John Clare's
Autobiographical Writings Edited by Eric Robinson, Oxford
University
John
Clare started to write his Life in March 1821, in order to
assist his publisher John Taylor.
His fragments of prose autobiography expand and amplify what
we already learn from his poems, Professor Eric Robinson has put these two sources together in skilful and convincing sequence. He
has added Clare's Journey out
of Essex, dealing with Clare's
escape from Dr Matthew Allen's asylum
in 1841. For the remainder of his
life, we have to depend on poems and
letters, as Professor Robinson points
out, adding ‘There is much that we still do not know'.
This book of John
Clare's Autobiographical Writings, under expert editorship, does to some extent fill this gap in our knowledge in a sensible and practical way. Clare's
Sketches and Autobiographical
Fragments can now usefully be read as a continuous narrative, with the Journey out of Essex as a tragic epilogue. Eric
Robinson's informed passion for the original
texts is allied to his sense of the most likely order in which to place many of these extracts.
He has produced a coherent
pattern in these discrepant jottings,
without in any way over-editing them. Robinson's own notes are refined down to the minimum of necessary information and
are always to the point.
His
informative introduction shows clearly how much Clare's autobiographical
writings generally are in the world of the chapbooks, which had
such influence on his youthful ambitions, and how
he was always, in some sense, the hero of his own writing, taking on the nature of some
semi-mythic person. Many incidents are not strict autobiography, but may be reckoned as what Clare would have liked to
experience. Did he really beat the bully, like one of his prizefighting heroes? Did the enigmatic governess really make amorous advances to him, in a woodland episode which anticipates the atmosphere of some of Clare's later poems? Clare all his life existed in a world where solid fact was mixed with imaginative fantasy. It was only when the two clashed that
he came to that point which the medicine of
his time could only regard as
insanity. Yet still the poetry,
where the two could be reconciled, remained.
Just as Dorothy Wordsworth, in the
last twenty years in which William and Mary had to keep her virtually a prisoner at Rydal Mount, could still write verses
of touching and truthful simplicity, contrasting
with her sad and senile violence, so
Clare could find and reconcile his two warring selves in poetry of power
and beauty.
This valuable book, splendidly produced,
adds to our understanding of Clare's
essential nature.
Robert
Gittings
John Clare Journal 3 – July 1984
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