Abstract
Clare introduces the Blue Bell, the public house next door to his family home where he spent a year as general servant, as ‘the nursery for that lonly and solitary musing which ended in rhyme’.1 According to his account his duties on the whole were light and solitary — ‘horse or cow tending weeding etc’ — and he recalls talking to himself and allowing his thoughts to wander. His most arduous task, a weekly or twice-weekly winter trip to Maxey (a ‘distant village’ some two or three miles from Helpston) to fetch flour, called this developing imagination into more serious service:
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Greg Crossan, ‘Clare’s Debt to the Poets in his Library’, John Clare Society Journal, 10 (1991), 27–41 (pp. 29–30).
Mark Storey, The Poetry of John Clare: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 199–200, n. 26.
James Plumptre, The Truth of the Popular Notion of Apparitions, or Ghosts, Considered by the Light of Scripture (Cambridge: Printed by James Hodson, 1818), pp. 6–7. Further references to this sermon are given after quotations in the text.
Hannah More, Tawney Rachel; or, The Fortune Teller: With Some Account of Dreams, Omens, and Conjurers (London: Cheap Repository, [n.d.]), p. 8.
See Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 34–6.
See George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983);
David Blamires, ‘Chapbooks, Fairytales and Children’s Books in the Writings of John Clare’, John Clare Society Journal, 15 (1996), 26–53; 16 (1997), 43–70. Clare himself worked for a time as an itinerant bookseller, selling stocks of his own volumes at least between 1828 and 1831.
See Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare (London: Macmillan, 1865), pp. 221–31; Bate, John Clare, p. 342; Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson, ‘Introduction’, Middle Poems, III, xvii–xviii.
Richard Lessa, ‘Time and John Clare’s Calendar’, Critical Quarterly, 24 (1982), 59–71 (p. 61).
Edmund Artis, Antediluvian Phytology: Illustrated by a Collection of the Fossil Remains of Plants, Peculiar to the Coal Formations of Great Britain (London: printed for the author, 1825), pp. iv–v.
Mark Minor, ‘John Clare and the Methodists: A Reconsideration’, Studies in Romanticism, 19 (1980), 31–50 (pp. 49–50);
Janet Todd, In Adam’s Garden: A Study of John Clare’s Pre-Asylum Poetry (Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 1973), p. 27; Barrell, Idea of Landscape, p. 193.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).
Copyright information
© 2007 Paul Chirico
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chirico, P. (2007). Audience and Haunting. In: John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591103_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591103_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35527-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59110-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)