Abstract
This chapter considers the critical status of John Clare’s asylum poetry, especially the later poems of the Northampton asylum period. Drawing in particular on recent work from the social history of medicine and psychiatry, the chapter aims to challenge some widespread critical assumptions about Clare’s position in the Northampton asylum, which has sometimes been characterised as a benighted half-life of the deepest obscurity, and to reconsider the actual possibilities for social and sociable communication which it allowed his poetry. This is pursued via three areas which have been discussed recently as showing the kinder or more sociable side of the early Victorian asylum system: staff-patient friendship, cultures of patient writing, and the material and metaphorical significance of landscapes, clothing, and musical performance in the asylum. These topics are then discussed in relation to Clare’s lyric ‘To Jenny Lind’ (1849) as an illustrative example of the possibilities and limitations of sociability in Clare’s later asylum poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1, 54.
- 2.
Hereafter ‘Northampton Asylum’.
- 3.
‘A First Line Index to the Poetry of John Clare: Introduction’ (1999), at http://www.johnclare.info/firstlineintro.html, accessed June 2019.
- 4.
Poems of John Clare’s Madness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 31.
- 5.
See John Clare in Context, 259–78, and the somewhat overlapping account in Porter’s own A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 76–81.
- 6.
This habit seems to have begun with Janet Todd’s In Adam’s Garden in 1973; others who write of Clare’s ‘pre-asylum’ poetry include Mark Storey, in Critical Heritage, and Tim Chilcott (both of whom do also give the earlier asylum years their due), Johanne Clare, and more recently Paul Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5, and Adam White, John Clare’s Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 108, 300.
- 7.
John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6, and passim; Kövesi (talking here, admittedly, about asylum writings, and establishing a critical frame for the later poetry), 204; Chirico, 1, 18.
- 8.
Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 165–88.
- 9.
I am thinking here in particular of the work of Peter Barham and Robert Hayward: From the Mental Patient to the Person (London: Routledge, 1991), and the piece cited below.
- 10.
Poems of John Clare’s Madness, 3, 31.
- 11.
Poems of John Clare’s Madness, v, 6, 28, 23. Grigson’s sense of Clare’s dementia praecox is very much a mid-twentieth-century conception of schizophrenia, before work by psychiatrists such as Manfred Bleuler and Luc Ciompi established, as Barham and Hayward quote Ciompi, that ‘the developmental course of schizophrenia is not compatible with the conception of a progressive disease process but, rather, that such courses, upon closer inspection, show themselves as being almost as protean as life itself’(‘Schizophrenia as a Life Process’, in Reconstructing Schizophrenia, ed. by Richard Bentall (London: Routledge, 1990), 62). The point is that even the most serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, or dementia, do not necessarily mean the end of life itself.
- 12.
Poems of John Clare’s Madness, 32, 2.
- 13.
St Andrew’s Hospital Northampton: the first 150 Years (1838–1988) (Cambridge: Granta, 1989), 3. Dr. Trick, at least, was a working psychiatrist.
- 14.
These and the medical judgements of neurologists and psychologists such as Walter Russell Brain (who splendidly not only became The Lord Brain, 1st Baron Brain, but also edited the journal Brain), Seán Haldane, and Evan Blackmore, constitute the other standard references on Clare and madness.
- 15.
The Later Poems of John Clare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964), 3; Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 25–6.
- 16.
See Bartlett’s The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in mid-Nineteenth Century England (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), now the standard reference point on this topic.
- 17.
‘Parsimony, Power, and Prescriptive Legislation: The Politics of Pauper Lunacy in Northamptonshire, 1845–1876’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81.2 (2007): 370.
- 18.
‘Parsimony, Power, and Prescriptive Legislation’, 373.
- 19.
New Essays on John Clare, ed. by Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3.
- 20.
Letters, 669.
- 21.
‘Kindness and Reciprocity: Liberated Prisoners and Christian Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History 47.3 (2014): 721. For similar dynamics of gratitude in the asylum, see Len Smith, ‘“Your Very Thankful Inmate”: Discovering the Patients of an Early County Lunatic Asylum’, Social History of Medicine 21 (2008): 237–52.
- 22.
The key sources used in most biographical accounts to date here are clearly MSS 410 and 412–14 in the Northampton catalogue, from the 1970 accession to the archive.
- 23.
Later Poems (1964), 9.
- 24.
Robinson and Summerfield’s mistake is repeated elsewhere, for example, in the introduction to John Clare in Context, 9, where Knight is called ‘Clare’s doctor’. This error was pointed out in the useful cluster of essays on Clare at Northampton in Northamptonshire Past and Present, 3 (1971): 85–102, which also gives the information on salaries cited here, taken from the asylum records.
- 25.
His retirement on a pension of £216 is reported in 1891 by the Birmingham Daily Post, September 29 and November 27. Knight had worked at the Birmingham Lunatic Asylum, later All Saint’s Hospital, for 41 years. By then he was 77 years old, which tells another sort of story: this was a long shift at an institution ‘enlarged repeatedly between opening and the late 1870s in order to contain ever increasing numbers of pauper inmates fuelled by the relentless expansion of Birmingham’. County Asylums website, https://www.countyasylums.co.uk/all-saints-winson-green-birmingham/. A much earlier article praises his ‘faithful and efficient services’, ‘high character’, ‘kindness’, and ‘great humanity’, reproducing a visitor’s report to this effect, while also reporting on a Dickensian debate among local councillors as to ‘whether they were always to be purchasing kindness and humanity with high wages?’ (Knight’s salary had just been raised modestly with the expansion.) ‘Local Intelligence’, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, October 17 (1853): 4.
- 26.
Foss and Trick, St Andrew’s Hospital, 58, 135–6.
- 27.
Northampton Mercury, March 2 (1850): 3.
- 28.
For anxieties relating to stewards and the possibility of embezzlement, see, for example, Jo Melling and Bill Forsythe, The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England 1845–1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 41–2, or Foss and Trick, St Andrew’s Hospital, 88–9, for a later case of this at the Northampton Asylum; cf. Clare’s line in ‘Don Juan’ about the steward ‘open[ing] shop’ and having a ‘jolly flare up’ with stolen tobacco: Later Poems, 1: 38.
- 29.
Robinson and Summerfield, Later Poems (1964), 10.
- 30.
‘“No ‘Sane’ Person Would Have Any Idea”: Patients’ Involvement in Late Nineteenth-century British Asylum Psychiatry’, Medical History 60.1 (2016): 37–8, 47.
- 31.
Kövesi, John Clare, 199.
- 32.
Rebecca Wynter, ‘“Good in all respects”: appearance and dress at Staffordshire County Lunatic Asylum, 1818–54’, History of Psychiatry, 22.1 (2010): 40, 41; Jane Hamlett and Lesley Hoskins, ‘Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-century England’, Journal of Victorian Culture 18.1 (2013): 93–114; see also Hamlett, ‘Public Asylums’ in At Home in the Institution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 16–37. The sketch of Clare’s coat and smalls is from Spencer Hall’s account of his 1843 visit, later recounted in his Biographical Sketches of Remarkable People (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1873), 166.
- 33.
‘The Role of Landscape in Relation to the Treatment of Mental Illness in the Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum’, Garden History 33.1 (2005): 49, 51–2 for the cottage.
- 34.
‘Cheerfulness and tranquillity: gardens in the Victorian asylum’, Lancet Psychiatry 1.7 (December, 2014): 506–7.
- 35.
Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Foucault: Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 195. My awareness of some of the social and medical historical work cited here was informed by two recent conferences; the asylum panels at the Society for the Social History of Medicine conference in 2018, and the ‘Rethinking the Institution’ conference at Liverpool John Moores University in 2017; thanks and acknowledgements to Kate Taylor for organising the latter.
- 36.
‘Playing Cards, Cricket and Carpentry: Amusement, Recreation and Occupation in Caterham Imbecile Asylum’, Journal of Victorian Culture 24.1 (January, 2019): 73, 80–2.
- 37.
Foss and Trick, St Andrew’s Hospital, 98–9.
- 38.
Roger Sales offers some lively comment on ‘asylum culture’ in his John Clare: a Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002; chapters 4 and 5), specifically addressing ‘the everyday theatricality of asylum life’ (120) in relation to Clare’s boxer roles, although not really in this actual everyday sense, and not with much detail that is specific to Northampton Asylum; rather, as a form of symbolic contest with authority, his reading of Clare’s time in the asylum being more marked by the anti-psychiatric critique (and some of the generalising) of earlier revisionary accounts, especially Porter’s.
- 39.
Letters, 660.
- 40.
Later Poems, 1: xv; quoting, partly critically, Tibble and Thornton, Midsummer Cushion, xii.
- 41.
Peterborough MS G5; quoted in Bate, Biography, 477. This was also used as the title of a play about Clare in the asylum, produced for BBC radio in 1978 by Roger Frith and later staged in 1989 and for the bicentenary in 1993.
- 42.
Goodridge, John Clare and Community, 190.
- 43.
Later Poems, 2: 666–7.
- 44.
See Joanna Ball, ‘“The Tear Drops on the Book I Read”: John Clare’s Reading in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, 1841–1864’, Wordsworth Circle, 34.3 (Summer, 2003): 155–8. There are 34 articles mentioning Lind in the Northampton Mercury up to February 1849 (Gale British Library Newspapers database).
- 45.
See Chaney, “No Sane Person”, 45, which reproduces and comments upon such an image.
- 46.
See Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1, 15.
- 47.
Judith Pascoe, ‘“The House Encore Me So”: Emily Dickinson and Jenny Lind’, Emily Dickinson Journal 1.1 (1992): 2.
- 48.
‘Objects & Apparitions: For Joseph Cornell’; Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 275.
- 49.
Kövesi, 203; Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 25.
- 50.
Mark Storey, ‘The Poet Overheard: John Clare and his Audience’, JCSJ 10.1 (1994): 9.
- 51.
Northampton MS 52, quoted in Later Poems, 2: 666.
- 52.
OED, online edition, senses 1–7.
- 53.
Giving up the Ghost (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 217.
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Whitehead, J. (2020). ‘A Song in the Night’: Reconsidering John Clare’s Later Asylum Poetry. In: Kӧvesi, S., Lafford, E. (eds) Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43374-1_13
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