George Crabbe Biography

George Crabbe was born on Christmas Eve in 1754 in Aldeburgh (or, as it was then known, Aldborough), Suffolk, the eldest son of the local collector of salt duties, who early recognized the intellectual potential of his son and endeavored to provide educational opportunities for him beyond those normally accessible to one in his station. Once a busy and prosperous seaport, Aldeburgh had dwindled in size and importance by the middle of the eighteenth century and contained a populace whose general poverty, ignorance, and ill-nature was matched by the isolated, inhospitable conditions of a seacoast plagued by tempestuous weather and surrounded by a dreary countryside consisting largely of salt marshes, heaths, and tidal flats. Crabbe’s early experiences in this setting left a lasting impression: Throughout his life, Aldeburgh retained a strong hold on his imagination. This strange mixture of fascination and repugnance formed the basis for a large number of the characters and settings that are possibly the most striking features of his poetry.

Between the ages of eight and thirteen, Crabbe’s father arranged for him to attend grammar schools in Bungay and Stowmarket, both in Norfolk, where he received the foundations of a classical education and is known to have made his first attempts at composing doggerel verse. Unable to continue financing his son’s education and having determined that the field of medicine would be the most suitable to his son’s talents and inclinations, the elder Crabbe in 1768 engaged for George to be bound as an apprentice to an apothecary and surgeon at Wickhambrook, near Bury St. Edmund’s, in Suffolk. Used more as a farmhand than as a surgical apprentice, young Crabbe was exceedingly unhappy there and, in 1771, was removed by his father to a more favorable situation in Woodbridge, Suffolk. These were to prove relatively happy years, for though he seems to have shown no great interest in his medical studies, life in Woodbridge was an agreeable contrast to what he had known in Aldeburgh and Wickhambrook. It was also during this period that he met and courted his future wife, Sarah Elmy, and saw his first poem of any consequence, Inebriety, appear in print in 1775.

In the summer of that year, his apprenticeship over, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh, and...

George Crabbe (krab), born at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1754, was the eldest son of a schoolmaster and revenue officer. In his youth, while apprenticed to a surgeon at Woodbridge, he met his future wife, Sarah Elmy, whom he addressed in his poems as “Mira.” After practicing surgery for a time he began to despair of his aptitude for the profession, and in 1780, bearing with him his accumulated poems in manuscript, he went to London in the hope of subsisting by literature. There, Crabbe owed much to patronage. Edmund Burke arranged for him to take holy orders in 1781 and recommended him to the duke of Rutland, who appointed Crabbe as his chaplain and started him on the progress from curate to rector.

Marrying in 1783, his financial condition improved gradually through the increasing popularity of his poems and later through an inheritance from his wife’s family. Typical of many eighteenth century Anglican parsons, Crabbe was a pluralist, one deriving income from a number of parishes; at one time Crabbe was rector of thirteen parishes, one in his birthplace. As a member of the minor gentry, his politics were conservative, and as a churchman, his theology was more ethical than mystical. His sermons were popular with his congregations, as were the sessions at home when Crabbe read eighteenth century fiction aloud to his family. Though of humble education—his degree was honorary—Crabbe was well read in the Latin and English classic authors and kept a...