From the Field to the Coffeehouse: Changing Representations of Stephen Duck
The natural habitat of the poet Stephen Duck is often assumed to be the fields and barns of his native Wiltshire. Duck is frequently referred to as the "thresher poet" and is chiefly remembered for a single poem, The Thresher's Labour, which he wrote in 1729 or 1730 when he was employed as an agricultural laborer in Wiltshire.1 The Thresher's Labour depicts the yearly cycle of "endless Toils" that an agricultural laborer must endure: threshing "Wheat," "Barley," and "Pease" through autumn and winter; mowing and haymaking in the spring and summer months; and reaping and collecting the "ripen'd Harvest" at the end of summer.2 The first-person narrative of "the Year's revolving Course" and the repetition of the personal pronouns "we," "us," and "our" situate the speaker of The Thresher's Labour, often identified with Duck, within the landscape of fields and barns that he describes:
Around we stand,
With deep Attention waiting his [the farmer's] Command.
To each our Tasks he readily divides,
And pointing, to our different Stations guides.
As he directs, to different Barns we go;
Here two for Wheat, and there for Barley two.(ll. 19–24)3
However, by the time The Thresher's Labour was published in 1730, Duck was in the process of leaving behind forever the landscape of fields and barns described in his poem. His poetic efforts had initially brought him local fame, interest in him had grown, and by September 1730, as was reported in the London press, Duck's "several ingenious poetical Compositions" had attracted the attention of [End Page 451] the queen. Queen Caroline rewarded his talents with an annual pension and "a little House in Richmond Park to live in."4 In the short term, the "Wiltshire Thresher" became a cultural phenomenon and for several months was the subject of intense interest from the press. In the longer term, Caroline's patronage meant that Duck never had to labor again, and after holding various positions attached to the royal household, he took orders as a clergyman, ultimately becoming the rector of Byfleet in Surrey.5
Many critics, from the late eighteenth century to the present day, have been unsettled by the abrupt change in fortunes that Duck experienced, often viewing the queen's award to the thresher not as a benevolent act of patronage but rather as a destructive act of deracination. Raymond Williams, for example, famously observed that Duck's changed circumstances represented "not only a transition from a Wiltshire field to Richmond Park and Royal Gardens" but also "a decisive literary transition, a shift from 'we' to 'the Swain.' Within a few years Duck was writing, with the worst of them, his imitations from the classics."6 Transplanted from his native fields to an alien soil, such an argument suggests, Duck failed to flourish as a poet. Indeed, not only did this relocation impair his poetic voice, but it has also been argued that severing the poet from his roots may even have led to his death by suicide twenty-six years later.7 While other critics may not be as blunt or explicit as Williams in attacking the royal patronage and disregarding Duck's later poetry, the almost exclusive concentration on The Thresher's Labour in critical accounts of the poet betrays a similar bias.8 If Duck's importance rests entirely upon his identification as a "laboring-class poet," then his only important work is believed to be that which he wrote when he was a laborer in a field in the English countryside.
For Duck's contemporaries, however, his origins as a thresher from Wiltshire had a different resonance. When Duck was catapulted to national fame in the autumn of 1730, opinions were divided: was he a poetic genius who greatly merited the patronage he had received from the queen, or was he an unlettered yokel whose pretensions...
