PART I
1
‘A servant write verses!’ says Madam Du Bloom:
‘Pray what is the subject – a Mop, or a Broom?’
‘He, he, he,” says Miss Flounce: ‘I suppose we shall see
An ode on a Dishclout – what else can it be?’ …
‘I once had a servant myself’, says Miss Pines
‘That wrote on a wedding some very good lines’.
Says Mrs Domestic, ‘And when they done,
I can’t see for my part what use they were on;
Had she wrote a receipt, to’ve instructed you how
To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragout,
Or to make cowslip wine, that would pass for Champagne,
It might have been useful, again and again’.
Elizabeth Hands, ‘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’, 1789.
Christian Tousey his My Naime and England his My Naishan
and Solsbury my Dwelling plas and Christ His My Salvaton
Mrs Christian Tousey, Hir Book, 1748.
Christian Tousey’s Book, deposited in Wiltshire County Record Office, is folded and hand-sewn, about 10 cm square, probably put together in the kitchen out of some kind of wrapping paper; it contains undated lists of spending on foodstuffs day by day.1 Discussing the twentieth-century development of recording and writing systems among the Vai people of Liberia, the anthropologist Jack Goody noted that several of the Vai records he consulted had been compiled by men who had worked as cooks at some point in their life, and who had thus, like Mrs Tousey, become familiar with elementary forms of bookkeeping.2 In eighteenth-century England, if you wanted writing abilities (‘graphic-linguistic abilities’ is Goody’s term) that had some use in a household servant, then it was the cook you wanted them in, as Elizabeth Hands’ Mrs Domestic points out in the first epigraph to this chapter. In modest households, in a cash-short economy, the kitchen door was egress for most small coin; it needed to be accounted for on a daily basis. Your cook was likely to be your one domestic servant, a multi-tasking young woman, who took charge of the kitchen and the household cleaning, milked the house cow if there was one, and washed the baby’s nappies.3 Tousey’s Book was compiled by two hands, the second probably the mistress’s (or master’s) detailing payment to unspecified others, probably charwomen, or bought-in work-boys. The way in which a single-servant household was managed and maintained by the supplementary employment of a steady stream of casual domestic workers or ‘helpers’, the calculations necessary for paying them, as well as records of daily marketing, meant that an account book like Tousey’s was likely to come under regular scrutiny by the employer.4
Someone else had access to Christian Tousey’s Book; but she called it her own. Once, there was a disparaging little note on its catalogue card in the record office at Trowbridge, in a hand nearly as faded as Tousey’s own (but which must have been made in the 1950s or 1960s), wondering why such triviality had ever been thought worth preserving. But the inside cover of ‘Hir Book’ belies inconsequentiality: she places herself within a history of literacy and many accounts of the social and psychological consequences of writing.5 This woman knew what a book was and how organised, with cover, title, and epigraph. Her inscription suggests the form of schooling she experienced: limited though it may have been, it was in all likelihood conducted in a parochial school, where first steps in reading were to do with the God-given identity the Catechism inquires into (‘What is your Name?’ ‘Who gave you this Name?’).6 This inferred experience suggests that she could read simple literature of the faith, and probably a great deal more besides. By whatever method she had been taught to read (the syllabic method and its implications for prosody will be discussed shortly) she had been given the means to make the discovery that letters, syllables, and words represent the sounds of spoken language, and so had the resources to spell some of the words she used (‘his’ for ‘is’, ‘Solsbury’ for ‘Salisbury’) from speech, as well as from (sometimes imperfect) visual recall of the words on page or slate. Her little verse inscribes a geography and a cosmology. The writer knows that Salisbury is smaller than England. She knows that both of them exist in a much vaster order of things.7 The inscription also registers a particular form of Protestant Christianity, which many histories of its educational project from the sixteenth century onwards, tell of the construction of particular kinds of social and religious subject shaped by access to the written word.8 The inscription is also in doggerel, which no child is or ever has been taught in school, but which the exercise books of even modern schoolchildren show is acquired there.
Poetical maids were fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century, their popularity sometimes attributed to a proto-Romantic taste for humble genius – for plebeian literary creativity – and to the edifying consequences of contemplating talents that might, without your charitable donation to the subscription list of a Mary Leapor or an Ann Yearsley, be doomed to disperse themselves upon the desert air of a provincial village or a gentleman’s back kitchen.9 Some have more unkindly said that ‘natural poets’ made ‘splendid household pets who could fawn in words’, usually having in mind the long half-career of the thresher poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756) whose talents were thought to have flourished in inverse proportion to his climb up the ladder of patronage.10
Mary Leapor (1722–1746) served in at least two Northamptonshire gentry households during her brief life, producing there a corpus of poetry which was first published posthumously in 1748 and which achieved its first critical edition some 250 years later.11 The Works of Mary Leapor (2003) was heralded by a flurry of articles, provoked as her modern editors suggest, by a feminism that ‘created an environment in which writers like [her] could be re-examined’.12 The relationship between the servant poet and her patroness Bridget Fremantle has been particularly well described, leaving room for modern scholars to imagine the recognition by a rector’s daughter of true poetic talent in a subordinate and the development of an Enlightened friendship around the making of poetry – as well as the tensions and impossibilities of one attempted across a vast social divide. It is for those impossibilities that the relationship between the philanthropist Hannah More and Ann Yearsley (‘Lactilla’–‘The Milkwoman of Bristol’) is now usually discussed. The record of Yearsley’s creative independence and More’s anxieties about it are well preserved.13 Even in More’s fraught correspondence with friends about Yearsley’s insistence on writing the poetry she wanted to write, reaping the financial rewards of its publication, and spending the money on what she wanted, not on what More thought proper for a milkwoman, her patroness’ acknowledgment of Lactilla’s talents and abilities is discernable.
Ann Yearsley was not More’s servant, though she had much to do with More’s cook and kitchen: her poetry came into More’s life through the kitchen door. Collecting kitchen waste for her pigs from More’s cook, Yearsley showed the woman her poetry, and she showed it to her mistress. The pigswill was in fact the most difficult and perplexing factor in the relationship between poet and patron, for Lactilla had an arrangement for it with the cook. More attempted to override what Yearsley called a ‘contract’ at the high point of one of their quarrels about the subscription money and as a way of punishing Yearsley for her ingratitude and insubordination.14 Both cook and milkwoman knew that in doing so More had transgressed the boundaries of customary practice and the law that ‘everyone’ knew. As Yearsley pointed out, at length and in print, More had no grounds on which to be offended by the kitchen-door arrangement, for the pigswill was the perquisite of the cook, and the whole world knew it.15
Mary Leapor was a cook among a household retinue of servants (or part of a ‘menial Train’, as she put it); not a jobbing girl in a single-servant household turning her hand to dusting and the dinner; but, rather, hired in the capacity of cook to a gentry family, and in no other.16 In ‘Crumble Hall’ the servant-poet wanders the corridors and grounds of the country house (at sun-up it appears, truly the servant’s hour) for the purposes of nostalgia (its ‘hospitable Door/Has fed the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor’) and for the purposes of aesthetic judgement, for the grounds are being cleared for a new landscape garden – ancient oaks uprooted ‘to clear the Way for Slopes and modern Whims’.17 The poet spends longest in the kitchen, visiting it twice in the course of her tour. She describes its larder store of ‘good old English Fare’, sketches out a recipe (for cheese cakes), admires the skill (her own) that went into the ‘soft Jellies’ stored in the larder, and gives the menu for the servants’ dinner (boiled beef and cabbage).
Jeannie Dalporto has suggested how disconcerting it might be for a member of the employing classes to see depicted ‘servants who have lost sight of their servitude’, behaving as if their place in the big house is assured by affective relationships – not by contract or hiring agreement, or by the system of landownership, rent, and investment that the country estate represented.18 But there is more to it – to the affront – than this. The servants carry on their complex lives as if the family of the house simply does not exist; affective relationships are between themselves, not between servant and employer. The kitchen is a social universe presented as completely independent of the economic structures actually inscribed in ‘Crumble Hall’. In this poem, labour, and the objects and products of labour, belong entirely to the workers. The ploughman resting by the kitchen fire dreams of ‘his Oxen’, and when rain threatens worries for ‘his new-mown Hay’. Urs’la the kitchen maid, in love with the unresponsive Roger, works entirely for him, not for the Family on the other side of the door. ‘For you my Pigs resign their morning due’, she cries to his snoring form slumped across the kitchen table (emphases except for Roger’s name added):
My hungry Chickens lose their Meat for you:
And was it not, Ah! Was it not for thee,
No goodly Pottage would be dress’d by me.
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 a part.
To employ a poetical maid was a fashionable thing to do and literacy in a cook was certainly a useful commodity; but perhaps these factors did not outweigh the discomfort of realising that the servants might live an autonomous life in your kitchen, quite independent of what law and legal theory said they were: mere aspects of your own personality, exercising your own (unused) capacity to turn spits and collect eggs, as kinds of proxy.19 And as for the cultural clout associated with the possession of a literary servant, perhaps many less-elevated employers than Lady Kingsborough discovered that it was all very well sending to London for a glamorous and recently published philosophical governess to tutor her daughters on the Irish estates; you might indeed be doing your best by the girls in employing Mary Wollstonecraft; but she would turn out to be obdurately and infuriatingly her Self, alienating the affections of the children, unassailably disapproving of your fondness for pugdogs, flirtatious with the gentlemen in the drawing-room, and possessed of a large and (to the gentlemen) alluring bosom and a demandingly overdeveloped sensibility. If we may attribute to Lady Kingsborough a sentiment she could not have voiced – certainly did not voice in this manner – Impossible! Not what I pay her for!20 But in a smaller, far more modest household a mistress might welcome a literary – or at least a literate – servant. Writing skills were particularly useful in a cookmaid, for the purposes of reckoning and accounting, as already mentioned, but also because they were a means by which – when she left, as she surely would – you could get to keep some of the skills and abilities you had acquired access to at the hiring.21 She might leave you a recipe for Banbury Cheese, for example, instructing you in writing that ‘Madam the Season for making Bambory Chess is from Lamos to all Holontids Let your veats be A bout A inch & a hf Dress and Scald with whay and water mixed from Lamos to mickelmas …’, going over the finer points of the instructions several times in tagged-on afterthoughts.22 A writing maid might be able to exercise your skills in managing farm and other outdoor servants during your absence, as Molly Wood did for her mistress Frances Hamilton, when the latter departed for six weeks holiday in Wells at Christmastide 1786. Molly started as she had been instructed to go on, in Mrs Hamilton’s day book: ‘1786 Dec 31 meer went For Coal to Taunton Thos clove wood & Cleand best nives Edward pick sticks brought down Saw dust From the Sapit’.23 Full written instructions had been left on the previous pages. Now, all through January 1787, Molly Wood exercised her mistress’s capacities in literacy and household management, which is what the law said her position as servant embodied: she was Mrs Hamilton’s proxy, or prosthesis, during this month, in writing.
It is not known whether or not Elizabeth Hands, whose poetry is the focus of this chapter, worked as a cook, only that before her marriage and the birth of her daughter in 1785 she was a servant to at least one Warwickshire family, in the north of the county between Coventry and Rugby.24 And yet her reading of the professional cookery manuals is inscribed in her poem ‘On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Maid’, with the ability to make the ‘ragou’ that Miss Pines thinks would be really useful knowledge in a maid.25 An assertion of plain English taste has been discerned in the work of authorial women cooks of this period, an endorsement of simple, clear flavours, and of cookbooks ‘not stuffed with a nauseous hodge-podge of French kickshaws’, as Ann Peckham assured readers hers was not.26 As English cooking style moved away from debased versions of court cuisine, to production of the French sort à la mode and on the cheap, many cooks (the shock-troops of culinary change) contemplated the ragout.27 Martha Bradley, like Ann Peckham, thought that it typified the French way of mixing together so many ingredients that purity of flavour was lost. And yet she had several recipes for ragoux and perhaps her ‘To Ragoo a Breast of Veal’ had penetrated the poetic imagination if not the kitchens of central Warwickshire by 1789. Bradley gave detailed instructions for ragoo-ing a cut of fresh meat, a recipe written in the teeth of her opinion that ‘the French, who never know when to stop, serve up a Capon [for example] … with a rich Raggoo about it, but this is a Confusion, and the Taste of one Thing destroys another’.28 It is economical English home cooking that the fictional Mrs Domestic is after, the using-up of leftovers and the making of ersatz champagne, not fully Frenchified dishes; Elizabeth Hands makes sure you know this, just as she makes sure the reader knows that the servant ‘who wrote on a Wedding some very good lines’ is herself, for six verses ‘On a Wedding’ are to be found some thirty pages on, in the real volume that the ladies and gentlemen in the drawing room have just seen advertised (in the real Coventry Mercury), and that you, now, hold in your hands.29 Hands knows that you – the reader – will know that the bean dish on which Mrs. Domestic is complimented (‘ “Your haricots, ma’am, are the best I e’er eat … may I venture to beg a receipt?” ’) was actually cooked by her maid, though you may have doubts about her production of poetry. Hands does not need to labour either of these points (Supposition II, l.60–71). It is Hands’ knowingness and her control of it, for fashioning into a good joke, that astonishes. Modern critics have scarce got the measure of the insubordination – the barefaced cheek, the nerve of it – that the two ‘Suppositions’ imply (at least to social historians whose understanding of female domestic service in this period is framed by the pathos and melodrama – the knowledge of gender and labour exploitation – taught us by the last half century of labour and women’s history). There is simply not a way of concluding that these two poems were ‘offensive to none’; they are – surely – intentionally offensive, and wonderfully so.30 Hands appears to have got away with a sustained satire on bourgeois and gentry manners and to have laughed heartily at her employers’ pretensions to literary taste as well as at the mean-mindedness of their cuisine. The maidservant watching them knows more than they do.
Roger Lonsdale, who first brought Hands to modern critical attention by including the ‘Death of Amnon’ and other pieces from her volume in his Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989), remarked that Hands expected ‘Amnon’ to disconcert her social superiors.31 Of the two much more discomforting ‘Suppositions’, Clifford Siskin – he calls them ‘extraordinary’ – has convincingly argued that the sublime trick of the second (‘on … the Book Having Been Published and Read’) works precisely because the two ‘Suppositions’ were not read, just as ‘Amnon’ was not read. Hands shows the gentlemen and ladies in the parlour discussing at length ‘precisely those books – from the Bible to “Poems” by a “poor servant maid” [which] they have never read’ and never will read.32 Hands’ textual control appeared to extend to her reviewers, and Richard Clough in the Gentleman’s Magazine opened his assessment by recalling ‘A Wag of our acquaintance’ who, ‘coming into a bookseller’s shop in the country, where subscriptions were taken in for the benefit of this poetess, burst out [with] … “The Death of Ammon”! Who the devil is this Ammon? Hah! I have read a great many books, but never met with the “Death of Ammon” before” ’.33 ‘Amnon’ is spelled incorrectly in the heading to the review as well, a gloriously accidental joke by the compositor, probably. Hands did indeed give her reviewers most of their lines. ‘Let Mrs. Hands be the judge in her own cause’ said the Monthly Review; ‘in the words of Miss Rhymer and the honest old Rector … “There are various subjects indeed:/With some little pleasure I read all the rest,/But the Murder of Amnon’s the longest and best”.’34
Amnon was reviewed not so much for the novelty of a servant’s writing, but because a woman – perhaps because a plebeian woman – treated of a subject so portentous and elevated (and on ‘a delicate theme’, observes Captain Bonair in Supposition II). ‘ “Tis a Scripture tale, ma’am – he’s the son of King David” ’, explains the old Rector:
Quoth Madam, ‘I have it;
A Scripture tale? – ay – I remember it true;
Pray, is it I’ th’ Old Testament or the New?
If I thought I could readily find it, I’d borrow
My housekeeper’s Bible, and read it tomorrow’.
‘’Tis in Samuel, ma’am’, says the Rector: – Miss Gaiety
Bowed, and the Reverend blushed for the laity.
Supposition II, l.45–9.
Hands transmuted Amnon’s desire for his sister Tamar, his rape of her, and his consequent death at the hands of their vengeful half-brother Absalom (2 Sam. 13) into blank verse, considered to be the noblest of metrical forms by contemporary literary theorists.35 Her theme was important (as well as delicate): 169 of her 1,200 subscribers were clerical gentlemen, including members of Oxford and Cambridge colleges and two Bishops, though this high proportion may have had more to do with the networking skills of Hands’ sponsor Philip Bracebridge Homer than with their interest. (Yet Hands anticipated interest, in the shape of her ‘Reverend old Rector’.) Homer was classics master at Rugby school, had studied at Oxford, and maintained an extensive clerical and literary acquaintance – ‘a community of interest’ in John Brewer’s terms.36 To subscribe to such a publishing enterprise was in the first place a charitable act: the Gentleman’s Magazine hoped that monetary homage to the poetical talents of a blacksmith’s wife might ‘make the remainder of her life comfortable to herself and family’.
This was indeed how Elizabeth Hands had first been presented to the reading public, as a deserving – and talented – case: ‘Had the poetical Fancy derived any Assistance from Education, She would probably have stood high in the Rank of female Writing … but She has had no opportunities of Improvement, except for the careful Perusal of Books, which she was permitted to make Use of in the Families to which she was a Servant, and from the gradual Purchase of a Few, as her Finances could afford it.’37 Recognition of her talent was also an act of approbation – this was evident to all reviewers – of character and merit in Mrs Hands, measured by the ‘uncommonly numerous list of subscribers’, and the ‘extraordinary patronage’ of ‘persons of rank and consideration’ that it showed.38 Thirty-one members of the nobility subscribed (including the former Lord Chief Justice, William Earl of Mansfield and his family of legitimate and illegitimate nieces at Ken Wood);39 and seven members of parliament, including Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, bishops as already enumerated (plus the Dean of Canterbury), the Poet Laureate, the President of the Royal Society, the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, Anna Seward. Over 400 subscribers came from Warwickshire (about 600 from the Midlands counties including its major towns and cities), but it sold in London as well (90 subscribers) and extraordinarily well in Oxford and Cambridge. It was popular in Norfolk, and got as far north as Leeds.
It is not very likely that Edmund Burke or Lord Mansfield read the volume when it was sent out to subscribers in September 1789.40 The Newdigates of Arbury, Warwickshire (Sir Roger and his wife sent in five shillings for the larger, superior version), kept a careful log of their library during these years, recording books as they came in and those lent out to friends; The Death of Amnon does not appear on their lists.41 They had perhaps merely received the object by which they supported a deserving case of ‘elevated genius’ in a ‘poor serving maid’.42 Homer had told the Gentleman’s Magazine reviewer (he was assiduous in getting her noticed as well as in recruiting subscribers) that there was ‘no woman poet, in this age, from whom he [had] received so much entertainment’, and he certainly had read it. (Though one wonders about how much space and opportunity there was for Hands to slip off to the Mercury offices and have material inserted that Homer had not seen. We simply do not know how far his editorial grasp reached.) Homer was a poet himself and keenly interested in prosody. In his published work and private poetic musings he never attempted the heroic, Miltonic metre, and produced no blank verse on topics tragic and elevated. In The Garland he apostrophised many a flower, but scarce looked at one, contenting himself with listing their attributes and associations.43 Privately, for some ‘sweet maiden of the Leame’ (the River Leam runs through what was then Leamington Priors and is now Leamington Spa), he struck ‘again, the golden wire’. But he cared about poetry and spent much time translating Latin verse into English and composing his own. We should at least entertain the notion that he knew that Elizabeth Hands could do something that he could not do himself; that he recognised poetic talent where he saw it.44 The Gentleman’s Magazine thought him generous in precisely this way, ‘not jealous or envious of any who aim to attend the Heliconian hill, and particularly attentive to female merit’. Bertie Greatheed, to whom Amnon was dedicated, may have promoted Hands for the same reasons, certainly among his very grand family: seven members of its Midlands branches subscribed to it, and he purchased a further seven volumes for himself. His mother was a daughter of the Duke of Ancaster, his wife an Ancaster niece; he wrote plays and poetry and the family had promoted talent in the serving class before.45 In the 1770s, a very young Sarah Siddons (Sally Kemble as was) had been his mother’s maid, and continued to visit the Greatheed family at the Guy’s Cliffe estate just outside Warwick well into the nineteenth century.46 Dramatic and poetic talent might exist in a plebeian woman, as far as he was concerned.
Why might a woman like Elizabeth Hands choose to write poetry rather than prose narrative? Our assumption as historians is still that someone like her would more likely first inscribe some version of ‘I’ upon the page, accounting for a hard-won individuality by reference to a range of available religious models for a life-story.47 ‘Why poetry?’ is not a question asked about the working-class writers whose work continues to be discovered. Modern scholars properly acknowledge the compulsion to write poetry: Donna Landry says that Mary Leapor appears to have written not because she could make verses but because she could not not write verse.48 But even Jonathan Bate’s biography of John Clare, extraordinary testimony to the extraordinary difficulties facing a working man who wanted to write, does not ask ‘why write poetry?’ For Clare there was lack of time, of space, of a surface on which to rest a scrap of paper, of the paper itself, and of writing implements. An unannounced call from an interested reader (and social superior) eager to discuss the lyric form had to be attended and might cost him a day’s wages. Clare wrote when and where he could, in fields, resting by roadsides, and on what he could; before his madhouse years, paper was much harder for him to come by than it was in Elizabeth Hands’ or Christian Tousey’s kitchens.
Poetry itself, from the Bible, and in the language of the hymnal and the psalter, shaped a basic instruction in literacy, certainly for the poorer sort, though children of all ranks and stations encountered it when learning to read. Presenting a child who is having difficulty learning to read with verse was a strategy of instruction discovered by educators and psycholinguists of the 1970s.49 Many unrecorded and inventive – or despairing – teachers may have made this discovery from the seventeenth century onwards, when printed verse in the vernacular became widely available. Verse looks easy on the page, unlike intimidating blocks of densely set prose. Wide margins, relatively short lines, space for the eye to rest between stanzas, all help an initial reader in the visual processing necessary for understanding that in some way, letter-marks relate to what can be voiced. Verse is short and semantically self-contained; its form is much less socially ramified than the novel – though for the later eighteenth century the novel cannot be our point of comparison. Neo-literates may have held in their hands a chapbook almanac or fortune teller, a Protestant conversion narrative, a ghost story, or the latest Seven Champions of Christendom, hot off the Banbury press in 1771; but not a triple-decker proto-gothic novel, which in any case operated by social and textual conventions that were probably incomprehensible to uncertain early readers. Poetry usually inscribes smaller and more independent units of thought than does fictional prose narrative. This point applies to six lines from, or indeed, the whole twelve books of Paradise Lost (or to a Canto of The Death of Amnon) as much as it does to ‘The Death of Cock Robin’: rhyme, metre, assonance, and figurative devices hold groups of lines together, as units of perception and understanding. Above all, rhyme (to a lesser extent, alliteration and assonance) provides a powerful regularity to support the good guessing by which any young (or inexperienced) reader proceeds. But it is highly unlikely that John Clare, or Christian Tousey, or Mary Leapor – that any eighteenth-century child – was formally instructed in reading by means of poetry. Rather, what we know about much later reading acquisition in English society alerts us to the resource a child might have found in the mass circulation of verse in the eighteenth century. After the printed sermon-collection, poetry was probably the most widely available genre of writing.50 For those who held a volume of poetry or ballad sheet in their hands, it was a bridge between the world of the book and a resonant oral culture in which newly invented poetry, oral and written, served to celebrate and affirm many social occasions and cultural connections (she ‘wrote on a Wedding some very good lines’).51 Many a recently discovered plebeian poet of the eighteenth century was a really useful social item, in the way of Elizabeth Hands’ writing a carillon for a wedding. Christopher Jones, the announcement of whose Miscellaneous Attempts (1782) in Jopson’s Coventry Mercury may have set Elizabeth Hands a-thinking about how she might make some money (or simply, that she could do it too) produced verse on national events (war, naval victories, responses to ‘Parliamentary Intelligence’ in the press) and local ones ‘On the Death of …’ many a provincial notable, productions that must in their own way have been ‘useful again and again’, for they were what was required at a wake and the funeral bard’s metrical blueprint was infinitely re-usable.52 Poetry was a form of language available to the literate, the non-literate, and the vastly complex set of abilities between the two that pertained in any English community: it has been noted that Alexander Pope, who was only really cruel about the thresher-poet Stephen Duck on one occasion (and that when Queen Caroline had suggested him for the laureateship), said that his published verse was only what you could find in any country village.53 For children and other literacy learners in those communities, poetry provided an immediate form to work with, in the written language.
We do not know for certain how these plebeian poets were taught to read; but we can say that when it was formally done it was by some version of the syllabic method. A child – or young adult learner – was expected to learn the alphabet (how not? The alphabet was sublime and/ or God-given, the key to unlock all understanding),54 that is, they must get by heart the letter names, rather than the sounds the letters represent. Rather rapidly (and sometimes, if nineteenth-century evidence is anything to go by, in parallel, for you could recite the alphabet on a daily basis for years in a village school, whilst doing quite other and sophisticated things with the written word) the learner was introduced to the phonetic qualities of the twenty-six letters by articulating strings (primers usually printed them in rows) of syllables: ba–ca–da–fa– … building these up into units that conveyed meaning as do bat–cat–dash–fat … and then gaining further experience of letter sounds (and the variety of sounds that might be conveyed by the same letter) by combining syllables.55 After this, as might be supposed, the primers took wildly divergent approaches, for as contemporary language theorists were at pains to point out, English is not organised at the structural level by syllabification, but rather by stress, that is by the irregularly falling emphasis of the human (English) voice in articulation.56 Poetic rhythm encapsulates the essential features of any particular language. The suggestion here is that the syllabic method of literacy teaching may have allowed children and other learners a direct access to understanding the rhythmic structure of English, by allowing them to play with its sound system.
The repeated reading aloud and chanting of syllables provided a key to unlock the reading process, or at least James Beattie thought so; he was very keen that children should be made to pronounce each syllable distinctly (but naturally! a hard combination indeed!) when reading aloud.57 All of this method involved voicing: the runs of syllables (and, sometimes, the wild nonsense of their conjunction) were said out loud, often – we must presume this – in chorus with other children. This may be seen as a kind of formalised speech-play, or echo of a baby’s first babbling, mapping what many learners knew already (albeit unconsciously) about the organisation of their spoken language.58 In some refinements of the syllabic method (it seems in some early nineteenth-century Lancastrian-inspired schools for poor children) other sensory support for playing about with syllables (of finding out more about what you already knew about language) was offered, pupils being asked to repeat them again and again whilst tracing ba–ab, bat–tab … in trays of sand with a finger.59
What can be said about the syllabic method (which has to be assumed for the main part, from printed instructional and fragmentary autobiographical material) is that a method of literacy teaching may have affected thinking about poetry, not least because it connected with oral culture and a child’s individual experience of language through early speech development. Syllabic methods of literacy instruction may influence a child to play with rhyme and rhythm (ba–bat–batch–bachelor/run fast to catch her). Much later phonic methods of teaching the child to recognise sounds first may possibly have favoured alliteration and the avoidance of rhyme. But this is truly uncharted territory. It’s worth observing, however, that syllables are perceptually salient; how very much a syllabic method of teaching may have underscored the thinginess, the real existence of bat and cat and mat, as entities in the world and of language, in a way that learning that ‘buh’ is the sound with which bat begins, is not to learn of something perceptually real, in the same way. We can also note the very great opportunity for play (some would say for prosody, and some would say for parody) that the method allowed; and then we should look at the poetry that was – perhaps – produced out of it.
A working-class poet, writing at the very end of the eighteenth century, offers an answer to the question: ‘Why poetry?’ The answer was detailed, spelling out the poetic form, the metre, and the rhyme scheme that Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) chose, as well as reasons for his choice. He described a spell of shoemaking in London in the 1790s, away from his Suffolk home and family. In May 1796, he started to compose what would be published as The Farmer’s Boy whilst he worked at his bench, completing it in November 1797.60 He composed all of it and committed it to memory before writing it down between May and November of that year. The final version was dated 22 April 1798.61 Why poetry? Why rhyming couplets, in fact, of mainly iambic pentameters? ‘Nine tenths of it was put together as I sat at work’, he wrote in September 1798, ‘where there were usually six of us’:
No one in the house has any knowledge of what I have employed my thoughts about when I did not talk I chose to do it in rhime for this reason; because I found allways that when I put two or three lines together in blank verse, or something that sounded like it, it was a great chance if it stood right when it came to be wrote down, for blank verse has ten-syllables in a line, and this particular I could not adjust nor bear in memory as I could rhimes.62
Of course, had Bloomfield read Beattie’s Theory of Language or one of the many technical guides to English prosody available, he would have known that whilst the five-stress line of English blank verse may have ten syllables, that is not the correct way of analysing it, which is by stress: five strong stresses make an iambic line, each strong stress preceded by a weak one.63 (W. H. Aden had much to say about these historic matters of syllable, stress, metre, and meaning, as we shall see.) The iambic pentameter is, as many an eighteenth-century theorist pointed out, a highly encapsulated item of information about the way in which English works as a system of sound and articulation – the ‘most natural’ to it, in their terms (or in the modern scholar’s terms: ‘Poetic rhythm is a heightening and exploitation of the rhythm of a particular language’).64 Yet Bloomfield concentrated on rhyme and on syllables; he valued them because both allowed him to remember what he had composed, in a way that blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters) did not.65 Commenting on a much later aficionada of syllabic verse, Auden speculated on the childhood sources of her poetics, thought her similar ‘mistake’ about the iambic pentameter to be glorious. ‘No questioning of how … [Marianne Moore] came to write her syllabic verse has yet succeeded in eliciting … an explanation which does not mystify still further … I strongly suspect that she owes her discovery to providential ignorance, that, when as a child she first read traditional English verse, she noticed that metrically equivalent lines contained, normally, the same number of syllables, but did not notice (and was never told) that they also contained the same number and same kind of [metric] feet. O blessed mistake!’66 ‘The blessed mistake’ was Bloomfield’s too. We should also note that it evidently never occurred to him to compose prose narrative. For an autobiography, any kind of fictional narrative, a diary entry, a recipe – whatever – you really do need to have a writing implement in hand and something to write on, there and then. When you do not have these tools, you cannot really write.
Most proletarian poets ‘wrote’ like Robert Bloomfield. John Clare did not take paper and portable ink-pot to the field or the limekiln (though he once, memorably, wrote a fragment on his hat-band – with a pencil we must presume – whilst in a field).67 Labour occupies hands; you must compose in your head, using aural rather than visual memory; this is what Bloomfield said. And it was the same for the ploughman, the thresher, the journeyman weaver, the young woman sweeping out the parlour, the cook making a ragout of veal. But in the kitchen there were surfaces to rest on; there was paper of a sort around, and perhaps something to write with (anyway, you could always whip up a little ersatz ink, from soot, and scrapings from an iron pot and some very strong tea) alongside the elderflower champagne. And the gall bladder of a recently eviscerated chicken would have been useful for fixing your ink … Cooking processes are irregularly timed and leave moments for composition. No wonder that the cook it was who wrote.
When Robert Bloomfield’s first editor saw the manuscript of The Farmer’s Boy he was worried that ‘seeing it divided into the four Seasons’ the author was attempting – as so many ‘so injudiciously and unhappily’ had – to transmute James Thomson’s best-seller, ‘that noble Poem [The Seasons] from Blank Verse into Rhime; … from its own pure native Gold into an alloyed metal of incomparably less splendour, permanence and worth’.68 Blank verse had very high status in eighteenth-century English prosody; when its splendours were extolled it was usual to remind readers that it was the form of choice for Shakespeare and Milton. Elizabeth Hands’ ‘Death of Amnon’ commanded attention because the unrhymed pentameters suggested – as Jopson’s Coventry Mercury pointed out – ‘elevated genius’ in one so low, and it was on her ability to sustain the heroick style that her reviewers judged her: ‘if here and there an unequal line has insinuated itself into the five cantos of this heroic poem … we must pardon the inexperienced Muse, and consider it as more than compensated by the sentiments conveyed in the whole’.69 The rest of the volume, its ‘miscellaneous articles’ and the two ‘Suppositions’, would be read by Mrs Hands’ subscribers ‘without the severity of criticism’ – meaning exactly the opposite. In more judgemental mode, The Analytical Review designated all the pieces, including Amnon, ‘singsong’.70 Most of them actually are singsong, a less elevated way of describing the iambic tetrameter than did Beattie, but in line with modern accounts of metre and meaning in English prosody. Discussing Chartist and other nineteenth-century poetry of labour, Anne Janowitz has revealed ‘a dialectic within English poetry of a fundamentally oral stress (four-beat) metre and the syllable stress (five-beat) metre of artifice, that is, print culture’.71 For Derek Attridge, English poetics, all of it, is determined by a division into four-beat and five-beat systems: ‘five-stress poetics is determined by its difference from the plurality of four-stress metres’. Four-stress metres in written poetry provide ‘the simplest and strongest rhythmic patterns’, infinitely open to speech-like rhymes. The five-beat line’s special character is due to the way it resists the four-beat line: this ‘helps explain its widespread use in literary verse … and its virtual absence in popular verse which tends to prefer more salient rhythms’.72 Rhythm in poetry ‘works’, says Attridge, not because of any inherent quality, but because of the literary culture in which it poetry gets written and read and the modes of understanding the society provides.73 As we have seen, eighteenth-century society provided hierarchies of knowledge about the rhythmic patterns and rhyme schemes chosen by its poets, labouring or otherwise. This was information transmitted in a highly codified technical language, which needed instruction to be understood (tetrameter, pentameter, trimeter, and so on; trochee, dactyl … and so on).74 Some scholars writing recipes for poetry still think, as they did in the eighteenth century, that these descriptive terms are necessary (or perhaps actually useful) for conveying knowledge about poetic techniques; or at least did so until the revolutionary proposals of Meter and Meaning that ‘rhythm in English poetry is realized by the alternation of beats and offbeat’, and that this is how we should describe it, abandoning the hallowed terms derived from Classical poetics.75
From 1771 onwards there was a hymn of praise to the rhythmic resources of the English language to be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and many other handbooks and guides: there is just so much cadence, rhythm, stress, so many words and sounds available to English-language poets. The availability of emphasis (stress) in English was the means ‘whereof … a necessary union between sounds and sense … in versification, unknown to the ancients’ was effected.76 There was the very high cultural status of blank verse, as we have seen, and a certain sneering at the four-beat (‘singsong’) line. In fact, Elizabeth Hands’ use of the iambic tetrameter reveals that not all of the gentry gathered in the drawing room are quite up to date in their literary criticism (or that the old Rector retains his own strong links with oral poetry and commonsense critical principles):
‘That “Amnon”, you can’t call it poetry neither,
There’s no flights of fancy, nor imagery either;
You may style it prosaic, blank verse at the best;
Some pointed reflections, indeed, are expressed;
The narrative lines are exceedingly poor.’
Supposition II, l. 102–107.
This is indeed clever, in its punning on ‘prosaic’ in order briefly to say exactly what is meant in regard to poetics, prosody, and want of knowledge of both in the Rector and the general company. And we are obliged to ask whether or not the Rector knew about the high literary and cultural value of blank verse, for this is not the critical response of a well-educated gentleman. Had he not read his Beattie? Nor Joseph Priestley, on the theory of language? Perhaps it was unlikely that a Church of England clergyman would read a Unitarian. But then, Priestley was but 20 miles away in Birmingham, active nerve centre of propositional scientific knowledge and propositional and prescriptive knowledge about poetry.77 Elizabeth Hands’ characterisation of the Rector allows her readers (still) to think these things. It is very clever indeed. The eruption into printed and published verse of a resonant and still largely shared oral culture by the socially despised tetrameter was commented on thus by Elizabeth Hands:
‘Who’, says Lady Pedigree, ‘can this girl be?
Perhaps she’s descended from some Family – ’ …
‘I know something of her’, says Mrs Devoir;
‘She lived with my friend Jack Faddle, Esq.
‘’Tis some time ago, though; her mistress said then
The girl was excessively fond of a pen;
I saw her, but never conversed with her, though:
One can’t make acquaintance with servants, you know’.
‘’Tis a pity the girl was not bred to high life’,
Says Mr Fribello. – ‘Yes, – then’, says his wife,
‘She doubtless might have wrote something worth notice’.
‘’Tis pity,’ says one – says another, ‘and so ’tis’.
‘O law!’ says young Seagram, ‘I’ve seen the book, now
I remember; there’s something about a mad cow’.
‘A mad cow! – ha, ha, ha’, returned half the room.
‘What can y’expect better?’, says Madam du Bloom.
Supposition I, l. 72–9; and ‘Written, originally extempore, on seeing a Mad Heifer run through the Village where the Author lives.’
There is no scandal here in Elizabeth Hands living with Jack Faddle, Esq. This was the conventional way of describing the contract to serve clinched at the hiring, as in ‘NB Jonathan if he lives wth me to June 1796 is to have £2 2s 0d’.78 However, there is possibly a frisson of misbehaviour among the better sort, hinted at by Hands. Why is Jacky Faddle Mrs Devoir’s ‘friend’? Why does she slip – so effortlessly that you have to pay it attention – from Mr to Mrs Faddle, as if trying to cover something up? Why is Jacky Faddle called Faddle in the first place? (To faddle: v. tr., v. intr. – To pet, to fondle, to make much of; to play about with [1755].)
In the later eighteenth century, the organisation and agencies of literacy affected the most far-flung parts of the British Isles. Knowledge travelled fast, often by the movement of skilled artisans, by print communication and newly developed transportation systems; the cost of moving around Britain decreased in this period. By the 1760s, most of Britain received mail daily, and much of what the mail delivered was newspapers. The mid century also saw the end of law Latin, and a more general end to Latin’s dominance as a mode of communication. Descriptive and taxonomic systems were standardised over a wide range of print products. Many a worker was provided with the means to visualise methods and techniques of making something by handbooks and manuals – and we should include here the cook in the kitchen perusing the latest how-to information on the ragout.79 Poetry and knowledge about poetry spread in the same way, allowing people to become familiar with the way it looked on the page. This seeing altered prosody, says Attridge. This observation inscribes a history for eighteenth-century writing in general, and poetry in particular, because the ‘gradually increasing importance of the visual dimension’ accelerated wildly for new audiences along the lines of communication laid down by an expanding book trade.80 Technical knowledge about poetry was available to those (like Robert Bloomfield and Elizabeth Hands) who probably did not read the manuals and guides provided by high literary culture. The suggestion here has been that these poets ‘discovered’ or intuited this knowledge for themselves, out of their experiences in literacy learning, and that the syllabic method of teaching drew their attention to the rhythmic potentialities of language in a highly specific way. In describing the spread of technical and scientific knowledge during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Joel Mokyr has said that it does not matter if propositional knowledge is incorrect by later standards: if you can japan a piece of metal, lustre the motif on a teacup – or write a poem; not his example – with that knowledge, then it is good enough to be going on with. And Elizabeth Hands’ knowledge about poetry as a technology of language may have come from her reading: she and several commentators mentioned the free access she had been given to household libraries in her various places. But her knowledge (her technical know-how) also came from her own reflection on the language system she employed and the heightened cognitive means that a poetic system (oral or written) provides.
From the time of classical antiquity, commentators have bemoaned the inadequacies of writing for expressing meaning.81 A piece of written language may be a reasonable model of what a speaker said, but it is pretty useless for conveying what the speaker meant. Writing systems have great difficulty in capturing the prosodic features of speech: intonation, loudness or softness of volume, or voice quality. Spoken utterances imply, hint, insinuate; they also assert and define. Written language can do the last two; it cannot easily do the first three. It cannot readily indicate its hidden and intended meanings, as speech can. Writing, to say it at its most definitive and forceful, lacks illocutionary force.82 Or does it?
‘Some whimsical trollop most like’, says Miss Prim,
‘Has been scribbling of nonsense, just out of a whim,
And, conscious it neither is witty or pretty,
Conceals her true name, and ascribes it to Betty’.
Supposition I, l.41–4.
The illocutionary force here comes from the device of irony, to be sure; but also from the present-ness, the now-ness, that the rhythmic structure (the four-beats) forces out of this utterance. David Olson describes the slow and gradual evolution of punctuation marks, the way in which, across many writing systems, punctuation attempts to give writing the illocutionary force it lacks.83 Printers’ type draws attention to the phrasing and emphasis of spoken language, to its syntactic structure, and to its sound system; it is a device for making meaning (or the intention of the speaker) plainer, by drawing attention to the rhythmic and phonetic structure of the language, by simply showing what the voice did, where it paused, stopped, trailed away, or made emphasis. Poetry – metrical composition – certainly in the few poets we have considered here, allowed a writer to do the same thing as punctuation. That is to say, poetic composition brought into writing the pauses and emphases of spoken language, tone and timbre of voice: the means to hear or reckon meaning.84
Elizabeth Hands’ poetry gives the historian access to a ferment of inquiry and investigation into language and the question of how it worked. Hands may have had access to this knowledge, by reading or by overhearing, but her verse is also highly articulate evidence of the ways in which craftsmen and women, exercising their skills (in weaving, cooking, and versification), could increase their own knowledge and make technical discoveries that they were not actively prevented from trying out. Indeed, Hands received a good deal of encouragement to do what she did, though we do not know what that encouragement meant. What were they up to, the Warwickshire bon ton, the Midlands tout monde, in letting her get away with it? When Hands wanted us to know something of what she really meant, she chose the iambic tetrameter, and everything it implied about a language and a social system. And some members of the Warwickshire bourgeoisie appear to have known exactly what Hands was up to, and what gentry encouragement of her insubordination meant, albeit fifty years on, albeit in a novel. In her 1833 Constance, Katherine Thomson performed the comic turn – the comic strategy – of having her readers laugh at the servants before they could laugh at their employers (at you and her) with a ‘warning’ scene, encapsulating the belief of employers that their domestics teetered perpetually on the brink of handing in their notice (of giving warning). Thomson set Constance fifty years back in 1780s Warwickshire, in the county town of Warwick – bang slap in the middle of Hands territory – opening with the tea-time ejaculation of a mistress to her servant: ‘ “Thomas … this water don’t boil, Thomas”.’ The narrator continues:
The words conveyed no very important meaning, but they were uttered in a tone so different to the apathetic manner habitual to Mrs Cattell, that her consequential domestic, humoured, as servants were wont to be fifty years ago, did condescend, as he was quitting the room, to turn round and look at her. ‘She is in a fuss – a miff about something’, was Thomas’s internal ejaculation, while his audible expostulation consisted of this laconic reply, ‘This here water do boil, ma’am’ …
‘ “Thomas won’t stand it long, I can tell you, my dear; he’s not a man to be run after, nor interfered with” ’ says her husband a few minutes later, to which she replies ‘ “Bless me, Mr. Cattell, he’s stood it these fifteen years” … “And if I don’t give you satisfaction, – ma’am –” said Thomas, re-entering the room. Thomas well knew that those words always brought his mistress to reason; and setting down the toast at the same time, he retreated, having said, he thought, just enough.’85
W. H. Auden was surely correct when he noted (in 1963) that satire, like Hands’ satire (and maybe Thomson’s historical satire), ‘flourishes in a homogenous society where satirist and audience share the same view as to how normal people can be expected to behave, and in times of relative stability and contentment, for satire cannot deal with serious evil and suffering’.86 Even in the annus horribilis of 1789, the Great Year of Revolution, the curtain sliding open on terrifying social instability, things were homogenous enough for parties on both sides of the drawing-room door to know what the other was up to, to laugh knowingly and pointedly at each other, tittering behind a fan in the parlour, or sniggering up a sleeve in the kitchen. It was cruel, though; a cruelty silently witnessed by the servant’s satire, her rebellious gesture at inequity and condescension; for she knows that if she writes, there maybe someone (maybe, someone like Katherine Thomson) who will read her later, and know what her laughter, at least, actually meant.
A poem, then, was and is a really useful item of social and psychological information. It allows historians to see, just a little bit, what was in the head of their historical subjects, to measure by a small degree their knowledge of the world and the book. To gain some grip on their technical knowledge of writing in general and poetry in particular is at least as useful as knowing about the worker’s performance of the eighteen stages of manufacture that produced Adam Smith’s famous pin, or about the complex, coordinated movement of hands and feet, with cross bar, sinkers, and jack strings that produced the stocking shapes made by a framework knitter, over a fourteen-hour day, and a lifetime. And just as useful as knowing what the cookmaid had to go through to ragout a breast of veal. But W. H. Auden thought that poetic form – ‘Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc.’– were like enough to the poet’s servant as to actually be one.87 We shall now turn to the topic of the poet and his (many) servants.
1 Wiltshire Country Record Office, 776/922A. Household Account Book, kept by Christian Tousey of Salisbury, a cook or housekeeper.
2 Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 212.
3 Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.
4 Ann Walker, A Complete Guide for a Servant Maid; or, the Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem, T. Sabine, London, 1787, pp. 26–27; John Trusler, Trusler’s Domestic Management; or, the Art of Conducting a Family, with Economy, Frugality and Method, J. Souter, London, 1819, p. 88.
5 James Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies. Ideology in Discourses, Falmer, Basingstoke, 1998, p. 59; Goody, Interface, pp. 191–208; Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy. Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN, 1987, p. 264; David R. Olson, ‘Literate Mentalities: Literacy, Consciousness of Language, and Modes of Thought’, Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hilyard (eds), Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 141–151; The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologising of the Word, Methuen, London, 1982; ‘Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought’, Gerd Bauman (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986; Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1981; David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy. Reading and Writing in Modern Europe, Polity, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 92–94.
6 W. H. Auden remembered his childhood rehearsal of the Catechism when in 1961 he wrote that ‘The purpose of all educational institutions, public or private, is utilitarian and can never be anything else; their duty is to prepare young persons for that station in life to which it shall please society to call them.’ W. H. Auden, ‘The Poet as Professor’, Prose Volume IV. 1956–1962, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2010, pp. 317–319; orig. pub. Observer, 5 February 1961. He substituted ‘society’ for the ‘God’ of The Book of Common Prayer: ‘What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour? … [T]o learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state if life, unto which it shall please God to call me.’
7 Anthropologists and psychologists suggest (or until very recently suggested) that she would not have known these things in the way she did, had she not been literate. Olson, World, pp. 20–44; Goody, Interface, pp. 191–195, 209–257; Vincent, Rise of Mass Literacy, pp. 20–25; Graff, Legacies of Literacy.
8 Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969; Dean Ebner, Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, Mouton, The Hague, 1971; Margaret P. Hannay (ed.), Silent But for the Word. Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, Kent State University Press, Ohio OH, 1985; Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism. The Discourse on Childhood, SUNY Press, New York NY, 1989; Elspeth Graham, Elaine Hobby, Hilary Hind, and Helen Wilcox, Her Own Life. Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century English Women, Routledge, London, 1989; Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1989; Effie Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-century Englishwomen’s spiritual diaries. Self-examination, covenanting, and account keeping’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30 (1999), pp. 3–21; Linda Olson, ‘Did Medieval English Women Read Augustine’s Confessiones? Constructing Feminine Interiority and Literacy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Sarah Rees Jones (ed.), Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, Brepols, Turnhout, 2003, pp. 69–96.
9 William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muse: Work, Writing and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830, University of Delaware Press, Newark NJ, 2001.
10 Betty Rizzo, ‘The patron as poet maker. The politics of benefaction’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20 (1990), pp. 241–266.
11 Mary Leapor, Poems on Several Occasions, 2 vols, for the author, London, 1748–1751, in Richard Greene and Ann Messenger (eds), The Works of Mary Leapor, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.
12 Leapor, Works, p. xxix.
13 Madeleine Kahn, ‘Hannah More and Ann Yearsley. A collaboration across the class Divide’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 25 (1996), pp. 203–223; Anne Stott, Hannah More. The First Victorian. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. 73–74; Charles Howard Ford, Hannah More. A Critical Biography, Peter Lang, New York NY, 1996, pp. 71–100.
14 For ordinary people’s understanding and use of the law in this period, Carolyn Steedman, ‘A lawyer’s letter. Everyday uses of the law in early nineteenth century England’, History Workshop Journal, 80 (2016), pp. 62–83.
15 Kahn, ‘Hannah More’, p. 216. Ann Yearsley, ‘Narrative’, Poems on Various Subjects. A Second Book of Poems … by Ann Yearsley, G. G. J. & J. Robinson, London, 1787.
16 Leapor, ‘Crumble Hall’, Works, pp. 206–211, l.110.
17 Leapor, ‘Crumble Hall’, l.176.
18 Jeannie Dalporto, ‘Landscape, labor and the ideology of improvement in Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall” ’, The Eighteenth Century. Theory and Interpretation, 42 (2001), pp. 228–244.
19 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Servants and their relationship to the unconscious’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 316–350.
20 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft. A Revolutionary Life, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 2000, pp. 84–109 for Wollstonecraft’s time on the Kingsborough estate, Mitchelstown, County Cork.
21 Steedman, ‘Servant’s labour’; Michael Symons, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Prospect Books, Totnes, 2001, pp. 27–188; Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class. A Study in Comparative Sociology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, p. 99.
22 Somerset Archives (SA), DD/GB, 148–149, Gore Family Papers. Volume 1, DD/ GB/148: 264, nd (probably 1771).
23 SA, DD/SF, Bishop Lydeard Farming Accounts and Household Accounts, Mrs. Frances Hamilton. Box 7. 2: 63–72.
24 W. K. Riland Bedford, Three Hundred Years of a Family Living, Being a History of the Rilands of Sutton Coldfield, Cornish, Birmingham, 1889, pp. 112–114; Tim Burke (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Labouring Class Poets, Volume III, 1700–1800, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2003, pp. 153–155; Cynthia Dereli, ‘In search of a poet. The life and work of Elizabeth Hands’, Women’s Writing, 8 (2001), pp. 169–182; Caroline Franklin (ed.), The Romantics. Women Poets 1770–1830, Routledge, London, 1996, pp. i–xiii; Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance. Laboring Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 186–209; Jan Fergus, ‘Provincial Servants’s Reading in the late Eighteenth Century’, James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 202–225; Cynthia Dereli, ‘Hands, Elizabeth (bap. 1746, d.1815)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
25 For cookery manuals as used by servants, Carolyn Steedman, ‘Poetical maids and cooks who wrote’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39:1 (2005), pp. 1–27. This chapter is a rewriting and revision of ‘Poetical maids’.
26 Ann Peckham, The Complete English Cook, or, Prudent Housewife, Griffith Wright, Leeds, 1773, Preface.
27 Gilly Lehmann, Women’s cookery in eighteenth-century England. Authors, attitudes, culinary styles’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 305 (1992), pp. 1737–1739; Martha Bradley: The British Housewife: or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s and Gardiner’s Companion, Prospect, Totnes, 1996, ‘Introduction’.
28 Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 37–38, 55–56, 97–98.
29 Elizabeth Hands, The Death of Amnon. A Poem, with an Appendix, containing Pastorals, and other Poetical Pieces, N. Rollason, Coventry, 1789, pp. 47–49 for Supposition I; pp. 50–56 for ‘A Poem, on the Supposition of the Book Having Been Published and Read’ (Supposition II).
30 Dereli, ‘In search’, pp. 169–182, 180; Fergus, ‘Provincial Servants’, p. 224.
31 Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, pp. 422–429.
32 Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing. Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD and London, 1998, p. 221. Landry, Muses, pp. 188–189.
33 ‘Review of New Publications. The Death of Ammon [sic] A Poem; with an Appendix, containing Pastorals and other Poetical Pieces. By Elizabeth Hands’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790), p. 540.
34 ‘Monthly Catalogue for November 1790’, Monthly Review, 179 (1790), pp. 345–346.
35 Franklin, Romantics, p. ix; Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled Upon a New Plan, Bell and C. Macfarquhar, Edinburgh, 1771, ‘Poetry’; Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 7.
36 Birmingham University Library, Special Collections, 1956/V27–27A. Philip Bracebridge Homer, Letters, Papers, Copy of The Garland &c. Birmingham Central Library, Archives Department, Homer425; ‘Accounts of the Births, Deaths and Other Circumstances of the Children of the Rd. Henry Secheverell Homer, Rector of Birdingbury, & Vicar of Willoughby, Warwickshire’; Eric Benjamin Branwell, The Ludford Journals of Ansley Hall, privately printed, 1988, pp. 78–85; Fergus, ‘Provincial Servants’, p. 223; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Harper Collins, London, 1997, pp. 182–183.
37 ‘Proposals for printing by Subscription for the Benefit of the Author’, Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 24 November 1788, p. 3.
38 Rizzo, ‘Patron as poet maker’; Stott, Hannah More, p. 73; Jonathan Bate, John Clare. A Biography, Pan Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 143–192 and passim. Fergus, ‘Provincial Servants’, pp. 223–224.
39 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Lord Mansfield’s women’, Past and Present, 176 (2002), pp. 105–143.
40 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 14 September 1789, p. 3.
41 Warwickshire County Record Office, Newdigate of Arbury, CR 136/A [565]. Notebook of books received and sent out from Arbury; CR 136/A [621] Appointment and Memorandum Diaries.
42 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 23 November 1788.
43 Mary Wollstonecraft noted that Homer’s The Garland ‘contains … common sense, and a few lines which may be termed pretty. We shall select a few verses from the poem addressed to the Crocus.’ Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (eds), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 7. On Poetry. Contributions to the Analytical Review, 1788–1797, Pickering, London, 1989, p. 98.
44 Birmingham Central Library, Special Collection, 1956/V27–27A. Philip Bracebridge Homer, letters, papers &c. Philip Bracebridge Homer, The Garland; A Collection of Poems, C. S. Rann, Oxford, nd [1783]).
45 Corinna Russell, ‘Greatheed, Bertie (1759–1826)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
46 Warwickshire County Record Office, CR1707, Heber-Percy of Guys Cliffe, 1759–1826. Diaries of Bertie Greatheed. CR 1707/116, entry for 10 September 1805; CR 1707/122, entries for 14 and 17 July and 17 November 1818.
47 Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
48 Donna Landry, ‘The Labouring Class Women Poets. “Hard Labour we most chearfully pursue” ’, Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (eds), Women and Poetry, 1660–1750, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 223–243.
49 Marlene and Robert McCracken, Stories, Songs and Poetry to Teach Reading and Writing, American Library Association, London, 1986. W. H. Auden thought the same: ‘Verse, owning to its … mnemonic power, is the superior medium to prose for didactic instruction.’ ‘Introduction to Poets of the English Language’ (orig. W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (eds), 1950), in Prose Volume III. 1949–1955, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008, pp. 103–154; 128–129.
50 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 172.
51 Vincent, Rise of Mass Literacy, pp. 92–94.
52 Charles Jones, The Miscellaneous Poetic Attempts of C. Jones, An Uneducated Journeyman-Woolcomber, for the author by R. Trewman, London, 1781; announced Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 25 August 1783, p. 3; Bridget Keegan (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Laboring Class Poets, 1700–1800. Volume II, 1740–1780, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2003, pp. 303–332.
53 Rizzo, ‘Patron as poet maker’, p. 245.
54 James Beattie, The Theory of Language. In Two Parts: Of the Origin and General Nature of Speech, Strahan, Cadell & Creech, Edinburgh, 1788, p. 16; Thomas Astle, The Origin and Progress of Writing, as Well Hieroglyphic as Elementary, &c, for the author, London, 1784, p. 6.
55 Ian Michael, The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 72–130.
56 Beattie, Theory of Language, pp. 62–64, 66–67; Anon., The Art of Poetry on a New Plan. Illustrated with a great Variety of Examples from the best English Poets, and of Translations from the Ancients, 2 vols, Newbery, London, 1762, Vol. 1, p. 813; Edmund Waller, Ballads and Songs chiefly taken from Dr Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry … with Prolegomena Notes and a Glossary. The Whole collected and published by Theophilis Miller, Kuemmel, Halle, 1793, pp. 32–33.
57 Beattie, Theory of Language, p. 61.
58 Courtney B. Cazden, ‘Play with language and metalinguistic awareness. One dimension of language experience’, International Journal of Early Childhood, 6 (1974), pp. 12–23; Mary Sanches and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Children’s Traditional Speech Play and Child Language’, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (ed.), Speech Play, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelpha PA, 1976; Catherine Garvey, ‘Play with Language and Speech’, Susan Ervin-Tripp and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (eds), Child Discourse, Academic Press, New York NY, 1977.
59 Ronald Morris, Success and Failure in Learning to Read, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 41–46.
60 Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy. A Rural Poem, Vernor and Hood, London, 1800; B. C. Bloomfield, ‘The publication of The Farmer’s Boy by Robert Bloomfield’, The Library, Sixth Series, 15 (1993), pp. 75–94; Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems, John Goodridge and John Lucas (eds), Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, 1998. For shoemaker poets, Bridget Keegan, ‘Cobbling verse. Shoemaker poets of the long eighteenth century’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 42 (2001), pp. 195–217.
61 Bloomfield, ‘Publication of The Farmer’s Boy’, p. 78.
62 British Library, BL Add MS 28.266: 83–84, 85–86, quoted Bloomfield, ‘Publication’.
63 Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning. An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 102–103.
64 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm. An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 3.
65 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry. Its Nature, Significance and Social Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 72, 90–102.
66 W. H. Auden, ‘A Marianne Moore Reader’, Prose Volume IV, pp. 392–395, orig. review of A Marianne Moore Reader, Mid-century, February 1962.
67 Bate, John Clare, pp. 89–109, 451–458.
68 Bloomfield, Farmer’s Boy, p. ii. James Thompson’s The Seasons (1726–1730) was the century’s most influential poem series.
69 Gentleman’s Magazine, p. 540.
70 This review was by Mary Wollstonecraft who declined to ‘lend a hand to support a humble muse, whose chief merit is a desire to please’ because there was quite enough support for her shown by ‘the respectable number of subscribers’ to the volume: ‘if we cannot praise the attempt of a servant-maid of low-degree, to catch a poetical wreath, even after making due allowance of her situation, we will let her sing-song die in peace’. ‘Article 43’, The Analytical Review or History of Literature, Domestic or Foreign, 6 (January–April 1790), p. 98: Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 7, p. 203. But this was kinder than she had been to Phillip Bracebridge Homer; Note 43, above.
71 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, p. 7.
72 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, p. 159; Goodridge and Lucas, Selected Poems, pp. xvi–xvii; Finnegan, Oral Poetry, pp. 90–102.
73 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, p. 11; Finnegan, Oral Poetry, pp. 90–102.
74 See Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry, Oberon, London, 2012, pp. 84–107, on this point: ‘I don’t teach prosody. Iambs, dactyls, spondees, trochees … If you need to know what an anapaest is in a hurry, use Google.’
75 Carper and Attridge, Meter and Meaning.
76 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Poetry’. The celebration continued into the twentieth century: ‘By comparison with French, English seems an anarchic language, but this very anarchy, if it stimulates the proper revolt against it, can give rise to new and living structures. Would Valery, I sometimes patriotically wonder, have finished his poetic career so soon if he had had the vast resources of our tongue, with all the prosodic possibilities which its common syllables permit, to play with?’ W. H. Auden, ‘L’Homme d’Esprit. Introduction to Analects by Paul Valery’, Prose Volume III, pp. 590–596; review written 1955, published Hudson Review, Autumn 1969.
77 Joel Mokyr has proposed a new history of the industrial enlightenment, fuelled by the spread of philosophical propositions about new technology and the ‘how-to-do’ (prescriptive) knowledge that taught workers and their employers how to make, build, and construct. The Gifts of Athena. Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002, pp. 28–77; Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, Faber, London, 2002, pp. 319–323 for Birmingham’s literary and scientific culture.
78 Somerset Archives, DD/FS 5/8. Bishops Lydeard Farm Accounts, 1791–1799.
79 Mokyr, Gifts, pp. 56–76.
80 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, p. 2; Brewer, Pleasures, pp. 125–166.
81 Olson, World, pp. 89–92. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language: Two Essays. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder (Rousseau orig. pub. 1781), University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 1966; A Discourse on Inequality (1755), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1974, pp. 30–37, 101–140, 302–113.
82 Olson, World, pp. 92, 154–155.
83 Olson, World, pp. 190–195.
84 John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, pp. 120–121; Bate, John Clare, pp. 563–578.
85 Katherine Thomson, Constance. A Novel. In Three Volumes, Richard Bentley, London, 1833, Vol. 1, pp. 1–3. Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Thomson, Katherine (1797–1862)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
86 W. H. Auden, ‘Notes on the Comic’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1963, pp. 371–385; this quote p. 384.
87 Auden, Dyer’s Hand, p. 22.