Scott and Crabbe: A Meeting at the Border

Walter Scott (1771–1832) and George Crabbe (1754–1832) met twice, first in London at John Murray’s in Albemarle Street, in 1817, then in August 1822 when Crabbe was Scott’s guest in Edinburgh. But although a guest, Crabbe did not see much of his host, who was busy stage-managing the state-visit of George IV. ¹ Scott and Crabbe, Lockhart tells us, had “but one quiet walk together, and it was to the ruin of St. Anthony’s Chapel and Muschat’s Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by The Heart of Midlothian [1818] had given him an earnest wish to see” (4:57). It is not surprising that The Heart of Midlothian made a deep impression on Crabbe since, as Tony Inglis notes, he “steps in and out of the novel from beginning to end.” ² It is the literary relationship between the two men, the meeting of minds, that I want to explore here: a relationship that can be followed through their correspondence, through the biographies by Lockhart and George Crabbe, Jr., ³ and, above all, through allusions in the poems and novels themselves.

Different as the two writers were in important respects, their regard for each other was high. In fact, it was probably the special compound of similarity and difference that made each so significant to the other and caused each to some extent to work out what he was doing by measuring himself against what he thought the other was doing. A study of their literary relationship must, therefore, have a double focus and look at the influences running in both directions.

Crabbe’s son records his father’s first encounter with Scott’s poetry. One day in 1805,

casually stepping into a bookseller’s at Ipswich, my father first saw the Lay of the Last Minstrel [1805]. A few words only riveted his attention, and he read it nearly through while standing at the counter, observing, “a new and great poet has appeared!” ⁴

Sharply different as Crabbe’s own poetry is from Scott’s—the one antiromantic, the other ultraromantic—Crabbe seems to have felt there was also an affinity. “Peter Grimes” (in The Borough [1810]) begins with an epigraph from Marmion (1808), and the “Preface” to The Borough makes an explicit comparison between Grimes and “the ruffian” in Scott’s poem. ⁵

Scott’s admiration for Crabbe’s poetry went back much earlier, to Scott’s late teens, when he read extracts from The Library (1781) and The Village (1783) in Dodsley’s Annual Register. These two poems, together with The Newspaper (1785), were the poems of Crabbe’s eighteenth-century literary career. When he appeared again, over twenty years later, with Poems (1807), The Borough (1810), and Tales (1812), Scott’s earlier enthusiasm was renewed. This is the story Scott told in his first letter to Crabbe, written on 21 October [1812] after reading Tales. “It is,” wrote Scott,

more than twenty years...since I was for a great part of a very snowy winter the inhabitant of an old house in the country in the course of a poetical study so very like that of your admirably painted young poet [John, in “The Patron”] that I could hardly help saying “that’s me” when I was reading the tale to my family. Among the very few books which fell under my hands was a volume or two of Dodsley’s Register one of which contained copious extracts from the “Village” & the “Library” particularly the conclusion of Book I of the former and an extract from the latter beginning with the description of the old Romancers—I committed them most faithfully to my memory where your verses must have felt themselves very strangely lodged in company with ghost stories Border riding ballads scraps of old plays and all the miscellaneous stuff which a strong appetite for reading...had assembled in the head of a lad of eighteen. ⁶

Lockhart records that in the reading aloud in the Scott household, “Crabbe was, perhaps, next to Shakespeare, the standing resource” (3:197). It was Crabbe...