Although John Clare’s admiration for Robert Bloomfield is well known, his most detailed comments on Bloomfield’s passing date from a year after the event.[1] In letters to Thomas Inskip – on whom see Philip Hoskins’s article in Newsletter No. 8 (Autumn, 2004) – and Allan Cunningham Clare expressed his high regard for Bloomfield’s writing describing him to Inskip as: ‘the most original poet of the age & the greatest Pastoral Poet England ever gave birth to’.[2]

Clare’s letter to Allan Cunningham, written on 9 September 1824, is interesting not simply for his impassioned defence of Bloomfield, but also for the way in which he attempts to define an autonomous tradition of labouring-class writers. At the beginning of the letter Cunningham is addressed as ‘Brother Bard and Fellow Labourer’, adopting the salutation used by Bloomfield in his first letter to Clare of 25 July 1820.[3] Carol McGuirk has noted that Robert Burns’s ‘praise of other writers tends to focus on them as brothers in feeling rather than masters in style’ and this is somewhat similar to the strategy adopted here; suggesting that it was important for labouring-class writers to craft their own literary communities, whether real or imagined.[4]

Allan Cunningham was born in Dumfriesshire in 1784, and before completing his eleventh year at a local dame-school was apprenticed to his brother James, a stonemason.5 Like other labouring-class writers, he used his leisure hours to read all the books he could lay his hands on, and he took a keen interest in popular songs and stories.

As a child, Cunningham heard Burns read, and he recalled in later life that Burns’s ‘looks and his voice cannot well be forgotten; … while I write this I behold him as distinctly as I did ·when I stood at my father’s knee, and heard the bard repeat his ‘Tam o’ Shanter’.[5] On Burns’s death, Cunningham went to pay his respects to the body and walked in the poet’s funeral procession. The young Cunningham greatly admired other Scottish writers, including James Hogg and Sir Walter Scott. At about the age of eighteen, he and his brother James travelled especially to see Hogg, who later was to become a firm friend; and, when Scott’s Marmion appeared in 1808, Cunningham allegedly walked to Edinburgh and back in the hope of catching a glimpse of the author. Cunningham contributed most of the pieces collected in R. H. Cromek’s Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810). When he initially showed his poems to Cromek they were dismissed as poor imitations of Burns, so he proceeded to disguise them as old songs, at which point they were accepted for inclusion. The book was well received, and while Cunningham’s role was underplayed by Cromek, many realised that the ballads were in fact his. At the time of his correspondence with Clare, Cunningham worked in the studio of the sculptor Francis Chantrey, a post he held until Chantrey’s death in 1841. Like Clare, Cunningham was a regular contributor to the London Magazine, whose proprietors were his and Clare’s publishers, John Taylor and James Hessey.[6] An unsigned article by Cunningham on ‘Robert Burns and Lord Byron’ had recently featured in the August number of the London, and his assessment of these two poets may have influenced Clare’s remarks on Bloomfield and Byron in his letter of 9 September. Cunningham suggests: ‘One was a peasant and the other was a peer; but Nature is a great leveller, and makes amends for the injuries of fortune by the richness of her benefactions; the genius of Burns raised him to a level with the nobles of the land; by nature if not by birth he was the peer of Byron’.[7] Clare’s letter to Cunningham has been justly remarked, but is worth reprinting here. Regrettably the original no longer appears to be extant, and so the text which follows is based on that given by Frederick Martin in his 1865 Life of Clare:

Brother Bard and Fellow Labourer, I beg your acceptance according to promise of this autograph of our English Theocritus, Bloomfield. He is in my opinion our best Pastoral Poet. His ‘Broken Crutch’, ‘Richard and Kate’, &c. are inimitable and above praise. Crabbe writes about the peasantry as much like the Magistrate as the Poet. He is determined to show you their worst side; and, as to their simple pleasures and pastoral feelings, he knows little or nothing about them compared to the other, who not only lived amongst them, but felt and shared the pastoral pleasures with peasantry of whom he sung. I had promised that I would visit him this summer at Shefford, but death went before me. He was a warm-hearted friend and an amiable man. His later poems show that his best days were by. His ‘Remains’ are very trifling, but these have nothing to do with his former fame. I never forgave Lord Byron’s sneering mention of him in the ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’; but, never, mind, he has left a genius behind him that will live as late as his lordship’s; and, though he 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. I could hazard a higher opinion for truth, but this is enough. Titles and distinctions of pride have long been stript of their dignity by the levellers in genius; at least they have been convinced that the one is not a certain copyright or inheritance of the other. I should suppose, friend Allan, that ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ [James Hogg] ‘The Nithsdale Mason’ [Cunningham himself] and ‘The Northamptonshire Peasant’ [Clare], are looked upon as intruders and stray cattle in the fields of the Muses (forgive the classification), and I have no doubt but our reception in that Pinfold of his lordship’s ‘English bards’ would have been as far short of a compliment as Bloomfield’s. Well, never mind, we will do our best, and as we never went to Oxford or Cambridge, we have no Latin and Greek to boast of, and no bad translations to hazard (whatever Our poems may be), and that’s one comfort on our side. I have talked enough on this string, so I will trouble you a little with something else. I can scarcely tell you how I am, for I keep getting a little better and a little worse, and remaining at last just as I were. I was very bad this morning, but have recovered this evening as I generally do, and I really fear that I shall never entirely overset it. I have written to Hessey for Dr. Darling’s assistance again today, and I have desired him to forward this letter to you. Drop a line to say that you receive it, and give my kind remembrances to your better half, Mrs Cunningham. I will try your patience no longer with this gossip, so believe me, friend Allan, Your hearty friend and well-wisher, John Clare[8]

Cunningham replied on the 23 September, however, his letter did not reach Clare until over a month later. The reason for this was given in the following postscript added by Cunningham to the address sheet:

My dear friend I detained this letter after I had written it with the hope of finding a frank but none of those fortunate few[9] came who have the power of enabling poor poets to communicate without paying for it. We ought to petition the Govt to have the correspondence of ‘plackless’ devils of Bards sent free.

23 Oct- 1824.

Cunningham’s description of himself and Clare as ‘plackless [i.e. penniless] devils’ takes a term from Burns’s ‘Scotch Drink’ (l. 93); and his wish that their correspondence be sent free is based on the fact that unless the postage was accounted for in advance, the recipient had to pay for it on receipt of the letter. This was frequently bemoaned by Clare, especially when the correspondence was unasked for. So, for instance, his comment made in late February the following year: ‘Received a letter in ryhme from a John Pooley a very dull fooley who ran me 10^d further in debt as I had not money to pay the postage I have often botherd with these poet pretenders . . . pilfered . . . the rhymes . . .’[10]

According to an entry in his Journal, Clare received Cunningham’s letter on 26 October, and it can be found today among the letters to Clare held by the British Library.[11] – It was given almost in full in J. L. Cherry’s Life and Remains of John Clare (1873), but does not appear to have been printed in full before.[12] The address sheet is marked ‘Missent to Northampton’ and is postmarked 4 EVEN 4 22 OC 1824.

Dear Clare, I thank you much for Bloomfields note and as much for your own kind letter. I agree with you in the praise which you have given to his verse. That he has living life about his productions there can be little doubt, he trusts too much to nature and to truth to be a fleeting favorite and he will be long in the highway where fame dispenses her favours. I have often felt indignant at the insulting way his name has been introduced both by critics and poets. To scorn him because of the humility of his origins or his trade is ridiculous any where and most of all here where so many of our gentles and nobles are come from the clods of the valley. Learned men make many mistakes about the value of learning: I conceive it is chiefly valuable to a man of genius in enabling him to wield his energies with greater readiness or with better effect. But learning though a polisher and refiner is not the creator – it may be the mould out of which genius stamps its coin but it is not the gold itself. If education reveals to us the stores of ancient learning and can do as none such revelation[13] has been made by other means – can we hope to know Dante better if we know Italian Homer better if we know Greek or Virgil more intimately if we had learned Latin; than Cary does or Cowper and Dryden did. When Homer travelled to see Men and manners Froissart to seek historic story[14] and Shakespeare came to London to see many-coloured life they stopt at no colleges and the learning they acquired from looking on human life renders the works as wonderful as if they had attended college and been whipt from [?] to [? ].[15] I am glad to hear that you are a little better – Keep up your heart and sing only when you feel the internal impulse and you will add something to our Poetry more lasting than any of the Peasant Bards of Old England have done yet. I remain dear Clare your very faithful friend Allan Cunningham

27 Belgrave Place, 23 Sep’ 1824

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[1] This is almost certainly due to gaps in the surviving correspondence.

[2] Letter to Thomas Inskip,10 August 1824. The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 300.

[3] British Library MS, Eg. 2245, fol. 186r.

[4] Carol McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997), p. 54. For useful thoughts on this issue see part one of Tim Burke’s ‘The Poetry of Friendship: Robert Bloomfield, John Clare, and the Labouring-Class Tradition’, RBNS, No. 5 (March, 2003), 3-6, and John Goodridge, ‘John Clare and Eighteenth Century Poetry: Pomfret, Cunningham, Bloomfield’, The Eighteenth­ Century: Theory and Interpretation, 42, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 264-78.

[5] Biographical information is based on the entry for Cunningham in the DNB.

[6] The firm had published Cunningham’s Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, A Dramatic Poem; The Mermaid of Galloway; The Legend of Richard Faulder; and Twenty Scottish Songs in 1822. For Clare’s opinion of this collection see his letter to Hessey of 8 April that year (Letters, pp. 236-37).

[7] ‘Robert Burns and Lord Byron’, London Magazine (August 1824), 1st Series, X, 117. Cunningham also describes Byron’s funeral in a manner which warrants comparison with Clare’s own in his autobiographical prose.

[8] Letters of John Clare, pp. 302-303.

[9] A transcription of this letter made in the 1860s or 70s has ‘fellows’ for ‘few’, but if this is the case the end of the word has been concealed by the hinge to which the original is now attached in Eg. 2246.

[10] John Clare By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: Mid-NAG and Carcanet, 1996), p. 214. Deletions reinstated.

[11] By Himself, p. 189. Clare’s editors suggest that only the transcript of the letter survives, although this is incorrect. The letter is Eg. 2246, fols 391v-392r. 16.

[12] J. L. Cherry, The Life and Remains of John Clare, the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, Including Letters from His Friends and Contemporaries, Extracts from His Diary, Prose Fragments, Old Ballads (Collected by Clare) (London, 1873), pp. 73-74. I have checked my transcription against the parts included by Cherry and against the transcription of the letter in Northampton MS N62 used by him.

[13] ‘revelation’ is based on the transcription given in NMS N62, though I am not entirely persuaded by this reading.

[14] The transcription in NMS N62 has ‘histories & story’.

[15] I have been unable to decipher these two words in either the original or the transcript.