Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare

I

In the preface to his 1840 Canadian Naturalist, P. H. Gosse referred to the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada that had been quelled just before he published his work: "[Canada] is here presented in a light on which there can be no clashing of opinion, no discordancy of sentiment: the smiling face of Nature, the harmony and beauty of the works of God, may be turned to by men of all parties as a refreshing relief from the stern conflict of political warfare." ¹ Gosse's confident separation of powers--human from nonhuman, political from natural--is one that John Clare, writing around the same time, was destined to dispute. Even the title page of his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1821), identified the author as "John Clare the Northamptonshire Peasant." ² Not only did Clare thus receive from the start both a topographical and a social gloss, but he also promised to address the human community indisseverably from its environment.

Elizabeth Helsinger has pointed out that Clare's binomial label "peasant-poet" constitutes "a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history." ³ Of course, figures as different as Stephen Duck and Robert Burns had preceded Clare as "peasant-poets." Nevertheless, Clare complicated the terms of this discordia concors by his aspiration to be, like Gosse, a natural historian. His poems "Remembrances," "The mores" and "[The Badger]" execute thought experiments exploring the implications and impasses of taxonomies, some of them scientific, that advantaged and obstructed a writer who was defined from the start by the intersection of class and locality. Clare diagnoses the dynamism of classificatory systems-- the liability of their vocabulary to analogical transposition--into realms such as real estate and social rights.

But where and how could such transposition end? As Clare remarks in the terminal line of the mordant "Nigh Leopards Hill," "Life lives by changing places." ⁴ Landscape and society being metamorphic, neither Linnaean nor any alternative nomenclature tested by the peasant, poet, and field biologist Clare guarantees definitive purchase on naturalia, human or nonhuman--though perhaps, for Clare, definition is not the ultimate aim. Clare may be, in a sense, holistic, as the attempted coordination of his multiple identities could imply; but, if so, his is a difficult, contentious, Heraclitean holism.

During Clare's maturity, popular study of natural history moved toward its Victorian climax. William Howitt, introducing The Book of the Seasons in 1830, documents this enthusiasm when he states his intention of "promoting that general acquaintance with Nature . . . for which a taste has of late been strongly and growingly evinced." ⁵ Clare annotated lists of birds and flowers, composing natural history letters roughly modeled on Gilbert White--an ambition that united the roles of peasant and poet. Clare's ambivalent regard for contemporary scientific convention exposes the politics of natural history in the literary marketplace and in the landscape. His opinions of Robert Bloomfield, George Gordon, Lord Byron, John Keats, and other literary figures help, in turn, to elucidate his stance toward scientific authorities such as Linnaeus, the arch-nomenclator.

Duck and Burns managed, before Clare, to straddle the categories of "peasant" and "poet." Clare's older contemporary, the Suffolk cobbler Bloomfield, whose fame began with The Farmer's Boy in 1800, provided immediate inspiration. The poets corresponded, Bloomfield avowing, "I am . . . very glad to have lived to see your poems." ⁶ In a letter of September 1824 to Allan Cunningham, Clare enlarges on his sense of Bloomfield's emblematic meaning. The rhetoric with which Clare champions Bloomfield illuminates his response to the boundaries imposed by systematic nomenclature. Clare condemns Byron for a "sneering mention of [Bloomfield] in the 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.'" Clare adds that "though [Bloomfield] was but a 'Cobler,' his poems will meet posterity as green and growing on the bosom of English nature and the muses as those of the Peer." He continues: "I should...