13 - John Clare and the British Labouring-Class Tradition

Summary

Attending to the multitude of temporal markers found in Clare’s poetry, this essay argues that his representation of time and his thematic and stylistic experimentation with temporality demonstrate his pivotal place in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring-class poetry. Finding, having, and protecting time to write – asserting writing as an activity (whether conceived of as ‘work’ or as a pastime) for which one could have or take the time – was fundamental for Clare, his predecessors, and successors, to publish at all. Examining the burgeoning awareness of what E. P. Thompson has named ‘work-time discipline’, the essay traces how awareness and time anxiety impacts artistic self-fashioning for poets such as Robert Dodsley, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Bloomfield among others. However, Clare’s work remains an important point of transition for understanding how plebeian poets shaped their artistic identities within increasingly constraining notions of work.