Yearsley, she seeks to use the print medium— specifically lower forms such as the ballad and chapbook—to enter into dialogue with those potentially reformable readers of the laboring classes. Because of her relatively high social position, public opinion of the sort that Yearsley had attained mattered very little to More. More still enjoyed the steadfast support of fashionable society. Her turn toward a conservative brand of evangelical Christianity and her correspondence during this period show that she met Yearsley’s public onslaught with characteristic Christian stoicism: ‘‘I grieve most for poor fallen human nature; for, as to my own part, I am persuaded Providence intends me good by it. Had [Yearsley] turned out well I should have had my reward; as it is, I have my trial.’’44 More emerged from her ‘‘trial’’ with Yearsley to embrace a higher calling to reform the lower classes. Although More never responded directly to Yearsley in print, her publications after 1787 at times seem directly informed by her experience with the upstart milk-

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woman. For instance, in Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, published in 1788, More writes: The same principle in human nature by which the nabob, the contractor, and others, by a sudden influx of unaccustomed wealth, become voluptuous, extravagant, and insolent, seldom fails to produce the same effect on persons in [the] humbler stations, when raised from inferior places to the sudden affluence of these gainful ones. Increased profligacy on a sudden swell of fortune is commonly followed by desperate methods to improve the circumstances, when impaired by the improvidence attending unaccustomed prosperity.45

We can read More’s experience with Yearsley in those ‘‘desperate methods’’ to which she alludes. More never gave up the ideal of securing upper-class charity for the needful members of the lowerclasses, but hindsight dictated that the poor required moral reform to be worthy of, and to properly receive, such assistance. In the aftermath of the Yearsley episode, Walpole pointed out that More ‘‘lov[ed] good works: a temper superior to revenge’’ (31:255), but, as Susan Pedersen has argued, More’s post-Yearsley texts amount to ‘‘a deliberate assault on popular culture.’’46 Pedersen is referring specifically to the Cheap Repository tracts, but Village Politics, published two years before the tracts began appearing, is also part of More’s bombardment. Village Politics is explicitly addressed ‘‘to all the mechanics, journeymen, and day labourers, in Great Britain,’’ and is written under More’s pseudonymous plebeian persona, ‘‘Will Chip, a country carpenter.’’47 One commentator has called this poem ‘‘Burke for beginners,’’ a phrase which accurately sums up More’s central purpose: to diffuse the critique against egalitarian ideas circulating in England amongst the lower social orders after the French Revolution.48 The text takes the form of a political dialogue between two laboring men, ‘‘Jack Anvil’’ and ‘‘Tom Hod,’’ one a blacksmith and the other a mason. Tom is a budding Painite republican who seeks ‘‘Liberty, Equality, and the Rights of Man,’’ and so is in need of the moral and social enlightenment provided by Jack, a conservative ideologue who polemicizes against the reform movement in the interest of maintaining social harmony (3). The subject of work is a primary feature of their dialogue, and thus is central to the didacticism of the poem as a whole. More has Tom admit early on that ‘‘work’s plenty enough, if a man had but the heart to go to it,’’ in effect positing the notion that real social

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problems are not plaguing the country, but instead radical social and political ideas are leading workers like Tom to stray from their proper labors (3). One of the points Tom raises in this discussion suggests that More understands work and leisure as specific class markers: ‘‘I don’t see why we are to work like slaves, while others roll about in their coaches, feed on the fat of the land, and do nothing’’ (7). However, to illustrate More’s appeal to a traditional social paradigm, Tom resigns himself to his fate of laboring for others in order to survive himself. When Tom asserts that ‘‘all men are equal,’’ More, speaking through Jack, answers Tom’s political query with a plea to religion: ‘‘If that’s thy talk, Tom, thou dost quarrel with Providence and not with the government’’ (8). Jack chastises Tom further for not ‘‘go[ing] oftner to church,’’ and thus More effectively manipulates the contemporary discussion about social equality to serve her own ideological ends. That is, by shifting the issue of work and social equality from a political to a religious question precisely by appealing to larger theological imperatives, More defuses Tom’s incendiary politics. Tom, of course, eventually capitulates to Jack’s arguments. Yet, for many laboring-class people living in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the points and questions Tom raises in the poem were increasingly political, and only real political change would be entertained by the growing ranks of workers seeking better standards of living. It is characteristic of More’s politics that she looks back to an idealized past for the answers to present social ills. For example, through Jack, More paints an idyllic picture of rural laboring life and the earning power of a single family working on an aristocrat’s estate. When ‘‘Sir John’’ and his Lady are down in summer, Jack notes that they [bring] such a deal of gentry that I have more horses than I can shoe, and my wife more linen than she can wash. Then all our grown children are servants in the family, and rare wages they have got. Our little boys get something every day by weeding their gardens, and the girls learn how to sew and knit at Sir John’s expence; who sends them all to school on a Sunday. (11)

More’s ideal case scenario describing a laboring family’s earning power is strikingly similar to Arthur Young’s, published in 1772. Young theoretically calculated that the average earnings of such a working family would have been close to £51 8s. per year, but Thorvald Rogers rightly notes that ‘‘it is plain that not one family in a thousand corresponded at that time to Young’s hypothesis, and

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that, therefore, the calculations [with regard to] the remuneration of labour [are] entirely fictitious.’’49 Tom complains that ‘‘there’s not Sir John’s in every village,’’ to which Jack replies ‘‘the more’s the pity’’ before pointing out the ‘‘other help’’ that is available in every parish (11). This assistance includes better management of parish poor rates and continued charity from benevolent aristocrats to raise the material conditions of the laboring poor—at least to basic subsistence levels. But the poor were required to be morally upright and productive: ‘‘no drinking, no riot, no bonfires,’’ and they were to ‘‘ ‘Study to be quiet, work with [their] own hands, and mind [their] own business’ ’’ in order to reap the benefits of what amounts to More’s welfare package (16). Clearly, More’s ideas for social welfare were designed to maintain traditional hierarchical relations among the ranks of working people, the factory owners, and the landed gentry. The specter of riot haunted the Mores and Burkes of this period because it was only through insurrection that radical social change would be effected, as it was in France. More attacked this problem directly in one of her many contributions to the Cheap Repository tracts. ‘‘The Riot; or Half a Loaf is Better than No Bread’’ (1795) continues the dialogue between Jack Anvil and Tom Hod that was begun in Village Politics. The poem opens with Tom inciting a large group of workers to take to the streets: ‘Come, neighbours, no longer be patient and quiet, Come let us kick up a bit of a riot; I am hungry, my lads, but I’ve little to eat, So we’ll pull down the mills and seize all the meat: I’ll give you good sport, boys, as ever you saw, So a fig for the justice, a fig for the law.’ (Works, 6:62)

Again, More co-opts the language of the lower classes in order to speak as one of them and thus (potentially) influence their actions. ‘‘The Riot’’ was apparently successful in achieving this purpose; More wrote to Mrs. Boscawen that a very formidable riot among the colliers in the neighbourhood of Bath, was happily prevented by the ballad of ‘‘The Riot.’’ The plan was thoroughly settled; they were resolved to work no more, but to attack first the mills, and then the gentry. A gentleman of large fortune got into their confidence, and a few hundreds were distributed and sung with the effect, as they say, mentioned above. It is a fresh proof by what weak instruments evils are now and then prevented.50

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More was becoming increasingly aware of the profound influence that such ‘‘weak instruments’’ as ballads and chapbooks could have as political and ideological tools. Much of ‘‘The Riot,’’ then, shows More presenting her own arguments, again through Jack, to counter Tom’s incendiary rhetoric. Jack begins by pointing out the paradox inherent in the rioter’s actions, noting the ‘‘whimsey’’ of destroying the infrastructure for producing food when food is in fact what they want (6:63). He then goes on to present a series of concisely argued points for Tom (and the reader) to consider. Jack appeals to national pride, observing that the Dutch and Spanish have it worse than the English; he exhorts Tom to cultivate patience because ‘‘prices will fall’’ (6:63), and to tighten his domestic economy in order to offset the current hardship—‘‘The more ale we drink, boys, the less we shall eat’’ (6:63). Neither ‘‘Parliament’’ nor the King can control the weather, Jack argues, and so Nature, not government, is to blame for the bad harvests. This point eases into an insidious religious interpretation of the suffering experienced by the laboring poor: ‘Besides, I must share in the wants of the times, Because I have had my full share in its crimes; And I’m apt to believe the distress which is sent Is to punish and cure us of all discontent. (6:64)

Thus Jack argues that the poor are as culpable for the bad times— sent by Providence—as any other social group because they are equally morally corrupt. Finally, Jack glorifies manual labor, affirms his own piety, and places his faith in upper-class charity for his survival during hard times: ‘And though I’ve no money, and though I’ve no lands, I’ve a head on my shoulders, and a pair of good hands; So I’ll work the whole day, and on Sundays I’ll seek At church how to bear all the wants of the week. The gentlefolks too will afford us supplies; They’ll subscribe—and they’ll give us their puddings and pies. (6:64)

‘‘I’d rather be hungry than hanged,’’ Jack exclaims, putting an end to the riotous rhetoric issued from Tom, who throws down his pitchfork ‘‘and went to his work’’ (6:65). Apparently the colliers in Bath did, too. More’s success in ‘‘The Riot’’ can be attributed to her presentation of complex ideas in a language and form that working people could understand. The overarching purpose of the Cheap Repository was very much

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defined by the evangelicals’ desire to maintain traditional English values, and hence, the socioeconomic structure of traditional English society. The values that More proselytizes in the tracts— honesty, industry, domesticity, and piety—travel across class lines, though the lower-class people who cultivate these values do not. For instance, in ‘‘Patient Joe, the Newcastle Collier,’’ the protagonist is held up as an example of laboring-class complacency and rightly-turned submission to both God and the class system: He prais’d his Creator whatever befell; How thankful was Joseph when matters went well! How sincere were his carols of praise for good health, And how grateful for any increase in his wealth! In trouble he bow’d him to God’s holy will; How contented was Joseph when matters went ill! When rich and when poor he alike understood That all things together were working for good. (Works, 6:66)

Joe’s Panglossian maxim that ‘‘all is for the best’’ includes an implicit justification for social difference. Although Joe is a collier, he represents one of the moral poor and so is counted as equal to any other Englishman before God in More’s schema. In her effort to quell class antagonism, More uses Joe and other characters in her tracts to set out a program that simultaneously erases and upholds class difference: an ethereal equality before God is propagandized as reward for those who submit to God’s will on earth, understood as their proper place within the social structure. More thus employs the distinction between the moral and the material to manipulate class definitions in her work. Persons of all ranks can (and should) cultivate similar values and can thereby achieve equality in moral terms, according to More, but the Cheap Repositories as a whole never present material advancement of the sort that could blur social lines. The sheer number of tracts in circulation by March 1796—over two million—shows that More was successful in commodifying a fictional plebeian discourse on work and suggests a level of potential political and ideological influence that far surpasses the influence that Yearsley’s public performances could have had.51 Yearsley did publish consistently in the decade following her break with More, working in other genres with some critical acclaim.52 More important, she succeeded in turning her writing into a career that would support her family, though her published pieces may not have had the same far-reaching political and ideological effects that More’s did. Given their respective social po-

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sitions, however, it is ironic that the print medium allowed Yearsley access to a potentially supportive community of polite readers, and More—in the case of the Cheap Repository—access to a potentially reformable community of low-order readers. Theirs was a textual dialogue fueled by the events of 1785, which led to a failed patron/ poet relationship and an end to conventional lines of communication. One way to understand their texts published after this affair is to read Yearsley as using her knowledge of More and her polite social values to fashion herself as a successful plebeian author; and likewise, to read More as using her knowledge of Yearsley’s values—the apparent source of her ‘‘ingratitude’’—to formulate a poetic language to reform men and women like her. While More may have won the larger, class-based ideological war with Yearsley with her Cheap Repository tracts, Yearsley’s final volume of poems, The Rural Lyre (1796), is an important last retort in the dialogue between these two women writers. Given More’s aggressive assault on popular culture in the Cheap Repository, we might have expected Yearsley to respond directly, with fire and purpose, continuing the angry poetics of class resistance begun in earnest in 1787 with Poems, on Various Subjects. However, Yearsley was never one to cede to expectations. At times, she echoes More in this volume on the subject of a poet’s role in society, as in ‘‘Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade,’’ in which the poet tunes her ‘‘rural lay to universal love,’’ in particular to her ‘‘social duties . . . / To Friendship, Virtue, Love, and Heav’n’’ (67, 73). Instead of pointedly engaging in the dialogue of social critique, Yearsley now pleads to Providence for assistance in finding social harmony: ‘‘O teach me Father! so to touch the lyre / That woe may smile, and social joy be near’’ (133). But if Yearsley’s new poems suggest a resignation on her part to the ‘‘social duties’’ defined by More and the dominant culture, they nevertheless point us toward recognizing her ultimate success: her achievement of personal ‘‘liberty,’’ particularly from the economic constraints that plagued earlier plebeian poets. After Duck’s elevation in Caroline’s court, we have seen other plebeian poets throughout the century worry in print about worldly ‘‘cares’’ and attempt to use their writing to alleviate the penury they felt in varying degrees. Early in her career, Yearsley was no exception to this rule. But by the end of her career, she seeks to transcend the cash-nexus of poetry and print by means of a vision of pure poetry we have not yet witnessed from a plebeian pen. In the ‘‘Familiar Poem to Milo, an Aged Friend, who Wished the Author Riches,’’ Yearsley writes:

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You talk of wealth, dear Milo, as if I Could find no joy in Nature’s purer gifts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . You are good and rich; I poor—a vot’ry of wild fancy. When You listen to my song, I am not poor; You have not wealth enough to buy my joys:— (28, 34)

The notion of poetic ‘‘fancy’’ turns up in this poem and elsewhere in the volume to illustrate Yearsley’s sense of herself as a true poet, as one who writes not for money, though her ‘‘purse is light,’’ but because of a deep-seated passion to find and celebrate ‘‘Truth’’ (131). A decade after her experience with More, Yearsley distances herself from the worldly cares which defined her status as a plebeian poet: Fly me, Care! I will not be Through the world a slave to thee! Take thy fetters; know, my soul Laughs, old Friend, at thy controul (82)

By 1796, perhaps Yearsley had earned enough money from her writing to feel free of worldly ‘‘care.’’ But more important, this statement (and the many others like it that appear in this volume) presents an image of a poet now basking in her freedom as a writer. In the last poem of the book, ‘‘The Indifferent Shepherdess to Colin,’’ Yearsley illustrates this ‘‘dominion bright and clear’’ over both gender and class oppression (139): For my eternal plan Is to be calm and free. Estrang’d from tyrant man I’ll keep my liberty. . . . . . . . . . . I stray o’er rocks and fields Where native beauties shine: All fetter’d fancy yields Be, Colin, ever thine. Complain no more! but rove— My cheek from crimson free, Within my native grove I’ll guard my liberty. (141–42)

We might imagine Yearsley’s speaking through the character of a lowly shepherdess in this poem in order to emphasize her own

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ideas, as a laboring-class woman, of maintaining personal ‘‘liberty’’ in the face of ‘‘tyrant man’’ and those forces originating from outside her ‘‘native grove.’’ Thus, at the end of her career, Yearsley can imagine herself as having defeated such worldly cares and the oppression that stems from them. Her ‘‘liberty’’ of thought and expression is what marks her having achieved the status of poet. For Yearsley, the world always appeared ‘‘an empty bauble bound with chains,’’ but she did much in her life and in her published poetry to resist the limiting effects of those chains—real and imaginary, material and ideological (86).

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Epilogue Ensconced in the ‘‘muses seat’’: Bloomfield, Clare, and the Plebeian Tradition IF ANN YEARSLEY’S RURAL LYRE IS THE LAST SIGNIFICANT VOLUME OF

poetry by an English laboring-class author to appear in the eighteenth century proper, it nevertheless does not represent the end of anything. Donna Landry argues that ‘‘by the end of the century, the discourse of laboring-class women’s verse seems to have played itself out,’’ though she still finds examples of this discourse, however more conservative or subtle, in the post-1800 publications of Ann Candler and Elizabeth Bentley.1 The century-break, in fact, did not precisely cut off female laboring-class poets from the literary marketplace, though their numbers dropped dramatically. The problem of closure is only magnified when their male counterparts are included. A new century is, of course, one of those convenient, artificial boundaries or divisions in a discipline rife with them. ‘‘Eighteenth Century,’’ ‘‘Romantic,’’ and ‘‘Victorian’’ continue to define the basic categories of periodization for roughly two hundred years of literary history. However distinguishable these periods are, and however useful these designations can be, literary and cultural traditions pass through them, rarely unaltered, but nevertheless still recognizable. The general presence of laboring-class authors and subjects in English literary culture increases substantially in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1820s the genre of working-class prose autobiography is thriving,2 and later, the representation of workingclass subjects by sympathetic middle-class novelists like Dickens, Disraeli, and Gaskell becomes an established feature of this culture. And there was no dearth of plebeian poetry in the period. Nigel Cross notes that ‘‘throughout the first half of the nineteenth century poetry was the favourite form of working-class writing,’’ and further that ‘‘there was a gradual shift away from the rural musings’’ of Robert Bloomfield, to the ‘‘radical, Whitmanesque outpourings’’ of Gerald Massey, whose Voices of Freedom, Lyrics of Love ap267

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peared in 1850.3 In between, the agitations leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832 and the later Chartist movements politicized laboringclass writing in unprecedented ways.4 By the 1840s, as Anne Janowitz observes, ‘‘the discourse of Chartist poetics would name Burns as a figure to be admired’’; he became, in effect, ‘‘a people’s poet’’ for the newly ‘‘self-identified working class.’’5 And so seventy years after Duck’s phenomenal success, a new literary genealogy is evident. Even pre-Chartist autodidacts like John Clare prominently listed Burns, along with fellow plebeians Thomas Dermody, Bloomfield, and Bloomfield’s imitators James Templeman and David Hurn, when he noted his ‘‘choisest authors’’ in 1820.6 Bloomfield also aligned himself with the legend of Burns as ‘‘peasant hero’’ and, like Clare, never publicly considered Duck an influence, though both poets surely passed over the reference to the thresher-poet in the first book of Crabbe’s The Village.7 Crabbe had remembered Duck nostalgically as a truth-teller of rural life— ‘‘Save honest Duck, what son of verse could share / The poet’s rapture, and the peasant’s care?’’—in 1783.8 And James Woodhouse reflected on his own ‘‘discovery’’ as a versifying rustic in Crispinus Scriblerus by linking himself to a tradition defined by Duck: ’Twas wond’rous, then, a Bardling should be found To twang the Lyre on ought but classic ground— Who dar’d presume to print poetic page, In such a letter’d, such enlighten’d, Age; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Twas long since Duck had thresh’d his harvest out— And, since his day, no Rustic had been seen, Who sung so deftly on the daisied green! (I, 68–69)

By 1800, Duck seems to have dropped out of the collective consciousness of the most prominent rural plebeian poets, in part because of the influence and popularity of Burns, and in part because times had changed. Whatever the reasons for Bloomfield’s and Clare’s forgetfulness, there exists enough connective tissue to see them as part of an ongoing plebeian poetic tradition that extends back to 1730. In imposing my own sense of closure on this tradition, I shall follow Merryn and Raymond Williams’s sharp observation that ‘‘John Clare was not the first, but in effect the last, of the English ‘peasant poets.’ ’’9 In the introduction to their edition of Clare’s poems, the Williams suggest that ‘‘the label [peasant poet], and the cultural model it indicates, belongs to a historical period which was

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ending in Clare’s early lifetime.’’10 One might say that the beginnings of this end were identifiable in Duck’s day, too. The indicators of its demise were waxing in the 1730s: enclosure, wage labor in the countryside, the reorganization of rural productive relations, in effect, the capitalization of agriculture. That this process is felt by Bloomfield and Clare, and is playing itself out in the early decades of the nineteenth century, makes these two poets logical endpoints for this study. But I have tried to show that there is more to the story of early-modern plebeian poetry than the context of rural life and its poetic representation. Bloomfield and Clare offer important insight into another major theme of this study—writing as work—which I have been arguing links this tradition of plebeian versifiers. The ideal of the gentleman-poet of truly independent means and circumstances remained an elusive goal for Bloomfield and Clare. Yet, both poets also made significant strides in mapping out new cultural space for plebeian literary careers. When he composed his first major poem, The Farmer’s Boy, in the late 1790s, Robert Bloomfield supposedly eschewed the subject matter of religion and contemporary politics. But, as John Lucas has recently shown, Bloomfield, working as a shoemaker with his brother George in London in the early 1780s, certainly had some truck with the voices of radical dissent in the period. He heard the radical minister Joseph Fawcett preach at the Old Jewry meetinghouse; as a shoemaker, Bloomfield would have been connected to one of the more reform-minded sets of artisans in the period; and, living in London, he could not have missed references to a variety of reformist movements and political debates.11 Viewed against this backdrop of contention and strife, The Farmer’s Boy is an escapist poem, perhaps even self-consciously so, and many commentators have noted that Bloomfield’s idealizing of rural life in the not-sodistant past, especially his focus on the peace and plenty found in the countryside, goes a long way toward explaining the poem’s popularity when it finally appeared in March 1800. Lucas argues that Bloomfield provides ‘‘a kind of discreetly utopian account of the ‘natural’ world very far removed from the contentious actualities of the moment,’’ while Roger Sales, nicely linking Bloomfield’s poetic mode to the plebeian desire for literary success, points out that ‘‘pastoral cooks the economic books when it reconstructs both past and present.’’ 12 Indeed, ‘‘joy was a valuable commodity in 1800,’’ as Sales later observed, and Bloomfield could capitalize on this by reinvigorating the pastoral, by recalling (and no doubt reshaping) his own earlier experiences as a plowboy working for a family relation, William Austin, at Sapiston.13 However much

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Bloomfield self-consciously sugarcoated his rural labor experiences to produce the poetic candy that met audience expectations and desires, The Farmer’s Boy also reveals a reformist political edge that links Bloomfield to the sort of ideological doublespeak that I have been arguing is the mainstay of much eighteenth-century plebeian poetry. Bloomfield’s first patron, the barrister and sometimes political writer Capel Lofft, was responsible for shepherding Bloomfield’s poem through the press, and for introducing yet another worthy plebeian natural genius to the public. Lofft, however monied and well connected, was not a typical member of the cultural orthodoxy in the period, as he was known to harbor radical political ideas and sympathies.14 He was also known as something of a patron of the arts, which George Bloomfield must have been aware of when he approached Lofft in November 1798 with the manuscript of The Farmer’s Boy. Lofft’s initial comments about the poem in his ‘‘Preface’’ to the first edition indicate that he valued Bloomfield’s neopastoral mode, the ‘‘simplicity, sweetness, [and] natural tenderness’’ that Bloomfield brought to his descriptions of rural life.15 Yet he also notes in passing that he ‘‘intend[s] some farther and more particular Critical Remarks on this charming Performance’’ in the future, likely a reference to the extended prefatory apparatus, notes, and ‘‘Appendix’’ he provided for subsequent early editions that were later deemed ‘‘political’’ and therefore inappropriate by Bloomfield and his printer, Thomas Hood (iii).16 For the remainder of his ‘‘Preface’’ to the first edition, Lofft largely relies on quoting George Bloomfield’s ‘‘Account of the Author’’ which was provided to Lofft for just this purpose. Like other examples of the genre, the account sets out to establish Bloomfield’s character in ideologically acceptable terms. Thus Bloomfield’s honesty, industry, and piety are emphasized—‘‘His Mother, who is a very religious member of the Church of England, took all the pains she could in his infancy to make him pious’’—and Lofft closes with the final stamp of approval: ‘‘It is much to be a Poet, such as he will be found: . . . . it is more to be such a Man’’ (xiii, xvi). Though patterned after Thomson’s The Seasons, Bloomfield begins his ‘‘Spring’’ on a Crabbe-like note, invoking his Muse to ‘‘Bear me through regions where gay Fancy dwells; / But mould to Truth’s fair form what Memory tells.’’17 Bloomfield wants us to believe that ‘‘Fancy’’ will be beholden to ‘‘Truth,’’ but in several ways the poem does not bear this out. For example, the discourse on work discernable throughout the poem is repeatedly folded into pleasing images, pleasant poetry, and the eternal optimism of a fecund natu-

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ral world and laboring-class content. Giles, the plowboy who carries some of the structural weight of the poem because he appears in every season, is introduced as follows: ’Twas thus with Giles: meek, fatherless, and poor; Labour his portion, but he felt no more; No stripes, no tyranny his steps pursu’d; His life was constant, cheerful, servitude: (3)

Giles works throughout the year—harrowing, harvesting corn, turnip gathering, sheep tending—but these labors become an oxymoronic ‘‘cheerful, servitude’’ in Bloomfield’s idealized poetic world. In contrast to Duck, who called his readers’ attention to the monotonous, backbreaking cycle of agricultural labor in 1730, Bloomfield wants to convey the notion that, by the end of the century, ‘‘each new duty brought its share of joy’’ (3). The Farmer’s Boy also includes several more specific anti-Duckian images: Duck’s sweating mowers are replaced by Bloomfield’s ‘‘sturdy’’ versions ‘‘whose writhing form meridian heat defies’’; and Duck’s restless threshers who dream still of work are replaced with land-laborers who enjoy ‘‘peaceful dreams’’ in Bloomfield’s world (16, 36). Bloomfield’s idealized discourse on work suggests not only that he knew Duck’s poem, but that he was self-consciously creating a new poetics of rural realism. Bloomfield’s discourse on work in fact could accommodate specific aspects that distinguish its plebeian form—rural dialect, specialized diction, the effects of work on the laborer—by consistently incorporating them into the pastoral fold. ‘‘Spring’’ includes a lengthy description of plowing and harrowing that well illustrates the point. Once spring herself has summoned the ‘‘slumb’ring ploughs,’’ Bloomfield waxes specific about the method of plowing practiced: No wheels support the diving, pointed, share; No groaning ox is doom’d to labour there; No helpmates teach the docile steed his road; (Alike unknown the ploughboy and the goad;) But, unassisted through each toilsome day, With smiling brow the ploughman cleaves his way, Draws his fresh parallels, and, wid’ning still, Treads slow the heavy dale, or climbs the hill: (4)

This is the ridge-and-furrow method of plowing, as both John Barrell and John Lucas have pointed out, a method that was imple-

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mented on the ‘‘ ‘lands’ which were the basic unit of land-tenure in parishes farmed on the open-field system.’’18 Bloomfield represents this method in detail because he is nostalgic for the tenant-farmer based, open-field system that was increasingly under siege in the early nineteenth century due to enclosure and other improvements in husbandry. The passage is remarkable for its careful mix of specialized agricultural diction (the ‘‘pointed share,’’ ‘‘the goad’’) and familiar language (‘‘fresh parallels, and wid’ning still’’) to create a vivid picture of the field under plow. There is real work going on here, yet the potentially painful effects of ‘‘each toilsome day’’ on the plowman are negated by his ‘‘smiling brow.’’ Bloomfield further obfuscates the difficult nature of the work by deemphasizing human agency: the plow continues ‘‘Till all is chang’d, and hill and level down / Assume a livery of sober brown’’ (4). The human work involved with changing the clothes of the field in effect has been dropped out by the end of the description. Even when Bloomfield does provide a human agent and some accommodation to the effects of labor on the laborer, as in the description of Giles’s ‘‘wearying strides’’ when harrowing, he nevertheless quickly moves to reinscribe the image into an idealized picture of rural bliss, where simple ‘‘rest’’ quickly ‘‘chase[s] each transient pain’’ (4). The trend toward idealization in The Farmer’s Boy is evident in other aspects of the poem as well. In ‘‘Summer,’’ ‘‘Nature herself invites the Reapers forth’’ according to Bloomfield, the single line mystifying a range of material necessities and productive relations between laborer and farmer that in fact require the reapers, mowers, and others to engage in harvest work (15). While the various laborers heed the call of nature to share ‘‘the general toil,’’ in Bloomfield’s communal ideal the farmer simply ‘‘quits his elbow-chair’’ (an image of leisure laden with the weight of class distinction, but not developed by the poet) to view the goings-on (16). Bloomfield casually notes that the laborers are a ‘‘ready group attendant on his word,’’ but, unlike Duck’s ‘‘Master,’’ this farmer never has to bark any orders; everybody knows his role and his place (16). For Bloomfield, even the custom of gleaning—the laborer’s traditional right at harvest time—is figured as unnecessary because of a bounteous, beneficent ‘‘Heaven’’: No rake takes here what Heaven to all bestows— Children of want, for you the bounty flows! And every cottage from the plenteous store Receives a burden nightly at its door. (15–16)

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After the series of bad harvests in the 1790s that caused so much social upheaval, Bloomfield’s image of effortless, egalitarian plenitude must have been particularly appealing to his polite audience. This idealized rendering of harvest labor culminates in ‘‘Summer’’ with the harvest-home feast. Bloomfield’s lengthy version of this set piece includes ample evidence that ‘‘Plenty reigns’’: the general ‘‘boundless hoard,’’ the ‘‘tempting heaps’’ of hazelnuts, the ‘‘crackling Music,’’ ‘‘peals of laughter’’ and ‘‘sprightly joys’’ of the participants (20). The description, however, leads to pointed narrative commentary: ‘‘Here once a year Distinction low’rs its crest, / The master, servant, and the merry guest, / Are equal all;’’ (20). Duck had maintained the edge of ‘‘Distinction’’ in his harvest-home scene by exposing it as ‘‘the Cheat,’’ as an emblem of the cashnexus that conjoins master and laborer in an unequal economic relationship. For Duck, as we have seen, the feast is represented as an illusory—and perhaps even inadequate—reward for labors already performed and for labors in the barn still to come. Bloomfield, by contrast, seeks to erase ‘‘Distinction’’ with an explicit image of social leveling that feeds the golden-age fire of the poem. But here, the idealization is in fact set up for the most significant interlude which occurs in the exact middle of the poem. The final verse paragraph of ‘‘Summer’’ begins with the narrative voice in an overtly reflective mode, one which raises tensions between an idealized, prelapsarian past and an implied, fallen present: Such were the days,—of days long past I sing, When Pride gave place to mirth without a sting; Ere tyrant customs strength sufficient bore To violate the feelings of the poor; To leave them distanc’d in the mad’ning race, Where’er refinement shows its hated face: Nor causeless hated;—’tis the peasant’s curse, That hourly makes his wretched station worse; Destroys life’s intercourse; the social plan That rank to rank cements, as man to man: Wealth flows around him, Fashion lordly reigns; Yet poverty is his, and mental pains. (20–21)

This passage is noteworthy because it signals an important ideological disruption in the poem’s tone and general argument. Here Bloomfield invokes the trope of ‘‘tyrant custom’’ along the lines of a Henry Jones or a Ann Yearsley: it is Custom-writ-large that is the foundation of Bloomfield’s critical commentary on contemporary trends in the countryside. The passage recalls the rhetorical energy

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and direction of Goldsmith in The Deserted Village (another of Bloomfield’s influences), but in The Farmer’s Boy, ‘‘custom’’ becomes a way of pitching a critique of an ideology that has ‘‘violate[d] the feelings of the poor.’’ Indeed, an ideology that upholds ‘‘refinement,’’ ‘‘Wealth, ‘‘ and ‘‘Fashion’’ over the range of pastoral values the poem advocates is viewed as problematic because it (rather than any class of people, for example) rends the social fabric—or, as Bloomfield puts it, ‘‘destroys life’s intercourse.’’ We should recall that it was also ‘‘custom’’—the old, good kind I suspect—that sanctioned the harvest-home feast: ‘‘For all that clear’d the crop, or till’d the ground, / Are guests by right of custom’’ (20). Hence Bloomfield uses ‘‘custom’’ in two distinct ways if we think of ideology as habitual behavior: to define an ideal, organic social order of the past, and to level a critique of what has become of that ideal in the present. It is also the case that the discourse on custom offers Bloomfield a way of distancing himself from the radical potential of his critique because he casts the blame for such changes on an abstract concept. The ideological tensions raised in this passage are, however, played out further in the ensuing lament spoken by ‘‘the mourner’’ that closes ‘‘Summer’’ (21). Instead of maintaining the narrative voice that began this final verse paragraph, Bloomfield creates a second speaker, a sympathetic rural figure whose ‘‘wounded heart’’ is the result of the many recent changes he has seen in the countryside, to deliver the final lines of the section (21). The maneuver is at once a gesture toward distancing himself-as-poet from any political or ideological content potentially offensive to polite readers, and an opportunity for more specific commentary about the effects these changes have wrought on rural people: The widening distance which I daily see, Has Wealth done this?—then Wealth’s a foe to me; Foe to our rights; that leaves a pow’rful few The paths of emulation to pursue:— For emulation stoops to us no more: The hope of humble industry is o’er; The blameless hope, the cheering sweet presage Of future comforts for declining age. (21)

Mary Collier knew all about how wage labor and the capitalistic profit motives of ‘‘a pow’rful few’’ spelled the end of plebeian ‘‘hope of humble industry’’ in 1739 when she poignantly noted that ‘‘For all our Pains, no Prospect can we see / Attend us, but Old Age

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and Poverty’’ (WL, 15). Bloomfield knows this, too—the process is still operative in the countryside he describes at late century—but he adds to his commentary a discussion of causes which turns on the word ‘‘emulation’’ repeated in the passage. Jonathan Lawson has argued that ‘‘the social pattern behind the term appears to be that of certain landowners imitating urban values, and adopting a new sensibility which matches their new wealth and which considers rural life loutish and its people inferior.’’19 This strikes me as accurate, but I would add that the connotations of competition available in ‘‘emulation’’ are suggestive of a capitalistic tinge to those ‘‘urban values.’’ In the first instance, ‘‘emulation’’ is the holy grail for the wealthy landowners ‘‘to pursue;’’ in the second, it is personified as a figure who will have no interaction with men of ‘‘scanty means,’’ like the speaker (21). Consequently, neither the speaker nor his sons can hope to compete in this brave new world of capitalistic agriculture: Can my sons share from this paternal hand The profits with the labours of the land? No; though indulgent Heaven its blessing deigns, Where’s the small farm to suit my scanty means? (21)

Swallowed up by wealthy landowners increasing their holdings, the old organic order that linked landowner to tenant farmer to laborer sacrificed on the altar of economic growth is Bloomfield’s answer to the last question. This was the historical process that effectively ended the open-field system Bloomfield knew and loved. The personification of ‘‘emulation’’ also sets up the final image of the new harvest-home feast that Bloomfield uses as a foil for the previous, pastoral example in ‘‘Summer.’’ Here, ‘‘emulation’’ does not stoop to invite plebeian guests, and so those ancient (idealized) bonds that connected rural people despite differences in wealth or rank are now severed completely: Our annual feast, when Earth her plenty yields, When crown’d with boughs the last load quits the fields, The aspect still of ancient joy puts on; The aspect only, with the substance gone: The self-same Horn is still at our command, But serves none now but the plebeian hand: .............. His guests selected; rank’s punctilios known; What trouble waits upon a casual frown!

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Restraint’s foul manacles his pleasures maim; Selected guests selected phrases claim: (21–22)

The mourner’s formal lament ends with ‘‘Let labour have its due!’’ repeated twice in the last four lines (22). It is as close as Bloomfield comes to a revolutionary refrain in the poem, and it establishes forcefully that the mostly idealized rural world that surrounds this interlude is rendered with an ideological edge. Bloomfield’s consciousness of contemporary rural practices that affected the laboring-classes is evident and, though he does not represent the hardships of their workaday life in 1800, he nevertheless does speak out for laboring-class interests. If Bloomfield shied away from representing the harsh realities of agricultural labor and rural existence for people in The Farmer’s Boy, he did show some of these facets as they related to animals in the period. In fact, the poem contains more specific references to animals than people, a poetic maneuver that can also be read in the context of Bloomfield’s ideological doublespeak throughout the poem. Even the casual reader cannot miss the structural connections between the slaughtering of sheep at the end of ‘‘Spring,’’ and the birth of new lambs in ‘‘Winter.’’ The pastoral bliss of ‘‘Spring’’ is momentarily interrupted when the ‘‘shepherd comes, a messenger of blood’’ to drive the ‘‘firstlings’’ to the butcher (11). The ensuing description is graphic and precise: His gay companions Giles beholds no more; Clos’d are their eyes, their fleeces drench’d in gore; Nor can Compassion, with her softest notes, Withhold the knife that plunges thro’ their throats. (11)

The image is certainly counter-pastoral, and yet it might also have been suggestive of lamb chops to Bloomfield’s polite audience. Bloomfield not-so-gently reminds his readers of the actual process that brings lamb to their tables; this is one of the realities of the countryside the poem is explicit about, even if Giles’s reaction to the loss of his ‘‘companions’’ is duly suppressed. However, the lines of ideological accommodation are quickly redrawn: the speaker reacts with genteel distress—‘‘Down, indignation! hence, ideas foul! / Away the shocking image from my soul!’’—and reiterates that his ‘‘sweet theme is universal joy’’ (11). When the ‘‘teeming Ewes’’ give birth in ‘‘Winter,’’ then, Bloomfield succeeds in bringing the natural cycle of death and rebirth to bear on the argument (41). But, it is worth noting that even here Bloomfield raises the specter of rural realism:

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But casualties and death from damps and cold Will still attend the well-conducted fold: Her tender offspring dead, the Dam aloud Calls, and runs wild amidst th’unconscious crowd: And orphan’d sucklings raise the piteous cry; No wool to warm them, no defenders nigh. And must her streaming milk then flow in vain? Must unregarded innocence complain? No;—ere this strong solicitude subside, Maternal fondness may be fresh apply’d, And the adopted stripling still may find A parent most assiduously kind. (42)

Though both ewes and lambs sometimes do not survive the birthing process, Bloomfield suggests that Nature has its own internal logic of social harmony. One wonders if Bloomfield sees in this image of adopted lambs the sort of paternalistic model for social harmony that many middle- and upper-class reformers of the period (like Hannah More) advocated.20 If so, Bloomfield cleverly strikes a chord for the status quo. And yet elsewhere in the poem, Bloomfield’s use of animal imagery is suggestive of a safe, symbolic language for registering social criticism. For example, in ‘‘Summer,’’ Bloomfield allows that Giles is ‘‘Oft doom’d in suffocating heat to bear / The cobweb’d barn’s impure and dusty air’’ when he handles the corn harvest in the barn (17). It is a ‘‘Laborious task!’’ but Bloomfield quickly shifts his apparent concern for the laboring conditions of his plowboy to the physical condition of his horse: Poor patient Ball! and with insulting wing Roar in thine ears, and dart the piercing sting: In thy behalf the crest-wav’d boughs avail More than thy short-clipt remnant of a tail, A moving mockery, a useless name, A living proof of cruelty and shame. (17)

Just when we might reasonably expect a critical comment about the harsh laboring conditions agricultural workers faced, the counterpastoral potential is neatly subterfuged into a condemnation of the practice of docking horses’ tails. But what of Giles? Any ‘‘cruelty’’ he endured simply gets dropped out, or, it is symbolically linked to the ensuing discussion of ‘‘poor patient Ball.’’ Likewise, in one of the more well-known interludes of the poem, Bloomfield uses horses again, though this time as figures for his

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antiurban commentary. In ‘‘Winter’’ the farmer’s workhorse, ‘‘Dobbin,’’ is contrasted with ‘‘the poor post-horse’’ in a country versus city morality tale (37). Dobbin works, but he is asked to see his ‘‘trivial hardships’’ in relation to the ‘‘complicated pains’’ of the post-horse (37). The post-horse is cruelly treated—‘‘ ’tis he must feel / The double efforts of the lash and steel’’—all because of money, an ‘‘extra shilling in the rider’s hand’’ (37). Thus Bloomfield makes clear that city values organized around profit motives and money-mongering lead to mistreatment of the post-horse. By extension, we are left to infer that it is the intrusion of those same urban values in the countryside that will continue adversely to affect rural people. Throughout the poem, then, Bloomfield adopts a safely resistant poetic strain; he is an ideological ‘‘double chatterer’’21 extraordinaire who utilizes methods of poetic displacement and subterfuge to walk the fine line between complicity and critique. For a variety of reasons, not least its apparent affirmation of cultural orthodoxy in the period, The Farmer’s Boy was wildly successful in the turn-of-the-century literary marketplace. A phenomenal number of texts were printed within the first three years—26,100 according to Lofft—and the poem went to fourteen editions before Bloomfield’s death in 1823.22 Just three months after the poem first appeared, Bloomfield wrote to his brother, George, that he can only ‘‘like a coachman, talk flying’’ because of the whirlwind of activity his celebrity has stirred up: he hobnobs with gentlemen; almost meets the Prince of Wales; sups with his publisher; and sits for portraits.23 It is difficult to discern exactly how much money The Farmer’s Boy netted Bloomfield in that busy first year; he receives gifts of guineas from many hands, including the duke of Grafton (who later awarded Bloomfield a £15 annuity), but the full sum was substantial—enough for Bloomfield to move his family from their garret to a house on City Road.24 Given Bloomfield’s initial economic success, it is surprising that he was never able to give up his trade to devote himself to writing. Of course, literary culture was still in the business of patrolling its boundaries, as evidenced by Lord Byron’s comments on Bloomfield and other plebeian poets which echo Scriblerian sentiments about Stephen Duck and John Bancks almost a century before.25 However, when it came to the problem of occupational status, Bloomfield enjoyed the support of the duke of Grafton. Lofft quotes Grafton on the issue, noting that the duke wants to press Bloomfield at their impending interview about ‘‘his plans or wishes for his future occupations,’’ and, several days after the meeting, Bloomfield wrote to Lofft that Grafton was purchasing books for

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him (Correspondence, 4). Apparently Bloomfield did not have a ready answer for the duke about how he wished to be helped because he quotes Grafton telling him ‘‘ ‘. . . you will have thought more what may be most agreeable to be done further’ ’’ before their next meeting (Correspondence, 5). The context is vague, but given that Grafton was giving Bloomfield money without strings attached, and indulging the poet’s desire for literature, it seems reasonable to infer that the duke supported Bloomfield’s vocation for poetry. At the very least Grafton sought to alleviate the stresses of working poverty by helping Bloomfield to an easier, more lucrative ‘‘second’’ career, which he eventually did by appointing him to a place in the Seal Office late in 1802. Bloomfield, however, lasted only about six months in the position before resigning at the end of May 1803.26 Bloomfield grew increasingly weary of his dual laboring life, and always hoped for a permanent income from patronage or his books that would be sufficient to support himself and family. Despite the fact that The Farmer’s Boy was still bringing in money, and his second volume, Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802), was doing well, Bloomfield still needed a supplementary income to make ends meet. Subsequent publications—Wild Flowers; or Pastoral and Local Poetry (1806) and The Banks of Wye (1811)— showed that Bloomfield’s days of literary fame and fortune were fading. Finally, Bloomfield was forced to remove his family from City Road to Shefford, Bedfordshire, in 1812 because he could no longer afford the expense of a London address.27 There has been a disturbing tendency in critical discussions of Bloomfield’s career to view the poet’s slow fade into penury as the result of an unpredictable, volatile literary marketplace, or worse, as the just desserts of a man given to the weaknesses of drink and dissipation.28 Neither of these explanations is adequate, nor even wholly accurate. Bloomfield certainly enjoyed his drink (paeans to ale show up in many later poems), but he was no Henry Jones when it came to this vice. Lawson has argued convincingly that Bloomfield’s more prominent character flaw was that he was generous to a fault, always giving away money when he had any.29 Bloomfield was also prone to counting his money before he had it in hand. For example, in November 1801, when the fifth and sixth editions of The Farmer’s Boy were printed (ten thousand copies in all) along with seven thousand copies of Rural Tales, Bloomfield confidently writes that ‘‘I have at any rate to share the profits of 17,000 books, for which (at full price) the public, if they are goodnatured enough to buy them, will pay no less than 36,025l.!’’ (Correspondence, 17). I doubt Bloomfield believed he would actually see the author’s take

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of such a figure, but the thinking process reveals a man smitten by the spirit of ‘‘emulation’’ (he was making money by his writing, and could reasonably expect to make more), if also a man not likely to hold on to what money he had cleared. There were additional factors less in Bloomfield’s control. When his new bookseller, one Mr. Sharp (who had inherited Hood’s business), went bankrupt, Bloomfield is full of characteristic hope for a future financial windfall.30 Several years later, in a letter addressed to Reverend Tillbrook, Bloomfield soberly reflects ‘‘I always reckon that I lost by the bankruptcy, and its consequent interference with the book market, about 250l. or 300l. At present the sale of the poems is diminished; and I hardly know what is not diminished, except the public debt’’ (Correspondence, 60). When the full copyright of The Farmer’s Boy finally reverted to him in 1814, Bloomfield thought to increase his fortune, but by this time the poem’s popularity was waning. The lowest point came in 1816 when Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and others attempted to resurrect Bloomfield’s career in the wake of Sharp’s bankruptcy by making a public appeal for assistance: Several noblemen and gentlemen of Suffolk, the patrons and friends of Robert Bloomfield, a native of that county, so well known as a pastoral poet by his ‘Farmer’s Boy’ and other compositions, which have conferred on him the fame of pure and native genius, having been informed that he is now labouring under embarrassment, owing partly to the failure of his former booksellers, having entered into a subscription to be applied in the purchase of an annuity, which may secure independence and comfort to himself and his family during the remainder of his own sickly existence, the literary friends of this amiable poet are exerting themselves to procure contributions to this benevolent design.31

This first sentence of what amounts to a lengthy appeal for alms reminds the public of Bloomfield’s status as a living natural genius, and deploys several tropes—his ‘‘family’’ and ‘‘sickly existence’’— prominent when Brimble and Lucas, for example, were advertised as charity cases. Up until this point in his career, significantly, Bloomfield had never published any of his books by subscription, but no literary product is being advertised here for exchange. In the early nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, initial financial success did not guarantee artistic or material independence. It strikes me as both sad and ironic that the most commercially successful plebeian poet of the century was reduced to a public charity case by the end of his career. However, it is necessary to emphasize that Bloomfield was com-

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mercially successful despite being forced to negotiate a competitive, fickle literary economy at the turn of the century. Although he published four more volumes of verse, an occasional poem, a volume of songs he edited titled Nature’s Music (1808), a children’s book, and a play between 1800 and his death in 1823, Bloomfield was unable to achieve the career status of poet-at-large; and yet, as Annette Wheeler Cafarelli has recently observed, ‘‘by establishing a proven market, Bloomfield changed the accessibility of the working-class writer to the institutions of publication.’’32 Bloomfield’s example showed that there were still vast numbers of anonymous consumers out there with ready money to purchase the poetical effusions of a rustic natural genius. Viewed in this context, Bloomfield becomes a significant ‘‘transforming presence’’ in the literary/ cultural milieu of the period.33 Certainly John Clare owed much to Bloomfield’s establishment of this market. But the career trajectories of both Bloomfield and Clare ultimately proved that market economics were simply a new set of chains for the plebeian poet to bear. Robert Dodsley’s 1732 frontispiece depicting the chained poet might have been redrawn in very different terms by Bloomfield or Clare who, almost a century later, could replace the chains of poverty and despair with those of booksellers and the whims of public opinion.34 Yet Bloomfield did mount Parnassian heights, and though he did not quite gain the peak of independence, he still achieved much. When Bloomfield and Clare first exchanged letters in 1820, the elder poet’s star was all but extinguished, while the young Clare’s was just about to burn bright. Yet Clare’s fortunes would all too soon parallel the man he called ‘‘the most original poet of the age & the greatest Pastoral Poet England ever gave birth too’’ (Letters, 300). Although there are glaring differences (Clare, suffering from severe anxiety, delusions, and memory loss, lived out the last twenty-two years of his life at the Northamptonshire General Lunatic Asylum), his experience as a publishing plebeian poet in the 1820s paralleled Bloomfield’s at the turn of the century in many respects. Clare’s first volume of poems, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, appeared in January 1820 and sold three thousand copies and went to four editions within the year—not quite Bloomfield numbers, but nevertheless a sensational success. By April, Clare confides to a friend that ‘‘I am scarcly able to bear up with my success’’ and, seventeen months later, in a metaphor that speaks to the rigors of modern celebrity, wonders when the ‘‘peep show will be over’’ (Letters, 44, 215). However, Clare’s second book, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), proved not nearly as

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popular, and his third of the decade, The Shepherd’s Calendar; with Village Stories and Other Poems (1827), sold only four hundred copies. From 1828 through 1831, Clare returned to agricultural labor to support himself and family, a move which amounted to a severe blow not only to his already frustrated literary ambitions, but also to his fragile sense of identity.35 Like every other plebeian poet before him, male or female, Clare lived out the many irresolvable contradictions embedded in the status of a naturalized laborer who is also a natural poet. But unlike earlier plebeians, Clare left behind reams of written material— poetry, letters, fragments of an autobiographical narrative—that speak to his understanding of, struggles with, and resistance to these contradictions. It is, emphatically, not my intention to marshal all of the available evidence or to develop every possible interpretive connection linking Clare to the history of plebeian poetic endeavor that blossoms with Stephen Duck in 1730. But Clare’s innovative, politicized, and radically self-reflexive poetry represents a potential end to that history as it also suggests a new beginning. What interests me about Clare, as far as this study is concerned, is that his published (and unpublished) poems36 reveal important plebeian responses to contemporary social issues like enclosure, and to the problem of vocation for the laborer poet. That Clare exercises a more explicitly political poetic voice than his predecessor Bloomfield is best exemplified by those poems that include anti-enclosure sentiments. Several of these poems, for example ‘‘Helpstone’’ and ‘‘The Village Minstrel,’’ record Clare’s indignation and sense of loss at the enclosure of his native Helpston, and others—such as ‘‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’’— show Clare venturing beyond the confines of his own village. Though Bloomfield was no doubt aware of the destructive aspects of the process, he creates images of enclosure in The Farmer’s Boy that can only be described as positive. In ‘‘Spring,’’ Giles takes on the role of shepherd: ‘‘Small was his charge: no wilds had they to roam; / But bright inclosures circling round their home’’ (9). ‘‘Bright inclosures’’ paints a happy picture of what John Lucas suggests are the ‘‘variegated hedgerows’’ that contain the sheep.37 Further on, Bloomfield also makes reference to ‘‘high fences’’ that ‘‘charm the gazing eye,’’ adding another image that might be read as supporting enclosure—especially when we recall Clare’s fence imagery in ‘‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’’ and ‘‘The Mores’’ (10).38 In sharp contrast to the early Bloomfield, Clare speaks out forcefully against the effects of ‘‘accursed wealth’’ on the

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land and the people, particularly rural laborers, who are victimized by it even in ‘‘Helpstone,’’ the lead poem in Poems Descriptive: Oh! who could see my dear green willows fall, What feeling heart, but dropt a tear for all? Accursed Wealth! o’er bounding human laws, Of every evil thou remain’st the cause. Victims of want, those wretches such as me, Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee: Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed, And thine our loss of labour and of bread; Thou art the cause that levels every tree, And woods bow down to clear a way for thee.39

John Goodridge’s careful reading of these lines shows Clare ‘‘beginning to draw together his resources for the great verse-battle’’ against enclosure. These resources, Goodridge argues, are both derivative (the language of Scripture, the language of sensibility, the mock-heroic final line) and new, as ‘‘Clare begins to develop his own forms of political-poetical rhetoric’’ that repeat in later enclosure poems.40 I would also suggest that the personification of ‘‘wealth,’’ certainly a standard eighteenth-century trope for leveling social criticism in verse, is effectively reinvigorated by Clare to specify actual evils perpetrated against laborers because of enclosure. Whereas Bloomfield invoked ‘‘wealth’’ generally as the ‘‘foe’’ to laboring-class rights, for seven lines Clare names real effects on people (‘‘loss of labour & of bread’’) and expertly links the subjugation of the rural poor and the natural world (‘‘every tree / & woods’’) to the whims of ‘‘wealth.’’ It is worth reiterating that these lines were also those that Clare’s most intrusive patron, Lord Radstock, singled out with the marginal comment ‘‘this is radical slang,’’ and they were finally expunged from the fourth edition of Poems Descriptive (Letters, 69). Though composed in 1818, ‘‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’’ was deemed unfit for publication in Poems Descriptive by John Taylor, Clare’s first editor and publisher. The poem, however, has generated significant commentary in recent years as one of Clare’s ‘‘enclosure elegies.’’41 My interest in this particular example stems from the echoes of a plebeian discourse on work that can be detected in three key stanzas in the middle of the poem. Fourfifths of ‘‘Round-Oak Waters’’ gives voice to ‘‘the genius of the brook,’’ and the stream begins to issue strong anti-enclosure sentiment in the thirteenth stanza (EP, I, 229):

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‘But now alas my charms are done ‘For shepherds & for thee ‘The Cow boy with his Green is gone ‘And every Bush & tree ‘Dire nakedness oer all prevails ‘Yon fallows bare and brown ‘Is all beset wi’ post & rails ‘And turned upside down’ (EP, I, 231)

Here the dressed ‘‘green’’ world of the pastoral has been stripped of its clothes and cast in a new color because of enclosure. The references to the ‘‘fallows’’ and to the post-and-rail subdivisions are suggestive of the capitalistic motives that support the process. For Clare, not only the earth but also the pastoral world—the natural one that staves off melancholy and loneliness, and sanctions pleasure and poetry—has been ‘‘turned upside down.’’ Given the poem’s ballad-stanza form, and given that Clare was himself a collector of English songs and ballads, perhaps the last line also functions as an echo of the seventeenth-century Royalist ballad ‘‘The World is Turned Upside Down’’ (1646). My sense is that Clare sees some obvious parallels between the imposed commercial reorganization of the land under enclosure and the imposed Whiggish reorganization of English society under the Puritans. The following two stanzas provide further details of this inverted, upside down rural landscape, and raise the issue of the pernicious effects of work more explicitly: ‘The gently curving darksom bawks ‘That stript the Cornfields o’er ‘And prov’d the Shepherds daily walks ‘Now prove his walks no more ‘The plough has had them under hand ‘And over turn’d ‘em all ‘And now along the elting Land ‘Poor swains are forc’d to maul’ ‘And where yon furlong meets the lawn ‘To Ploughmen Oh! how sweet ‘When they had their long furrow drawn ‘Its Eddings to their feet ‘To rest ‘em while they clan’d their plough ‘And light their Loaded Shoe ‘But ah—there’s ne’ery Edding now ‘For neither them nor you’ (EP, I, 231)

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Thus Clare shows that the reorganization of the land under enclosure is not simply about the ‘‘common’’ lands; rather, every inch of traditional ‘‘green’’ space—the grassland left between plowed fields (‘‘bawks’’) where the shepherds walked, and the heading, the grassland left at the end of a plowed field (‘‘edding’’) where the plowman turned his plow around, rested, and cleaned the heavy dirt from his shoes—has been sacrificed to the plow by greedy landowners. These stanzas significantly make use of the specialized diction of husbandry, a feature that connects Clare poetically to Stephen Duck and Mary Collier, though Clare does not write explicitly about working in the fields himself. However, Clare does turn this language of labor into a recognizable political discourse. Whereas Duck and Collier earnestly described the rigors of rural labor as an ideological counterbalance to pastoral idealization, the actual work figured in Clare’s lines carries an ironic weight in the context of his anti-enclosure position. That is, the plowing, the ‘‘maul[ing]’’ of the green lands that the poor swains are ‘‘forc’d’’ to do is precisely the kind of work that should not be done because it destroys ‘‘the greens the Meadows & the moors’’ (EP, I, 231). Labor disrupts the pastoral landscape, and for poets like Duck and Collier, its representation in verse is central to what we might describe as a progressive, revisionist cultural politics. But for Clare, labor becomes a way of pitching a traditionalist critique against the destruction of the countryside in the name of commercial interests. By the 1820s, however, Clare’s position—in terms of both his politics and his poetics—is no less ‘‘radical.’’ By poem’s end, Clare singles out those ‘‘greedy souls’’ who, ‘‘ankering after more’’ ‘‘lay the greens and pastures waste / Which profitted before’’ (EP, I, 234). Not wanting to offend such souls who were also patrons, Taylor never published ‘‘Round-Oak Waters.’’ Clare struggled his entire career to gain the artistic and economic independence that would allow him to publish his work uncensored. The incident involving Lord Radstock (and others) concerning the enclosure lines in ‘‘Helpstone’’ (and offending lines in several other poems in Poems Descriptive) generated a pointed response from Clare to his publisher, Taylor: Being very much botherd latley I must trouble you to leave out the 8 lines in ‘helpstone’ beginning ‘Accursed wealth’ & two under ‘When ease & plenty’—& one in ‘Dawnings of Genius’ ‘That necessary tool’ leave it out & put ***** to fill up the blank this will let em see I do it as negligent as possible d—-n that canting way of being forcd to please I say—I cant abide it & one day or other I will show my Independence more stron[g]ly then ever. . . . (Letters, 68–69)

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Even the usually supportive Eliza Emmerson chimed in with the Radstocks of the world, exhorting Clare to expunge the lines, adopt several of her own bland revisions, and shift his theme to ‘‘Gratitude.’’42 Though Clare capitulates to the pressure, like a rebellious teenager, he hits upon a method to show his polite critics that he does so ‘‘as negligent as possible.’’ True independence for any writer in early-nineteenth-century England, but especially one of Clare’s pedigree, was difficult to achieve. Even if Clare failed to reach his goal, he nevertheless asserts that desire for artistic autonomy that connects him to both the later Woodhouse and the postMore Yearsley. As we have seen, Yearsley found important allies in the publishing trade in her public battle with More, but, ultimately, Clare’s experience would reveal the inherent flaw, detrimental to plebeian independence, in such an arrangement. It is significant, if also somewhat ironic, that Clare articulates a sharp critique against the strictures of meddling patronage to the bookseller/publisher who was most responsible for editing his distinctive rural muse. And yet it must be noted that Clare willingly submitted his work to Taylor, and that Taylor was hardly the repressive, profiteering publisher he has sometimes been made out to be. As both Tim Chilcott, Taylor’s biographer, and Zachary Leader have shown, Taylor was a decent man and, for Clare, a ‘‘valued collaborator.’’43 In fact, Taylor initially stood up for Clare in the business involving Lord Radstock, and it was not until the fourth edition of Poems Descriptive that all of the alterations Radstock called for were made. Clare’s early letters to Taylor often speak to the friendship and mutual respect that developed between the two men. But as early as November 1820, Clare begins singing a different tune. Upon seeing an announcement in the New Times that The Village Minstrel was in the press (which it was not), he wrote to James Augustus Hessey accusing Taylor of neglecting him in the preparation process: ‘‘I feel dissatisfied with Taylors proceedings & tho I alow his judgment to be correct in such matters yet he must know without my seeing the proofs he will not posses that universal taste to please me always.’’ (Letters, 107). Leader has suggested that Taylor was only engaging in good marketing strategy as ‘‘the advertisement was intended merely to keep Clare’s name in print,’’ but this nevertheless marks the beginning of an increasingly strained relationship between poet and publisher.44 Indeed, Clare went on to paint an unflattering portrait of Taylor in his autobiography, describing him as a man who ‘‘works himself into the good opinions of people in a moment but it is not lasting for he grows into a studied carelessness and neglect that he carries

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into a system.’’45 And, further on, Clare extrapolates his experience with Taylor and other bookseller/publishers, probably J. B. Henson and Edward Drury, into advice to ‘‘young authors’’: ‘‘I would advise young authors not to be upon too close friendships with booksellers that is not to make them bosom friends . . . their friendships are always built upon speculations of profit like a farmer showing his sample.’’46 Hence Clare comes to understand another kind of bane to his desire for independence: the self-interested publisher driven by literary trends and the vicissitudes of the market. For his part, Clare wrote to Hessey that ‘‘I mind no fashions’’ when planning the form of what became ‘‘The Village Minstrel,’’ his long, complex vocational poem (Letters, 82). Taylor, of course, did pay attention to ‘‘fashions’’; he needed to in order to stay in business. While Clare could control his stanza forms, diction, and punctuation in manuscript, producing some of the most original work of the period, in my reading Clare felt he was losing the collaborative influence he originally had with Taylor regarding the production of his books. Whether Clare or Taylor was most to blame for the breakdown in their working relationship is difficult to say; what is clear, however, is that this breakdown negatively affected Clare’s goal of achieving authorial independence. Economic independence would prove equally elusive and transitory. Although the second edition of Poems Descriptive was out and selling well, Clare wrote to Taylor at the end of March 1820 about a possible subscription: ‘‘if by subscription I could get £1000!!!! dont be struck I should be satisfied & shoud want not a farthing more £50 a year woud keep me capital & I shoud have no dread to look forward’’ (Letters, 39). Aware of the ephemeral nature of market success, and of ‘‘poor’’ Bloomfield’s fate, Clare hoped to achieve financial security by investing in the five per cents, and living off the interest earnings. Radstock and others had in fact raised almost £400 toward such a plan, and the money was invested in the Navy five per cents that spring, from which Clare was to receive dividend of almost £10 every six months. Clare’s modern biographers, J. W. and Anne Tibble, point out that in spite of the machinations of Clare’s many patrons, all the sources of income combined amounted to an annual income of ‘‘just a little more than the 30l. a year he might have earned by full-time work as a day labourer,’’ and that was hardly enough to support his extended family in 1820.47 Still, in the throes of his initial success, Clare wrote to Octavius Gilchrist that ‘‘I am quite set up now as to money matters’’ (Letters, 53). This would prove an overly confident statement. In fact, Clare was trying to supplement his income by engaging in

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somewhat shady business dealings with Edward Drury (the other bookseller/publisher involved with Clare’s ‘‘discovery’’) over the copyright to Poems Descriptive, and entered into an agreement with Drury to produce songs set to music.48 By late summer, Clare was back at ‘‘Harvest Work, ‘‘ complaining about several excisions from the third edition of Poems Descriptive, wondering about the progress of The Village Minstrel, and drumming up interest among his publishers for a ‘‘third Vol if its ever calld for’’ (Letters, 89, 84). These are the musings of a man who has decided to cast his lot with poetry, but who nevertheless struggled more with the material realities of that decision (the ‘‘chains’’ of booksellers and the marketplace) than with overt class-based resistance to a ‘‘peasant’’ turning poet. By the 1820s, one finds more support from the rich and the great for setting Clare up as an independent rural muse— though one who must, it seems, remain true to specific features of his ‘‘peasant’’ origins. Lord Radstock, for example, worried privately about the effects of monetary gifts on Clare, but supported a rent-free cottage, with a cow and two pigs.49 At least among Clare’s most active patrons, the worst of those class-based attitudes linking labor to innate social position that characterized most eighteenthcentury examples of literary philanthropy have largely disappeared. This is not to say that those attitudes have vanished completely from the cultural field, though they do seem to be more localized, emanating more from ‘‘gentlemen of letters’’ like Lord Byron, and less from polite readers who devoured (but usually spit out) literary celebrities like Clare. Through all of Clare’s dealings with meddling patrons, joustings with publishers, and struggles with personal anxieties about independence and making poetry pay, one thing remains constant: his deep-seated sense of himself as a ‘‘true’’ poet. It is this sense of self that Clare fought most stridently to maintain. For Clare, the many eruptions of this self-description in his poetry and other writings suggest that there is more at stake than mere self-promotion as a poetic natural genius. To my mind, Clare is the preeminent plebeian poet of vocation, not of manual labor, but of writing. His poems on the subject connect him both to a plebeian poetic tradition on the topic, and stake out new ground for the laborer who is, first and foremost, a poet. One obvious connection to earlier models of plebeian vocational poetry is Clare’s engagement with ‘‘Wish’’ poems. Clare produced two examples in this early period: ‘‘The Wish,’’ written sometime after 1813, never was published, while ‘‘The Poet’s Wish,’’ written between 1818 and 1820, appeared in Poems Descriptive. For 1730s poets like Bancks, Dodsley, and Tatersal, the ‘‘Wish’’ poem func-

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tioned as an acceptable neoclassical form within which the laboring poet could make potentially radical public pleas for material support and a career change. While Clare does the same in ‘‘The Wish’’ (he’s read his Pomfret), he also revives this type-poem, I suspect, because he finds in it the potential for exploring further the inherent contradictions of the ‘‘peasant poet’’ designation. As Gary Harrison has well argued, the tensions in the ‘‘The Wish’’ between its utopian trajectory and the built in ‘‘counterforce’’ that defeats that utopian drive indicates Clare’s confusion about negotiating the boundaries imposed upon him as a laborer striving to be a poet.50 In ‘‘The Wish,’’ Clare is explicit about these two spheres of labor, and, in keeping with his eighteenth-century models, Clare’s speaker projects himself as a landed gentleman of leisure: All I would do should be to view my grounds And every morning take my daily rounds To see that all was right and keep secure the bounds: With trifling in the garden now and then Which finds employment for the greatest men Each coming day the labour should renew And this is all the labour I would do, The other hours I’d spend in letterd ease To read or study just as that might please This is the way my plan of life should be Unmaried Happy in Contentment free. (EP, I, 49)

Walking his property and a bit of garden work forms Clare’s ideal of a gentleman’s daily cycle of labor. And, we are left to infer that it is a labor cycle that leaves plenty of time for composing poetry. In ‘‘The Wish,’’ Clare is explicit about finding release ‘‘from all labouring strife’’ (EP, I, 43), but certainly less so about his desire to embrace his calling and turn poet. Harrison concludes that ‘‘Clare ultimately finds himself in the unenviable position of partly accepting and partly resisting’’ the contradictory positions of ‘‘peasant’’ and ‘‘poet’’ in this poem.51 But ‘‘The Wish’’ is ultimately a conventional type-poem, while Clare’s second effort, ‘‘The Poet’s Wish,’’ which Taylor chose to publish in Poems Descriptive, is a more original, Clarean piece. In my reading, ‘‘The Poet’s Wish’’ is the more radical vocational poem of the two because Clare projects a mature embrace of the dystopic world of the working poet. At one level, this focus makes the poem less problematic to Clare’s landed-gentleman patrons, and so more obviously publishable on the surface of things. But at another level there is real transgressive energy in the poem’s content

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and form. ‘‘The Poet’s Wish’’ is uniquely structured for this sort of type-poem: it includes a sixty-four-line opening section spoken by the would-be poet himself, followed by nineteen lines of narrative commentary in a different voice. The poem begins blandly enough: A wish will rise in every breast, For something more than what’s possess’d; Some trifle still, or more or less, To make complete one’s happiness. (PD, 125)

This is vague and inoffensive stuff, the radical potential embedded in the craving for ‘‘worldly things’’ that would ‘‘free’’ the speaker from a life of labor that opened ‘‘The Wish’’ is altered here to a ‘‘trifle’’ that might ‘‘complete’’ the speaker’s happiness (EP, I, 43). The poem continues in this muted materialist vein, but soon raises the inequities of wealth within the social class system, and posits the speaker’s desire for independence within it: So rich men get their wealth at will, And beggars—why, they’re beggars still. But ’tis not thoughts of being rich That make my wishing spirit itch; ’Tis just an independent fate, Betwixt the little and the great; (PD, 126)

The first couplet is suggestive of Clare’s ready indignation at the limitations of social hierarchy, but the matter-of-fact tone prevents the lines from becoming ‘‘radical slang,’’ in Lord Radstock’s terms. Here, significantly, the speaker’s ambition as a would-be poet is not to occupy the social position of the landed gentry; rather, the poem suggests a moderate resolution to the peasant/poet dichotomy in the image of an independent, working writer. The details that follow suggest nothing more than a meager Grub-street existence. The speaker desires only ‘‘a little garret,’’ a ‘‘learned lumber-room’’ with books his ‘‘chiefest furniture,’’ and the room is strewn ‘‘with littering papers, many a bit / Scrawl’d by the Muse in fancied fit’’ (PD, 127). The wisher’s section ends with the idyllic notion that this life will make him happier than wealthy men because he would ‘‘see more joys than they’’ (PD, 128). To some extent, the narrator’s comment that follows undoes the first speaker’s tendency to idealize his writerly independence. It begins: Thus wish’d a bard, whom fortune scorns, To find a rose among the thorns;

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And musing o’er each heavy care, His pen stuck useless in his hair, His muse was dampt, nor fir’d his soul, And still unearn’d his penny roll; Th’ unfinish’d labours of his head Were listless on the table spread; (PD, 128–29)

A rap at the door brings a dunning letter—a ‘‘master’s bill’’ (for what we are not told), the single incident standing in for the many economic pressures heaped upon the working writer (PD, 129). The effect of the interlude is to undermine further the previous idealization of the hack poet’s existence: Then sat in terror down again, Invok’d the Muse, and scrigg’d a strain; A trifling something glad to get, To earn a dinner, and discharge the debt. (PD, 129)

Thus ‘‘happiness’’ has been transformed into ‘‘terror,’’ and Clare mobilizes all the lowly images of Grub-street hackdom to convey the difficult life a poet ‘‘whom fortune scorns’’ would face. And yet, we must also note that Clare’s alter-ego poet is successful when he most needs to be; he ‘‘scrigg’d a strain,’’ and earned his penny roll to eat and ‘‘discharge the debt.’’ Though self-consciously muted in the unthreatening terms of Grub street, ‘‘The Poet’s Wish’’ ultimately pitches the desire for basic writerly independence, an often reiterated theme in Clare’s work. Clare surely had higher material hopes for his poetic labors, but ‘‘The Poet’s Wish,’’ like so many other compositions, includes the characteristic tensions formed out of Clare’s private drive to imagine self-elevation and his public need to project self-effacement.52 If Clare was forced by the ideological limitations of his cultural moment to view himself as a ‘‘trespasser’’ in the realm of literature (as he put it in another early poem, ‘‘To trespass upon parnuss plain’’), he nevertheless seems to have felt that the figurative land beyond the boundaries was his natural right (EP, II, 323).53 Alert to the need for public self-deprecation, Clare often constructs himself accordingly: he is the ‘‘poor rude clown’’ in ‘‘An Effusion to Poetry’’ who, in the very next line, ‘‘cannot help the will of fate’’ (EP, I, 546); and later, in ‘‘To the Rural Muse,’’ he describes his ‘‘weak song’’ but ends with the assertion, ‘‘O thou queen of rhyme / Ive lovd thee long I cannot bid farwell’’ (EP, II, 436). This is a repeated pattern in Clare, especially in his poems about poetry. But it is precisely that these poems continually assert the poet’s claim to poetry as

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innate, natural, and uncontrollable that suggests Clare’s always available private resolution to the tensions he publicly displays. Hiding behind the pseudonym ‘‘Stephen Timms,’’ Clare composed a mock letter to the editor of The London Magazine, and included a poem, ostensibly for publication, titled ‘‘Some account of my Kin, my Tallents & myself,’’ wherein he defines his claim to the status of poet: Ryhme is a gift as our folks here suppose Nor wealth nor learning ever makes a poet Tis natures blessing so the story goes & my condition goes the way to show it (EP, II, 607)

The ‘‘story’’ to which Clare alludes, of course, is the story of natural poetic genius, and with his emphasis on genius-as-fate, Clare is effectively poaching on eighteenth-century theories of the concept. Clare consistently reclaims for himself the force of Poeta nascitur, non fit over and against the ideological and material limitations he still faced in the 1820s as a versifying plebeian. Although many earlier plebeians were aware of the complex contradictions inherent in the ‘‘laborer-poet’’ identification, Clare appears to have thought long and hard about his predicament, and rendered more of those reflections into verse than any other poet in this study. Indeed, ‘‘The Village Minstrel,’’ the lead piece in Clare’s second volume, is the most original and substantive record of vocational issues from a plebeian pen in the period. As Bridget Keegan has pointed out, Clare’s second volume is an effort ‘‘to transcend his initial reception as a ‘quaint’ curiosity and assert an authority for his unique poetic perspective.’’54 ‘‘The Village Minstrel,’’ which tells the story of ‘‘Lubin,’’ a plebeian swain whose natural gift for song and poetry erupts over the enclosure of his native village, encapsulates this effort well. Keegan also notes that ‘‘The Village Minstrel’’ is a ‘‘partially fictionalised vocational poem’’ wherein Clare significantly rewrites his own inspiration to render his experience in verse.55 The stereotypical inspiration found in canonical models (Clare’s reading of Thomson, emphasized by Taylor in the introduction to Poems Descriptive, for example), takes on more explicit political and ideological connotations when the impetus to set poetry to paper is enclosure. Early on, the poem works to establish ‘‘Lubin’’ as a plebeian figure who sings of the expected rural subjects: & markt too in his rhymes How musical betimes

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From mowers wetting scythe in meadow ground Came a murmring oer the ear a sharp shill tinkling sound & the long day how labour wore away How swains & maidens mixt to make the hay (EP, II, 134)

However typical the topics, Clare adds an important detail in representing Lubin’s awareness of the subtle sounds of the the mowers’ scythes, a quality of his fictional alter ego that he connects to himself-as-poet with the alliterative sounds of the line. To these happy images Clare adds the complexity of counter-pastoral elements: & lubin had his lamentable tale His songs oft bitterd wi the ways of woe For lubins self was nursed in sorrows vale & early learnd the ills of life to know From pain & toil & poverty that flow So copiously in lifes low humble sphere (EP, II, 135)

Hence Lubin’s songs tend toward empathy for the rural poor, and what has been consistently represented as an oral tradition— Lubin’s ‘‘humming, singing [and] muttering’’—is transformed into writing after the well-known enclosure stanzas toward the end of the poem.56 ‘‘Oppresions power’’ enacted on the countryside sparks the shift to writing, the very act itself understood in political/ideological terms for a plebeian swain like Lubin (EP, II, 168). Clare registers his sense of this inescapable fact in another context—the appearance of the laborer-poet’s verses in the literary marketplace: & malice mocks him wi a rude disdain Proving pretensions to the muse as vain They deem her talents far beyond his skill & hiss his efforts as some forged strain (EP, II, 178)

‘‘Malice,’’ of course, is found in the reaction of polite readers and critics, those representatives of a literate culture into which the laborer poet is intruding (Clare cannot help seeing this at the level of his own composition as well where he notes in the last stanza ‘‘Thiss far intruded lubins tale shall close’’) (EP, II, 179). Just how far the plebeian poet should, or could, intrude on literate culture has always been the question for poets, sympathetic patrons, and anonymous readers alike. Cognizant that composing and publishing poetry represented a plebeian trespass or intrusion into a different world, one to which Clare desired the full rights of admittance,

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‘‘The Village Minstrel’’ ends with characteristic ambiguity on the subject: Times steady movements must [Fates] end descide & leave him painfull still to hope the day & group thro ignorance his doubtful way By wisdoms disregard & fools anoyd & if no worth anticipates the lay Then let his childish notions be destroyd & he his time employ as erst its been employd (EP, II, 179)

The passage bleeds with self-effacement and resignation, and yet it is not precisely clear just how we should take the last line. Following public failure, the line suggests that Lubin would return to his previous manual labors, but the poem itself shows that Lubin’s time was formerly spent composing poetry (broadly defined) as much or more than anything else. That is, Clare creates an important fissure whereby the work of writing becomes a viable option for the true poet. A later verse fragment, dated from the mid-1820s to early 1830s, drives this point home: Fames hopes with me are faint to look upon The clouds of doubt with gloom her [sky] defiles Though flattering pulse & burning thrills urge on & hope at intervals the way beguiles The flowers she plucks me wear precarious smiles Yet I do follow with unwearied eyes The shadowy recompence for real toils (MP, II, 240)

This is a powerful statement that includes all the characteristics of Clare’s vocational musings: the sense of hopelessness and resignation in tension with the poet’s innermost feelings (‘‘flattering pulse & burning thrills’’); the desire for success (the ‘‘hope’’ which ‘‘beguiles’’ the way); the understanding of the precariousness of fame’s ‘‘flowers’’; and, most important for Clare, the unwavering pursuit of what he is, despite the ‘‘shadowy recompence for real toils.’’ That last line also figures poetry as real work, if also work that might not be able to support the poet and his family. Finally, it is the right to engage in that work that Clare is subtlely, but repeatedly, agitating for: ‘‘But know rank powers where ere ye meet / You ne’er shall drive me from the muses seat’’ (EP, II, 4). But just what ‘‘muses seat’’ Clare saw himself sitting in at the end of ‘‘The Village Minstrel’’ is part of the poem’s complexity. Clare calls his readers’ attention to ‘‘the low muse’’ in the last (un-

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published) lines of the poem, a reference Keegan insightfully describes as ‘‘the muse of popular culture’’ and she reads Clare favoring this muse against the more typical vocational definition available to him: the poet of Nature (EP, II, 179).57 After The Village Minstrel, Clare sought to tap into this muse and, though he continued to be advertised as one of the great Romantic poets of Nature, we must recall that Clare did not shy away from his ties to popular culture in print. The evidence is everywhere available in form as well as content. Thus Clare represents a plausible fulfillment of an eighteenth-century English plebeian poetic tradition not because he made more money or because he gained a greater degree of creative independence (neither progressivist claim actually holds up), but rather because he defined himself against the expectations of polite literary fashion and embraced his calling to represent the world he knew best in its own idiom. If Clare is at the end of one line of laboring-class writer, he is also at the beginning of a new, more overtly politicized and independent breed of plebeian poet. Such a claim is, of course, overly generalized for effect. I have traced myriad eruptions of political and ideological resistance in plebeian texts forward from the 1730s, just as I have examples of ideological complicity, outright capitulation to dominant social values, and resignation to one’s lot in life. Laboring-class poets throughout this period chafed under stifling patron/poet relationships, felt the restrictive gaze of literate culture, suffered the hardships of poverty, and still, by and large, aspired to transcend those material and ideological limitations. Theirs is a poetic tradition defined by a complex process of accommodation to polite expectations of what a plebeian poet should be, and the assertion of laboring-class identity and experience in the face of those expectations. Clare’s status as a transitional figure within that tradition is best defined by that same ‘‘low muse,’’ with all of its connotations of the popular, which links him to the artisanal, reformminded poetry by fellow laboring-class authors of the 1820s and 1830s. This is the poetry that comes to reflect, and even produce, a specifically working-class consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Whether they read Clare or not, the Ebenezer Elliott of both The Village Patriarch (1829) and Corn Law Rhymes (1834), the angry Chartist poets of the 1830s, and the many Victorian poets who harbored Parnassian aspirations owed something to the Northamptonshire peasant poet. Clare himself wanted ‘‘to rise above [his] fellows,’’58 and, in a telling letter to a ‘‘brother Poet,’’ George Darley, Clare begins with a compliment that ends up saying more about himself than Darley: ‘‘you are one among the many that shall be

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elected as true Poets of the 19th century & I assure you I will do my best yet if I live to make one of the number with ye’’ (Letters, 396). Clare’s eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century predecessors were certainly less ambitious, perhaps even less talented, but no less poets. My hope is that we have finally reached that far welcome day when fortune finds them out.

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Appendix 1: Henry Jones Bibliography THE

BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF JONES’S PUBLISHED WORK CURRENTLY

available all contain significant omissions or problems of attribution. The bibliographical listing which concludes the DNB entry on Jones (10:997–98), and D. J. O’Donoghue’s account in his The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of Irish Writers of English Verse (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 218, are the most severely flawed in this regard. The entry on Jones in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature is more complete, but still omits the early occasional pieces addressed to Chesterfield and his wife, and includes several minor errors regarding publication information (See 2:367–68). The most recent edition of the Bibliography of British Literary Bibliographies, ed. T. H. Howard Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) does not offer a definitive bibliography for Jones. At this time, the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is the best available source for a listing of Jones’s published works, and in what follows I have followed the lead provided there. However, the ESTC errs on the side of overzealous inclusion, listing two publications that are clearly not the work of this Henry Jones, if one examines the circumstantial evidence. The first disputed text is New Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin, 1735–36). The title page announces the author to be one ‘‘Henry Jones,’’ but the bricklaying Jones would have been a mere fourteen-years-old when this volume was published. The volume has been attributed to Jones apparently because it includes many epistles addressed to various polite persons, a genre Jones was accomplished in. Foxon rightfully catalogs this imprint separately from Jones’s pre-1750 publications, noting that this ‘‘author is clearly not the bricklayer’’ (1:390). The second work is entitled Lucy: A dramatic poem. By Henry Jones, Shoemaker (London: [1775?]). Both internal and external evidence suggests that this piece was not the work of the bricklayer Jones either. The title page identifies the author as a ‘‘shoemaker,’’ which the Irish Jones never was. The publication date is unknown: 297

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the British Library estimates the date as ‘‘1754?’’ and the ESTC has recently revised this designation to ‘‘1775?’’. The original guess puts the text squarely within the height of the bricklayer Jones’s dramatic career, the second places it after Jones’s death. In either case, Jones would not have required the ruse of publishing as a ‘‘mechanic genius’’ to gain access to print. His popularity in literary circles in 1754, and his death in 1770, negate the possibility that Jones was attempting to refashion himself as a shoemaker-poet at either time. What is more likely is that some other fledgling-bard was attempting to capitalize on Jones’s success by imitating the most obvious aspects of his authorial persona. The ‘‘Epilogue’’ to Essex, added to Jones’s play by an anonymous hand when it was first performed in 1753, turns on the ‘‘intelligence’’ of Jones’s previous laboring life: ‘‘Who do you think he is?—You’ll never guess; / An Irish Bricklayer, neither more nor less’’ (1). The epilogue further celebrates Jones for his honesty and poetic talent, and suggests that he deserves the protection (and support) of his patrons. By the 1750s, Jones was not actively advertising his former laboring life, but the circulation of this ‘‘Epilogue’’ could have spurred another fellow plebeian to try his or her hand at dramatic writing. It is worth noting, too, that the revised versions of Baker’s Companion to the Play-House (1764) list Lucy under a separate ‘‘Henry Jones’’ heading (see Biographia Dramatica, vol. 1, part 2, 412). The following bibliography separates the poetry from the drama, and is organized chronologically (including posthumous editions) in order to provide a clearer sense of Jones’s active and substantial writing career. Poetry Henry Jones. The Bricklayer’s Poem. Presented to his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. On His Arrival in this Kingdom. Dublin, 1745. ———. The Bricklayer’s Poem to the Countess of Chesterfield, on Her Ladyship’s saving the Soldiers from being shot. Dublin, 1745. ———. Philosophy. A Poem Address’d to the Ladies Who attend Mr. Booth’s Lectures. Dublin, 1746. ———. On seeing a picture of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. Which was presented to the University of Dublin. A poem. Dublin and London, 1749.

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———. Poems on Several Occasions. Dublin and London, 1749. ———. An Epistle to the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, Occasion’d by reading his Lordship’s Translation of Pliny’s Epistles. London, 1751. ———. Fortitude, a poem, inscribed to Colley Cibber, Esq. Dublin, 1751. ———. Merit. A Poem inscribed to the Right Honourable Philip Earl of Chesterfield. London, 1753. ———. The Relief; or, Day Thoughts: A Poem. Occasion’d by the Complaint, or Night Thoughts. Humbly inscribed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Holderness. London, 1754. ———. Verses to His Grace the Duke of Newcastle, on the Death of The Right Honourable Henry Pelham. London, 1754. ———. Concord: or, the Olive Branch. An ode. Humbly inscribed to his Excellency the Marquess of Hartington, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Dublin, 1755. ———. The Invention of Letters and the Utility of the Press. Dublin, 1755. ———. Poems. Dublin, 1756. [This collection includes reprints of The Relief: or, Day Thoughts; Merit; An Epistle to the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery; Verses to His Grace the Duke of Newcastle; Fortitude; Concord; The Invention of Letters and the Utility of the Press; as well as two new poems: On the return of the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Charlemount from his Travels, to this Kingdom and Hezekiah: a sacred ode.] ———. Lines humbly addressed to the Rt. Hon. the Lord Viscount Jocelyn, occasioned by the death of the Right Honourable the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Dublin, 1757. ———. The Patriot Enterprize: or an Address to Britain. A poem. Inscribed to the Right Hon. William Pitt. London and Dublin, 1758. ———. Kew Garden: a poem. In two cantos. Dublin, 1763. ———. The Royal Vision: in an Ode to Peace. Dublin, 1763. ———. Vectis. The Isle of Wight: a poem. In three cantos. London, 1766. ———. Clifton: a poem, in two cantos. Including Bristol and all its environs. Bristol, [1767]. ———. Kew Garden. A poem. In two cantos. London, 1767. ———. Inoculation; or beauty’s triumph: a poem, in two cantos. Bath, 1768. ———. The Arcana: or mystic gem. Wolverhampton, 1769.

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———. Shrewsbury quarry, &c. A poem. Shrewsbury and London, 1769. ———. Shrewsbury quarry, &c. A poem. Shrewsbury, 1770. ———. Clifton: a poem. In two cantos. Including Bristol and all its environs. To which is added, an Ode to Shakespear, in honor of the jubilee. 2d ed. Bristol, 1773. ———. Clifton: a poem. In two cantos. To which is added, an Ode to Shakespear. 3d ed. Bristol, 1779. ———. The Isle of Wight, a poem, in three cantos. Isle of Wight, 1782.

Drama Henry Jones. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden. London and Dublin, 1753. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden. 2d ed. London, 1754. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden. Dublin, 1756. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden. 3d ed. London, 1760. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden. Dublin, 1765. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden. 4th ed. London, 1770. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the TheatreRoyal in Covent-Garden. London, 1773. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. Marked with the variations in the manager’s book, at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. London, 1776. ———. The Earl of Essex; a tragedy. As performed at the TheatreRoyal in Covent-Garden. Regulated from the prompt-book, . . . by Mr. Wild, prompter. London, 1776. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the TheatreRoyal in Covent-Garden. Belfast, 1778. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the TheatresRoyal in Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden. London, 1779. ———. The Earl of Essex; a tragedy. As performed at the TheatreRoyal in Covent-Garden. Regulated from the prompt-book, by permission of the managers. London, 1779. ———. The Earl of Essex, a tragedy. Marked with the variations

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in the manager’s book, at the Theatre-Royal, in Covent-Garden. London, 1788. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. Taken from the manager’s book, at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden. London, [1790]. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As performed by the Old American Company, at the theatre in Southwark, Philadelphia. American edition. Philadelphia, [1790]. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. Adapted for theatrical representation, as performed at the Theatre-Royal, in Covent-Garden. Regulated from the prompt-books. London, 1791. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. Adapted for theatrical representation. As performed at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. Regulated from the prompt-books. Dublin, 1792. ———. The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. Adapted for theatrical representation, as performed at the Theatre-Royal, in Covent-Garden. Regulated from the prompt-books, by permission of the managers. London, 1799. Jones wrote two other pieces for the stage for which there are no existing manuscripts. The tragedy Harold appears to have been circulating among booksellers in the early 1760s. According to Cooke, the manuscript finally ended up in the possession of ‘‘Mr. Reddish, of Drury-Lane’’ who went insane late in life and ‘‘perhaps consigned Harold to the flames, or impenetrable obscurity’’ (Cooke, 260). Another tragedy, titled by Jones The Cave of Idra, was enlarged to five acts and brought out after Jones’s death by Dr. Paul Hiffernan as The Heroine of the Cave (Dublin, 1775). The preface to the printed text gives ignominious credit to Jones for his efforts: The late Mr. Henry Jones, author of the now acted Earl of Essex, and several other poetical productions, had left in the hands of Mr. Reddish, a very affecting piece in three acts, called The Cave of Idra, founded on a narrative in the Annual Register.—It was, according to his composition, all under ground, which gave to it a tiresome and disgusting monotony, unfit for a stage representation. [i]

However, according to Stone, Hiffernan’s work did not fare well on the stage, surviving only two performances at Drury Lane, one on 19 March 1774, and the other over a year later on 25 March 1775 (The London Stage, 1660–1800, 3:1794, 1879).

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Notes Introduction 1. George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies (New York: Harper & Bros., 1897), 1:233. 2. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 2:127. 3. Pope to Gay, 23 October 1730, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:142, 143. 4. H. Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester Press, Ltd., 1985), 6. 5. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, ‘‘The Romantic ‘Peasant’ Poets and their Patrons,’’ The Wordsworth Circle 26 (1995): 78, 83. 6. The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature 37 (January 1774): 473. 7. Walpole to More, 13 November 1784, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 31:220. 8. Cafarelli, ‘‘Romantic ‘Peasant’ Poets,’’ 83. 9. Robert Southey, The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831), ed. J. S. Childers (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), 11, 15. 10. See C. B. Tinker, Nature’s Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1922); Dwight L. Durling, Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935); and Rayner Unwin, The Rural Muse: Studies in the Peasant Poetry of England (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1954). Raymond Williams’s brief discussion of a number of these poets in The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 87–90, 134, is the one notable exception to this critical trend in work published before the 1980s. 11. See Roger Lonsdale, ed., The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Moira Ferguson, Augustan Reprint 230: The Thresher’s Labour (Stephen Duck) and The Woman’s Labour (Mary Collier) (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), ‘‘Resistance and Power in the Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley,’’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 27 (1986): 247–68, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); Donna Landry, ‘‘The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History,’’ in The New 18th Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 99–120, and The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard Greene, Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English

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Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Also of interest in this context is Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 12. Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 130. 13. Jonathan Swift, ‘‘On Stephen Duck, the Thresher, and favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram. Written in the Year 1730,’’ in Swift’s Poems, 2d ed., ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 2:521. 14. The Grub-street Journal, no. 55, 21 January 1731. 15. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, no. 115, 11 December 1753, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 2:457–59. 16. Samuel Johnson, The Idler, no. 2, 22 April 1758, in Works, 2:7. 17. For ‘‘discourse,’’ see the work of Michel Foucault, esp. Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965) and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978). For a historical account of the term ‘‘work,’’ see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 281–84. Williams notes that ‘‘labour and toil are still harder words than work,’’ though ‘‘labour’’ and ‘‘work’’ share a ‘‘strong sense of toil’’ dating from the medieval period (282). 18. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York: Verso, 1991), xiv. 19. John Goodridge exerts a similar caution in his Rural Life, esp. 16–22, 91. 20. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry (1774; reprint, New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), 1:ii–iii. 21. For a discussion of the concepts of divine inspiration and natural talent as they emerged in ancient Greece, see Penelope Murray, ‘‘Poetic Genius and its Classical Origins,’’ in Penelope Murray, ed., Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 9–31. 22. For a full analysis of poetic natural genius in the eighteenth century, see Jefferson Matthew Carter, The Unlettered Muse: The Uneducated Poets and the Concept of Natural Genius in Eighteenth-Century England (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1972). I borrow Carter’s ‘‘classical’’ and ‘‘radical’’ nomenclature here. The shift in terminology to ‘‘original genius’’ occurs with Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759), and is continued in William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767). 23. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 160, 3 September 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Gregory Smith (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1958), 1:482, 484. 24. Ibid., 1:484, 482. 25. More to Montagu, 27 September [1784], in The Female Spectator: English Women Writers before 1800, ed. Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), 279. 26. Mark Storey, ed., Clare: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1973), 43. 27. For the importance of youth in period definitions of natural genius, see Bridget Keegan, ‘‘Boys, Marvelous Boys: John Clare’s ‘Natural Genius,’ ’’ forthcoming in John Clare: New Approaches, ed. Simon Ko¨vesi and John Goodridge. For the masculine gendering of genius in the period, see Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius (London: The Women’s Press, Ltd., 1989), esp. 71–80.

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28. Anon., The Guardian, 28 May 1820, in Clare: The Critical Heritage, 101. 29. Buxton appeared frequently in the GM. See the numbers for August 1751 (21:347); December 1753 (23:557); and June 1754 (24:251–52). Notice of Hill appeared in the number for September 1754 (24:413–15); and February 1759 (29:51– 52). 30. Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670– 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 249. 31. Ibid., 70. 32. See Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), who concludes that ‘‘patronage would seem to have provided a means of support for many writers—women, peasant poets, regional authors—who would not otherwise have had a hearing. It is very likely that poets like Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Robert [sic] Woodhouse would have wasted their sweetness on the desert air if they had not been adopted by patrons’’ (289). 33. [William Roberts], The Looker-on, no. 87, 18 January 1794, in Alexander Chalmers, ed., The British Essayists (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1857), 37:264. 34. The Monthly Review 29 (July 1763): 74–75. 35. The Monthly Review 58 (February 1778): 162. By signing the proclamation ‘‘Scriblerus,’’ Langhorne links his effort to the satiric program of the wits in the 1720s and 30s. 36. A. J. Sambrook, ‘‘An Essay on Eighteenth-Century Pastoral, Pope to Wordsworth (II),’’ Trivium 6 (May 1971): 107. 37. John Goodridge, ‘‘Some Predecessors of Clare 2. The Response to Duck,’’ The John Clare Society Journal, no. 9 (1990): 17. 38. The descriptions of Woodhouse and Hands are supplied by contemporary accounts that appeared in the GM 34 (June 1764): 289; and 67 (June 1790): 540, respectively. 39. John Bancks, Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose (London, 1738), 2:128–29 and note. I am grateful to Thomas Lockwood for this reference. 40. Mary Masters, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1733), np. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 41. Dictionary of National Biography, 13:25. 42. DNB, 4:39; Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 151–52. 43. GM 57, part 1 (March 1785): 169. 44. DNB, 14:406. Newton’s ‘‘Sonnet to Miss Seward’’ appeared in the GM 65, part 1 (January 1789): 71; and an earlier sonnet addressed to Peter Cunningham was published in the number for March 1785 (61, part 1:212). 45. [Robert Burns], preface to Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), iv. 46. Robert Burns, dedication, ‘‘To the Nobleman and Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,’’ in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Edinburgh, 1787). 47. The Monthly Review 75 (December 1786): 439, 440. 48. The Edinburgh Advertiser, 28 November 1788, quoted in Ian McIntyre, Dirt & Deity: A Life of Robert Burns (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 225. 49. The Edinburgh Review 13 (January 1809): 249. 50. Ibid. 51. [John Scott], London Magazine 1, 3d series (March 1820): 323–28, quoted in Clare: The Critical Heritage, 78. 52. Robert Burns, Poems, ed. William Beattie and Henry W. Meikle (New

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York: Penguin Books, 1946). The quotation appears on the back cover of the paperback edition, ninth printing, 1983. 53. Cafarelli, ‘‘Romantic ‘Peasant’ Poets,’’ 83. 54. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1963), 55.

Chapter 1. Terminology and Methodology 1. Kurt Heinzelman, ‘‘The Uneducated Imagination: Romantic Representations of Labor,’’ in At the Limits of Romanticism, ed. Mary Favret and Nicola Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 102, 119. 2. [Thomas Carlyle], ‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ in The Edinburgh Review 55 (July 1832): 340. 3. Ibid., 342. 4. Brian Maidment, ed., The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester and New York: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1987), 13. 5. John Goodridge, introduction to The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the self-taught tradition, ed. John Goodridge (Helpston: The John Clare Society and The Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994), 15. The earliest use of ‘‘selftaught’’ that I have located dates from 1767. In his Essay on Original Genius, William Duff notes that ‘‘a Poet of Original Genius has very little occasion for the weak aid of Literature: he is self-taught’’ (William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767), ed. John L. Mahoney [Gainesville, FLA.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1964], 281). 6. J[ame]s Woodhouse to [Elizabeth Montagu], 28 November 1768; Huntington Library manuscript MO 6792, [1]. 7. E. P. Thompson, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’’ Social History 3 (1978): 145 n. 25. 8. Roger A. E. Wells, ‘‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700–1850,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies 6 (January 1979): 115. 9. See Asa Briggs, ‘‘The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,’’ in Essays in Labour History, ed. Asa Briggs and John Saville (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1960), esp. 43–51. Briggs notes that ‘‘there was no dearth of social conflicts in pre-industrial society, but they were not conceived of at the time in straight class terms. The change in nomenclature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected a basic change not only in men’s ways of viewing society but in society itself’’ (44). See also E. P. Thompson, ‘‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,’’ Journal of Social History 7 (summer 1974): 382–405; and E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Notes on Class Consciousness,’’ in Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1984), esp. 15–17. 10. Thompson, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century English Society,’’ 148. 11. See P. J. Corfield, ‘‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’’ History 72 (February 1987): esp. 47–50; and Keith Wrightson, ‘‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,’’ in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, et al, (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 177–202. The quotation is from John Rule, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London and New York: Longman Ltd., 1992), 105.

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12. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English WorkingClass History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 21. 13. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 (London, 1755). 14. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, nos. 106 and 128, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 6:201, 317. 15. John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750– 1850 (London and New York: Longman Group Ltd., 1986), 383. 16. These descriptions are from H. J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 37; and Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 3d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 22. For a critical summary of Perkin and Laslett, see R. J. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution: 1780–1850 (London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1979), 12–20. 17. Williams, Keywords, 61. 18. See Williams, Keywords, 61–62; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 163; see also 464 n. 49; and John Richetti, ‘‘Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett,’’ in The New 18th Century, 84–98, and ‘‘Class Struggle Without Class: Novelists and Magistrates,’’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (fall 1991): 203–18. ‘‘Class criteria’’ is McKeon’s phrase for distinguishing a new order of values—wealth, income, occupation—from an older, but not yet outmoded, order of values defined by blood, honor, and birth. McKeon calls this older order ‘‘status criteria’’ (163). 19. McKeon, Origins, 164. 20. Daniel Defoe, A Review of the State of the British Nation, no. 36, Saturday, 25 June 1709, in Defoe’s Review, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord (London, 1704–13; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press for the Facsimile Text Society, 1938), 6:142. Further citations to Defoe’s Review are from this edition and will be given in short form in the notes. 21. Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild, ed. David Nokes (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1982), 78. 22. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 188. 23. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5. 24. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, Materialist Feminisms (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 5. 25. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985; reprint 1994), vii–viii. 26. My purpose here is not to trace the long and complicated history of the concept of ideology as it is developed by Marx and others down to our own time. The fullest account to date is Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, although one must be prepared for Eagleton’s analytical bias toward the classical Marxist concept of ideology. See also James H. Kavanagh, ‘‘Ideology,’’ in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 306–20; William Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), esp. ix–xvii; and Myra Jehlen’s ‘‘Introduction: Beyond Transcendence,’’ in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Myra Jehlen and Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1–18.

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27. Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),’’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 159. 28. Ibid., 160. 29. Ibid., 159. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Ibid. For ‘‘hegemony,’’ see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12. Gramsci makes an important distinction between what he calls ‘‘ ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State’’ and ‘‘hegemony,’’ which, like Althusser’s materialist definition of ideology, is a concept which describes a ubiquitous, complex combination of cultural and political forces that shape our daily lives (12). Gramsci’s conception of hegemony includes the notion that dominance and subordination is a dynamic process. Significantly—and in this Gramsci differs from Althusser—hegemony is also a site for dissent, what Raymond Williams calls the production of ‘‘the concepts of counter hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice’’ (Marxism and Literature, 113). 32. Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ 162. 33. Eagleton, Ideology, 149. 34. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993), 86–87. 35. For Thompson’s critique of Althusser, see The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors (London: The Merlin Press Ltd., 1978), and Perry Anderson’s important discussion of Thompson’s work in Arguments Within English Marxism (London: NLB and Verso, 1980). Thompson had registered his distaste for Althusser’s concept of ideology, calling it a ‘‘profoundly static category’’ and linking it explicitly to ‘‘the vulgar economistic version’’ of ideology as false consciousness in classical Marxism as early as 1978, though he also allowed, in an essay published the same year, that ‘‘Althusserian theory tends to have a larger theoretical arsenal to explain ideological domination and the mystification of consciousness’’ (‘‘Eighteenth-Century English Society,’’ 148). Anderson provides a sort of prophetic glance toward Thompson’s embrace of Gramsci when he notes that ‘‘the lack of empirical controls which Thompson rightly perceives in Althusser’s work in fact forms part of a wider pattern within Western Marxism . . . from whose speculative slide only Gramsci escaped’’ (15). For those theorists before and after Althusser and Foucault, I am thinking specifically of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gramsci, and Michel Peˆcheux, as well as the many new historicist and cultural materialist theorists and practitioners who cite Foucault and/or Althusser. For Bakhtin, see The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtin’s notion of ‘‘heteroglossia’’ refers to historical ideological struggle enacted within language and affirms the idea that language does not merely reflect the social world, but helps to constitute it in all its complexity. For Gramsci, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, esp. 375–77. For Peˆcheux, see Language, Semantics, and Ideology, trans. Harbans Nagpal (London: Macmillan, 1982). 36. Istva´n Me´sa´ros, The Power of Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 10. 37. Defoe’s Review, no. 5, 20 February 1706, 4:19. 38. Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen

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and Meridel Le Sueur (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140. Coiner borrows the phrase ‘‘between complicity and critique’’ from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 39. A point made by Pamela Fox in Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), esp. 3–26. Fox argues persuasively for expanding the category of resistance against what she calls ‘‘the reproduction-resistance circuit’’ that characterizes so many theoretical models that deal with working-class writing (3). 40. Marjorie Levinson, ‘‘The New Historicism: Back to the Future,’’ in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson, et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 52. 41. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 (London, 1755). 42. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; reprint 1987), 32. 43. For an analysis that builds on Pocock’s work and emphasizes the role of reason in seventeenth-century debates about custom and the common law, see Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), esp. 37–57. I am indebted to Brian Lockey for this citation. 44. Thompson, Customs in Common, 4–5. 45. Ibid., 6. 46. Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. 84–96. 47. Thompson, Customs in Common, 9. 48. Ibid., 3. 49. Ibid., 7. 50. Ibid. 51. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, part 1, 4th ed. (London, 1701; reprint, New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 10. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 52. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 1:172. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 53. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 447, Saturday, 2 August 1712, 3:180. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 54. Alexander Pope, ‘‘To a Lady with the Temple of Fame,’’ in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (London: Methuen, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 6:127. 55. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1987), 159. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 56. Henry Fielding, An Inquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers (London, 1751), xxiii. 57. Oliver Goldsmith, The Bee (1759), in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:484–85. 58. Anon., An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696; reprint, New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 26. 59. Aphra Behn, Sir Patient Fancy (1678), in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 6:9. 60. The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, . . . with An Account of the Life of

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the Author, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1751), 1:xxviii. I am indebted to Rebecca Merrens for this citation. 61. [Catharine Cockburn], ‘‘Verses, occasion’d by the Busts in the Queen’s Hermitage, and Mr. Duck being appointed Keeper of the Library in Merlin’s Cave,’’ in the GM 7 (May 1737): 308. Lonsdale identifies the author as Cockburn in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, xxviii. 62. James Thomson, Autumn, from The Seasons (1744), in The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 141. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 63. Fanny Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom, with Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 164. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 64. The Universal Magazine 1 (October 1747): 233.

Chapter 2. Stephen Duck and Plebeian Poetry 1. [Edward Young], Two Epistles to Mr. Pope, Concerning the Authors of the Age (London, 1730), 6. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 2. For the culture of Grub Street, see Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1972); for an account of the literary battles and the role of the wits during the Walpole era, see Bertrand Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). 3. Henry Fielding, The Champion, no. 50, Saturday, 8 March 1739–40. 4. Mary Collier, ‘‘Some Remarks of the Author’s Life drawn by herself,’’ in Poems, on Several Occasions (Winchester, 1762), iv. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 5. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., vol. 9 The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 187. 6. Roger Lonsdale, introduction to The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, xxv. 7. Unwin, The Rural Muse, 71 8. Lillian Robinson, Sex, Class and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 223. 9. Klaus, The Literature of Labour, 2. 10. William Winstanley, The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687), ed. William Riley Parker (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963), 168. 11. For a full account of Taylor’s career and capacities, see Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), esp. 1–18; 55–97. 12. John Taylor, All the Workes of John Taylor, the Water-Poet (London, 1630), 7. 13. Greene, Mary Leapor, 103. See [Edward Ward], The Delights of the Bottle: or, The Compleat Vintner (London, 1720). 14. David Foxon provides a full account of the information summarized here. See his English Verse, 1701–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1:494–95. 15. H[enry] N[elson], A New Poem on the Ancient and Loyal Society of Journey-Men Taylors (Dublin, 1725). All of Nelson’s poems appeared originally as un-

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numbered, single-sheet publications. The examples I consulted in the British Library have been preserved in this form; hence subsequent page references are not given and should be assumed as (1). 16. Genesis 2:7, 2:5; see also Genesis 3:17–19. 17. H[enry] N[elson], A Poem, in the Honour of the Antient and Loyal Society of the Journey-Men-Taylors (Dublin, 1726). 18. H[enry] N[elson], A New Poem on the Procession of Journey-Men Taylors (Dublin, 1727); Henry Nelson, Poem on the Procession of Journeymen Taylors (Dublin, 1729). 19. Henry Nelson, The Order of the Procession of the Journeymen Builders, Plaisterers, Painters and Free-Masons [Dublin, 1728/29?]. The date of publication does not appear either in the title or on the broadsheet. Foxon dates this poem 1728 or 1729, based on typographic evidence compared to the other poems in the progression. See English Verse 1701–1750, 1:494. 20. Henry Nelson, Poem on the Procession of Journeymen Smiths on May the First, 1729 (Dublin, 1729). 21. J. M., A New Poem in Honour of the Journey-Men Taylors: Written By J. M. [Dublin, 1726?/27?]. Foxon notes that this poem is ‘‘possibly by John Morgan’’ who published A poem on the taylor craft (Edinburgh, 1733) (1:506). The weaving guilds were celebrated in A New Poem on the Order of the Procession, of the Society of Silk and Worsted Weavers, written by J. S. a welwisher to the trade [Dublin 1728?/29?]. 22. See Robert Ashton, A Poem in Honour of the Loyal Society of Journeymen Shoe-makers [Dublin, 1725]; and A Poem in Honour of the Loyal Society of Journey-men Shoe-makers [Dublin, 1726]. 23. Anon., The Triumphant Taylors: Or the Vanquished Lice. A satyr, on the Taylors Procession July the 25th, 1726 [Dublin, 1726]. 24. No publication date appears on the title page of this ‘‘first edition.’’ 1729 is accepted based on an advertisement that appeared in the Country Journal; or, The Craftsman of 20 September 1729, which reads, ‘‘This day is published, Servitude: A Poem. . . .’’ The title published in this advertisement matches the title page of this edition. The last part of the title reads: ‘‘Also a Postscript, occasion’d by a late Trifling Pamphlet, entitled, Every Body’s Business, is no Body’s.’’ This pamphlet is recognized by Defoe scholars to be Defoe’s work, but the evidence arguing for Defoe’s authorship of the prose sections introducing and appended to Servitude is shaky at best. For example, an early commentator, one W. Lee, points out that ‘‘there is no resemblance whatever’’ between these prose sections of Servitude and those in Dodsley’s later work, A Muse in Livery, published in 1732. But his account of Dodsley seeking out Defoe for assistance in revising Servitude is quite unfounded. See Notes and Queries, 3d series, 9 (17 February 1866): 141–43, quotation 141. 25. [Robert Dodsley], Servitude: A Poem (London, [1729]), title page. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 26. See Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750– 1850 (London: Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1930), 127; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 300–301; and Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 42–43. 27. Anon., ‘‘A Poem descriptive of the Manners of the Clothiers, written about the year 1730,’’ in Thoresby Society Publications 41, part 3, no. 95 (1947): 275; cited in Pinchbeck, Thompson, and Hill. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text.

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28. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Life of Thomson,’’ in Lives of the Poets (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1970), 328. 29. The most complete of these modern accounts is Rose Mary Davis, Stephen Duck, The Thresher-Poet, University of Maine Studies 8, 2d series (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1926), esp. 1–93; but see also R. G. Furnival, ‘‘Stephen Duck: The Wiltshire Phenomenon, 1705–1756,’’ The Cambridge Journal 6 (1953): 486–96; J. H. B. Peel, ‘‘From Farm Labourer to Court Poet,’’ The Listener 68 (1962): 616, 619; Michael Paffard, ‘‘Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet,’’ History Today 27 (July 1977): 467–72; and Martin Garrett, ‘‘Stephen Duck (1705–56): Wiltshire Thresher and Court Poet,’’ The Hatcher Review 3 (spring 1987): 138– 46. 30. Davis, Stephen Duck, 30. The title page of the first edition of Duck’s pirated Poems on Several Subjects records that his early compositions were ‘‘publickly Read by the Right Honourable the Earl of Macclesfield, in the Drawing-Room at Windsor-Castle, on Friday the 11th of September, 1730. To Her Majesty.’’ A letter from Joseph Spence to Pope, also dated 11 September 1730, attests to Macclesfield having ‘‘sent for [Duck] some days ago’’ but does not mention that Macclesfield had gone to court to read Duck’s poems (The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 3:132). Neither Spence nor Duck ever mention the Macclesfield reading in later accounts of Duck’s presentation at court. 31. ‘‘Some Account of the Author’s Life,’’ in Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Subjects, 7th ed. (London, 1730), v. 32. Stephen Duck, ‘‘The Preface,’’ in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1736), x. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 33. Betty Rizzo, ‘‘The Patron as Poet-Maker: The Politics of Benefaction,’’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 241–65; esp. 244–45. 34. See Davis, Stephen Duck, 31–34. 35. Joseph Spence, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck (London, 1731), 5. 36. See Austin Wright, Joseph Spence: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 45–48. 37. Ibid., 48. 38. For an exhaustive account of Spence’s fascination with natural genius see James Osborn, ‘‘Spence, Natural Genius and Pope’’ Philological Quarterly 45 (January 1966): 123–44. The quotation is Pope’s description of Chubb in a letter to Gay dated 23 October 1730, cited in Osborn, 124. 39. Both Wright and Osborn make similar points. Wright notes that Spence was ‘‘lavish in his praise of Duck’s intellectual and social qualities, and thoroughly convinced of the poet’s worthiness’’ (48–49); and Osborn argues that ‘‘endorsement of Duck’s integrity was Spence’s second purpose’’ (131). The question of why Spence was so intent upon publishing information relevant to establishing ‘‘Duck’s integrity,’’ however, requires further exploration. 40. Osborn, ‘‘Spence, Natural Genius and Pope,’’ 128. Osborn provides a complete shorthand transcription of Spence’s notes taken during his conversations with Duck. The page references that follow in this paragraph are to this source. 41. Joseph Spence, ‘‘An Account of the Author, in a Letter to a Friend,’’ in Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Occasions, xii, xiv, xiv. Further references to Spence’s ‘‘Account’’ are from this source and are cited appropriately in the text. 42. For a well-researched discussion of this publishing history, see Foxon, English Verse 1701–1750, 1:200–201. The seventh edition added the spurious ‘‘Some Account of the Author’s Life’’ before the poems and appended two mildly satiric poems by other hands.

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43. See Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Occasions (1736), ed. with introduction by John Lucas (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1973); Moira Ferguson uses the ‘‘corrected’’ 1736 text of ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ for her Augustan Reprint No. 230, The Thresher’s Labour (Stephen Duck) and The Woman’s Labour (Mary Collier); and editors John Barrell and John Bull also excerpt the 1736 text in The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (Bungay, Suffolk: Richard Clay, Ltd., 1982), 385–90. 44. E. P. Thompson and Marian Sugden, eds., ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ by Stephen Duck and ‘‘The Woman’s Labour’’ by Mary Collier: Two Eighteenth Century Poems (London: The Merlin Press, 1989), 27, 28. 45. Peter McGonigle, ‘‘Stephen Duck and the Text of The Thresher’s Labour,’’ The Library 4, 6th series (1982), 290. 46. Ibid., 291. 47. Stephen Duck, Truth and Falsehood. A Fable (London, 1734), 2. 48. This advertisement appeared in the Daily Post for Wednesday, 14 October 1730, and is reprinted in the GSJ, no. 52, Thursday, 31 December 1730. 49. GSJ, no. 50, Thursday, 17 December 1730. ‘‘L. M.’’ has not been identified, but it is clear that he had intimate knowledge of Duck’s texts and the revisions in progress. One of the ‘‘false Prints’’ that he calls attention to is in fact a revision of an entire line of ‘‘The Shunamite.’’ The line on ‘‘p. 7’’ of the 1730 text reads: ‘‘No lasting Joys we wretched Mortals know’’ which, according to ‘‘L. M.,’’ should read: ‘‘Our sweetest joys are mixt with bitter woe’’ (GSJ, no. 50). This revision appears verbatim in the 1736 authorized text of the poem. 50. Mrs. Katherine Byerley Thomson, Memoirs of the Court and Times of King George the Second, and His Consort Queen Caroline, including Numerous Private Letters of the Most Celebrated Persons of the Time Addressed to the Viscountess Sundon, Mistress of the Robes to the Queen, and her Confidential Adviser, exhibiting much of the Secret, Political, Religious, and Literary History and a Variety of Particulars not Mentioned by our Historians (London: H. Colburn, 1850), 1:197. 51. For a full description of the attempts made to neoclassicize Duck, see Davis, Stephen Duck, 34–36. 52. Bancks, Dodsley, and Tatersal all published their volumes prior to 1736, the date of Duck’s authorized edition, and so each must have been familiar with one of the earlier pirated editions. Collier published The Woman’s Labour in 1739, but thematic and textual evidence suggests that the version of ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ that Collier ‘‘got by heart’’ and responded to was from an early pirated edition (POSO, iv). For example, a passage from Duck’s 1730 text, omitted in 1736, notes that ‘‘Behind our Backs the Female Gleaners wait, / Who sometimes stoop, and sometimes hold a Chat’’ (24) and Collier is careful to include a positive view of female gleaners in response: ‘‘Or else we go the Ears of Corn to glean; / No Labour scorning, be it e’er so mean’’ (9). Collier also refers directly to ‘‘Those mighty Troubles which perplex [Duck’s] Mind, / (Thistles before, and Females come behind)’’ (11). In the 1736 version of ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ the ‘‘Thistles’’ remain ‘‘before’’, but the ‘‘Females’’ have been replaced with the ‘‘Master’’: ‘‘Behind our Master waits. . . .’’ (POSO, 24). Thus Collier is clearly quoting from an early pirated version of Duck’s poem as she composes her own. 53. Spence, ‘‘An Account of the Author’’ (1736), xv; and Osborn, ‘‘Spence, Natural Genius and Pope,’’ 128. 54. Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1730), 27. Further references to Duck’s early poems are to this first edition, and will be given appropriately in the text.

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55. Anon., ‘‘Drake upon Duck. A Poem,’’ GM 5 (July 1735): 383–84. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 56. See James Drake, The Complaint. A Lyric Rhapsody; Address’d to his Genius (Dublin, 1730) and [James Drake], The Humors of New Tunbridge Wells at Islington. A Lyric Poem. With Songs, Epigrams, &c. (London, 1734). In each case of these versifying ‘‘Drakes,’’ Foxon notes that the name must be pseudonymous (1:196). 57. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 43. See also Wrightson, ‘‘The Social Order of Early Modern England,’’ 184–85. 58. Pamela Horn, Life and Labour in Rural England, 1760–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1987), 50. 59. For the generic designation ‘‘anti-pastoral’’ see Barrell, The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, 376–90, where Duck’s poem appears in a section entitled ‘‘Some Versions of Anti-Pastoral.’’ For contrary views, see A. J. Sambrook, ‘‘An Essay on Eighteenth-Century Pastoral, Pope to Wordsworth (I),’’ Trivium 5 (May 1970): 21–35. Sambrook argues that ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ is ‘‘one of the earliest eighteenth century poems to belong to no recognized literary ‘kind’ ’’ (32). John Goodridge has suggested the phrase ‘‘ ‘proletarian anti-pastoral poem’ ’’ to describe both Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ and Collier’s The Woman’s Labour, though he also asserts that, in the cases of both Duck and Collier, ‘‘a satisfactory title for their genre has not been formulated, partly because their work has been rather neglected in the past, though it seems to me to represent an important response to the georgic tradition’’ (Rural Life, 6–7). Most recently, Bridget Keegan has traced Duck’s engagement with the Virgilian georgic tradition, arguing convincingly that ‘‘Duck is in fact deliberately engaging and responding to early eighteenth-century theories of georgic,’’ particularly Addison’s influential ‘‘Essay on the Georgics’’ which appeared as preface to Dryden’s translation of Virgil in 1697, a text that Duck owned and read (‘‘Sweating Poetry: Stephen Duck, The Thresher’s Labour, and Early Eighteenth-Century Georgic Transformations,’’ Studies in English Literature [forthcoming, 2001]). 60. This term is not of my coinage. Greene uses it in linking Duck’s poem to ‘‘the century’s most vigorous counter-pastoral,’’ Crabbe’s The Village, but stops short of identifying ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ as such (Mary Leapor, 105). Goodridge, however, consistently uses ‘‘anti-pastoral’’ in his analysis of Duck and Collier. See his Rural Life, esp. 6–7, 12–15, 45–46. 61. See Thompson and Sugden, eds., ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ and ‘‘The Woman’s Labour,’’ 28. 62. Ibid. 63. Goodridge, Rural Life, 47. 64. An advertisement appears in the GM 2 (July 1732), for this volume under the title, The Countryman’s Miscellany; or, Reflections on the glorious Planet of the Sun, with other Poems. Wrote by a Person who took the Hint from a Request made to Mr. Stephen Duck, to write something on that Subject; which he declin’d. The title page of the edition that I located reads differently: The Country-mans Miscellany, or, Reflections on that Glorious Planet the Sun, with other poems: Intermix’d with Innocent Mirth, and Solid Contemplations (London, 1732). This edition is bound second in a volume that includes A Collection of select Original Poems and Translations, chiefly on Divine Subjects, by Dr. [Simon] Patrick (London, 1734), in the Huntington Library. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. 65. The artist is unknown, but the print is cataloged in The Dictionary of British Portraiture, ed. Richard Ormond and Malcolm Rodgers, compiled by Elaine

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Kilmurray (London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd. in association with The National Portrait Gallery, 1979), 2:67. See frontispiece to this book. 66. GSJ, no. 40, Thursday, 8 October 1730. 67. Ibid. For a full account of the doggerel on Duck published in The Grubstreet Journal, see James T. Hillhouse, The Grub-Street Journal (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1928), 51–57. 68. Jonathan Swift, ‘‘On Stephen Duck, the Thresher, and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram’’ in Swift’s Poems, 2:521. 69. Swift’s name appears in the ‘‘Names of the Subscribers’’ section as ‘‘The Rev. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s’’ (POSO, xxix). 70. This plate is the work of George Bickham, after a portrait painted by Sir James Thornhill. See Ormond, The Dictionary of British Portraiture, 2:67. 71. For a complete discussion of this portrait and Kneller’s relationship with Pope, see W. K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), 27–37. 72. Ibid., 31. 73. Stephen Duck, Curious Poems on Several Occasions. viz. I. On Poverty. II. The Thresher’s Labour. III. The Shunamite. (London, 1738), title page. 74. Stephen Duck, Every Man in his Own Way. An Epistle to a Friend. (London, 1741), 1. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 75. See the GM 5 (August 1735): 498. 76. [Catharine Cockburn], ‘‘Verses, occasion’d by the Busts in the Queen’s Hermitage, and Mr. Duck being appointed Keeper of the Library in Merlin’s Cave,’’ 308. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 76. Mary Jones, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, (London, 1750), 403–4. 77. GSJ, no. 40, Thursday, 8 October 1730. 78. Mary Jones, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1750), 403–4. 79. J. Wainwright, ‘‘Upon her Majesty’s Bounty to the Thresher. Written in the Year 1730,’’ in Duck, POSO, xxxv. 80. Anon., GM 3 (April 1733): 208. 81. William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 132. 82. Goodridge, ‘‘Some Predecessors of Clare 2,’’ 21. 83. Theophilus Cibber, et al, The Lives of the Poets of Great-Britain and Ireland (London, 1753), 5:310. ‘‘Banks’’ is clearly a spelling variation of ‘‘Bancks.’’ I adhere to the latter spelling because it appears on the title pages of his published work throughout the 1730s. 84. John Bancks, The Weaver’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1730), [v]. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. There were many satirical pieces published at Duck’s expense in 1730. For one significant example, see The Thresher’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects, written by Arthur Duck. Now a poor Thresher in the County of Suffolk, at the wages of five shillings and six pence per week, though formerly an Eton-scholar (London, 1730). The extent of Duck’s celebrity in London in the early 1730s was such that authors and printers simply played upon his name to advertise pamphlets and texts of all sorts. An example of this trend is Geneva. A Poem in Blank Verse. . . . By Stephen Buck, of Stocks-Market (London, 1734). Foxon notes that ‘‘Stephen Buck is almost certainly a pseudonym inspired by Stephen Duck,’’ oddly appropriating Duck’s fame for a poem in praise of gin (1:95). 85. For a still relevant discussion of eighteenth-century ‘‘Wish’’ poems, see Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classi-

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cal Ideal, 1600–1700 (Oslo, 1954; reprinted Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), esp. 299–300; and Vol. 2, 1700–1760, (Oslo, 1958; reprinted New York: The Humanities Press, 1958), esp. 295–315. 86. Røstvig, The Happy Man, Vol. II, 299. 87. This statement appears at the bottom of the title page of the British Library copy of The Weaver’s Miscellany and is signed ‘‘J. B——’’ (British Library shelfmark 992.h.7). There is further reason to believe that this statement was written by Bancks as this edition was in all likelihood the author’s due to the corrections which appear in the text. A second edition was never published, so the corrections were not heeded by any printer. 88. John Bancks, ‘‘Fragment of an Ode to Boreas, made while the Author sold Books in an Alley,’’ in Poems on Several Occasions (London, [1733]), 166–68. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 89. John Bancks, ‘‘Freedom and the Muse: An Irregular Ode,’’ in Proposals for Printing by Subscription, Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose, of Mr. John Bancks. Adorned with Sculptures, and Illustrated with Notes (London, 1737), 13. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 90. Duck, POSO, ix; John Bancks, Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose, 2d ed. (London, 1739), 1:xxi. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 91. The artist is unknown. 92. For Bancks’s publishing history, see The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue. Eleven editions of Cromwell appeared in the eighteenth century, four after 1751, the date of Bancks’s death. Bancks followed this with The history of the life and reign of the Czar Peter the Great, emperor of all of Russia, and father of his country (London, 1740), which went through six editions before 1813. The History of the life and reign of William III appeared in 1744. The public and economic success of these prose works captured Bancks’s attention for, after 1739, he never again published poetry. Bonamy Dobre´e counts Bancks among those writers responsible for raising the status of prose in the literary marketplace in the early part of the century. See his English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 320–21. 93. On this point, Alexander Chalmers notes that Dodsley’s father was ‘‘born [into] a situation in which it is natural to suppose he could have bestowed some education on his children; yet it is not easy to reconcile this with the servile track of life into which they were obliged to enter.’’ See his ‘‘Life of Robert Dodsley,’’ in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), 15:313. 94. Robert Dodsley, A Muse in Livery: or, the Footman’s Miscellany (London, 1732), [ii]. 95. For full accounts of Dodsley’s life see James Tierney, introduction to The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764, ed. James Tierney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 3–50; Ralph Strauss, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher & Playwright (London and New York: John Lane Co., 1910) and E. Marston, Sketches of Some Booksellers of the Time of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1902; reprint, Clifton, N. J.: Augustus M. Kelly, 1972). The details recounted here are condensed from these sources. 96. Robert Dodsley, The Muse in Livery. A Collection of Poems, 2d ed. (London, 1732), title page. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 97. Dodsley, ML, [iii]. The engraving is signed by Pierre Fourdrinier, a French artist who flourished in London from 1728 until his death in 1758. See Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, ed. George C. Williamson (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), 1:184.

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98. Quoted in Marston, Sketches of Some Booksellers, 83. 99. Robert Tatersal, The Bricklayer’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects: . . . The Second Edition (London, 1734), title page. There is no extant copy of the first edition, though the first volume of Tatersal’s poetry seems to have appeared around May 1734. Foxon notes that ‘‘what was possibly the first edition (or perhaps another issue) was listed in GSJ 23 May 1734’’ (1:785). The GSJ advertisement, which reproduces the title page verbatim, does not include a line indicating an edition number, suggesting that this was in fact the first. Corroborating evidence is found in The Gentleman’s Magazine, which includes The Bricklayer’s Miscellany in its ‘‘Register of Books Published’’ for May 1734 (4:279). Thus it seems that this first volume went to a second edition quickly in 1734, and Tatersal added a short second volume, The Bricklayer’s Miscellany. The Second Part. Containing Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1735), the following year. Further references to Tatersal’s poetry are to these editions and will be given appropriately in the text. 100. Goodridge, ‘‘Some Predecessors of Clare 2,’’ 21. 101. See John Frizzle ‘‘An Irish Miller, to Mr. Stephen Duck,’’ in the GM 3 (February 1733), 95. Frizzle argues that Duck is not ‘‘an Equal Pen to such a Queen,’’ and notes that ‘‘Were I a while from Noise and Dust releas’d, / And Sacks and Horses, and the Mooten-chest; / As well as you my little Skill might try’’ (95). Tatersal knew Frizzle’s poem because he makes reference to Frizzle in his own work—‘‘If Threshers, Millers, entertain the Muse’’—and borrows a half line from Frizzle: ‘‘And can I write!’’ is altered slightly to ‘‘And can I write?’’ in Tatersal’s ‘‘To Stephen Duck’’ (24). 102. The former appeared in the GM 2 (December 1732): 1121; and the latter was published separately as A Poem on the Marriage of his serene Highness the Prince of Orange, with Ann, Princess-Royal of Great Britain (London, 1734). 103. In her discussion of Mary Collier’s work, Donna Landry notes that ‘‘[Collier] addresses primarily an elite readership, but never offers to confuse their class [polite readers] with hers, or to become one of them through the act of writing’’ (‘‘The Resignation of Mary Collier,’’ 116; Muses, 71). The point is useful in a positive sense for elucidating Tatersal’s radicalization of ‘‘The Author’s Wish,’’ which was, after the examples of Bancks and Dodsley, a plebeian stock poem. So far as we know, Collier never published a ‘‘Wish’’ poem. 104. The lines are from an anonymous poem entitled ‘‘To Mrs. Mary Barber. . . .’’ which appeared in the GM 5 (August 1735): 727. 105. Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to his Late Poem, Called The Thresher’s Labour (London, 1739), title page. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 106. Mary Jones, ‘‘Letter to the Hon. Miss Lovelace, January 2, 1735,’’ in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 320–21. 107. Moira Ferguson, ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578–1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 21. 108. Ferguson, Augustan Reprint 230, ix. 109. Ferguson, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 7–25; quotation, 24. 110. Landry, ‘‘The Resignation of Mary Collier,’’ 116, 120. 111. Ibid., 102, 120. 112. Landry, Muses, 76–77. 113. Landry, ‘‘The Resignation of Mary Collier,’’ 104; Muses, 58. 114. See Goodridge, Rural Life, 20. 115. I have made two editorial changes to this passage. First, I have emended

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‘‘prow,’’ which appears in the 1739 edition of The Woman’s Labour, to ‘‘row.’’ As several recent editors of The Woman’s Labour have noted, ‘‘prow’’ does not appear in the OED and therefore must be a misprint. However, there seems to be much confusion concerning just what the correct emendation should be. My emendation is based upon a later, authorized text of the poem that appeared in Collier’s Poems, on Several Occasions (1762), and eighteenth-century usage of ‘‘row’’ as a transitive verb. Either Collier or her printer corrected the line to read ‘‘Nay, rake and row it in, the Case is clear;’’ in the 1762 edition (POSO, 8). The OED gives the following definition for row: ‘‘To arrange, put or place in a line or row,’’ and provides evidence of eighteenth-century usage. Not only is ‘‘row’’ apt in terms of the poetic context (the hay harvest), but its usage also reestablishes something of the aural integrity of the line. Second, I have added a typographical change that appears in the 1762 text, italicizing ‘‘Cocks in equal rows appear’’ (POSO, 8). This printer regularized the use of italics to highlight obvious references to Duck’s poem. Collier’s printer in 1739 had italicized similar phrases in 1739 (cf. 9, 10, 11, 13, 16), but missed this one. 116. Michael Roberts, ‘‘Sickles and Scythes: Women’s Work and Men’s Work at Harvest Time,’’ History Workshop 7 (1979): 3–28; quotation, 20. 117. Citing a passage from Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, ed. H. J. Massingham (London: Harmondsworth, 1991), 235, John Goodridge suggests that by the 1880s a tradition of female sickle harvesters was ending. It is possible, then, that Collier’s women workers aided in the pea harvest with this smaller, lighter tool (Rural Life, 38). 118. Roberts, ‘‘Sickles and Scythes,’’ 17. 119. See Pinchbeck, Women Workers, 7–26; and Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics, 133. For a woman at her level of service, Collier’s figures are quite accurate. 120. The literary examples are too numerous to cite, but Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) is the obvious philosophical tract that resonates with Collier’s image. See Goodridge, Rural Life, 51, and note, 193, for a careful working out of ‘‘the verbal echoes’’ between the two texts (193). For the periodicals, see The Bee; or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet, &c., ed. Eustace Budgell, 1733–35; The Bee Reviv’d; or, the Prisoner’s Magazine, &c. From Whitechapel Gaol, 1750; and The Bee, ed. Oliver Goldsmith, 1759. 121. Thompson, introduction to ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour’’ and ‘‘The Woman’s Labour,’’ xiii. 122. See Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees (Oxford, 1609); William Lawson, The Country Housewife’s Garden (London, 1623); [Samuel Hartlib, et al.], The Reformed Common-wealth of Bees (London, 1655); Samuel Purchas, A Theatre of Political Flying-Insects (London, 1657); Moses Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees. Treating of the Nature, Government, Generation & Preservation of the Bee (London, 1679); Joseph Warder, The True Amazons, or the Monarchy of Bees (London, 1713); and John Gedde, The English Apiary: or, The Compleat Bee-Master (London, 1721), to name a few. Note the ways history, politics, and gender collide in these early-modern scientific descriptions of apiculture. 123. See, for example, Instructions for Managing Bees. Drawn Up and Published by Order of the Dublin Society (Dublin, 1733), 9–11. This tract describes the new technique of using layers of wooden boxes, instead of straw hives, which allows the keeper to harvest the honey ‘‘without smothering or destroying the Bees’’ (10). However, ‘‘these Boxes are costly and Troublesome, so as not to be fit

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for the Countryman,’’ suggesting that this new technology was still out of reach for rural laboring-class families and small-scale country farmers alike (10). In his popular catalog of agricultural improvements, The Country Gentleman and Farmer’s Monthly Director, 6th ed. (London, 1736), Richard Bradley advocates the box method: ‘‘I prefer the Boxes rather than Straw-Hives; for the Box-Hives may give as much room as one pleases to the Bees, that they may work Year after Year without being destroy’d;. . . .’’ (20–21). However, Bradley does not address the economic costs to the farmer for such an improvement. 124. Ferguson, Augustan Reprint 230, ix. 125. Stephen Duck, Hints to a School-Master. Address’d to the Revd. Dr. Turnbull (London, 1741), 8.

Chapter 3. ‘‘A Muse unknown’’ 1. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘The Vanity of Human Wishes,’’ in Works, 6:95. 2. John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 112. 3. Ibid. 4. For a complete bibliography of Jones’s work, see Appendix 1. The bibliographies currently available are incomplete, erroneous, or both; I attempt to provide clarification of Jones’s publishing history in this appendix. 5. [Thomas Cooke], ‘‘Table Talk; or, Characters, Anecdotes, &c. of Illustrious and Celebrated British Characters, during the last Fifty Years. (Most of them never before published),’’ The European Magazine and London Review 25 (January–June 1794): 423. The piece on Jones began in the April number (257–60), and continued through the May (348–51) and June (422–24) issues. Following its publication in The European Magazine, The Sentimental and Masonic Magazine, a Dublin periodical, ran the account verbatim in its July through September numbers under the heading ‘‘Anecdotes of Illustrious Persons.’’ See The Sentimental and Masonic Magazine (July–December 1794): 18–22, 112–16, 213–16. 6. John Hill provides information which complicates and clarifies the production history of Essex in his Inspector, no. 34 (April 1751). Hill devotes this paper to an assessment of Jones’s most recent poem, An Epistle to the Right Hon. the Earl of Orrery, a panegyric on a man Hill admired. Hill relates the following account of recent events concerning Essex: ‘‘The reader who is acquainted with the peculiarly unlucky fate of this author, in regard to his tragedy of the Earl of Essex, which was received at one of the houses, and had even a day fixed for the performance of it, and on the success of which he might have built very rational hopes of considerable advantage, cannot but sensibly feel the modest and resigned manner in which he alludes to that unhappy disappointment in the following passage’’ (1:142). Jones’s play was apparently ready for production in the spring of 1751, but was for some reason (which Hill withholds) shelved until the winter season of 1752–53. Despite Hill’s reticence regarding the reasons for the delay, his commentary does provide a corrective to Cooke, who erroneously noted that Jones ‘‘finished [the play] about the latter end of the season of 1752’’ (258). 7. For the performance history of The Earl of Essex, see The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 4: 1747–1776 (3 vols.), ed. George Winchester Stone, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962); quotation, 1:353. Cooke records that the play ‘‘was brought out in the best part of the season, January, and played fifteen nights’’ (259). Surviving theater records show an initial run of

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eleven consecutive nights that began in late February and continued through 5 March 1753, with a total of fifteen performances before the close of the season, the last on 23 May 1753 (Stone, 1:353–73). Tickets for the second night’s performance, and likely for others thereafter, were available at ‘‘Dodsley’s, Bookseller,’’ indicating that Jones was still in good standing and receiving assistance from his first bookseller/publisher at this time (1:353). Jones’s Essex was perfomed a total of sixty-five times at both the Covent Garden and the Drury Lane Theaters before his death in 1770, making it one of the most popular new plays of the mid-century period. 8. Henrietta Knight, Baroness Luxborough, Letters Written by the late Right Honourable Lady Luxborough, to William Shenstone, Esq. (London, 1775), 333. Lady Luxborough is likely comparing Jones’s Essex to Henry Brooke’s contemporaneous treatment of the same subject. For a full account of eighteenth-century versions of the Essex story, see Thomas Marshall Howe Blair, ed., The Unhappy Favourite, or The Earl of Essex, by John Banks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 123–27. 9. The Monthly Review 8 (March 1753): 226. 10. [Cooke], ‘‘Table Talk,’’ 424. 11. Ibid. 12. See DNB, 10:997. 13. [Cooke], ‘‘Table Talk,’’ 424. 14. David Erskine Baker, ed., The Companion to the Play-House: or, an historical account of all the dramatic writers (and their works) that have appeared in Great Britain and Ireland, from the commencement of our theatrical exhibitions, down to the present year 1764, vol. 2 (London, 1764). 15. See Biographia Dramatica; or A Companion to the Playhouse, ed. Isaac Reed, (Dublin, 1782), 1:262–63; and Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse, ed. Stephen Jones (London, 1812), 2:411–12. 16. I am speaking here only of the comments from Cooke and Baker. The Monthly Review did, of course, review many of Jones’s occasional poems soon after publication, and comments—both positive and negative—from these reviews will appear in the analysis that follows. My point here is that the views of Cooke and Baker have been widely reproduced and hence passed down, often unreflected upon, into our critical history of the period. The Monthly Review is a specialized source, one which neither Cooke nor Baker seems to have consulted in reaching his conclusions. 17. Tinker, Nature’s Simple Plan, 97; Greene, Mary Leapor, 112. 18. Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660–1780, vol. 3, The Routledge History of English Poetry, ed. R. A. Foakes (Boston, London, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981), 214. 19. This general description of mid-century poets is John Sitter’s. See Literary Loneliness, 12. 20. [Henry] Jones, ‘‘To his Excellency the Earl of Chesterfield,’’ in LM 14 (January 1746): 46. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. I quote from this source because it represents the first version of the poem that circulated in London. It is a slightly revised version of The Bricklayer’s Poem. Presented to his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. On His Arrival in this Kingdom (Dublin, 1745). 21. Chesterfield to A. M. Le Baron de Kreuningen, 8 May 1753, in The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobre´e (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932), 5:2018. Translation mine. 22. [James Eyre Weeks], The Cobler’s Poem. To a certain Noble Peer. Occa-

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sioned by the Brick-layer’s Poem (Dublin, 1745), 3. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 23. Jonathan Swift, ‘‘On Stephen Duck,’’ in Swift’s Poems, 2:521. 24. Weeks addressed two other poems to Chesterfield in rapid succession— Rebellion (Dublin, 1745) and A Rhapsody on the Stage, or, the Art of Playing (Dublin, 1746)—as well as another to his wife, the Countess of Chesterfield, titled The Amazon, or Female Courage Vindicated (Dublin, 1745). According to Patrick Fagan, this is probably not the same James Eyre Weekes who published a volume, Poems on Several Occasions, in 1743. See his A Georgian Celebration: Irish Poets of the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Branar, 1989), 120–23. 25. Henry Jones, Philosophy. A Poem Address’d to the Ladies who attend Mr. Booth’s Lectures (Dublin, 1746), title page; LM 16 (April 1747): 188. 26. Henry Jones, Poems on Several Occasions (London and Dublin, 1749), 1. Further citations from this work are from the London edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 27. The Monthly Review 8 (March 1753): 226. 28. Henry Jones, Merit. A Poem inscribed to the Right Honourable Philip Earl of Chesterfield (London, 1753), 8. 29. The Inspector 1:141. 30. The Critical Review 24 (October 1767): 315. 31. See Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), esp. 109–14, quotation, 109; and Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘‘William Collins and the Mid-Century Ode: Poetry, Patriotism, and the Influence of Context,’’ in Howard D. Weinbrot and Martin Price, eds., Context, Influence, and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1990), 1–39. 32. Henry Jones, Shrewsbury Quarry, &c. A Poem (Shrewsbury, 1769), 20. 33. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 185. Further references to Young’s poem are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 34. Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, in Works, 6:107. 35. There can be little doubt that Jones was familiar with Johnson’s poem. Notice of the publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes appeared in the GM 19 (January 1749): 48, and notice of Jones’s Poems on Several Occasions appeared six months later in the LM 18 (June 1749): 292. Thus Johnson’s poem and Jones’s volume were brought out six months apart, and by the same publisher (Dodsley), so Jones had both ample time and the means for reading and responding to Johnson’s work. 36. Cornford, introduction to Night Thoughts, 3. 37. John Dryden, ‘‘Absalom and Achitophel,’’ in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, et al., vol. 2, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 2: 11. 38. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, in Thomas Gray and William Collins: Poetical Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 35. Sitter makes this point in Literary Loneliness, 104. 39. Henry Jones, The Invention of Letters and the Utility of the Press (Dublin, 1755). This is a single-sheet publication ‘‘printed before the Company of Stationers, the 12th of August, 1755, being the Day of perambulating the Franchises, and Bounds of that City,’’ a gloss which connects Jones’s effort here to Henry Nelson’s guild procession poems of the 1720s.

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40. See, for example, Young’s view in Night V where ‘‘Ambition fires Ambition, Love of Gain / Strikes, like a Pestilence, from Breast to Breast; / Riot, Pride, Perfidy, blue Vapours breath’’ (121). Further on in Night VI, the poet asks ‘‘With error in Ambition justly charg’d, / Find we Lorenzo wiser in his Wealth?’’ (159). 41. Sitter, Literary Loneliness, 9. 42. The Monthly Review 34 (May 1766): 349. 43. The Monthly Review 37 (August 1767): 152. Both reviews are signed with the large ‘‘L’’ which indicates the authorship of John Langhorne. See Benjamin Nangle, The Monthly Review, First Series, 1749–1789, Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 25–26. 44. The Critical Review 24 (October 1767): 315. 45. Sitter, Literary Loneliness, 107–8. 46. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, no. 137, for Tuesday, 26 February 1754, in Works, 2:488. 47. Robert Dodsley, Public Virtue: A Poem. In Three Books. I. Agriculture. II. Commerce. III. Arts (London, 1753), title page. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 48. The Monthly Review 10 (January 1754): 30–1. 49. Henry Jones, Clifton: a poem. In two cantos. Including Bristol and all its environs. 2d ed. (Bristol, 1773), 5–6. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 50. For example, Johnson, Collins, and Gray never used the word ‘‘Custom’’ in their poetry. See Helen Harrold Naugle with Peter B. Sherry, eds., A Concordance to the Poems of Samuel Johnson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973); Branford A. Booth and Claude E. Jones, comp., A Concordance of the Poetical Works of William Collins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939); and Albert S. Cook, ed., A Concordance to the English Poems of Thomas Gray (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908). 51. Henry Jones, The Relief; or, Day Thoughts: A Poem. Occasioned by the Complaint, or Night Thoughts (London, 1754), 10, 25. 52. For ‘‘interpellation,’’ see Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ 170–77. His problematic example of ‘‘hailing’’ notwithstanding, Althusser’s concept of interpellation is useful for explaining the role ideology plays in the process of ‘‘ ‘transform[ing]’ . . . individuals into subjects’’ (177). 53. Henry Jones, The Earl of Essex. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden (London, 1753), 56. 54. Henry Jones, An Epistle to the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, Ocassion’d by reading his Lordship’s Translation of Pliny’s Epistles (London, 1751), 4. 55. Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, in Works, 6:96. 56. This characterization is Martin Price’s. See his ‘‘The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,’’ Yale Review 58 (winter 1969): 203; cited by Sitter in Literary Loneliness, 84–85. 57. The Monthly Review 10 (April 1754): 304. 58. The dating of this story is difficult to ascertain based on Cooke’s account. Cooke quotes a poem, ‘‘To Lord Tyrawly, on his sending me to Lord Chesterfield, when I durst not knock at the Door,’’ published in 1749 in Poems on Several Occasions, as evidence of Jones’s attempts at reconciliation. But the poem makes no references to the alleged money lending or to Jones being in disfavor. Jones lacks the courage to knock simply because he is ‘‘By Greatness aw’d and Worth renown’d’’ (POSO, 113). Indeed, other evidence suggests that Jones would not have been out of favor with Chesterfield until after 1753, as Chesterfield was actively

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engaged in setting up Jones’s subscription in 1748–49 and assisted in the production of Essex in the winter season, 1752–53. Chesterfield also still spoke highly of Jones to his correspondents as late as May 1753, as we have seen in his letter to the Baron de Kreuningen. Therefore, it seems likely that Jones’s falling out with Chesterfield occurred sometime in the mid to late 1750s, after the money from Essex began to run low. 59. [Cooke], ‘‘Table Talk,’’ 350. 60. Ibid., 351. Again the question of dating is difficult here, but because the story revolves around Jones’s unfinished, and now lost, tragedy Harold and the poem Kew Garden—which we know was first published in 1767—we can date Jones’s deviant business dealings with the booksellers in the late 1760s. 61. Ibid., 260. 62. Ibid.

Chapter 4. Writing as Work in Mid- to Late-Century Plebeian Poetry 1. Richard Jago, Labour, and Genius: or, the Mill-Stream, and the Cascade. A Fable. Written in the Year, 1762. (London, 1768), 2. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. 2. Samuel Johnson, as quoted by James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 3:19. 3. James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, ed. L. F. Powell (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1958), 31. 4. Samuel Johnson, The Idler, no. 2, 22 April 1758, in Works, 2:7. 5. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 2:127. 6. For the copyright figures and publishing history of Tom Jones and Amelia, see Martin Battestin, general introduction to Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), esp. xliv–l. 7. These figures are taken from Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, revised edition (1982; London and New York: Penguin, 1990), 245. See also J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 116–45; and A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters: A Study of the Relation of Author to Patron, Publisher, and Public, 1780–1832 (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1928), 17–27. For a sense of the growth that had taken place in the book trade by mid-century, compare these figures to those paid to authors earlier in the century, described in Frank Arthur Mumby and Ian Norrie, Publishing and Bookselling, 5th ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), esp. 127–39. 8. [Cooke], ‘‘Table Talk,’’ 258, 259. Jones also received an additional £100 for the copy of Essex from Robert Dodsley on 5 March 1753 (Tierney, ed., Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 519). 9. Thorvald Rogers, Work and Wages (London: Swan Sonnen Scein & Co., 1902), 124. 10. See the wage graphs comparing craftsmen and laborers in Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 12, 14, 47, 49. My approximate median annual income for craftsmen is based on Gilboy’s daily wage figures. 11. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 164.

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12. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), esp. 269–70, 330. 13. James Woodhouse, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1766), vii. Further references to Woodhouse’s early poems are to this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 14. Tierney, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 518. For a detailed account of the sums Dodsley paid to authors during the mid-century period, see Tierney’s Appendix B.1, ‘‘Abstracts of Robert Dodsley’s publishing agreements, receipts, and bills,’’ 506–29. 15. Greene, Mary Leapor, 37. 16. See George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, eds., Poems by Eminent Ladies (London, 1755) and Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland (London, c.1775). For a complete discussion of evidence of Leapor’s stature in the eighteenth century and after, see Greene, Mary Leapor, 31–37. 17. Anon., ‘‘To the Reader,’’ in Mary Leapor, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1748), i. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 18. ‘‘To John *****, Esq.,’’ in Mary Leapor, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1751), xix. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 19. That Leapor’s Crumble Hall is Edgcote House has been recently established. See Greene, Mary Leapor, 15. 20. Greene discusses ‘‘To Lucinda’’ in the context of the preparations to publish Leapor’s first volume of poems, but his reading does not account for its exclusion from that volume. See Mary Leapor, 124–25, 154. 21. Betty Rizzo argues that Browne was the editor of both volumes. See her ‘‘Christopher Smart, the ‘C. S.’ Poems, and Molly Leapor’s Epitaph,’’ The Library 5, 6th series (1983): 25. Greene notes that there is a ‘‘lack of information on this point’’ (Mary Leapor, 27). 22. [Mary Leapor], ‘‘The Rural Maid’s Reflexions, Written by a Gardener’s Daughter. Inscribed to a Lady,’’ LM 16 (January 1747): 45. 23. See Greene, Mary Leapor, 55–58, 180–82, 193–95; and Landry, Muses, 80, 99. For a detailed discussion of Pope’s influence on Leapor, see Caryn Chaden, ‘‘Mentored from the Page: Mary Leapor’s Relationship with Alexander Pope’’ in Pope, Swift and Women Writers, ed. Donald C. Mell (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 31–47; and Claudia N. Thomas, Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 152–57, 199–204. Leapor herself refers to Pope as ‘‘my favourite Author’’ in a letter (POSO, II, 309). For Swift’s influence on Leapor, see Margaret Doody, ‘‘Swift Among the Women,’’ Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): esp. 79–82. 24. See John Philips, The Splendid Shilling (London, 1705); and also The Tatler, no. 249 (14 November 1711) written by Addison, after Philips, in the voice of a shilling. The title page for the fourth edition of The Splendid Shilling (London, 1728) advertises another poem, ‘‘The Shoe-heel, a Rhapsody, in imitation of The Splendid Shilling’’ by Joseph Mitchell. Foxon indicates that this poem first appeared in 1727 (1:469). Thus Leapor could well be drawing upon a specific mode of satire popular earlier in the century. 25. For a thought-provoking discussion of the kind of argument I am developing here, and of Leapor’s use of other conventional poetic forms—the blason and the pastoral—see Laura Mandell, ‘‘Demystifying (with) the Repugnant Female Body: Mary Leapor and Feminist Literary History,’’ Criticism 38 (fall 1996): 551– 82. Mandell argues, quite rightly I think, that ‘‘we need to find those places where

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the countering of Enlightenment forms of oppression is visible. Historians of difference must ask how desires subversive of the existing social order can be represented in conventional forms which helped to build and sustain that order. . . .’’ (567). 26. Greene, Mary Leapor, 116. 27. See Valerie Rumbold, ‘‘The Alienated Insider: Mary Leapor in ‘CrumbleHall,’ ’’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (autumn 1996): 63–76, for a careful reading of ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ in relation to the generic features of traditional country house poems. 28. Alastair Fowler, ed., The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of SeventeenthCentury Estate Poems and Related Items (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 1. For earlier discussions which define the historical parameters and characteristics of this poetic genre, see G. R. Hibbard, ‘‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtland Institutes 19 (1956): 159–74; and Heather Dubrow, ‘‘The Country-House Poem: A Study in Generic Development,’’ Genre 12 (summer 1979): 153–79. 29. Dubrow, ‘‘Country-House Poem,’’ 176. 30. Hibbard, ‘‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeeth Century,’’ 159. 31. Ben Jonson, ‘‘To Penshurst,’’ in Ben Jonson: Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 89. 32. Williams, Country and the City, 32. For a critical view of many past readings of ‘‘To Penshurst,’’ including Hibbard’s and Williams’s, see Thomas D. Marshall, ‘‘Addressing the House: Jonson’s Ideology at Penshurst,’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (spring 1993): 57–78. 33. Greene’s appendix lists the inventory of books at the Weston Hall Library that were published prior to Leapor’s death and, as Greene judiciously notes, though ‘‘not all of the books . . . were certainly in the library during Leapor’s employment in the house and subsequent friendship with [Susanna] Jennens,’’ it remains likely that Leapor did have access to them (Mary Leapor, 210). There are no books of poetry by Jonson, Carew, Herrick, or Marvell on the list. However, Greene asserts that ‘‘the only country house poem [Leapor] certainly read is Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’ ’’ (137). A volume of Pope’s Works in Prose published in 1741 appears on the list, and Freemantle notes that Leapor’s own small library consisted of ‘‘Part of Mr. Pope’s Works’’ (POSO, II, xxxii). Perhaps Leapor owned her own copy of this poem. 34. Hibbard, ‘‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeeth Century,’’ 159. 35. Alexander Pope, ‘‘Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays),’’ The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 3, part 2, ed. F. W. Bateson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 147, 146. Further citations are to this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 36. Landry, Muses, 112. 37. Valerie Rumbold notes that it is precisely this feature of Leapor’s poem that distinguishes it from the ‘‘estate poems’’ of the seventeenth century, which rarely include descriptive details of the house itself. As a poem about a house, ‘‘Crumble-Hall’’ represents ‘‘an impressive articulation of dissent from the assumptions of country house . . . writing’’ (‘‘Alienated Insider,’’ 74). 38. Greene, Mary Leapor, 115. 39. For an account of the hierarchy of maidservants in eighteenth-century households, see Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), esp. 60–69.

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40. Fowler, The Country House Poem, 16–17. 41. See also ‘‘Nature Undone by Art’’ (POSO, II, 98–100), where Leapor transfers this argument to describe the corruption of individual human character. 42. GM 54, part 2 (November 1784): 807. 43. Greene, Mary Leapor, 19. 44. See Greene, Mary Leapor, 118–21; quotation, 121. 45. This appellation was popularized by the GM, which published an account of Woodhouse in the June 1764 number (34:289–90). A slightly revised version of this piece appeared in the Annual Register (1764): 64–66. 46. See Tierney, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 431, 460. 47. Elizabeth [Montagu] to [Sarah Scott], 21 January 1765; Huntington Library manuscript MO 5818, [3–4]. 48. For the dating of Woodhouse’s varied service under the Montagus, see Katherine G. Hornbeak, ‘‘New Light on Mrs. Montagu,’’ in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncy Brewster Tinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 349–61. 49. J[ames] Woodhouse to [Elizabeth Montagu], 28 November 1768; Huntington Library manuscript MO 6792, [1]; and James Woodhouse to [Elizabeth Montagu], 10 April 1769; Huntington Library manuscript MO 6793, [1, 2]. 50. J[ames] W[oodhouse] to [Elizabeth Montagu], 26 June 1769; Huntington Library manuscript MO 6794, [2]. 51. Hornbeak, ‘‘New Light on Mrs. Montagu,’’ 353. 52. Ibid., 356; The Life and Poetical Works of James Woodhouse, 2 vols., ed. R. I. Woodhouse (London: The Leadenhall Press, Ltd., 1896), I, 85. Further citations to Woodhouse’s post-1766 works, including Crispinus Scriblerus, are from this edition and will be given by volume and page number in the text. 53. Eliz[abeth] Montagu to Edward Bridgen, 4 March 1779; Huntington Library manuscript MO 694, [4]. 54. Woodhouse is suitably vague about why he returned to Montagu’s service in Crispinus Scriblerus, perhaps because the reasons do not reflect well on his selfconstruction throughout the poem as strong and independent of character. He notes only that Montagu essayed him with ‘‘fresh arts,’’ and bribed him with promises of ‘‘pow’er and privilege’’ (I, 130). Thus he describes himself as the victim, glossing over the fact that he did accept her offer. 55. See The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus . . . A novel in verse . . . With annotations and commentaries by a friend, Part 1 (London, 1814) and The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: a Novel in Verse, written in the last Century: with Annotations and Commentaries. By a Friend [London, 1816]. Notice of the 1814 text appeared in The New Monthly Magazine 3 (March 1815): 152, and notice of the 1816 text appeared in The Monthly Review 80 (June 1816): 216–17. I have not been able to locate a copy of the 1816 text to determine whether it is a second edition of the 1814 text, which was styled ‘‘Part 1,’’ or a continuation. The reviews do not provide concrete evidence either way, though the headnotes list each text at ninety pages in length. What remains clear, however, is that the poem was not published in its entirety until 1896. I am grateful to Bridget Keegan for bringing these early versions of Crispinus Scriblerus to my attention, and to Tim Burke for providing me with the text of The New Monthly Magazine review. 56. Betty Rizzo establishes this point in ‘‘Patron as Poet-Maker,’’ 257. 57. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (November 1829): 753. 58. Public Record Office, London, PROB 6/196, fol. 171v. There is some confusion about the history of Woodhouse’s married life. Woodhouse refers to his wife

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in his early poems as ‘‘Daphne,’’ an obvious neoclassical pseudonym he often paired with the self-referential ‘‘Crispin’’ or ‘‘Crispinus.’’ ‘‘Ann’’ is a derivative of ‘‘Hannah,’’ the addressee of his Love Letters to my Wife in Verse, written in 1789. Although she was deathly ill in 1788, Woodhouse is clear in Crispinus Scriblerus that she did not die (II, 29). Internal evidence suggests, then, that Woodhouse married only once, that his wife’s name was Hannah (not Daphne), and that she outlived him. I am grateful to the New DNB researchers for uncovering Woodhouse’s probate will. 59. Rizzo, ‘‘Patron as Poet-Maker,’’ 254. 60. James Woodhouse to [Elizabeth Montagu], 26 August 1764; Huntington Library manuscript MO 6782, [6]; Woodhouse’s emphasis. 61. The Critical Review 17 (May 1764): 392–93. 62. The Critical Review 21 (June 1766): 474. 63. The Monthly Review 30 (June 1764): 415; and 35 (July 1766): 78. 64. The British Critic (August 1803): 191. 65. As early as 1749, Shenstone was dealing with vandals who were pillaging his flowers. He wrote to Lady Luxborough that ‘‘Half a dozen Flowers were cropt on May-morning, but the offenders have been detected, and brought to open Shame. And this, considering ye Numbers, [yet] pay their Compliments to ye Place on Sunday-Ev’nings, is a small Infringement, scarce worth mentioning.’’ (‘‘[To Lady Luxborough],’’ 14 May 1749, in The Letters of William Shenstone, ed. Marjorie Williams [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939], 193). Shenstone thus weighs the damage against the many other people who attend his gardens who, importantly, ‘‘pay their compliments.’’ After Shenstone’s death, Goldsmith noted in an essay titled ‘‘The History of a Poet’s Garden,’’ which appeared in the first number of the Westminster Magazine, 1 January 1773, that it was ‘‘having recourse to the praises of those who came to visit his Improvement’’ that inclined Shenstone to open The Leasowes ‘‘to the visits of every stranger’’ (Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 3:207). 66. The circumstances surrounding Shenstone’s patronage of Woodhouse would seem to support Paul Korshin’s argument that the traditional ‘‘patron-client’’ relationship declined over the course of the eighteenth century. See his ‘‘Types of Eighteenth-Century Literary Patronage,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 7 (summer 1974): 453–73. For an account which highlights the persistence of the patron-client model, see Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800, esp. 13–44. However, Griffin discusses Woodhouse’s example only in passing. 67. ‘‘To Sherrington Davenport,’’ 4 January 1763, in Letters of William Shenstone, 648. 68. Preface to William Shenstone, The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, 2 vols. (London, 1764), 1:iii. For an example of Shenstone’s money troubles, see his letter to Mr. Graves dated 21 August 1748: ‘‘The truth is, my affairs are miserably embroiled, by my own negligence, and the non-payment of tenants’’ (Letters of William Shenstone, 157). 69. ‘‘To Mr. [Graves],’’ 21 August 1748, Letters of William Shenstone, 156. In his account of The Leasowes published long after Shenstone’s death, Joseph Heely observed that ‘‘The Leasowes is to be considered as a farm only, without the least violation of character.——To have styled any part of it as a garden, or park, in fine shorn lawns, banks of roses, delicate flowers, and extrageneous plants, would only have served to spoil the whole of its design, its simplicity, and its beauty’’ ([Joseph Heely], A Description of The Leasowes [London, 1777], 140). 70. Carole Fabricant makes a similar point about this poem, but in the service

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of a very different argument about eighteenth-century tourism. See her essay, ‘‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property,’’ in Nussbaum, ed., The New 18th Century, 254–75, esp. 271. 71. The Monthly Review 79 (August 1788): 167. 72. For a full account of the Scriblerus Club and the creation of Martinus, see Charles Kerby-Miller’s preface to The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–77. 73. LM 54 (January 1785): 49. It is also worth noting that George Crabbe burned his three novels sometime in the late eighteenth century, and crafted the dark, novelistic verse that would characterize his long narrative poems The Parish Register (1807) and The Borough (1810) in this period. 74. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class, 38. 75. See Huntington Library manuscript MO 6781. The handwriting matches that of Woodhouse’s letters. 76. For a historical account of this specifically ‘‘English agitation,’’ see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, esp. 102–85. 77. Hornbeak notes that during Woodhouse’s second tour of duty for Mrs. Montagu, he ‘‘had become increasingly evangelical and equalitarian (a ‘methodistical’ leveler)’’ (‘‘New Light on Mrs. Montagu,’’ 350). However, it is unclear from Hornbeak’s discussion when Woodhouse’s interest in Methodism commenced, and whether the adjective ‘‘methodistical’’ is Montagu’s derisive comment or Woodhouse’s self-description. 78. David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1984), 12 79. Ibid. 80. Rev. L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of the Methodists (New York: Burt Franklin, 1872; reprint, Lenox Hill, 1973), 2:618. 81. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Methodism and the Threat of Revolution in Britain,’’ in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1964), 23. 82. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea Of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 33–34. 83. John Learmont, Poems: Pastoral, Satirical, Tragic, and Comic (Edinburgh, 1791), ix. Further citations are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 84. There is a copious literature on this subject. See, for example, George Rude´, Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971); M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 180–88, 373–74; and Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 103–5, 115–19. For worker combinations in response to the loss of customary rights, see C. E. Searle, ‘‘Custom, Class Conflict and Agrarian Capitalism: The Cumbrian Customary Economy in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Past and Present 110 (February 1986): 106–33. A primary cause of the Wiltshire weavers’ riots in 1739 was described by a contemporary as follows: ‘‘One cause of these Riots is said to be, Oppression of the Poor by their rich Masters.’’ See English Historical Documents, ed. D. B. Horn and Mary Ransome (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957), 10:489. 85. These are E. P. Thompson’s distinctions. See his ‘‘Eighteenth-Century English Society’’ 134–35; and his ‘‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,’’ 396.

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86. John Fredrick Bryant, Verses (London, 1787), 34. Further references to Bryant’s work are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 87. Joseph Addison, Spectator, no. 160, 1:482. 88. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius, 281–82. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 89. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:215. 90. William Duff, Critical Observations on the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (1770), ed. William Bruce Johnson (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1973), 364, 365. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 91. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1:310. 92. For Bennet, see Redemption, A Poem in Two Books (Oxford, [1796?]), and for Lucas, see The Fall of Pharaoh and Philo’s Apology (1781). 93. William Brimble, Poems, Attempted on Various Occasions (Bath, 1765), title page. Further references to Brimble’s poetry are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 94. The Monthly Review 36 (March 1767): 241. 95. The Critical Review 24 (October 1767): 317. 96. Brimble’s ‘‘List of Subscribers’’ identifies these primary patrons as ‘‘The Most Hon. the Marquis of Carnarvon’’ and ‘‘The Most Hon. Lady Barbara Montague,’’ who subscribed for four books. 97. John Bennet, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1774), vi. Further references are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 98. The Critical Review 37 (January 1774), 473. 99. John Lucas, Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (Salisbury, 1776), title page. Further references are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 100. For the eighteenth-century definitions of ‘‘pensioner,’’ see the OED, which provides the following example from Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator: ‘‘She entered into a monastery, where she still lives a pensioner.’’ 101. A point made by Klaus, Literature of Labour, 17. 102. Bryant does not name his primary patrons in his autobiographical narrative; only one ‘‘Colonel G——’’ is mentioned and he merely accompanied ‘‘the gentleman’’ who first discovered Bryant (xxxii). Betty Rizzo correctly names ‘‘Sir Archibald Macdonald, Att. Gen., M. P.’’ as Bryant’s primary patron (‘‘Patron as Poet-Maker,’’ 243). Macdonald became attorney-general in June 1788, and so he is likely ‘‘The Attorney-General’’ listed in Bryant’s ‘‘Names of Benefactors,’’ though the dating is slightly off since Bryant’s volume appeared in the summer of 1787 (DNB, 12:475). However, the patronage connection is corroborated in a Notes and Queries article that appeared in 1860, where the editorial respondent observes that ‘‘in 1787, by the liberality of Sir Archibald Macdonald, [Bryant] set up as stationer and printseller at No. 35, Long Acre, London. . . .’’ (2d series 9 [12 May 1860]: 367). 103. The Monthly Review 77 (August 1787): 159. 104. The Critical Review 64 (November 1787): 391. 105. This plate is cut by a process known as drypoint in which needles are used to engrave the copper in an effort to recreate the effects of freehand drawing. Compare this presentation of Bryant to the presentation of Duck in his Poems on Several Occasions (1736).‘‘J. G.’’ has not bee identified, and the portrait is not cataloged in The Dictionary of British Portraiture. 106. See Richard Gough’s piece in the GM (67 [June 1790]: 540) for informa-

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tion regarding Hands’s marriage. Hands’s poem titled ‘‘On the Author’s Lying-In, August, 1785’’ indicates that she was pregnant and possibly out of service by 1785. 107. Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 422. 108. The Monthly Review 3, 2d series (November 1790): 346. 109. Elizabeth Hands, The Death of Amnon. A Poem. With an Appendix Containing Pastorals, and other Poetical Pieces (Coventry, 1789), [i–ii]. Further references to Hands’s poetry are from this edition and will be given appropriately in the text. 110. Greatheed had published his play The Regent in 1788, and his uncle was the ‘‘Duke of Ancaster.’’ See the entry on him in Biographia Dramatica (1812), 1:296. 111. Landry, Muses, 189. 112. Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 422; Landry, Muses, 191. 113. Thompson, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century English Society,’’ 157.

Chapter 5. Class Dialogue 1. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘London,’’ in Works, 6:56. 2. More to Montagu, 27 August 1784, in Mahl, The Female Spectator, 277. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 3. The Monthly Review 73, part 2 (September 1785): 219. 4. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2d ed. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834), 1:384 n. 1; and Mary Alden Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947), 124. 5. Southey, Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets, 129, 130. 6. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Polite Marriage: Eighteenth-Century Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 59. 7. See Moira Ferguson, ‘‘Resistance and Power in the Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley,’’ and her Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, esp. 49–51; Donna Landry, Muses, esp. 120–85; Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–5. 8. See Mary Waldron, ‘‘Ann Yearsley and the Clifton Records,’’ The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 3, ed. Paul Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 310–18. For a judicious critique of Waldron’s argument in this essay, see Landry, Muses, 303 n. 19. Waldron continues her argument in ‘‘ ‘By no means milk and water matters’: the contribution to English poetry of Ann Yearsley, milkwoman of Clifton, 1753–1806,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 304 (1992): 801–4); and Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996), esp. 16– 20. Waldron has continued to chastise critics who, she argues, see only what they want to see in Yearsley’s life and poems: ‘‘In many cases insufficient care has been taken to search out the details of the very varied situations within which so-called ‘labouring’ women writers produced their work, and important aspects of their writings have been ignored in the interests of proving a theory’’ (‘‘ ‘This Museborn Wonder’: the Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton,’’ in Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730– 1820, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain [London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999], 124). Waldron has in fact provided us with many significant details in Year-

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sley’s case, and the question of Yearsley’s plebeian status might be as dubious as, for example, that of John Bancks. But whether a ‘‘milkmaid’’ or a ‘‘self-employed trader’’ (as Waldron would have it), there can be little doubt that Yearsley was of the lower social strata in late-eighteenth-century English society, and that both she and her patrons constructed her public identity as a poet vis-a`-vis the formulaic cultural tropes—poverty, hardship, natural genius, industriousness, Christian piety, and so on—of a plebeian poetic tradition (124). 9. Patricia Demers, ‘‘ ‘For mine’s a stubborn and a savage will’: ‘Lactilla’ (Ann Yearsley) and ‘Stella’ (Hannah More) Reconsidered,’’ The Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 56 (spring 1993): 135–50; quotation, 136. 10. Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 1:387–88. 11. Walpole to More, 13 November 1784, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 31:221. Further references to Walpole’s letters are from this edition and will appear appropriately in the text. 12. There is no extant manuscript of this ‘‘Letter’’ in the corpus of letters More sent to Montagu during this period. It also contains information that had been previously communicated to Montagu in earlier letters, and reveals a less personal voice than many of those same earlier epistles. 13. Hannah More, ‘‘A Prefatory Letter to Mrs. Montagu. By a Friend,’’ in Yearsley’s Poems, on Several Occasions (London, 1785), xi. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 14. Linda Zionkowski, ‘‘Strategies of Containment: Stephen Duck, Ann Yearsley, and the Problem of Polite Culture,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 13 (November 1989): 102. 15. Ann Yearsley, Poems, on Various Subjects (London, 1787), xviii. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 16. See Moira Ferguson, ‘‘The Unpublished Poems of Ann Yearsley,’’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 12 (spring 1993): 39. Yearsley provides a copy of the billet that was sent along with her unpublished poem addressed to George III, ‘‘To the King On His Majesty’s arrival at Cheltenham 1788.’’ Ferguson has discovered that Yearsley left behind several unpublished poems that were handwritten on the blank pages of what was probably Yearsley’s own copy of Poems, on Several Occasions (1785). Ferguson generously appends the texts of these poems as well as the author’s statements included in this volume, now housed in the Bristol Public Library, to her article for other scholars to use. 17. Ann Yearsley, Stanzas of Woe, addressed from the Heart On A Bed Of Illness, to Levi Eames, Esq. Late Mayor Of the City Of Bristol (London, 1790), title page. 18. Ann Yearsley, The Rural Lyre (London, 1796), vi. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 19. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 63. 20. The Monthly Review 77, part 2 (December 1787): 485. 21. The Critical Review 64 (December 1787): 435–36. 22. See Zionkowski, who points out that ‘‘the increased commercial trade in literature strengthened [the] idea of authorial ownership, which the House of Lords in 1774 finally codified into law’’ (‘‘Strategies of Containment,’’ 102). 23. Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 1:391. 24. See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 321–56.

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25. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, abridged edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 293. For the new emphasis on mothers in child-rearing practices in the eighteenth century, see 254–99. 26. Yearsley publicly vindicated Montagu because she felt Montagu was ignorant of the exact contents of More’s ‘‘Deed of Trust’’: ‘‘Mrs. Montagu’s name I think profaned in a proceeding of this nature; nor do I suppose that lady was ever made acquainted with the contents of the Deed before it was signed’’ (xxv). There is no evidence that Montagu was familiar with the document, but she did trust More implicitly and supported her decisions steadfastly. 27. More to Montagu, 20 October 1785, unpublished letter, Huntington Library manuscript MO 3993, quoted in Demers, ‘‘ ‘Lactilla’ and ‘Stella’ Reconsidered,’’ 145. 28. Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 2:81. 29. This engraving was cut by Wilson Lowry. See Freeman O’Donoghue, ed., Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits (London: Longmans and Co., 1914), 4:562. 30. This engraving was executed by James Heath from a portrait painted by John Opie in 1786. More is also wearing long lappets. 31. H. R. Plomer, ed., A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford: Bibliographical Society at the Oxford University Press, 1932 [for 1930]), 215. 32. Ibid. Not only did the Robinsons take on Yearsley at the height of the controversy with More, but they were fined in 1793 for selling copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The Robinsons apparently had laboring-class sympathies. 33. Ferguson, ‘‘Resistance and Power,’’ 253. 34. A point made by Landry, Muses, 157. 35. Ibid. 36. See Ferguson, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 76–77. 37. For the poetic movement toward meditation and self-expression in the latecentury period, see Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and P. W. K. Stone, The Art of Poetry, 1750–1820 (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967), esp. 84–103. 38. See, for example, Jennifer Breen, ed., Women Romantic Poets, 1785–1832: An Anthology (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1992), 96–103; and Jerome J. McGann, ed., The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7–8. 39. Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton, 150. 40. Ibid., 46. I take issue with Waldron’s overarching claim that Yearsley felt ‘‘misrepresented and miscategorized’’ by her patrons in print in 1785. Though plausible in the context of Yearsley’s sense of class pride, there remains the issue of her natural genius, and the fact that Yearsley maintained specific features of her public representation left over from More’s editorship. For a further discussion of Yearsley’s relationship to contemporary theories of genius, see Tim Burke, ‘‘Ann Yearsley and the Distribution of Genius in Early Romantic Culture,’’ in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1998), 215–30. 41. Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade (London, 1788), 5. 42. The Monthly Review 78 (March 1788): 246. Perhaps for effect, the editors juxtaposed the reviews of each author’s slavery poem. 43. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 167.

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44. Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 1:390–91. 45. Hannah More, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, in The Works of Hannah More (London, 1834), 2:254–55. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 46. Susan Pedersen, ‘‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England,’’ Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 84–113; quotation, 106. 47. [Hannah More], Village Politics (Manchester, 1793), title page. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 48. M. G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 134. 49. Rogers, Work and Wages, 118. 50. Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 2:386. 51. For information regarding publication and circulation figures of the Cheap Repository tracts, see Pedersen, ‘‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon,’’ 112. 52. For example, a reviewer of Yearsley’s play Earl Goodwin (1790) wrote in the GM that: ‘‘In the evening was performed at the Theatre at Bath, a maiden tragedy of the celebrated Mrs. Yearsley, the Bristol milkwoman. It was called Goodwin, and was very much approved. And on Monday the 9th it was performed again at Bristol, to a very genteel and numerous audience.—The language is said to be highly poetical’’ (GM 66, part 2 [November 1789]: 111).

Epilogue 1. Landry, Muses, 273. 2. See David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London and New York: Methuen, 1981); and John Burnett, et al., eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography, 2 vols. (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984). 3. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 128. 4. For a detailed discussion of Chartist poetics, see Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 133–58. Janowitz points out that ‘‘Chartism placed literature and literary practice near the heart of its political agenda’’ (138). 5. Ibid., 68. 6. John Clare, ‘‘The Wish,’’ in The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1:44. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. Later, Clare was to rescind his assessment of Templeman and Hurn in a letter to his publisher, John Taylor: ‘‘Hurn & Templman is bad bad stuff as I have since heard’’ (The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985], 131; hereafter cited appropriately in the text). 7. John Lucas suggests that ‘‘as a young man [Bloomfield] must have studied Duck.’’ See his introduction to Selected Poems: Robert Bloomfield, ed. John Goodridge and John Lucas (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1998), xii. I agree with Lucas, but, beyond the textual affinities noted below, there is no concrete evidence for the assertion.

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8. George Crabbe, Tales, 1812 and Other Selected Poems, ed. Howard Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1. 9. Merryn and Raymond Williams, eds., introduction to John Clare, John Clare, Selected Poetry and Prose (London and New York: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1986), 4. 10. Ibid. 11. John Lucas, ‘‘Bloomfield and Clare,’’ in Goodridge, ed., The Independent Spirit, 58–59. 12. Ibid., 59; Roger Sales, ‘‘The Politics of Pastoral,’’ in Peasants and Countrymen in Literature: A Symposium Organized by the English Department of the Roehampton Institute in February, 1981, ed. Kathleen Parkinson and Martin Priestman (Surrey: English Dept. of the Roehampton Institute, 1981), 94. 13. Roger Sales, English Literature in History, 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 21. 14. In 1788, Lofft ‘‘defended the rights of gleaners in the Court of Common Pleas.’’ (Jonathan Lawson, Robert Bloomfield [Boston: Twayne, 1980], 137–38). See also Lofft’s autobiographical account that appeared in The Monthly Mirror 13 (June 1802): 370–76 and continued in vol. 14 (July 1802): 9–14. 15. Robert Bloomfield, Collected Poems 1800–1822, facsimile reprints with an introduction by Jonathan Lawson (Gainesville, Fla: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971), ii. Further references to Lofft’s ‘‘Preface’’ are from this facsimile first edition of The Farmer’s Boy, and will be given by page number only in the text. 16. The third edition of The Farmer’s Boy includes several pages of notes, and a long digression by Lofft styled as an ‘‘Appendix.’’ References to the ‘‘political’’ nature of these additions are likely calling attention to Lofft’s inappropriate discussion of his recent dismissal from his position as ‘‘Justice of the Peace for the County of Suffolk’’ (The Farmer’s Boy, 3d ed. [London, 1800], 105). 17. Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy, in Selected Poems: Robert Bloomfield, 2. Hereafter cited by page number only in the text. A full scholarly edition of The Farmer’s Boy is not yet available. However, Goodridge and Lucas use the 1809 stereotype edition of the poem as their copy text because it includes Bloomfield’s own corrections and restorations of manuscript changes made by Lofft. 18. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 98; and 225 n.; and see John Lucas, introduction to Bloomfield, Selected Poems, xi. 19. Lawson, Robert Bloomfield, 81. 20. Evidence for this notion of responsible paternalism is found elsewhere in the poem, especially in the Master’s speech to Giles in ‘‘Winter’’ in which the Master moralizes to Giles about his duty to care for the flock: ‘‘That duty’s basis is humanity’’ (36). Giles’s responsibility to the animals is just one link in the chain that also includes, by extension, the Master’s responsibility to Giles. 21. The phrase is Roger Sales’s, who uses it to describe the split in Bloomfield’s personality ‘‘between the farmer’s boy and the artisan’’ (English Literature in History, 19). I am exploiting the ideological differences embedded in that split in my analysis of The Farmer’s Boy. 22. For a complete account of the publishing history of The Farmer’s Boy, see B. C. Bloomfield, ‘‘The Publication of The Farmer’s Boy by Robert Bloomfield,’’ The Library 15, 6th series (June 1993), esp. 79–86. Lofft’s figure appears in his ‘‘Preface’’ to the seventh edition of the poem (1803).

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23. Selections from the Correspondence of Robert Bloomfield, The Suffolk Poet, ed. W. H. Hart (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1870; facsimile reprint, Surrey: Robert F. Ashby, 1968), 6–7; quotation, 6. Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 24. See Lawson, Robert Bloomfield, 25–27. 25. See Byron’s lines in ‘‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’’ (1809): Hear, then, ye happy sons of needless trade! Swains! quit the plough, resign the useless spade! Lo Burns and Bloomfield, nay, a greater far, Gifford was born beneath an adverse star, Forsook the labours of a servile state, Stemmed the rude storm, and triumphed over Fate:

Byron’s satiric mode connects him with Scriblerian efforts to ridicule plebeian pretentions to poetry at the expense of their ‘‘Fate’’; that is, the labors they were born to perform instead of writing. Cited in Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives, 290. 26. See Lawson, Robert Bloomfield, 29, for details of Bloomfield’s Seal Office experience. 27. Lucas argues that ‘‘Bloomfield had been forced to earn his living in the city, but he quit London as soon as he could’’ (‘‘Bloomfield and Clare,’’ 63). The first part rings true, but Bloomfield does not quit London until the spring of 1812, and then only because of his financial straits and ill health. He wrote to the new duke of Grafton on 7 April 1812 that ‘‘I find the expenses of London housekeeping too heavy for my precarious income, and have besides by no means good health’’ (Correspondence, 54). 28. To take but one example of this trend, Nigel Cross argues that ‘‘poetry, patronage and strong waters ruined many a tailor, cobbler and hatter’’ and goes on to list Bloomfield as one of fourteen such laboring-class examples in the early nineteenth century who ‘‘all died on the edge of poverty after various encounters with patronage and the bottle—to which they turned as a consequence of frustrated literary ambition’’ (Common Writer, 133). This amounts to a gross oversimplification of the issue for Bloomfield, as I suspect it does for many of the other poets listed as well. 29. See Lawson, Robert Bloomfield, 29, 134. 30. In a letter to his daughter, Hannah, dated 6 April 1812, Bloomfield wrote of the affair: ‘‘Sharp sold his complete quarter of my books to Crosby, for—what would you guess?—509l.! And, consequently, if such copyrights as his, all in a few years coming back into my own hands, will fetch that price, what is the worth of my entire half, and the other reverting half? Certainly not less than 2,000l.’’ (Correspondence, 54). 31. ‘‘To the Friends and Admirers of Robert Bloomfield,’’ quoted in Correspondence, 58. 32. Cafarelli, ‘‘The Romantic ‘Peasant’ Poets,’’ 86. 33. Ibid., 85. 34. I owe this point to Dustin Griffin’s ‘‘Conclusion’’ to Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800, 286–92. Griffin argues that ‘‘there is abundant evidence that eighteenth-century writers found that when they turned to the emerging marketplace for support they had simply exchanged one set of chains for another’’ (287– 88). Griffin ends his study just before Bloomfield and Clare come onto the scene,

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but they surely are examples that plausibly extend the argument into the nineteenth century. 35. For the problem of Clare’s fractured identity, see John Lucas, ‘‘Clare’s Politics,’’ in Hugh Haughton, et al., eds., John Clare in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 153; and Hugh Haughton and Adam Phillips, ‘‘Introduction: relocating John Clare’’ in the same volume, esp. 5. My data of Clare’s early publishing career are condensed from this source, 4–5. 36. The study of Clare’s poetry is both problematized and invigorated by complex textual issues. The problem of ‘‘textual primitivism,’’ the principle behind the multi-volume Oxford edition of Clare’s work which incorporates manuscript readings in an effort to reproduce ‘‘authentic’’ versions of Clare’s poems, versus the first published versions of the poems edited by Taylor is the one that concerns me here. I have elected to quote from the Oxford editions generally, except when issues of reception and/or circulation are either directly pertinent or implied. In these cases, both involving poems that appeared in Poems Descriptive, I quote from the first edition and provide appropriate citation. For most recent discussion of this issue in Clare studies, see Hugh Haughton, ‘‘Revision and Romantic Authorship: The Case of Clare,’’ The John Clare Society Journal, no. 17 (July 1998): 65–73; and Tim Chilcott, ‘‘Child Harold or Child Harolds: The Editing of Clare’s Texts,’’ The John Clare Society Journal, no. 19 (July 2000): 5–17. 37. Lucas, introduction to Bloomfield, Selected Poems, xiv. 38. ‘‘The Mores,’’ generally viewed by critics as Clare’s most mature and poignant enclosure elegy, includes the following couplet: ‘‘Fence now meets fence in owners little bounds / Of field & meadow large as garden grounds’’ (Poems of the Middle Period, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 2:349; hereafter cited appropriately in the text.) The question of just why Clare thought so well of Bloomfield and his work, given their apparently opposing views of enclosure, is explained in two possible ways. John Lucas points to a later Bloomfield composition, ‘‘The Broken Crutch,’’ which appeared in Wild Flowers; or, Pastoral and Local Poetry (1806). This poem includes a sharp anti-enclosure interlude, and was a favorite of Clare’s. Lucas also rightly suggests that ‘‘Bloomfield was writing about rural circumstance before enclosure had done its vilest work, or at all events Clare could think of him as doing so’’ (Selected Poems, xiv). The qualification makes all the difference, for the Enclosure Act of 1809, the one that effectively began the process in Clare’s Helpston, was the point from which the younger poet historically located the ‘‘vilest work’’ of enclosure. Perhaps it was easy, then, to overlook or forgive Bloomfields’s pro-enclosure images in The Farmer’s Boy. 39. John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London, 1820). Hereafter cited appropriately in the text. 40. John Goodridge, ‘‘Pastoral and popular modes in Clare’s ‘enclosure elegies,’ ’’ The Independent Spirit, 140. 41. The phrase is Johanne Clare’s, see her John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987), 36. The notable commentaries are: Goodridge, ‘‘Pastoral and popular modes in Clare’s ‘enclosure elegies,’ ’’ The Independent Spirit, 142–47; Leonora Nattrass, ‘‘John Clare and William Cobbett: the personal and the political,’’ The Independent Spirit, 49–52; and John Lucas, ‘‘Clare’s Politics,’’ 156–57. 42. Clare: The Critical Heritage, 62. 43. See Tim Chilcott, A Publisher and His Circle: The Life and Work of John Taylor, Keats’s Publisher (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); and Zachary

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Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 206–61; quotation, 210. 44. Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, 213 n. 30. 45. John Clare, By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet Press, 1996), 131. 46. Ibid., 158. 47. See J. W. and Anne Tibble, John Clare: A Life (London: Michael Joseph, Ltd. 1972), esp. 133–35; quotation, 135. 48. See Tibble and Tibble, John Clare: A Life, 136–44. 49. See Storey, Letters, 55 n. 8. 50. Gary Harrison, ‘‘ ‘Ambitions Projects’: Peasant and Poet in John Clare’s ‘The Wish’ and ‘Helpstone,’ ’’ The John Clare Society Journal, no. 17 (July 1998): 44. 51. Ibid., 49. 52. This tendency is noted by many commentators; see Mark Storey, introduction to Clare, Letters, xvii–xix; Lucas, ‘‘Clare’s Politics,’’ 152–53; and Harrison, ‘‘ ‘Ambitions Projects,’ ’’ 44. 53. For a full discussion of trespassing as a key metaphor for Clare in many contexts, including writing, see John Goodridge and Kelsey Thornton, ‘‘John Clare: the trespasser,’’ in John Clare in Context, 87–129. 54. Bridget Keegan, ‘‘Broadsides, Ballads and Books: The Landscape of Cultural Literacy in ‘The Village Minstrel,’ ’’ The John Clare Society Journal, no. 15 (July 1996): 12. 55. Ibid. 56. A point made by Keegan, ‘‘Broadsides, Ballads and Books,’’ 17. For the relevant enclosure material in ‘‘The Village Minstrel,’’ see stanzas 103–10. 57. Keegan, ‘‘Broadsides, Ballads and Books,’’ 18. 58. Clare, By Himself, 68.

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Index Addison, Joseph, 17; and custom, 56; and natural genius, 25, 210, 254; The Spectator no. 160, 25, 303 n. 23; no. 447, 56; The Tatler no. 249, 323 n. 24 Adventurer, The, 21 agriculture: capitalization of, 82, 230, 269, 274–75 Akenside, Mark, 130 Althusser, Louis, 46–48, 52; and interpellation, 87, 150, 321 n. 52; and Thompson, 307 n. 35; ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),’’ 46 anti-pastoral, 81, 313n. 59. See also counter-pastoral apiculture: and Collier, 126–28; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific literature on, 317n. 122 Arbuthnot, John, 199 artisan poets, 42 Ashton, Robert, 69 Astell, Mary, 54–56, 58, 60, 116; A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 54 Augustine, Saint: Confessions, 200 Augustanism, 78, 126. See also neoclassicism Austin, William, 269 autodidactic, 41. See also self-taught Bacon, Francis, 25 Badcock, Samuel, 235, 253 Baker, David Erskine, 298, 319 n. 14 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 307n. 35 Bancks, John, 21, 30, 64, 65, 132, 278; biographical background, 96–97; and discourse on work, 99–100, 105; and Dodsley, 106, 108, 110, 114, 115; and Duck, 99–100, 102; and Jones, 133, 138; and Leapor, 165; and natural genius, 98–99; and Tatersal, 111, 114–15; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 98,

101–2; and writing-as-work, 100– 101. Works: ‘‘The Diurnal. An Epistle to Mr. B. G.,’’ 101; ‘‘Fragment of an Ode to Boreas, made while the Author sold books in an Alley,’’ 315 n. 88; ‘‘Freedom and the Muse: An Irregular Ode,’’ 315 n. 89; ‘‘The Introduction,’’ 100; Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose, 30, 103; Poems on Several Occasions, 102, 105; ‘‘The Progress of Petitioning,’’ 103–4; Proposals for Printing by Subscription, Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose, of Mr. John Bancks, 103, 315 n. 89; A short critical review of the political life of Oliver Cromwell, 105, 315 n. 92; The Weaver’s Miscellany, 66, 97, 98, 99, 102, 105, 106; ‘‘The Wish,’’ 101–2 Barber, Mary, 115, 116 Barrell, John, 271 Bath, 31, 188, 212, 262 Bathurst, Allen, Lord, 173, 179 Battersby, Christine, 303 n. 27 Beaulieu, 130 Becket, Andrew, 196, 246, 256 Behn, Aphra, 61, 81, 116; and custom, 58; ‘‘The Disappointment,’’ 81; Sir Patient Fancy, 58 Bennet, John, 18, 30; and Brimble, 216; and Duck, 218; and honesty, 218, and idleness, 217; and industry, 218; and natural genius, 216; and piety, 218–19; and Warton (Thomas), 215. Works: ‘‘An Epilogue of Thanks,’’ 217; ‘‘Hampton-Gay,’’ 218–19; ‘‘Industry and Sloth,’’ 218; ‘‘To a Kinsman,’’ 218; Poems on Several Occasions, 215; Redemption, 219; ‘‘Sent to his Grace the D—— of ——, on receiving a Bounty for his Poems,’’ 217; ‘‘Woodstock,’’ 219

353

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Bentley, Elizabeth, 267 Bickham, George, 91, 92 Biographia Dramatica, 132, 298 Birmingham, 183, 188 Blacklock, Thomas, 75 Bloomfield, B. C., 333 n. 22 Bloomfield, George (brother of Robert Bloomfield), 269, 270, 278; ‘‘Account of the Author,’’ 270 Bloomfield, Robert, 19, 23, 28, 30, 42, 56, 61, 267, 268; and animals, 276–78; and authorial independence, 281; and Brimble, 280; as charity case, 280; and counter-pastoral, 276, 277; and custom, 273–74; and discourse on work, 270–72; and dominant social values, 270; and Duck, 271, 272, 273, 332n. 7; and enclosure, 282, 335 n. 38; and gleaning, 272; and ideology, 278; and Jones, 273; and Lucas, 280; and natural genius, 280; success of The Farmer’s Boy, 278; and Yearsley, 273. Works: The Banks of Wye, 279; ‘‘The Broken Crutch,’’ 335 n. 38; The Farmer’s Boy, 28–29, 269–78, 282; The Farmer’s Boy (third ed.), 333 n. 16; Nature’s Music, 281; Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, 279; Wild Flowers; or Pastoral and Local Poetry, 279 Boscawen, Mrs., 261 Boswell, James, 17, 158 Bourton, 228 Brackley, 162, 171 Bradley, Richard, 318n. 123 Bridgen, Edward, 184 Briggs, Asa, 305 n. 9 Brimble, William, 30; biographical background, 212–13; and Bennet, 216; and Bloomfield, 280; and Leapor, 215; and patronage-as-charity, 214; and social hierarchy, 214–15; and Woodhouse, 215. Works: ‘‘Colin and Strephon,’’ 214–15; Poems, Attempted on Various Occasions, 212; ‘‘Strephon and Celia,’’ 213 Bristol, 29, 50, 224, 244 Bristol Hotwells, 251 British Critic, The, 190

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Brooke, Henry, 319 n. 8 Brown, Marshall, 331 n. 37 Browne, Isaac Hawkins, 163, 164 Bryant, John Fredrick, 30, 210; biographical background, 223–24; and discourse on work, 225; and natural genius, 210, 224–25; and patronageas-charity, 226; and Woodhouse, 225; and writing-as-work, 226. Works: ‘‘The Author on his Own Situation,’’ 226; ‘‘On a Piece of Unwrought Pipe-Clay,’’ 225; Verses, 226 Brydges, Samuel Egerton, Sir, 280 Burgess, Glenn, 308 n. 43 Burke, Edmund, 57 Burke, Tim, 331n. 40 Burlington, Richard Boyle, earl of, 173, 179 Burney, Fanny, 59; Evelina, 60 Burns, Robert, 18, 19, 32–35, 268; and Duck, 32–33, 34; Edinburgh edition of poems, 32; Kilmarnock edition of poems, 32; and a laboring-class poetic tradition, 34; and Romanticism, 34 Buxton, Jedidiah, 27 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 278, 288, 334n. 25 Cadell, Thomas, 251 Cafarelli, Annette Wheeler, 18, 19, 281 Cambridge, 188 Cambridge History of English Literature, The, 65 Candler, Ann, 267 capitalism, 49, 151 Capp, Bernard, 309n. 11 Carlyle, Thomas, 40, 49; ‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ 40; Sartor Resartus, 49 Caroline, Queen, 20, 59, 64, 94, 95, 96 Carter, Elizabeth, 246 Carter, Jefferson Matthew, 303n. 22 Cave, Edward, 158 Chandler, Mary, 31, 32; A Description of Bath, 31 Chartism, 53, 268 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of, 30, 131, 136–37; relationship with Jones, 137, 143, 155–56, 321 n. 58 Chilcott, Tim, 286

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Chubb, Thomas, 75 Cibber, Colley, 79, 89 Cibber, Theophilus, 97, 314n. 83 Clare, Johanne, 335 n. 41 Clare, John, 18, 30, 41, 42, 50, 268; biographical background, 281–82; and Collier, 285; and counterpastoral, 293; and discourse on work, 23, 283; and Duck, 285; and enclosure, 282, 283–85, 293; and independence (economic and authorial), 285–88; and natural genius, 26–27, 288, 292; and the problem of vocation, 282, 288; relationship with Taylor, 286–87; and textual issues in, 335 n. 36; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 288–91; and Woodhouse, 286; and writing-as-work, 294–96; and Yearsley, 286. Works: ‘‘An Effusion to Poetry,’’ 291; ‘‘Helpstone,’’ 282, 283, 285; ‘‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,’’ 282, 283–85; ‘‘The Mores,’’ 282, 335n. 38; Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, 26, 34, 42, 281, 282, 285, 288, 289, 292; Poems Descriptive (second ed.), 287; Poems Descriptive (third ed.), 288; Poems Descriptive (fourth ed.), 286; ‘‘The Poet’s Wish,’’ 288, 289–91; ‘‘To the Rural Muse,’’ 291; ‘‘The Village Minstrel,’’ 282, 287, 292–95; The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems, 281, 286, 288, 295; ‘‘The Wish,’’ 288–89 Clarke, Dr. Alured, 73, 78 class, 22; and class conflict, 43, 124, 208; and class consciousness, 43, 207, 208, 295; as heuristic category in literary studies, 39, 42, 50; and Marxist theory, 42; social-historical debate about, 42–44, 305n. 9, 305n. 11. See also class criteria; social hierarchy class criteria, 43, 44, 45, 234, 306 n. 18; and Woodhouse, 203 Clayton, Mrs. Charlotte, 73 Clifton, 153, 244 Clive, Robert, Lord, 151 Cockburn, Catharine (ne´e Trotter), 58– 59, 61, 116; The Revolution of Sweden, 58

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Coiner, Constance, 50 Collier, Mary, 24, 30, 64, 65, 73, 170, 274; ‘‘Advertisement’’ to WL; and apiculture, 126–28; charring in WL, 122–23; and Clare, 285; and the commercialization of print culture, 118; and the commodification of labor, 127–28; domestic labor in WL, 122; and discourse on work, 122–23, 128; and Duck, 119–29, 161; and economic exploitation of the rural poor, 118–19; emendations to WL, 316 n. 115; gleaning in WL, 121; and ideology critique, 123, 126–28; reaping in WL, 121; representation of female agricultural laborers in WL, 120–22; tedding in WL, 120–21; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 316n. 103, WL as counter-pastoral, 122; and Yearsley, 255. Works: ‘‘An Epistolary Answer To an Exciseman Who doubted her being the Author of the Washerwoman’s Labour,’’ 129; Poems, on Several Occasions, 309n. 4, 316n. 115; The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher’s Labour, 64, 115, 119–24 Collins, William, 130, 153; Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects, 139 Cooke, Thomas, 131, 155 Corfield, P. J., 44, 305 n. 11 Cornford, Stephen, 141, 320n. 33 counter-pastoral, 81, 313n. 60; and Bloomfield, 276, 277; and Clare, 293; and Collier, 122; and Duck, 81– 82. See also anti-pastoral Country-mans Miscellany, The, 85–86; ‘‘On the Sun,’’ 85; ‘‘Secret Musings, or Reflections on the Times,’’ 85–86 Courtdown, Lord, 244 Coventry, 50 Crabbe, George: The Village, 268, 313 n. 60 Critical Review, The: on Bennet, 18, 217–18; on Brimble, 213–14; on Bryant, 226; on Jones, 145; on Woodhouse, 139, 189; on Yearsley, 246 Cromwell, Oliver, 143

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Cross, Nigel, 267, 334n. 28 cultural materialism, 45–46 cultural studies, 19, 46, 54 Cunningham, Alan, 35 Cunningham, Peter, 32 custom: and Addison, 56; and the ancient constitution, 51; and Astell, 54–55; and Behn, 58; and Bloomfield, 61, 273–74; and Burney, 59; and Cockburn, 58–59; and Defoe, 57; as a discourse, 54; eighteenthcentury definitions of, 51; and Fielding, 57; and ideology critique, 51, 61; and Jones, 61, 133, 148–52; and Mandeville, 54–55; personification of, 53; and Pope, 56; and Thomson, 59; versus ‘‘customs,’’ 52–53; and Yearsley, 61, 257 Daily Post, The, 77 Dante, 125; The Divine Comedy, 200 Darley, George, 295 Dartiquenave, Charles, 106 Davenport, Sherrington, 192 Davis, Rose Mary, 73, 311 n. 29 Defoe, Daniel: and class, 43, 44; and custom, 57; and Dodsley (Servitude), 310 n. 24; and industry, 49; The Complete English Tradesman, 57; The Review, 44, 49, 306n. 20 Demers, Patricia, 237 Dermody, Thomas, 33, 268 Dickens, Charles, 267 Dictionary of British Portraiture, The, 313 n. 65 discourse formation: and Foucault, 47 discourse on work, 23, 49, 64, 96; and Bancks, 99–100, 105; and Bloomfield, 270–72; and Bryant, 225; and Clare, 23, 283; and Collier, 122–23, 128; definition of, 22, 303 n. 17; and Dodsley, 69, 107–8; and Duck 81, 82–84; and Jones, 134; and Leapor, 170, 176; and Lucas, 223; and midcentury shift, 160–61, 182; and More, 258; and Tatersal, 113; and Thomson, 72; and Woodhouse, 202; and Yearsley, 255 Disraeli, Benjamin, 267 Dobre´e, Bonamy, 315n. 92

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Dodsley, James (brother of Robert Dodsley), 183, 186 Dodsley, Robert, 30, 64, 160, 281; and Bancks, 106, 108, 110, 114, 115; biographical background, 106, 315n. 93; and Defoe, 310 n. 24; and discourse on work, 69, 107–8; and Duck, 107; and Jones, 138, 147–48; and natural genius, 106; and Pope, 106; and Tatersal, 111, 114–15; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 110. Works: ‘‘Effigies Authoris: or the Mind of the Frontispiece,’’ 108; ‘‘An Epistle to Stephen Duck,’’ 107, 110; ‘‘The Footman. An Epistle to my Friend Mr. Wright,’’ 107–8; A Muse in Livery: or, the Footman’s Miscellany, 106; The Muse in Livery. A Collection of Poems (second ed.), 315n. 96; Public Virtue, 147; Servitude, 69–71, 108, 310n. 24; The Toy-shop, 106; ‘‘The Wish, ‘‘ 110 Dollimore, Jonathan, 45 dominant social values. See honesty; industry; piety Dowling, William, 96 ‘‘Drake, Benjamin,’’ 84, 86; ‘‘Drake upon Duck. A Poem,’’ 80 Drogheda, 130, 131 Drury, Edward, 287, 288 Dryden, John, 26, 28, 142; Fables, 26 Dublin, 67, 134 Dubrow, Heather, 324n. 28 Duck, Stephen, 17, 20, 21, 22, 30, 31, 59, 65, 73, 170, 189, 268, 278; and Bancks, 99–100, 102; and Bennet, 218; and Bloomfield, 271, 272, 273, 332n. 7; and Burns, 32–33, 34; and Clare, 285; and classical learning, 78–79; and Collier, 119–29, 161; and counter-pastoral, 81–82, 313 nn. 59 and 60; and discourse on work, 81, 82–84; and Dodsley, 107; and dominant social values, 65; and economic exploitation of the rural poor, 123–25; and ideology critique, 125; and independence (economic and authorial), 94; and Jones, 132; as model for plebeian literary success, 64; and natural genius, 26, 74–75; pictorial commodification of, 89, 90–91; and

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piety, 87; presentation at court, 73–74; and the professionalization of poetry, 94–95; representation of female agricultural laborers in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ 119–20; satires on, 314n. 84; and Tatersal, 111; tedding in ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ 120; textual issues and, 76–77; and Virgilian georgic tradition, 313 n. 59; and Weeks, 135; and Woodhouse, 193; and Yearsley, 255. Works: Curious Poems on Several Occasions, 314 n. 73; Every Man in his Own Way. An Epistle to a Friend, 91; Hints to a School-Master, 128; A Poem on the Marriage of his serene Highness the Prince of Orange, 113; Poems on Several Occasions, 17, 74; Poems on Several Subjects, 76, 311n. 42; Poems on Several Subjects (7th ed.), 89, 311n. 31; ‘‘On Poverty,’’ 79–81; ‘‘On the Queen’s Grotto,’’ 113; ‘‘The Shunamite,’’ 86–88, 89; ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ 23, 80, 81–84, 119–29, 273; Truth and Falsehood, 77 Duff, William, 25, 210–11; Critical Observations on the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry, 211, 224; An Essay on Original Genius, 303 n. 22, 305n. 5 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 308 n. 38 Eagleton, Terry, 24, 47, 306 n. 26 Earle, Peter, 323 n. 12 Edgcote House, 162, 175, 176, 180 Edinburgh, 207 Edinburgh Advertiser, The, 32 Edinburgh Review, The, 304n. 49; 305 n. 2 Eighteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue, The, 297, 315 n. 92 Elliott, Ebenezer, 40, 295 Emmerson, Eliza, 286 enclosure, 269, 272; and Bloomfield, 282, 335 n. 38; and Clare, 282, 283– 85, 293, 335 n. 38 An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, 57 European Magazine, The, 132, 318 n. 5 Eusden, Laurence, 89

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Fabricant, Carole, 326 n. 70 Fagan, Patrick, 320 n. 24 Fawcett, Joseph, 269 Ferguson, Moira, 19, 116, 251 Fielding, Henry, 44, 64; and custom, 57. Works: Amelia, 159, 322 n. 6; The Champion, 309n. 3; An Inquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers, 308n. 56; Joseph Andrews, 44; Tom Jones, 159, 322 n. 6 Forrest, Theodosius, 60; ‘‘Custom. A Satire,’’ 60 French Revolution, 259 Foucault, Michel, 47, 48 Fourdrinier, Pierre, 109, 315 n. 97 Fowler, Alastair, 171, 176 Fox, Pamela, 308n. 39 Foxon, David, 309n. 14, 311 n. 42 Freemantle, Bridget, 162, 167, 168, 181 Freud, Sigmund, 46 Frizzle, John, 113, 316 n. 101 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 267 Gay, John, 17 gender, 22, 115, 121–22, 125, 126 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 27, 31, 59, 80, 180, 233 George I, 30 George, Dorothy, 160 georgic, 81–82, 229, 313n. 59 Gilboy, Elizabeth W., 322 n. 10 Gilchrist, Octavius, 287 gleaning: and Bloomfield, 272; and Collier, 121 Goldgar, Bertrand, 309 n. 2 Goldsmith, Oliver, 57, 191, 211–12, 274; The Deserted Village, 274; An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 211 Goodridge, John, 19, 29, 41, 83, 96, 112, 120, 283, 313n. 59; 313 n. 60, 317 n. 117 Gough, Richard, 233 Grafton, duke of, 278, 279 Gramsci, Antonio, 47–48, 307 nn. 31 and 35 Gray, Thomas, 130, 142–43, 153–54; Elegy Written in a Country ChurchYard, 142–43, 154 Greatheed, Bertie, 229, 329 n. 110

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Green, James: ‘‘To the Author,’’ 216; ‘‘Crispin,’’ 219 Greene, Richard, 19, 67, 133, 161, 175, 182–83, 313 n. 60; 323 n. 20; 324n. 33 Griffin, Dustin, 304 n. 32, 334n. 34 Grub street: culture of, 64, 290, 291 Grub-Street Journal, The, 20, 22, 23, 78, 89, 90 Hague, The, 136 Hammond, Brean, 28 Hands, Elizabeth, 30, 228–33; and dominant social values, 229; and Leapor, 230; and resistance to polite censorship, 228. Works: ‘‘On Contemplative Ease,’’ 232; The Death of Amnon. A Poem. With an Appendix Containing Pastorals, and other Poetical Pieces, 159, 228, 233; ‘‘A Poem, On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant Maid,’’ 230–31; ‘‘A Poem, On the Supposition of the Book having been published and read,’’ 230, 231–32; ‘‘On an Unsociable Family,’’ 230 Harrison, Gary, 289 harrowing: and Bloomfield, 272 Hay, Douglas, 53 Heath, James, 250, 331 n. 30 Hect, J. Jean, 324n. 39 hegemony, 47–48, 307n. 31 Heinzelman, Kurt, 39–40 Helpston, 335 n. 38 Hempton, David, 327n. 78 Henson, J. B., 287 Hervey, Fredrick Augustus, 244, 245 Hessey, James Augustus, 286 Hibbard, G. R., 171 Hiffernan, Paul, 301; The Heroine of the Cave, 301 Hill, Bridget, 310n. 26; 324 n. 39 Hill, John, 139, 318 n. 6 Hill, Robert, 27, 75 Hillhouse, James T., 314 n. 67 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 205, 245 Hobsbawm, Eric, 205 Hogarth, William: ‘‘The Distress’d Poet,’’ 103

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Hogg, James, 35 Homer, 26, 210 Homer, Philip Bracebridge, 228, 232 Homer, Rev. Henry (father to P. B. Homer), 228 honesty, 49; and Bennet, 218; and Bloomfield, 270; and Duck, 65; and Hands, 229; and Jones, 131, 142; and Leapor, 162; and More, 263 Hood, Thomas, 270 Hopkins, Mary Alden, 329n. 4 Horace, 194 Horn, Pamela, 313n. 58 Hornbeak, Katherine, 184 Hurn, David, 268 ideology: Althusserian conception of, 46–47; class-based conception of, 22; and Foucault, 47; history of concept, 306 n. 26; as interpellation, 87, 219, 321 n. 52; Marxist conception of, 46; resistance to, 22 ideology critique, 23–24, 39; and Bloomfield, 278; and Collier, 123, 125–26; and Duck, 125; and Jones, 152; and Leapor, 179; and Woodhouse, 209; and Yearsley, 252 idleness, 161; and Bennet, 217; and Leapor, 170, 181; and Woodhouse, 188 Idler, The, 22 Iliad, The, 91 imagination, 210–11; and Duff, 211; and natural genius, 239 imitation, poetic, 24 imperialism, 151 independence, authorial, 23; and Clare, 285–88; and Duck, 94; and Jones, 155 independence, economic, 23; and Clare, 285–88; and Duck, 94; and Woodhouse, 186–87; and Yearsley, 264 industry, 49; and Bloomfield, 270; and Defoe, 49; and Duck, 65; and Hands, 229; and Jones, 131, 142; and Leapor, 162; and Lucas, 222; and More, 263; and Thomson, 72–73; and Yearsley, 239 Inspector, The, 318n. 6 Instructions for Managing Bees. Drawn

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Up and Published by Order of the Dublin Society, 317n. 123 Jago, Richard, 157; Labour, and Genius, 157 Janowitz, Anne, 268, 332 n. 4 Jeffrey, Francis, 33–35 Johnson, Samuel, 17, 21, 22, 28, 31, 43, 51; and the commercialization of print culture, 157–59. Works: The Adventurer, 21; Dictionary of the English Language, 51, 159; The Idler, 22, 158; London, 160; The Vanity of Human Wishes, 140, 152, 320 n. 35 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 43 Jones, Henry, 24, 30, 42, 56, 61; and ambition; 142–44; and authorial independence, 155; and Bancks, 133, 138; bibliography, 298–301; biographical background, 130–31; and Bloomfield, 273; and custom, 61, 133, 148–152, 156; and discourse on work, 134; and dominant social values, 131, 142; and Dodsley, 138, 147–48; and Duck, 132; and economic success, 138; and industry, 142; and loco-descriptive poetry, 144, 153; and mid-century poetic conventions, 153; and natural genius, 132, 134–35, 137; and nature, 144; and piety, 141; and Pope, 146; relationship with Chesterfield, 137, 143, 155–56, 321 n. 58; and Romanticism, 133; and self-love, 150; and solitude, 153; and Swift, 146; and virtue, 140–41; and Woodhouse, 209; and writing-as-work, 139; and Yearsley, 156. Works: ‘‘Advertisement’’ to Poems on Several Occasions, 137–38; The Bricklayer’s Poem to the Countess of Chesterfield, on Her Ladyship’s saving the Soldiers from being shot, 134; The Bricklayer’s Poem. Presented to His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. On His Arrival in this Kingdom, 134–35, 136–37; The Cave of Idra, 301; ‘‘To Cleon, on his Arrival at his Villa,’’ 140, 146–47; Clifton, 144, 147; The Earl of Essex, 131, 143, 150, 155, 156, 159, 298, 318n. 7; An Epistle to the

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Right Honourable The Earl of Orrery, 150, 318 n. 6; ‘‘To a Friend,’’ 148; Harold, 301, 322 n. 60; The Invention of Letters and the Utility of the Press, 143–44; The Isle of Wight, 144; Kew Garden, 144, 145, 322n. 60; ‘‘Lines to Lord Chief Justice Singleton,’’ 139; Merit, 139; Philosophy, 137; Poems on Several Occasions, 131, 137, 139, 140, 149, 155, 159, 320 n. 35; ‘‘Rath-Farnham, a Poem,’’ 148; The Relief; or Day Thoughts: A Poem. Occasioned by the Complaint, or Night Thoughts, 149, 153–54; ‘‘To the Reverend Dr. Mann,’’ 141–42; Shrewsbury Quarry, 140, 151, 152; ‘‘Tempe, a Poem, inscrib’d to Solitude,’’ 153; ‘‘On the vain Pursuits and imperfect Enjoyments of Human Life,’’ 141, 142; ‘‘To a Young Gentleman,’’ 142 ‘‘Jones, Henry’’: New Poems on Several Occasions, 297 Jones, John, 19, 40; Attempts in Verse, 19 Jones, Mary, 95; and custom, 116 Jonson, Ben, 17, 113, 138; and Leapor, 171–75; and Pope, 173; ‘‘To Penshurst,’’ 171–72 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 228 Keegan, Bridget, 292, 295, 303n. 27, 313 n. 59 Kerby-Miller, Charles, 327 n. 72 Kew, 64, 78 Klaus, H. Gustav, 18 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 91, 93 Korshin, Paul, 326n. 66 labor. See work labor, gendered division of, 121 laboring-class, 42 Landry, Donna, 19, 41, 45, 117–18, 174, 229, 252, 267, 316 n. 103, 329 n. 8 Langhorne, John, 29, 145 Lawson, Jonathan, 275, 279, 333n. 14 Leader, Zachary, 286 Leapor, Mary, 22, 24, 30; and Bancks, 165; and discourse on work, 170, 176; and division of labor, 167; and

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Hands, 230; and honesty, 162; and ideology critique, 171; and idleness, 170, 181; and industry, 162; and Jones, 163; and Jonson, 171–75; and natural genius, 162, 163; and piety, 165–66; and Pope, 166, 170–80, 323 n. 23, 324n. 33; and relationship with Freemantle, 162; and Richardson, 163; and Swift, 166; and Tatersal, 165; and writing-as-work, 166, 180–82. Works: ‘‘Advice to Sophronia,’’ 183; ‘‘Crumble-Hall,’’ 170–80; ‘‘An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame,’’ 180; ‘‘The Epistle of Deborah Dough,’’ 169–70; ‘‘To Lucinda,’’ 163; ‘‘The Month of August,’’ 178; Mopsus, 167; ‘‘Nature Undone by Art,’’ 325 n. 41; Poems upon Several Occasions (1748), 159; ‘‘The Proposal,’’ 168; ‘‘To the Reader,’’ in Poems upon Several Occasions (1748), 163; ‘‘The Rural Maid’s Reflexions,’’ 163–66; ‘‘The Ten-Penny Nail,’’ 167–68 Learmont, John, 35, 207–8. Works: ‘‘An Address to the Plebeians,’’ 208; ‘‘The Petition of the Journeymen Gardeners of Scotland,’’ 207; Poems: Pastoral, Satirical, Tragic, and Comic, 207 Leasowes, The, 183, 190, 191–92 Levinson, Marjorie, 50 Licensing Act (1695), 63 ‘‘The Life of Mr. John Bancks,’’ 97 literary marketplace: eighteenthcentury expansion of, 28 Lofft, Capel, 270, 278, 333 n. 14; ‘‘Preface’’ to The Farmer’s Boy, 270 London, 29, 50, 64, 97, 111, 160, 184, 188, 224, 269 London Magazine, The, 34, 163, 164, 292 Lonsdale, Roger, 19, 66, 133, 228, 230 Lowry, Wilson, 248, 249 Lowther, Mrs. Jane, 106 Lucas, John (critic), 269, 271, 282, 334 n. 27, 335n. 35 Lucas, John (poet), 30; biographical background, 220; and Bloomfield, 280; and discourse on work, 223; and industry, 222; and natural genius,

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220–21, 222; and patronage-as-charity, 223; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 221–22. Works: ‘‘Address to a Friend,’’ 220; ‘‘The Author and his Muse,’’ 220; ‘‘The Cobler,’’ 223; ‘‘A Dialogue, by way of Apology,’’ 222–23; Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, 220; ‘‘Mr. T——s W——s,’’ 223; ‘‘A Wish,’’ 221 Lucy: A Dramatic Poem. By Henry Jones, Shoemaker, 297 Luxborough, Lady Henrietta, 131, 319n. 8 Lyttleton, Lord, 183, 187, 192 Macclesfield, earl of, 73, 77, 79 MacLean, Gerald, 45 Maidment, Brian, 41 Mandell, Laura, 323 n. 25 Mandeville, Bernard, 54–56, 126; Fable of the Bees, 54, 126 Mansfield, 106 Marshall, Thomas D., 324 n. 32 Marston St. Laurence, 162 Marvell, Andrew: ‘‘Upon Appleton House,’’ 172 Marx, Karl, 47 Massey, Gerald: Voices of Freedom, Lyrics of Love, 267 Masters, Mary, 31, 32; Poems on Several Occasions, 31 materialist literary criticism, 39, 52 McGonigle, Peter, 77 McKeon, Michael, 43, 306n. 18 Me´sa´ros, Istva´n, 48 Methodism, 204; and Woodhouse, 186, 187, 203–7, 209 Milton, John, 25, 89; Paradise Lost, 199 money: and class, 45; in Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher’s Labour,’’ 124; and publishing at mid-century, 159–60; writing for, 64, 280 Montagu, Edward, 184 Montagu, Elizabeth, 26, 27, 41, 235; relationship with Woodhouse, 183, 184–86, 200–202, 205, 325 n. 54; and smuggling, 204–5 Monthly Mirror, The, 333n. 14 Monthly Review, The, 29, 32, 319n. 16; on Brimble, 212–13; on Bryant, 225;

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on Hands, 228; on Jones, 138, 144, 147, 155; on Woodhouse, 190, 196; on Yearsley, 246 More, Hannah, 19, 23, 26, 27, 30, 257, 277, 286; and discourse on work, 258; and dominant social values, 263; and evangelical Christianity, 258; and laboring-class reform, 238; and writing-as-work, 238; and Yearsley, 235–51, 258–64. Works: Cheap Repository tracts, 258, 259, 262, 263, 264; ‘‘Patient Joe, the Newcastle Collier,’’ 263; ‘‘Prefatory Letter to Mrs. Montagu,’’ 239, 242, 244; ‘‘The Riot; or Half a Loaf is Better than No Bread,’’ 261–62; Slavery, 257; Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, 259; Village Politics, 258, 259–61 Murray, Penelope, 303n. 21 Nangle, Benjamin, 321 n. 43 natural genius: Addison on, 25, 210, 254; as amateur science, 27, 75; and Bancks, 98–99; and Bennet, 216; and Bloomfield, 280; and Bryant, 210, 224–25; and Clare, 26–27, 288, 292; ‘‘classical’’ vs. ‘‘radical’’ view of, 25, 303 n. 22; and Dodsley, 106; and Duck, 26, 74–75; Duff on, 25, 210–11; and gender, 303 n. 27; Goldsmith on, 212; and imagination, 210–11; and Jones, 132, 134–35, 137; and Leapor, 162, 163; and the literary marketplace, 160; and Lucas, 220–21, 222; and poetic originality, 26; and Romanticism, 26; and Spence, 74–75, 210, 311 n. 39; and Woodhouse, 190–91, 196; and Yearsley, 239, 243–44, 253–55; and youth, 303 n. 27. See also primitivism, poetic Nelson, Henry, 67–69 neoclassicism, 42, 84, 110, 125 New Times, 286 Newton, William, 31–32 Notes and Queries, 310n. 24 O’Donoghue, D. J., 297 Ogle, George, 228

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Oldfield, Ann, 56 old historicism, 50 Onslow, Richard, Lord, 111 Opie, John, 250 original genius. See natural genius Ossian, 26 Oxford, 75, 188, 215 pastoral, 81, 124, 128, 229, 269 paternalism, 30, 277 patronage, 28, 161, 195, 206, 304 n. 32; as charity, 212, 214, 223, 226, 280 peasant, 19, 42 Peˆcheux, Michel, 307 n. 35 Pederson, Susan, 259 Pepys, Weller, 237 Philips, John: The Splendid Shilling, 168 piety, 49; and Bennet, 218–19; and Bloomfield, 270; and Duck, 87; and Hands, 229; and Jones, 131, 141, 142; and Leapor, 165–66; and More, 263 Pinchbeck, Ivy, 310 n. 26 Plato, 25 plebeian, 41–42; definition of, 29 plebeian poetry: as means to social advancement, 20; polite response to, 17, 21; social problems in, 24 plowing: ridge-and-furrow method, 271 Pocock, J. G. A., 52 ‘‘Poem descriptive of the Manners of the Clothiers, written about the year 1730,’’ 71–72 Poems by Eminent Ladies, 161 poetry: as mass medium, 24–25; professionalization of, 28, 94, 96, 105 Political Shakespeare, 45 Pomfret, John, 98, 289; The Choice, 98 Pope, Alexander, 17, 23, 28; assessment of Duck, 17, 211; and custom, 56; and Dodsley, 106; and Jones, 146; and Jonson, 173; and Leapor, 166, 170–80, 323 n. 23; 324n. 33; portrait compared with Duck’s, 91. Works: The Dunciad, 104; Epistle to Arbuthnot, 105; ‘‘Epistle to Burlington,’’ 162, 170–80; ‘‘Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture,’’ 56; ‘‘To a Lady with the Temple of Fame,’’ 56

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Porter, Roy, 322 n. 7, 327 n. 84 preromanticism, 253, 255, 331n. 37 Price, Martin, 321 n. 56 primitivism, poetic, 19, 212. See also natural genius proletarian, 41 Radstock, Lord, 282, 287, 288 Rambler, The, 43 Reform Bill (1832), 40, 268 resistance, 45, 48; and Clare, 282; and Collier, 117–18; definition of, 49–50; and Hands, 228; textual, 62, 117 Richardson, Samuel: and Leapor, 163, Pamela, 86 Richetti, John, 43 Rizzo, Betty, 74, 323 n. 21, 328n. 102 Roberts, James, 88 Roberts, Michael, 122 Roberts, William, 329 n. 4 Robertson William: Charles V, 159 Robinsons (George, George and John), 251, 256, 331 n. 32 Robinson, Lillian, 66 Rochester, Lord: ‘‘The Imperfect Enjoyment,’’ 81 Rogers, Nicholas, 53 Rogers, Pat, 309n. 2 Rogers, Thorvald, 260 Rollo, John, 30–31, 32 Romanticism: and Jones, 133; and natural genius, 26 Rome, 42 Røstvig, Maren-Sofie, 314 n. 85 Rothstein, Eric, 133 Rowe, Nicholas: Jane Shore, 56 Rowley Regis, 183 Rude´, George, 327 n. 84 Rugby, 228 Rule, John, 43 Rumbold, Valerie, 176, 324n. 37 Sales, Roger, 269 Salisbury, 29, 220 Sambrook, A. J., 29 Sandleford, 184, 185 Sapiston, 269 Scott, John, 34 Scott, Sarah, 183 Scottish plebeian tradition, 35 ‘‘Scriblerus, Martinus,’’ 199

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Searle, C. E., 327 n. 84 self-taught, 41, 305n. 5 Sentimental and Masonic Magazine, The, 318 n. 5 Seward, Anna, 31–32; Louisa, a Poetical Novel, 200 Shaftesbury, earl of, 142, 143 Shakespeare, William, 52, 75, 210 Sharp, Mr., 280 Shenstone, William, 131, 187; and Woodhouse, 190–92; Works in Verse and Prose, 183 Sinfield, Alan, 45 Singleton, Lord Chief Justice, 140 Siskin, Clifford, 20 Sitter, John, 130, 145 Smith, Adam: Wealth of Nations, 159, 245 Spitalfields, 30, 64, 97 social hierarchy, 21, 44, 124. See also class social mobility, 157–58; and Woodhouse, 196–97 social order. See class; social hierarchy Southey, Robert, 19, 39, 132, 237; Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets, 19, 39 Spectator, The: no. 160, 25, 303n. 23; no. 447, 56 Spence, Joseph, 26, 210, marketing of Duck, 76; and natural genius, 74–75, 311n. 39. Works: ‘‘Account of the Author, In a Letter to a Friend. Written in the Year 1730,’’ 76; Essay on Pope’s Odyssey, 75; A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, 74 Stone, George Winchester Jr., 318n. 7 Stone, Lawrence, 246 subscription publishing, 28, 138, 159, 211–12, 280 Surrey, 198 Swift, Jonathan, 17, 20; criticism of Duck, 90; and Jones, 146; and Leapor, 166; ‘‘On Stephen Duck, the Thresher, and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram,’’ 90, 314n. 68 sycophancy, 24, 133, 187, 192–93 Tatersal, Robert, 30, 42, 65; and Bancks, 111, 114–15; denigration of Duck, 113; and discourse on work,

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113; and Dodsley, 111, 114–15; and Duck, 111; and Leapor, 165; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 113–14. Works: ‘‘The Author’s Wish,’’ 113–14; ‘‘The Bricklayer’s Labours,’’ 111–12; The Bricklayer’s Miscellany, 111; The Brickalyer’s Miscellany. The Second Part, 111; ‘‘The Introduction, to Mr. Stephen Duck,’’ 114; ‘‘To Stephen Duck,’’ 113; ‘‘The Way of the World,’’ 115 Tatler, The, no. 249, 323 n. 24 Taylor, John (poet), 17, 66–67; ‘‘A Very Merrie Wherrie-Ferry-Voyage. Or, York for my Money,’’ 67 Taylor, John (publisher), 26, 27, 285, 289, 292; relationship with Clare, 286–87 tedding: and Collier, 120–21; and Duck, 120 Templeman, James, 268 Thompson, E. P., 35, 47–48, 51–53, 233; and Althusser, 307n. 35; on ‘‘The Thesher’s Labour,’’ 82; on The Woman’s Labour, 126; Customs in Common, 48 Thomson, James, 59, 127, 292; and discourse on work, 72; and industry, 72–73; Autumn, 59, 72–73, 127 Thornhill, Sir James, 314 n. 70 Thrale, Mrs., 17 Tibble, J. W. and Anne, 287 Tierney, James, 315 n. 95 Tillbrook, Rev., 280 Tinker, C. B., 133 Town and Country Magazine, The, 251 Tompkins, J. M. S., 237 Twerton, 212 uneducated, 39, 40 Universal Magazine, The, 60 Vincent, David, 332n. 2 Virgil, 25, 126 wages, 160, 322n. 10; agricultural, 125, 260–61 Waldron, Mary, 237, 254, 329n. 8, 331 n. 40 Walpole, Horace, 19, 26, 238, 242, 248, 259

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Walpole, Robert, Sir, 64 Ward, Edward, 67 Warton, Joseph, 130; Odes on Various Subjects, 139 Warton, Thomas, 24, 130; and Bennet, 215 ‘‘wave’’ theory, 18 Weekly Journal; or, The British Gazetteer, The, 30 Weeks, James Eyre, 135, 320n. 24; and Duck, 135; The Cobler’s Poem. To a certain Noble Peer. Occasioned by the Bricklayer’s Poem, 135 Wells, Roger, 42 Wesley, John, 203, 204–6; ‘‘A Word to a Smuggler,’’ 204 Weston Hall, 162 Whitefield, George, 203, 204 Williams, Merryn, 268 Williams, Raymond, 18, 43, 45; on Clare, 268; on class, 43; on Jonson, 172; Marxism and Literature, 45 Wiltshire, 78 Wimsatt, W. K., 314 n. 71 Winchester, 74 Windsor, 74 Woodhouse, James, 17, 18, 24, 30, 41, 49, 158–59, 268; biographical background, 183–87; and Brimble, 215; and Bryant, 225; and Clare, 286; class criteria in, 203; and discourse on work, 202; and Duck, 193; and economic independence, 186–87; and ideology critique, 209; and idleness, 188; and Jones, 209; and locodescriptive poetry, 195; and Methodism, 186, 187, 203–7, 209; and natural genius, 190–91, 196; relationship with Montagu (Elizabeth), 183, 184– 86, 200–202, 325n. 54; and the Scriblerians, 199; and Shenstone, 190–92; and smuggling, 204–5; and social mobility, 196–97; as sycophant, 187, 192–93; and ‘‘Wish’’ poems, 194; and writing-as-work, 196. Works: ‘‘Address to the Public,’’ 187, 195–96; ‘‘Advertisement to the First Edition,’’ 187–88, 191; ‘‘The Author’s Apology,’’ 160, 188–89; ‘‘Elegy to Shenstone,’’ 190–91; ‘‘The Lessowes,’’ 193–95; The Life and

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364

INDEX

Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus, 41, 198–207, 208–9, 236, 268, 325 n. 55; The Life and Poetical Works of James Woodhouse, 186; Love Letters to My Wife; written in 1789, 185, 206; Norbury Park, 185, 198; ‘‘Ode to ——— on her Birth Day,’’ 201; ‘‘Palemon and Colinet; a Pastoral Elegy,’’ 193; Poems on Several Occasions (1766), 183; Poems on Several Occasions (1788), 185, 186; Poems on Sundry Occasions, 183, 192; ‘‘Ridicule,’’ 197–98; ‘‘To William Shenstone, Esq.; in his Sickness,’’ 183 Woodstock, 215 Wordsworth, William: Lyrical Ballads, 145; The Prelude, 200 work: as analytical category, 49; classbased assumptions about, 22; and social hierarchy, 21, 44; and writing, 20, 22, 23, 269 working-class, 41 ‘‘The World is Turned Upside Down,’’ 284 Wright, Austin, 311n. 36; 311 n. 39 Wrightson, Keith, 44 writing-as-work, 20, 22, 23, 269; and Bancks, 100–101; and Bryant, 226; and Clare, 294–96; and Duck, 94–95; and Jones, 139; and Leapor, 166, 180–82; and More, 238; and Woodhouse, 196 Yearsley, Ann, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 50, 56, 226; and Bloomfield, 273; and Clare, 286; and Collier, 255; and custom, 61, 257; and discourse on work, 255; and Duck, 255; and economic independence, 264; and ideology critique, 252; and industry, 239;

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and Jones, 156; and natural genius, 239, 243–44, 253–55; and preromanticism, 253, 255; and More, 235–51, 258–64; and self-expression, 253. Works: ‘‘Addressed to Ignorance, Occasioned by a Gentleman’s desiring the Author never to assume Knowledge of the Ancients,’’ 252–53; ‘‘On Being Presented with a Silver Pen,’’ 255; ‘‘Billet’’ to Lord Courtdown, 244; counterproposal, ‘‘in Behalf of her Children, 247; ‘‘Dedication’’ to The Rural Lyre, 244; Earl Goodwin, 332n. 52; ‘‘Familiar Poem to Milo, an Aged Friend, who Wished the Author Riches,’’ 264–65; ‘‘The Indifferent Shepherdess to Colin,’’ 265; ‘‘To Mr. ****,’’ 253–55; ‘‘Narrative’’ in Poems, on Various Subjects, 236, 242–43, 246, 247, 248; ‘‘Ode, to Miss Shiells,’’ 255; A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade, 256–58; Poems, on Several Occasions, 235; Poems, on Several Occasions (2d. ed.), 241; Poems, on Several Occasions (4th ed.), 236, 242, 251; Poems, on Various Subjects, 236, 244, 247, 254, 264; ‘‘Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade,’’ 264, The Rural Lyre, 244, 264, 267, Stanzas of Woe, 244; ‘‘To Stella,’’ 240; ‘‘To Those Who Accuse the Author of Ingratitude,’’ 251–52 Yorkshire, 72 Young, Arthur, 260 Young, Edward, 25, 60, 153–54, 210. Works: Conjectures on Original Composition, 210; ‘‘Epistle to Mr. Pope,’’ 63; Night Thoughts, 139, 140, 141, 143 Zionkowski, Linda, 242

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