John Clare essays by John Goodridge
Although Clare and Keats never met or directly corresponded, they were close contemporaries with ... more Although Clare and Keats never met or directly corresponded, they were close contemporaries with much in common, including a publisher and overlapping literary circles and interests. Moreover, they passed messages to each other via their publisher John Taylor, and the evidence suggests a significant level of literary and personal engagement between them. In particular, Clare took a keen interest in Keats's poetry and person in the last year of the latter's life, responding richly and enthusiastically to the 1820 volume, and following Keats's failing health and final journey to Rome with increasing concern and sadness. All this is documented in the correspondence between Clare and Taylor, much of it unpublished, including three hitherto unrecorded letters from Clare to Taylor. This essay, drawing on transcripts of these unpublished materials by Bob Heyes and Emma Trehane, offers a detailed, chronological study of this under-examined but invaluable correspondence between two key Romantic poets.
This is a public lecture that was given thirty years ago in May 1993, at the Literary and Philoso... more This is a public lecture that was given thirty years ago in May 1993, at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, to celebrate the Society’s bicentenary, which coincided with that of the poet John Clare. The lecture suggests that the poet and the Society were both products of the Enlightenment and the intellectual ferment of the late-eighteenth century, of the radical decade of the 1790s. Noting the Society’s historical connections with a number of self-taught poets in Clare’s tradition, the lecture goes on to describe Clare's life and to analyse in detailtwo of his poems, ‘The Lament of Swordy
Well’ and ‘The Yellow Hammers Nest’.
The Ronald Blythe Centenary Lecture, delivered at the John Clare Festival in Helpston, 16 July 20... more The Ronald Blythe Centenary Lecture, delivered at the John Clare Festival in Helpston, 16 July 2022, examines the idea of tradition and by looking at a range of John Clare’s poetry, considers the question of how Clare understood and responded to tradition. Clare is seen in this reading as a writer who both embraces tradition, and welcomes change, surprise and the unexpected. In this I compare him to the great living writer whom the lecture is named for, Ronald Blythe, whose love of the past never prevents him from being open to the new and the surprising,
(This is also being published in two parts in the John Clare Society Newsletter, 147 (February 2023), 4-10, and 148 (June 2023.)
Critical Survey, 1999
Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ was John Clare’s favourite eighteenth-century poem,... more Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ was John Clare’s favourite eighteenth-century poem, one that addresses anxieties he shared: what is a fulfilled life? What is the role of the poet? And how can one reconcile being a writer with being from a class that has not had educational privilege? This essay examines some of Clare’s responses to the poem, in terms of how he adapted and adopted it in his own writing, and gives this some context. It was partly incorporated in revised form into chapter 2 of ‘John Clare and Community’.
The essay was written for my friend John Lucas, and published in a special number of Critical Survey, ‘Poetry in English, 1800-2000: A Special Issue in Honour of John Lucas’.
Romanticism, 1998
This essay was my first attempt to consider the ways in which John Clare records and celebrates a... more This essay was my first attempt to consider the ways in which John Clare records and celebrates a village culture of occasional and festive celebration. It discovers that he does so by contrasting danger and safety, both within the community and as between indoor and outdoor worlds, and that he uses a rich mixture of literary and folkloric sources to build a compelling picture of a community asserting and protecting itself, using ritual and tradition, in a world that grows more dangerous and unpredictable at the autumnal season’s turning.
The title ‘Out There in the Night’ is borrowed from a song title by Peter Perrett, recorded by The Only Ones on their album Even Serpents Shine (CBS, 1979).
The essay was published in Romanticism, 4, no. 2 (1998), 202-11, and further developed in ‘John Clare and Community’.
A related essay on Clare’s unfinished poem ‘Martinmas Eve’ was published in the John Clare Society Journal in 2023.
The Wordsworth Circle, 1998
This essay provides a brief introduction to some of the narrative techniques used by John Clare i... more This essay provides a brief introduction to some of the narrative techniques used by John Clare in his poetry,
It was published in The Wordsworth Circle, 29, no, 3 (1998), 164-7.
Ideas from it were further developed in my study, John Clare and Community.
This essay, based on a talk given at the Cowper & Newton Day held at the Cowper & Newton Museum, ... more This essay, based on a talk given at the Cowper & Newton Day held at the Cowper & Newton Museum, Olney, on April 23rd 2005, reconsiders popular perceptions of William Cowper and John Clare as ‘mad’ poets, examining the various diagnoses of Clare, introducing some of the biographical sources of these, and making brief comparison with the twentieth-century novelist Philip K. Dick, whose writings like Clare’s reflect the loss of a twin sister in infancy. Some remarks about Cowper’s life and writings follow, comparing the ways the two poets each describe in different ways a ‘mad girl’, a familiar figure in Romantic poetry. The essay tentatively concludes that the sensitivity that left Cowper and Clare vulnerable to mental distress also gifted them with a special alertness to others that made them both socially valued and able in their poetry to respond to the external world with a sensitised authenticity.
This brings together two short pieces examining association copies of Clare formerly owned by the... more This brings together two short pieces examining association copies of Clare formerly owned by the late Victorian classicist L.E. Upcott, and the poet and biographer of Thomas Chatterton, E.H.W. Meyerstein.
These three book reviews cover the five volumes of Clare's Poems of the Middle Period edited by E... more These three book reviews cover the five volumes of Clare's Poems of the Middle Period edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson and published by Clarendon Press between 1996 and 2003 to conclude a nine-volume edition of Clare's collected poetry. The reviews contextualise the material and the project, examine issues relating to editing style, and discuss areas of interest in the poems.
They were first published in the BARS Bulletin and Review and in Romanticism,
John Dyer and georgic poetry by John Goodridge
John Dyer, The Fleece, 2019
This is a full scholarly edition of John Dyer's influential and historically important georgic po... more This is a full scholarly edition of John Dyer's influential and historically important georgic poem, The Fleece (1757). The edition offers a rich annotation, especially on Dyer's topographical, historical, agricultural and industrial themes, drawing on, among other things, Dyer's surviving notebooks and manuscripts. The editors are John Goodridge (Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University) and Juan Christian Pellicer (Professor of English, University of Oslo).
Title corrected <Poems> to <Poem> November 2022
Cyder, 2019
This is a full scholarly edition of John Philips's influential georgic poem Cyder (1708), with a ... more This is a full scholarly edition of John Philips's influential georgic poem Cyder (1708), with a particular emphasis on the political, historical and agricultural themes of the poem. The editors are John Goodridge (Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University) and Juan Christian Pellicer (Professor of English, University of Oslo).
This short essay examines one of Herodotus’s ‘amazing stories’, that of the Arabian sheep breed w... more This short essay examines one of Herodotus’s ‘amazing stories’, that of the Arabian sheep breed whose tails were so big that they needed a special wheeled cart to carry them around. Examining a range of different accounts of this sheep, from classical times, to John Dyer’s classic shepherding poem The Fleece (1757), and more recently Bruce Chatwin’s account of Afghanistan, the article concludes that the story appears to be true, vindicating Herodotus, ‘the finest storyteller of the ancient world’.
It was first published in Ad Familiares. A fuller discussion of accounts of the tail-trolleys was published as ‘The Case of John Dyer’s Fat-tailed Sheep and their Tail-trolleys: “a thing to some scarce credible”’, Agricultural History Review, 54, part 2 (2006), pp. 229-39
This paper examines a passage from John Dyer’s poem The Fleece (1757) in which Dyer discusses thr... more This paper examines a passage from John Dyer’s poem The Fleece (1757) in which Dyer discusses three different types of sheep and their appropriate habitats. By carefully comparing the three descriptions with contemporary and modern agricultural sources, the paper concludes that one of the descriptions of sheep is a good but generic description of mountain sheep, a second is a romanticised, classicising ideal, and the third is an accurate and historically quite early description of a prototype of Robert Bakewell’s revolutionary New Leicester breed. The paper concludes with some thoughts on how these varying levels of precision and invention reflect the different ways in which eighteenth-century didactic/georgic poetry selects and presents materials from the observed world.
It is based in a talk given at a conference of the Society for the History of Natural History in 1993. Some of the material was further developed in my study of Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1997, 2005).
Thomas Chatterton by John Goodridge
The poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) greatly influenced the abolitionist movement that emerged ... more The poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) greatly influenced the abolitionist movement that emerged in the next generation. Raised in the major slave-trading city of Bristol, Chatterton’s resistance to slavery echoed his rejection of commercial Bristol, to which his Rowley World provided an imagined alternative. His ‘African Eclogues’ similarly posited a nobler imagined society from which slaves were rudely snatched. This did not go unnoticed in the other great west-coast slaving port, and Edward Rushton was influenced especially in his West Indian Eclogues and in Neglected Genius (1787), his Chatterton tributary poem, which for Joseph Cottle was ‘by far the best poem on the subject of Chatterton’. Chatterton earliest biographer was an important abolitionist and associate of the poets, Revd. George Gregory. This paper considers Chatterton’s influence on the group of working-class abolitionist poets who included John McCreery, Hugh Mulligan, William Roscoe, and Rushton.
This paper was given at ‘New Light on Liverpool’s Radical Romantic Period
Working-class Poets and Intellectuals: A Symposium’, in the Department of English, University of Liverpool, July 2022. It extends and revises my previous paper on Chatterton and the radical Liverpool poets, given at the BARS/NASSR biennial conference, ‘New Romanticisms’, Edge Hill University, August 2022.
Angelaki, 1993
This was my first attempt to link the poets Chatterton and Clare, not just through influence and ... more This was my first attempt to link the poets Chatterton and Clare, not just through influence and echo, but also in the way Clare understood and interpreted Chatterton as a cultural figure, and shared some of his literary instincts, responses and strategies. I missed a few things, and the chapter in Chatterton in my ‘Clare and Community’ book moved it all on a little.
First published in Angelaki, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1993-94), 131-48. This was a special number on ‘Narratives of Forgery’, edited by Nick Groom. This material was further developed in my study of John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2015).
This essay examines the poetry of John Gregory (1831-1922) focusing on his four ‘Sonnets on Chatt... more This essay examines the poetry of John Gregory (1831-1922) focusing on his four ‘Sonnets on Chatterton's Church, Bristol' (1877) and verses ‘Concerning Chatterton' (1908). In the long history of tributary poems to the Redcliffe poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), Gregory's are distinctive. The sonnet sequence celebrates the church that had inspired Chatterton's mock-medieval ‘Rowley' poems, before demanding that its doors be thrown open to re-admit the spirit of the poet, whose statue then stood on unconsecrated ground, reflecting ambivalent local feeling about this perceived ‘forger' and ‘suicide' (an ambivalence that continues). The later poem forms a sequel to the sonnets, bringing the Chatterton statue imaginatively to life so that the earlier poet can make his own posthumous ‘wail' for fairer treatment from his erstwhile community. Predominant in these poems is the desire to re-localise and re-socialise Chatterton's spirit and art. As a radical socialist and a Christian Gregory saw the church, with its fine ring of twelve bells and beautiful medieval craftsmanship, as a place that could inspire those in humble life like Chatterton and himself to ‘look up' and aspire to more, and could reinstate Chatterton's lonely art into the joyfully socialised world of Gregory's political and social milieu. As well as a poet, a shoemaker and a singer-musician, Gregory was a pioneering figure in the development of an independent working-class movement in Bristol, a passionate speaker against capital punishment and war. His call for Chatterton's readmission into Bristol culture is fired with his campaigning instincts and remains relevant.
This is a revised version of a chapter, first published in Literary Bristol: Writers and the City,, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2015).
This is a discursive checklist of poems, novels, plays, paintings, musical and other creative wor... more This is a discursive checklist of poems, novels, plays, paintings, musical and other creative works inspired by the life and works of the poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), Wordsworth's 'Marvellous Boy'. It is a much-expanded and revised second edition, posted to commemorate the 250th anniversary in 2020 of Chatterton's early death in 1770. It has been further revised in December 2024 and will continue to be developed and improved.
This essay examines a ‘unique copy’, passed down through the author’s family, of the Rowley Poems... more This essay examines a ‘unique copy’, passed down through the author’s family, of the Rowley Poems (1777), ‘Supposed to have been written at Bristol…by Thomas Rowley’ in the fifteenth-century; in reality forged (in both senses) by Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), whom Wordsworth would accordingly dub ‘the marvellous boy’. It is discovered that there are at least three such ‘unique’ copies, all written in by, and casting new light on, Chatterton’s publicity-hungry friend George Symes Catcott (1729-1802), as part of his perverse and indefatigable campaign to ‘prove’ that the phantom medieval priest Rowley truly existed and wrote the poems.
Labouring-class Poetry by John Goodridge
This prints and discusses two unpublished poems by the great Scottish vernacular poet Allan Ramsa... more This prints and discusses two unpublished poems by the great Scottish vernacular poet Allan Ramsay (1684-1758), which reflect Ramsay's sociability and charm, as he offers his patron Sir John Clerk some tobacco-pipes and sounding like his great successor Robert Burns declares that wine, not beer, makes for good poetry.
It was first published in The Drouth, 28 (2008), pp. 43-7.
BARS Bulletin and Review, 2013
This is a review of a three volumes edition of the letters of Iolo Morganwyg (Edward Williams, 17... more This is a review of a three volumes edition of the letters of Iolo Morganwyg (Edward Williams, 1746-1846), along with three monographs on this key figure in the history of modern Welsh literature and culture.
Uploads
John Clare essays by John Goodridge
Well’ and ‘The Yellow Hammers Nest’.
(This is also being published in two parts in the John Clare Society Newsletter, 147 (February 2023), 4-10, and 148 (June 2023.)
The essay was written for my friend John Lucas, and published in a special number of Critical Survey, ‘Poetry in English, 1800-2000: A Special Issue in Honour of John Lucas’.
The title ‘Out There in the Night’ is borrowed from a song title by Peter Perrett, recorded by The Only Ones on their album Even Serpents Shine (CBS, 1979).
The essay was published in Romanticism, 4, no. 2 (1998), 202-11, and further developed in ‘John Clare and Community’.
A related essay on Clare’s unfinished poem ‘Martinmas Eve’ was published in the John Clare Society Journal in 2023.
It was published in The Wordsworth Circle, 29, no, 3 (1998), 164-7.
Ideas from it were further developed in my study, John Clare and Community.
They were first published in the BARS Bulletin and Review and in Romanticism,
John Dyer and georgic poetry by John Goodridge
Title corrected <Poems> to <Poem> November 2022
It was first published in Ad Familiares. A fuller discussion of accounts of the tail-trolleys was published as ‘The Case of John Dyer’s Fat-tailed Sheep and their Tail-trolleys: “a thing to some scarce credible”’, Agricultural History Review, 54, part 2 (2006), pp. 229-39
It is based in a talk given at a conference of the Society for the History of Natural History in 1993. Some of the material was further developed in my study of Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1997, 2005).
Thomas Chatterton by John Goodridge
This paper was given at ‘New Light on Liverpool’s Radical Romantic Period
Working-class Poets and Intellectuals: A Symposium’, in the Department of English, University of Liverpool, July 2022. It extends and revises my previous paper on Chatterton and the radical Liverpool poets, given at the BARS/NASSR biennial conference, ‘New Romanticisms’, Edge Hill University, August 2022.
First published in Angelaki, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1993-94), 131-48. This was a special number on ‘Narratives of Forgery’, edited by Nick Groom. This material was further developed in my study of John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2015).
This is a revised version of a chapter, first published in Literary Bristol: Writers and the City,, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2015).
Labouring-class Poetry by John Goodridge
It was first published in The Drouth, 28 (2008), pp. 43-7.
Well’ and ‘The Yellow Hammers Nest’.
(This is also being published in two parts in the John Clare Society Newsletter, 147 (February 2023), 4-10, and 148 (June 2023.)
The essay was written for my friend John Lucas, and published in a special number of Critical Survey, ‘Poetry in English, 1800-2000: A Special Issue in Honour of John Lucas’.
The title ‘Out There in the Night’ is borrowed from a song title by Peter Perrett, recorded by The Only Ones on their album Even Serpents Shine (CBS, 1979).
The essay was published in Romanticism, 4, no. 2 (1998), 202-11, and further developed in ‘John Clare and Community’.
A related essay on Clare’s unfinished poem ‘Martinmas Eve’ was published in the John Clare Society Journal in 2023.
It was published in The Wordsworth Circle, 29, no, 3 (1998), 164-7.
Ideas from it were further developed in my study, John Clare and Community.
They were first published in the BARS Bulletin and Review and in Romanticism,
Title corrected <Poems> to <Poem> November 2022
It was first published in Ad Familiares. A fuller discussion of accounts of the tail-trolleys was published as ‘The Case of John Dyer’s Fat-tailed Sheep and their Tail-trolleys: “a thing to some scarce credible”’, Agricultural History Review, 54, part 2 (2006), pp. 229-39
It is based in a talk given at a conference of the Society for the History of Natural History in 1993. Some of the material was further developed in my study of Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1997, 2005).
This paper was given at ‘New Light on Liverpool’s Radical Romantic Period
Working-class Poets and Intellectuals: A Symposium’, in the Department of English, University of Liverpool, July 2022. It extends and revises my previous paper on Chatterton and the radical Liverpool poets, given at the BARS/NASSR biennial conference, ‘New Romanticisms’, Edge Hill University, August 2022.
First published in Angelaki, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1993-94), 131-48. This was a special number on ‘Narratives of Forgery’, edited by Nick Groom. This material was further developed in my study of John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2015).
This is a revised version of a chapter, first published in Literary Bristol: Writers and the City,, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2015).
It was first published in The Drouth, 28 (2008), pp. 43-7.
First published in Criticism, 47, Number 4 (Fall 2005; pub. 2007), pp. 531-47, special number on ‘Learning to Read in the Long Revolution: New Perspectives on Laboring-Class Poets, Aesthetics, and Politics’, ed. William J. Christmas and Donna Landry.
This is a new edition marking the centenary of Frank Goodridge’s birth (1924-2024)
15 Sept, 2024 - improved and corrected (editions properly listed, etc.) following advice from fellow Clare scholars
Oct 2024 more minor corrections and additions
It was first published in the Robert Bloomfield Society Newsletter.
Updated and corrected 1st October 2024,
Corrected and update March 3rd 2024