The main features of this land change were; the open field system was abolished; the plow and grazing lands were enclosed; small farms were consolidated into larger ones; new methods and machinery were introduced; and the laborer was separated from the land. It was in this change of rural conditions that the poet John Clare was born and reared—in Northamptonshire, which was a purely agricultural district and felt the misery and universal pauperization that went with the agrarian revolution.
PART II The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)
John Clare was horn in the little village of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, in 1793. His family, one of the poorest in the village, was enrolled in the parish pauper list. When the poet was seven, his father by the greatest privations sent him to a certain “Dame-School”; but the money could not be spared to keep him there very long, and John was hired out to tend the geese and sheep on the commons. He saved up his few pennies during the next two or three years; and again, at the age of ten, went to school for a few months. This was all the formal education that the poet received; for at twelve he was already working regularly in the fields. With hardly strength enough for the slightest labor, so small and weak-armed that his father made him a special flail to thresh with, he must have endured sufferings of body and spirit those years.
When he was thirteen, the reading of Thomson’s “Seasons” led him to believe that he was a poet himself. He had already showed a poetic temperament: as a very young child he had set out one day to walk towards the horizon, that he might touch it. As he grew older he was unusually credulous of supernatural things, fancying all kinds of ghosts and goblins in the swamps ready to attack him. Then, when he read the “Seasons”, he scribbled down on a piece of paper the lines which were afterwards known as “The Morning Walk.” He wrote other verses on scraps of paper which he would stuff into a hole in the wall. When his mother would find them, she used them for lighting the fires. The poet showed some of his verses to a Mr. Thomas Porter living near Helpstone, and was advised to learn grammar. The attempt to do this kept him from writing any more poems for several years.