NARRATION: This is Poetry Off The Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, the start of a special series: [Poverty's History.]

The past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this problem that we’ve created as human beings and that doesn’t seem to go away: POVERTY.

And specifically: how poverty has been showing up in poems, throughout the centuries. When poverty became an acceptable topic for a poem, instead of just love or beauty or the divine. And if there were any poems that were important for advocacy and social change. And of course: I wanted to know who the first poor poets in the English-speaking world were?

So here’s Part I of that series. [In the Beginning Was the Word.]  

For most of human existence, there’s very little we know about the poor. The rich and powerful were writing letters, keeping diaries and leaving wills, while the poor, meaning everybody else, seem to have simply lived and disappeared. 

David: Nobody represents them. They don't vote. Nobody will speak for them.

NARRATION: This is David Aberbach, professor at McGill University in Montreal, and one of the experts who helped us with our series [Poverty's History.]
For his book Literature and Poverty, David Aberbach spent years searching the Western literary canon up and down for mentions of poverty: 

David: It is a subject close to my heart. That's true.

NARRATION: In this episode, [In The Beginning Was The Word], we’ll talk about a few poets who changed literature forever: Phillis Wheatley in America; and, in England, William Blake, William Wordsworth and John Clare. These were all poets who were either themselves poor, or wrote about the poor at a time when few other people did. Until the 18th century, poor people just didn’t have much of a say at all:

David: They were excluded from government, they were excluded from any exercise of power, they were excluded from literacy for the most part, because there simply weren’t schools.

NARRATION: Across Europe and most of the world, rates of literacy varied a great deal, and generally improved with industrialization. But there was another factor that made some regions more literate. Here is the historian Lynn Hollen Lees of the University of Pennsylvania:

Lynn: In Protestant countries, churches wanted people to be able to read the Bible. Sunday Schools that began to organized, particularly by the Methodists, after the 1780. And they took in enormous numbers of children for free.

NARRATION: Lees has written a lot of books about the history of poverty, for instance, The Solidarities of Strangers, about the Poor Laws in England, for which she poured over parish records. And it turns out that those records are as good an indicator as any of rates of literacy:

Lynn: When people got married, they were supposed to sign the marriage registers. And by the later eighteenth century, something like 70 to 75 percent of all men could sign their names when they married and 25 to 30 percent of women could do the same. Now, we don't know exactly what amount of literacy went along with being able to sign your name. But generally people learned the alphabet and learned how to read first and they learned how to write second. Now, obviously, middle class women, people from the upper classes were much more likely to be literate than farm laborers. On the other hand, artisans normally knew how to read and write. Craftsmen knew how to read and write. People who worked in shops, people who worked in the towns. So, in fact, literacy is extremely widespread.

NARRATION: On the other side of the Atlantic, in Colonial America, the rates of literacy among white people were even a bit higher than in their Protestant countries of origin, for reasons historians are still debating. But what we do know, is that it was a competitive edge the colonists would brutally enforce.
In 1642, for instance, Massachusetts passed legislation that gave the government the right to take children away from their families if the children couldn’t read or write.

For enslaved African-Americans, there was no such rule. Most were illiterate, some were taught to read the Bible. But that privilege was taken away after 1740. Because when a literate, enslaved man named Jemmy organized a rebellion in South Carolina, setting fire to 6 or 7 houses and killing about 25 slave owners, South Carolina immediately retaliated. Most of the rebels were executed, and then the state passed the first anti-literacy law.

Other states followed, and by the mid-19th century, enslaved people who were caught reading anywhere in the South would be punished with floggings, imprisonment or both.

Honorée: And so for old school black people, reading and writing is a sacrament. It is a holy sacrament, you know, for us. Frederick Douglass said, you know, in so many words, "it was when I learned to read that I knew I must be free."

NARRATION: This is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. She’s a poet and professor at the English Department of Oklahoma University, and she specializes in Early African-American Literature.

Honorée: Somebody's got to teach these things because people's memories are very short.

NARRATION: Jeffers spent the past 15 years researching and writing a book of poems titled The Age of Phillis, about the American poet Phillis Wheatley and the society she was and was not a part of. The little girl whose name we don’t know, but who was later named Phillis, after the slave ship she arrived on, was born on the African West-Coast in 1753 and sold at the age of 7 or 8, to the Wheatleys, in Boston.   

PHILLIS WHEATLEY

Honorée: And so, when you think on Miss Phyllis, and you think on what she did, that she learned the English language within like a year and a half, then she was reading the classics as a child, -  there's a freedom there.

NARRATION: Of course, the people who taught her all that, the Weathleys, were, you know, her owners.  

Honorée: That's very complicated. I still have gratitude toward those people because they gave her power. They probably didn't think of it as giving her power. But as a black woman who was literate, I mean, that's a real power that they gave her, unknowingly.

NARRATION: Phillis Wheatley was also brought up around relative wealth. John Wheatley was a successful property owner, merchant-tailor and money lender, and Susanna Wheatley made sure Phillis wore nice clothes, read serious books, and was introduced to her circle of influential evangelicals, philanthropists and abolitionists in Boston and in England.  

Honorée: One can only imagine that, you know, because Miss Phyllis was very privileged that people would be saying, oh, how nice you are, how.... And then they would probably be saying it to Phyllis. Shouldn't you be grateful?

NARRATION: It’s probably the most complicated story ever told. And because it’s so complicated, I feel it’s not too crazy to suggest that Phillis Wheatley, for all of her privilege, was also one of the very first published poor poets in America.

Helena: Well, what I find so intriguing and complicated and messed up is that apparently the. So they. Okay. So you have the timeline straight. So she published her collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. And then about two months later, she's emancipated. So John and Susanna Wheatley, you know, say, OK, you're no longer a slave. And then Susanna dies. I think the year after that. And then John Wheatley dies in 1778. So a few years after that. And so what I found so interesting, is that ... They don't leave her a penny.

Honorée: They don't. So, yeah, she didn't give any money in a will.

Helena: But help me understand, when she was emancipated, what were her options economically?

Honorée: None. Not any. This is what people don't really understand. She was a woman. Women didn't. Only working class women and enslaved women worked in the 18th century. And so… she didn’t really have any options. And then the other thing is the patriarchy. There were men that they were trying to introduce to her and who were paying court to her, but once she married, she would not have had any power.

Helena: Yeah.

Honorée: She wouldn't have been able to have power over her own money. She would. You know, nothing.

NARRATION: She couldn’t count on her former mistress’s friends to help out either. They had gotten it in their heads that Phillis should sail to Anomabu, a small coastal town in present-day Ghana, marry an African Christian she had never met, and convert the locals to Christianity. Not only would that mean leaving the only place she ever knew, but on top of that, for a Black woman in the 18th century, Ghana was not a place you wanted to be:   

Honorée: I mean in Ghana was a huge slave trade. That was huge. What would keep somebody from just, you know, snatching her off a street, and putting her back on a slave ship? Nothing.

NARRATION: As delicately and tactfully as she could, Phillis Wheatley rebuked their offer. Instead, she married a man she loved, the free African-American John Peters.

Honorée: Well, John Peters was a hustler. OK. Par excellence. He did a lot of stuff. He was a lawyer. So he clearly was a literate man as well. So he worked as a doctor because people didn't, you know, have medical schools back then. Right. And he owned a grocery store. But he was also in debt a lot. And one of the reasons for that is when they married, it was the middle of the American Revolution. And there were a lot of people who were starving to death because America was broke.

NARRATION: The Revolutionary War had sucked so much money out of the economy, that everybody was suing everybody to try and get what they were owed. John Peters was embroiled in multiple court cases, as debtor and as creditor, but even when he won, it was hard to actually get paid. Many states tried to curb the chaos by printing money, or writing debt forgiveness laws. But Massachusetts did no such thing, with disastrous consequences for John Peters.

Honorée: He was in and out of debtor's prison for, you know, often on one through their entire marriage. I mean, he was doing the best he could.

NARRATION: Phillis Wheatley tried to find subscribers for a second book of poems - which is how publishing worked in those days - but she couldn’t find enough people willing to sponsor the book. There was the recession, and after the War, access to the British market was cut off. Plus, her former evangelical benefactors may have cooled towards her after she refused to go to Ghana to be a missionary.

What happened to her next, we don’t really know. Did she go hungry? Was she cold? Did her asthma or tuberculosis flare up? All we know is this: six years after she married John Peters, she died, alone, at the age of about 31.

Honorée: Mr. John was probably in debtor's prison when she died.

NARRATION: All that’s survived of her, are about a dozen letters, and of course her poetry. But if you want to know who she was in the privacy of her own company, her poems don’t give you many clues. Here are a few lines from her poem “On The Death of General Wooster”:

Honorée:

By thy high will, celestial prize she came—
For her we combat on the field of fame
Without her presence vice maintains full sway
And social love and virtue wing their way
O still propitious be thy guardian care
And lead Columbia thro' the toils of war.


NARRATION: Neoclassical poetry was like that: highly artificial, didactic, abstract, full of references to the Greeks and Romans.

Honorée: People didn't put their business out there in the 18th century. And women in particular did not.

NARRATION: But soon, poetry took a dramatic turn:

Towards the styles and ideas of Romanticism, which sought out the wilderness of the imagination, worshipped nature, and celebrated all shades of the human experience. 

MUSIC

WILLIAM BLAKE
 

NARRATION: Phillis Wheatley’s English contemporary William Blake has often been called the first Romantic visionary poet.

He was born in London in 1757, the third of seven children in a family of “Dissenters”, which meant that they didn’t attend the Anglican Church, and that they were probably sympathetic to the progressive wind that was picking up in the country.

Blake grew up in Soho, around the corner from a slaughterhouse, but not too far either from the posh homes on Golden Square.              

David: They weren't poor, but they weren't they certainly weren't wealthy. And he had to go to work as a young man.

NARRATION: This is David Aberbach again.

David: He was a very highly accomplished engraver. And he engraved the pictures for his poetry books. But he had in mind always the use of his training in order to earn money.

Helena: And were there any drawings or that he made of the poor?

David: Uh, yes, in the poem London in The Songs of Experience, Blake illustrated this poem in this book with pictures of, for example, the chimney sweepers’ cry, and the hapless soldiers’ sigh. And so there are images of people who have lost everything or all who have never had.

NARRATION: In his engravings as well as his poetry, Blake expressed a vision rooted in Christian mysticism, for a radical liberation of humanity: a release from the shackles of tyranny and poverty for all.

These shackles only seemed to have been getting heavier during his lifetime; so much was changing.

For centuries, the majority of British people had lived off the land, meaning their survival depended on the fickle English weather. Most people didn’t own this land, either, but they were paid a yearly wage to work someone else’s. Here’s Lynn Hollen Lees again:  

Lynn: And they were working in somebody's household, where the rent would be paid, they would be given food and they would be given a suit of clothing every year.

NARRATION: Especially teenagers and young people worked this way, and the yearly arrangement sheltered them from the ups and down of the market. But then, large landowners started figuring out that they could produce more and have it cost less by paying workers only when they needed them.   

Lynn: And so they began to stop this yearly hiring. And it particularly meant that you had people who had had yearlong secure jobs, starting in the late 18th in the early 19th century, are finding that they have seasonal work. They're hired at harvest time, they're hired at planting time. And in between, they're out of work and they've got to figure out what to do.

NARRATION: And of course, on top of all that, you still had those years that the harvest failed, and people would go hungry. There was some form of poor relief though:    

Lynn: England, unlike most of the rest of Europe, had in effect a kind of cradle to grave welfare system from the start from the early 17th century. And what that meant was that people, in a parish where they were settled, had the right to be relieved if they became poor.  You got a grant of money. You could get a couple of loaves of bread a week. If your shoes had too many holes, they give you a new pair of shoes. If your parents died, children were taken care of and they were apprenticed when they got to be teenagers. So in fact, there was an enormous range of service from medical to elder care that was given to you just on the basis of right. And there's a lot of written evidence in which people claim that right to relief. But you had to do it in the place where you had rights, which meant that, if you were an insider, you could get aid. If you were an outsider, you were likely to be booted out. You might be put in jail as a vagrant. You would be told you would be told to move on. So this is not a totally benign, wonderful system, but it worked.

David: As long as the population was not too great, as long as you didn't have too many poor people, the system worked. And the point at which it stopped working but began to fall apart was the point where the population began to increase.

Helena: Why did the population increase so much?

Lynn: Right. The population increased for very specific reasons. First of all, there were a certain number of really nasty diseases like the plague and smallpox that began to be much less virulent. Ah, in the later 18th century, people began to be vaccinated against smallpox. And this made a big difference in the death rate. English agriculture was being reorganized, and it was producing more food and industrialization was producing cheap cotton goods. And with cheap cotton, you could have clothing that you could wash. So you weren't wearing something that was dirty and smelly all the time and you weren't wearing the same kind of damp wool all the time. People began to be healthier. So in fact, people increasing in population is a sign that things are getting better. On the other hand, there's a downside because it's with more and more people there, you have more and more poor.

NARRATION: Britain was also fighting a lot of wars, meaning many young men were hired away to fight in Europe, or across the Atlantic. And those who stayed behind did their best to keep things running at the farm, where women had been supplementing the family income by spinning, weaving, sewing, straw-plaiting or whatever else, from home. But the harvests kept failing. And now the spinning and weaving from home had to compete with new technologies: 

Lynn: The spinning factories in the north were producing better thread, much cheaper and much quicker than they ever could. And so that job disappears. So they go off to the town or they go somewhere else to try to find a way that they can get a job.

NARRATION: Many of these job seekers ended up in places like London. William Blake often went for walks through the streets of his cramped, polluted, changing city, and looked around:

Lynn: One thing that he would have noticed, and I think that it's something that might not signal abject poverty, but normal people, ordinary workers would look poor in the mid to late or 18th century. They would have had only maybe one or two changes of clothing, they would have had very little chance to wash frequently. Remember that a lot of it could've been wool. They might have had one pair of shoes, one pair of stockings. Those might have had holes in them. Remember how damp and clammy it is in England? Unless you had a fair amount of money, you wouldn't have a really heavy coat. Women would have a shawl that they would clutch around themselves. Ordinary people didn't live in places with running water and bathtubs. There would have been little chance to wash so that a great many people that he would have passed on the streets would just have looked rather dirty, rather downtrodden. They probably would've smelled. Remember that people were using coal for their fuel from the later 17th century. So everything would have been covered with kind of black soot. There would have been mud all over everywhere. The streets would have been filled with horses, and the horses were totally dirty. There were no sewers. There were kind of open ditches and they would go from there into the Thames or into the small creeks that were around London.

MUSIC
 

Helena: I would love to get to a poem by William Blake. It's that poem called London, and I was wondering if you could read it and maybe if there are one or two things that strike you as you can just talk about those a little bit.

David: I have the original text in front of me and in a copy. And it has the illustrations and the lettering is in Blake's own hand. So it's not printed. It is actually written out. And I I think I can read it. I'll try.

Helena: (LAUGHING) It's a nice experiment.

David:  Yes, well, it’s not so easy, actually, but I think I’ll manage.

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls

 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

Helena: Thank you. You know, what I also find so fascinating is that … he seems almost like the original flaneur, you know?

David: Wandering through the town and observing?

Helena: Yes. Exactly. And he is not quite doing it in the French way of Flaubert…

David: He’s not window shopping.

Helena: No! (LAUGHING)

David: He’s not window shopping. No. But what he sees is what everyone sees, but it hurts him in a way that it doesn’t hurt everyone, because they’re used to it. But it’s as though he sees it for the first time. And these are things that are part of English life and they are appalling. They are an atrocity. And he’s shocked by them. And what is implicit is the need for change.

Helena: Yeah. What are harlots?

David: A harlot is a prostitute.

Lynn: A major occupation for poor women, unfortunately, was prostitution. There were not very many women's jobs.

Helena: What jobs were there for women? Except prostitution?

Lynn: Women were the main group of domestic servants. And this was an occupation that you took up where you could not marry. You lived in somebody's house. Women would spun thread, they made artificial flowers. They were milliners. They were tailoresses. They were seamstresses. So there were really relatively few jobs that they could do. And prostitution was one of them. And it was one of the things that you could do if you lost your other jobs and you couldn't find another one that would support you.

NARRATION: Children would work too. They always had, of course, on the farm:

Lynn: Everybody was working. And so it's not abnormal to have children work, but it was normal to have them work within a family economy. It wasn't normal to send them out to work in a factory. But when times were bad, people would have to figure out ways to have children make money, too. And it might be begging. It might be street sweeping. There's not much out there.

NARRATION: That line in Blake’s poem about the chimney sweepers?
David: ...how the chimney sweepers cry every blackening church appals... - those were always children:

Helena: Could you tell me a little bit who they were and what their lives were like?

David: Well, the chimney sweepers were probably at the lowest point of the social pecking order.

Lynn: It wasn't a very pleasant job. Let's start with that. The chimneys are not very large and slithering down in them in the dark on a rope. It was not a great way of spending time. Now, ordinary children did not go out and become chimney sweeps. It is your orphan children.

David: They were often abandoned.

Lynn: Sometimes children that were hired from the workhouse or from the parish, people who were the poorest of the poor and who were in effect being exploited by either a parent or by somebody who needed their services.

David: And this was an extremely dangerous profession. And it was an extremely unhealthy profession because they were breathing in coal dust all day…

Lynn: … which made them extremely liable to get tuberculosis or a whole series of lung diseases. And keep in mind, they're always kind of wet and cold.

David: Their life expectancy was no more than about 20.  The chimney sweeper is the very epitome of what is wrong with this society. It takes small children and it sentences them to death, a slow death, which is what this meant.

NARRATION: Blake poured his grief about what he saw around him into the paintings and illustrations he made for the radical Unitarian bookseller Joseph Johnson, who was famous for publishing books by progressive thinkers such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) or Thomas Paine. 

And at a time when the French Revolution was sparking the hope that radical change was possible in England, too, Tom Paine’s two part-pamphlet, Rights of Man, became THE work that defined the movement: in less than 2 years, it sold more than 200.000 copies across Europe, and it was so lively and direct that people read it out loud to each other at coffee shops or public houses. It demanded voting rights for all men, education for the poor, and a centralized - instead of local - tax and welfare system, including maternity pay and pensions.

But these practical suggestions didn’t go nearly far enough for William Blake. He wanted a complete spiritual transformation of society:

David: He identified with the prophets of the Bible because they tended to attack the existing order. He regards princes and kings as frauds. He regards the aristocracy as a fraudulent institution, which exploits the poor. Blake was really a radical. And he was regarded as mad in his time. That may have helped him somewhat, because if you regard somebody as mad, then you don’t take them seriously.

NARRATION: And not being taken seriously could be crucial. Because for all of these progressive ideas flying around, the British establishment was still deeply conservative. And the prime minister, William Pitt, had an outsized influence in making sure that radicals were silenced. One recent scholar describes this period as “the British equivalent of the McCarthy era.” You could end up in prison for what you wrote, but more likely, they would wage a sneakier campaign: you were sued for “libel” or some other thing you didn’t do, your name was smeared, your professional opportunities suddenly dried up. It could mean the end of your career as a writer. So in a way, it WAS a blessing that William Blake was seen as “mad”.   

David: And Blake identified with the prophets to the point where it seems he actually had visions of them appearing, not as in dreams or in the imagination, but actually meeting and conversing with prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel. So he describes it. This is something that is quite difficult to understand, I think, today, but for Blake, it was a living reality. And the reality of England was a reality that had failed the ideals of the Bible, in particular in its treatment of the poor.

And what he hopes for is a kind of restoration of Eden. Not through the conventional God. It is through an ideal of freedom which he feels is a necessity for human beings and which accounts for his enormous identification with the French Revolution. And he - you feel also he wishes that it would come to England as well. It would liberate.

And it wasn't just a liberation from poverty. It was transforming human character, making it purer, making it better, it was a revolution in one's whole existence, freeing the spirit, as it were.

MUSIC
 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

NARRATION: Blake was not the only English poet who was aching for a better world. Around the time Blake’s  “Songs of Experience” came out, another poet, thirteen years younger and with a very different temperament, was discovering his own political conviction. His name was William Wordsworth.     

David: Wordsworth also identified very strongly with the French Revolution, but he was not as radical as Blake.

NARRATION: Wordsworth was not thinking of a total liberation of the spirit, he just wanted to get rid of poverty.

David: Poverty justifies the revolution, in his view. And I think that's how he saw it.

NARRATION: William Wordsworth was born in 1770, in Cumberland, in the beautiful Lake District in northwestern England. And like Blake, he wrote about the orphans and beggars he saw around him. But one reason Wordsworth may have been less radical, is that, in the countryside, where he lived, he didn’t witness the same brutal poverty you saw in the city:  

David: I think in such small towns, you had poor people, but they were so well known, everybody knew their story.

Lynn: Because the poor were your neighbors

David: You knew how they came to be poor.

Lynn: The poor were your neighbors who had gotten old. A neighbor who might have been widowed. Someone who had had a work accident and then was disabled.

David: And together with the help of the local parish and the priest and private individuals, these people were usually looked after. And this must have been very common for hundreds of years in these rural hamlets.

Now Wordsworth knew very well how dangerous it would be if industry came into the Lake District, because when the question arose towards the end of his life, if the train line was to be extended into the Lake District, he fought it, took up a petition and he won. And to this day, the rail line ends in Windermere. There is no rail line going through the Lake District. And this is owing to Wordsworth's efforts.

NARRATION: Each year, David Aberbach visits the cottage where William Wordsworth lived as a boy. So I asked him what it looks like over there.

David: ...it is as lovely as he describes it. It is a gorgeous place. And the village is laid out as a medieval village. The whole area all the way around is just beautiful hills and valleys and lakes. And you can walk for miles and hardly see anyone and hardly encounter any traffic. And it was nothing for people living in the Lake District to walk huge distances. I mean, they thought nothing of walking 20 miles a day because they were used to it. These lovely descriptions of how he and his sister Dorothy would carry seeds with, flower seeds, and they would plant them in various places and they would grow wild. And I think many of the wild growing flowers in the Lake District probably come from this.

NARRATION: His poems often came out of these walks, too. Locals would see him mumble to himself while he walked, and he was able to keep hundreds of lines of poetry in his head before even putting a single one to paper.

But despite the rugged beauty of his surroundings, growing up there hadn’t been easy. William Wordsworth was the second of five in a relatively wealthy family: his father owned land and worked for a powerful Earl, and the family lived in a big mansion.

But then his mother died. William was only 7. The children were separated and sent away, to relatives who were by all accounts not warm or loving people. And their father didn’t do a great job staying in touch, and six years later, he died too. And William would struggle with money for many years.  

To find some comfort, he turned to the natural world: the hills, river and green plains you’ll find all over his autobiographical poem The Prelude:  

David: The descriptions of his early life in the Lake District are superb. They describe a child who is constantly having these extraordinary experiences in this place of overwhelming natural beauty. It's as though the natural world becomes his teacher and nurse. He learns about beauty. He learns about fear. He learns about awe in the face of something greater than himself.   

NARRATION: Wordsworth, like so many others, had started to get excited about the possibility of a Revolution like in France. He read Paine, and Godwin, and got so fired up that in 1791, when he was 21 and a student at Cambridge, he took a summer trip to France. One sunny day, two years after the storming of the Bastille, he went to see the destroyed prison for himself. Later he described how he looked through the rubble, picked up a stone, and put it in his pocket as a relick.

But more than these symbols of the Revolution, it was the poverty he saw in France, especially in children, that converted him to the cause. One day, on a walk with a French friend, he saw a “hunger-bitten girl.” His friend said “‘t is against that / Which we are fighting.”

Wordsworth’s empathy for the fate of the poor also showed up in his poetry, and he painted the people he saw on his walks through the Lake District so vividly they seemed to leap off the page: 

Helena: There's a fragment in your book from his poem, Alice Fell, also called Poverty. And I was wondering if you could read just that fragment. It's on page 117-118.

David: Yes, certainly.

A little girl I found,
Sitting behind the chaise, alone.
“My cloak!” no other word she spake,
But loudly and bitterly she wept,
As if her innocent heart would break;
And down from her seat she leapt.

“What ails you, child?” — she sobbed, “Look there!”
I saw it in the wheel entangled,
A weather-beaten rag as e’er
From any garden scare-crow dangled.

Helena: Thank you.

David: Well, this is her only cloak. You see, and that is why the poem is called Poverty. Poverty in her case means that if her cloak is entangled in the wheel, she has nothing to cover herself. It shows the extent to which people were poor. And children aroused the poet's particular compassion, because I think he he he was never desperately poor himself. But he understood the nature of the loss of family, the loss of security, um, the sense that the world is against you and that you are vulnerable.

NARRATION: Children were important, he felt, a conviction that was probably strengthened by the French Enlightenment: 

David: It's associated particularly with Rousseau. The idea that children should be treated as children and not as miniature adults. And their education should be in accordance with their needs and their passions and should aim to help them to realize themselves as individuals.

NARRATION: In his influential book Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined an education that would help a child become an idealized ‘natural man,’ uncorrupted by the ills of society. It involved lots of running around freely in nature and learning an honest trade, something manual like carpentry, before bothering with intellectual pursuits, and then only those the child was personally interested in.

Rousseau’s book moved not just Wordsworth - it changed the education system and the views on children forever. But what it also did was feed into this stereotype: that poor people in the country - adults! - were pure and wild and childlike as well. One poet in particular who was to suffer this treatment, we’ll talk about next. But first, I need to tell you what happened to Wordsworth in 1793.

Because, as I mentioned before, while Blake and Wordsworth and other progressive artists and thinkers were celebrating the possibilities of a revolution, the conservative establishment had been on the attack. And conservative intellectuals had been publishing pamphlets that wrote all those progressive dreams into the ground. Edmund Burke, for instance, was vehemently opposed to the idea of giving any ordinary man a vote, and Thomas Malthus was against poor relief, on the grounds that it would only encourage the poor to procreate. As you can imagine, their viewpoints were not wildly popular among ordinary people. 

But what happened that year, 1793, in Paris, greatly helped the conservative, anti-revolutionary cause. On the morning of January 21st, at the Place de la République, in front of a crowd of almost a hundred thousand people, the French king Louis XVI was beheaded. It marked the start of what’s called the “Reign of Terror”, when tens of thousands of people were executed: royals, aristocrats and priests, but also peasants and workers.   

David: And when the violent excesses of the Revolution became known to Wordsworth, he was turned off it. And I think he never really recovered his full enthusiasm for a revolution.

NARRATION: Now that they felt vindicated, the conservatives in Britain made it perfectly clear: there would be no revolution in England. Equality and liberty for all seemed once again beyond reach, and not just that, but the entire rhetoric around poverty shifted: 

Lynn: And for a portion of society, for the more conservative, poverty became a vise. Poverty was something that was a sign that you were not willing to work. The poor clearly were being thought of as more and more like criminals, people who were responsible for their own condition.

MUSIC

JOHN CLARE

NARRATION: The same year, 1793, a few months after the execution of the French king, the poet John Clare was born, in Helpston, Northamptonshire, 90 miles north of London.

David: In a village of about I think probably no more than a few dozen people in all.

NARRATION: Unlike Blake or Wordsworth, Clare was actually poor. He was the son of a thresher (if you’re a city person like me: that’s whoever beats the grain off the plant during harvest), and in terms of status and income, threshers were the lowest of the low.

David: So what they had in the way of schooling was very limited.

NARRATION: Clare dropped out of school at the age of 11, and started working alongside his family:

David: He worked as a shepherd. He looked after horses and cows. He thrashed and plowed and hoed, he chopped wood and planted trees, he gardened and weeded, he burned lime and put up fences and at one time, he even worked as a human scarecrow to scare away the crows.

NARRATION: But it was backbreaking work, and that was not the worst of it.

David: You weren't sure that you would, um, be able to produce enough to live on. There were times when the crops failed. There were times of hung- I think very few people living in those circumstances would be free of hunger at some point. And it also meant that generally you didn't have much time for cultural pursuits. There was music. There was poetry. There was a folk tradition.

NARRATION: John Clare actually played folk music on his violin.

David: But you were tied to the land and you were tied to your circumstances. And it was very difficult to leave. And it was very difficult to stay. And so the idea that a poet should come from this kind of background is quite improbable.

NARRATION: Despite these difficulties, Clare had been writing poetry for years. 

David: Well, he did learn to read. And his father had some books. And he discovered a love of reading.

NARRATION: Whenever it was too rainy to get much done out in the fields, he would find his notes and work on his poetry.

Finally, when he was 25, he wanted to see if he could get something published. He wrote up a proposal, collected some of his poems, and the proposal came in the hands of a local bookseller by the name of Edward Drury, who was impressed and decided to get in touch with his cousin...

David: … a publisher named Taylor in London...

NARRATION: … who had also published John Keats. Drury wrote this cousin, John Taylor, a letter, introducing the young poet, John Clare. And I know it’s tricky to look at the past through contemporary eyes. But this letter makes for a painful read. Drury wasn’t even sure he should call Clare’s writings “poetry,” but IF they are, he wrote, and I quote, “there cannot be a stronger proof of the art being a gift”. He also assured his cousin that for all the corrections of spelling and grammar that would be needed, the poor author would be grateful.

Taylor showed interest. And in every letter that followed, Drury told a new story about exactly how poor this poor poet was: when Drury visited the Clare family, for instance, he found that they lived in “the worst hut of the meanest village I ever saw.”
But…  he did get Clare a book deal.     

David: And Clare…  I don't know if you would call him a celebrity, but he was certainly recognized as a rustic poet, as a poet who wrote beautiful nature poems which were worth seeing as literature.

NARRATION: And sales were impressive too. So John Clare was invited to London to be wined and dined, and he received an expensive - but bucolic looking - green suit for the occasion. 

David: But, um, you know, what was special about it was perhaps the novelty of it, that you simply did not expect poetry to come from such a source. I think he wasn't seen in the same light as, say, Wordsworth or Coleridge. And this was partly because he was lower class, I think the tendency was to see him as having a lower status.

NARRATION: And this class bigotry was not just about literary worth. He wasn’t even allowed to control the money he received from his book sales: that was put in a trust for him, and managed by Taylor, his publisher, and a local clergyman, the Reverend Mr Mossop.

But John Clare, even if he had left school at 11, was no fool. While a poet like Wordsworth looked with compassion at people living in poverty, Clare looked at the injustices that caused it.

Helena: I was wondering if you could read a fragment of one of his poems. It's on page 124 and 125 of your book. And before you read, could you explain a little bit? Because he talks about this phenomenon of enclosures in this poem. What is that? And why is it bad?

David: Well, the enclosures were, um, as the word sounds. They were enclosures of land, land which had previously been open to everyone to share. And so they could be used by the common people. They could plant potatoes there, for example, they could plant onions or they could plant trees and the trees would give firewood or they could use them as a place to to celebrate. To have to have a marriage, for example, or to have a concert or to play games. And this land now was banned to them.

Lynn: The late medieval farming system was a communal farming system. People had their own strips of land, but they sort of decided what crops everybody was going to grow more or less at the same time. And they would harvest at the same time and people would help one another out with the harvest. And there was a kind of communal thrust to work as well as a communal commitment to certain kinds of agriculture. Well, in the 18th century in particular, demand for food began to go way up because the population was rising. So grain prices in particular went way up. So if you could grow more grain, if you could have larger farms which were much more efficient to run, you could in fact make a great deal more money. So anyone with capital who already had a fair amount of land was trying to get more land. And the way they could do it was to get an act of parliament to say: if the people who own the majority of land in a parish wish to enclose it, it becomes legal. So, of course, the large landowners would have the majority of the land and several of them would get together and do a deal and get their act of parliament passed, which would mean that they could then break up all of these communal farming arrangements and they could take over the common land.

David: And now there were laws, that a public land was now privatized and it was now owned by somebody local who put a fence around it and put up signs saying no intruders.

Lynn: Those people who were left with just the tiniest amount of land were generally browbeaten into selling it, at which point they had a little bit of money, but no land whatsoever. So suddenly you are a poor person who had mostly a cottage and not much else. And you were now in a position where you could get work as a day laborer, perhaps at harvest and at planting time. You would no longer be able to keep a cow, which would mean you wouldn't have milk for your children. You might not have the ability to raise chickens and you wouldn't have any firewood. So suddenly you have lost all of these sources of things that help keep your family afloat. So enclosure was a very big deal.

David: And Clare witnessed the effects of these enclosures in his hometown. And he bitterly resented it. He really felt that this was a cruel thing to do.

Helena: Yeah. Would you mind the fragment of the poem?

David:Yes.

On paths, to freedom and to childhood dear

A board sticks up to notice “no road here”

And on the tree with ivy overhung

The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung

As though the very birds should learn to know

When they go there they must no further go.

Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade good-bye

And much they feel it in the smothered sigh,

And birds and trees and flowers without a name

All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came.

Helena: Oh, it's so terrific. I mean, it sounds so modern, doesn't it?

David: It does. It does. And the outrage is so deeply felt. It’s so…  And I think when people read Clare, they could see things from the eyes of the local residents. Perhaps for the first time, because they didn't have representation in parliament. They didn't have anyone to describe these things. And now they had a great poet who could describe it from within. How did it feel to lose this land.

MUSIC

NARRATION: Meanwhile, the attitudes against the poor kept  hardening. In 1834, the poor laws that had been in place since the time of Queen Elizabeth were rewritten, vilifying many of the people who relied on them: 

Lynn: What came to be thought of as really criminal was the figure of the, quote, able bodied laborer who would not work. Able-bodied men were... the unemployed, the mildly ill, the slightly disabled. An able-bodied man was basically virtually any man that was not half dead. (LAUGHING)

NARRATION: The new law made sure that as few people as possible could claim a right to relief, and that the factories and workshops of the Industrial Revolution would have plenty of cheap labor to draw from.  

Lynn: And therefore, the whole point of the poor laws was thought to be to push the poor into the labor market and keep them there. At a time when the economy was very unstable and was producing large amounts of regular unemployment.

Helena: And what were some of the ways in which the New Poor Law deterred relying on it?

Lynn: Well, for one thing, the New Poor law was, in theory it was centralized. Even though the money was still collected locally and dispensed locally, the bureaucrats in London set the rules of the game. And one rule that they set was, you can't give an able-bodied laborer - and they mostly meant men - any kind of money under the Poor Law, unless you took him and his family into the workhouse.

Helena: And can you talk a little bit about the conditions at these workhouses and the ways in which they were made deliberately as unpleasant as possible?

Lynn: When you went into a workhouse, if you were an able bodied man you had to bring your family in too. And the families then were split up. There was an adult male section and adult female section, and then there were the children's sections. So you might not even see your family regularly. Everything was done by the sound of a bell. You ate at the same time you went to sleep at the same time you were herded from place to place.
And there were jobs that you had to do. The women were put to work in the laundries and in the kitchens, but the men were given all kinds of nasty jobs. They would do something called picking oakum, which is the disentangling of the very heavy raffia strips that made hard ropes for the Royal Navy ships. And they were impregnated with tar. And somehow, if you took these apart, you could then re-use them, it was a kind of recycling, but it was a very nasty job. And so there are all kinds of jobs that were in part make-work. Sometimes they were real jobs: you could be breaking stones for the roads. There was a lot of hard labor. And then they essentially, I think, browbeat you into behaving yourself. You weren't allowed to smoke, you weren't allowed any alcohol. The food was pretty dreadful and pretty bland and absolutely uniform. You lost all your freedom.

MUSIC

NARRATION: Meanwhile, in Northborough, the village where he now lived, Clare was sinking back into the poverty he’d hoped his literary fame could save him from. He had gotten married and had kids, who needed to be clothed and fed. But despite the success of his first collection, the next ones, even with positive reviews, didn’t really sell. And as any writer could tell you, then or now, the book market works in mysterious ways. But you have to think: could these sales be because the novelty of John Clare, “the poor, rural poet,” had worn off? Which is, you could argue, what happened to Phillis Wheatley, when she tried to publish her second book. 

John Clare didn’t take this change in fortune well. He became depressed and erratic. At the recommendation of his publisher, Clare was committed to a private asylum in Epping Forest, about 80 miles south of where he lived. After 4 years, he had enough and undertook the 80-mile trip back on foot, without money or food. But after only a few months at home, he was recommitted, this time to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, which he called "the purgatorial hell and French bastille of English liberty, where harmless people are trapped and tortured until they die."

And he did die at the asylum, 23 years later, at the age of 70.

WHY he was in the asylum all this time isn’t clear. Recent scholarship points to bipolar disorder, or maybe schizophrenia--conditions that weren’t understood or treatable for another century. But the man who ran the first asylum at Epping Forest, wrote that it wasn’t “madness” that was plaguing Clare, but the ups and downs of literary fame, combined with “his extreme poverty and over exertion of body and mind.” All the poet needed in order to be cured, he thought, was a small pension. He even tried to raise the money through a public campaign, but he was unsuccessful. It’s not the ending I wish I could give you.

But David Aberbach told me that, even though John Clare wouldn’t live to see it, he did change the world he was never fully accepted into.    

David: I think Clare may have done more than is realized to enable people to understand that the poor were also thinking and feeling creatures and that they were discriminated against in a society that did not allow them representation in parliament. And you have, towards the end of Claire's life, a whole genre, The Condition of England novel, where writers write specifically about the problems that England faces, particularly the problems of poverty. This has now become the foremost concern in legislation and also in literature. And this is something that was not the case at the time of Blake's birth in the mid 18th century. By the mid 19th century, this had completely changed and the attitude towards the poor was actually a lot more sympathetic now than it had been in the past.

Today, I think Clare is really recognized not just as a curiosity, but rather as one of the great nature poets in English and perhaps in any language.

Lynn: One sort of larger issue that I think it's worth saying a sentence or two is that industrialization made a great deal of difference and improved the livelihoods and raised the incomes of most people over the long run. The period that these poets are looking at is the short run and the beginning stages where the economy is incredibly unstable. And when you combine that with war-time and you combine that with all of these agricultural changes that are shaking up the labor market and making it very difficult for a lot of people to earn money in the same sort of way. It meant that this was a period of about 75 years where things were getting worse for large numbers of people.

Helena: Yeah. Worse before they would get better.

Lynn: Worse before they would get better. Yes.

NARRATION: This was Part I of our [Poverty's History] series, [In the Beginning Was the Word.] For this series, I got help from many experts: historian Lynn Hollen Lees at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote The Solidarities of Strangers about the English poor laws, David Aberbach at McGill, who wrote the book Literature and Poverty, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers at the University of Oklahoma, she recently published The Age of Phillis - I’ll talk to her about just her book on the next episode of Poetry Off The Shelf.

I also got invaluable advice from people you didn’t hear. Gareth Stedman Jones is a historian of ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, and wrote An End to Poverty, about the intellectual debates surrounding the French Revolution.

The person who helped us find all these experts in the first place is Alice O’Connor, a historian at UC Santa Barbara, where she heads up the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy, and the author of many books on poverty, as well as co-editor of the in-sigh-clo-PEE-dya titled Poverty in the United States.

I also drew on the biographies of all these poets. Vincent Carretta on Phillis Wheatley; Charles Gardner on Blake; Stephen Gill on Wordsworth; Jonathan Bate on Clare.

And since the library is closed now, the past month I’ve also raided JSTOR for its academic articles, and the archive of the London Review of Books, which I already knew was a treasure trove on all things literary, but discovered is pretty much inexhaustible when you’re looking for stuff on 18th and 19th century Britain.

The person who helped me get structure in this mountain of stories, facts and context is my editor at the Poetry Foundation, Jim Sitar. If despite all this help, you heard a mistake, please blame no-one but me.

The music in this episode is by David Hilowitz and Todd Sickafoose, who made a few variations of his tracks especially for this show. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Part I of our series of Poetry Off The Shelf, [Poverty's History]. We’ll have Part II ready for you in a few months. Thank you for listening!

(And if you made it through this interminable outro, you will make it through the pandemic. Best of health to you, and thanks again for listening.)