George Crabbe

George Crabbe (1754-1832). Portrait by Henry William Pickersgill (1782-1875), circa 1818. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Rev. George Crabbe (24 December 1754 - 3 February 1832) was an English poet and naturalist.

Life

Overview

Crabbe was born at Aldborough, Suffolk, where his father was collector of salt dues. He was apprenticed to a surgeon, but, having no liking for the work, went to London to try his fortune in literature. Unsuccessful at first, he as a last resource wrote a letter to Burke enclosing some of his writings, and was immediately befriended by him, and taken into his own house, where he met Fox, Reynolds, and others. His first important work, The Library, was published in 1781, and received with favor. He took orders, and was appointed by the Duke of Rutland his domestic chaplain, residing with him at Belvoir Castle. Here in 1783 he published The Village, which established his reputation, and about the same time he was presented by Lord Thurlow to 2 small livings. He was now secured from want, made a happy marriage, and devoted himself to literary and scientific pursuits. The Newspaper appeared in 1785, and was followed by a period of silence until 1807, when he came forward again with The Parish Register, followed by The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and his last work, Tales of the Hall (1817-18). In 1819 Murray the publisher gave him £3000 for the last named work and the unexpired copyright of his other poems. In 1822 he visited Sir Walter Scott at Edinburgh. Soon afterwards his health began to give way, and he died in 1832. Crabbe. has been called "the poet of the poor." He describes in simple, but strong and vivid, verse their struggles, sorrows, weaknesses, crimes, and pleasures, sometimes with racy humour, oftener in sombre hues. His pathos, sparingly introduced, goes to the heart; his pictures of crime and despair not seldom rise to the terrific, and he has a marvellous power of painting natural scenery, and of bringing out in detail the beauty and picturesqueness of scenes at first sight uninteresting, or even uninviting. He is absolutely free from affectation or sentimentality, and may be regarded as one of the greatest masters of the realistic in our literature. With these merits he has certain faults, too great minuteness in his pictures, too frequent dwelling upon the sordid and depraved aspects of character, and some degree of harshness both in matter and manner, and not unfrequently a want of taste.

Family

Crabbe was born at Aldeburgh in Suffolk. His family was partly of Norfolk, partly of Suffolk origin, and the name was doubtless originally derived from “crab.” His grandfather, Robert Crabbe, was the first of the family to settle at Aldeburgh, where he held the appointment of collector of customs. He died in 1734, leaving one son, George, who practised many occupations, including that of a schoolmaster, in the adjoining village of Orford. Finally the poet’s father obtained a small post in the customs of Aldeburgh, married Mary Lodwick, the widow of a publican, and had 6 children, of whom George was the eldest.

Youth

The sea has swept away the small cottage that was George Crabbe’s birthplace, but one may still visit the quay at Slaughden, some 1/2 from the town, where the father worked and the son was at a later date to work with him. After attending a dame’s school in Aldeburgh, at age 9 or 10 he was sent to a boarding-school at Bungay, and at 12 to a school at Stowmarket, where he remained 2 years.

His father dreamed of the medical profession for his clever boy, and so in 1768 he went to Wickham Brook near Newmarket as an apothecary’s assistant. In 1771 we find him assisting a surgeon at Woodbridge, and it was while here that he met Sarah Elmy. Crabbe was now only 18, but he became “engaged” to this lady in 1772. It was not until 1783 that the pair were married. The intervening years were made up of painful struggle, in which, however, not only the affection but the purse of his betrothed assisted him.

About the time of Crabbe’s return from Woodbridge to Aldeburgh he published at Ipswich his debut volume, a poem entitled Inebriety (1775). At home he found his father fallen on evil days. There was no money to assist him to a partnership, and surgery for the moment seemed out of the question.

For a few weeks Crabbe worked as a common laborer, rolling butter casks on Slaughden quay. Before the year was out, however, the young man bought on credit “the shattered furniture of an apothecary’s shop and the drugs that stocked it.” This was at Aldeburgh.

A year later Crabbe installed a deputy in the surgery and paid his 1st visit to London. He lodged in Whitechapel, took lessons in midwifery, and walked the hospitals. Returning to Aldeburgh after 9 months — in 1777 — he found his practice gone. Even as a doctor for the poor he was an utter failure, poetry having probably taken too firm a hold upon his mind.

At times he suffered hunger, so utterly unable was he to earn a livelihood. After 3 years of this, in 1780 Crabbe paid his 2nd visit to London, enabled thereto by the loan of £5 from Dudley Lang, a local magnate. This visit to London, undertaken by sea on board the “Unity” smack, made for Crabbe a successful career.

His poem The Candidate, issued soon after his arrival, helped not at all. For a time he almost starved, and was only saved, it is clear, by gifts of money from his sweetheart Sarah Elmy. He importuned the great, and the publishers also. Everywhere he was refused, but at length a letter which reached Edmund Burke in March 1781 led to the careful consideration on the part of that great man of Crabbe’s many manuscripts. Burke advised the publication of The Library, which appeared in 1781. He invited Crabbe to Beaconsfield, and made interest in the right quarters to secure his entry into the church.

Crabbe was ordained in December 1781 and was appointed curate to the rector of Aldeburgh. He was not happy in his new post. The Aldeburgh folk could not reverence as priest a man they had known as a day-laborer. Crabbe again appealed to Burke, who persuaded the duke of Rutland to make him his chaplain (1782), and Crabbe took up his residence in Belvoir Castle, accompanying his new patron to London, when Lord Chancellor Thurlow (who told him he was “as like Parson Adams as twelve to the dozen”) gave him the 2 livings of Frome St Quentin and Evershot in Dorsetshire, worth together about £200 a year.

In May 1783 Crabbe’s poem The Village was published by Dodsley, and in December of that year he married Sarah Elmy. Crabbe continued his duties as ducal chaplain, being in the main a non-resident priest so far as his Dorsetshire parishes were concerned. In 1785 he published The Newspaper. Shortly after this he moved with his wife from Belvoir Castle to the parsonage of Stathern, where he took the duties of the non-resident vicar Thomas Parke, archdeacon of Stamford.

Crabbe was at Stathern for 4 years. In 1789, through the persuasion of the duchess of Rutland (now a widow, the duke having died in Dublin as lord-lieutenant of Ireland in 1787), Thurlow gave Crabbe the 2 livings of Muston in Leicestershire and West Allington in Lincolnshire. At Muston parsonage Crabbe resided for 12 years, divided by a long interval.

He had been 4 years at Muston when his wife inherited certain interests in a property of her uncle’s that placed her and her husband in possession of Ducking Hall, Parham, Suffolk. Here he took up his residence from 1793 to 1796, leaving curates in charge of his 2 livings. In 1796 the loss of their son Edmund led the Crabbes to move from Parham to Great Glemham Hall, Suffolk, where they lived until 1801. In that year Crabbe went to live at Rendham, a village in the same neighborhood. In 1805 he returned to Muston.

He broke a silence of more than 20 years by the publication in 1807 of The Parish Register, in 1810 of The Borough, and in 1812 of Tales in Verse.

Last years

In 1813 Crabbe’s wife died, and in 1814 he was given the living of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, by the duke of Rutland, a son of his early patron (who, it is interesting to recall, wanted the living of Muston for a cousin of Lord Byron). From 1814 to his death in 1832 Crabbe resided at Trowbridge.

These last years were the most prosperous of his life. He was a constant visitor to London, and in friendship with all the literary celebrities of the time. “Crabbe seemed to grow young again,” remarks his biographer, M. René Huchon. He certainly carried on a succession of mild flirtations, and a parishioner, Charlotte Ridout, would have married him. The elderly widower had proposed to her and had been accepted in 1814, but he drew out of the engagement in 1816. He proposed to yet another friend, Elizabeth Charter, somewhat later.

In his visits to London Crabbe was the guest of Samuel Rogers, in St James’s Place, and was a frequent visitor to Holland House, where he met his brother poets Moore and Campbell. In 1817 his Tales of the Hall were completed, and John Murray offered £3000 for the copyright, Crabbe’s previous works being included. The offer after much negotiation was accepted, but Crabbe’s popularity was now on the wane.

In 1822 Crabbe went to Edinburgh on a visit to Sir Walter Scott. The adventure, complicated as it was by the visit of George IV. about the same time, is most amusingly described in Lockhart’s biography of Scott, although an episode — that of the broken wine-glass — is discredited by Crabbe’s biographer, M. Huchon.

Crabbe died at Trowbridge on the 3rd of February 1832, and was buried in Trowbridge church.

Writing

Never was any poet at the same time so great and continuous a favorite with the critics, and yet so conspicuously allowed to fall into oblivion by the public. All the poets of his earlier and his later years, Cowper, Scott, Byron, Shelley in particular, have been reprinted again and again. With Crabbe it was long quite otherwise.

His works were collected into 8 volumes, the 1st containing his life by his son, in 1832. The edition was intended to continue with some of his prose writings, but the reception of the 8 volumes was not sufficiently encouraging. A reprint, however, in one volume was made in 1847, and it has been reproduced since in 1854, 1867 and 1901.

The exhaustion of the copyright, however, did no good for Crabbe’s reputation, and it was not until the end of the century that sundry volumes of “selections” from his poems appeared; Edward FitzGerald, of Omar Khayyám fame, always a loyal admirer, made a Selection, privately printed by Quaritch, in 1879. A “Selection” by Bernard Holland appeared in 1899, another by C.H. Herford in 1902 and a third by Deane in 1903. The Complete Works were published by the Cambridge University Press in 3 volumes, edited by A.W. Ward, in 1906.

Crabbe’s poems have been praised by many competent pens, by Edward FitzGerald in his Letters, by Cardinal Newman in his Apologia, and by Sir Leslie Stephen in his Hours in a Library, most notably. His verses comforted the last hours of Charles James Fox and of Sir Walter Scott, while Thomas Hardy has acknowledged their influence on the realism of his novels. But his works have ceased to command a wide public interest. He just failed of being the artist in words who is able to make the same appeal in all ages.

Yet to-day his poems will well repay perusal. His stories are profoundly poignant and when once read are never forgotten. He is one of the great realists of English fiction, for even considered as a novelist he makes fascinating reading. He is more than this: for there is true poetry in Crabbe, although his most distinctively lyric note was attained when he wrote under the influence of opium, to which he became much addicted in his later years.

Crabbe's poetry was predominantly in the form of heroic couplets. His poetry has also been described as unsentimental in its depiction of provincial life and society.

Lord Byron, an avowed admirer of Crabbe's poetry, called him "Nature's sternest painter, yet the best".

Critical introduction

by William John Courthope

Crabbe's poems form a very distinct landmark in the course of English literature. Nothing is more noticeable in the latter part of the eighteenth century than the apparent exhaustion of poetical material. Poetry thrives in an agitated atmosphere; it languishes in a state of settled repose. For more than a century before the appearance of Crabbe the prevailing tone of English poetry had been political. The interest of the people had been absorbed in the establishment of their constitutional liberties, which they had secured at the price of civil war and a disputed succession, and what was felt in society was reflected in verse. The political passions of the period show themselves in different forms in the controversial satires of Dryden, in the personal satires of Pope, in the dramatic declamation of Addison, and at last in the more composed moralising of Johnson and Goldsmith. But by degrees, under a settled dynasty, the air is cleared of serious political storms.

And as the times become more quiet, we observe a rapid ebb in the inspiration of the poets who carried on the traditions peculiar to the eighteenth century. Churchill is but a poor third in satire to Dryden and Pope; The Traveller and The Vanity of Human Wishes are ill replaced in the didactic class of poetry by Erasmus Darwin’s frigid Loves of the Plants, or Payne Knight’s Progress of Society. In another direction the strong centrifugal tendency of poetry, afterwards so fully developed by the Lake School, first discovers itself in the solitary and meditative muse of Cowper, and in the Doric provincialism of Burns.

Another feature equally observable in late eighteenth-century poetry is the decline of the Romantic pastoralism of the classical Renaissance. From The Shepheards Calender down to the Pastorals of Pope this literary fashion of thought had continued to afford materials to the English poet. It was derived from the fiction of a Golden Age of virtue and innocence, traces of which were supposed still to linger in the simplicity of country life. A belief so artificial could only thrive in an artificial atmosphere; it was congenial to Courts. For a long period ‘every flowery courtier writ romance,’ and in all that portion of society which pretended to good breeding, each lover thought of himself as a shepherd, and sighed for his mistress as a nymph. Slight indications of the fashion are to be found even in poets so plain and unaffected as Willim Cowper and Burns.

But as wealth accumulated, and the democratic influence of cities extended, it was gradually felt that for a rich and refined society to be always emulating the manners of shepherds was somewhat absurd. This feeling found a vigorous exponent in Samuel JohnsonJohnson, whose Lives of the Poets abound in expressions of contempt for the insipidity and unreality of pastoral poetry.

Of these conditions of taste Crabbe dexterously availed himself. He saw that the questions which were becoming of paramount interest in men’s minds were no longer political but social. Himself born and bred among the poor, he knew that there was a vast range of human interest in the actions, passions, and manners of common life, of which the general reader, though they lay immediately under his eyes, was completely ignorant. At the same time his knowledge of English literature enabled him to perceive how effective a contrast might be drawn between rural life as it was conventionally described by poets, and as it existed in reality.

On this principle he designed and executed The Village. Beginning with a brief but telling allusion to the fiction of the Golden Age, he proceeded to draw with a stern fidelity the picture of the actual village, with its sterile soil, its half-starved inhabitants, and its smuggling surroundings; he described the sufferings of the peasant concealed by pride or suppressed by necessity, the hopelessness of his prospect, in the workhouse which awaited his old age, and where he could look for no relief for his material and spiritual wants except such as might be afforded by the quack doctor or the fox-hunting parson. His apology for such a representation of reality was, he said, the necessity of showing how small was the difference between the different ranks of men, when measured by the standard of their common nature. The plea was felt to be just; many whose imaginations had before been satisfied with the dreamland of conventional fancy were induced to extend their sympathies to the drama of actual life; The Village speedily became popular.

Yet though Crabbe had thus established for himself a permanent place among the English poets, he seemed in no haste to work further the vein of poetry which he had discovered. After the publication of The Newspaper — a somewhat uninteresting composition — he seemed almost to lay aside literary ambition, and 22 years elapsed before the appearance of The Parish Register. This poem is an extension of the subject treated in The Village; he takes up again the old text, ‘Auburn and Eden can be found no more,’ but experience of the world had enlarged his views, and his descriptions of life and character in the Register are not so unvaryingly dark as in the earlier poem. To his view of country ‘tempers, manners, morals, customs, arts,’ he now joined some highly finished episodes of individual life, one of which, the story of Phœbe Dawson, is specially memorable as having given pleasure to Fox in his last illness.

In his next poem The Borough, together with many admirable pictures of that Suffolk coast life and scenery, which always exercised a strong spell on his imaginations, he inserted several connected tales, illustrative of the peculiar temptations and passions to which the poor are exposed, and having now discovered his extraordinary power of tracing the working of the human mind, he soon afterwards published twenty-one Tales of various kinds, tragic, pathetic, and humorous. These were entirely wanting in connection; and it was probably a fear that the appearance of a new set of separate stories might expose him to the charge of repeating himself, which caused him to attempt a kind of unity in his last work, Tales of the Hall. In this the stories, though in every other respect resembling the first series, were connected with each other by the persons of the narrators, two brothers, who having been parted since their youth, meet when middle-aged in the house of the elder, and amuse each other with their different experiences.

Though Crabbe occupies so marked a place in the history of English poetry, he has not met in our own generation with all the attention which he deserves. Something of this comparative neglect is to be attributed to changes in society; the altered position of the poor has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the reality they once possessed. Something too must be ascribed to the revolutions of taste. We have been long accustomed to look at Nature and peasant life through the philosophic medium created for us by Wordsworth and his followers. From the poetical standpoint of this school Crabbe is as far removed as he is from the conventional pastoralism of his predecessors.

His intention is simply to paint things as they are, and modern ideology therefore finds in his poetry an uncongenial atmosphere. But beyond this it must be allowed that of all standard English writers Crabbe makes the largest demands on the patience of his readers. His great defect is an incurable want of taste. Like Rembrandt, to whose work his poetical chiaroscuro has a striking analogy, he seems, while impressing the imagination with powerful effects of light and shade, to delight at the same time in the exhibition of the most vulgar details. These he introduces into his poetry without the slightest attempt at generalisation or selection. In the midst of a passage of sustained tragic pathos he shocks us by the appearance of some incredibly mean thought or word; his shrewd humour runs without restraint into coarseness; and he frequently oversteps the line that divides the horrible from the terrible.

Yet after making full deduction for these defects we have still left a body of powerful and original poetry, and indeed the defects themselves arise from that strong bent of genius which makes Crabbe’s verse such an admirable foil to the insincerity of the fashionable pastoral. The extraordinary minuteness of his descriptions of actual nature becomes excusable when we take into consideration the deep moral truth which he seeks to convey in them.

As an observer and painter of the individual truths of nature no poet has ever approached him. He had a scientific interest and curiosity about all living objects, and this, though it impaired his sense of beauty, gave him an unrivalled power in placing the scenes and persons he described before the mind of the reader. Whether he paints a storm on the East Coast, or exhibits the succession of images passing through the imagination of the condemned felon, or shows the mental stages by which the enthusiast of virtue proceeds to crime, everything is represented with an appearance of scientific precision, which in an ordinary poet would be offensive, but which from Crabbe’s point of view is just and necessary.

At the same time, with all this Dutch minuteness, he possessed, as we see in "The Lover’s Journey," and "Delay has Danger," exceptional skill in describing Nature in the aspect which she presents to minds labouring under strong emotions. His powers of pathos are extraordinary, and his faculty of giving pain is often put to an illegitimate use. When his humour is under his control it is admirable, and of all the poets who have used the heroic couplet, Pope himself not excepted, he is the best writer of easy dialogue.

As a painter of character he evidently modelled himself on Pope, but the style of the two poets is as different as their genius. Pope, an unequalled observer within a limited compass, is most careful to choose rare types and to embody their prominent features in the most select and pregnant words; Crabbe, on the other hand, trusts to the largeness of his experience, and to the general human interest of his descriptions, and, though preserving the antithetical form of Pope’s verse, makes comparatively little attempt at epigrammatic expression. It is noticeable that, as his subjects become more numerous and extended, his care in composition seems to diminish; there is far more literary finish in The Village than in Tales of the Hall.

Recognition

George Crabbe monument, Wiltshire, UK. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Crabbe is buried in St. James's Church, Trowbridge, Wiltshire. An ornate monument was placed over his tomb in August 1833. The inscription reads:

SACRED to the memory of THE REV^d G. CRABBE L.L.B. / who died on the 3^rd of February 1832 in the 78^th year of his age / and the 18^th year of his services as rector of this parish. / Born in humble life, he made himself what he was; breaking through the obscurity of his birth by the force of his genius; yet he never ceased to feel for the less fortunate; entering, as his works can testify, into the sorrows and wants of the poorest of his parishioners, and so discharging the duties of a pastor and a magistrate as to endear himself to all around him, as a writer he cannot be better described than in the words of a great poet, his contemporary, "tho' nature's sternest painter, yet her best". / This monument was erected by some of his affectionate friends and parishioners.

3 of his poems ("Meeting," "Late Wisdom," and "A Marriage Ring") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

In popular culture

Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes is based on Crabbe's poem The Borough.

Publications

Poetry

• Inebriety. Ipswich, UK: C. Punchard, 1775,
• The Candidate: A political epistle to the editors of the 'Monthly Review. London: H. Payne, 1780.
• The Library. London: J. Dodsley, 1783.
• The Village. London: J. Dodsley, 1783.
• The News-paper. London: J. Dodsley, 1785.
• Poems. London: J. Hatchard, 1807.
  • includes "The Parish Register"
• The Borough. London: J. Hatchard, 1810.
• Tales. London: J. Hatchard, 1812.
  • Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1973.
• Tales of the Hall. London: John Murray, 1819.
• Posthumous Poems (edited by John Crabbe). Philadelphia: Carey, Lee & Blanchard, 1835.
• New Poems (edited by Arthur Pollard). Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1960.

Non-fiction

• A Discourse, Read in the Chapel at Belvoir Castle: After the funeral of His Grace the Duke of Rutland. London: J. Dodsley, 1788.
• Posthumous Sermons (edited by John David Hastings). London: J. Hatchard, 1850.

Collected editions

• Works. London: J. Hatchard, 1816.
• Works. (5 volumes), London: John Murray, 1823.
  • Poetical Works; with his letters and journals, and his life. London: John Murray, 1834. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835.
• Poetical Works; complete in one volume. Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1829.
• Poetical Works. London: Routledge, 1858.
• Poetical Works (selected by Edward Lamplough). London: Walter Scott / New York: T. Whittaker, 1888.
• The Life and Poetical Works (edited by his son). London: John Murray, 1901.
• Poems (edited by Adolphus William Ward). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1905-1907.
• Poetical Works (edited by A.J. Carlyle & R.M. Carlyle). London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1932.
• George Crabbe: An anthology (edited by F.L. Lucas). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1933.
• A Selection from George Crabbe (edited by William John Lucas). London: Longmans, 1967.
• A Crabbe Selection (edited by Geoffrey Newbold). London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
• Crabbe (edited by Cecil Day-Lewis). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973.

Letters and journals

• Selected Journals and Letters of George Crabbe (edited by Thomas C. Faulkner & Rhonda L. Bair). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press / London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

George Crabbe - The Borough Letter 1. General Description

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Shorter, Clement King (1911). "Crabbe, George". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 358-359.  Wikisource, Web, Dec. 30, 2017.

External links

Poems

• Crabbe in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "Meeting," "Late Wisdom," "A Marriage Ring"
• Selected Poetry of George Crabbe (1754-1832) (2 poems) at Representative Poetry Online.
• George Crabbe 1754-1832 at the Poetry Foundation
• Crabbe in The English Poets: An anthology: The Village As It Is (from The Village), An Entanglement (from Tales of the Hall)
  • Extracts from The Borough: The Convict's Dream, Strolling Players, The Founder of the Almshouse, A Storm on the East Coast
• Rev. George Crabbe (1754-1832) info & 9 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830
• George Crabbe at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive
• George Crabbe at PoemHunter (64 poems)

Audio / video

• George Crabbe poems at YouTube

Books

• Works by George Crabbe at Project Gutenberg
• George Crabbe at Amazon.com

About

• George Crabbe in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• A brief biography of George Crabbe.
• The Columbia Encyclopedia article on George Crabbe
• Crabbe, George in the Dictionary of National Biography
• George Crabbe in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature
• Crabbe in Leicestershire — Bottesford DC
• Alfred Ainger, Crabbe, 1903, English Men of Letters series, eText from Project Gutenberg
• George Crabbe in Poets' Graves.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at Crabbe, George