Fighting, Writing, and Delusion

How John Clare Became Lord Byron

Children used to learn that there were nine planets and six great Romantic poets. Now there are eight planets, Pluto having been booted out (too small), and seven stars among the writers, John Clare (1793-1864) having joined Blake (1757-1827), Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Byron (1788-1824), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821).

John Clare in 1820, age 27

Each was a visionary. But even in their company, Clare stands out. The central fact of Clare’s long life was delusion. He internalized the words and identities of other writers. He imagined not only that he wrote their poems but also that he was the authors of their works. People told Clare that he was wrong, that he was not Byron, much less Shakespeare, but Clare’s beliefs and perceptions remained real to him. His link to Byron was reinforced by Clare’s conviction that, like Byron, he was a boxer. That is the essence of delusion, not to know what is genuine from what is not, to be unaware of how one’s own artificial intelligence remakes the world.

Clare had a unique attribute. He could not stop writing. His compulsion to write suggests that he had a syndrome known as hypergraphia, extensive and compulsive writing or drawing. If he thought it, he wrote it. His mind was full of sensation in search of expression. The compulsion to write shaped who he was.

Writing strengths our grip on ideas and their grip on us. Everybody knows the difference between having a passing thought and writing that thought down. Writing changes the brain and strengthens it, keeping the brain at a high level of activity. That’s why writing is tiring. Clare’s constant writing has to be taken into account when we think about  his confusion. His writing helped make his delusions real to himself.

Clare left some 10,000 pages of poetry and prose, according to Jonathan Bate, his most recent biographer. Readers often mention the freshness of Clare’s work. New readers are surprised by the passion under its lightness and lyricism. Clare’s poetry animates the countryside he loved and does that in ways we do not expect.

Just a taste: “Sheep in Winter,” unpublished at the time of his death. As Erica McAlpine has written, the poem is not about the poet’s perceptions but those of the boy the sheep follow. Loyal, seemingly domestic, they still prefer to spend the night in the cold:

The sheep get up and make their many tracks
And bear a load of snow upon their backs,
And gnaw the frozen turnip to the ground
With sharp quick bite, and then go noising round
The boy that pecks the turnips all the day
And knocks his hands to keep the cold away
And laps his legs in straw to keep them warm
And hides behind the hedges from the storm.
The sheep, as tame as dogs, go where he goes
And try to shake their fleeces from the snows,
Then leave their frozen meal and wander round
The stubble stack that stands beside the ground,
And lie all night and face the drizzling storm
And shun the hovel where they might be warm.

There was always some interest in Clare and his work. Frederick Martin’s biography appeared in 1865, a year after the poet’s death and forty years after the publication of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, Clare’s only commercially successful book. In 1932, J. W. and Anne Tibble published another biography, which they revised in 1972. Bate’s study came out in 2004.

Branded as the “peasant poet,” Clare was once regarded as a gentle rustic. The view that Clare was a peasant was set aside by the Tibbles in 1932. They sought to emphasize instead Clare’s originality, a side that had already been acknowledged. English Romantic Poets, for example, an anthology published in 1933 (ed. James Stephens, Edwin L. Beck, and  Royall H. Snow), includes nine selections by Clare, accompanied by this bracing assessment : “Clare was not a peasant, but he had a peasant’s instinct for the earth”—and, we might add, for weather, sheep, and shepherds.

The image of Clare one sees most often is the portrait above, by William Hilton, done in 1820, when Clare was just 27, well-dressed, wide-eyed, and dreamy, nothing like a fighter. It is a shock to see Thomas Grimshaw’s portrait of Clare at 50, now a man with a history,

or a photograph of him at 70. Forty years of poverty, alcohol, and institutionalization took their toll, as did obligations to his wife and their eight children.

Much about Clare plays to modern concern about disfunction, including his experience of class oppression, his alcoholism, and his delusive, seemingly psychotic behavior.

As a successful young author, Clare found a patron in London, where he went to dinners with other writers. In 1820, Clare just missed meeting Keats. He never met Shelley or Byron, although Clare grew up less than a hundred miles from Byron’s family estate. He remained in Byron’s shadow and seems to have modeled his life and writing on his hero. Some of his poetry is closely imitative of Byron’s, using the same titles and stanza forms. In his old age, he imagined that he was Byron as well as a boxer (Tibble and Tibble, p. 392).

Clare and Byron came to boxing by different routes. There was no question that Byron, born a wealthy aristocrat, would learn to box. He lived in what Kasia Boddy calls “the golden age of boxing” (p. 75). Gentlemen were expected to demonstrate some bravado, to leverage their status, and to mix with lower social orders by frequenting boxing clubs, as Byron did. That was the masculinity of the upper class. The “golden age” was theirs.

Clare was not a boxer, as he himself tells us, but he seems to have had some knowledge of fighting. His father, who, unlike Clare, was a large, strong man, was a wrestler, a singer, and a storyteller in Helpston, the village where Clare was born, in what was then Northamptonshire (about 45 miles north of Cambridge). Clare’s father offers a modest pairing of the interests of Byron and his peers: fighting and narrating, not only labor, defined the masculinity of the working class.

Perhaps his father’s example (seldom mentioned) was behind Clare’s own sense of defense. Late in life, according to Bate, Clare took an interest in self-defense.spurred by the violent air of the first of the two asylums he went to (p. 438). But I think there is an earlier and better sign that Clare understood how fighting related to masculinity.

During the period when England feared an invasion by Napoleon, young men were recruited and trained for the local militia. In 1812 (at age 19), Clare joined the Northamptonshire Militia at Oundle. He had been passed over at Nottingham in 1810 because he was too short. He was accepted and sworn in at Peterborough (Tibble and Tibble, pp. 51, 56).

At Oundle Clare found himself picked on by the corporal in charge. Here is how he wrote about his response. “I had no heart to boxing but I saw little [to] fear in him, for he was much less in strength than I was & the dread of the dark hole or awkard squad [forms of punishment] was but little in comparison to the teasing insults which his fellow daily inflicted.” The corporal was smaller than he was. Clare sized up his opponent, an astute, fighterly thing to do, even if he “had no heart to boxing,” meaning no enthusiasm for it or perhaps neither skill nor enthsuaisam.

Clare writes that “madness flushed my cheeks in a moment & when he saw it he rapt me over my knees in a sneering sort of way.” At this point, Clare “threw my gun aside and seizing him by the throat I hurled him down and kickd him.” Others rushed to help the fallen man. Clare was threatened with punishment but was only given extra guard duty (Bate, pp. 78-79).

He was not afraid, “for I had always lookt on such things as mere trumpery for children.” Clare’s maneuver worked. He escaped punishment, and the sneering corporal “never found his tongue to tell me of a fault even when I was in one” (Tibble and Tibble, pp. 58-59). Clare notes that he made a lot of mistakes in the militia, “for then I was a ryhmer and my thoughts were often absent when the word of command was given.” That is no doubt what provoked the corporal to begin with. Clare was writing in his head all the time; the need to command his own words crowded out “the word of command.”

This episode gives us a new view of Clare. Clare cultivated his anger. He was aware of his weaknesses as a soldier and knew he risked punishment, but he refused to be singled out for demeaning treatment. He not only threw the corporal to the ground but kicked him, a gesture of passion, to be sure, but also a sign of confidence and strength. Even though he had “no heart to boxing,” Clare would fight to defend his sense of himself as a man who had to write.

That was in 1812. Clare would develop a strong interest in boxing through his friendship with the painter Edward Villiers Rippingille, with whom Clare visited boxing clubs and prostitutes in London. By 1822 he owned a poetry collection called The Fancy, published in 1820 by J. H. Reynolds, who is known as the father of sports writing. “The Fancy” means “those who entertain a liking for boxing.” First recorded in use in 1807, it became a generic word for pugilists and their fans. Clare was one of those who fancied boxing. (See Bate, pp. 259-64, on “Rip” and on Clare’s experiences of London “low-life.”)

A poem in Reynolds’s collection concerned a boxer named John Randall, whom the poem compared to Byron (Bate, p. 438). “Lord Byron is a powerful poet, with a mind weighing fourteen stone,” Reynolds wrote, “but he is too sombre a hitter, and is apt to lose his temper,” whereas “Randall has no defect, or at least he has not yet betrayed the appearance of one” (“Lines to Philip Samson,” poems no. 88-90).

Clare “fuse[d]” Randall and Byron into “Boxer Byron” (Bate, p. 263). “Boxer Byron” balanced intellectual power and physical perfection. The idealization of balance explains in part the fashion for boxing as a literary topic. Other sources available to Clare mixed boxing and brains. Among William Hazlitt’s most famous works, for example, is “The Fight,” an 1822 essay that merges the prize-fighting world and the writing world. Clare met Hazlitt in July 1824, on his third visit to London (Bate, p. 264).

Clare received impressions of boxing and Byron from several media and genres. This encouraged his tendency to mix the real and the imagined, and the high and the low.

One source was historical writing. Pierce Egan’s Boxiana, a serial history of boxing, appeared in 1812 and continued for several highly successful years. Another source was Egan’s fiction. In his novel, Life in London, two men cruise through the high and low levels of city life; the book makes many references to boxing and famous boxers. Then there was theater, a “vaudeville dramatization” of Life in London, a play called Tom and Jerry. Clare saw it in London and later wrote that Byron’s Don Juan was a “fit partner” for Tom and Jerry since Don Juan also got into difficulties and found a way out of them (Bate, p. 264).

Clare had also heard about Randall the boxer, and other legendary figures, from songs his father and mother sang. Tibble and Tibble refer brilliantly to “the human mind’s chronic adeptness at displacement of image,” a feature of Clare’s later life (and the lives of many of his readers, to be sure; p. 223). These streams of “the Fancy,” history, fiction, drama, country songs, poetry, and prose, met in Clare’s imagination, where they formed a river of impressions and words that would power the writer’s pen.

Most evidence of Clare’s interest in boxing dates from the last  years of his life. In 1837, at 44, he was admitted to High Beech Asylum, Epping Forest. Despite his delusions, he was calm and conversant. He was able to take long walks on his own. In the spring of 1841, Cyrus Redding, who edited the English Journal, visited Clare, “in a field, cutting up thistles.” They talked about poetry, but then Clare, while talking about Byron, “broke off at once into remarks about boxing.”

(Fairmead House, now demolished, once part of High Beech Asylum)

Redding described Clare’s habit of inserting boxing into his conversation about other topics and called it an “aberration of mind” (Tibble and Tibble, pp. 342, 346, 373). It was difficult for visitors to know what caused Clare to jump from the wide-ranging topics of his prose and poetry to boxing (Bate, p. 439). But this should be less a mystery to us than it was to them. We can see in Redding’s note that it was Byron’s name that brought boxing to Clare’s mind. Redding then sent Clare two of Byron’s books.

Clare never lost his urge to write. In July 1841 he left High Beech and walked some 80 miles to his family’s home at Northborough. Wandering, lost, cold, sleeping outside (like the sheep), Clare survived by eating grass (again, like the sheep). In his notebook he reported that he had had no food “since yesterday morning,” when he had been at a certain town. He had in fact passed through that town two days before and had been without food for three days, not two. Starving and disoriented, living like an animal, Clare still had to write (Bate, pp. 451, 457).

In December 1841 he entered the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he died 23 years later. Clare wanted to go home but could not be discharged. He thought he knew why: “They won’t let me go, however,” he told Spencer T. Hall. “For, you see, they’re feeding me up for a fight; but they can’t get nobody to strip me.” He also asked Hall, who was going to London, to remember him to Tom Spring, a famous boxer who is mentioned in Reynolds’s poem, as if he and Clare were friends. When he thought of London now, he thought of fighters, not editors.

Boxing came to outweigh writing. “Asked if he felt more proud of his reputation as a poet than as a prize-fighter, Clare replied rather absently, ‘Oh, poetry, ah, I know, I once had something to do with poetry, a long while ago; but it was no good. I wish, though, they could get a man with courage enough to fight me’” (Tibble and Tibble, pp. 370-71; Bate p. 471).

Clare defended himself as a writer while retaining the belief that as a working man, a common man, he had views that mattered. This brings us again to Byron. Clare was in London in July 1824, still enjoying the success of his first book. He had come to visit his literary patron, Eliza Louisa Emmerson and, by accident, saw Byron’s funeral procession. His famous account reveals both Clare’s distinctive vision and his Byronic sympathies (content in brackets inserted by me; Clare never punctuated):

[W]hile I was in London the melancholly death of Lord Byron was announced in the public papers & I saw his remains born away out of the city on its last journey to that place w[h]ere fame never comes tho it lives like a shadow & lingers like a sunbeam on his grave[. I]t cannot enter[,] therefore it is a victory that has won nothing to the victor[. H]is funeral was blazed forth in the papers with the usual parade that accompanys the death of great men[.] I happend to see it by chance as I was wandering up Oxford street on my way to Mrs Emmersons when my eye was suddenly arested by straggling gropes [groups] of the common people collected together & talking about a funeral

I did as the rest did tho I coud not get hold of what funeral it coud be but I knew it was not a common one by the curiosity that kept watch on every countenance[. B]ye & bye the grope collected into about a hundred or more when the train of a funeral suddenly appeard[,] on which [sight] a young girl that stood beside me gave a deep sigh & utterd Poor Lord Byron

[T]here was a mellancholy feeling of vanity for great names never are at a loss for flatterers that as every flower has its insect[. T]hey dance in the sunbeams to share a liliputian portion of its splendour upon most countenances[.] I looked up in [i.e., upon] the young girls face it was dark & beautiful & I could almost feel in love with her for the sigh she had utterd for the poet[. I]t was worth all the Newspaper puffs & Magazine Mournings that ever was paraded after the death of a poet since flattery & hypocrisy was babtizd in the name of truth & sincerity . . . .

Clare noted that the young girl had “counted the carriages in her mind as they passd & she told me there was 63 or 4 in all they were of all sorts & sizes & made up a motly show[, and] the gilt ones that led the processions were empty.” Clare added that “the Reverend the Moral & fastidious may say what they please about Lord Byrons fame & damn it as they [please] – he has gaind the path of its eternity without them & lives above the blight of their mildewing censure to do him damage.”

In contrast,  “the common people felt his merits & his power & the common people of a country are the best feelings of a prophecy of futurity[. T]hey are the veins & arterys that feed & quicken the heart of living fame[,] the breathings of eternity & the soul of time are indicated in that prophecy.”

The passage is delicate but stern, Clare’s genius in a snapshot. Fame is like sunshine lingering on a grave it cannot enter. Every flower has its insects; every famous man has fans who share his splendor. The common people are the veins and arteries that quicken “the living heart of fame.” Clare captured “the vigor and sharpness of reality about him,” as others have written (English Romantic Poets, ed. Stephens, Beck, and Snow). He also had a gift for finding a commonplace image to animate a deeply felt social truth.

The elite spurned Byron in life but felt that they could not ignore him in death. Their solution was to send their gilded, crest-bearing carriages to the funeral procession—empty. They registered their importance without risking their reputation. They knew Byron, and they didn’t.

What did “the common people” know? They knew that Byron had sided with workers against their masters. In the House of Lords, he defended weavers in Nottingham who rioted against power-driven looms that were costing them their jobs. Byron said, “I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country.” The common people knew whose side he was on. So did John Clare, who was one of them.

(Clare’s grave in Helpston, with, at the top, a marker added in 2014, 150 years after his death, bearing the original wording: “HERE Rest the HOPES And Ashes of JOHN CLARE.” Marker created by John Nicholls)

And yet he was not. He was more like Byron that we might think. Leslie A. Marchand says that the poet dreamed his whole life of “playing the soldier” (Byron, p. 431). He could not play at soldiering if he could not mix with soldiers as well as with officers. By boxing, Byron crossed social boundaries and built his brawn and his bravery. His last days in Greece were spent fighting for freedom, his own and the Greeks’. Clare tried to cross social boundaries by writing; that’s how he learned about boxing.

Clare was interested in boxing because Byron boxed. I got interested in Byron because I box.

Why focus on boxing? Any boxer would have to wonder why Clare, a writer who spent his life doing manual labor, would aspire to pugilism. It seems to me that the less freedom Clare had, the more freedom he saw in Byron and in boxing. In the end he abandoned poetry for a boxer’s identity. To him, boxing was freedom, assertion, power, adventure—all the things he lacked in his narrow and quiet life.

Boxing to Byron meant freedom. To Clare it meant the idea of freedom, which was as close to being free as Clare could get. Men today can do better than that. We experience a culture that demonizes and mocks masculinity. Boys are hemmed in by an educational system that is dominated by women who want boys to behave like girls. At higher levels, education is obsessed with feminism and all things related to women.

Boxing is a great corrective to this contempt for the decency and integrity of men. Boxing helps men fight for themselves. It creates a sense of worth that deflects woke contempt. All of which is to say that, if you haven’t given boxing a shot, you should.

(Warm thanks as always to Janice Fiamengo and Tom Golden for inspiration and encouragement.)