The Ballad of John Clare - Softcover

Hugh Lupton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907650008 ISBN 13: 9781907650000

Publisher: Dedalus Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

The Ballad of John Clare tells the story of twelve momentous months in the early life of John Clare. We see him courting his childhood sweetheart, labouring in the fields, having his first sexual encounter and playing the fiddle with the village band. Above all we see him at one with the landscape that would be his life-long inspiration.

However, this is no rural idyll. The enclosures are about to begin, taking the village land held in common and parcelling it out to the local landowners. Starvation and malnutrition are a constant presence and rural England will never be the same again.

The Ballad of John Clare vividly brings to life the villages and countryside around Peterborough as it would have been two centuries ago and allows us to empathise with the young John Clare. Educated beyond his class, the peasant poet is about to emerge on his short and tragic career.

About this title

Product Description

This is a bitter-sweet tale which evokes both the splendour and the harshness in life in rural England at the beginning of the 19th century and deals with the events which would lead to tragedy for John Clare. It looks at his life when he was 17.

Review

The first novel from the renowned storyteller Hugh Lupton opens with a scene that could be straight out of Thomas Hardy, but could just as easily be seen, by the more politically sensitive, as a typical Sabbath a few years into David Camerons Big Society. It is 1811 and the people of Helpston are gathered for Rogation Sunday, under the watchful eye of Parson Mossop, for prayers, music and the traditional dispensation of charity masquerading as a spring blessing. It is no accident that the novel opens on this feast day,whose central text is;ask, and ye shall receive ;, for the tradition of asking and receiving is shifting radically, as the rural economy enters the high point of a policy of enclosure that taints the English countryside to this day.Much has been written about the process of enclosure, but its key tenets are probably best expressed by Arthur Young, a writer and social observer who became a great champion of the policy, in his A Six Months Tour Through the North of England of l770. Young hated the smallholdings and self-reliant farms upon which the rural economy was based. Much to the delight of the landowning classes, he and others advocated enclosure as an improvement of agriculture that, while depriving poorer members of the community of their traditional means of subsistence, supposedly made more efficient use of the land and created a rootless and docile labouring population.It was this policy that broke the community into which John Clare was born, and he reflects the damage that enclosure did to his environment in much of his poetry. But that work is still to come when The Ballad of John Clare opens. What we get here, in fact, is a portrait of John Clare in the 12th month of his 17th year, a boy full of contradictions and strange ideas who mystifies the village. He is bookish and solitary and cannot seem to set his hand to any trade. One minute he will be muttering to himself and crouching beneath a hedge or inside a hollow dotterel scribbling onto a scrap that he holds against the crown of his hat, the next he will be picking a quarrel with some village Hickathrift. A helpless observer of the damage that enclosure is doing to his beloved landscape and the people who live there, a young man torn between romantic love for his muse,Mary Joyce, and the consequences of a moment's folly with a woman named Betsy Jackson, Clare comes to see that the bright world has begun, one by one, to break its promises.. Yet, while the immediate causes of his grief and disillusionment are personal, they are always intricately linked to what is happening to the land - and it is to Luptons great credit that, in this engaging and lyrical novel, he brings this relationship between emotional and psychological life and the environment into play at every turn.This vision transforms a bittersweet love story that takes place seven generations ago into a study of the politics of land use, revealing the true nature of British agriculture as systematic exploitation of land and people whose tragic consequences, as Lupton notes in an afterword,;we are reaping the full harvest of today. --John Burnside in The Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Dedalus Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1907650008
• ISBN 13: 9781907650000
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280