SOURCE: “An Exercise in Nostalgia?: John Clare and Enclosure,” in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-taught Tradition, edited by John Goodridge, The John Clare Society, 1994, pp. 165-77.

[In the following essay, Rowbotham discusses whether John Clare was correct in blaming enclosure for what he saw as the destructive changes in rural society.]

There once was lanes in natures freedom dropt
There once was paths that every valley wound
Inclosure came, and every path was stopt
Each tyrant fixt his sign where pads was found
To hint a trespass now who crossd the ground
Justice is made to speak as they command
The high road now must be each stinted bound
—inclosure thourt a curse upon the land
And tastless was the wretch who thy existence pland

Clare's direct experience of enclosure came when he was sixteen. In that year, 1809, his parish of Helpston was enclosed:

But now alas my charms are done
For shepherds and for thee
The cowboy with his green is gone
And every Bush and tree
Dire nakedness oer all prevails
Yon fallows bare and brown
Is all beset wi’ post and rails
And turned upside down.

In his poetic comments on enclosure, Clare makes plain his reaction to the process: it turned his world ‘upside down’, and he deeply resented such a process, seeing it as a negative factor in his life, and in the lives of those around him. To sum up Clare's view, through enclosure, he and his community were denied the joys of rural life to which they had been entitled from time immemorial.

Broadly speaking, enclosure involved a re-ordering of the patterns of agricultural use—open fields gave way to fields ‘enclosed’ by fences and hedges. What had been permanent grassland often gave way to a crop rotation system. The older, simpler, (arguably less profitable) arable rotation systems gave way to systems that omitted the need for fields to lie fallow. All this, in turn, had an inevitable effect on the broader social and economic relations within individual enclosed parishes, though to varying degrees, depending on other factors. It cannot be denied that enclosure did involve a real and tangible change in the rural world. But the historian must ask whether Clare's condemnation of enclosure, his claim that:

Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine

or that:

All sighed when lawless laws enclosure came

is just an unspecific, generalised expression of personal regret (tinged with nostalgia) for changes affecting him and those around him, or whether his perceptions have a wider application as a comment on the process and human experience of enclosure on a larger scale.

That Clare was one of those adversely affected—socially and, in the long term, economically—by enclosure is not just a matter of personal reaction. It is borne out by the wider evidence on his life. That others were also adversely affected is equally borne out by an amount of evidence, touching not just on the economic but also the social and cultural aspects of rural lives.¹ But can Clare's comments be taken as providing a general picture of those in his station of life, at least in his region? Do they, in any real sense, embody the majority view that he claimed? Did ‘All sigh’ when enclosure came? Paul Langford, in A Polite and Commercial People, assessing the process of eighteenth and nineteenth century enclosure overall, is but one of the historians arguing that enclosure was the final stage in the evolution of a more flexible and so more productive system of farming with important and positive implications for most people in both rural and urban societies. He argues that too many commentators, such as E. P. Thompson, have exaggerated the communal harmony and sturdy individual independence of pre-enclosure parishes, and underrated the opportunities offered by ‘the new regime’. The point of such historians is that if, relatively, a few suffered, the vast majority gained, certainly economically and probably socially by any reasonable assessment of gains and losses.² But is this mere materialism, and if so, is materialism an improper base for such assessments?

In any assessment of the impact of enclosure in association with Clare's perspectives, the historian needs to be conscious of the wider context—not just that of Clare's own parish, or even of Northamptonshire. Where do Clare's comments on loss of freedom for the rural working orders fit into the broader picture of English social history at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century? With a lifespan of 1793-1864, John Clare was born into and lived through a period of rapid change and upheaval in English society—changes and upheavals of which contemporaries generally were acutely, indeed increasingly aware. Clare's consciousness of change and upheaval was not unique. But it should not be automatically assumed that the comment on such change and upheaval was universally critical.

Equally it must be remembered that Clare's personal focus was relatively narrow. His perspective related directly only to his rural Northamptonshire context—a context in which, essentially, he lived and died despite travels outside. But the turmoil of which Clare was conscious in his own context was not confined to Northamptonshire, or even to rural localities alone. The turmoil was also, and in the eyes of many contemporary observers, primarily, urban and industrial in locale and scale. The early years of Clare's life were, in majority perceptions, dominated by revolutions of varying kinds. The political, social and economic impacts of the French Revolution encouraged the use of the term, or the use of a related apocalyptic vision on the changes and upheavals of the period, arguably magnifying some of the impacts in popular and elite understanding at the time. Certainly it can be argued that it imparted a sense of doom to the rhetoric of the period in both prose and poetry. Of course it would be a gross misunderstanding of the period to ignore the extent, range and depth of the changes that were taking place in the relatively confined space of England and over a relatively short period. But a real understanding of those changes is promoted by a willingness to look beyond the rhetoric, no matter how appealing to a modern eye, and to evaluate also a range of other related factors.

Let me briefly summarise some of the changes perceived by contemporaries and modern historians, changes that, practically, were often outside human control at either a local or a national level. These involved a dramatic growth in population; the acceleration of a changing demographic pattern where the population was, during Clare's lifetime, increasingly locating itself in urban surroundings. Moreover, this increased population, especially in urban locations, was becoming self-consciously organised in different and more rigid social patterns or classes. In addition, the urban locations were changing in nature, purpose and appearance becoming industrial urban locations. Patterns of employment were also changing as more and more people entered the more rigidly regulated world of industrial, or quasi-industrial, employment—a world where they were employees of single identifiable masters. All of this helped to accelerate the development of a mass, class-ordered society in the modern sense. In a physical sense, experiences of England changed as developments in the communications and transport systems made travel for individuals and goods relatively easier, cheaper and swifter. If urban topography was changing rapidly in this period, so too was the rural landscape. Partly this was the indirect result of urbanisation and industrialisation. Partly, it resulted from the developments known to some historians as the Agrarian Revolution, which depended on an upheaval in agricultural techniques more than technology with the overall (successful) aim of improving the output of Britain's agricultural sector, and as a corollary for many landlords, improving the conditions of the rural poor.³

Given all this, it is not surprising that changes in perception of the physical world, especially the man-made or man-regulated world, were also a feature of this period, along with a perception by the successful in society at least (a not inconsiderable number at this time) that things were improving for people at all social and economic levels of society. Increasingly the concepts of ‘improvement’ were associated with material magnitude—a growth in size, of buildings, urban centres, of industrial or craft concerns, and, in the countryside, of farms and estates and their constituent elements. And in all areas, economic concepts took as an axiom of efficiency and improvement in output and profits, an ideal of involvement of large-scale capital and investment. Such changes manifested themselves, with overtones of both approval and disapproval, in art and literature, such as that produced by Clare.

Clare can be located within the self-taught tradition of the period, the context of men and women who acquired a basic literacy as a result of some form of (often desultory) teaching of reading and possibly writing, or even cyphering. A number of these men and women went on to expand their powers of expression and their range of knowledge outside formal systems of education. A good range of information was available in purchasable, printed form as a result of the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century, in terms of collecting and classifying knowledge. Thus equipped, such men and women were both able, and often willing, to commit to paper their perceptions and reactions to the world and their experience of it—and even, if opportunity offered, to commit themselves to print.

Developments in basic literacy from the late eighteenth century at least were an identifiable feature in social development—the result of an increase in a variety of educational establishments of varying quality, but most significantly the development of an increasingly organised system of teaching the basic skills that was sponsored by organised religion via various denominations. The development and proliferation of Sunday Schools was of particular importance, but there were also daily schools run by religious denominations, all serving to reach increasing numbers, though admittedly, generally at a very basic level. Thus this increase in literacy was, in itself, a significant change on its own terms, with considerable implications for types and expressions of popular culture. It was also, at least in part, a product of a further change, effectively amounting to a revolution in its impact on many individuals and communities, produced by the development of the evangelical movement from the late eighteenth century. Starting from a predominantly Nonconformist base but spreading to the Anglican church, where it became one of the driving forces of that church, the evangelical awakening of this period was a movement that had profound secular effects.

It linked easily with, and gave weight and authority to, many of the secular social and economic developments of the period. Evangelical religious belief supported, for example, a rational regulated outlook on life and an active pursuit of commerce and profit via the logicalities (as it seemed to men like Adam Smith, for example) of a capitalist system in all its ramifications. It also supported an outlook on life where due acceptance of God's will (manifested, for example, in acceptance of one's ‘ordained’ social station) might result in worldly profit, but would certainly bring a heavenly reward. Evangelicalism also encouraged a proselytising sense of responsibility towards ‘inferiors’ amongst those who saw themselves as being part of a social and economic elite.

Where do Clare, and his comments on enclosure, fit into all this, and does it mean that his comments need to be seen more as a comment on the broad changes of the period in intangible ways, and resistance to such change, rather than the more tangible matters of enclosed fields and barred paths and what this led to? In an assessment of the impact that evangelicalism and its manifestations had on Clare, it is worth remembering that Northamptonshire was one of the rural counties that fostered Anglican evangelicalism. The Reverend Thomas Scott, ‘Scott the Commentator’, was, for instance, given patronage and support by several members of the Northamptonshire landed elite.⁴ One result of this at local levels was a proliferation of an Anglican-sponsored educational system over much of the county. Clare himself, after all, owed much to his local vestry school.

Another result was the proliferation amongst some of the landed elites, along with clergy and others in positions of authority, of a sense of moral responsibility which led them to seek a greater degree of active intervention in the lives of the rural masses. This was part of what Boyd Hilton has dubbed an ‘exercise in atonement’; the taking on, voluntarily and unasked by the majority (at least!) of those masses, of a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the masses, taking the form of regulating aspects of the daily and spiritual lives of the masses to eradicate ‘undesirable’ elements or sins therein.⁵ Those involved in this exercise felt a spiritual compulsion towards, and divine approval of, such activity—but it was not universally well received at a popular level.

In terms of illuminating aspects of popular hostility to this well-meaning interference, the evidence of Clare's work provides useful material. For instance, his prose and poetic writings make it clear that certainly by the 1820s, he had little time for the established and organised forms of religion—which is not, of course, to say that Clare was devoid of belief or an individual piety. But he described the forms of religion as ‘little more than cant’, and it seems highly probable that the ‘cant’ he disliked was essentially evangelical in its outlook. But why were evangelicalism and expressions of public piety so unpopular amongst persons like Clare? The key to understanding this is the essential hostility of evangelicalism to so much of what Clare held dear in life and experience, in terms of the local cultures and customs of Helpston. As mentioned, such evangelical hostility was no local phenomenon: it was widespread, and both rural and urban. Thus it can be expected that neither was the reaction to the phenomenon and impact of evangelicalism—which gives a broader dimension to Clare's comments and justifies a further examination of the impacts of evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism laid a stress on the individual achievement in terms of seeking salvation. One way in which this increasingly expressed itself in the upper echelons of society was in a drive for personal privacy. It promoted meditation, modesty, self-control—all the values and qualities seen as pleasing to God (after all, justification by faith was one of the important principles of evangelical Protestantism). Thus landowners surveying their lands had moral, as well as aesthetic, grounds for not wishing to bump into any of the hoi polloi, and for building walls and fences and restricting free access by their tenants etc to their grounds in wide swathes around their residences. It was loud and boisterous ruderies that were associated with rustics, rather than calm serenity. As William Cowper's poetry, for instance, underlines, evangelicalism and the issue of personal inspiration and faith were linked to the quiet contemplation of God's beautiful world of nature untainted by the ruder specimens of humanity:

The calm retreat, the silent shade
With prayer and praise agree
And seem by Thy sweet bounty made
For those who follow Thee.

This contemplation included the wonders of animal life; and in a development that has delightful ironies and implications of hypocrisy (but, I suspect, often unconscious) a move towards privacy for gentry and aristocratic lands and parks was advertised by contemporaries as part of a protection of animal life—of rabbits and hares, for example—against rustic cruelties and indiscipline. Hunting, by contrast, was seen as an aspect of animal preservation.

Thus there was a move to close off access to parklands etc for reasons that may have paralleled enclosure in their effect, but were significantly different, being driven by a will to control trespass primarily as an offence against individual privacy. It is trespass on parkland etc, not enclosure of previously open fields, that Clare complains about when talking of his ‘horror’ of certain laws:

I dreaded walking where there was no path
And prest with cautious tread the meadow swath
And always turned to look with wary eye
And always feared the owner coming bye.

Yet in a sense, Clare himself sympathised with a search for privacy and quiet, and for the importance of Nature as a source of positive inspiration; and a need, at moments of inspiration and meditation, to get away from his fellow man. When he read Thomson's Seasons, he ‘clumb over the wall into Burghley Park and nestled in a lawn at the wall side’ to enjoy his reading in private, and surrounded by an inspiring Nature.

But for all that, the real impact of the evangelical culture of the period on Clare, and those of a like mind, was, from their perspective, negative. Traditional local culture and custom was widely perceived by evangelicals of all social levels as being undesirable. Nineteenth century collectors of folk songs and customs, such as the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould, often found it necessary to modify and ‘clean up’ the cultural products they collected. Baring Gould noted, for instance, that the original words of a currently well-known British folk song, ‘The Nightingale’, were too dubious, morally, to be recorded. But as it was (and is) a pretty tune, he wrote more seemly words to a tale of courtship where two lovers sat on a bank to ‘hear the fond tale of the sweet nightingale’. Instead of extolling the pleasures of seduction, Baring Gould's words have the couple decorously hastening off to the church to get married before indulging in anything unseemly. For such men and women, the popular culture of the masses was characterised by idleness and indulgence, dissoluteness and depravity—all too often related to excess alcohol consumption. Deficiencies in personal and communal productivity were generally blamed on indulgence in the time-honoured custom of drunkenness. As his poetry shows, Clare enjoyed such simple pleasures, and resented attempts to eradicate them from his community and his own life, no matter how high-minded might have been the motives of those promoting the change. It was an enclosure of a less tangible kind, but one that was clearly associated in his mind with the process of change going on around him in a more tangible sense that he dubbed, if somewhat simplistically or superficially, ‘enclosure’.

It was in the interests of society as a whole, and in particular of the labouring orders, that such ‘undesirable’ customs be rooted out. But a successful rooting out would, as contemporaries realised, involve a major upheaval. it was not just a question of dealing with rural leisure—though many of the ‘worst’ pastimes (like fighting and fornicating) were essentially leisure pastimes transmitted by tradition. More respectable leisure occupations, productive of ‘good’, needed to be placed before the labouring orders, and those orders induced by various means to take them up. Literacy and an education based on literacy was one aid used to undermine the traditions of oral culture. Reading was seen as a pastime enjoyable in itself, and, if properly controlled, recreational in the best sense. Through works of fiction and non-fiction, the labourer could learn about the folly of his traditional pastimes, and the delights and individual profits of more rational pastimes. He could also learn concepts of time that were absolute rather than relative. This was one important aspect of the ways in which literacy undermined the basis and traditions of an essentially oral popular culture. There was a profound interconnection between rural work and its concepts of time and rural culture and customs, on a daily and an annual basis. That Clare was well aware of this is displayed in The Shepherd's Calendar, where he records a society in which daily rhythms and daily labour and leisure were regulated by the seasons and the weather, not a mechanical clock. To quote David Vincent, Clare knew:

… the beliefs and practices subsumed under the heading of ‘Superstition’ were … threatened with oblivion by the insect encroachments of literacy and the more general disruption of established social and economic relations.⁶

Yet Clare himself valued his own literacy, despite these perceived dangers.

As well as aiding the spread of literacy, the Church took an active role in supporting and furthering the breakdown of traditional patterns of work and popular culture in the higher interest of the people. After all, ‘what profiteth it a man, if he gain the world, yet lose his soul’. Thus while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the church had opposed enclosure, in the eighteenth century (with individual exceptions) it promoted it. Partly this was for personal profit, it is true, but the significance of more abstract moral reasons should not be overlooked, if only on the basis of providing a personally convincing justification of support for enclosure. It was a support widely resented amongst the rural masses. Church support for the contemporary system of enclosure was, for instance, one factor in the anti-clericalism of the Swing Riots. Yet clergymen saw the results of such systems of enclosure amongst their flocks as being generally improving. The practicalities of new work patterns and hierarchies enabled and required a greater control and regulation to be introduced.

Organised religion used new patterns of work and hierarchy to introduce a new calendar of annual observances and celebrations through which people were taught the tangible and intangible values of order and punctuality. Literacy was also an aid in providing a fixed record, as well as the authority of a created ‘pedigree’ for the new calendar. For instance, Christmas became a time of reward for those embracing the new attitude, with the distribution of appropriate gifts of clothing, food and even money to the deserving in a parish, acquiring a new popular importance thereby at the expense of less respectable celebrations during the year. The Church also did its best to take over, and regulate, harvest celebrations. No wonder, then, that the recalcitrant Clare wrote:

Churchwardens, constables and overseers
Make up the round of commons and of peers.

Rather comprehensibly to a modern perception, John Clare remained determinedly and resentfully amongst the undeserving in his attitude towards such moral improvements as the new order was promoting.

But as many historians have pointed out, this move to regulation was not just arbitrary and internally motivated, nor was it caused solely or even primarily by enclosure, despite popular interpretations of blame such as those by Clare. There were increasing pressures on traditional society as a whole, including rural society, forcing on change. One of the most significant of these pressures was that exerted by demographic growth. For the first time, probably, England was undergoing a sustained population growth unchecked by factors like famine and disease. In the decade of Clare's birth the rise was particularly profound. The impact of that rise worried contemporaries. Malthus wrote his apocalyptic vision of the impact of growth in a fear that the natural resources of England would give out, bringing disaster in its wake. Yet there was also a real pride that national famine appeared, at the end of the eighteenth century, to be a thing of the past. Adam Smith emphasised the vital contribution of the agricultural sector to national and individual wealth and well-being. For many landowners and tenants, the obvious corollary was to enclose the unenclosed and so improve the efficiency of that sector.

Enclosure was not new—even in Northamptonshire—and all of the available evidence seemed to show that, properly organised, enclosure made economic and so, social, sense and did so on an individual as well as a community level. For many landlords concerned about their responsibilities in terms of tenant welfare, enclosure seemed the best way to improve that welfare. It must also be understood that by itself, enclosure was not necessarily the thing that outraged men like Clare. Rather, it was engrossment. This, far more than enclosure alone, acted as a systematic onslaught on the values and habits of rural society. It was engrossment—where the economies of scale produced ever larger units of agricultural production—that brought the fat cat new breed of tenant farmers with ever larger farms that Clare hated—and not just Clare. If less poetic than Clare, Christopher Anstey, was a more accurate observer of the changes in the rural world. In 1780, in his poem ‘Speculation’, Anstey wrote:

Proud tenants with rapacious hand
Engross the produce of their land
Usurp the empire of the plains
And lord it o’er the humbler swains.

As one of the humbler swains, and with no personal ambitions to develop into a large tenant farmer, simply to farm in the old tradition of smallholding, Clare found himself an anachronism, as did others in his position. All over the country, the smallholder and the small farmer, unwilling or unable to transmute into a larger dimension, were going to the wall in terms of ability to maintain an independent living. Instead, they were often forced by necessity to take on work as farm labourers, if they did not migrate to towns.⁷ In that sense, Clare certainly provides a voice of genuine and valuable commentary on the process. But it was engrossment on top of enclosure, not enclosure per se, that disadvantaged Clare, though he clearly was not aware of this.

Another impact of demographic growth was the migration of surplus populations to towns and cities—where increasingly they became involved with craft and industrial work on an ever-increasing scale. Clare himself must have seen something of this migration towards urban centres from villages like Helpston. For one thing, towns in the county, notably Northampton, were experiencing some industrialisation and attracting larger populations from the surrounding countryside. Then there was the lure of centres like London and the booming metropolises of Manchester and Birmingham, for example. The spread of literacy helped to spread information about such centres and their benefits in terms of ready employment and good wages—even if such expectations of fortune often turned out to be hollow! The growing urban populations were dependent on agricultural productivity; something that the landowning and successful tenant farming community was acutely aware of, as was the growing industrial bourgeoisie.

Enclosure was seen as an intrinsic part of that necessary process, despite the regrets voiced by a number of even the landowning observers at the short term miseries and upsets it caused. But in the long term, it was believed, it was in the interests of all in what was fast becoming the best of all possible worlds. As Kay Shuttleworth pointed out: ‘civilisation is most powerfully promoted by commerce’.⁸ And for many observers in all stations of life, including the self-taught, the confinements of urban life far outweighted the confinements brought to rural society by enclosure. Commenting on urban dwellers, Sir John Sinclair talked of ‘a servile, pallid, and sickly race, brought up in the confined air of cotton mills’.⁹ Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, claimed that ‘manufacturing towns and populous cities … may literally be said to be the grave of the human species’.¹⁰ The town dweller was seen as most truly enclosed, and far more readily and effectively regulated than country dwellers. In the urban context traditional customs, it was believed, were far more easily destroyed to promote more ‘rational’ leisure pursuits.

Clare certainly did not share this perception. His own experiences of visits to London show he saw urban life as providing him with an opportunity to indulge in the unrespectable pleasures that, for him, had become more difficult to indulge in in Helpston but in the more impersonal urban surroundings they were still accessible. The resulting sense of spiritual enclosure that he associated with the process of physical rural enclosure around him, plus the closing off of land to his incursions and the physical presence of obstacles (like the hedges that he himself had to help in planting) to his free passage through that landscape, all ensured that for Clare, urban life had its freedoms. After all, if traditional observances and festivals had been eradicated, and a sense of mechanical timekeeping installed, the nature of the urban landscape made the loss less visible to the casual visitor like Clare. This was particularly the case since it seemed plain to Clare from his own personal experiences that a lesser success was obtained in terms of eradicating drunkenness and fornication amongst the urban masses.

Thus to many contemporaries, such as those who acted as his patrons, Clare's comments on enclosure seemed essentially foolishly (if understandably) ignorant—understandably because of the limited nature of his background and educational achievements. The ‘authentic’ peasant voice of his poetry and its genuine lyricism and sympathy with Nature overcame the practical reservations about its message. To less sympathetic contemporaries, essentially those conscious of an atmosphere of social unrest symbolised by movements such as Luddism, Clare's comments were deemed to be ungratefully dangerous folly that could lead to a worsening of social tensions, to the detriment of all classes and conditions. Thus the reactions to Clare's works can be used to understand some of the thinking of the land-owning classes. For the historian of rural England, however, Clare's opinions also provide a clue to the unease and discontent with the new world evolving in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century that were felt by that social group (relatively small, maybe, but still important) of those who would be cottagers and smallholders. It is easy to emphasise the short-sightedness of this social group. This group had little liking for the proclaimed benefits of the new world when they compared its ‘gains’ to what they had lost with the eradication of the old world, in an exercise that may well have lacked practicality but was none the less real to those who regretted the passing of an old age and refused to become reconciled to the new. Clare, typically of this group, lacked the broader understanding and knowledge to enable him to classify precisely the nature of the changes taking place around him. He, like others, summed it up simply as enclosure—an imprecise judgment in a material sense, as can easily be demonstrated. But to emphasise this point alone is to ignore the perspective on change by a group about to be dispossessed of a cultural heritage, at least. By enclosure men like Clare meant not so much the purely agricultural, economic process as the changing lifestyle and social mores of this period, that such observers associated with the term. Clare's attitude to enclosure was an exercise in nostalgia, but its importance to the historian is the indication it gives that the process of change and ‘improvement’ in rural England was regretted and resisted. While this failed to halt the path of progress, history ignores the perspective of failed minorities at its peril. Clare's comments on enclosure may be a footnote to the overall process, but good history requires such footnotes.

Notes

1. See, for example, E. P. Thompson, Customs In Common, The Merlin Press Ltd., 1991; J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right. Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

2. See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, Routledge, 1992.

3. There was by this time a long-standing concern with the condition of the rural poor. Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, George Crabbe's The Village, Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy are poetic milestones along a path of literary works that reflected that concern. See A. D. Harvey, English Poetry in a Changing Society 1780-1825, Allison & Busby, 1980, for example, on this.

4. Thomas Scott the Commentator, also a self-educated man to a large extent, spent most of his religious working life in Buckinghamshire (notably Olney, where he was in contact with William Cowper) and London, but he had connections with Northamptonshire—and his eldest son, another Thomas and another clergyman, obtained all his preferment in Northamptonshire on the basis of his father's reputation.

5. See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement, The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785-1865, Clarendon Press, 1991.

6. See David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 183. See also pp. 64, 181, 184-5.

7. Though it must be remembered that often such labouring work was far more materially remunerative than seeking to scratch a subsistence living as a cottager or smallholder. Thus though it was a descent in terms of social status, no light thing, it was often economically preferable to accept change and work as a labourer in the period of which Clare had knowledge.

8. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 1832, quoted in B. I. Coleman (ed), The Idea of the City in Nineteenth Century Britain, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1973, pp. 66-70.

9. Sir John Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1825, vol 1, p. 170.

10. Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, London, 1829, colloquy xv.