The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (The Nineteenth Century Series)

THE ROMANTICS AND THE MAY DAY TRADITION

For my mother and my sister

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

ESSAKA JOSHUA University of Birmingham, UK

© Essaka Joshua 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Essaka Joshua has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi ed as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Joshua, Essaka The Romantics and the May Day tradition. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. English poetry – 19th century – History and criticism 2. Folklore in literature 3. May Day 4. Romanticism – England I. Title 821.7’093559 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joshua, Essaka. The romantics and the May Day tradition / by Essaka Joshua. p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5774-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Romanticism—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. May Day. 4. Folklore in literature. I. Title. PR457.J67 2007 820.9’334—dc22 2007028372 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5774-3

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents General Editors’ Preface List of Figures Acknowledgements 1 The Rise of Folklore

vii viii ix 1

2 ‘Precious rites and customs’: The Lake Poets

27

3 ‘Very fond of nature, very fond of art’: Leigh Hunt and May Day

69

4 May Day in the City: William Blake

89

5 ‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’: John Clare and Common Fame

115

6 Conclusion

135

Bibliography Index

139 149

This page intentionally left blank

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to re ect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

List of Figures 1.1

1.2

4.1

‘Planting the Village Maypole’ in William Hone, The Every-Day Book and Table Book, 3 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1831), II, 593–4. From the author’s collection.

19

‘The Milkmaids’ Dance’ in William Hone, The Every-Day Book and Table Book, 3 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1831), II, 591–2. From the author’s collection.

21

Samuel Collings (del.) and William Blake (sculp.), ‘May-Day in London’, The Wit’s Magazine, 1784, between pages 190–91. Douce M 25. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

99

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Bob Bushaway, Jeremy Catto, David Grif th, Betty Hagglund, Tim Jones, Greg Kucich, Francis O’Gorman, Fiona Robertson, Wendy Scase, Mark Storey, Kelsey Thornton, Robert Trager and Robert Vilain for their advice at various stages of this project. I would also like to thank the Provost and Fellows of Oriel College, Oxford, for appointing me to a Visiting Fellowship during my nal year of writing this book, and I would especially like to thank my husband, Richard Cross, my mother Sue Beardmore and my sister Eleoma for their help and support.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

The Rise of Folklore It is the aim of this study to explore literary responses to the customs associated with May Day alongside antiquarian material in order to present the beginnings of an account of the variety of attitudes to folklore expressed by Romantic-era writers. While attention has been devoted to the importance of traditional poetic forms and the relationship between writers and place, a full sense of the richness and diversity of Romantic engagements with the traditional folkloric practices of Britain, and particularly England, has yet to emerge in the scholarship on the period.1 Why May Day? There are a number of reasons for this choice. May Day, as a theme, brings into focus a range of issues now regarded as central to the writing of the period: the natural world, city life, the pastoral, the past, regional and national identities, popular culture, public spheres, revivalism, cultural degeneration and cultural difference. It offers an opportunity for exploring new connections between these issues in the context of a set of heterogeneous cultural practices that are rooted in the traditions and activities of diverse social groups. I have restricted my study to May Day because to outline the variety of approaches to folklore in Romanticera literature using a range of different folkloric practices would not only be a vast undertaking but would also make it more dif cult to see where writers differ or converge. May Day is a tting subject because it is a common topos in Romantic literature that occurs in several major canonical texts (The Prelude, Intimations Ode, Songs of Innocence and Experience), and some important less-canonical texts (for example, ‘The Village Minstrel’), and because this aspect of these texts has not been explored in the context of May Day as a cultural practice. A fuller examination of this festival will enable these texts to be reinterpreted in a cultural context which has been ignored by literary critics. Furthermore, May Day brings with it a set of customs that are particularly local. Every village celebrated May Day differently, and, importantly, the festival was celebrated in the city as well as the country. The local nature of the festival makes it easier to determine the origin of the customs acknowledged in the texts, and the practice of these customs in urban areas helps to avoid any conclusion that might imply that local identities are particular to the 1 The history of traditional forms and cultures is discussed in the following: Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, ed., The Literary Ballad (London: Edward Arnold, 1966); David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); G. Malcolm Laws, The British Literary Ballad (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972); James Reed, Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: Athlone, 1980); George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983); Pat Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985); and Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

2

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

rural setting. Finally, Romantic writers made use of the festival at a time when its practice was in serious decline. Britain was gradually emerging from a period during which customary rites were integrated at every level of community activity. Literary texts participated in the negotiations between different understandings of indigenous traditions that were, in some regions, still alive and in others the subject of calls for revival. ‘Folklore’ itself is a broad and diverse term, and there has been little agreement on its de nition, though it is clear that the study of the subject emerges out of and is con uent with popular antiquarianism. In 1913, Charlotte Burne de ned folklore as ‘a generic term under which the traditional Beliefs, Customs, Stories, Songs, and Sayings current among backward peoples, or retained by the uncultured classes of more advanced peoples, are comprehended and included’.2 While the pejorative nature of this comment is indicative of its time, the extent to which folkloric material is deemed solely to emanate from ‘lower-class and relatively uneducated rural communities’ has been widely debated among more recent historians of popular culture.3 Marilyn Butler has de ned ‘popular antiquarianism’ as the study of oral and written traditions, ‘not merely literary forms and art, but beliefs, and festivities’, distinguishing it from ‘classical, religious and orientalist learning’.4 Rosemary Sweet’s recent history of antiquarianism characterizes the study of popular culture both as self-descriptive, in that it charted ‘the rise of a polite and commercial society’, and as contributing to the ‘Tory ideology based upon nostalgic conservatism’.5 It is certainly important to acknowledge that antiquarian treatments of folklore are as subject to sociological and ideological pressures as literary texts; and it is easy to nd examples of the politicization of folklore in the antiquarian research of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Richard Polwhele’s The History of Cornwall (1803), for instance, explores the pagan origins of local customs, demonstrating cultural continuity with the Roman occupiers through ‘ancient

2 Charlotte Burne, The Handbook of Folk-lore (1913), cited in A Dictionary of English Folklore, ed. by Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 130. 3 Simpson and Roud, p. 130. See also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); David Chaney, Fictions and Ceremonies: Representations of Popular Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1979); Robert D. Storch, Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England: 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Tim Harris, Popular Culture in England c1500–1850 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995); and Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1998). 4 Marilyn Butler, ‘Antiquarianism (Popular)’, in An Oxford Companion to The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, ed. by Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 328–38 (p. 328). 5 Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. xiv.

The Rise of Folklore

3

customs still retained by the Cornish’.6 Polwhele, who was the vicar of Manaccan and a vehement anti-Jacobin, records a range of miscellaneous material about Cornish history and mythology, offering subjective judgements on the re ection of national identity in aspects of local customs. For example, he describes Padstow’s festival of the Hobby Horse as ‘the British festivity of May-day, observed in a manner not British’.7 Polwhele’s record of contemporary additions to the custom is clearly an expression of patriotic enthusiasm inspired by the con ict with France: ‘An addition completely English has been very lately made to it; by the men and women singing a song in English of which the burden is: “where are the French? Give them to us, that we may kill them”’.8 Sweet’s research reveals the centrality of the documentation of manners and customs to the understanding of civilization in the historical research of the eighteenth century. There is a need, however, for further enquiry into the political af liations of antiquarians. Antiquarian scholarship largely took place in the middle ranks of society, and whether we see it as contributing to the ‘whiggish project of charting the rise of a polite and commercial society’, as Sweet does, or as a part of a more inclusive impetus that placed peasant culture at the heart of local identity, it is clear that it is not easy to characterize all who participated in debates on traditional popular culture as entirely ‘of the middling sort’.9 Sweet’s research reveals, nevertheless, the centrality of the study of customs to the understanding of civilization in the historical research of the eighteenth century. In the recent debates on popular culture, there have been widespread challenges to Peter Burke’s social model, which posits that culture polarizes in such a way that the ‘great tradition’, associated with elite social groups, is separate from the ‘little tradition’ that is associated with the customary culture of the poor. By 1800, Burke suggests, the polite classes (clergy, nobility, merchants and professional men) dissociated themselves from the ‘little tradition’, abandoning ‘popular culture to the lower classes’.10 Barry Reay argues, instead, for a more complex categorization, contesting Burke’s description of cultural strati cation and uniformity within social levels. He suggests that the reductionism of the binary argument underestimates other factors (such as religion, politics and gender) that may determine the nature of group af liation.11 Reay contends, furthermore, that the divisions between cultures are less rigid than Burke allows; such bipolarity, positioning the elite and the popular as culturally distinct and in opposition, xes conceptual boundaries to such a degree that enquiries are predetermined to observe con ict and separateness rather than interaction between the social strata.12 In the context of urban cultures, Kathleen Wilson investigates further the extent to which the manipulation of cultural traditions is not exclusively ascribable to the social elite, arguing that popular culture 6 Richard Polwhele, The History of Cornwall, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1803), I, 41. 7 Ibid., I, 54. 8 Ibid. 9 Sweet, p. xiv. 10 Burke, p. 270. 11 Reay, p. 2. See also John Mullan and Christopher Reid, eds, Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 2–3 and Harris, pp. 1–27. 12 Reay, p. 2.

4

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

is just as inventive as elite culture in its use of custom for ideological ends. Wilson notes that the calendar provided a ‘cultural basis for alternative readings of English history’.13 The events that the populace were encouraged to celebrate transmitted a ‘particularized interpretation of England’s political heritage’.14 These debates have taken place in historical and socio-historical studies, and have much to offer the literary historian. Nevertheless, creative literature, if it is a concern at all in these studies, is a secondary one. Rosemary Sweet, for example, comments on literature only in passing, remarking particularly on the satirical characterization of the antiquarian, prevalent in the eighteenth century, as a pedant concerned with trivia. She hints, too, at a possible relationship between literary texts and antiquarian research: local concerns, Sweet suggests, become more interesting to eighteenth-century historians because of literary trends towards the exploration of emotion and biography. An interest in self-examination may be behind the rise of interest in folklore, but the association seems vague. It is the aim of my study to begin to particularize the encounter between literature and folklore.15 Just as classical scholarship made available an extensive range of mythical material to writers, so antiquarian research legitimized literary interest in folkloric subject matter. A secondary concern here will be the way in which literature played an important role in the development of the wider cultural acceptance of folklore. Literature acted as evidence for antiquarian research. The writings of Shakespeare, for instance, were mined by antiquarians for folkloric signi cance, and the work of Romantic-era writers, such as Leigh Hunt and John Clare, contributed to contemporary collections on traditional customs. By the 1840s, folklore is established as a topic of national interest. The journal Notes and Queries: A Medium of InterCommunication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, rst published in 1849, includes folklore in its list of discursive topics. William John Thoms (1803– 85), who launched the journal, invented the word ‘folklore’ in 1846.16 Folklore is a regular subject of discussion in periodical literature, however, as early as the 1790s. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1790, for example, offers a detailed account of the celebration of May in Helstone, Cornwall.17 While antiquarianism became ‘a favourite pastime of the vernacular connoisseur’, as Nick Groom has recently commented,18 creative writers, in increasing numbers, ctionalized customary rituals as an essential part of British identity.

13 Wilson, p. 22. 14 Ibid. 15 I am not here concerned with making a case that the ways in which English writers engage with their sources owes anything to non-English literary developments (on this see Kate Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997]). It seems to me, rather, that the Romantics’ use of folklore is best considered independently of such developments, and to be distinctively English. 16 Simpson and Roud, p. 355. 17 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790), p. 520. Cited in John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chie y Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, 3 vols (London: Charles Knight, 1841–42), I (1841), 133. 18 Groom, p. 32.

The Rise of Folklore

5

Tradition, according to Raymond Williams, ‘is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits’ on a society.19 It is a ‘radically selective’ and ‘actively shaping force’ which sustains the dominance of a particular class.20 This selectivity is particularly apparent in much of the literary use of folkloric subject matter both in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Thomas Hardy, for example, is cognizant of the power of custom to link the rural poor to the ‘fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, [and] dialect’.21 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) opens with a May Day dance: ‘a gay survival from Old Style days when cheerfulness and May time were synonyms’.22 Like many nineteenthcentury advocates of folkloric practices, Hardy tends to view rural custom in restricted ways. It is, in his work, ‘the passive victim of the historical process’, a remnant that has survived, having been undermined by external forces rather than adapted from within a culture.23 Hardy connects May Day with two traditions: the classical and the rustic. The May Day dance is ‘the local Cerealia’, a festival held in honour of the goddess of agriculture.24 Here Hardy refutes the separateness of the bipolar cultural model: these allusions link the ‘great tradition’ and the ‘little tradition’. Angel Clare’s participation in the May Day dance demonstrates the potential for social uidity at such events, and the dif culty of assigning folkloric practices to speci c social groups. Angel’s brother, Felix, reacts to the dance as if it is a low cultural practice, however, recoiling at the idea that he might become involved in this kind of public ritual: ‘Dancing in public with a troop of country hoydens – suppose we should be seen!’25 Angel similarly recognizes his superiority to the dancers, but is attracted by the simplicity of the occasion. By associating the festival with both elite (classical) traditions and the practices of the rural poor, Hardy renders Angel’s involvement less shocking. Tess herself exposes the problem of assigning individuals to a social group. Parson Tringham’s revelation of the d’Urberville connection ascribes an ambiguous social status to Tess and her family. Tess possesses ‘[p]edigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the d’Urberville lineaments’ and ‘Norman blood’, yet none of the ‘Victorian lucre’ that would attract her to ‘a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry’.26 That the poor scion of an aristocratic family is the subject of academic study suggests that the ‘great tradition’ is not necessarily con ned to the elite. The exibility of social categories in Tess highlights the problem of using social class as a point of departure. Furthermore, Tringham’s research illustrates the acceptance of popular history in bourgeois circles. 19 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 115. 20 Ibid., pp. 115–16. 21 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1998), p. 32. 22 Hardy, p. 20. 23 Tim Harris, ‘Problematising Popular Culture’, in Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, pp. 1–27 (p. 23). 24 Hardy, p. 20. 25 Ibid., p. 24. 26 Ibid., p. 25.

6

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Current folklorists employ the methodologies of social historians, particularly quantitative analysis, but often ask different questions from those asked by such historians. The discipline of folklore studies looks at the frequency and character of repeated events, the accuracy of the presentation of customs by past recorders, the mythology and the literature surrounding the interpretation of these. Folklore studies, however, has moved towards mainstream social history in recent years. Ronald Hutton observes, in The Stations of the Sun, that until the 1970s folklorists contented themselves with treating ‘seasonal customs as survivals from an almost amorphous past, with virtually no sense of chronological perspective’.27 Hutton is concerned that folklorists have been overly selective in omitting to collect data on ecclesiastical traditions, civic rituals, class con ict and the practices of the urban proletariat.28 Since then an era of ‘new scholarly folklore studies’ has dawned, and there has been more emphasis on the exploration of the wider political and historical contexts of customs, and the mythology which surrounds early scholarship on customs.29 Hutton favours a complex historiography in which beliefs about cultural practices are seen to in uence the recording of customs, and variants on customs are shown to re ect self-identi cation at a local and a national level. Until recently, there has been little interaction between folklore studies and literary criticism. Occasionally literary texts are cited by folklorists as con rmation that a folk custom is prevalent, or as evidence for a particular attitude towards customs.30 Folklorists have tended to treat literature as historical data. Roy Judge, for example, investigates Flora Thompson’s depiction of the Oxfordshire May revels in Lark Rise (1939) and Alfred Tennyson’s use of the custom in ‘The May Queen’ (1842) in order to assess their value as ‘witnesses’.31 Comparing Thompson’s literary account with contemporary logbooks, newspapers and diaries, Judge determines that Thompson’s work is ‘factual and authentic’ but has an ‘idyllic quality’.32 He concludes that Lark Rise, on the subject of May Day, represents extremely valuable con rmatory evidence concerning many details and arrangements, and that beyond this it should be seen clearly as [a] profoundly skilful and deeply subjective recreation, not as the simple reminiscences of an untutored country girl.33

27 Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. vii. 28 Ibid., p. 419. 29 Ibid., p. xi. 30 Roy Judge, ‘Changing Attitudes to May Day, 1844–1914, With Particular Reference to Oxfordshire’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 1987); Roy Judge, ‘Fact and Fancy in Tennyson’s “May Queen” and in Flora Thompson’s “May Day”’, Aspects of British Calendar Customs, ed. by Theresa Buckland and Juliette Wood, The Folklore Society Mistletoe Series, 22 (Shef eld: Shef eld Academic Press, 1993), pp. 167–83. 31 Judge, ‘Fact and Fancy’, p. 182. 32 Ibid. 33 Judge, ‘Changing Attitudes to May Day’, p. 14.

The Rise of Folklore

7

Tennyson’s poem is classed as ‘an important element in the myth of May Day’, but for ‘those concerned with the serious study of calendar customs, the poem gives very little detail about May Day’.34 The methodology of the folklorist necessitates that Judge conclude at ascertaining the delity of the literary text to contemporary practices. The accuracy of historical information, while it is important to students of literature, is not the whole picture. Literary critics may ask why Thompson perpetuates a golden-age idyll on the eve of the Second World War, and what this attitude to local customs tells us about the writer and the writing of the time. Creative literature is not a straightforward medium for the record of social customs, as Judge acknowledges. The separation of literary texts from literary contexts is problematic for literary critics. Literary texts which record social customs are often determined by factors other than the direct observation of that custom, or even the general view of a particular custom; literature is often shaped by elements that may only be tangentially connected to the discussion of customs. The folklorist asks: ‘Was Tennyson at that time writing of what he had seen, or of what he had read?’35 The literary scholar would be more concerned with the relationship between customs and literary tradition, and with the wider interests of individual writers. Judge usefully identi es a ‘May-Day repertoire’: a body of allusions of dubious authority that occur with regularity in the material used by folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This material consists largely of descriptions of local customs, maypoles, garlanding and May Queens.36 His study reveals that nineteenthcentury compilers of books and articles on English customs legitimized the ndings and mistakes of previous generations through unquestioned borrowing from their work: there was ‘a strong tradition of plagiarization in this kind of publication’.37 Nineteenth-century folklore studies, some of which contain literary descriptions of May Day (Spenser usually gets a mention in this context, and often Herrick), contribute to the mythology which surrounds the festival, but folklorists do not often go much further than referencing literary texts. The most recent interactions between literary and folklore studies have taken place in research on John Clare. Clare’s literary and non-literary records of the folk songs and customs of Northamptonshire earn praise from folklorists as genuine attempts at cultural preservation. The folk historian George Deacon writes, in John Clare and the Folk Tradition (1983), that ‘Clare records without pretension or condescension the spirit of a tradition of mutual and self-entertainment. No other English poet had drawn so much from that tradition, nor contributed so much to an understanding of it’.38 Problematically, however, Deacon sees Clare the poet as less worthy than Clare the folklorist, and he privileges texts which ‘show less interference from the poet in Clare’ because he regards these as ‘probably closer to the tradition as [Clare] recorded it’.39 Deacon nds it curious that ‘Clare’s account of the death 34 35 36 37 38 39

Judge, ‘Fact and Fancy’, p. 182 and p. 168. Ibid., p. 167. Roy Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, Folklore, 102 (1991), 131–48 (p. 131). Ibid., p. 132. Deacon, p. 11. Ibid.

8

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

of village customs’ in his prose non- ctional writing does not preclude the inclusion of such customs in his poetry: ‘one might expect not to nd them in his verse or to nd them portrayed as decaying’.40 Clare, however, portrays authentic folklore customs as both declining and alive in his poetry; the neat distinction that Deacon proposes between the authentic prose Clare and the inauthentic poet Clare is a false one. Deacon’s analysis of Clare’s poetry is concerned with establishing which of Clare’s ctional usages are genuine, and in justifying Clare’s revivi cation of extinct customs through suggestions that they capture the essence of the activity: Whichever folk custom he [Clare] describes comes to vivid life under his pen. As always, whenever he writes about his village life and the activities of his contemporaries he does so with a remarkable perception that heightens our understanding of the subject. There is an undeniable life to the morris dancers whose activities he portrays […].41

Following the usual treatment of creative literature in folklore studies, Deacon’s main interest is in realism and authenticity, and neither with Clare’s motivations nor with the literary climate in which such descriptions ourished (though he brie y considers Clare’s anger at the enclosure acts).42 Clare’s inaccuracies are regarded as aesthetic judgements and are forgiven on the grounds that his characters ‘enact village rituals or participate in customs fully believing in their ef cacy’.43 Clare the folklorist is, curiously, permitted to ctionalize because he is also Clare the villager, a man who cannot ‘patronise the villagers’ because he ‘was himself a participant in the rituals, games and customs he recorded’.44 The allusion to local custom in creative literature has also been noted by literary critics, and is sometimes dismissed without proper consideration. Roger Sales comments, in English Literature in History: Pastoral and Politics, that William Wordsworth ‘often writes about rural society like a fussy folklorist’, and repudiates the poet’s work on the grounds that his portraits of rural society are dependent on a pastoralism which ‘hides a world in which […] members of rural society are eeced by their local overseers’.45 Wordsworth’s portrait of rural customs is interpreted by Sales as an attempt to sustain an ‘illusion of authenticity’ through presenting the customs of his childhood as ‘severe and unadorned’.46 Sales regards Wordsworth’s accounts of rural customs in The Prelude as inauthentic for three reasons: they are connected with ‘the geographical and emotional landscape of childhood’, they are a misguided attempt to equate severity with realism, and they are ‘an integral part of 40 Ibid., p. 69. 41 Ibid. 42 Deacon comments that Clare ‘despised and hated enclosure, not just for its economic effects but also for the changes it brought to village social life and his environment. Common land, once used for village sports and customs in addition to its agricultural uses, was now fenced off and ploughed up […]’ (Ibid., pp. 67–8). 43 Ibid., p. 74. 44 Ibid. 45 Roger Sales, English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), p. 40 and p. 61. 46 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

The Rise of Folklore

9

Wordsworth’s pastoral perspective’ and therefore motivated by dominant ideology.47 These points, however, are hardly conclusive evidence, and are in any case dependent on an interpretation of Wordsworth’s intentions, rather than evidence of inaccuracy in Wordsworth’s record of local customs. The studies undertaken by Sales, Deacon and Judge illustrate that the folklorist provides the more convincing methodological approach to the question of inaccurate portraits of customs in creative literature; the literary critic, however, is more interested in pursuing the reasons for a particular interpretation of a custom by a writer. Folklore and the plebeian public sphere The literature of rural retirement has an ancient heritage, but the inclusion of locally speci c customs, particularly public festivals, is certainly more frequent from the late-eighteenth century onwards, when folkloric knowledge and customs become an important part of the literary fascination for what Nick Groom calls ‘antiquarian rusticophilia’.48 By this time, ctions about the continuity, universality and public nature of these cultural events begin to assume a privileged place in the bourgeois understanding of rural community. Concern for the decline in the celebration of May Day, at the end of the eighteenth century, contributes to the increased attention to recording and preserving this festival throughout the nineteenth century. Given that folkloric subject matter generates debate about the nature of public space, and that discussions of folkloric material promote the practice of rationalcritical discourse amongst the bourgeois class, Jürgen Habermas’s model of the bourgeois public sphere is relevant here. Habermas’s seminal study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, gives an historical and sociological account of the emergence, the development and, ultimately, the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere. His central concern is with identifying the conditions that make possible the rational discussion of public affairs and democratic decision-making. Habermas traces the development of the literate bourgeois public which took on a public role in evaluating contemporary culture and political policy. Clubs, salons and coffee houses were the main discussion forums that support an increasingly important free press. Using these media, Habermas argues, bourgeois men became independent of court culture and political institutions, discussing the events of the day in an environment of relative equality (in other words, freedom from commerce). Before the second half of the eighteenth century, the public state (that is, courtly-noble society or state administration and authority (for example, the rulers of the administration)) existed in opposition to the private realm of civil society (commodity exchange) and the private realm of the conjugal family’s space. At this stage, the line between state and society divided the public sphere from the private sphere. Habermas argues that, in late eighteenth-century society, there occurred a movement from the idea of public as the display of monarchic or aristocratic power to the notion of public as the published word – still in contrast to the various private 47 Ibid., p. 60. 48 Groom, p. 26.

10

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

realms. The domain of the published word signals the emergence of public opinion. The rise of democratic forms of political governance, he suggests, was consolidated by the literary public sphere that stigmatized public displays of chivalry and feudal relationships and validated the domestic private life. Habermas’s interests lie broadly in establishing reciprocal relationships between the rise of the domestic novel and an increase in the economic and political power belonging to the bourgeois family, and, in particular, the male head of the family. Bourgeois writers dominate the literary public sphere in order to normalize their domestic activities. Habermas’s choice of literature (the epistolary novel) used to support these social theories, the omission of contributions to public activity by women, and the assumption that bourgeois self-identity was able to transcend economic activity, have all been questioned. It is striking, however, that Habermas’s theories have elicited little comment from those interested in local or rural cultures. This may be because Habermas’s primary concerns are with the growth of capitalism and the effectiveness of commerce in the urban centres, and not with the ideological power of local or rural cultures. The lack of attention Habermas pays to what he identi es as ‘the plebeian public sphere’ (characterized in his paradigm by illiteracy) is part of what Craig Calhoun calls Habermas’s ‘failure to describe adequately the full eld force impinging on the bourgeois public sphere’.49 The literary public sphere, according to Habermas, played an instrumental role in establishing the process by which ‘the state-governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making use of their reason’.50 In other words, the contestation of authority by the bourgeois class took place in a rationalcritical discursive environment. Private individuals communicated ‘through critical debate in the world of letters, about experiences of their subjectivity’ and ‘concerning the regulation of their private sphere’.51 The literary public sphere established ‘love, freedom, and cultivation’ as the universal values of humanity.52 Habermas argues that when private individuals ‘in their capacity as property-owners desired to in uence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm’.53 Bourgeois literary uses of plebeian ritual do not necessarily con ict with the promotion of these universal values, and the public representation of rituals is not as incompatible with progressive political interests as has been previously thought. David Chaney’s claim, in Fictions and Ceremonies, that vulgar rituals are irreconcilable with rationalist goals implies an antagonism between reformative politics and plebeian culture that is dif cult to sustain:

49 Craig Calhoun, ‘Introduction’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), p. 39. 50 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 51. 51 Ibid., pp. 55–6. 52 Ibid., p. 55. 53 Ibid., p. 56.

The Rise of Folklore

11

It is because the emergent rationality found local customs and commitments inappropriate encumbrances that such a web of af liations, festivals, and entertainments had to be supplemented by a more abstract political community. It is possible to see that if national politics was to have the role of articulating public consciousness the representativeness of the public forum becomes an important topic; and thus the debates on the reform of political institutions became part of broader processes of social change. […] [T]he power of local customs was condemned as irrational to be supplanted by sensible, coherent policies emanating from an administrative elite.54

Local customs were condemned by some for a number of reasons, but they were not necessarily detached from bourgeois considerations of national politics and bourgeois universalist concerns. To correct this misconception is one of the aims of this study. Folklore raises questions about the nature of public activity of the kind which concern Habermas’s study. There is much evidence to suggest that literary accounts of peasant rituals formed part of the challenge to state authority. Bourgeois writers regarded the countryside community as a semi-private sphere distant from state authority, as a refuge from commerce and as offering an alternative to aristocratic public rituals. Folklore was a new category of public knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century, one that had the potential to, and often did, contest the aristocratic dominance of the public sphere by giving prominence and authority to the public rituals of the poor. Dialogic exchange between antiquarians and correspondents gives an indication of the increasing activity of public forums, and their important role in establishing the identities of national and local cultures. Notes and Queries conceives of such public discussion as a ‘Literary Exchange’, implying that these forums create intellectual wealth. The editor asks, ‘where do both writer and reader luxuriate so much at their ease, and feel that they are wisely discursive?’55 Public discussion of rural rituals represents a public sphere in the political realm, but the state had no dominion over what became a ‘common concern’.56 Habermas sidelines the public rituals of the poor because his theory is dependent on the bourgeois class’s promotion of its own culture and values as different from, and superior to, those of other social groups. Centralizing bourgeois rejections of the rituals of the ruling class, Habermas downplays the bourgeois fascination for the rituals of the lower classes. Bourgeois interest in, and mimicry of, the public rituals of the upper and lower classes runs counter to his theory, and the poor merit only a passing comment in this respect: At the start of the eighteenth century, more than half the population lived on the margins of subsistence. The masses were not only largely illiterate but also so pauperized that they could not even pay for literature. They did not have at their disposal the buying power needed for even the most modest participation in the market of cultural goods.57

54 David Chaney, Fictions and Ceremonies: Representations of Popular Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 41. 55 Anon, ‘Notes and Queries’, Notes and Queries, 1 (1849), 1–3 (p. 3). 56 Habermas, p. 36. 57 Ibid., p. 38.

12

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Habermas excludes the culture of the poor on the assumption that illiteracy prohibits an individual from participation in the literary market; contestation of authority is seen as taking place solely in a rational-critical discursive environment which excludes the uneducated. Organized rational discussion among private gentleman, Habermas’s preferred model of the bourgeois challenge to the public sphere, does not fully elucidate the literary and actual manipulation of public customs by the bourgeois class, however. He overlooks the contribution of non-bourgeois writers to literary trends and the rise of interest in local cultures. Habermas’s reduction of participation in the literary market to monetary exchange underestimates, furthermore, the iconic signi cance of customary culture. I wish, in my study, to introduce a new term to describe the space in which folklore operates – the common sphere. In their discussion of folklore, Romanticera writers imagine a sphere of public cultural activity (a common sphere) which is characterized by its localness, its detachment from commercialism, and its focus on community activity. In what follows, I use the term ‘common sphere’ to designate these common beliefs and practices in the rural setting and the urban environment. As we shall see, beliefs and practices highly analogous to those of the rustic labourers existed amongst urban workers too. The common sphere of public activity is not a realm of discussion but of interaction. The originators of this lore are anonymous, and their rules of thought are not derived from the kinds of rational principles that come to characterize the bourgeois public sphere. The common sphere is imagined by bourgeois writers to have universal qualities, whether this be through the extent to which it is active across the country or through its access to ‘essential’ humanity. Both the peasant and the bourgeoisie invest the common sphere with a unique value. Using this concept of a ‘common sphere’, derived partly from Habermas’s study of public spaces and partly from the work of John Clare, I intend to provide a new theoretical framework for discussion of the use of folklore in literary texts that allows for the complexities of class af liations and takes account of the nuanced interpretations writers have of the relationships between common culture and the bourgeois public sphere. As the bourgeois public sphere emerged in the 1790s, the study of the traditional customary events of the common sphere developed into a conspicuous forum for the discussion of public space and public authority. Academic study of folklore legitimized peasant ritual both as a eld of public activity and as an acceptable topic for public critical debate. Discussion of the origination and function of the rituals of the common sphere became part of the public interest and a prominent arena for the expression of public opinion. The rise of interest in popular antiquarianism was parallelled by the increasing inclusion of folkloric material in creative literature. Public recognition of the power, longevity and value of the common sphere by popular antiquarians at the end of the eighteenth century was particularly important for the poetry of the period. Just as the strength of monarchic power is tested by the potency of its validatory rituals, so the manipulation of vulgar rituals, and in particular rural peasant customs, in the literary public sphere reveals the extent to which the culture of the common sphere participates in the oppositional strategies of the bourgeois class. Vulgar rituals are indicative of a sphere distinct from both the bourgeois and the aristocratic in that they can contest, and occasionally parody, the

The Rise of Folklore

13

public rituals which make visible aristocratic authority. Bourgeois writers observe a plebeian ‘aura’ in the performances of rural rituals, just as Habermas understands them to observe an aristocratic ‘aura’ when they encounter aristocratic culture. They recognize that the command of public space by the peasant class, whether characterized by carnivalesque irreverence, or by less directly challenging gestures, can be authoritative. The bourgeois writer demarcates the common sphere as removed from civil society and commodity exchange, suggesting an illusory socio-cultural synthesis that implies commonality between the rural subject and the bourgeois observer. Andrew McCann’s comment that the bourgeois public sphere ‘block[s]’ and ‘fragment[s] proletarian experience’, composing ‘itself of media that assimilate this experience, recode it, prepare substitute grati cations for the elements of social wealth it implies, and (dis)organize it such that it can be domesticated within prevailing forms of politics, consumption and privacy’, is pertinent here.58 Discussion of plebeian rural ritual by bourgeois writers is, inevitably, ideologically mediated. For example, the systematization of esoteric knowledge by antiquarians may involve assumptions of superiority over the vulgar participant of the custom; the observer con rms his civilized status by selecting, rationalizing and ascribing particular cultural values to what he or she sees. Furthermore, the dissemination of information on rituals may take advantage of the value systems of the dominant classes. Tradition, and national and local identity, are at the root of what makes customs appear to be worth saving, recording and discussing; and peasant traditions are made more palatable to the dominant classes by their easy incorporation into the pastoral aesthetics already favoured by these classes. The imposition of academic methodologies, via explication and rationalization, further facilitates this process of acculturation. Sir Walter Scott offers a good example of the attitude of bourgeois writers to the common sphere. His novel, The Antiquary (1816), identi es the aristocrat, peasant and antiquarian as the custodians of the past, but sets the knowledge of each against the other. Edie Ochiltree, the local mendicant, is the ‘news-carrier, the minstrel, and sometimes the historian of the district’.59 While he is often dismissed by Oldbuck, the antiquarian, as a ‘privileged nuisance’, his narrative function as a rescuer and as a discoverer of the truth confers on him an authority.60 Even Oldbuck acknowledges his importance as an historical source, ‘That rascal […] knows more old ballads and traditions than any other man in this and the four next parishes’.61 Oldbuck and Ochiltree nevertheless disagree on the origins of a barren stretch of land that Oldbuck has acquired in exchange, ‘acre for acre’, for his ‘good corn-land’.62 The antiquarian believes the spot to be the ‘situation of the nal con ict between Agricola and the Caledonians’, whereas the mendicant asserts that he, his beggar friends and some 58 Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 22–3. 59 Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. by Nicola J. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 47. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., p. 41.

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

14

masons had constructed the site themselves 20 years before.63 The local baronet, Sir Arthur Wardour, who understands history solely from an aristocratic point of view, also takes issue with Oldbuck’s antiquarian research. In argument it would sometimes occur to Wardour ‘that the descendant of a German printer [Oldbuck], whose sires had “sought the base fellowship of paltry burghers”, forgot himself, and took an unlicensed freedom of debate, considering the rank and ancient descent of his antagonist [Wardour]’.64 As I shall show in Chapter 5, the con ict between these different ways of thinking contrasts with Clare’s more integrative approach. Scott develops, through these three points of view (aristocrat, antiquarian and peasant), a sense that history is involved in the battle for social supremacy. The novel is set in the politically sensitive year 1794 – the year of the treason trials. This is a backdrop for the disguise and secrecy developed in the subplots, but it also hints at the problem of the ownership of public authority, and at the manipulation of public opinion. Scott’s three types of historians work antagonistically for much of the novel. The con ict between Wardour and Oldbuck characterizes the change from feudal deference (to the aristocratic public aura) to the bourgeois dominance of communication (emphasized by Oldbuck’s origins as the descendant of a printer and by his involvement in the world of letters). Oldbuck creates a bourgeois aura of his own, stressing his intellectual credentials: ‘The country gentlemen were generally above him in fortune, and beneath him in intellect’.65 Oldbuck’s viewpoint, in spite of the character’s similarity to Scott himself, is undermined by the exaggeration of his antiquarian obsessions, by his inability to interpret data impartially and by his tyrannical rule of his household. He is by no means the ideal bourgeois patriarch. While the different perspectives in The Antiquary con ict, through the petty rivalries of the individuals who represent their social groups, the effect of the narrative is to drive the reader towards accepting an inclusive historicism. Scott sees antiquarian study as distinct from popular culture, but he nevertheless demonstrates that there are many points of contact, and argues that the value placed on the former is sometimes misplaced. Romantic-era writers acknowledge that the interpolation of folklore into mainstream culture is subversive and gives authority to the plebeian rituals of the common sphere. William Wordsworth recognizes the potential of ritual to challenge public authority at the end of the eighteenth century (Chapter 2). He regards traditional customs as part of national identity, treating them as an acceptable alternative to the super cialities of aristocratic culture. Nevertheless, he often reduces their power by representing them in decline locally. He associates them with children and shows them being performed publicly, but with few observers. The enigmatic May Day symbolism in the Intimations Ode highlights both the diminished potency of plebeian public rituals and their potential for dominating the public sphere. Wordsworth’s perspective places an unmediable distance between the bourgeois sphere and the common sphere. His apparent concern with the details of the practices of the common sphere acts as no more than a rhetorical strategy to stress the cultural 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 53. 65 Ibid., p. 25.

The Rise of Folklore

15

signi cance of these traditions for the common sphere, and consequentially for the bourgeois public sphere. Southey and Coleridge are much less politically cautious than Wordsworth in their approach to May Day. Their accounts overtly radicalize the celebration. Southey associates the festival with the aristocratic dominance of public space; the May Day celebrations in Wat Tyler (1794) suggest an authorized and temporary use of the public arena that distracts the people from a true appreciation of the enslavement of the worker. While Southey draws on his own antiquarian research to inform his account of May Day, Coleridge’s 1796 note on May Day is articulated in the discourse of the antiquarian in order to divert attention from his inscription of the maypole as a liberty tree. Leigh Hunt, like Southey, had pretensions towards antiquarian study. Concerned with proposing a revival of the festival, he describes past May Day celebrations as occasions in which all classes participated, and sees its revival as a way of reclaiming public space as a common space for all (Chapter 3). For Hunt, the rituals of the common sphere are to be universalized. What grounds this universalizability is the connection between the springtime May Day ceremony and nature, for it is ultimately nature that Hunt sees as having the power to unify the classes in the face of rampant, disintegrative, urban commercialism. Discussion of the chimney sweeps’ involvement in the London May Day in the work of Blake, Montgomery, Lamb, Hunt and Southey is inseparable from humanitarian anxieties about child labour and concerns about the disintegration of the bourgeois ideal of the family (Chapter 4). The lost-child narrative, prevalent in May Day literature connected with London, is effective in af rming bourgeois domesticity by generating the hope that the chimney sweep is really an aristocrat in disguise. Blake’s use of the city May Day differs from that of his contemporaries. He places the chimney-sweep poems at the heart of Songs of Innocence and Experience, using a generalized spring paradise as a central pastoral image. In the writing of Blake’s contemporaries, chimney sweeps are inseparable from urban May Day celebrations. For Blake, however, the urban festival is associated with the corruption of the city; in its place, the chimney sweeps are offered a rural and pastoral May Day as both a symbol and the site of their liberation. Perhaps in line with this, there is some anxiety in literature contemporary with Blake that the close association of sweeps with the urban festival avoids a public acknowledgement of their suffering. John Clare’s interest in May Day links with his preoccupation with the cultural effects of enclosure and, in particular, his concerns about the disappearance of common public space (Chapter 5). Clare advocates keeping alive the customs of the common sphere which are threatened by this loss of space. Common culture is contrasted with commercial culture. Clare’s aim is to establish himself in a realm that has a different value system from that of the bourgeois public sphere. He argues that literature which circulates to an uncommercial public, such as folk stories, reveals the power of the common sphere to survive temporary fashions, and makes the case against his own assimilation into the bourgeois sphere. Nevertheless, Clare does not place the two spheres in such opposed separation as we nd in writers such as Wordsworth, adopting instead a more nuanced approach to the question of possible integration.

16

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

A brief history of May Day From the outset, it must be acknowledged that there is no single dominant version of the May celebration. May Day existed (and to some extent still exists) in many different forms throughout Britain and worldwide, though there are often common traits. The festival, which takes place on the rst of May, celebrates an important transitional point in the calendar: the beginning of the farming year and the return of more clement weather. Spring comes with a full ‘myth kitty’ of paraphernalia, much of which has ancient origins. By the beginning of the Romantic period, however, customs associated with May Day are seen by writers and antiquarians to be on the threshold between past and present culture: while some writers allow that contemporary May Day celebrations exist, others present the festival as part of a past and now lost heritage. Importantly, the celebration falls into a decline at different rates throughout the country. Nineteenth-century writers often turn to the classical or British past to depict a thriving May Day, denouncing present-day celebrations as corruptions. The nature of and attitude to literary in uence, the extent of personal knowledge of existing customs, and the writer’s cultural and political motivations all play a part in determining whether the festival is depicted historically or as a contemporary event. Any account of the history of May Day must begin with the classical myths of spring. The most prominent of these is the story of the kidnapping of Proserpina (Persephone). Ovid’s Metamorphoses records that Proserpina was dragged to the underworld by Pluto when gathering spring owers. Her absence from the world causes six months of bad weather, as her mother, Ceres (Demeter), the goddess of corn and harvests, in her grief and anger, makes the land unproductive. Jupiter intervenes, dividing the year into two parts, and allows Proserpina to return to her mother for six months of each year, during which time the weather is conducive to agriculture. During winter, Proserpina visits her husband, Pluto. The cyclical symbolism of the death and rebirth of the year is important for later writers. The festival of May Day has its origins in Maia’s festival. Occurring in the Roman calendar on 1 May, the festival was celebrated with the sacri ce of a pregnant sow, offered by the ‘ amen Volcanalis’, a priest of Vulcan.66 Although ‘May’ or ‘Maius’ is a word of disputed origin, it is widely believed to refer to the goddess Maia.67 A pregnant sow is also the proper sacri ce for Terra, the goddess of the earth; and because of this, Maia is sometimes identi ed with Terra.68 The Romans considered it unlucky to marry in the month of May; this is probably because the majority of festivals in this month were associated with death. May Day festivities are also associated with the Roman oralia. This fertility festival celebrated the goddess of owers and took place usually between 28 April and 2 May. Ovid does not associate this yearly festival with any rituals, but owers were distributed to crowds, who wore 66 Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Stevens, The Oxford Book of Days (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 183; H. H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 116. 67 Scullard, p. 116. 68 Blackburn, p. 183; Scullard, p. 116.

The Rise of Folklore

17

colourful clothes, and games were held. Lemprière notes that Flora was possibly a Roman courtesan who had left the money she had made from prostitution to set up a festival to be celebrated in her honour.69 Flora was represented in a crown of owers, with a horn of plenty in her hand, and the festival was known for its ‘unbounded licentiousness’.70 This may be the origin of the Romantic and Victorian hints at the doubtful innocence of May Queens. The rst of May was also the day on which the temple of Bona Dea (the good goddess) was consecrated. This goddess was associated with Maia and other deities.71 May Day was celebrated in pagan Britain as ‘Beltane’ (meaning goodly, bright or lucky re) and is remembered in Scotland, Ireland and parts of Northern Britain by this name.72 The rite involved the lighting of res, possibly two, and was intended to protect cattle from disease or from supernatural harm. Hutton notes a case in which cattle were driven between the two res.73 In some parts of the country, men jumped over the ames or danced around them. There are records of versions of the Beltane tradition in parts of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland until the nineteenth century.74 William Hutchinson observes of the Lake District in the 1790s that ‘Till of late years the superstition of the bel-tin was kept up in these parts’.75 Here, bon res were lit across the district, and ‘boughs of the mountain ash, still called witch-wood, and supposed to be protective against all evil in uences, were carried by the people around these res’.76 Hawthorn or ‘may’ often played a part in the festival. ‘May’ can refer to several types of owering tree, anything in bloom by the rst of the month, but it usually denotes hawthorn.77 The branches were brought into the house as decoration, and occasionally left on the doorsteps of those ‘favoured by the mayers’.78 Flowers were also collected by mayers in order to make garlands or decorate maypoles.79 A Victorian folklorist recalls that on May Day the ‘leaves and twigs of this tree were inserted into keyholes and suspended over doors

69 John Lemprière, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, ed. by F.A. Wright (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 244. 70 Ovid, Fasti, trans. by A.J. Boyle and R.D. Woodard, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 119 (5. v.195). 71 Scullard, p. 116. 72 Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, p. 218; Charles Kightly, The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain: An Encyclopedia of Living Traditions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 159. 73 Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, p. 218. 74 Ibid., pp. 218–25. 75 William Hutchinson, The History of the County of Cumberland, 2 vols (Carlisle: F. Jollie, 1794–97; reprint Ilkley, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1974), II, 162. 76 A. Craig Gibson, ‘Ancient Customs and Superstitions in Cumberland’, Transactions of the History Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 10 (1858), 97–110 (p. 105). 77 Kightly, p. 159. 78 Ibid. 79 The Whitelands mayers had to make do with evergreens because the calendar change of 1752 brought the festival forward. See J.P. Faunthorpe, ‘A May Queen Festival with Letters from Mr. Ruskin’, The Nineteenth Century, 37 (1895), 734–47 (p. 745).

18

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

of houses to prevent witches or other infernal agents from injuring the inmates’.80 Richard Polwhele notes that in Cornwall doors and porches were decorated with ‘green boughs of sycamore and hawthorn’.81 In Oxford, May Day is still celebrated in the early morning with a hymn of thanksgiving sung by the boys of Magdalen College choir from the top of Magdalen tower. Marc Alexander notes that the hymn that is sung on this occasion, Te Deum Patrem Collimus, dates back to 1660 and that this ceremony probably ‘replaced the performance of a requiem for the soul of Henry VII which was held annually at the top of the tower until the Reformation’.82 Maypoles are central to the celebrations from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, and may have evolved from earlier fertility rites associated with Druidical tree worship.83 The maypole was usually made from a tall straight tree, such as a birch or ash, and placed, decorated with owers, in a prominent place, usually on the village green (see Figure 1.1). Some poles were reused each year. The church of St. Andrew Undershaft in Leadenhall Street, London, is so called because the maypole set up there each year towered over the church.84 We see the beginnings of Protestant antipathy to May Day in the mid-sixteenth century, but it was not until the seventeenth century that there was widespread condemnation of the festival.85 The Puritans detested May Day because it was rooted in paganism and reminded them of idolatry. Maypoles were banned by Parliament on 8 April 1644: And because the profanation of the Lord’s day hath been heretofore greatly occasioned by Maypoles (a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness), the Lords and Commons do further order and obtain That all and singular Maypoles that are, or shall be erected, shall be taken down and removed.86

The restoration of Charles II (1660) brought back tolerance to festivities such as May Day, and the return of maypoles: ‘so closely identi ed were maying and Restoration, indeed, that in many places the May Day festivities were transferred to Oak Apple Day’ (29 May), the day of the accession of Charles II. A year after Charles II took the throne, a large maypole was erected in the Strand, next to Somerset House, in

80 Gibson, p. 105. 81 Polwhele, I, 40. 82 Marc Alexander, A Companion to the Folklore, Myths and Customs of Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), p. 190. 83 Kightly, p. 160; Lorena Blanche Rogers, The May-Day Festival in Literature (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1932), pp. 6–21. 84 J. H. Leigh Hunt, The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events (London: Smith and Elder, 1870), p. 162; J. H. Leigh Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’, in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. by Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 215–29 (p. 219). This article was rst published in The New Monthly Magazine, 13 (1825), 457–66. 85 For further discussion of Puritanism and May Day see Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 7–11. 86 Quoted in Wilfred Barnett Whitaker, Sunday in Tudor and Stuart Times (London: Houghton,1933), p. 149.

The Rise of Folklore

19

Fig. 1.1 ‘Planting the Village Maypole’ in William Hone, The Every-Day Book and Table Book. London. Chambers’ Book of Days notes that it was made of cedar and was ‘134 feet high’.87 According to Leigh Hunt, it was for a long time in a state of decay, and having been taken down in 1713, a new one was erected opposite Somerset House. The second May-pole had two gilt balls and a vane on the summit, and was decorated on holidays with ags and garlands. The races in the ‘Dunciad’ take place ‘Where the tall May-pole overlook’d the Strand’.88

Hunt notes that the pole was later removed in 1718 ‘probably being thought in the way of the new church, which was then being nished’.89 Hone contradicts this, claiming that the pole was bought by Sir Isaac Newton in 1717 and moved to 87 Robert Chambers, ed., The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, 2 vols (London: W and R Chambers, 1863–64), I, 576. 88 Hunt, The Town, pp. 161–2 89 Ibid., p. 162.

20

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Wanstead in Essex ‘for the purpose of supporting the largest telescope at that period in the world’.90 The pole had been cut down over the years, and Hone notes that it was 125 feet long when Newton had it. It was, he writes, used for other celebrations: ‘This May-pole on public occasions was adorned with streamers, ags, garlands of owers and other ornaments’.91 The use of maypoles for events other than May Day is noted elsewhere: in 1814, a maypole was erected at Wetheral in the Lake District, as part of the victory celebrations, remaining there for thirty years.92 Aside from the maypole, there were many other May Day customs. The May Queen and sometimes the May King, who is closely associated with the Green Man, took roles in many of the pageants, often processing in oral carts and taking part in mock coronations, or mock marriage ceremonies.93 Francis Douce notes that in the Elizabethan period the ‘May-lady’ ‘was usually represented by some smooth-faced and effeminate youth’; this custom clearly follows the traditions of the theatre.94 Morris dancing has been associated with May Day celebrations since the sixteenth century.95 Gathering owers on the eve of May Day was also popular throughout the country. Milkmaids (see Figure 2.2) and chimney sweeps were associated with the festival in many regions as far back as the early-eighteenth century (see Chapter 4). Joseph Strutt writes in 1801: The chimney-sweepers of London have […] singled out this rst of May for their festivities; at which time they parade the streets in companies, disguised in various manners. Their dresses are usually decorated with gilt paper, and other mock neries; they have their shovels and brushes in their hands, which they rattle one upon the other; and to this rough music they jump about in imitation of dancing. Some of the larger companies have a ddler with them, and a Jack in the Green, as well as a Lord and Lady of the May, who follow the minstrel with great stateliness, and dance as occasion requires.96

The Whitehall Evening Post notes on 26 May 1763 that ‘some Chimney-Sweeps were dancing before Lord Bute’s Door [in South Audley Street], and beating Time, as usual, with their Shovels and Brushes. This motley Band was decked with all their May-Day Finery; their Heads covered with enormous Periwigs, their

90 William Hone, The Every-Day Book, 2 vols (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826), I, 560. 91 Ibid. 92 Margaret Rowling, The Folklore of the Lake District (London: B. T. Batsford, 1926), p. 118. 93 E.O. James, Seasonal Feasts and Festivals (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), pp. 309–11. 94 Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), II, 457. 95 Simpson, p. 245. 96 Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ed. by J. Charles Fox (London: Methuen,1903), p. 281.

The Rise of Folklore

21

Fig. 1.2 ‘The Milkmaids’ Dance’ in William Hone, The Every-Day Book and Table Book. Cloths laced with Paper, and their Faces marked with Chalk’.97 Processions with garlands were widespread in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, though they existed before then.98

Washing in the morning dew was popular in several regions. William Carew Hazlitt notes that ‘a maiden washing herself with dew gathered on the rst of May at daybreak, would preserve her beauty forever’.99 Samuel Pepys records that his wife 97 The Whitehall Evening Post, 26 May 1763, cited in Roy Judge, Jack-in-the-Green: A May-Day Custom (London: D. S. Brewer and Rowman and Little eld, Folklore Society, 2000), p. 13. 98 Ibid., p. 227. 99 William Carew Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore (London: Reeves and Turner, 1905), II, 376.

22

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

believed that dew gathered at any time in May could do this (28 May 1667; 10 May 1669). Padstow’s Hobby Horse festival, one of the most distinctive May-Day celebrations, is characterized by its use of a canvas ‘extended with hoops, and painted to resemble a horse’.100 The Horse processes to a pool in order to drink, the head is dipped into the water and brought up swiftly sprinkling the spectators with water. Minehead in Somerset hosts a similar event with the ‘Sailor’s Horse’.101 Wrestling and racing was part of May Day in several villages of the Lake District, where it was also the custom to place garlands on holy wells.102 Jeremiah Sullivan notes that well-decoration was an ancient practice, and cites an AngloSaxon penitentiary which advised: ‘If any keep his wake at any wells, or at any other created things except at God’s church, let him fast three years’.103 In the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, well water, known as Spanish water, was mixed with sugar and carried in a bottle. Festival days of this type, of which there were several during the year, were known as Shaking-bottle days. In The Prelude, Wordsworth suggests that the practice has passed away; other commentators (contemporary with Wordsworth), however, believe the practice to be current in the region until the 1850s (see Chapter 2).104 May Day in the Lake District has some links with Robin Hood, who may be a version of the green man. Sullivan notes in 1857 that this favourite ballad hero ‘has been worked up with the celebration of the May festival; in Westmorland […] he is the patron of nutters’.105 There are few foods speci cally associated with May Day, but prior to the nineteenth century, when food is served it tends to be a variation on custard or cakes. Mary Lamb, the sister of Charles Lamb, in her account of a country May Day in Mrs Leicester’s School: or The History of Several Young Ladies Related by Themselves (1809) records that a syllabub is commonly placed under the May bush on May Day.106 Anne Hughes, a Chepstow farmer’s wife, describes, in her 1796–97 diary, making small savoury pies (‘maye-daye cakes’) for callers celebrating May Day.107 In Ireland a dish of milk thickened with our, called ‘hasty pudding’, was served on May Day in the seventeenth century. The dish was a formal af rmation of the frugality required in order to make the corn supplies hold out until the next harvest.108 A ‘repast of eggs and milk in the consistence of a custard’ and a ‘cake of 100 Fortescue Hitchins, The History of Cornwall, From the Earliest Records and Traditions, to the Present Time, ed. by Samuel Drew, 2 vols (Helston: W. Penaluna, 1824), I, 720. 101 Blackburn, p. 188. 102 Rowling, p. 119. 103 Jeremiah Sullivan, Cumberland and Westmorland, Ancient and Modern: The People, Dialect, Superstitions and Customs (London: Whittaker, 1857), p. 141. Public celebrations in the Lake District were known as wakes. 104 Rowling p. 65; Sullivan, p. 166. 105 Sullivan, p. 131. 106 Charles and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 351. 107 Anne Hughes, The Diary of a Farmer’s Wife: 1796–1797, ed. by Jeanne Preston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 34. 108 Brand, Observations, 1841, I, 128.

The Rise of Folklore

23

oatmeal’ served on a table made from ‘the green sod’ is recorded as taking place in various parts of Perthshire.109 From the nineteenth century onwards, village teas become popular on May Day. Many commentators note the detrimental effects of the calendar change of 1752 on traditional country customs: The Gregorian calendar, used on much of the continent, was ten days ahead of the Julian calendar, used in England, until 28 February 1700, and then eleven days ahead until 2 September 1752. Eleven days were omitted in September 1752, so that Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September.110

The change affected all of the major festivals, including May Day and Christmas. It caused widespread anxiety about market days, paydays and rents, and was denounced as ‘popish’, confusing and unnecessary. The alteration meant that collecting branches of owering ‘may’ from the woods proved more dif cult after 1752, as the trees were usually not in bloom in time. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, May Day customs began to die out, though the celebration still held fast with milkmaids and chimney sweeps in the south of England, particularly in London. By the early-nineteenth century, May Day festivals were seriously in decline in several regions. Many writers of the period lament its loss, but some complain of the gaudy spectacle of down-at-heel sweeps dressed in silver paper (see Chapter 4). The festival, however, survived in some rural areas. William Howitt observes in 1838 that north of the Trent maypoles can be found ‘standing in old-fashioned villages’.111 The American writer Washington Irving gives an account of May Day festivities around Newstead Abbey in ‘The Pride of the Village’ (1820), and these practices are con rmed by Howitt who visited Linby and Farns eld.112 The festival, which appealed to Victorian sentiment, was revived in various forms during the nineteenth century to satisfy a need to preserve Old England and to provide innocent amusements for the young. This continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. Flora Thompson recalls a late-Victorian procession of a large china doll and her May garland in Lark Rise (1939), her chronicle of Oxfordshire life. Thompson condemned the new forms of May celebrations which were ‘organised by a few superior persons for the good of a not too willing public’.113 Parading with dolls became quite popular during the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was assumed, incorrectly, that May dolls were an ancient indigenous Catholic custom.114 109 Ibid., I, 127. 110 Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London: UCL Press, 1998), p. xvii. 111 William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans,1838), II, 152–3. 112 Ibid., II, 153. 113 Flora Thompson, Catholic Fireside, 20 May 1827, cited in Judge, ‘Changing Attitudes to May Day’, p. 14. 114 Judge, ‘Changing Attitudes to May Day’, pp. 303–10.

24

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Critical tenets The exploration of the issues raised by the literary treatment of May Day in this study is premised on several relatively uncontroversial assumptions: that literary texts are different from non-literary texts; that literary texts contain a heterogeneous collection of discourses which employ both fact and ction; and that literary texts respond to each other as well as to historical events. This study shares with cultural materialism an acknowledgement that literature is shaped by history, and that history is shaped by literature. The critical assumptions employed here differ, however, from those used by new historicists and cultural materialists. New historicists and cultural materialists break down the distinction between history and literature by reading both as discourse. A reduction of texts to discourses suppresses an important difference between literary and non-literary texts: an acknowledgement that part or all of a literary text may be deliberately ctional and understood to be such by its audience. Following Marx, new historicists read history as a contest of ideologies, and view literature as a re ection (or mediator) of political interests. This study will acknowledge a space for political resistance in literature, turning attention to the particularities of historical moments, rather than relying on overarching theories of ineluctable power. I assume the basic contours of Habermas’s theory concerning the importance of rational debate for the rise of democracy and the challenge to state power, and wish to bring to it a focus on a stronger sense of the contribution of peasant culture to this movement. Plebeian culture is used by writers of the Romantic era as an effective counter-image to the symbolism of aristocratic and monarchic power. Habermas’s work grows out of the Marxist tradition in that it is concerned with class con ict, state ideology and power; nevertheless his emphasis on the detachment of the bourgeois family from monetary concerns places him in con ict with Marxism. Habermas’s bourgeois family ideal, while it can clearly be shown to persist within the bourgeois mindset, is an ideal which is dif cult to sustain beyond this, given its economic basis. Creative literature is a mediated form of historical data which operates as much in the context of literary tradition as it does within the socio-cultural and political domain. Consideration of May Day as a literary subject must, therefore, be undertaken in the context of May Day as an historical custom, for obvious reasons; but the nature of the relationship between an historical subject and the creative media is an issue of much debate. At the heart of the debate on how we treat historical material is the question of whether the observer genuinely has access to the past and can comment on it objectively. Postmodernist theories of the relativity of history, and indeed of reality, have posited that individuals are con ned by ideology; anything that is expressed is dependent on language, and anything that is understood is predetermined by what the individual already knows. On this model there is no access to truth in the past or in the present. While it is important to make ideologies visible (especially when they can be shown to be determinate), to recognize one’s cultural distance and to acknowledge that it is dif cult to be certain that one has understood a text, this should nevertheless not hinder an aspiration to achieve some

The Rise of Folklore

25

sort of interpretative plausibility; probabilistic argumentation about the interpretation of historical evidence is, perhaps, the most positive and cautious way to proceed. Acknowledging the differences between folkloric and literary analysis, this study asks the following questions: On what experience of the May Day festival is literature which refers to May Day likely to be based? What is the signi cance of the discordances between literary and ‘historical’ accounts of the festival, and what are the likely determinate causes? To what extent are literary descriptions of May Day dominated by literary traditions? And what are the wider implications of the use of folkloric material for our understanding of the use of the public sphere in literature? Furthermore, responding to Romantic-era texts necessitates an acknowledgement of the dif culties surrounding the word ‘Romantic’. This term has never been de ned in relation to folklore, and it is partly the aim of this book to begin to specify the relationship between folklore and Romantic-era writers. This study is an exploration of a context which manifests some elements of the concepts usually associated with Romantic-era writers, insofar as these have been de ned in relation to the canonical literature of the period, and aims to bring folklore into view as an unjustly neglected context. Much research has been carried out on the cultural construction of rural England, but very little has focused speci cally on the inclusion of folklore in creative literature. Centring on May Day, this study examines the relationships between the development of folklore studies and the growing emphasis on folkloric material in the literary image of rural England. Few of the original May Day songs survive from the Romantic era, though many from the Victorian period do. It is not my intention to attempt to recover these orally transmitted texts; rather, I wish to study the reactions to the festival by the published writers of the period.115 I do not assume that this literature (which for convenience I term ‘bourgeois’, as most of it is written by members of the middle ranks) is in con ict with aristocratic or plebeian cultures, but aim to prove this where it appears to be the case. Furthermore, antiquarian scholarship is not meant here to be seen as inevitably expressive of a metropolitan intellectual viewpoint. The agendas of particular antiquarians are often very individual, and to the extent that it is possible I shall take this into account in what follows.

115 The Chadwick-Healy databases have been extremely useful for tracing references to May Day in creative literature.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

‘Precious rites and customs’ The Lake Poets

It is a critical commonplace in Romantic studies that the lake poets are poets of place, but the exploration of their work on location has dealt very little with locally speci c custom and the links these poets have with antiquarianism. In this chapter, I shall delineate the variety of the interest in folklore shown by William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge through an examination of their experience and use of the May Day festival. William Wordsworth, antiquarianism, and the ‘Common Perspective’ For Wordsworth, indigenous customs, such as May Day traditions, betoken an ancient and close relationship between nature and humankind, and between place and people. In Book II of The Excursion, the Solitary laments that ‘many precious rites / And customs of our rural ancestry / Are gone, or stealing from us’ (ll. 550–53).1 Here, decline of rural traditions threatens the link with history and the connection with place, resulting in an estrangement from a formerly close connection with the natural world. Wordsworth’s rejection of the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere, seen in the admission, in The Prelude, of failure in the republic-like Cambridge, is counterpoised with a deeper appreciation of the culture of the remote villages of the Lake District. Wordsworth withdraws his gaze from national politics to focus on local, repetitive and ordinary activity. The public value of poetry becomes for him an af rmation of the common sphere and the smaller community. Displays of social activity are, in his work, concerned with promoting the value and authenticity of the rural way of life. Like the radical intellectuals around him, Wordsworth identi es as an authentic public sphere the traditional culture of the common people. Although Wordsworth, as a literary folklorist, enters into a different imaginative relationship with his subject matter than that seen in the work of contemporary and earlier eighteenth-century antiquarians, a brief examination of the nature of the antiquarian approach to folklore reveals a common purpose. Popular antiquarians positively re-evaluate the importance of plebeian rituals in the eighteenth century, emphasising their tenacity and authenticity. John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), the rst major scholarly collection of British folklore customs, takes pains to convince readers that ‘the English Antique has become a general 1 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949).

28

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

and fashionable Study’, and that the Society of Antiquaries is ‘very respectable’.2 Brand’s preface, like Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, highlights the unique perspective commanded by the connoisseur of common life. Wordsworth argues that the ‘manners of rural life’, its customary acts, ‘germinate from those elementary feelings and, from the necessary character of rural occupations’ and are, therefore, ‘more easily comprehended, and are more durable’.3 Brand’s purpose in writing about the culture of the common people is fundamentally political. A history of the rituals of the common people is important ‘to every one who is the Friend of Man’, he argues.4 His choice of the radical publisher Joseph Johnson suggests the progressive nature of the venture, although his preface to Observations is couched in paternalistic language. Brand, nevertheless, argues for the establishment of a new body of knowledge centred on the culture of ordinary people: ‘nothing can be foreign to our Enquiry, which concerns the smallest of the Vulgar; of those little ones, who occupy the lowest Place in the political Arrangement of human Beings’.5 The traditions of the people are not trivial, he contends, because they are persistent: ‘Tradition has in no Instance so clearly evinced her Faithfulness, as in the transmitting of vulgar Rites and popular Opinions’.6 While we may not expect ‘such imsy Materials’ to be retained in an oral culture, Brand opines, aspects of popular culture ‘have survived Shocks, by which even Empires have been overthrown’.7 Brand’s statements on vulgar antiquities anticipate Wordsworth’s Preface. Brand’s comment that ‘Antiquities of the Common People cannot be studied without acquiring some useful Knowledge of Mankind’ is in tune with Wordsworth’s acknowledgement of the essential lessons taught by common people.8 Both writers conclude that customary recreational activities and repetitive labour determine the nature of the ‘common’ perspective. The popular antiquarian, Joseph Strutt, comes to a similar view: that it is through customs that ‘the character of any particular people’ is ascertained.9 Strutt claims that rituals show the poor functioning authentically: ‘when we follow them into their retirements, where no disguise is necessary, we are most likely to see them in their true state, and may best judge of their natural dispositions’.10 Plebeian rituals are understood by Brand to possess universal appeal. Their revival, he contends, would be ‘highly pertinent at this particular Season, when the general Spread of Luxury and Dissipation threatens more than at any preceding 2 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities Including the Whole of Mr Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: J. Johnson, 1777), p. vi. 3 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992), p. 60, ll. 113–16. 4 Brand, Preface to Observations, 1777, p. ix. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. iii. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. xi. 9 Joseph Strutt, Glig-gamena Angel-ðeod, or, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May-Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions, and Pompous Spectacles, from the earliest Period to the Present Time (London: J. White, 1801), p. i. 10 Ibid.

‘Precious rites and customs’

29

Period to extinguish the Character of our boasted national Bravery’.11 Francis Douce sees the revival of traditional custom as the saviour of contemporary culture: ‘it is extremely probable that from the present rage for re nement and innovation, there will remain, in the course of a short time, but few vestiges of our popular customs and antiquities’.12 Wordsworth too denounces sophisticated culture and discourse, and maintains a particular distrust of expressions of sensibility divorced from ‘the passions produced by real events’ regarding them as trivial and indicative of ‘social vanity’.13 The Preface to Lyrical Ballads endorses the language and simple customs of the common man as the essence to which the poet must return. Although he did little eldwork, Brand’s interpretation of the task of a student of popular antiquity is imagined, metaphorically, as a physical engagement with his subject. He colourfully pictures himself as a traveller in search of ‘the hidden Sources of the Nile’ in ‘the barren African sands’.14 Recognizing the problem of promoting that which may be regarded as ephemeral, Brand stresses here the effort taken in collecting folkloric information. His metaphorical voyage into the heart of darkness suggests an explorer excited by the unknown. Wordsworth’s poetic quest similarly anticipates engagement with difference. For Wordsworth the poet is […] the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things gone silently out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time.15

Importantly, Wordsworth stresses the accessibility of customs to the poet and his possession of an intellect capable of encompassing all cultures. Folklore is not, Brand suggests, trivial or easily obtained knowledge, and in this he concurs with Wordsworth. Thomas Love Peacock’s dismissal of the folkloric element of contemporary poetry, in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), is indicative of the conservative backlash against the increased interest in popular custom in the literary public sphere. Peacock calls the poet of his age a ‘semi-barbarian in a civilized community’, denouncing the contemporary interest in rural manners as a waste of time.16 The poet’s ‘ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions’.17 The poet who pursues ‘disjointed relics of tradition’, ‘fragments of second hand observation’ and ‘village legends from old women and sextons’ is taking a retrogressive step: ‘his [the poet’s] intellect is like that of a

11 Brand, Preface to Observations, 1777, p. vi. 12 Douce, II, 482. 13 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p. 71 and p. 61. 14 Brand, Preface to Observations, 1777, p. iv. 15 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p. 77, my italics. 16 The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. by H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones, The Halliford Edition, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1974), VIII, 20. 17 Ibid.

30

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

crab, backward’.18 Brand glori es the folklorist as the heroic explorer; Peacock sees merely the blind digger who lives in a land of perpetual darkness. Brand’s Observations incorporates the whole of Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares, or the Antiquities of the Common People (1725), providing commentary and footnotes on Bourne’s original text. Brand’s interpolations bring Bourne’s text up to date, but they do more than this. Brand makes his text appear typographically and textually academic, emphasizing exegesis through considerable annotation. Richard Dorson describes the confusion that Brand’s academicism generates: [T]he original sections of Bourne’s treatise are dispersed, to sink into the mass of quotations, tailnotes, footnotes, thoughts, and afterthoughts which comprise the huge, undigested scrapbook. Set in three sizes of type, the [Observations on] Popular Antiquities gives the impression of notes upon notes upon notes, with ever increasing eyestrain.19

The annotation of the volume continued even after Brand’s death, as his incomplete study was nished by Henry Ellis in 1813 and re-edited by him in 1849, becoming the standard source for folklore material. The 1813 edition of the Observations on Popular Antiquities came forth at the right time for the right public, the intellectually curious, non-academic Victorians [sic], absorbed in their England and the by-ways of its culture, hobbyists with a purpose, amateur antiquaries blessed with leisure and private libraries. For them, as well as for professional men of letters and learning, Brand-Ellis became a vade mecum, an automatic reference and authority on antique custom and odd superstition.20 Brand’s incorporation of material from a range of regional studies, newspapers and correspondents is indicative of an increasingly discursive approach to folklore studies.

Brand, Douce and Strutt, while important mediators of popular culture, represent the approach of the generalist. Their studies encompass many regions, but they do not give sustained and detailed accounts of particular places. For this, a long residence in an area is required. It was left to local observers such as James Clarke, whose A Survey of the Lakes was published in 1787, to provide regional detail.21 Wordsworth builds on and to some extent functions within both of these traditions. Like the antiquarians, Wordsworth never manages to move beyond a bourgeois view of the common sphere, one that, for all its idealization of this sphere, never manages to see it as anything more than an object of study. He nevertheless stresses the accessibility of customs to the poet, linking this openness to the possession of an intellect capable of encompassing all cultures. Wordsworth’s speaker, in ‘Michael’, tells the history of a heap of stones ‘for the sake / Of youthful Poets’ who come

18 Ibid., VIII, 21. 19 Richard M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 17–18. 20 Ibid., p. 18. Dorson mistakes the dates of the Victorian period. 21 Local newspapers are also helpful in ascertaining the prevalence of a custom, though there is a tradition in this type of publication of pasting together accounts from other sources, and there is often a strong element of nostalgia.

‘Precious rites and customs’

31

after him.22 ‘Michael’ af rms that the public value of poetry is its af rmation of the common sphere. Like John Clare after him, Wordsworth calls attention to the responsibilities of the poet as having a duty to make common culture live again. The speaker of ‘Michael’ views this storytelling as his legacy to younger poets; Clare, however, presents such storytelling as a legacy not to his bourgeois successors but to the whole of humankind. In common with the ‘local observers’, Wordsworth presents himself as a writer concerned with the accurate details of regionally speci c practices. The common sphere of public activity is important to Wordsworth in particular because of its difference from the bourgeois public sphere. The common sphere provides access to ‘essential humanity’. Wordsworth’s child characters are emblematic of this essential quality, and it is no surprise to nd that he often places children in the common sphere in his work. Wordsworth’s interests mirror closely those of contemporary antiquarians, an aspect of his work which has been ignored by critics, but the difference between their factual records and his reference to the festival is seen in the sophistication with which he manipulates this material into a coherent account of the cultural value of a realm untouched by rationalization and commercialization. For Wordsworth the common sphere is a realm which exempli es tradition, essential activity and an iconic and digni ed power. What does an exploration of Wordsworth’s May Day reveal? May Day is an important subject in three of his major works: ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, the Intimations Ode and The Prelude. By examining the portrait of local ritual in these three texts against contemporary antiquarian material, we can establish the extent to which Wordsworth promotes an authentic vision of rural life, revealing the nature of his selectivity, and we can speculate on why he chose to promote a particular view of this cultural event. Importantly, reading these poems using the contemporary cultural information available provides the basis for a challenge to some of the established interpretations of these works. ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ and the common sphere Wordsworth’s poetry demonstrates an interest in the authenticity of rituals when their enactment is indicative of the common sphere. ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys or Dungeon-Gill Force, A Pastoral’ (Lyrical Ballads, 1800), includes the kind of detail which would appeal to popular antiquarians, and which in Wordsworth is the marker of the common, shared traditions of the peasant class. The poem is a local tale of two boys, Walter and James, who race for their whistles on May Day, dressed in ‘green coronals’. These coronals are hats decorated with ‘stag-horn or ‘fox’s tail’, local varieties of moss, and are worn in honour of the occasion.23 Nature and the boys ‘welcome in the May’ (l. 4) together, and the children are described as being ‘as happy as the day’ (l. 21). The use of the common names for the moss that decorates 22 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p. 344, l. 38. 23 Wordsworth implies that ‘Stag-horn’ and ‘Fox’s Tail’ are two names for the same plant. They are, in fact, two different plants. Stag’s-horn, as it is usually known, is Lycopodium clavatum, a clubmoss shaped like the branches of a stag’s horns. Fox-tail is the clubmoss Lycopodium alopecuroides, and is less branch-like in appearance.

32

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

the boys’ hats gives the story an air of authenticity, distinguishing the reference from the more classical allusions to garlands and coronals which appear in poems like ‘The Oak and the Broom’, which is more Spenserian: ‘The Spring for me a garland weaves / Of yellow owers and verdant leaves’ (ll. 75–6). Wordsworth may have chosen the moss as part of a literary conceit dependent on knowledge of local activities. Wordsworth mentions the echoing hills around Dungeon-Ghyll force: The valley rings with mirth and joy; Among the hills the echoes play A never never ending song To welcome in the May (ll. 1–4).

The distinctiveness of the acoustics of Dungeon-Ghyll, particularly during staghunting, is noted in The Gentleman’s Magazine (1751): The hunting of the stag here has more than ordinary music attending that sport; for the echoes reverberate the sounds in a manner not easily described, nor believed by any but those that hear them; the whole duration of the return of one sound being only one minute, and yet the repercussions innumerable, and the variety inconceivable.24

In line with this, Wordsworth’s stag-horn and fox’s tail suggest hunting trophies.25 Walter stops the race when he realizes that he will not win, and challenges James to follow him across an arched bridge of rock above the waterfall, a task which he suggests ‘will keep him working half a year’ (l. 44). When Walter reaches the middle of the arch, he notices that a lamb, watched by its distressed mother from above, is trapped in the dark plunge pool of the ghyll. They gladly defer their task of crossing the dangerous bridge and rescue the lamb with the aid of a poet. The poet, in religious vein, brings the lamb ‘forth into the light’ (l. 90). Local observers of the region note that foxes usually hide in ghylls: The most typical covert in Cumberland is the ghyll (the north country de nition of a woody ravine) planted on both sides, with a stream as a rule running through the bottom. These ghylls form a very snug shelter for a fox and nearly always hold one. In a run these ghylls are our most formidable obstacles and generally cause a great delay for the eld, as there is probably only one practicable path through it, and a good many are left behind.26

The hats point to the thrill of the hunt and the expectation of trophies, but in this case the shepherd boys are put off from seizing a quarry, endeavouring to preserve rather than destroy the animal hidden in the ghyll. At the end of the poem, the adult gently upbraids the children, ‘And bade them better mind their trade’ (l. 99).

24 The Gentleman’s Magazine cited in Hutchinson, II, 184. 25 Hunting in the Lake District ‘both of deer, fox and hare is of great antiquity’, with records dating back to the thirteenth century. James Wilson, The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Cumberland, 2 vols (London: Archibald Constable, 1905), II, 421. 26 Wilson, The Victoria History of the Counties of England, II, 426.

‘Precious rites and customs’

33

The message of ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ is located in the image at the beginning of the poem of the ‘mountain raven’s youngling brood’ which has ‘left the mother and the nest’ and gone rambling (l. 6). The young ravens are meant to be searching for food, but they are diverted into play and ‘through the glittering vapours dart / In very wantonness of heart’ (ll. 9–10). Like the younglings, the boys are distracted from their task, giving themselves up to the joyfulness of spring and May Day customs instead of performing a chore. They are ostensibly taught the lesson that they should be more careful, but the action and imagery of the poem imply that the excitement of being neglectful of duties is an important part of being young, and is a legitimate response to the joy of spring. The boys’ happiness, piping, play and hat decoration makes them emblems of the culture of the region, and of a simpler world. Wordsworth presents these May Day customs in contrast to the truly public nature of the bourgeois sphere. It is important to note here that analyzing the Wordsworthian encounter poem in the context of Habermasian social theory reveals that the poet places the common sphere in opposition to dominant culture, and that the private space of the common sphere is emphasized. There are only two boys celebrating and, although their singing can be heard throughout the valley, their rituals are essentially non-social. Their actions become public when the poet-character happens upon them. The poet- gure in ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ is not in search of esoteric antiquarian knowledge; he is characterized as a hater of books and a lover of ‘the brooks’ (l. 84). He is an authentic observer who arrives with the potential to interact with the subject. The rescue of the lamb by this gently upbraiding bard signi es, nevertheless, that he is different from them – the poet, and not the outlandishly dressed children, is the ‘unexpected sight’ (l. 92). In taking the role of the observer, the poet is distanced from their rebellious behaviour; his bourgeois work-ethic contrasts with their ritual observance of the May Day holiday. The bridge over the chasm in the poem possibly stands for the cultural gap between the poet-character and the children, and it is not easily traversed. May Day rituals often provide an opportunity for radical challenge in Romanticera literature. The ‘green coronals’, simulations of crowns and coronets, are pseudomonarchic insignias of the authority of the plebeian ritual. The boys’ leisure activity, temporarily playing at being shepherds instead of diligently tending their animals, mimics the freedoms of the aristocrat. Furthermore, their knightly contests imitate the chivalric codes perpetuated by the dominant class. Their actions are, nevertheless, perceived as natural, and therefore unthreatening. They are deemed harmless, because they are presented as traditional and unrelated to the contemporary political climate. Nevertheless, the shepherd boys can be understood both as the benign vehicles of lake-district pastoralism and as exponents of carnivalesque rites of misrule which have been seen elsewhere to inform ‘the Shrovetide and May Day revels’.27 The poem’s depiction of usurped power and authority is made safe, though, through its allusion to rural ritual. For Wordsworth, an emphasis on the authenticity of a ritual is crucial when the practices described are indicative of the common sphere. This is partly because 27 Nicholas Rogers, ‘Crowds and Political Festival in Georgian England’, in Harris, 233–64 (p. 240).

34

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

authenticity enables him to downplay the politically challenging aspects of local culture and partly because he sees these cultural practices as indicative of a true and genuine way of life which signi es a closeness with the natural world. To falsify this would be to falsify the relationship between humankind and nature. This means that Wordsworth must suppress any doubt his readers may have about the truth of his portraits of local customs. ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ provides an interesting case for this concern. Wordsworth asserted that he had observed the custom locally. His note on the subject, dictated to his friend and secretary, Isabella Fenwick, in 1843, recalls that Southey, who had a great interest in folklore, had once questioned the accuracy of the poem. In his defence, Wordsworth recounts the following anecdote. Southey and Coleridge were discussing the authenticity of the poem’s moss-covered hats in the Lake District one May Day, when they came across two Shepherd boys dressed exactly in the way that Wordsworth described: When Coleridge and Southey were walking together upon the fells, Southey observed that if I wished to be considered a faithful painter of rural manners I ought not to have said that my shepherd-boys trimmed their rustic hats as described in the poem. Just as the words had passed his lips two boys appeared with the very plant entwined round their hats. I have often wondered that Southey, who rambled so much about the mountains should have fallen into this mistake, and I record it as a warning for others who, with far less opportunity than my dear friend had of knowing what things are, and far less sagacity, give way to presumptuous criticism, from which he was free, though in this matter mistaken.28

Wordsworth presents the note as a ‘monitory anecdote’ about presumptive critics who lack rsthand experience of the diversity of local customs. He expresses surprise at Southey’s having been in the area so frequently without having observed the custom. Wordsworth does not debate the issue, but recounts an enactment of the ritual as evidence. Seen in Habermasian terms, the rational contestation articulated by Coleridge and Southey is countered by the demonstration of the custom. Wordsworth does not participate in a full dialogue with Coleridge and Southey; for him, the strongest evidence is ocular proof. Contemporary antiquarians operated, in a bourgeois manner, through public debate and the exchange of letters; in denying these participatory strategies favoured by folklorists of the era, Wordsworth maintains the ction of a rural common sphere in genuine opposition to the bourgeois realm. These customs are exhibited and not debated because the aura of common ritual offers a potent alternative to bourgeois rationalism. Observation of the custom af liates the poet with the community of the boys and not with his fellow lake poets, who understood custom in a different way. Wordsworth cites no further evidence for the May Day custom of wearing mosscovered hats, and there is no other record of this custom in contemporary antiquarian sources. Apart from the Fenwick note, which was published after the deaths of Coleridge and Southey, there is no other account of the meeting with the moss-wearing shepherds in the writing of the Lake poets. Is Wordsworth serious in his assertion of authenticity? Is the accuracy of his folkloric allusions a genuine marker of the 28 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, pp. 372–3; my italics.

‘Precious rites and customs’

35

common sphere? Or is the claim of authenticity just a trope used by Wordsworth to signal the presence of the common sphere? Either Wordsworth has recorded a dying custom which was enacted so rarely that those familiar with the area were unaware of it or he has invented the custom. Unfortunately, it is not possible to come to a nal adjudication. He does not give a date for the alleged meeting, but it is possible to establish when it may or might have occurred. If the incident occurred, and if Wordsworth’s account of it is correct, it would have taken place after the rst half of 1800, when ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ was written. The discussion between Southey and Coleridge could not have taken place in 1800 because, although Coleridge was with the Wordsworths in the Lake District on 1 May, Southey was abroad. Of the two occasions that Southey and Coleridge were in the lake district together on May Days, 1809 and 1810, the former is more likely. Wordsworth does not claim he was present at the encounter, but he was also in the region in these years; it is, nevertheless, unlikely that he had any contact with the other two on these dates. In May 1809, Coleridge, recently recovered from mumps, was hard at work on the rst installment of The Friend in Greta Hall, the house he shared with Southey and his family. His letters reveal that he was quite concerned that the stamped paper he had ordered from London, on which he intended The Friend to be printed, was late in arriving. Coleridge writes to Thomas Longman on 27 April 1809 that ‘I must remain here [Greta Hall] and at Penrith, till the rst number of The Friend has been sent off’.29 Though his letters do not record it, it is possible that he encountered the hatwearing boys on a trip to Penrith in search of his missing paper, which he believed would be delivered via the town. The alternative date is much less likely. Coleridge arrived at Greta Hall in the rst week of May 1810, having been at the Wordsworths’ home, Allan Bank, for some time. Mark Reed supposes that he probably left Allan Bank around 2 or 3 May.30 Dorothy Wordsworth mentions on 11 May that Coleridge left them ‘above a week ago’, implying either 1, 2 or 3 May. Southey con rms this in a letter to John Rickman (1 Aug 1810): ‘Coleridge […] has been quartered here since the beginning of May’.31 In order for Coleridge to take a walk with Southey on May Day, he would have had to leave Allan Bank in April, and all evidence points to this not being the case. Still, there is no evidence that the encounter did not take place, so the importance of genuine authenticity as a marker of the common sphere cannot be ruled out. The poets’ encounter with the boys, just at the moment that they were discussing the hats, may seem implausibly convenient, but there is little evidence to con rm or reject the accuracy of the episode. Wordsworth may imply, in the note, that the existence of the May Day festival in the Lake District, albeit in reduced form, connects the boys more closely with the shepherds of his present than with the literary shepherds of the classical past. It is possible, too, that he deems the authenticity of this custom 29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1807–1814, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 761. 30 Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years 1800–1815 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 452. 31 Robert Southey, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press: 1965), I, 573.

36

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

to be important for his delineation of the close relationship between children and the natural world. The boys’ observance of the custom and the strong associations with a speci c location and local plants indicates that they are also rooted in the place. Finally, as part of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ shares the collection’s purpose of recording rural and personal incidents with an imaginative colouring. Wordsworth’s principal object is ‘to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men’.32 Authenticity is possibly emphasized merely in order to af rm the coherence of the volume. Therefore, the whole volume contributes to the project (antiquarian or otherwise) of delineating the common sphere in opposition to the bourgeois public sphere. As I mentioned in my introduction, literary contexts are as important as historical ones when discussing the origins of folkloric references in literature. There are several conceivable literary sources for the poem. The shepherd boys play sycamore pipes and sit in the sun neglecting their ock like their classical forbears, and the poem draws on the classical-pastoral motif of the joyful and easeful life of the shepherd, which, as Blake’s Songs of Innocence exempli es, is also, by this time, an important part of the English pastoral. Additionally, the neglectful shepherds of Spenser’s May eclogue (in The Shepheardes Calender [1579]) may have in uenced Wordsworth’s portrait of the Shepherd boys. Wordsworth acknowledges Spenser as a source for May Day customs in The Prelude (1805/50). The May eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (1579) shares much with the descriptions of May Day in ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, the Intimations Ode and The Prelude: I sawe a shole of shepeheards outgoe, With singing, and shouting, and iolly chere: Before them yode a lusty Tabrere, That to the many a Horne-pype playd, Whereto they dauncen, eche one with his mayd. To see those folkes make such iouysaunce, Made my heart after the pype to daunce. Tho to the greene Wood they speeden hem all, To fetchen home May with their musicall: And home they bringen in a royall throne, Crowned as king: and his Queene attone Was Lady Flora, on whom did attend A fayre ocke of Faeries, and a fresh bend Of louely Nymphs. (O that I were there, To helpen the laydes their Maybush beare) […].33

Spenser and Wordsworth emphasize the freedom and happiness of the festival. Joyful singing, shouting and piping, seen in ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, is also part of the May Eclogue. Spenser’s pipes and tabor make an appearance in the Intimations Ode, 32 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p. 59. 33 Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, The Minor Poems, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, and Ray Heffner, 2 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1943–47), I, 47.

‘Precious rites and customs’

37

while Wordsworth’s ‘maids’, like Spenser’s, bring in the ‘maybush’ in The Prelude. The links with the pastoral tradition further temper the radicalism of ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, which, as have we have seen, rather tempers the con ict between the common sphere and the bourgeois public sphere. Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, which contains two May Day scenes, is a likely source for the ‘busy’ thrush in ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, and may suggest further literary elements of this poem. Chaucer’s ‘bisy larke’34 honours May in the second of these scenes, during which Arcite makes a garland of woodbine and hawthorn for his head: ‘To maken hym a gerland of the greves, / Were it of wodebynde or hawethorn leves’ (ll. 1507–8). In the rst scene, Emily gathers owers to make a garland: ‘She gadereth oures, party white and rede, / To make a subtil gerland for hire hede’ (ll. 1054–5). Wordsworth, who was a great admirer of Chaucer, may have been inspired by this work. Coleridge’s brief comment on the ‘The Idle ShepherdBoys’ in Biographia Literaria (1817) notes the literariness of the epithet ‘busy’, and is dismissive of the ‘green coronal’ on the grounds that it was a literary description of the type that Wordsworth had professed in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that he would avoid: Would any but a poet – at least could any one without being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity – have described a bird singing loud by, ‘The thrush is busy in the wood’ Or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys ‘with their green coronal?’ Or have translated a beautiful May-day into ‘Both earth and sky keep jubilee?’35

‘Busy’ is, nevertheless, the adjective that Southey nonchalantly uses to describe birds in a letter of 1832.36 Coleridge takes issue with the diction of Wordsworth’s poem, but does not question the accuracy of the scene. The reference to the coronal in the context of a discussion on literary language presented Coleridge with a good opportunity to question the accuracy of the description, but he does not. This may be because he had seen the evidence in 1809. According to Wordsworth’s story, the poets were discussing the ‘green coronal’ as they met the boys in the Lake District. Coleridge and Southey had little personal experience of May Day customs, but they were clearly struck by the image when they came across it in Wordsworth’s poem. Both poets used similar descriptions in their poetry after 1800. Written in the year he wrote the rst version of ‘Dejection’, Coleridge’s ‘To Mathilda Betham from a Stranger’ (1802) celebrates her talents as a poet and society portrait painter. In high classical mode, Coleridge elaborates on the green coronal image, describing Betham’s verse as a oral ‘coronal’ entwined with laurel, ‘engarlanded with gadding woodbine tendrils’, rose-buds, fruit blossoms and pretty weeds, ‘which, with undoubting hand, / I twine around the brows of patriot 34 F.N. Robinson, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edn (Boston: Houghton Mif in, 1987), p. 45, l. 1491. 35 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Bollingen Series, 54, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, 106. 36 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. by Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849–50), II, 190.

38

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

HOPE!’ (ll. 13–17). ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ also allude to coronals. Coleridge suggests in both poems that when he can dwell with those he loves best in ‘one Happy Home’, he will be able to crown himself ‘with a Coronal’ (l. 136). The ‘twining vine’ of hope is also part of the later version of ‘Dejection’ (1817, l. 80). Southey’s Madoc (1805) includes a green coronal in a catalogue of gaudy decorations worn by the Aztecs in time of war: Not half so gaudied, for their May-day mirth, All wreathed and ribanded, our youths and maids, As these stern Aztecas in war attire! The golden glitterance, and the feather-mail, More gay than glittering gold; and round the helm A coronal of high upstanding plumes Green as the spring grass in a sunny shower.37

The warriors’ clothes, Southey writes, are only slightly less bright than those worn on May Day. ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ may be a source for Southey’s description of the way in which the feathers were worn, with the branch-like moss corresponding to the plumes. The green plumes are also part of Tezozomoc’s hat in the same poem: ‘the crown of glossy plumage, whose green hue / Vied with his emerald ear-drops’.38 Southey’s notes suggest that the source for the plumes is Conquest of the Weast India. This describes the Tlascalan army as wearing ‘great tuffes of feathers’, but mentions neither the colour of the plumes, nor whether they were worn as hats or coronals.39 The comparison with the gaudy clothes of a Medieval Welsh May Day is Southey’s own, and may suggest that he believed the hats to be a literary ostentation. It is unclear whether Southey intended, in Madoc, an association with the green coronals that Wordsworth observes, or whether the simile is simply a general comparison of springtime garishness. Southey, however, makes a rmer association between May Day and the customs of the Aztecs in the section on Aztec recreational customs: Here round a lofty mast the dancers move Quick, to quick music; from its top af x’d, Each holds a coloured cord, and as they weave The complex crossings of the mazy dance, The checquer’d network twists around the tree Its intertexture of harmonious hues.40

The dance is clearly reminiscent of maypole dancing. Although much of his description of Aztec culture is based on the best sources available to him, Southey occasionally presents as Aztec the customs of other cultures. This is ‘simply because

37 Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected By Himself, 10 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843), V, 55–6; my italics. 38 Ibid., 291. 39 Ibid., 160. 40 Ibid., 364.

‘Precious rites and customs’

39

they struck his fancy, or seemed poetic’, as one critic puts it.41 The way in which Coleridge and Southey use green coronals as exotic, historical or classical decoration may explain why they assumed that Wordsworth’s use was a literary rather than a local reference. The Fenwick note may be a later attempt to play down this perceived literariness of the reference to the green coronal. There is, however, a contrast with Coleridge and Southey. For these latter poets, the fashions serve merely decorative purposes; for Wordsworth, they are markers of the common sphere. The Intimations Ode and the depreciation of ritual meanings Wordsworth began, in 1802, to articulate his sadness at the wider decline of local May Day customs. These lamentations take the form of grander classical laments for the erosion of a pagan appreciation of the natural world. Acknowledging the evolution of May Day from pagan rites, Wordsworth associates the decline of local customs with the disappearance of a pagan spiritual link between nature and humankind, an element of which these customs seemed to him to retain. Wordsworth’s purpose is, nevertheless, to reposition nature as an immortal, revivifying force that outlives cultural signi cance and provides solace to the individual. May Day customs become associated with classical festivals, and their decline signi es the loss of unity with nature. Wordsworth links this with an increasing concern for the loss of childhood innocence: it is the child, and not the adult, who retains unity with nature. Strikingly, the later Wordsworth loses all interest in the connection between indigenous customs and the common sphere, and more generally allows his interest in nature to supplant his interest in the common sphere. In exploring the source of the custom in the later period, Wordsworth is better able to understand the nature of its loss. May Day is elevated, in his classical odes of the 1820s, in order to suggest distance from it (and therefore its decline), and to highlight the merits of a pagan belief-system based on a love of nature. The continuity, from pagan times to present, of celebrating nature in a simple and instinctive way, is, nevertheless, emphasized in Wordsworth’s work from the Intimations Ode onwards. Wordsworth’s point is that cultural celebrations of nature are transitory. They are outlived by the self-renewing, self-celebrating natural world, and are survived by the instinctive human feelings that form the basis of a profound love of nature. The Intimations Ode (composed 1802–1804, published 1807) marks the beginning of Wordsworth’s classicization of May Day. The Ode bemoans the loss of the glorious ‘common sight’ (l. 2) that was once bathed in a ‘celestial light’ (l. 4) and is comparable to the experience of the soul in a state of pre-existence. This state of pre-existence is closely allied, in the poem, to an historical past, both in the sense of the personal history of the individual growing to maturity and in the sense of the historical development of culture away from festal celebration. Loss of the ‘celestial light’ is perceived both as growth into adulthood, when immortality is no longer assumed, and as the degeneration of past perceptions of the natural world.

41 John Larrymore Wilson, ‘Folklore in the Long Narrative Poems of Robert Southey’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina, 1947), p. 204.

40

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Traditions that accentuate an af nity with nature are in decline: ‘It is not now as it hath been of yore’ (l. 6). The archaic ‘yore’ indicates that the concern is with the distant past. Destruction of a past af nity with nature is conceived as the deprivation of an instinctive joyousness, the remains of which are conspicuous in the child’s enjoyment of spring and in the lingering customs associated with the celebration of the season. Wordsworth is unwilling, however, to disconnect the child from a true appreciation of the joy of May Day. The mountain echoes of children singing, rst seen in ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, return in the Intimations Ode as the poet presents a vision of nature and the child in harmony, ful lling the customary acts of the season: And with the heart of May Doth every Beast keep holiday;– Thou Child of Joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy! (ll. 32–5) My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel – I feel it all (ll. 39–41 ).

Wordsworth draws heavily on Spenser’s descriptions of May Day in order to summon up a worthy characterisation of the child’s happiness in spring. Children gather owers ‘in a thousand valleys far and wide’ (l. 47), and there is no room for melancholy: ‘Oh evil day! If I were sullen / While Earth herself is adorning, / This sweet May-morning’ (ll. 42–4). Grief is out of place in the season which provides a glimpse of the celestial joy that the soul has long forgotten. Jonathan Wordsworth suggests that this part of the Ode displays a ‘determined super ciality’ and cannot be read ‘without some sense of unease’, citing the use of the coronal as an example of this.42 The poet is, however, elevating his subject into something more than a facile reproduction of the classical celebration. In making a connection with the classical past, the speaker indicates that, brie y, he has a full understanding of the child’s enjoyment of the season; the poet harnesses the potency of the festival by representing an enactment of it. The ode form, allowing for the development of signi cant emotional progression, enables the poet to demonstrate an af nity with pagan ritual, both conceptually and emotionally, at this climactic point. Far from super cial, this section of the poem indicates a deliberate and emotional reaching back to the past: the past as childhood, the cultural past and the past connection with the natural world. The Ode, furthermore, suggests links to the pastoralism of ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, indicating that there is a profound connection between the classical version and the present-day celebration. The coronal, the shouting, the echoing mountains and the cataracts resounding with the blowing of trumpets, a transferred epithet applied to the waterfalls in the Ode (‘the cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep’ [l. 25]), belong to both poems.

42 Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 157.

‘Precious rites and customs’

41

The speaker of the Ode avails himself of the ‘primal sympathy’, exempli ed by a child’s joy, and realizes the cheerfulness and pleasures of nature during spring. The shepherd boy shouts his joy, the babe ‘leaps in his mother’s arms’, and the ‘sixyears Darling’ can write or draw fragments ‘from his dream of human life’ (l. 91). Wordsworth’s sympathy is ‘primal’ because it takes him back to the joyousness of platonic pre-existence, the rst hour, and because it belongs to ‘prima vera’, spring. He recalls a classical spring paradise in this account of the passing away of ‘a glory from the earth’ (l. 18). Paradise is irretrievable: ‘nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the ower’ (ll. 181–2). The shortness of an hour hints at the brevity of childhood and the impermanence of the belief in one’s own immortality. The Intimations Ode contrasts the child’s cognizance of the glory of a classical spring and his appreciation of the season as an eternal present with the adult’s understanding of cultural and personal development and awareness of death. Innocence, recreation and immortality all suggest that Wordsworth views childhood as a ‘golden age’. It is important and inevitable that the adult moves on from this stage; and progression is a signi cant part of Wordsworth’s experience of spring. If the adult were to remain in the original state, deriving ‘the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow, or any other irrational creature is endowed’, Wordsworth writes in ‘Upon Epitaphs’ (1810), then he would be ‘cut off from communication with the best part of his nature’.43 The child’s authentic counter-public is in opposition to certain bourgeois values. The six-year-old boy of stanza 6 mimics the discourse of commodity exchange tting ‘his tongue / To dialogues of business, love, or strife’ (ll. 97–8). His rebelliousness is characterized by his ability to throw off the trappings of commerce and create his own fragment of a ‘little plan or chart’ (l. 90) in ‘heaven-born freedom’ (l. 126). Unusually, Wordsworth gures the common sphere in an implied domestic setting. The ‘little Actor’ mimics public rituals in front of his parents: ‘A wedding or a festival, / A mourning or a funeral’ (ll. 92–3). The domesticity of this scene is undermined, however, by the war-like description of maternal affection. The child is ‘fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses’ (l. 88). In addition, Wordsworth emphasizes the child’s power by employing regal language more appropriate for the sphere of public authority: the child comes from the ‘imperial palace’ (l. 84), ‘trailing clouds of glory’ (l. 64). Maturity, in the poem, is characterized by an acceptance of commercial values and coercion. Life is understood to have ‘equipage’ (l. 105) and ‘earthly freight’ (l. 130); ‘shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy’ (ll. 67–8). Childhood is, on the other hand, the time of ‘jubilee’ (l. 38), and Wordsworth pictures a public of children celebrating their own festivals, and keeping their ‘heritage’ (l. 110). The common sphere here, however, merely acts as a foil for the commercialized bourgeois sphere; the common sphere symbolizes unity with nature without itself having any particular signi cance beyond this. The cultural question has been occluded by a new concern for nature.

43 Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. by Nowell C. Smith and Howard Mills (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1980), p. 81.

42

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

In the midst of the account of children gathering owers on ‘this sweet Maymorning’ (l. 44), the Ode turns its attention to ‘a Tree, of many, one’ (l. 51) and ‘a single Field which I have looked upon’ (l. 52): ‘Both of them speak of something that is gone’ (l. 53). ‘[R]eaders have sought long and in vain to specify the references of these passages’, suggests Jerome McGann, commenting in particular on the symbolism of the tree and eld.44 The general argument of this section of the poem is that the ‘visionary gleam’, which appears to brighten the world during childhood and is caused by the lack of awareness of mortality, is dimmed in later years. While the adult is only permitted glimpses of this light, the child experiences a close relationship with the natural world. The adult speaker asks of the pansy, tree and eld: ‘Whither is ed the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’ (ll. 56–7). Tree, eld and ower remind the speaker that this joy is gone, and they act as epitaphs to the exceptional joy that is past. The adult can retain a portion of this happiness, through memory and an appreciation of the natural world; the adult nds ‘Strength in what remains behind’ (l. 180). The implications of the references to the tree and eld have, in the critical literature, been largely treated as an instance of obscure symbolism. Unlike many of Wordsworth’s references to trees, this is not concerned with a particular location. Writing on the connotation of the tree, Marjorie Levinson suggests that the reader might ‘try to reconstruct the nexus of associations informing that image and word for the poet and his early years’.45 There is certainly an abundance of trees in Wordsworth’s work. Levinson settles on a political interpretation of the Ode, reading it alongside Hazlitt’s comments on it in the essay on The Excursion. Hazlitt explicitly equates Wordsworth’s ‘visionary gleam’ with ‘that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world’ when ‘France called her children to partake her equal blessings beneath her laughing skies’ and the ‘golden era’ of the French Revolution had begun.46 Wordsworth’s account of May Day in the Ode reminds Hazlitt of the aborted political renaissance. Looking back on the revolutionary period, he links the poem’s spring and childhood images to a golden era of social harmony. The aesthetic occurrence is given contemporary signi cance through, Levinson claims, an implied association with the French celebrations that Wordsworth witnessed rsthand. The liberty tree and the eld (Champ de Mars) represent ‘emblems and events of a glorious irrecoverable era’.47 Levinson reads the Intimations Ode, then, as a statement of political renewal. Although Wordsworth does not make an overt connection between May Day and the French liberty celebrations until 1815, there is evidence to suggest that he associates spring with the French Revolution before this time. In The Prelude, ‘the fe of war’ is described as ‘a spirit-stirring sound indeed, / A blackbird’s whistle in a vernal grove’ 44 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), p. 88. 45 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 86. 46 William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34), IV (1930), 119–20. 47 Levinson, p. 94.

‘Precious rites and customs’

43

(The Prelude (1805), VI. 695–7). He suggests, further, that the ‘benevolence and blessedness’ which spread throughout France was ‘like Spring’: it ‘leaves no corner of the land untouched’ (The Prelude (1805), VI. 368–9). A connection to spring is also implied in Wordsworth’s account of the liberty celebrations in The Excursion (1817). Here ‘The Solitary’ narrator describes the euphoria felt at the beginning of the French Revolution, recalling the triumphant chorus: ‘Bring garlands, bring forth choicest owers, to deck / The tree of Liberty’ (III. 725–6). Wordsworth explicitly makes a connection between May Day and French Liberty on one occasion: in the sonnet ‘To a Friend, Composed Near Calais’, composed in the year of the peace of Amiens. Walking southward from Calais, the speaker is reminded of the ‘songs, garlands, mirth’ of the celebration of 14 July 1790: then this Way, Which I am pacing now, was like the May With festivals of new-born Liberty (ll. 2–4).

This is not, however, a connection he seems to make at the time, but a later revision.48 The 1802 version of the poem has: this public Way Streamed with the pomp of a too-credulous day, When faith was pledged to new-born Liberty (ll. 2–4).

In the earlier version of the poem, Wordsworth is reminded of the precipitate celebration of liberty on 14 July 1790, describing the anxiety of the observer, who is as pensive as a bird ‘whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare’ (l. 14). The reference to being exposed to danger is an image of a blighted spring: a paradise which is destroyed. The later version, however, revises this into a ‘golden age’ ideal which looks forward to a cheerful future: ‘happy am I as a Bird / Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair’ (ll. 13–14). From the vantage point of the post-war period, the poet shows himself retaining his optimism, removing any sense of fear. May Day in the later version is restyled as a liberty festival, with spring implying a utopia to come. It is possible that Wordsworth makes a covert connection, in the Intimations Ode, between May Day and the French liberty celebrations, but it is not likely at this early stage (1802–1804). Levinson treats May Day as a purely literary occurrence, describing the Ode as ‘Wordsworth’s generic and greatly aestheticized May jubilee’.49 She argues that in alluding to May, Wordsworth ‘clearly invokes a tradition’, indicating Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton as part of this, but she does not concede that Wordsworth might have a view on May Day as a Lake District festival. Like me, Clarence Miller found it strange that he could ‘discover no commentator or critic who has ever

48 William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems 1800–7, ed. by Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 156–7 (MS 1815/1820). 49 Levinson, p. 84.

44

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

mentioned’ the fact that the Ode is a May Day poem.50 Given the poem’s May Day content, it is perhaps appropriate to ‘reconstruct the nexus’ around Wordsworth’s allusions to this calendar custom, locating signi cance not in the French celebration, which Wordsworth after all describes as ‘gaudy’ (The Prelude (1805), VI. 362; 398) and inappropriate ‘pomp’ (‘To a Friend, Composed Near Calais’ [1802], l. 3), but in his attitude to the decline of the May Day festival locally. Wordsworth laments, in the Ode, that the love for the natural world, experienced by children, is no longer felt more widely, because traditional celebrations have depreciated in signi catory value. The maypole, the village green and the May Day owers, important aspects of Wordsworth’s description of the festival in The Prelude and the Excursion, provide equivalents to the enigmatic tree, eld and pansy of the Ode. The Ode implies that these are symbols of loss as well as lost symbols. Their value is gauged through an examination of Wordsworth’s use of May Day customs and his development of the theme of cultural change. Critics, more interested in making connections with the practice of popular celebration in revolutionary France, have overlooked Wordsworth’s attitude to English customs. Like the hats in ‘The Idle-Shepherd Boys’, the enigmatic traditional symbolism in the Intimations Ode highlights both the diminished potency of common rituals, and their potential for dominating the bourgeois public sphere. In the Ode, the May Day paraphernalia is again closely linked with the child’s perception of the celebration. Wordsworth’s imperial child is deemed authentic in his continued understanding of the festival and in his ability to enact it fully. The ritual is, furthermore, a challenge to public authority, not through rational contestation, but through the child’s appropriation of the insignia of aristocratic political authority (‘the coronal’), his mimicry of the discourse of bourgeois authority (the ‘dialogues of business’), through his usurpation of the place of power (the ‘imperial palace’) and through the carnivalesque use of the ‘humorous stage’. The tree and the eld, of the Intimations Ode, point to more than an aestheticized May Day; they are epitaphs to the loss of unthinking joy which May Day initially celebrated. When Wordsworth signals the continuance of May Day customs, as he does in ‘The Idle ShepherdBoys’ and the Intimations Ode, these customs sustain a golden era in which the connection with nature is intact. The later Wordsworth, then, is interested in May Day merely as a symbol for childhood and the consequent more important proper sympathy for nature. The marked cultural commentary which was a feature of May Day in Lyrical Ballads has been replaced by a lively concern with the destructiveness of the bourgeois public sphere in its opposition not to the common sphere but to nature. The special signi cance of the child, symbolized by the May Day rituals, lies not in his association with the common sphere but with his innate sympathy for nature, a sympathy inaccessible to the adult.

50 Clarence H. Miller, ‘The May-Day Celebration in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 27 (1987), 571–9 (p. 571). Coleridge, incidentally, notices that this is a May Day poem in Biographia Literaria. See the quotation on page 37 above.

‘Precious rites and customs’

45

Recovering rural ritual in The Prelude(s) Wordsworth’s response to May Day in The Prelude (1805/1850) develops the focus away from the child’s experience to that of the adult. The Spenserian May Day, seen in the Intimations Ode and ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, is rmly associated with the child’s response to the season, and is abandoned here. The Prelude declares that customs of the type seen in Spenser’s work had died out before the poet was born: ‘the times had scattered all / These lighter graces’, transforming them into the ‘severe and unadorned’, yet ‘beautiful’, celebrations of his own youth (The Prelude (1805), VIII. 205–10). Spenser is now deemed part of the great tradition; the ‘little tradition’ is portrayed more simply; customs which sound more literary are consigned to the past. […] I had heard (perhaps what he [Spenser] had seen) Of maids at sunrise bringing in from far Their maybush, and along the streets in ocks Parading with a song of taunting rhymes Aimed at the laggards slumbering within doors – Had also heard, from those who yet remembered, Tales of the maypole dance, and owers that decked The posts and the kirk-pillars, and of youths, That each one with his maid at break of day By annual custom issued forth in troops To drink the waters of some favourite well, And hang it round with garlands. This alas Was but a dream (The Prelude (1805), VIII. 192–205).

Gathering maybushes, parading in the streets, maypole dancing, oral decorations and well-visits all belong to the past, and Wordsworth implies that he himself has not experienced them. The 1850 Prelude adds that ‘Love survives; But, for such purpose, owers no longer grow: / The times, too sage, perhaps too proud, have dropped’ these more elaborate May Day customs (The Prelude (1850), VIII. 156–8). Both versions of The Prelude stress the poet’s sadness at this loss. The abrupt transition in the above passage, from an acknowledgement of the beauty of simple customs to a consideration of the profundity of the desolation of mankind, suggests a connection between the decline of these customs and mankind’s alienation from nature. The poet is overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of ‘danger and distress’ which ‘Man’ suffers ‘among awful Powers and Forms’ (1850, VIII. 164–5). The 1805 Prelude nds consolation in a tale of a shepherd and his son tracking a lost sheep. The boy, eager to bring home the sheep, is stranded much like the lamb is in ‘The Idle ShepherdBoys’. The shepherd boy is nally rescued by his father. Their ‘home and ancient birthright’, and the geography of the area, are described in detail in order to stress their strong connection to the locality (VIII. 263). This tale of Lake District life represents the familiarity and solace of home. In 1850, this passage is omitted; and, instead, the poet is consoled by the ‘immutable and ever owing streams’. Wherever he roamed, the poet says, the streams ‘were speaking monuments’ (1850, VIII. 172). Nature, in the nal version, outlasts these tales of local life.

46

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

This kind of pessimism, however, is not generally expressed in Wordsworth’s portrait of rural customs in the 1850 version of The Prelude. Here Wordsworth sees the rural fair, a frequent occurrence in the Lake District, as an occasion that restores his faith in humanity when he is disturbed by the brazenness of London prostitutes and the corruption of town life. The 1850 Prelude retains the suggestion of rural retreat present in 1805. The rustic summer fair at Grasmere (The Prelude (1850), VIII. 1–69) contrasts with the ‘anarchy and din / Barbarian and infernal’ of St. Bartholomew’s Fair in London’s Smith eld (VIII. 674–87), and clearly draws on the distinctions between country and city seen elsewhere in Wordsworth’s poetry. The symmetry of the fair scenes hints at selectivity. In London, Wordsworth is made uneasy by the power of the mob. He recalls the martyrdom and rioting associated with Smith eld: the ‘street on re, / Mobs, riots or rejoicings’ (VII. 674–5).51 The few stalls in Grasmere’s ‘village green’ (VIII. 5) and the modest apple-selling ‘sweet lass of the valley’ (VIII. 38) represent the lack of commercialism and moral purity of the country. An anonymous account of the Keswick annual fair in 1792, however, notes that rural fairs in the region were gaudy: ‘there were but few booths, and those mostly for gew-gaws’.52 Harriet Martineau’s later account con rms the idealism of Wordsworth’s portrait: ‘the morals of rural districts are usually such as cannot well be made worse by any change. Drinking and kindred vices abound wherever, in our day, intellectual resources are absent’.53 Lake District fairs often ended in drunken wrestling matches. Martineau, a contemporary of Wordsworth’s who lived in the Lake District, also comments that the local spring and autumn sales were characterized by drunkenness.54 Wordsworth’s treatment of the common sphere is now sentimentalized. Rural culture is used as a foil for the decadent commercialism of bourgeois culture, and Wordsworth’s concern seems to be more with a past golden age than with either nature or the intrinsic value of the common sphere. Just as the account of the country fair is manipulated for its symbolism, so the decline of May Day customs is not what it appears. The graceful celebrations, associated with Spenser’s age had not, in actuality, disappeared; The Prelude gives a slightly inaccurate portrait of the extent of these observances in the Lake District. The local custom of drinking ‘the waters of some favourite well’ at daybreak on May Day and decorating the well ‘round with garlands’ (The Prelude (1805), VIII. 200– 203), had not passed out of practice. Developed from the Anglo-Saxon ceremony of ‘waking the well’, this custom was still very much in existence in Wordsworth’s time.55 James Clarke, travel writer and local land surveyor, notes the prevalence of visits to sacred wells on Sundays in the months of April, May and June in the 1780s.56 51 He hints perhaps at the murder of Wat Tyler. Southey, following historical accounts, sets the second act of his play on Wat Tyler in Smith eld. 52 Anon., A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes in Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland, By A Rambler (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1792), p. 164. 53 Harriet Martineau, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes (London: Whittaker, 1855), p. 141. 54 Ibid., p. 140. 55 Sullivan, p. 141. 56 James Clarke, A Survey of the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland, and Lancashire: Together with an Account, Historical, Topographical, and Descriptive, of the Adjacent

‘Precious rites and customs’

47

Sugar water or ‘Spanish-water’ made from well water was bottled on these Sundays, known as ‘Shaking Bottle or Sugar water Sundays’.57 Jeremiah Sullivan records the ‘shaking bottle’ custom as having survived at least until mid-Victorian times: The liquor it contains is a solution of Spanish licorice in water, which is supped or ‘sucked’ from the bottle; and the custom, though kept up for weeks, evidently belongs to May, as said in the children’s rhyme: ‘The rst of May / Is shaking-bottle day’.58

Sullivan suggests, furthermore, that of the various occasions on which well visits were made, the May visits were the last to disappear. The Whitehaven Gazette of 1819 con rms that there was still some remaining acknowledgement of May Day in the region: ‘In Whitehaven, gures, ornamented with garlands of owers, are still exhibited from the windows of some of the inhabitants’.59 The more ippant custom of declaring people ‘May geslings’, akin to the April Fool, survived until the midnineteenth century, but is ignored by Wordsworth. Garlanding, maypole decoration and Queen-making were still in existence in the region in Wordsworth’s youth and adulthood, but they were no longer used for celebrating May Day. The ancient ‘rush-bearing’ ceremony, which took place later in the year, and which is often described in late-eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury guides to the lakes, incorporated May Day customs. The rush-bearing was celebrated in many churches of the Lake District, including Grasmere Church, and there are records of its persisting throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.60 At Grasmere the festival took place on the nearest Saturday to 5 August (St. Oswald’s Day). Other villages in the region celebrated the rush-bearing on St. Peter’s Day (29 June), St. James’s Day (25 July) and St. Anne’s Day (26 July). The earliest references to the rush-bearing in the Lake District date from the late seventeenth century. For example, Rev. Mr Machel describes the rush-bearing at Burton-inKendal, Westmorland, in his journal of 1692: The young maids who perform the solemnity being entertained with music and such sort of Junkets as the country affords and there they dance about the Maypole, but none of their mirth is suffered to be enacted in the church or churchyard.61

Rush-bearing festivals took place elsewhere in the country and are referred to in James I’s Book of Sports (1618). There are also references to the need for rushes in churches in churchwarden’s accounts in London dating from the fteenth century.62

Country. To which is added a sketch of the Border Laws and Customs (London: J. Robson and J. Faulder, 1787), p. xxi. 57 Walter T. MacIntire, Lakeland and the Borders of Long Ago, ed. by, Thomas Gray (Carlisle: Charles Thurnam, 1948), p. 214 and Rowling, p. 65. 58 Sullivan, p. 166. 59 Anon., ‘May’, The Whitehaven Gazette, 14 May 1819, p. 4. 60 Rowling, pp. 120–21. 61 Ibid., p. 120. The earliest mention of the rush bearing festival dates from 1680. See MacIntire, p. 216 and Simpson and Roud, p. 152. 62 McIntire, p. 216; Simpson and Roud, p. 303.

48

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

The similarity of the Grasmere rush-bearing to May Day festivities can be seen from Clarke’s A Survey of the Lakes (1787): I happened once to be here [Grasmere] at what they call a Rush-bearing. This is an ancient annual custom, formerly pretty universal here, but now generally disused, and consisted of the following rural procession. […] She who leads the procession is stiled the Queen, and carries in her hand a large garland, and the rest usually have nosegays. The Queen then goes and places her garland upon the pulpit, where it remains until after the next Sunday; the rest then strew their rushes upon the bottom of the pews, and at the churchdoor they are met by a ddler, who plays before them to the public house, where the evening is spent in all kinds of rustic merriment.63

Wordsworth was clearly aware of this festival, as his poem ‘Rural Ceremony’, one of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821–22), describes the rush-bearing in detail. Accompanied by ‘rustic music’ (l. 4), the village children on this ‘day / Of annual joy’ (l. 3) process ‘Through the still churchyard, each with garland gay, / That, carried sceptre-like, o’ertops the head of the proud Bearer’ (ll. 7–8). The stem of rushes carried by children, although generalized as a ‘garland’, is accurately described as being carried upright. Its characterization as a ‘sceptre’ again points to Wordsworth’s perception of the potency of rural ritual. In order to connect the local to the national, the sonnet concludes with the suggestion that Archbishop Laud, who approved of ecclesiastical ceremony, would have appreciated this ‘spectacle’ (l. 14). The admiration of local customs and the disapproval of Puritan zeal in abolishing them is also discussed by Southey in The Book of The Church (1824): ‘By another [law], maypoles were to be taken down as a heathenish vanity, abused to superstition and wickedness’.64 Here Southey dismisses the Puritan curtailment of May Day celebrations as being motivated by a misunderstanding of the festival. The innocence and rustic beauty of the rush-bearing festival is pictured by Wordsworth as a connection to ‘Papal’ times (l. 11). In spite of the decline of May Day, the pagan ‘beltane’ was still observed in the region in the eighteenth century. William Hutchinson observes of the Lake District in the 1790s that ‘Till of late years the superstition of the bel-tin was kept up in these parts’.65 Hutchinson follows, almost word for word, the observations of Thomas Pennant, who passed through the Lake District during his tour to Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century: ‘Till of late years the superstition of the Beltain was kept up in these parts, and in this rude sacri ce it was customary for the performers to bring with them boughs of the mountain ash’.66 As I mentioned in Chapter 1, beltane did not die out completely. Some customs survive into the period to which Wordsworth alludes, but there is widespread acknowledgement of the decline in Lake District celebrations of May Day in the antiquarian accounts. A Westmorland correspondent 63 Clarke, p. 124. 64 Robert Southey, The Book of the Church, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1824), II, 402. 65 Hutchinson, II, 162. 66 Thomas Pennant, Tour in Scotland (1769), cited in William Rollinson, Life and Tradition in the Lake District (Lancaster: Dalesman Books, 1987), p. 70.

‘Precious rites and customs’

49

to William Hone’s Table Book con rms that the ‘anti-witching properties’ of rowan are still held in high esteem in 1827,67 but The Westmorland Advertiser and Kendal Chronicle of 1817 echoes the folklorist’s usual complaint, suggesting that May Day festivities in the region were dying out because so vitiated is the taste of this degenerate age, so absorbed are the ner feelings of the soul in the all-consuming passion of over-weening wealth, that pleasures connected with the rural life appear to live only in the poet’s fabled song, or with Arcadian ages.68

This 1818 edition of the paper regards the era of May Day as long past, consigning it to the domain of poets: it is ‘associated in one’s mind with the cheerful wisdom of old times’.69 The Whitehaven Gazette (1819) also laments the passing of May Day customs: Everyone who feels a genuine love of nature, must, we think, feel sorry for this. These customs connect us with a more really tasteful and poetical age than we can boast of at present, in which it was not thought vulgar to rejoice in whatever way, at the return of the blessings of Spring’. 70

The newspapers generally rely on past literary and historical accounts of May Day, but one journalist claims in 1818 that he can remember ‘something about milkmaids and their garlands in our boyish days; but even this lingering piece of professional rejoicing is gone’.71 There are no other records of May Day as a celebration for milkmaids in this region, and it is very likely that the writer is combining literary and antiquarian accounts taken from other localities. The Prelude suggests that May Day customs in the Lake District were in decline by the time of Wordsworth’s youth (1770s and 1780s). Wordsworth’s account of May Day in The Prelude, however, accelerates the decline of ‘the lighter graces’ of May Day in order to af rm the connection he makes between their loss and the destruction of an ancient and close relationship between nature and humankind. The ‘lighter graces’, which once recapitulated the ‘visionary gleam’ seen in the Intimations Ode, have now faded, The Prelude suggests. There is suf cient evidence from contemporary accounts to conclude that well-visits, doll dressing, beltane bon res and warding off evil spirits with witch-wood all still took place on May Day during Wordsworth’s lifetime. Maypoles, garlanding and ‘Queens’ existed in the region, though they were part of other celebrations. The victory celebrations of 1814 saw a wider dissemination of customs formerly used for May Day. A maypole was erected on the green at Wetheral in celebration of peace, remaining there for about

67 Hone, II, 674–5. 68 Anon., ‘Old May-Day (Last Wednesday)’, Westmorland Advertiser and Kendal Chronicle, 16 May 1818, p. 2. 69 Ibid., p. 2. 70 Anon., 1819, p. 4. 71 Anon., 1818, p. 2. Hutchinson’s The History of the County of Cumberland (1794– 1797) is used by several journalists of the Lake District and John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598) is often paraphrased.

50

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

30 years.72 The use of May Day customs for peace and victory celebrations is noted elsewhere in the country: ‘In the 1814 peace celebrations young women were […] given a visible role as the standard bearers of peace, plenty and renewal, carrying peace-garlands or processing two by two dressed in white’.73 Wordsworth shows that he is aware of alternative uses of the maypole and garlands in The Excursion.74 Although Wordsworth has considerable knowledge of folklore and uses this in The Prelude, he is nevertheless personally distanced from it in some respects. He uses it to express concern about cultural loss, and in order to do this he suggests that his experience of these customs is limited. Roger Sales’s assumption that Wordsworth is not entirely accurate about rural custom in The Prelude is correct, but it is only possible to conclude on this point when contemporary sources have been examined. In addition to this, aspects of these customs which give the impression of literary adornment or which are ippant (but which are still in existence during the period with which Wordsworth concerns himself) are omitted from his accounts of May Day in this poem. The unadorned purity of the remaining customs mentioned in the poem serves to promote the ideas that popular customs are unthreatening (in that they do not cause the drunken disruption that Harriet Martineau observes), that they are worth preserving (because they are in decline) and that they are in opposition to decadent dominant culture. Again, Wordsworth promotes the common sphere as superior to other public spheres. The Wordsworth of The Prelude seems more of a conventional antiquarian than anything else. He shares with the anonymous writer in the Westmorland Advertiser and Kendal Chronicle a strong distaste for urban capitalism, the decadence of which has, in his opinion, permeated the innocent and natural practices of the common sphere. May Day and cultural impermanence in the later odes Antiquarian research into the origins of vulgar rituals invigorates early nineteenth century pastoralism; interest in the fusion of classical and indigenous rituals is present in creative literature too. In the academic world, knowledge about vulgar customs functions alongside, and is sometimes inseparable from, classical scholarship; these links enable rural custom to become part of bourgeois culture. In the later odes, Wordsworth modi es his reaction to the loss of the common festival into classical laments more acceptable to elite culture. ‘Ode Composed on May Morning (While from the purpling east)’ (1826) encapsulates Wordsworth’s suggestion, in the Intimations Ode, that a full enjoyment of the glory of spring has been lost to the public. Primarily an elegy for the passing away of the pagan signi cance of the festival, the poem celebrates May Day as the birthday of the May deity, and the beginning of the year. Keats’s sonnet, ‘Dedication: To Leigh Hunt’ (1817), similarly notes that the ‘Glory and loveliness’ of the classical spring ‘have passed away’ (l. 1).

72 Rowling, p. 118. 73 Rogers, ‘Crowds and Political Festival’, p. 255. 74 The maypole used for the Midsummer wake is described thus: ‘Like a mast / Of gold, the Maypole shines’ (II, 132–3).

‘Precious rites and customs’

51

While the ‘shrine of Flora in her early May’ is no longer worshipped, ‘there are left delights as high as these’ which, Keats writes, Hunt appreciates: In a time, when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free A leafy luxury, seeing I could please With these poor offerings a man like thee (ll. 11–14).

Wordsworth continues the lament for the waning cultural signi cance of May Day through ‘the great tradition’. The maypole, ‘from which thy name / Has not departed’ (ll. 42–3), stands ‘forlorn / Of song and dance and game’ (l. 44). Addressing May, the poet declares that Time was, blest Power! when youths and maids At peep of dawn would rise, And wander forth, in forest glades Thy birth to solemnize. Though mute the song – to grace the rite Untouched the hawthorn bough, Thy Spirit triumphs o’er the slight; Man changes, but not Thou! (ll. 17–24).

The poet suggests that the present-day neglect of May Day customs is testimony to a common disregard for the May deity. As in the Intimations Ode, May, in ‘Ode Composed on May Morning’, brings with her ‘a quickening hope’ (l. 5), a ‘freshening glee’ (l. 5) and is welcomed by ‘all Nature’ (l. 9), which pays ‘instinctive homage’ to the season. Nature supplies its own garlands for the season and everything, from the ‘puniest ower-pot nursling’ (l. 39) to the birds, is employed in love’s sport, and honours ‘sweet May’ (l. 36). The ‘forlorn’ maypole (l. 43) and the ‘village green’ (l. 45) are testament to there having once been a covenant with spring; a covenant of which we are reminded when ‘peace is on the brow, / Or love within the breast’ (ll. 47–8). The lost cultural celebration is lamented, but the consolation is that May remains ‘Queen’ of ‘each gay plant’ (l. 29), and of ‘the slim wild deer’ (l. 30). The effect of spring is seen now in the restorative power the season has on people, in the way it teaches the heart to love, and in its moral lessons: Yes! where Love nestles thou canst teach The soul to love the more; Hearts also shall thy lessons reach That never loved before, Stript is the haughty one of pride, The bashful freed from fear (ll. 49–54).

In ‘Ode Composed on May Morning’, the cultural commemoration of May Day has waned, leaving only a few celebrants: the poet is reduced to playing a ‘feeble lyre’ (l. 57) and his words are ‘weak’ (l. 57). Nature continues the celebration of the season more effectively. The ‘exulting thrush’ replaces the poet in singing the praises of

52

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

May (l. 59), recalling Wordsworth’s ‘The Green Linnet’ (1803), in which the bird is ‘the presiding Spirit’ that ‘dost lead the revels of the May’ (l. 15). ‘Ode Composed on May Morning’ con rms what The Prelude and the Intimations Ode suggest: that nature is immortal and continues to celebrate the coming of the year in a tting fashion. The Intimations Ode exhorts us to ‘Feel the gladness of the May!’ (l. 178), but ultimately the ‘radiance which was once so bright’ is now gone (l. 179). Wordsworth is concerned about the decline of the cultural expression of May Day, but is resigned to its loss. Bards who once hailed May, he writes in ‘To May’, the companion poem to ‘Ode Composed on May Morning’, now ‘forget thy gifts, thy beauty scorn’ (l. 4). The lament for the lost signi cance of May Day in the later odes provides a resonant context for the Intimations Ode. Alienation from the natural world is seen as comparable to the decline of a religion. The pagan deity is no longer worshipped by people, but nature continues to exalt her.75 As the later odes show, and the Intimations Ode implies, the adult’s consolation for this comes from an awareness of nature’s immortality. The once brilliant vision may be an indistinct memory, but the adult can take comfort from an understanding that nature will always celebrate in springtime. In this context, the Intimations Ode does not seem to necessitate a link with French culture to explain the signi cance of the tree and the eld, though it may have this resonance. The symbols may be understood as the maypole and village green: the site of the celebration of youth, nature and happiness. They are indeterminate cyphers because adults are unable to understand them. This indeterminism is a consequence of a deliberate rhetorical strategy on the part of Wordsworth. It is the burden of the adult that he or she is faced with a strong sense of cultural impermanence. In the 1830s, Wordsworth consolidates this sense of loss as Merry Englandism. The sonnet, ‘They called thee Merry England’ (1833), con rms his later understanding of the English past as a happier and purer world. Although society has degenerated and ‘spreading towns’ are a ‘cloak for lawless will’ (l. 12), ‘Merry England’, he writes, ‘still / Shall be thy rightful name, in prose and rhyme’ (l. 14). We see the beginnings of this attitude in Wordsworth’s emphasis on the importance of the traditional way of life. For Wordsworth, the function of the common sphere lies in its opposition to the culture that he genuinely despises: urban commercialism. As customary culture emerges as a subject for enquiry, Wordsworth recognizes the potential of ritual to contest public authority. In his early work, simple rural rituals challenge the sophisticated ceremonies that dominate the public sphere by appropriating symbols of authority. ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’ and the Intimations Ode associate the enactment of May Day with children’s games, suggesting a ceremonial power which, because of its ambiguity, may appear unthreatening. Wordsworth exploits on the one hand the potential of ritual for contesting the domination of the ruling classes through the

75 This interpretation has something in common with the reading of the later Wordsworth suggested by Jonathan Bate in Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991). I return to the question of the ecological Wordsworth in the next chapter, because Wordsworth is used by critics such as Bate as a paradigm case; Leigh Hunt’s ecological concerns are best seen in the light of this de nitive exemplar.

‘Precious rites and customs’

53

symbolism of the ‘green coronal’, and on the other undermines this subversiveness by asserting the authenticity and innocence of the custom. Robert Southey, ‘antiquity bitten’ Among the men of letters of his generation, it has been remarked, Southey ‘best exempli es the professional writer with a taste for antiquities and folklore’.76 His concerns about the authenticity of Wordsworth’s ‘green coronal’ are understandable given his interest in local custom, an interest con rmed by his extensive links with antiquarian scholars. Southey corresponded with antiquarians Francis Douce, Thomas Crofton Crocker and the Scottish poet and antiquarian Allan Cunningham. He also demonstrates considerable knowledge of the work of Brand, Strutt and other folklorists. He describes William Hone’s Every Day Book and Table Book as ‘well worth having; brimful of curious matter’.77 The entries in his Common-Place Book con rm these commitments. Southey often copied out extracts from studies of the folklore of Britain and other countries. In the 1790s, Southey began work on a calendar of customs and festivals modelled on Ovid’s Fasti. Charles Lamb wrote to him on 28 July 1798 to enquire about its progress, commenting that: ‘Martlemas, and Candlemas, and Christmas, are glorious themes for a writer like you, antiquity-bitten, smit with the love of boars’ heads and rosemary; but how you can ennoble the 1st of April I know not’.78 The work has since been lost, but Southey’s conviction of the importance of folklore is well documented. This is illustrated by his correspondence to the local historian Anna Eliza Bray. Responding to a request for advice, Southey suggests she include the manners and rituals of rural communities in her study of Devonshire on the grounds that a successful description of any place required an understanding of its folklore: I should like to see from you what English literature yet wants – a good specimen of local history, not the antiquities, nor the natural history, not both together (as in White’s delightful book about Selbourne), nor the statistics, but everything about a parish that can be made interesting – all of its history, traditions and manners that can be saved from oblivion.79

Southey and Bray concurred that no work had fully integrated the heterogeneous cultural material derived from the inhabitants of a region with historical data. Bray calls this marriage the ‘history and biography of this place’.80 In essence, the project 76 Dorson, p. 92. 77 Robert Southey, Life and Correspondence, VI, 100. 78 The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. by Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), I (1975), 130. 79 Robert Southey, Life and Correspondence, IV, 436. 80 Anna Eliza Bray, A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on The Tamar and the Tavy; its Natural History, Manners, Customs, Superstitions, Scenery, Antiquities, Biography of Eminent Persons […] In a series of Letters to Robert Southey, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1836), I, 2.

54

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

provided human interest to topography and general history. Bray published her work, A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on The Tamar and the Tavy (1836), as a series of letters to Southey. In it she gives an account of the ‘old customs and traditions peculiar’ to the region.81 Southey repaid her courtesy with a positive review of the three-volume work in the Quarterly. For Southey, common culture is part of the identity of a place. Although he does not yet have a word for it, (the word ‘folklore’ was not invented until the 1840s), he is aware of what it is and how dif cult it is to describe. Southey knew of the London celebration of May Day, but he was also concerned to depict rural customs. In addition to the procession of chimney sweeps, Letters from England (1807) describes an unlocalized rural contemporary May Day: May-day is one of the most general holydays in England. High poles, as tall as the mast of a merchant ship, are erected in every village, and hung with garlands composed of all eld owers, but chie y of one which is called the cowslip; each has its King and Queen of the May chosen from among the children of the peasantry, who are tricked out as fantastically as the London chimney-sweepers; but health and cleanliness give them a very different appearance.82

These comments are dated May 1804. The origin of these misleading claims about the extent of the rural celebration of May Day is not clear. Southey may have intended Don Espriella, the ctional writer of these letters, to draw incorrect assumptions about the extent of rural May Day celebrations. Much of the humour of these letters is based on the passing observer’s tendency to generalize inaccurately from the particular. The Don probably exaggerates his view of the extent of May Day rituals, which were by no means countrywide. Southey may also be employing the idyllic May Day as an image of pastoral contentment to be contrasted with the distressing scenes of the poor in London. In general, Southey’s descriptions of May Day are based on historical accounts; his work displays little knowledge of the celebration as a contemporary event in the villages of England, though he clearly witnessed and read about the London celebrations of May Day. Southey developed an early taste for Merry England.83 He transcribes, into his Common-Place Book, John Stow’s description of May Day from A Survey of London (1598), as part of a collection of notes on various Easter and summer festivities, with the purpose of suggesting ideas for composition.84 Stow links the occasion with Robin Hood, one of Southey’s heroes, and describes Henry VIII and his rst wife, Catherine, being entertained by the outlaw to a feast of 81 Ibid., I, p. iii. 82 Robert Southey, Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, ed. by Jack Simmons (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984), p. 80. 83 While on a trip to Ormsby near Yarmouth in May 1798, Southey writes, in a letter to his wife, that he has been indulging in some Nottingham ale ‘such as Robin Hood and his outlaws used to drink under the greenward tree. Robin Hood’s beverage! Now could I choose but like it?’ Southey, Life and Correspondence, I, 335. 84 Robert Southey, Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. by John Wood Warter (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p. 116.

‘Precious rites and customs’

55

venison and wine in the romantic setting of a forest. Although he shows an interest in the historical and ritualized May Day, Southey’s excitement is reserved for a more natural and instinctive celebration of spring. Southey’s May Day and personal rejuvenation Southey associates Spring with youthful vigour: ‘the bursting foliage and opening owers of May’ accord ‘with the elastic spirits of youth and hope’, and his writing is informed by his personal experience of and love for the season.85 May Day marks the initiation of his yearly post-winter revival. Enlivened by the warm spring of 1806, Southey notes that: ‘The warm weather, after so long a winter, began on May day, and I cannot keep within doors; but it draws me like an insect from its hole’.86 During the harsh winter of 1803, Southey remarks: ‘I should roll myself up at the end of October, and give orders to be waked by the chimney-sweeper on May-day’.87 The winter of 1803 was emotionally dif cult for Southey, who suffered the loss of his rst child, Margaret Edith (1802–1803), in August of that year. His anticipation of the spring is also a wish for the end to grief. For Southey, spring symbolizes personal rejuvenation. The little-known dedicatory poem ‘To Edith May Southey’, from A Tale of Paraguay (1814), reveals that the poet has given his second child, born in 1804, the name ‘May’ for three reasons: May is, the poem suggests, the month of her birth, it is the ‘sweet month, the sweetest of the year’, and it is the surname of his close friend, the wine merchant John May, who became the child’s godfather.88 Edith May was born on 30 April, but the proximity of her birth to May Day was irresistible to Southey. The joyousness of the month is increased by the birth of the child who nally relieves his grief at the death of Margaret Edith. ‘To Edith May Southey’ is Southey’s Immortality Ode. Like the children of Wordsworth’s Ode, she has no taste for melancholy thoughts: Thy happy nature from the painful thought With instinct turns, and scarcely canst thou bear To hear me name the Grave.89

The incompatibility of spring and melancholy is stressed in both poems. Wordsworth’s child will pick up its burdensome ‘earthly freight’ and will in adulthood nd consolation through memory and nature. Southey’s child similarly will mature to 85 Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols (London: John Murray,1830), I, 117. 86 Robert Southey, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Cuthbert Southey, 4 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), I, 373. 87 Robert Southey, Life and Correspondence, II, 239. Charles Johnston writes of Southey ‘His tawney face looked just like that of a chimney-sweeper’s boy peeping through his maybush’ in The History of John Juniper, Esq., Alias Juniper Jack, 3 vols (London: R. Baldwin, 1781), II: 136. 88 Southey, Poetical Works, VII, 1. 89 Ibid., VII, 6 (stanza 7).

56

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

sorrow (‘Thus wilt thou feel in thy maturer mind; / When grief shall be thy portion’), though Southey hopes that ‘indulgent Heaven’ will bless her ‘with all imaginable happiness’.90 Edith May’s consolation, like that of the poet, will be found in thoughts of loved ones, rather than in ‘primal sympathy’ with nature. Southey’s poem is concerned with overcoming the loss of his child and of other dear friends, and it is tting that he nds his own consolation by dwelling ‘often in thought with those whom still I love so well’.91 Southey’s love for the festival is indicated by the close personal signi cance it has for him here. The false spring and republican zeal Southey’s ctional treatment of May Day reveals an understanding that cultural events can be comprehended from several perspectives. In spite of his love for the occasion, May Day in Southey’s poetry generally appears as a false paradise. He does not offer the reliance on rural ritual that we see in Wordsworth’s early work, falling back on an appreciation of culturally unmediated celebrations of nature as more certain and real. Southey presents May Day as a fraudulent sham: it appears to offer succour, but instead compounds misery. This is illustrated in the oriental poem Thalaba (1801). Here the heady exoticism is momentarily suspended when Southey likens an oasis to an English pastoral scene in May. On a quest for the murderer of his father, the eponymous young hero comes across a ‘blessed sight’ of a ‘green meadow’ in the ‘burning’ desert. Thalaba is, at this point, accompanied by Lobaba, a malevolent magician disguised as an old man. The magician tempts him in the wilderness, and the refreshing spring scene seems to the protagonist a ‘restoring sight’. The oasis appears ‘fair with owers besprent’, like the beautiful elds Of England, when amid the growing grass The blue-bell bends, the golden king-cup shines, And the sweet cowslip scents the genial air, In the merry month of May!92

Thalaba gazes at the scene with ‘hope-brighten’d eyes’, but none of the plants in the oasis can be eaten and there is no water. This denial of comfort is intended to demoralize the hero, who is forced to kill his camel in order to survive. The importance of this extreme test is stressed throughout the poem. Thalaba learns that he must forgive his father’s murderer rather than avenge his death; when he comes to this understanding, he realizes that he will be rewarded in Heaven. Like the golden and gem-encrusted desert palace at the beginning of the poem, the springtime oasis symbolizes the false earthly pleasures that must be renounced; it is rejected as an inordinately perfect mirage.

90 Ibid., VII, 6 (stanza 8). 91 Ibid., VII, 6 (stanza 7). 92 Ibid., IV, 151 (Book IV, stanza 23).

‘Precious rites and customs’

57

Southey favours, in Joan of Arc (composed in 1793 and published in 1796), a simple and pantheistic appreciation of spring over a tradition-laden aristocratic appropriation of the May Day festival. Joan imbibes the spirit of the season. There is no doubt that the poem has a radical aim: the subversion of the nationalistic purpose of the epic, and the disclosure of an historical precedent for England as an aggressor unlawfully interfering in French politics. Dismissive of detractors, Southey writes: ‘if there be any readers who can wish success to an unjust cause, because their country was engaged in it, I desire not their approbation’.93 Southey hoped that, with the money raised from Joan of Arc, he could buy some land in America and a few tools with which to set up a rural utopia based on egalitarian principles. The radical pantisocracy famously came to nothing. Written before he read Godwin’s Political Justice (1793), a book that rmly encouraged his radical views, Southey was already a republican by the time he wrote Joan of Arc. The French heroine is, for Southey, a great freedom- ghter, and there is no doubt that an analogy with contemporary Britain is intended. May Day is presented, in Joan, as a decorative part of a residual culture employed by the rich and powerful for ceremonial ends. Questioning the mettle of the King of France, Joan denounces him as Fit only like the Merovingian race On a May Morning deck’d with owers, to mount His gay-bedizen’d car, and ride abroad And make the multitude a holiday. Go Charles! and hide thee in a woman’s garb, And these long locks will not disgrace thee then! (III. 150–55)

Here Southey sees May Day as an elaborate and effeminate ritual of the idle French kings. The extensive notes, supplied with the poem, reveal that the reference to the owery chariot is taken from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources: Jean De Serres and Thomas Fuller. Southey cites their work: Here in this rst race you shall see our kings but once a year, the rst day of May, in their chariots deckt with owres and greene, and drawn by four oxen. Whoso hath occasion to treat with them let him seeke them in their chambers, amidst their delights. Let him talke of any matters of state, he shall be sent to the Maire. – De Serres. Fuller calls this race ‘a chain of idle kings, well linked together, who gave themselves over to pleasure privately, never coming abroad, but onely [sic] on May-day they showed themselves to the people, riding in a chariot, adorned with owers, and drawn with oxen, slow cattel, but good enough for so lazy luggage’ – Holy Warre.94

Joan requires the Dauphin to divorce himself from the decadence of royal privilege in order to spur on his troops to drive out the English. Riding in a chariot decked with owers is not the occupation of a soldier in time of war. Joan wishes to inspire him to set aside the peaceful ease and political complacency that May Day symbolizes by alluding to the passivity of the Merovingian Kings. Joan of Arc sets more store 93 Ibid., I, pp. xxvi–vii. 94 Ibid., I, 232.

58

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

by the instinctive response to spring, independent of traditional ritual and centred on an understanding of the divine in nature. Southey describes Joan’s childhood as an idyllic springtime, where she ‘pluck’d the primrose’ (V. 463) ‘amid the loveliest scenes / Of unpolluted nature’ (I. 244–5). She appreciates spring in a manner that is apparently unaffected by culture. Making much of Joan’s lowly origins, Southey characterizes her as an unconventional child of nature who prays near an oak tree (like a Druid or Coleridge’s Christabel) rather than in a church. She declares hers to be a simple and reliable way of understanding the Divine: ‘Nature is all benevolence, all love’ (III. 501). Southey’s emphasis on Joan’s direct experience of divinity is part of his criticism of the Catholic Church, of which, like many of his contemporaries, he disapproved. In Wat Tyler, the priest, John Ball, denounces the Catholic Church for ‘trading’ in religion.95 Ball preaches a new fundamentalism centred on Christ as lawgiver. Christ is the ultimate symbol of the power of the dispossessed; the ‘man of Nazareth’ (II.i.63–4) ‘humble in mien’ (II.i.96) warns the rich that they will not be saved, denouncing class privilege as a ‘blasphemy’ on the essential equality of man. Joan eschews the theology of the Catholic Church believing that she perceives God through nature. The Doctors of Theology who examine her suggest that she seems ‘to scorn / The ordinances of our Holy Church’.96 Concerned with the religious dimension to revolutionary zeal, Southey’s Joan of Arc associates the natural world with a divinely inspired political upheaval. Joan’s rst mystical experience takes place in a tempestuous spring, and the dramatic scenery and ‘wild music’ of nature is portentous: On a spring eve I had betaken me, And there I sat, and mark’d the deep red clouds Gather before the wind . . the rising wind, Whose sudden gusts, each wilder than the last, Appear’d to rock my senses. Soon the night Darken’d around, and the large rain-drops fell Heavy […]. On a rock I sat, The glory of the tempest ll’d my soul (I. 515–21, 526–7).

Amidst this apocalyptic spring storm, Joan feels the sublime presence of God within her, diffusing her sense of self: ‘All sense of self annihilate, I seem’d / Diffused into the scene’ (I. 531–2). The poem, like Coleridge’s Religious Musings, professes certainty of the possibility of unity with God, and of the role of the elect in the opposition to oppression. Joan reveals that she has been chosen by God: ‘I must save the country! … GOD is in me; / I speak not, think not, feel not of myself. / He knew and sancti ed me ere my birth’ (I. 65–7). Southey, acknowledging the sublime nature of revolutionary zeal, gives Joan a pantheistic understanding of God. Joan’s waking dreams equate her with the inspired poets of the Romantic period: ‘in that dreaminess of thought’, she says, ‘When every bodily sense is as it slept, / And the 95 See IX. 25 and Robert Southey, Wat Tyler, in Five Romantic Plays 1768–1821, ed. by Paul Baines and Edward Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 71–101 (II. i.60). 96 Southey, Poetical Works, I, 46 (III. 460).

‘Precious rites and customs’

59

mind alone is wakeful’, voices instruct her (I. 467–9). She talks of being ‘inebriate with Divinity’ (IV. 313). On this basis, Joan claims a just victory for France that will be remembered for generations. Although she is wounded in battle, the French are victorious and the poem ends with Joan crowning the King (in tears of ‘wild wonderment’), beseeching him to rule justly and wisely. Southey turns to a medieval pastoral in order to emphasize his commitment to simple and honourable ideals; these he locates in the peasantry rather than through the aristocratic chivalric code. In order to gain victory, the French must put their faith in an innocent peasant girl inspired by nature and by the voices of saints. The important role spring plays in Joan’s development, her closeness to nature, reliance on instinct, rejection of learning and man-made restrictions, suggests that she absorbs what Wordsworth later calls the ‘spirit of the season’.97 The prophet-like heroine is able to feel a close relationship with God on account of her virtue and freedom from the in uence of the Church. Like the revolutionary French, Southey believes Joan and her troops have right on their side. The poet nevertheless falls short of his republican intentions, as the poem is a celebration of the divine right of kings. Joan leads her men against the Anglo-Burgundian forces in order to relieve the siege of Orleans on behalf of the Dauphin whom she believes to be the true monarch. But she believes Charles will be a just king, declaring that if he is not he will answer for it at the Day of Judgement. The Middle Ages evoked here is rmly imbued with hierarchy – a hierarchy that Joan supports. Joan of Arc is concerned with the con ict between France and England and the moral question of a just war; it is not an exposé of the inequities of English and French society. Southey’s aim is to criticize England at the expense of France and to show France being governed by a benign leader. Southey takes his commitment to republicanism further in his controversial play Wat Tyler (1794). Written in haste when the poet was nineteen, the play is best known for the embarrassment it caused him when it was published without his consent in 1817. By this time, Southey had publicly declared that radicals should be deported, having by now ‘learnt to appreciate and to defend the institutions of my country’.98 The push for reform, the corn crisis, the rise of Chartism, and unpopular taxation, imposed as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars, meant that, by 1817, Britain was in a politically insecure position. The Habeas Corpus law, which had been suspended between 1794 and1801, was again suspended in 1817. As a consequence of this, the publication of Wat Tyler became a scandal, and questions were asked as to whether it could be deemed treasonous. Southey tried to claim the copyright in order to suppress the play, but it was considered beyond the bounds of copyright on the grounds that it was seditious literature. Wat Tyler is a history play on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which narrates the events leading to the death of the eponymous blacksmith. It loosely follows the account in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1792). Paine, using David Hume’s version of events as a source (History of Great Britain [1754–61]), draws upon the revolt to explicate the connection between enforced, unreasonable taxation and 97 Curiously, the later Wordsworth clearly owes something to the early Southey on this point. 98 Southey, Preface to Wat Tyler, p. 72.

60

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

unnecessary war-mongering. Paine’s account is brief, and his focus is not on historical detail. He omits the dates of the events, and is more concerned with delivering a political message: that a poll tax of a single amount, levied on the rich and the poor, is unfair to those on low incomes. The Rights of Man was a response to Edmund Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791). Dismissing the events of the Peasant’s Revolt as belonging to ‘a dark age’, Burke compares the medieval insurrection with the recent events in France.99 Burke was, of course, concerned that revolutionary zeal might spread from France to Britain. His simplistic dismissal of the medieval period, and the widespread unpopularity of his views among radicals in the 1790s, may have induced Southey to recount the story of Wat Tyler. Southey may also have been provoked into writing the play by Hannah More’s conservative Village Politics (1793), a short dialogue between a royalist blacksmith, Jack Anvil, and a despondent free-thinking mason, Tom Hod. The characterization in Village Politics, although rudimentary, anticipates Southey’s to some degree. Southey was clearly aware of More’s work, meeting her for the rst time in 1795.100 Mark Storey notes that although their political viewpoints were very different, ‘neither Southey nor Hannah More allowed the occasion of their rst meeting [at Cowslip Green, near Bristol] to be soured’.101 Village Politics is set in contemporary England. Hod, who has read Paine’s The Rights of Man, argues the case for reform until his friend eventually talks him out of his radical position. He begins the play in a depression caused by a lack of liberty: ‘I want Liberty and Equality, and the Rights of Man’.102 Southey’s portrait of rebellion likewise begins with a village blacksmith downcast and dwelling on liberty; in Southey’s play, however, the blacksmith manages to persuade his friend, Hob Carter, to agree with his libertarian politics and to help him incite a rebellion. The rst skirmishes of the Peasant’s Revolt began on 1 June 1381, but Southey’s play begins with the peasants discussing liberty in advance of the revolt. For this, Southey chooses May Day. The May Day celebration is largely welcomed by the villagers and a maypole is erected in the doorway to the blacksmith’s shop. The opening of the play, with its traditional May song and festivities, emphasizes community concord. Everyone, except the blacksmith, lives in ‘Merrie England’. His melancholy is deemed inappropriate for the happy occasion. Wat is downcast because he realizes that the May Day holiday merely distracts the villagers from the hardship of their daily lives and, instead of celebrating, he continues with his work. His daughter Alice, her friends and her suitor, Piers, sing and dance around the maypole, a totemic sign decorated with owers in celebration of the approaching fecundity of summer. The maypole stands as a phallic fertility symbol and as such is 99 Edmund Burke, ‘Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’, in The Works of Edmund Burke, ed. by F. W. Raffety, 6 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1906–1907), V, 1–135 (p. 103). 100 Southey, Life and Correspondence, I, 250. 101 Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 81. 102 Hannah More, Village Politics 1793, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995), p. 4.

‘Precious rites and customs’

61

ironic; the rustic group dancing around it in effect celebrate their lack of power. The power it represents is unharnessed, and is feminized by the oral display. The song the young people sing around it is an unselfconscious parade of oral and female symbolism: Cheerful on this holiday, Welcome we the merry May. On every sunny hillock spread The pale primrose lifts her head; Rich with sweets, the western gale Sweeps along the cowslipped dale; Every bank, with violets gay, Smiles to welcome in the May (I.i.1–8).

The people are acquiescent, failing to see and ultimately suppressing the more potent force which rages through the beauteous landscape in this song: ‘the western gale / Sweeps along the cowslipped dale’ and ‘on each wild gale sweet music ows’. Tyler alone understands the maypole as a sign of the impotence of the people, and his rebellion begins with his refusal to bow to tradition and attend the festivities that are taking place on his doorstep. The maypole is signi cantly positioned at the doorway to his shop, blocking his exit from toil and debarring him from power. The May holiday is a temporary release from work, a time when the worker can rest. It is seen by Southey as a recreational distraction that may prevent the people from focusing on their captivity, and as an occasion on which to contemplate rebellion. For Wat to accept May Day as a gift to the worker would be to cooperate with his own enslavement. May Day no longer holds any joy for him as ‘cares had quelled the heyday of the blood’ (I.i.23). The reference to Hamlet reminds us of Wat’s political impotence.103 The maypole is also a painful reminder of the Edenic and youthful innocence and ignorance of Wat and his companions, of a time when they had no understanding of the power of the state. May Day is a corruption of the spring idyll, a remnant of a lost Hesiodian paradisal life when the villagers ‘nor marked the black clouds gathering o’er our noon, / Nor feared the storm of night’ (I.i.25–6). The poet draws again on the imagery of the sinister ‘wild gale’, recalling the tempestuous apocalyptic energy of Joan’s divine visions. Wat spells out his political message to Hob: he is angry with the repressive state, which has chosen not to recognize the honour and moral worth of hard toil: TYLER Have I not been a staid, hard-working man? Up with the lark at labour; sober, honest, Of an unblemished character? (I.i.33–4)

103 ‘You cannot call it love; for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame […]’, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), III.iv.68–9.

62

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Utopia is the just reward of such georgic values, but it is denied to the villagers. The blacksmith cannot accept that the festal happiness of spring now coexists with dystopia: nature gives enough For all; but Man, with arrogant sel shness, Proud of his heaps, hoards up super uous stores Robbed from his weaker fellows, starves the poor, Or gives to pity what he owes to justice! (I.i.114–18)

Revolution, then, is intended to redress the imbalance that only charity (‘pity’) temporarily relieves; and equality is identi ed as a natural right. Southey stresses that Tyler and his wife belong to the rural working poor, endlessly toiling for little gain. Wat cannot reap the fruits of his toil, and he tells the people: ‘your hard toil / Manures their fertile elds’ (I.i.246–7). The May song at the beginning of the rst Act is echoed and undermined by the rebellious song at the beginning of the second. In Act I, the peasants sing that the land is full of plenty, ‘rich with sweets’. By the second act, revolutionary zeal has taken hold, and Southey invokes the rhyme traditionally associated with the Peasant’s Revolt: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?’ (II.ii.1–2). The villagers unite in singing of the lot of the wretched infant born into poverty and slavery under the ‘despotic rule’ of the aristocrat who reclines on ‘the couch of ease’ (II.i.15–18). The state rst demonstrates its power through the taxation of adults. Down to his last six groats, the blacksmith is concerned that they ‘must soon by law be taken from me’ (I.i.51). The attempted rape of Wat’s daughter, the May Queen, by the taxcollector, ostensibly to discover whether she is at the age of maturity, sexualizes the power of the state and highlights, too, the people’s lack of power. Alice, as a young girl (‘not yet fteen’), has not graduated fully into recognition by the state and is ineligible for taxation. The attack on her highlights the vulnerability of the worker, and in particular of women. As May Queen, Alice implicitly celebrates the power she lacks both as a child and as a female. In due course, the tax on each head is avenged by Wat’s attack on the tax-collector’s own head and, after this, an attempted attack on the heads of state. Through this violence, Wat gains power, reversing his own political emasculation. Wat and Hob employ this new-found power in the service of the people, issuing a general call to arms (‘To arms! Arm, arm for Liberty; / For Liberty and Justice!’), imploring them to reclaim their social potency (I.i.213–14). May Day in Wat Tyler is a catalyst for social rebellion. It highlights the power of the people to determine and retain their own traditions, and at the same time underscores, through its mimicry of regal hierarchy, the people’s lack of power and their suppression by the state. Wat bases his argument, that the current distribution of wealth is unjust, on natural rights. Nature ‘gives enough / For all’ (I.i.114–15) and ‘abundant is the earth’ (II.i.85), and ‘the budding orchard perfumes the sweet breeze, / And the green corn waves to the passing gale’ (II.i.88–9 [my italics]). The world is in a ‘golden age’, but access to its bounty is denied to the poor. The sun shines ‘with equal ray on both’ rich and poor, but the distribution of its fruits is unequal (II.i.83).

‘Precious rites and customs’

63

The destined hour must come, When it [the truth] shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendour, And the dark mists of prejudice and falsehood Fade in its strong effulgence. […] The rays of truth shall emanate around, And the whole world be lighted (III.ii.105–8, 113–14).

This nal speech of the revolutionary priest, John Ball, develops the sun imagery into a millennial light metaphor; when the sun disperses the mists of ignorance. Coleridge and Wordsworth employ similar images of revolution through enlightenment. Coleridge writes in Religious Musings of ‘the bursting Sun’ melting the ‘thick fog’ and ‘black vapour’ that envelops the earth.104 In Wordsworth’s The Excursion, the coming of the French Revolution is like a clearing of the mists: ‘from the blind mist issuing, I beheld / Glory […] dazzling the soul’ (III. 720–22). Wordsworth’s solitary narrator believes at this time that the ‘golden years’ promised by ‘the Hebrew Scriptures’ have come (III. 757; 759). In this period, the sun is often a symbol of revelation, truth and political freedom, standing for the end of the dark days of oppression. The end of the revolution is likened to the rst day of spring in Helen Maria Williams’s ‘A Farewell, for Two Years, To England’ (1791): ‘That purifying tempest now has past, / […] The vernal day-spring bursts the partial gloom, / And all the landscape glows with fresher bloom’ (ll. 119; 123–4). The rational sun of enlightenment, John Ball hopes, will beam down on the powerful and temper rash decisions. Southey suggests, as Godwin does, that revolution is to be achieved through rational education and not bloodshed. The natural symbolism reinforces the egalitarian politics which Southey shares with Coleridge at this time. Coleridge writes in ‘The Destiny of Nations’, for example: ‘For what is Freedom, but the unfettered use / Of all the powers which God for use had given?’ (ll. 13–14). May Day is used by Southey as a false paradise which must be recognized as such and then overthrown, an Eden which must be desecrated before the New Jerusalem can be attained. The Peasants’ Revolt signi es the coming into knowledge and sin of the populace: the ungodly rebellion against the established order. Only through demonstrating will, and transgressing against the god-like power of the state can the rebels potentially claim the New Jerusalem: ‘the blood-cemented pyramid of greatness / Shall fall before the ash’ (Wat Tyler, III.ii.67–8) and ‘the priests of Moloch taught, / Shall be consumed amid the re of Justice’ (III.ii.111–12). The Peasant’s Revolt was ultimately unsuccessful; Southey’s implication is that the present age can bring the task to completion. As a polemical attack on the repressive structures of contemporary society, Wat Tyler is a somewhat blunt instrument. Tyler’s struggle to break free of his determined economic place in the scheme of things, and his disapproval of the taxation system, expresses the alienation and anger of the radicals of the 1790s, but is a less than coherent response. The play seems to be torn between understanding government as irrelevant for the people, whose simple unsophisticated lives are far removed from 104 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, repr. 2000), I, l. 95 and 100.

64

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

national events (‘What matters me who wears the crown of France?’ [I.i.62]), and the notion that government is the direct oppressor of the people. Southey questions the ideology which forces people to live in poverty, but he does not see more than a supporting role for women. Alice has little say in choosing a husband and she and her acquiescent fainthearted mother have very few lines. Southey’s rebellion is about the redistribution of power amongst men. Ball’s question ‘Why is the difference?’ is aimed at the differences between men. Alice’s treatment provokes the peasants to rebel but at the same time they are hardly aware of her disenfranchisement as a woman. The endorsement of ‘where Adam delved and Eve span’ also reinforces traditional gender roles. Joan of Arc comes close to challenging these, but Joan has to make sacri ces in order to do so. She retains her virginity, never acting on her love for Theodore. History dictates that Southey depict her in men’s clothing, but her sensibility is emphasized as a counter to this, reaching its peak when she cries during the coronation of the French King at the end of the poem. In spite of his romantic vein, and the personal signi cance that May Day held, Southey’s ctional work treats the ritual enactment of festivals with suspicion. Southey, partially inspired by his antiquarianism, associates the festival either with the aristocratic dominance of public space, or with an authorization by the powerful, of a temporary use of the public arena as a distraction from a true appreciation of the enslavement of the worker. The symbols of May Day conceal injustice. The poet’s non- ctional writing, on the other hand, stresses his love of May Day as an indication of the beginning of milder weather, and as a reminder of the birth of his second daughter. By 1814, the date of ‘To Edith May Southey’, Southey’s political af liations were solidly Tory; the change from a political to a personal interpretation of May Day tracks his ideological journey. Coleridge, May Day and liberty trees Of the lake poets, Coleridge makes the earliest and briefest reference to May Day. Coleridge discusses the origin and signi cance of the maypole in an unsigned note in The Monthly Magazine (February 1796). He is, like Southey, drawn to an historical version of May Day. The note, like Southey’s annotations to his own poems, employs the discourse of the speculative antiquarian. Coleridge’s comments, though they gesture at erudition, do not amount to a serious enquiry; instead, his aim is the political appropriation of the symbolism of the maypole by presenting information about its signi cance as an academic note and query: The leisure days after seed-time had been chosen by our Saxon ancestors for folk-motes, or conventions of the people. Not till after the Norman conquest, the Pagan festival of Whitsuntide fully melted into the Christian holiday of Pentecost. Its original name is Wittentide, the time of choosing the WITS OR WISE MEN to the WITTENAGEMOTTE. It was consecrated to Hertha, the goddess of peace and fertility; and no quarrels might be maintained, no blood shed, during this truce of the goddess. Each village, in the absence of the baron at the assembly of the nation, enjoyed a kind of Saturnalia. The vassals met upon the common green round the May-pole, where they elected a village-lord, or king, as he was called, who chose his queen. He wore an oaken, and she a hawthorn wreath,

‘Precious rites and customs’

65

and together, they gave laws to the rustic sports during these sweet days of freedom. The MAY-POLE then is the English TREE OF LIBERTY! Are there many yet standing?105

For Coleridge, May Day is a festival of the people; the local aristocracy is noticeably absent and the villagers govern themselves. The aristocrats, however, sit on an elected council. Two ideas of May Day compete with each other here: the subversive popular festival and the idealistic fantasy of a legitimately governed Merry England. In effect, Coleridge accords May Day the status of a residual culture, but instills it with the values of the emergent radical counterculture. The villagers stage their own mock election, ‘a kind of saturnalia’.106 The debauchery of the occasion is overlooked in favour of the festival’s politically anarchic status as an interval in which the people are free and the state suspends its punishment for crime. The elected mock monarchy is entitled to give mock laws, and freedom is ‘sweet’.107 The festival temporarily enfranchises the people. Direct reference to liberty trees was proscribed in the 1790s, but Coleridge had already dared to mention them in Conciones ad Populum (1795):108 The August and lofty Tree, which while it rose above the palace of the Monarch, sheltered the distant dwelling of the Cottager, stripped of its boughs, now stands the melancholy memorial of conquered Freedom. – We can only water its roots with our tears, or look forward with anxious eye to the springtide, when it shall branch forth anew! We are no longer Freemen […].109

The denuded tree indicates that liberty no longer ourishes in England. Watered by the tears of radicals, or by the inevitable ‘springtide’ deluge of revolution, the tree will eventually prosper. Coleridge clearly implies a connection with the trees of liberty seen in revolutionary France, and those associated with the American Revolution. Thomas Paine’s earlier poem ‘Liberty Tree: A Song Written Early in the American Revolution’ (1775) capitalizes on the popularity of the image. Paine suggests that ‘A fair budding branch’ from ‘the Liberty Tree’ was brought to America.110 Liberty, though an ‘exotic’ plant, grows heathily in this country. Paine suggests that ‘tyrannical powers’ of ‘Kings, Commons, and Lords’, nevertheless,

105 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Origin of the Maypole’, The Monthly Magazine, 1 (1796), 29. The article is cited in full. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), p. 105; William Ruddick, ‘Liberty Trees and Loyal Oaks: Emblematic Presences in Some English Poems of the French Revolutionary Period’ in Re ections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. by Alison Yarrington (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 59–67 (p. 66). 109 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, The Bollingen Series, 75 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 61–2. 110 The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. by Michael Foot and Isaac Kramner (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), p. 63.

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

66

threaten to ‘cut down this guardian of ours’.111 Both Coleridge and Paine see the tree as a sanctuary. Coleridge’s cottagers are protected by its shade, and Paine’s ‘freemen’ use it as a ‘temple’.112 For Coleridge, May Day is not a straightforward temporary release from tyranny. While the festival goes on, the local barons attend ‘conventions of the people’ (another link with revolutionary France). The supposed etymological link to ‘Whitsuntide’ at the beginning of the note and the close proximity of this festival to May Day in the calendar are suf cient justi cation for a further reference to elected governors. The barons, he suggests, attend the Saxon ‘Wittentide’, the time of choosing the wisest men for the ‘Wittenagemotte’ or national assembly. This establishes an historical precedent for democratic meetings. The erroneous etymological link between Whitsun and Wittentide suggests, furthermore, a religious link between democracy and the Holy Spirit, something signi cant for the devout Coleridge. Conclusion Wordsworth’s acknowledgement that the festival still exists, albeit in a somewhat reduced form, in the Lake District, distinguishes his writing on May Day from that of Southey and Coleridge. Wordsworth exploits on the one hand the potential of ritual for the contestation of the power of the ruling classes, and on the other retains ambiguity on the issue of subversion. May rituals are performed, in his poetry, before a tiny audience, and discussion of them is limited. Vulgar public ritual is understood by him to constitute a common sphere. Wordsworth’s interest in May Day cannot be dismissed as bourgeois paternalism, however. In his early work, the potency of rural ritual undermines aristocratic dominance of the public sphere and challenges bourgeois commercial values, associating the power of the festal with childhood. Traditional custom is regarded by him as a part of the national identity, and is embraced rmly as an alternative to the super ciality of both aristocratic culture and bourgeois commercialism. The Prelude, however, rewrites May Day from the adult’s perspective, and while there are many points in the poem at which the poet recounts experience from the child’s viewpoint, the May Day sections do not show evidence of this. In consequence, Wordsworth emphasizes decline in order to render neutral the subversive potential of the command of public space by the rural poor. He links the forfeiture of ‘the visionary gleam’ with the truncation of certain cultural associations. Human memory and literature give access to this meaning, but these are merely fragmentary epitaphs to a fuller appreciation of nature. The decline of rural customs breaks the link with the past and estranges the adult from a close connection with nature. This link with the natural world is retained only by the child, who can experience a full enjoyment. The later Wordsworth focuses on the value of nature, and he ultimately rejects bourgeois commercialism in favour of pagan pastoralism. Nevertheless, abandonment to the joys of spring belongs to Wordsworth’s May Day throughout his poetry; the abnegation of responsibility and the deep feeling of

111 Ibid., p. 64. 112 Ibid., p. 63.

‘Precious rites and customs’

67

festal happiness are expressed by children in these poems. The depiction of poor Ellen, the May Queen in The Excursion (1817), plays on this connotation. She is a child-like woman whose happiness on May Day is profound. In her innocence, we are told, she ‘loved and fondly deemed herself beloved’ (VI. 843). Wordsworth connects the decline of local customs with the disappearance of a pagan spiritual link between nature and humankind. Ellen’s association with pagan tradition is seen through her celebration of May Day and through the description of her as an ‘Oread or Dryad’ (VI. 829). As a nymph of the mountains and trees, both the link she has with nature and her link with the location are emphasized. In this enactment of the May Day celebration, the local connotations of the solitary tree remain: it is called ‘THE JOYFUL TREE’ (VI. 831): From dateless usage which our peasants hold Of giving welcome to the rst of May By dances round its trunk (VI. 832–4).

The festival is, here, presented as belonging not to the lost past, but to a golden version of the present. Ellen’s involvement in these customs proclaims her naturalness, her connection with the place, and the pain of her subsequent estrangement from the ‘golden hills’ (VI. 834). In becoming an unmarried mother, Ellen is ‘delivered to distress and shame’ (VI. 847), and is no longer part of the May Day celebrations. She leaves the joys of childhood behind, and eventually dies. The accounts of May Day given by Southey and Coleridge overtly recognize the political character of the festival, though in different ways. Southey, whose antiquarian background prompts him to view the subject as historical rather than contemporary, associates the festival with freedom that has been granted temporarily, rather than justice that has been fought for and maintained. This negativity is further compounded by Southey’s other references to the festival, which link it with luxury, effeminacy and illusion. Southey is wary of the ritual enactment of the festival, preferring a less culturally mediated celebration of the return of Spring. His letters reveal his profound love of the season, and his poem ‘To Edith May Southey’ suggests the personal signi cance that May Day held for him. Coleridge’s suspicion that May Day customs might exist somewhere in England is driven by ideological assumptions about its origins and his own radical politics, and not by a concern for the festivities as a declining local custom. Coleridge stresses cultural continuity from the AngloSaxon past to recent history, implying that liberty is no longer found in England. The note expresses hope that the simple village, through its use of the symbolic maypole, could be a site for the celebration of the vestiges of this privilege. The May Day festival in the work of the Lake poets reveals wide divergence in the extent of rsthand experience of folkloric practices, and widespread exposure to literary and historical versions. Folklore is used by these poets to express a fundamental part of their political, social and aesthetic agendas. Although Southey treats aspects of the May Day festival with caution, all three poets exploit its links to democratic ideals and understand its signi cance for the politicization of public space. Folklore is an important part of their cultural understanding of place, and its signi cance for the readings of major poems needs to be recognized.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

‘Very fond of nature, very fond of art’ Leigh Hunt and May Day

Leigh Hunt ‘liked to display his worship for Spenser, to criticize poetry, and to write of Mayday and rural pleasures’.1 Hunt, whose experience of the festival was limited to the London processions of chimney sweeps, suggests that the May Day of his time has been reduced to a ‘remnant’ of its former glory by the ‘necessities of war and trade’.2 Nevertheless, he reveals his con dence in the power of public opinion to effect cultural change, arguing that ‘[o]pinion is made of the very least, tiny little bits of opinion, rst sown in private and afterwards issuing forth and increasing in public’.3 He asks: ‘If ten people say: “We should like to have a May again of the good old sort,” twenty may say it […] then twenty more, then eighty, then a hundred, till at last the voters for May are counted by hundreds, then by thousands, and if thousands desire it, the thing is done’.4 Hunt sees the festival primarily as an occasion for the appreciation of the natural world; its present form, he argues, is neither beautiful nor joyful enough to do this. Hoping to revitalize interest amongst all classes, Hunt promotes a festival that is to be part of a shared culture; he is uninterested in regional variation, preferring instead to champion a generic national May Day inspired by Elizabethan literature. He encourages a revival of the festival amongst the ‘rising generation’; the media in which Hunt publishes – polite literature and the periodical press – con rm this.5 So for Hunt, the common sphere is not necessarily set in opposition to the bourgeois public sphere, though there are some aspects of the bourgeois public sphere which Hunt subjects to trenchant criticism: This time two hundred years ago, our ancestors were all anticipating their May holidays. Bigotry came in, and frowned them away; then Debauchery, and identi ed all pleasure with the town; then Avarice, and we have ever since been mistaking the means for the end.6

1 Hunt cited in Molly Tatchell, Leigh Hunt and his Family in Hammersmith (London: Hammersmith Local History Group, 1969), p. 29. 2 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘Tomorrow The First of May’, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, 30 April 1834, pp. 33–4 (p. 33 and p. 34). 3 Ibid., p. 33. 4 Ibid. 5 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘Old May-Day’, The Examiner, 10 May 1818, pp. 289–91 (p. 289). 6 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘May-Day’, The Indicator, 26 April 1820, pp. 225–32

(p. 231).

70

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Attributing the decline of May Day to the dominance of commerce and con ict, Hunt describes nature as having been abandoned. Crowds are ocking to the cities, he comments in 1818, and are ‘forsaking the elds’.7 Hunt had, to some extent, a self-consciousness about his call for a public revival of the celebration, given that he thought that a progressive society was one which moved away from feudalism towards an enlightened democracy. He was aware that his call could potentially be misconstrued as a glori cation of ‘the feudality of the old times or the extreme inequalities’ in the lives of people.8 Hunt’s problem is that a desire for a revival of the cultural past is in some sense a revival of the ideology associated with that culture. This dif culty – the problem of divorcing a cultural event from a repressive ideology which may be associated with it – concerns much of his writing on May Day between 1813 and 1851. William Howitt, a commentator on English rural life and an admirer of Wordsworth, lauds the aim of raising awareness of the festival, but dismisses revivalism of this type as a hopeless attempt to turn back the clock: ‘Can they make the nation young again? Can they make us the simple ignorant, con ding people, living in the present, careless of the future, as our ancestors were? Till they can do this, they must lament and exhort us in vain’.9 Culture, Howitt argues, is too sophisticated: ‘We have fed on much knowledge, and are no longer children, but full-grown men, with manly appetites and experienced tastes’.10 Hunt’s friend, Charles Dickens, who caricatured him as the childishly simple Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (1852–53), likewise dismissed revivalism as romantic. May Day, he writes in Sketches by Boz (1833–36), calls ‘to our minds a thousand thoughts of all that is pleasant in nature and most beautiful in her most delightful form’, but the whole concept is associated with a nostalgia for one’s youth and nature as she never was: ‘the sky seemed bluer, and the sun shone more brightly’.11 ‘The fancies of childhood’, Dickens writes, dress nature ‘in colours brighter than the rainbow, and almost as eeting’.12 Dickens attributes the decline of May Day to a natural progression: ‘many years ago we began to be a steady and matter-of-fact sort of people, and dancing in Spring being beneath our dignity, we gave it up, and it descended to the sweeps’.13 Dickens observes that we may ‘cling with peculiar fondness to the custom of days gone by’, but what is left of the festivities is little better than an undigni ed charade undertaken by people who get drunk and stagger around in peculiar costumes.14 George Cruikshank illustrates

7 Hunt, ‘Old May-Day’, The Examiner, p, 289. 8 Hunt, ‘Tomorrow The First of May’, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, p. 33. 9 William Howitt, The Rural Life of England, 2 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans,1838), II, 143. 10 Ibid., II, 150. 11 Charles Dickens, ‘The First of May’, in Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, ed. by Thea Holme (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 169. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 170. 14 Ibid., p. 174.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

71

this comically, in 1839, with a sketch of a rabble processing with a precariouslooking ‘jack-in-the-green’.15 Hunt, however, invested much in the revival of May Day, arguing consistently for it to be understood as ‘the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other’.16 Through a revival of this festival, Hunt anticipates the return of the close connection between nature and humankind of the type which Wordsworth suggests is lost, and, moreover, the successful harmonizing of social classes. Far from seeing it as undigni ed, Hunt associates the festival with English manly vigour and moral purity, presenting May Day as a festival which will revitalize the country. Merry England, he suggests, is ‘a state of manhood be tting man’.17 In his enthusiasm for May Day, Hunt overtly combines ideology (‘love of each other’) and the sincere praise of nature (‘love of nature’). Is Hunt’s view of May Day the nostalgic bourgeois fantasy dismissed by Dickens and Howitt, or should we discern in it a serious attempt to engage with the cultural associations of spring and reclaim, through May Day, a socially harmonious public ritual that reconnects mankind with nature? Eco-criticism and the problem of Hunt Hunt’s stress on the continuity between human activity and nature suggests that his discussion of May Day would be pro tably addressed in relation to ecocriticism. Eco-criticism is concerned with scrutinizing the relationship between human culture and the environment, often making a distinction in merit between that which is human-made and that which occurs naturally, privileging the latter. Eco-critics admire the work of writers who try to reclaim a lost unity with nature or to nd consolation in nature, without making a cultural imposition upon nature. The de nition of nature as a purely cultural or linguistic concept, seen in Marxisthistoricist criticism, is rejected by eco-critics, who argue that in suppressing the referent (i.e. seeing nature as something that does not exist of itself, but only as a cultural or linguistic construct) critics devalue and disrespect the natural world, and consequently misinterpret Romantic writers. Jonathan Bate, for example, takes issue with critics who interpret the interest in nature in Wordsworth’s later work as conservatism, arguing that love for nature and overt avoidance of engagement with radical politics does not necessarily denote conservatism. Bate suggests that Wordsworth’s radicalism lies in his ‘green’ thinking: he places value on nature above all else. Mankind, in Wordsworth’s poetry, gains solace from the perpetuity of nature: ‘human survival and the survival of nature

15 George Cruikshank’s ‘The First of May’ is illustrated in Charles Dickens, Sketches By Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, ed. by Thea Holme (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 169. 16 Hunt, ‘May-Day’, The Indicator, p. 225. 17 J.H. Leigh Hunt, Table-Talk: To Which are Added Imaginary Conversation of Pope and Swift (London: Smith, Elder, 1851), p. 28

72

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

are […] co-ordinate with one another’.18 Bate reads the ‘Wordsworthian pastoral’ not as an aristocratic fantasy which hides the conditions of the rural poor, but as an ‘attempt to forge a link between the holistic values of his native vales and the “social meliorism” that underlay the French Revolution’.19 The Romantics construct nature, Bate says, as a paradise in which mankind is in harmony with the environment: To go back to nature is not to retreat from politics but to take politics into a new domain, the relationship between Love of Nature and Love of Mankind and, conversely, between the Rights of Man and the Rights of Nature.20

This harmony between nature and mankind is to be understood as radicalism. Bate holds that nature in Wordsworth’s The Prelude is represented as a ‘republican pastoral’, and that Wordsworth’s ideology has been misunderstood by commentators as Burkean conservatism.21 Bate explicates the political relevance of nature, arguing for a ‘continuity between [Wordsworth’s] “love of nature” and his revolutionary politics’.22 Importantly, Wordsworth’s radical pastoral places value on unmediated nature. The problem of how Hunt ts into this picture has been overlooked by ecocritical discussions. Hunt’s absence from these debates is perhaps the product of his initial reputation. In 1818, John Gibson Lockhart dismissed his observations on nature, along with those of the ‘Cockney school’, as ‘laborious affected descriptions of owers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at Vauxhall’.23 Hunt con rms his urban-rural perspective, writing in his Autobiography that while walking with Keats ‘in the streets we were in the thick of the old woods’.24 The Lake Poets, in comparison, are seen by Lockhart as ‘the purest’ and ‘the loftiest’: ‘Wordsworth and Hunt! What a juxtaposition!’25 According to Lockhart, the Cockney school lived in or around London but pretended it was the countryside; this in turn disquali ed its members from expressing a sincere admiration of nature. Clearly the imagination plays a role in Hunt’s response to nature. His view of nature is at times a little suburban, but many contemporary accounts of him note that he was sincerely uplifted by the glimpses of nature around him. The artist William Bell Scott notes that ‘there were always a few cut owers, in a glass of water, on the table’ in Hunt’s house, and that Hunt ‘referred to the owers [primroses] as if they lit up his room or even his life’.26 The 18 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 34. 19 Ibid., p. 19. 20 Ibid., p. 33. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 10. 23 ‘Z’ [John Gibson Lockhart], ‘The Cockney School of Poetry. No IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818), 519–24 (p. 521). 24 J.H. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. by J. E. Morpurgo (London: The Cresset Press, 1948), p. 275. 25 Lockhart, p. 520. 26 William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott; And Notices of His Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends, 1830 to 1882 (London: James R. Osgood,

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

73

question is whether this is ‘Cockney’ affectation, or an ingenuous engagement with nature. Can nature be brought into the house and still bring joy? If we are to accept Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, which promotes the view that ‘No plot so narrow, be but Nature there’ (l. 61), then the answer must be yes. Coleridge, deprived of the grandeur of the Sublime and the beauty of the picturesque, learns the lesson that there is ‘No waste so vacant, but may well employ / Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart / Awake to Love and Beauty’ (ll. 63–5). Lockhart’s vitriolic protest at the Cockney school, setting aside his elitist premise that poetry can only be written by an educated gentleman, derives from the contemporary preoccupation with sincerity and the assumption that one cannot nd nature in Hampstead – that the owerpot is worth less than the wild ower. For Hunt, ‘the glimpse of a piece of sky or eld from the window of a manufactory’ speaks ‘volumes of eloquence against the system’ of government.27 The authenticity of Hunt’s love of nature cannot be questioned: ‘whenever I got in a eld [I] felt my soul in it’ (‘To William Hazlitt’ [1816], l. 23). Hunt counted on nature to bring him solace and hope. Furthermore, the consolatory role he ascribes to the natural world is intimately connected with his political radicalism. When in prison, he writes of the ideal spring day in Hampstead: Give me such a day, and plant me in some nook about Hampstead where I may shut myself in with a little hill and a dale, – a few sheep on the slope before me, – clumps of trees all round, – a glimpse of a spire through a break of them, – a glowing warmth, swept now and then with snatches of air, – and a small wrapping silence about me humming with a bee, and rather making me dream over my book than read it, – and all the descriptions of Italian Elysiums shall be nothing to that sense of English enjoyment deepened and perfected by the consciousness of English liberty.28

Political freedom is part of a natural landscape and demonstrates, to use Bate’s comment on Wordsworth, a ‘continuity between’ Hunt’s ‘“love of nature” and his revolutionary politics’.29 Lockhart dismisses Hunt’s glimpses of nature as pretension to grandeur; Coleridge regards himself as bereft of nature in such places, though he is thankful that ‘no sound is dissonant which tells of Life’ (l. 76). Hunt sees in Hampstead ‘the Joy that out of nature springs, / And Freedom’s air-blown locks’ (‘To Hampstead’, ll. 9–10). Hunt’s radical aim, like that of William Morris later, is to bring nature to the town – to harmonize the human-derived with the natural, and to see nature everywhere. In this respect, Hunt differs from Wordsworth: Hunt believes we can ‘green’ the city. Hunt was not ecologically aware, but his essay-writing on nature originates from a profound belief in nature’s intrinsic worth. His writing is eclectic, topical and literary, and the goal of much of Hunt’s journalism is to comment on nature and its relationship to art. He describes one of the purposes of his popular Literary PocketBook: or Companion for the Lover of Art and Nature (1818–22) as the production McIlvane, 1892), p. 126. 27 Hunt, ‘Old May-Day’, The Examiner, p. 289. 28 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘May Weather’, The Examiner, 20 May 1813, pp. 350–51 (p. 351). 29 Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 10.

74

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

of a calendar of the attractions of the seasons and ‘the diffusion of love of their appearances and effects’, rather than an ‘account of the causes or operation of things’.30 The work, collected as The Months in 1821, follows the successive changes to the ora and fauna of Britain, and the events of the farming year, citing much relevant poetry. Another work, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, aims to introduce the reading public to natural joys, such as the American wilderness. Through reading the journal, Hunt advises, the reader can sit in thought looking at the ‘American solitudes’.31 The essays published in The Indicator and The Companion were, Hunt explains, also written with the view of ‘inculcating a love of nature and imagination’.32 It is through an appreciation of the literary representation of nature, in particular, that Hunt sees humankind connecting with the natural world. Moreover, Hunt does not separate nature writing from political writing. The Examiner, motivated by a belief in political reform, was also in the service of nature. Hunt writes of the journal in 1834: ‘it was the Robin Hood of its cause, plunder excepted’ and it declared its ‘love of the green places of poetry, and its sympathy with all who needed sympathy’.33 The ways in which human culture presents the natural world are very important to Hunt. For example, Hunt concerns himself with the accuracy of literary and scienti c descriptions of nature, and he often corrects false impressions of the natural world. Hunt asks: ‘Why do naturalists never mention the kindly chuckle of the young crows? particularly pleasant, good humoured, and infant-like’,34 and he questions the inescapable association of the rook with hoarseness. His essay ‘The Song of the Nightingale’ comments on Chaucer’s description of the happiness of the bird. Hunt concludes that ‘the notes of the nightingale, generally speaking, are not melancholy in themselves’.35 Coleridge, of whose poem Hunt was aware, comes to a similar conclusion in ‘The Nightingale’, Lyrical Ballads (1798). The issue of the character of the bird’s song, Hunt writes, comes down to ‘the association of ideas’.36 Hunt is committed to explicating the interaction between nature and humankind, paying close attention to seasonal change in his writing. His journalism often responds to the seasons as they are happening, and he is devoted to renewing interest in the processes and variety of nature: ‘the older one grows, the more one sees; and if a man were to devote his life to any one aspect of nature, he would never get

30 Cited in List of the Writings of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt […] Preceded by Charles Lamb ed. by Alexander Ireland, Bibliography & Reference Series, 299 (London: John Russell Smith, 1868; reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), p. 132. 31 Cited in Richard Brimley Johnson, Leigh Hunt (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1896), p. 83. 32 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘Introduction’, The Indicator and The Companion: A Miscellany for the Fields and the Fireside, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1834), I, pp. ix–x. 33 Ireland, p. 109. 34 Hunt, Table-Talk, p. 30. 35 Ibid., p. 28. 36 Ibid.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

75

through all that is to be found in it’.37 Although he does not enquire into the causes of such seasonal changes, he frequently traces the development of the natural year: ‘Some observers for the last years have suspected the seasons to have taken a turn for the worse, at least in point of changeableness; and really the present spring seems to fall in with their suspicion’.38 He appreciates that spring is not the same every year, and that early spring is different from late. The Months, nevertheless, presents a generalized view of spring, rather than the spring of a particular location, and relies heavily on literary quotation. The imagination, then, plays an important role in Hunt’s reaction to spring. For example, he states that he knows what a cuckoo looks like, but he cannot help thinking of it ‘in connexion with the colour of yellow, like that of the cowslips’.39 He understands this reaction to the bird to be intended by nature: the cuckoo ‘conceals himself, in order that we may make of him what colour we please, as well as to invite us to look at nature’.40 The cuckoo is ‘the ute that nature plays, to call us back to childhood and joy’.41 His essay ‘Wild Flowers, Furze and Wimbledon’ compares nature’s ability to create beauty with the abilities of humankind. Echoing the dialogic form of the pastoral, Hunt argues that Nature has more power than the painter. Poetry is treated less harshly. Hunt concedes that poetry can retain a natural freshness: ‘God forbid I should undervalue his most wonderful work here on earth, – the creature who can himself create’.42 Eco-critics perceive literary tradition to be an anthropocentric imposition on the natural world, and those writers who refrain from overusing culturally derived material are seen as more ecological (or in touch with nature) than others. Hunt’s work offers an alternative view to that provided by the Wordsworthian model (where love of nature leads to the love of mankind) on which Bate bases his theory. Hunt proposes that it is possible to immerse oneself in literary tradition without abandoning a direct experience of nature, and that it is justi able to revive and change ancient English traditions that publicly promote this closeness with nature (departing from the ‘natural’ evolution of culture), reinterpreting tradition in order to assert a social purpose. Through this human intervention, Hunt suggests, harmony can be achieved between nature and people, and amongst people. His calls for the revival of May Day, and his veneration of poetry which talks about spring, are an attempt to forge a link with the past experience of spring which he deems better than that of the present. Hunt does not place the bourgeois literary tradition and the practices of the common sphere in opposition to nature; rather, he positions them as a route through which harmony with nature can be achieved. Hunt frequently compares his own situation as a lover of nature with that of his forebears, with a view to re-establishing a ‘natural’ connection with them. Observing

37 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘Life in May. – Butter ies, Bees &c. – With the Consideration of a Curious Argument, drawn from the Government of the Hive’, The Indicator, 1 May 1832, pp. 457–68 (p. 457). 38 Hunt, ‘May Weather’, The Examiner, p. 350. 39 Hunt, ‘Life in May’, The Indicator, p. 458. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Hunt, Table-Talk, p. 9.

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

76

the disunity between what he expects of spring (the result of engagement with literary accounts) and spring as he experiences it, Hunt is interested in how culture in uences the way we think about the seasons. His main observation is that the May Day he experiences is different from that of previous writers; this, he concludes, is for cultural reasons. Hunt is particularly anxious that the mid-eighteenth century change in the calendar caused a discontinuity between the past and the present. This arti cial change, in his opinion, severed the present from previous cultural expressions, and was detrimental to a natural enjoyment of the environment. A draught was made upon every month, and about eleven days taken out of April and honoured with the title of May. The twelfth of May is thus the old and proper May-day of which Milton spoke, and some allowances must be made for the month on this score.43

Hunt’s contemporaries are advised not to complain about the weather on May Day because spring, in effect, comes earlier in the calendar than it once did. He exonerates Milton’s descriptions of the warmth of the season on these grounds. Hunt aims to reclaim a sense of what it was like for Milton, by imagining that Milton was writing about the twelfth of May instead of the rst of May. His understanding of Milton’s work, like the interpretation of Romantic literature by eco-critics, is motivated by a need to nd a causal connection between the words on the page and the physical reality which inspires them. The alteration of the date of May Day has brought about, in Hunt’s view, a cultural dislocation. Hunt is adamant that this man-made change has directly affected the appreciation of spring. While it is not destructive in the way that deforestation might be, this occurrence, nonetheless, is understood by Hunt to be the reason for the decline in May Day festivities, and therefore the loss of an important cultural connection with the natural world. Repeatedly throughout his prose writing on spring, Hunt observes that the spring he experiences is different from the spring he reads about in literature. ‘May Weather’, an article which largely comments on the spring of 1813, and which is laden with climactic observations, illustrates this neatly.44 May is the favourite month of the poets, Hunt says, but outside there are ‘chilling and boisterous winds and thick rains’.45 It should be the month of love, ‘full of genial aims and a lightsome sparkling’, but the season ‘has given “mirth” to nobody except it be the duck and the umbrella-makers’.46 He concedes that, to a degree, his favourite poets of spring (Chaucer, Spenser and Milton) followed the Italian school rather than observing their own surroundings: ‘they had got an Italian notion of May grafted upon their proper English one’.47 Theirs is a kind of double vision: they retain, in Hunt’s view, the worthy position of being close observers of nature, but at the same time view nature from an Italian perspective. The coupling of Italy and England is seen again in Hunt’s poem ‘To Lord Byron on His Departure for Italy and Greece’ (1816) in which England is depicted as ‘a high-souled man’ and his female ‘charmer’ (l. 77) is 43 44 45 46 47

Hunt, ‘May Weather’, The Examiner, p. 350. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

77

the ‘enchantress Italy’ (l. 34). Italy’s ‘woman’s sweetness’ complements the ‘bolder, deeper, and more masculine’ genius of the great English poets. Italy is a wayward, feminine and irresistible in uence on English poetry. Hunt, nevertheless, draws more frequently on the Italian School of Elizabethan poets as prime examples of writers who understood how to celebrate the natural world in a manly fashion: ‘The age of Shakespeare was at once the most wise and lively, the most dancing, rural, and manly period of our English history’, he writes in 1818.48 In The Months (1821), the Elizabethans are seen as the great observers of nature. Ben Jonson, for example, is praised for understanding that ‘a great part of the enjoyment of the year’ comes in ‘merely looking at nature’: May is the month spoken of with the greatest rapture in all the polite countries of Europe, though the Englishman is sometimes at a loss to perceive why. The stanza at the head of our chapter [from Spenser’s Faerie Queene] is a beautiful specimen of this enthusiasm, which in fact is partly owing to the happy-making imagination of poets in general, and partly to their favourites the southern poets, who nd all that they speak of in their sunnier countries.49

The ‘Italian school’, then, exaggerates the season as it appears in England, giving it ‘exotic owers’, ‘warm dews’, ‘blue skies’, ‘refreshing shades’, ‘delicious sides of rivers upon which you may lie down and bask like a Narcissus’.50 When he observes the real spring, Hunt nds that he has been misled by his favourite poets. Longing to nd the clement weather he reads about, he recalls damp trips into the countryside from which he emerges disillusioned with his environment: I have myself, deluded by these gentlemen and their masters, got into shady places, before my time, with a systematic determination to be refreshed, and have taken the most unromantic colds in consequence. I have also attempted to lie down on the banks of rivers, but there was no compounding with the mud and reeds, – to say nothing of snails and black beetles in the few places where it was possible to stretch one’s limbs.51

The habitat of Hunt’s literary heroes cannot be found in May in Britain. Hunt, nevertheless, refrains from separating the Italianate pastoral idyll from what he supposes is its manifestation in the natural world. He views the Italianate spring as originating in a reality which belongs to warmer climes. Italian literature brings nature to life for Hunt. Whilst in prison for libel (February 1813–February 1815), a collection of poetry called the Parnaso Italiano reminds him of the natural world from which he is largely cut off: ‘In prison it was truly a lump of sunshine on my shelves’.52 Hunt survives in prison because he is able to

48 J.H. Leigh Hunt, Foliage: Or Poems Original and Translated (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818), p. 20. 49 J.H. Leigh Hunt, The Months: Descriptive of the Successive Beauties of the Year (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), p. 31. 50 Hunt, ‘May Weather’, The Examiner, p. 350. 51 Ibid. 52 Hunt, Autobiography, p. 414.

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

78

make a strong connection with the natural world through literature, and he is able to value the small glimpses. His poem ‘To May’ makes the same point:

If the rains that do us wrong Come to keep the winter long, And deny us thy sweet looks, I can love thee, sweet [May], in books Love thee in the poets’ pages, Where they keep thee green for ages […]. There is May in books for ever; May will part from Spenser never; May’s in Milton, May’s in Prior, May’s in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer; May’s in all the Italian books; She has old and modern nooks […]. Come, ye rains then, if ye will May’s at home, and with me still But come rather, thou, good weather And nd us in the elds together (ll. 23–8, 33–8, 43–6).

Contrariwise and according to Bate, Wordsworth ‘proposes that survival of humanity comes with nature’s mastery over the edi ces of civilization’.53 Hunt looked to culture as his saviour; and when faced with an environment bereft of the natural world, he depends on poetry. He wallpapered his prison cell ‘with a trellis of roses’ and ‘had the ceiling coloured with clouds and sky’ in order to bring nature indoors.54 The prison garden contained a cherry tree which Hunt ‘saw twice in blossom’, and the owers brought him solace.55 Hunt’s wife, Marianne, joined him in prison during her pregnancy, and to cheer her spirits ‘the garden door was set open, and she looked upon trees and owers’.56 When Hunt regained his freedom, his Italian book, along with the work of Spenser, remained an important lter through which he viewed landscape, lling his ‘English walks with visions of gods and nymphs’.57 It is telling that Hunt, at this point in his life story, distinguishes his view of nature from that of Wordsworth: I suspect I had far more sights of ‘Proteus coming from the sea’ than Mr. Wordsworth himself; for he desired them only in despair of getting anything better out of the matterof-fact state of the world about him; whereas, the world had never been able to deprive me, either of the best hopes for itself, or of any kind of vision, sacred or profane, which I thought suitable to heaven or earth. […] I know not in which I took more delight – the actual elds and woods of my native country, the talk of such things in books, or the 53 54 55 56 57

Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 34. Hunt, Autobiography, p. 244. Ibid. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 414.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

79

belief which I entertained that I should one day be joined in remembrance with those who had talked it. I used to stroll about the meadows half the day, with a book under my arm, generally a ‘Parnaso’ or a Spenser, and wonder that I met nobody who seemed to like the elds as I did.58

Hunt accepts that literature and tradition have mediated responses to the natural world, and includes his own responses among these. The poet’s imagination is able to take a tradition of allusions to the warmth of spring, based on a warmer climate, and incorporate it into descriptions of England, which has cooler springs, and still create something of personal signi cance. Appreciative of the literature of a different climate, Hunt is, consequently, able to present a legitimate answer to the issue, raised by Bate, of retaining meaning without direct reference to a physical reality. Hunt felt a close connection to a literary version of spring that bore little relationship to the one he experienced in England; yet he was also disturbed by the incoherence between spring in literature and spring ‘out there’. This remoteness did not deprive him of enjoyment, nor of the ability to detect the difference between what does and does not happen in May in Britain. His appreciation of the natural world was deepened by his experience of cultural representations of it. Nevertheless, he detects a great distance between himself and his literary forbears. The Elizabethans, he suggests, were able to harmonize the country and the city: ‘The whole city went out to invite, as it were, the country to town; and to welcome her beauty and her bounties with dances, and shouts of joy’.59 Just as eco-critics today look back to the Romantics as possessing a better understanding of the natural world, so Hunt looks back to the Italian school. Hunt is different from the majority of eco-critics, however, in that he accepts nature both as something which can be experienced directly and as something which can be experienced through a cultural medium. Hunt retains an element of ambiguity nonetheless: he does not decide whether he prefers the literary version of spring to the real version. This indecision makes more sense when seen in the context of his writing on Spenser. Hunt is clearly impressed by Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Shepheardes Calender, but Spenser’s time is so far removed from his own that the description of ‘faire May’ appears as ‘absolute paintings on canvass’.60 Hunt argues, nevertheless, that the complexity of Spenser’s version of the natural world has never been appreciated. Spenser, he says, was prepared to use ‘an amalgamation of opposites’, to employ both ‘seriousness and levity, the familiar and the digni ed’.61 Hunt understands these contraries as ‘natural’. Those who simplify Spenser’s response to May (seeing it as either serious or light, but not both), misunderstand the natural element: ‘Nature puts them out’, Hunt suggests, by not being consistent. Hunt argues for a lack of formality in critical 58 Ibid., pp. 414–15. 59 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, The Companion, 7 May 1828, pp. 241–3 (p. 216). 60 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’, in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed., by Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 215–29 (p. 215). First published in The New Monthly Magazine, 13 (1825), 457–66. 61 Ibid., p. 215.

80

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

approaches to dichotomous literature: we should not, he says, ‘reconcile [literature] to the formality of [our] judgments’.62 This irreconcilable quality enables him to praise Spenser for living in a time in which all England did ‘homage to nature’, but also to view Spenser as someone who aestheticized the natural world, deriving his concept from Italian poetry. Wordsworth, in contrast, when presenting his adult perspective, dismisses the ‘Arcadian’ ‘lighter graces’ of Spenser as dream-like (The Prelude (1805), VIII. 192–210). The Prelude suggests that Wordsworth can nd little connection with Spenser’s May: ‘True it is / That I had heard (what he [Spenser] perhaps had seen)’, but ‘This, alas, / Was but a dream: the times had scattered all / These lighter graces, and the rural ways’ (The Prelude (1805), VIII. 92–3; 203–5). The Intimations Ode is a lament for the loss of the ‘visionary gleam’ in a Platonic sense, but in the context of the light and dream imagery in Book VIII of The Prelude, we can see this as a loss of a Spenserian or even a classical tradition too. Hunt embraces Arcadia in its English and Italian forms, overcoming the problem of the distance suggested by Spenser’s Italian heritage by claiming that Spenser’s May ‘may seem a conceit; but I believe he felt it himself’.63 Hunt claims for Spenser’s work an authenticity which is natural, even though it is culturally derived. This open-ended ‘natural’ critical approach is occasionally employed by ecocritics. Karl Kroeber associates literary criticism with a dynamic quality which is found in nature. Kroeber suggests that that which ‘is alive is continually self-transforming’, and claims that a poem can likewise continue to be ‘alive’ by remaining open-ended.64 Kroeber attempts to justify retaining the enigmatic quality of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (1798) on the grounds that ecological criticism ‘endeavors to sustain the poem’s resistance to the imposition of any de nitive interpretation’.65 Through eco-criticism, he writes, the critic can ‘renew’ the poem’s ‘vital, hence changing, meaningfulness’.66 Kroeber’s theory, reducing everything to natural processes, is based on the presupposition that culture is natural: ‘all human cultures are constructed by natural creatures’.67 Although this is a view he contradicts later (‘our cultures cut us off from a joyous vitality offered to us by natural phenomena as natural creatures as well as cultural beings’68), the general implication of his study is that culture works according to natural processes. Kroeber argues that Wordsworth resists his cultural training by experiencing owers as sentient creatures, ‘just as his poem challenges our learned cultural presupposition that human consciousness alienates us from physical nature’.69 Prompted by Wordsworth’s phrase ‘what man has made of man’, Kroeber presents the negative aspects of human culture as indicative

62 Ibid., p. 216. 63 Ibid., p. 215. 64 Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 43. 65 Ibid, p. 47. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 45. 68 Ibid., p. 46. 69 Ibid., p. 45.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

81

of alienation from ‘bene cial natural processes’.70 Dif culties arise here from the switch between culture as de ned in opposition to nature and culture de ned as part of nature. Eco-criticism, on this model, is subsumed into the ecosystem which is meant to be its subject; the ‘transformitoriness’ that characterizes the natural world spills over into the cultural, disabling the critic from applying a stronger theory of interpretation. Does Hunt con ate nature and culture? It is worth drawing, at this point, on a light-hearted question Hunt poses to his readers: ‘Reader, what sort of animal would you be, if you were obliged to be one, and were not a man?’71 It will, Hunt says, ‘do us no harm to sympathize with as many beings as we can’.72 In answering this, Hunt highlights the difference between the natural world and the human. We can sympathize with the natural world, he says, but we are unable ‘to divest ourselves of an overplus of […] human nature’.73 La Fontaine’s animals, Hunt comments, ‘are all La Fontaine’:74 We cannot leave our nature behind us, when we enter into their [an animal’s] sensations. We must retain it, by the very reason of our sympathy; and hence arises a pleasant incongruity, allied to other mixtures of truth and ction.75

Hunt dismisses, furthermore, the notion that natural human behaviour is animal-like. Recalling Aristotle’s Politics, Hunt suggests that bees were often thought to have the greatest moral likeness to man; not only because they labour, and lay up stores, and live in communities, but because they have a form of government and a monarchy. […] A monarchical government, it is said, is natural to man, because it is an instinct of nature: the very bees have it.76

The similarities are, Hunt argues, super cial, and he suggests a range of possible responses to this view. Primary among these is the argument that animal instinct is not superior to human reason. Hunt takes the comparison to its logical conclusion in a humorous satirical portrait of how England might look if it were organized after the example of bees: Parliament and the aristocracy would be abolished and a matriarchal society would have to be instituted. Nature and culture are closely associated in Hunt’s work; he has a great deal of sympathy for nature and sees animals as sometimes more admirable than humans. Nevertheless, Hunt regards culture and politics as ultimately separate from nature. Bate is concerned with understanding Romantic responses to the natural world as responses both to a physical reality and as an expression of radicalism, aiming to dispel the suggestion that descriptions of nature are merely hiding politics. For 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Ibid. Hunt, ‘Life in May’, The Indicator, p. 459. Ibid., p. 460. Ibid., p. 463. Ibid., p. 460. Ibid., p. 463. Ibid., p. 464.

82

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Wordsworth, the love of nature leads to the love of mankind, and, in Bate’s opinion, this is radicalism. Hunt restates this equation, suggesting that the love of culture and nature leads to the love of mankind, and that a true appreciation of the natural world needs a cultural dimension inherited from tradition. Romantic Ecology calls for a rehabilitation of the pastoral mode: ‘pastoral has not done well in recent neo-marxist criticism’, but does so by rede ning the pastoral solely along Wordsworthian antitraditionalist lines.77 Hunt, on the other hand, calls for a pastoral which unites the two discrete elements of culture and nature. He was, as Dickens suggests, ‘very fond of nature, very fond of art’.78 May Day and social harmony In ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’ (1828), Hunt describes taking a walk in Hampstead and pausing at Holly Lodge on Highgate Hill, where the Duchess of St Albans was entertaining guests with an evening party. Hunt witnessed ‘a ne exception out of a monied common-place’: an aristocratic party with a May Day theme.79 He was clearly struck by this scene: ‘something extraordinary was doing there, on this genial anniversary’.80 The party had ‘a proper May-pole, and garlands, and dances’ performed by dancers from the theatres.81 Hunt was fascinated because he saw a festival which he strongly associated with the countryside enacted in his native suburb. Looking on from the street, Hunt contrasts the pleasure gained from the outdoors with the unnaturalness of indoor pursuits, hoping that the Duchess’s guests will discover ‘that not only chalked oors and sti ing rooms, but May-day, and the morning air, and a good honest piece of turf with health and vigour upon it, have their merits’.82 Coleridge makes a similar point of the ‘youths and maidens most poetical’ who ‘lose the deepening twilight of the spring / In ball-rooms and hot theatres’ in ‘The Nightingale’ (ll. 35–7). Elsewhere Hunt urges people to get out of their beds on May morning and breathe the ‘“raw” air’, and describes covering his family in ‘blossom enough to make a bower of the breakfast-room’.83 He even muses on the possibilities of his own physical regeneration, like that of nature in spring: methinks it were a pleasant sphere, If, like the trees, we blossomed every year; If locks grew thick again, and rosy dyes Returned in cheeks, and raciness in eyes, And all around us, vital to the tips, The human orchard laughed with cherry lips! 77 Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 19. 78 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Penguin Classics, ed. by Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 119. The quotation refers to Harold Skimpole, a character Dickens admitted was a portrait of Leigh Hunt. 79 Hunt, ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, The Companion, p. 242. 80 Ibid., p. 241. 81 Ibid., p. 242. 82 Ibid. 83 Hunt, ‘Tomorrow The First of May’, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, p. 33 and p. 34.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

83

Lord! what a burst of merriment and play, Fair dames, were that! and what a rst of May!84

Hunt considers, here, that if people could rejuvenate in the way that trees do, May Day would certainly come to be valued again. People ourish in spring and they interact emotionally with it: ‘In spring-time, joy awakens the heart: with joy awakes gratitude and nature; and in our gratitude we return on its own principle of participation, the love that has been shown us’.85 In spite of Hunt’s criticism of the guests at the Duchess’s party for their lack of direct connection with the natural world, Hunt nds May Day at Holly Lodge compelling. He does so because he regards the festival as emblematic of the harmony between nature and mankind, and of the concord which should exist between people. May Day is a catalyst which, for Hunt, could stimulate such a new harmony. He sees May Day, too, as a way to merge the customs of the town and the country. For Hunt, the contemporary celebration of spring is marred by what he sees as uncomfortable cultural associations, such as the feudalism associated with Merry England. He argues, nevertheless, that ‘as knowledge and comfort advance, there is no reason whatever why old good things should not revive as well as new good ones be created’.86 Any sense of condescension to the lower classes which might accompany the idea of Merry England must be removed. Hunt uses the May Day party at Holly Lodge as a touchstone for a discussion of the coming political reforms, urging the gentry to nd common ground with the lower classes. He calls the Duchess ‘wise in not affecting to patronize, and to distribute holiday beef and pudding’.87 The poor, he says, ‘do not want alms now-adays. They are too poor, and too well informed. They want employment and proper pay; and after employment, a reasonable leisure’.88 A revival of May Day, Hunt claims, will lead to a harmonizing of the classes. He does not advocate revolution, but that people should share common cultural interests in order to move towards the kind of reform which disadvantages none. The ‘principle of participation’ in the love that spring shares with us, he says, necessitates that we emulate the joys of the season: these joys are assumed to be communitarian.89 The Duchess herself, Harriot Mellon (1777?–1837), seems to encapsulate the harmonious community of classes which Hunt seeks. An actress of obscure birth, Mellon rose to fame playing country girls on the stage before marrying Thomas Coutts, inheriting his great wealth, and

84 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘Lines Written on A Sudden Arrival of Fine Weather in May’, 1831, ll. 24–31 in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. by H. S. Milford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 352. 85 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘Spring and Daisies’, in Essays by Leigh Hunt, ed. by Arthur Symons (London: Walter Scott, 1887), pp. 74–80 (p. 75). 86 J.H. Leigh Hunt, ‘The Month of May’, in Men, Women and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, And Critical Memoirs from his Uncollected Prose Writings ed. by L. Stanley Jast (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1943), pp. 150–56 (p. 151). 87 Hunt, ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, The Companion, p. 242. 88 Ibid., pp. 242–3. 89 Hunt, ‘Spring and Daisies’, Essays by Leigh Hunt, p. 75.

84

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

going on to marry William Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, the ninth Duke of St Albans.90 It is tting, then, that she celebrates a festival that should be common to all. Through May Day festivities, Hunt suggests, the aristocracy can be seen to share, rather than to appropriate, the culture of the poor – the common sphere. The interests of both should converge in such a way that they ‘exhibit as many tastes in common as possible’.91 Hunt is fully aware that nostalgic representations of England, such as those associated with pastoral scenes, may be used fundamentally to express the values of particular groups in society. But he believes that this ideological standpoint can be used to political advantage. Marxist critics such as Raymond Williams, unlike eco-critics, are wary of ‘sentimental and intellectualised accounts of an unlocalised “Old England”’.92 Nostalgia ‘is universal and persistent’,93 and the pastoral vision does not re ect the real social situation of the rural poor. Williams de nes the literary perception of the country and the city as fundamentally different ways of life. This account is resonant when considering Hunt. Hunt repeatedly de nes the country against the city, and, while celebrating his love of the seasons and his direct contact with the natural world, he acknowledges the presence of ideology in cultural representations of the natural world. To Hunt, nature acts both as a cultural referent and as a physical reality. Hunt’s radicalism lies in his vision of May Day as a festival worthy of revival because it celebrates not only closeness to nature but also political change. Hunt suggests, too, that nostalgia for May Day can be read ideologically. He demonstrates unease at his need to campaign for a revival of May Day, suggesting that such a revival, though warranted by its aesthetic and moral value, is a form of nostalgic conservatism which has feudal implications. Hunt’s is a very different challenge to the status quo from that of Southey, for instance. Southey’s Wat Tyler presents May Day as a festival which reminds the poor of their disenfranchised lot, with the intention of causing the people to rebel. In order to convince his public of the need for a revival of May Day, Hunt suggests that it is possible to celebrate it as a festival which promotes a social harmony and which is advantageous for all classes. His goal is for the rich to make a ‘common cause with the poorest in a taste for nature’.94 He sees May Day as an opportunity for a cultural exchange between rich and poor. He sees the common sphere as a universal sphere that encompasses all social groups. Hunt’s journalism traces the progress of the degeneration of the festival. By the late eighteenth century, May Day has to some extent became a remnant of a previous culture which is retained within the dominant culture, acting in some cases oppositionally to this dominant culture (as in the case of Southey’s subversive 90 Joan Perkin, ‘Beauclerk, Harriot, Duchess of St Albans (1777?–1837)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/18533, accessed 25 August 2005]. 91 Hunt, ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, The Companion, p. 243. 92 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 10. 93 Ibid., p. 12. 94 Ibid.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

85

Wat Tyler); May Day is also subsumed into the dominant culture by virtue of its reinterpretation. Wordsworth, in The Prelude (1805), sees May Day as dead and gone; it has little signi cance for him other than that he is aware that some can remember it. It is preserved in the classical arcadianism of writers like Spenser, for whom he has no taste, and his appreciation for it belongs to his earliest work. May Day, in Hunt’s opinion, has been crushed by capitalism, which displaces people from the countryside and the values of its way of life. In his view, May Day is a predominantly ‘rustic’ festival which has been all but eradicated by the ‘growth of trade’.95 But ‘commerce, while it thinks it is only exchanging commodities, is helping to diffuse knowledge’; the world may learn, says Hunt, the value of simple pleasures.96 Hunt negotiates for a festival which does not exclude any class, and which has the potential to become again as it once was, universal. Commerce, Hunt believes, despite its capacity for disseminating knowledge, is pushing people apart, and he laments the division of the town from the country: ‘Almost every poet now belongs either to town or country. If to the town, he knows, or feels, nothing of the country. If to the country, he knows nothing of the town’.97 The poetry of Shakespeare’s age, however, was a product of the ‘whole nation’, both country and city.98 Hunt recalls the story of a lady of the manor of an unnamed village ‘a long way from London’, who, as a ‘lover of books’, revived the May Day festival ‘to the exceeding delight of the natives’.99 The revival is unimpeded because ‘the remoter the scene from London, the more [May Day] ourishes’.100 Hunt invests in May Day the potential for reuni cation of town and country; it is a way of bringing country values to the city. As in much of the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the countryside is presented as morally good, whereas the town supports a morally degenerate culture. Hunt even takes issue with those who might wish to remember the sexual license implied in the rural festivities associated with May Day in order to support this view: ‘Let us be assured that a taste for Nature will do none of us harm. What it nds strong in us, it will strengthen. What it nds weak, it will at least divide and render graceful’.101 Women will be quite safe if they ‘go into the elds in May’ and there will be no danger to ‘their virtue’.102 The May Day at Holly Lodge offers Hunt the chance to imagine the classes united in celebration of the natural world, and to put nature above social difference. It is, of course, idealistic. Hunt is left as an observer on the street, uninvited to the grand party; and the dancers are paid entertainers rather than guests. His view of this residue of ancient culture ignores the fact that the party enacts social difference. To this extent, Hunt’s wish to escape from class division into a celebration of classless 95 Hunt, ‘New May-Day’, Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, p. 219. 96 Hunt, ‘May-Day’, The Indicator, 26 April 1820, p. 232. 97 Hunt, ‘New May-Day’, Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, pp. 220–21. 98 Ibid., p. 221. 99 Ibid., p. 222. 100 Ibid. This story anticipates Hunt’s article ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, which has a more de nite location. Both stories are, of course, unveri able, and Hunt has a vested interest in claiming that the festival can be revived. 101 Hunt, ‘New May-Day’, Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, p. 220. 102 Ibid.

86

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

concord must be treated with caution too. Williams is thus right to be suspicious of the English idyll; Hunt’s ideological awareness extends so far but no further. While progressive in his attitude to the poorer classes, Hunt is not without prejudice. In an attempt to masculinize May Day, Hunt highlights, in particular, a male literary and cultural tradition of allusions to spring. Inspired by the poetry of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Sidney, Raleigh and others, Hunt supports his case for the revival of the May Day festival on the grounds that it was familiar to, and loved by, these poets. Although Hunt admires Charlotte Smith’s love of botany and the close observations of nature in such poems as ‘Sonnet. Written at the Close of Spring’, he says ‘there is nothing great in her’; women writers are not at the forefront of Hunt’s pantheon.103 Spring takes a prominent role in Hunt’s favourite anecdotes about male poets. The Autobiography, for example, describes Chaucer’s inability to work as a ‘comptroller of wool’ and a ‘clerk of works’ during the month of May: ‘he could not help passing whole days in the elds, looking at daisies’.104 This anecdote is recounted in connection with Hunt’s description of his own inability to combine his ‘propensity to verse-making with sums in addition’ while working in the War Of ce. Chaucer’s lack of manliness here is vindicated only by ‘the consequences’, that is, the greatness of his poetry.105 As noted above, May Day, for Dickens, required men to dance, and thus compromise their dignity. To compensate for showing male poets enjoying owers, dancing and worshipping a goddess, Hunt stresses the masculinity of the festival. He does this by emphasising its peasant origins in the common sphere and by contrasting these with the overly elegant French manners of the aristocracy. The English paradise is contrived at the expense of the French, and the dominance of French-derived aristocratic culture is high on Hunt’s list of reasons for the decline of May Day. The moral superiority of May Day is jeopardized, Hunt says, by the veneration of French culture (which Hunt likens to imperial ‘conquest’) by the English aristocracy.106 May Day, as an indigenous peasant festival, is seen to be more natural than anything originating from aristocratic French manners. De ning English masculine culture against French feminine culture, Hunt brands French tastes ‘unpoetical and effeminate’.107 ‘Effeminacy’, he clari es, ‘is different from womanhood’; it is an expression of tasteless extravagance.108 English aristocrats, then, demonstrate their ‘re nement by being superior to every rustic impulse’, but this is merely ‘false politeness and quiescence to the higher spirit of old English activity’.109 Xenophobia, then, plays a part in Hunt’s wish for the public to embrace May Day. Lamenting the slipping away of the countryside into the clutches of industry and new housing, Hunt presents May

103 Hunt, ‘Specimens of British Poetesses’, in Men, Women and Books, pp. 318–55 (p. 340). 104 Hunt, Autobiography, p. 180. 105 Ibid. 106 Hunt, ‘New May-Day’, p. 219. 107 Ibid. 108 Hunt, Autobiography, p. 225. 109 Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’, Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, p. 220.

‘Very fond of nature. very fond of art’

87

Day as a route through which an understanding of England as a former paradise can be reclaimed from the ‘invasion’ of French culture. In Foliage (1818), Hunt declares that observation of the natural world is primary in poetry: ‘A sensativeness [sic] to the beauty of the external world, to the unsophisticated impulses of our nature, and above all, imagination, or the power to see, with verisimilitude, what others do not, – these are the properties of poetry’.110 In essence, Hunt and Bate are interested in the same thing: sensitivity to the beauty of the external world. Hunt differs from Bate, however, in that he is prepared to see, and value, the natural world as something which is culturally determined as well as physically ‘given’. Hunt writes about spring both as a real, changing climactic process and as an event laden with historical, literary and cultural signi cance. Hunt’s discussions of May Day are driven by a nostalgia for the ancient celebrations of the season and his interest in the Italianate pastoral; he acknowledges that his May Day is arti cial and ideologically laden. His observations, however, reveal that his interest is not solely with the cultural reference to the season: he exposes the inaccuracies of the literary celebrations of the spring he holds dear. These diverse interests present a problem for the eco-critic: Hunt is interested in representing spring as a physical reality and in acknowledging the season as a literary construct, clearly allowing for a cultural understanding of the natural world as well as the idea of nature ‘out there’. Hunt consciously borrows from his literary predecessors and deliberately distinguishes the natural and the cultural, describing the consequences of their con ict. For Hunt, May Day encapsulates all that is genial about spring, Spenser, and communal life. Spring is the propagator of renewal and harmony. The value he places both on literary tradition and on close observation of the natural world means that his work cannot be easily dismissed as ‘simplistic nostalgia’. In wishing to revive May Day, Hunt locates an ideal in the recovery of a lost past; he accepts literary arcadianism in conjunction with his direct and personal interaction with the natural world, resolving the problem of romantic alienation from the natural world, and alienation from each other, by proposing a revival and revision of the May Day festival. He looks to the past in order to move forward. Wordsworth, on the other hand, can see no point in revivalism; for him the natural world still celebrates spring. Through May Day, Hunt advocates what Wordsworth believes cannot return: the cultural celebration of the closeness of a community. Hunt anticipates recent ecological thinking in sincerely calling for a realignment of human and natural concerns, but he is no ecologist. His aim is, rather, to attempt to expand the practices of the common sphere as a way of fostering social cohesion. He is ultimately focussed on a deep love for nature, whether this be for nature appreciated directly or through the lenses of common ritual and bourgeois literary production. Hitherto Hunt’s extensive collection of journalism has received little critical attention. The agenda we nd there is, nevertheless, at the heart of the Romantics’ response to folklore. Hunt, like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, recognizes the new potential of folklore to bring about social and personal change, and his writing adds to the considerable increase in the visibility of the folkloric subject in the 110 Hunt, Foliage, p. 13.

Romantic era. Hunt’s important contribution to the concept of a common sphere is his attempt to integrate it with the bourgeois public sphere. He wishes folklore to be a part of mainstream culture. His work reveals, furthermore, some of the weaknesses in the critical tenets that form the foundations of eco-criticism.

Chapter 4

May Day in the City William Blake

Discussion of the London May Day ritual is inseparable from humanitarian concerns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Antiquarian and literary comment on the festival frequently alludes to the poverty and destitution of the sweeps involved in the celebration. The yearly enactment of May Day, in which chimney sweeps had a prominent role, allowed this humanitarian issue to be brought into public view. William Hone’s antiquarian account of the city May Day, for instance, questions the destination of charitable gifts given to the boy-sweeps: ‘the offerings on the festival are not exclusively appropriated to the receivers; masters share a certain portion of their apprentices’ pro ts from the holiday’.1 The literary representation of the hardship of the chimney sweeps emphasizes bourgeois concerns about the absence or disintegration of the intimate family, raising the issue of the lost, orphaned or abandoned child, and his lack of patriarchal protection. There is, however, another prominent sweep narrative in this period: the boys were often presented in the contemporary media as the missing children of aristocrats, a theme that Dickens later picks up in Oliver Twist (1838). Popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the lost-child narrative is effective in af rming bourgeois domesticity. Newspapers perpetuated tales of chimney sweeps as disguised aristocrats, or lost sons of the well-to-do. The relief of the working child’s suffering is assimilated in these texts into the ideology of bourgeois domesticity. Recovery of the elite or bourgeois origins of boy-sweeps re ects the bourgeois need to restore a Burkean social order based on the family. Texts which depict the London May Day in these terms offer the bourgeois individual the possibility of alleviating his or her conscience, and the child’s suffering, through charitable giving: the child’s role in economic production is momentarily suspended by an ethical act. In this way, the bourgeois subject signals the pecuniary basis of his power and at the same time distances himself from normal nancial practices. The domestic myth of the recovered child is sustained in the narrative accounts of the city May Day because of the emphasis on disguise in the ceremony itself. Hone observes that The chimney-sweeper’s jackets and hats are bedizened with gilt embossed paper; sometimes they wear coronals of owers in their heads; their black faces and legs are

1

Hone, I, 585.

90

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition grotesquely coloured with Dutch pink; their shovels are scored with this crimson pigment, interlaced with white chalk.2

One writer comments in 1772 that the faces of the boy-sweeps are ‘whitened with meal, their heads covered with high periwigs powdered as white as snow, and their cloaths bedawbed with paper-lace’.3 The imsy disguise makes the sweeps acceptable to the public gaze; their residual blackness, however, is a reminder of their profession. In some cases the sweep is shown wearing a mask. Brand notes that the young chimney-sweepers, some of whom are fantastically dressed in girls’ clothes, with a great profusion of brick-dust by way of paint, gilt paper, &c., making a noise with their shovels and brushes, are now the most striking objects in the celebration of May Day in the streets of London.4

In his 1817 collection of anecdotes and drawings of mendicant wanderers of the streets of London, John Thomas Smith includes a portrait of a masked chimney sweep clutching a pole decorated with bells and owers and a small brush and box, accompanied by a clown.5 The sweep’s disguise is seen by many as a mask that conceals a range of potentialities both positive and negative. Disguise is central to much of the mythology which surrounds the boy-sweeps in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The earliest example of the interest in the sweep as a false identity, however, is likely to be George Chapman’s play, May Day (1609), in which the foolish Lorenzo disguises himself as a sweep in order to visit Francheschina.6 Dickens recounts several stories of the unmasking of boy-sweeps, who are clearly prototypes for Oliver Twist. His sketch, ‘The First of May’ (1836), suggests that the sweeps are the ‘objects of great interest’ well into the 1830s.7 In the guise of Boz, the writer recalls encountering in our young days, a little sweep about our own age, with curly hair and white teeth, whom we devoutly and sincerely believed to be the lost son and heir of some illustrious personage – an impression which was resolved into an unchangeable conviction on our infant mind, by the subject of our speculations informing us, one day in reply to our question, propounded a few moments before his ascent to the summit of the kitchen 2 Hone, I, 585. 3 Peter J. Groseley, A Tour to London; or New Observations on England and its Inhabitants, trans. by Thomas Nugent, 2 vols (London: Lockyear Davis, 1772), I, 183–4. 4 Brand, Observations, 1841, I, 126. 5 John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana; or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers Through the Streets of London; with portraits of the most remarkable, Drawn from the life by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of the Prints in the British Museum (London: J. and A. Arch, Hatchard and Clarke, 1817). 6 George Chapman, May-Day, A Comedie (London: I. Browne, 1611). See also William Dean, ‘Chapman’s May Day: A Comedy of Social Reformation’, Parergon, 16 (1976), 47– 55. 7 Charles Dickens, ‘The First of May’, in Sketches By Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, ed. Thea Holme (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 170.

May Day in the City

91

chimney, ‘that he believed he’d been born in the vurkis [workhouse], but he’d never know’d his father’. We felt certain, from that time forth, that he would one day be owned by a lord.8

The boy-sweeps, Dickens continues, are rendered more interesting because of the mythology surrounding them, some of which, he suggests, derives from ‘the romance of spring-time’.9 The tales are as romantic as those of ‘merry dances round rustic pillars, adorned with emblems of the season, and reared in honour of its coming’.10 Stories of orphaned or kidnapped children who were forced to become sweeps and then were rescued when their class origins were discovered are popular in the protest literature of the period. A four-year-old working as a climbing boy in 1804 is recorded as having been discovered by ladies who realized that he was not all he seemed: Soon after he got to Boynton, the seat of Sir George Strickland, a plate with something to eat was brought him; on seeing a silver fork he was quite delighted, and said ‘Papa had such forks as those’. He also said that the carpet in the drawing-room was like papa’s; the housekeeper showed him a silver watch, he asked what sort it was – ‘Papa’s was a gold watch’.11

The boy gives an account to his benefactors of how he was snatched while ‘gathering owers in his mamma’s garden’; torn from a natural environment and transported into the unnatural.12 Though it is dif cult to verify this kind of tale, the popularity of such narratives clearly served to reassure the bourgeoisie that the trappings of their class, in this case ‘civilized’ manners, good ‘dialect’ and taste, could be identi ed young, and were incorruptible.13 The case of Edward Montagu is the most celebrated of these climbing-boy tales. Edward, the son of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (bap. 1689–1762), ran away from Westminster School in the 1720s to work as a sweep, experiencing a number of adventures, not all of them honest, until he was nally caught trying to pawn his gold watch.14 The story entered into popular mythology by an accident of name. From 1782, the London bluestocking and society hostess, Elizabeth Montagu (1718– 1800), held an annual party on the lawn of her home, Montagu House in Portman Square, in celebration of May Day.15 The ‘climbing boys were given a shilling each and a grand feast consisting of “roast beef and plum pudding” with beer, and dancing afterwards’.16 Montagu was elected vice-patroness of the Chimney-Sweeper’s 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Frank Cass, 1961– 62), p. 348. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 George L. Phillips, ‘Mrs Montagu and the Climbing Boys’, Review of English Studies, 25 (1949), 237–44 (p. 243). 15 Strange, p. 136. 16 Ibid.

92

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Friendly Society in 1800, the year of her death.17 Edward Montagu was not related to Elizabeth Montagu, though he was believed in popular mythology to be so. The Times incorrectly attributes Elizabeth Montagu’s kindness to the sweeps to her gratitude for having found her son working in the trade, though it later corrected the assumption.18 Charles Lamb recounts the story in his essay ‘The Praise of Chimney Sweepers’ (1822): The seeds of civility and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions […] the tales of fairyspiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune, out of many irreparable and hopeless de liations.19

Lamb noticeably omits to mention the various thefts which Edward committed, preferring to characterize the boy in accordance with the contemporary perceptions of the sweep as an honest aristocrat in disguise. Mary Alcock’s ballad, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’s Complaint’ (1799) similarly emphasizes the sweep’s honesty, suggesting that in spite of the boy’s blackness or disguise, he is honest: ‘Tho’ black, and cover’d o’er with rags, / I tell you nought but truth’ says the sweep.20 The tale of Edward Montagu prompts Dickens to re ect that physical appearance is merely a veneer on which society bases incorrect social assumptions about character and worth, a point he makes in Oliver Twist too. Stories were related of a young boy who, having been stolen from his parents in his infancy, and devoted to the occupation of chimney-sweeping, was sent, in the course of his professional career, to sweep the chimney of his mother’s bedroom; and how, being hot and tired when he came out of the chimney, he got into the bed he had so often slept in as an infant, and was discovered and recognised therein by his mother, who once every year of her life, thereafter, requested the pleasure of the company of every London sweep, at half-past one o’clock, to roast beef, plum-pudding, porter, and sixpence.21

Dickens, who confuses Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth Montagu, rehearses one of many inaccurate and romanticized versions of the Montagu tale. Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782), written at the beginning of social agitation for the reform of the working conditions of sweeps, deftly uses the sweep disguise to highlight the imsiness of social veneer. The novel was published in July 1782, the year that Mrs Montagu held her rst May Day event for the sweeps. It is likely, however, only to be a coincidence that Burney places Cecilia’s London residence in Portman Square, the home of Elizabeth Montagu. The heroine’s guardian, Mr Briggs, appears dressed as a sweep at a masquerade. His use of real soot to blacken his face shocks the guests. Some of them believe that Briggs, who is thought to be of 17 Ibid., p. 137. 18 Ibid., p. 240. 19 Charles Lamb, ‘The Praise of Chimney Sweepers’, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 6 vols (London: Methuen, 1912), II, 124–30 (II, 127). 20 Mary Alcock, Poems etc etc By the Late Mrs Mary Alcock (London: C. Dilly, 1799), p. 23. 21 Dickens, ‘The First of May’, p. 170.

May Day in the City

93

low social standing, is a real sweep who has gatecrashed the party. The smell of the soot intrudes upon the sensibilities of Miss Larolles: ‘I really believe there’s a common chimney-sweeper got in! I assure you its enough to frighten one to death, for every time he moves the soot smells so you can’t think; quite real soot, I assure you! only conceive how nasty! I declare I wish with all my heart it would suffocate him!’22

The smell of the soot forces the society lady into to contact with a working world. Miss Larolles is terri ed of the social disruption that this implies. The encounter with the sweep enables her to avoid thinking (‘you can’t think’) about how the soot might affect a real sweep. The sweep’s blackness, anonymity and social inferiority frighten her. By engrossing herself in her own inconvenience, she avoids the acknowledgement of social injustice. Miss Larolles hopes that the soot suffocates the sweep, the fate of many climbing-boys; his extinction would put an end to the potential confrontation she might have with the idea of oppression. The wealthy heroine, who in typical Burney fashion is tormented by a number of public humiliations, silently recognizes the sweep as her guardian. Briggs, in an attempt to prompt her to acknowledge that she has identi ed him, opens the mouth of his soot sack and playfully offers to put her in it and ‘cram’ her up the chimney.23 Realizing that she is tainted by her guardian’s social standing, she avoids him when he attempts with ‘his sooty hands to reach her cap’. Starting back, Cecilia tries to ‘save herself from his touch’.24 Briggs responds: ‘Poor duck! won’t hurt you; don’t be frightened; nothing but your old guardian; all a joke!’ And then, patting her cheek with his dirty hand, and nodding at her with much kindness, ‘Pretty dove,’ he added, ‘be of good heart!’25

Cecilia’s dove-like whiteness is tainted by the black hand of her socially embarrassing guardian, with its implication of class inferiority. Briggs is, nevertheless, well intentioned, unlike the more daring masquerader dressed as a devil (‘black from head to foot, save that two red horns seemed to issue from his forehead’), who refuses to let any young man near Cecilia.26 The use of real soot for the sweep’s costume in this scene highlights the ambiguities of the enlightened, progressive society, which exists in tandem with, and attempts to mask, the inequities of a capitalist system. The ladies in this scene are obliged to engage with the taint of work, upon which their fortunes depend. Given the popularity of stories of disguised sweeps in this period, Burney relies on the reader being reassured that the sweep is not real, even if his soot is. The overall effect of the scene is to juxtapose the common sphere with the bourgeois sphere in such a way as to problematize both. 22 Frances Burney, Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 110. 23 Burney, p. 117. 24 Burney, p. 117 and p. 118. 25 Burney, p. 118. 26 Burney, p. 107.

94

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Questions of disguise, deceit and mistaken identity are not the only issues to arise from the May Day festivities of the urban common sphere. These issues are fundamentally about the integrity of the family as a unit, and this concern is expressed by philanthropic generosity towards the urban poor, represented speci cally by the sweep. The humanitarian debate on the working conditions of the London chimneysweep apprentices began in the 1780s and continued for several decades.27 James Montgomery collected some of the protest literature in The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend and Climbing-Boy’s Album (1824), with the aim of agitating for parliamentary reform on the issue. Much of it draws on antiquarian and rsthand observations of the festival. The rst half of the volume contains ‘miscellaneous tracts and documents’ on the working conditions of the sweeps and rsthand accounts; the second half is devoted to verse and includes Blake’s chimney-sweep poem from Songs of Innocence (1789–90).28 Charles Lamb was cautious about the effectiveness of such a combination: I think it was injudicious to mix stories avowedly colour’d by ction with the sad true statements from the parliamentary records, etc., but I wish the little Negroes all the good that can come from it. I batter’d my brains (not butter’d them – but is a bad a) for a few verses for them, but I could make nothing of it. You have been luckier. But Blake’s are the ower of the set, you will, I am sure, agree, tho’ some of Montgomery’s at the end are pretty; but the Dream awkwardly paraphras’d from B.29

Montgomery’s collection endeavours to elicit a rational response as well as an emotional one. ‘It is in vain’, Montgomery writes, ‘to talk of the age being enlightened’.30 He appeals to the pride of the nation: ‘the national disgrace is manifest: it is an offence against God; and nature cries against us!’31 Philanthropists interested in improving the working conditions of the sweeps used the city May Day to aid their cause. There is much reference to the occasion in Montgomery’s volume. William Lisle Bowles’s poem in the collection asks us to remember the sweep on May Day, When summer comes the bells shall ring, and owers and hawthorns blow, The village lasses and the lads shall all ‘a-Maying’ go: Kind-hearted lady, may thy soul in heaven a blessing reap, Whose bounty at that season ows, to cheer the little sweep. […] But one day in the toiling year the friendless sweep is gay, Protect, – and smiling industry shall make his long year May!32 27 For a discussion of the working and living conditions of the sweeps and an account of the reform of legislation on this issue see K. H. Strange Climbing Boys: A Study of Sweep’s Apprentices 1773–1875 (London: Allison and Busby, 1992), and Mayhew. 28 James Montgomery, ed., The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing-Boys Album (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824), p. vii. 29 The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb 1821–1842, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1912), II, 690–91 (15 May 1824). 30 Montgomery, p. xviii. 31 Ibid., p. 58. 32 Ibid., p. 347.

May Day in the City

95

Widely reported on, Elizabeth Montagu’s May Day, mentioned above, helped to put sweeps on the political agenda, alongside the campaigns of Jonas Hanway, David Porter, Thomas Bernard and John Howard. The participation of the sweeps in the city May Day festival, and their visibility on the streets, meant that their cause continued to claim a high pro le. Although the sweeps were often treated with contempt, their role in May Day literature is principally to receive the donations or succour of the spectator- gure, whose sensibility is awakened by their performances. Hazlitt notes that the procession of the sweeps calls forth ‘good-humoured smiles and looks of sympathy in the spectators’.33 In Southey’s Letters from England (1807), sweeps solicit money from the crowds who watch their May Day procession.34 The antiquarian Robert Chambers suggests that the boys ‘expect to be remunerated by halfpence from the onlookers’.35 Lamb, too, recommends giving money to sweeps in his essay ‘May Day Effusion’ of 1822.36 The majority of poems on sweeps imply or implore a charitable act of some kind. William Holloway’s The Chimney Sweeper’s Complaint (1806) opens with a man questioning a boy-sweep on May Day: ‘Why hangs that tear upon thy cheek, / My little sooty boy?’37 The boy replies that he cannot join in the ‘May-Day sports’ because ‘all my little-gains, / At evening, shall be swept away, / And pleasures changed to pains’.38 The boy recounts his history, his sojourn with a band of gypsies, his search for an uncle who dies penniless, and a spell in the workhouse, before being ‘apprentic’d slave’ to ‘this miserable trade’.39 His only respite has been Mrs Montagu’s May Day celebration: In all this time, one holiday Is all I ever knew – That given by the Sweeper’s friend – Good MADAM MONTAGUE.40

After the death of Mrs Montagu, the sweep adds, this sole relief from drudgery ceased. The celebrations were in fact continued by a nephew of Elizabeth Montagu for some years after her death. At the end of the poem, in the style of the sentimental novel, it is revealed that the boy has been talking to the friendly squire he has been seeking all along, who ultimately gives him charity, declaring ‘Benevolence is still at home’.41 Humanitarian writers made much of the ‘blackness’ of the climbing boys. Occasionally there are attempts to dispel the negative connotations of the colour:

33 34 35 36 37 p. 1. 38 39 40 41

Hazlitt, Complete Works , XVII, 154. Southey, Letters from England, p. 78. Chambers, II, 573. Lamb, ‘The Praise of Chimney Sweepers’, p. 124. William Holloway, The Chimney-Sweeper’s Complaint (London: J. Harris, 1806), Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 33.

96

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

‘Tho’ black without, they’re not within, / No harm they think, so cannot sin’.42 Rarely given the opportunity to wash, the soot clung to their clothes and skin. Their blackness also prompted associations of their cause with that of African slaves. Literature concerned with the improvement of the working conditions of climbing boys employs strategies common in reformist and abolitionist literature. Sentimentalist techniques, such as the inclusion of personal testimony, benevolent benefactors, the expression of hope for freedoms which have been denied, examples of abuses and stories of release from oppression, are common. Habitually represented as black in the visual media, sweeps are seen as racially other. Charles Lamb calls them ‘young Africans of our own growth’.43 Thomas Hood’s satirical poem, ‘The Sweep’s Complaint’ satirizes the suggestion that the blackness of sweeps and the blackness of slaves can be easily equated. His sweep says: We shan’t do for black mutes to go a standing at a death’s door. And we shan’t do to emigrate, no not even to the Hottentot nations, For as time wears on, our black will wear off, and then think of our situations! And we should not do, in lieu of black-a-moor footmen, to serve ladies of quality nimbly, For when we were drest in our sky-blue and silver, and large frills, all clean and neat, and white silk stockings, if they pleased to desire us to sweep the hearth, we couldn’t resist the chimbley.44

Hood laments that the ‘gagging’ act, the law passed in 1834 which prohibited the sweeps from ‘calling the streets’ in order to tout for business, will lead to greater hardship for the climbing-boys: ‘Next year there won’t be any May-day at all, we shan’t have no heart to dance’ (l. 62). The boys’ sooty bodies are emblematic of the unacceptable immorality of the city that is implicated in their plight. Southey, Hunt, Lamb, Hazlitt, Hood and Dickens all comment on the working conditions of the climbing boys in the context of discussions of the London May Day festival. They express discontent with the tawdry disguises the boys traditionally wear, and the incongruity of an urban celebration of an event usually associated with rural life. This plebeian ritual of the common sphere is, for them, the epitome of urban cultural degeneration. May Day in the city is widely seen as an occasion on which the difference between rural and urban is conspicuous. Leigh Hunt is disturbed by the focus on chimney sweeps in contemporary May Day festivities, calling for an end to this ‘melancholy burlesque’; ‘Will anybody have the goodness to abolish the May-day chimney sweepers?’45 Sweeps, too much associated with the industrial world of dirt and smoke, present an unsettling paradox 42 Anon., May-Day: A Poem in Four Parts (London: H. Turpin, 1790), p. 18. 43 Lamb, ‘The Praise of Chimney Sweepers’, p. 124. 44 The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed. by Walter Jerrold (London: Henry Frowde, 1906), p. 314, ll. 87–91. 45 Hunt, ‘Tomorrow is the First of May’, p. 34; Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old MayDay’, p. 216.

May Day in the City

97

for Hunt: they are ‘a contradiction to the season’.46 Hunt sympathizes with their situation, lamenting that they have only one holiday, and that they are exploited: ‘Give them money for God’s sake, all you that inhabit the squares and great streets’.47 The spectacle of the sweeps, nevertheless, is a ‘blot upon the season’.48 Spring should be ‘clean, wholesome, and vernal’, whereas the sweeps present an amalgam of ‘dirty skin, dance, and disease’.49 For Hunt, the sweeps are not suf ciently disguised: ‘They contradict even the spirit of masquerade itself; and, like the miser in the novel, wear real chimney-sweeping clothes, with a little tinsel to make the reality more palpable’.50 Hunt’s disapproval of the involvement of sweeps in the festival is coupled with a benevolent wish for an improvement of their lot. He identi es the city version of the festival with the degeneration of English culture, regarding the sweeps as a disturbing image, not merely because of their destitution, though this is signi cant, but because of their incompatibility with the naturalness of spring. The milkmaids of the past, who had also taken part in the city procession, are more to his taste. For Hunt the rural common sphere is more faithful to what is fundamentally a celebration of nature than the urban festival is. Although nature can exist in the city, it cannot be exempli ed by a group – the chimney sweeps – whose raison d’être is the preservation of the commercialized urban space. Prior to Songs of Innocence, it is rare for chimney sweeps to be mentioned in creative literature without direct reference to the English May Day. The anonymously written ‘May Day’ (1790) tells of ‘poor little Smut the Chimney-Sweeper’, who though ‘low in fortune’ is not ‘forlorn’, and blithely hails the ‘birth of rosy May’.51 St James’s Street (1790), by Marmaduke Milton (the pseudonym of Charles Dunster [1750-1816]), a poem about the rich and fashionable who travel to London for its diversions, describes the chimney-sweeps’ procession as one of the sights of the town. They are ‘in motley dress array’d’, wearing ‘bushy Perukes’ and dancing the ‘Moresque gay’ whilst accompanied by ‘the patt’ring Brush’.52 The sweeps in the poetry of the Romantic period are usually poverty-stricken and oppressed, but they turn out for May Day. The association of sweeps with May Day continues well into the Victorian period. Thackeray’s comparison of the ‘mulatto’ heiress, Miss Swartz, with a gaudily dressed May Day sweep in Vanity Fair (1847) reinforces the link between sweeps, May Day costume, and the racial other. [H]onest Swartz is in her favourite amber-coloured satin with turquoise-bracelets, countless rings, owers, feathers, and all sorts of tags and gimcracks, about as elegantly decorated as a she-chimney-sweep on May day.53 46 Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’, p. 217. 47 Hunt, ‘Tomorrow is the First of May’, p. 33. 48 Hunt, ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’, p. 217. 49 Hunt, Ibid., and Hunt, ‘The Month of May’, p. 53. 50 Hunt, ‘New May-Day’, p. 217. 51 Anon., May-Day: A Poem in Four Parts, p. 18. 52 Marmaduke Milton, St. James’s Street. A Poem. In Blank Verse (London: J. Debrett and E. Harlow, 1790), p. 8. 53 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. by Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 199.

98

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

This description implies the familiar character of the sweep as a disguised aristocrat, and the racial ambiguity that the ‘blackness’ of the sweep denotes. Her status as a wealthy woman of white and black parentage is as socially ambivalent as that of the sweep. The sweep’s blackness denotes his social inferiority, but this status, according to the popular stories, has the potential to be impermanent. The social inferiority suggested by Miss Swartz’s blackness is rendered irrelevant by her money. Blake’s May Day William Blake’s awareness of the city May Day festival is not dif cult to determine. He produced an engraving of Samuel Collings’s picture of the London May Day procession of sweeps for The Wit’s Magazine in 1784 (see Figure 4.1); and ‘The Sunshine Holiday’, one of Blake’s watercolour illustrations of L’Allegro (c.1816– 20), depicts a group dancing around a maypole, picking up on Milton’s lines: ‘Zephir with Aurora playing, / As he met her once a Maying’ (ll. 19–20).54 Though there is no evidence to suggest that he saw the festival rsthand, it is hard to imagine that Blake would not have known that May Day was celebrated in London throughout his lifetime. Blake’s 1784 engraving, entitled ‘May-Day’, portrays a group of sweeps in large wigs dancing with milkmaids in the streets and, judging from contemporary accounts, it is an accurate portrait of the festival. From this picture we can establish that Blake knew of the prominence of the sweeps in the London celebration of May Day.55 Blake’s poetic interest in sweeps is perceived, in the critical literature, as conventionally humanitarian.56 Songs of Innocence, containing Blake’s rst chimney-sweep poem, was published a year after the rst chimney-sweep act was passed (1788), and so the poem has a contemporary political resonance. Critics have focused on the irony of the stoicism expressed by the sweeps, on the signi cance of the vision in Innocence, and on descriptions of the harsh conditions under which the sweeps worked and lived.57 Kathleen Raine, for example, regards the poems as 54 The picture also is illustrated in Ronald Primeau, ‘Blake’s Chimney Sweeper as AfroAmerican Minstrel’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1974–75), 418–30 (p. 423) and in Judge, Jack-in-the-Green: A May-Day Custom, p. 10. 55 Other evidence con rms that the sweeps are signi cant enough to signify May Day. See Anon. May-Day: A Poem in Four Parts (London: H. Roberts; W. Fry, 1769), cited from the 1790 edition; Milton, St. James’s Street, A Poem (1790); William Holloway, The ChimneySweeper’s Complaint (1806). See also George L. Phillips, England’s Climbing Boys: The History of the Long Struggle to Abolish Child Labor in Chimney-Sweeping (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1949). 56 John Adlard, who makes the most sustained case for Blake’s use of folklore, only touches on the festival in passing pointing out that Blake mentions it. John Adlard, The Sports of Cruelty: Fairies, Folk-Songs, Charms and Other Country Matters in the Work of William Blake (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1972), p. 126. 57 See Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Vintage, 1995); David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New York: Dover, 1977); D. G. Gillham, Blake’s Contrary States: The ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ As Dramatic Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Nicholas Marsh, William Blake: The Poems (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave,

May Day in the City

99

Fig. 4.1 Samuel Collings (del.) and William Blake (sculp.), ‘May-Day in London’, The Wit’s Magazine expressive of ‘social indignation’.58 The extent to which the Songs are May Day poems, and the connotations of Blake’s use of rural May Day images, have not been examined in any detail in the critical literature, though occasional comment has been made on the chimney-sweep procession as part of the social context of the poems.59 The reason for the lack of thorough exploration of the May Day context is the dominance of the view that Songs is not a collection of pastoral poems, and that Blake is not a pastoral poet. Blake’s frequent reference to spring is regarded as little more than the appropriate backdrop for depicting innocence, or as an allegory for

2001); Paul D. McGlynn, ‘Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence)’, The Explicator, 27 (1968), 20; Martin K. Nurmi, ‘Fact and Symbol in “The Chimney Sweeper” of Blake’s Songs of Innocence’, in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 15–22; Porter Williams, ‘“Duty” in Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” of Songs of Innocence’, English Language Notes, 12 (1974), 92–6. 58 Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), I, 20. 59 Ackroyd, p. 123.

100

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Christian symbolism.60 The chimney-sweeper poems are often used as evidence that Blake does not use the pastoral mode. The reading of Blake as an anti-pastoralist needs some comment. Terry Gifford asserts that in Songs of Experience (1794) Blake undercuts the ‘sentimentalising pastoral’ of Innocence, transcending the ‘Sunday School’ homiletic tradition by exposing, via a dialectical mode of writing, the ‘hypocrisy on which it was based’.61 The dialectical mode, he argues, enables Blake ‘to give true innocence its importance, whilst indicating the experience required to recognize it’: ‘The journey through Hell was the way to achieve a perception of Heaven that was not an idealized Arcadia’.62 Gifford understands Songs of Experience as evidence that the pastoralism of Songs of Innocence is undermined. Reading the volume as a whole, Gifford argues, reveals Blake’s anti-pastoral stance. Asserting that Experience is the key to understanding Innocence as anti-pastoral, Gifford avoids the issue of whether Blake may have intended Innocence to have been read as pastoral when it was published initially as a stand-alone volume. He hints that it is possible to understand Innocence as celebrating the pastoral, but his interpretation of Blake as ‘celebratory whilst corrective’ is enigmatic.63 It is dif cult to assess his argument for reading Songs as anti-pastoral, as Gifford offers little evidence.64 His de nition of anti-pastoralism appears to be limited to understanding Blake’s motivation to be in opposition to the sentimentalising tradition through the exposure of the ‘pastorally-comforting images of Heaven as self-deceiving constructs’.65 The evidence for this anti-pastoralism is based on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c1793). The obscurity of the narrative voice in this text, which is largely diabolical and therefore likely to be contrary to Blake’s own, undermines Gifford’s theory. Michael Tolley and Robert Gleckner come closest to discussing Songs as a collection of pastoral poems.66 Tolley argues that spring, for Blake, ‘is more than a natural season: it is a type of the paradisaical state to which we may be called in death and which we may apprehend even during our mortal life through the power of the Imagination’.67 Commenting on the Biblical context for spring images in Blake’s work, Tolley argues that Blake’s exotic spring (‘To Spring’, Poetical Sketches) implies an anticipated apocalypse.68 The less exotic ‘May Songs’ of Poetical 60 Commentary on the spring poems is rarely sophisticated. Tolley suggests, for example, that ‘One can get a lot of harmless fun from chanting it: the pleasures of analysis are not comparable’. Michael J. Tolley, ‘Blake’s Songs of Spring’, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. by Morton D. Paley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 96–128 (p. 110). 61 Terry Gifford, Pastoral, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 134. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 This is an introductory work, and Blake’s poetry is discussed in two pages. 65 Gifford, p. 134. 66 Martin Nurmi recognizes that the sweep poems should be viewed in the context of the rest of Songs of Innocence and Experience, but like others sees the poems in terms of ‘contrary states’. 67 Tolley, p. 96. 68 Ibid., p. 98.

May Day in the City

101

Sketches are not discussed in any depth, however, because the season is interpreted here as ‘only a setting for the human concern, the joys and torments of love, and is not itself the subject’.69 Spring in Songs of Innocence is, likewise, understood as largely ‘free from obtrusive allusions’. Only ‘Holy Thursday’ is deemed ‘richly allusive’ in a theological sense.70 The remainder of the songs are praised for their ‘freshness, simplicity, and purity of tone’.71 Songs is seen as Blake’s digression on a less theological aspect of spring, with occasional theological signi cance appearing in ‘Holy Thursday’, ‘The Ecchoing Green’ and ‘The Little Vagabond’. Songs of Experience, Tolley suggests, focuses on the ‘premature blighting of Spring’ in a humanitarian context; the symbolism of destruction is a metaphor for the miserable lives of the less fortunate.72 He underestimates the potential of Songs to signify spring as more than just a ‘season of innocent creativity’, or a metaphor for the ‘eternal state of Innocence’.73 Gleckner, like Tolley, downplays both the pastoral and the theological signi cance of spring in Songs. In the majority of poems in Songs of Innocence, Gleckner claims, spring does not ‘play a major role except as a contrasting element’.74 E. D. Hirsch offers the most sustained reading of Songs as pastoral poems. Comparing ‘Song by an Old Shepherd’ (Poetical Sketches) and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Innocence), Hirsch observes that: ‘we can see the direct lineal descent of the Songs of Innocence from [Blake’s] early pastorals’.75 In the opening poem to Innocence, Blake initially ‘presents himself as a poet of secular pastorals’.76 The poet receives a new inspiration, Hirsch suggests, to sing a religious song: ‘it is to be played on the same pipe as before and will be written down with the same “rural pen”’.77 Blake, he argues, exploits the ‘natural association between pastoral imagery and Christian symbolism’.78 In combining pastoral and Christian symbols, Blake ‘could transcend the restrictions of the traditional pastoral, and could even write city poems of innocence’.79 If we apply Owen Schur’s broader de nition of the pastoral, however, it is possible to understand Blake as working within the pastoral mode:

69 Ibid., p. 105. Tolley suggests that Blake’s May Songs are: ‘How sweet I roam’d’, ‘Fresh from the dewy hill’ and ‘When early morn walks forth’. I would also include ‘I love the jocund dance’, which Tolley does not include because it ‘has no indisputable marks of spring about it’ (p. 106). The connection between this poem and ‘The Ecchoing Green’ implies, however, that it has a May Day context. Tolley does not discuss the chimney sweep poems. 70 Ibid., p. 106. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p. 112. 73 Ibid., and p. 110. 74 Robert F. Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), p. 95. 75 E. D. Hirsch, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 26. 76 Ibid., p. 27. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., p. 28.

102

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition Pastoral is a genre that explores rules and boundaries and the ways the individual transgresses them. Pastoral creates a self-contained world, normally composed of a country setting, with rural simple folk as the principal characters. But it ventures into the city at times, and the tone and style hold in a state of tension rural simplicity and cosmopolitan sophistication.80

Hirsch’s de nition of pastoral underestimates its complexity; it is possible to understand Blake to be working within the tradition of the pastoral, rather than transcending it. Blake consciously fails to mention the chimney-sweep ritual of the urban common sphere, seeing the rural May Day of the peasant common sphere as a refuge for the urban oppressed. Songs depends on the pastoral form and pastoral imagery for its theological and liberational message.81 Blake rejects the morality and the sentimentality of the homiletic Sunday-School book by restating the stoicism found in these books as irony; but his contempt for the genre neither implies nor necessitates an aversion to the emblematization of pastoral images and themes commonly found in this genre. Blake’s Songs are traditionally pastoral and theologically conventional. Anna Letitia Barbauld’s popular Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), one of the more sophisticated and least sentimental examples of the genre, similarly embraces the pastoral whilst rejecting the conventional morality associated with these books. Barbauld employs pastoral subject matter to reveal ‘the Creator in the visible appearances’ which surround the child.82 As her editors comment, ‘the child reader is invited to associate God with the beauties, pleasures, and goodness of the natural and human worlds’.83 Like Blake, Barbauld aims to distance the genre from the pessimism and overly doctrinal didacticism which characterizes it; she performs this task ingenuously. Barbauld’s rejection of the Calvinist model for children’s books does not imply a renunciation of pastoral subject matter; these prose poems employ the pastoral subject, largely anglicized, because of its familiarity to the child reader. She offers the pastoral subject as a counter to the exoticism and eroticism of the Psalms. It was appropriate for inspiring ‘devotional feelings’ in children because of its simplicity.84 Blake’s Songs goes further than Barbauld’s Hymns in re ecting the nuances of classical pastoralism by exploiting the tension between the sophistication of the speaker and the naive subject. The representation of Blake as an anti-pastoralist underestimates the sophistication of the pastoral form. Songs of Experience does not undermine Innocence through its oppositional tropes; rather, it helps to de ne Innocence as pastoral.

80 Owen Schur, Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 5. 81 My position differs from that of Hirsch. Hirsch implies that Blake does not employ the pastoral but transcends it. 82 Anna Barbauld, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. by William McCarthy Kraft and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), p. 238. 83 Ibid., p. 235. 84 Ibid., p. 238.

May Day in the City

103

Pastoral in its very beginnings moves beyond the bucolic world. In fact the bucolic acquires its de nition by interacting with its opposite: the bucolic world cannot exist without its counterpart. […] Sometimes pastoral play makes characters appear to be children of the world, simultaneously naive and calculating.85

Blake’s Songs employ the traditional rhetoric of the genre: the golden age, the locus amoenus (lovely place), the language games, the competition between voices: The genre functions in terms of a constant tension between thesis and antithesis, opposites working toward an unfolding synthesis; this is the modality of the form’s progression. Pastoral’s dialectical play takes as its ground the idea of song.86

According to Owen Schur’s de nition of pastoral, the dialectical mode is typical of the genre. Blake’s pastoral May Day in Songs exhibits a dialectical relationship with the sweep poems and the other urban poems of social oppression in the collection. The pastoral elements in Blake’s Songs, like Barbauld’s Hymns, clearly possess religious signi cance. Heaven is often, in Blake’s poetry, ‘a pastoral landscape’.87 Hirsch suggests that the ‘ecchoing green’ is ‘not simply a symbol of spiritual blessedness but a sacramental experience of what Heaven is really like’.88 That is, Blake’s symbolism is not just a representation; the green either is Heaven, or brings about Heaven. The spiritual dimension of the green is made real sacramentally. Hirsch bases this interpretation on Blake’s understanding of Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences: ‘all objects and events in the natural world have a corresponding meaning in the spiritual world’.89 The green, then, represents and gives an encounter with the heavenly reality, and the innocence of children is ‘a manifestation of heavenly insight’.90 Hirsch reads ‘Spring’ (Innocence) as a Swedenborgian poem: ‘the interest resides almost entirely in the sacramental meaning’.91 He interprets the ‘ ute’ of the poem as ‘a pastoral prophecy of the last trumpet’.92 While Hirsch’s arguments in favour of understanding the religious connotations of much of Blake’s pastoral imagery are compelling, little evidence is offered for understanding these images as sacramental. In the case of Songs, it is uncertain how far we should interpret this as Swedenborgianism, or as millenarianism. Blake’s earlier uses of spring anticipate some of the Christian images seen in Songs, and in the prefatory poem to Milton (1804). The speaker of ‘To Spring’ (1783) invites the season to return to Britain in the supplicatory opening. Spring, personi ed as a holy bridegroom with ‘angel eyes’ (l. 3), is welcomed back to the bride, Britain (l. 3). There are echoes of the Christian identi cation of the male lover with Christ, and the overall language implies a theologically orthodox characterization of Christ as king. The whole of creation entreats Spring to visit: ‘let thy holy feet visit our 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Schur, p. 3. Ibid. Hirsch, p. 37. Ibid. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 39.

104

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

clime’ (l. 8). Spring is orientalized, and is, unusually, male. The arrival of the season is like the return, from the warm East, of a wealthy monarch who has abandoned his love. The monarch’s approach is hailed by a ‘full choir’ (nature) and ‘all our longing eyes’ are ‘turned up to’ his ‘bright pavillions’ (l. 6–7). Like the Eastern bridegroom, his garments are perfumed, and it is anticipated that his arrival will be accompanied by a display of wealth: ‘scatter thy pearls / Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee’ (ll. 11–12). When the bridegroom returns, we are told, the bride will be dressed by his ‘fair ngers’ (l. 13), and honoured with a ‘golden crown’ (l. 15), suggesting, perhaps, a heavenly reward. The bride’s hair, previously bound to show her modesty, will then be freed (l. 16). The joy of the bride on the return of the bridegroom is akin to the joy of salvation, and recalls Isaiah: I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels. (Isaiah 61:10)

The presence of the bridegroom, in the New Testament, is an event for rejoicing. Jesus is asked why his disciples do not fast, as the Pharisees fast often. He replies: ‘Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast’ (Matthew 9:15; Mark 2:19–20; Luke 5: 34–5). The parable of the foolish virgins likewise places Christ in the position of much anticipated bridegroom (Matthew 25: 1–13). Blake’s early poetry overtly combines the imagery of spring with the theology of imminent salvation: ‘Each eld seems Eden, and each calm retreat; / Each village seems the haunt of holy feet’ (‘Fresh from the dewy hill’, ll. 15–16). There seems to be insuf cient evidence to argue for an interpretation of Blake’s pastoral-religious symbolism in Songs as anything other than theologically conventional. Hirsch implies that Blake’s interest in Swedenborg is suf cient to support a reading of ‘Spring’ as apocalyptic.93 There is, however, very little apocalyptic imagery in any of Blake’s songs. The images which occur in the poems possess none of the grotesqueness or unnaturalness of Revelation.94 Blake’s spring imagery unquestionably implies salvation, but the extent to which the imagery implies the millenarianism Hirsch suggests is debatable. Gillham argues that ‘The Songs announce no millennium and explore the challenges of living without suggesting any way of escaping dif culty. […] It is true that Blake talks of a millennium in the Songs’, but he ‘does not say anything positive’ about it.95 Coleridge’s millenarian Religious Musings (1794–96) gures Christ, as shepherd, returning to gather the lambs. There is considerably more evidence for the presence of millenarianism in 93 Ibid., p. 38. 94 Authors who focus on Blake’s apocalypticism mention Songs only rarely. See for example Morton Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), and Romanticism and Millenarianism, ed. by Tim Fulford (New York: Palgrave, 2002). This is, presumably, because they do not think that Songs is apocalyptic. 95 Gillham, pp. 216–17.

May Day in the City

105

Coleridge’s poem. If we are to accept Hirsch’s interpretation of the refrain, ‘Merrily, Merrily to welcome in the Year’, a conventional line in English pastoral poetry associated with May Day, as giving ‘to the word “Year” the same apocalyptic sense it has in Isaiah’, further evidence is needed than an interest in Swedenborg, who was not a millenarian.96 Blake explores, in Songs of Innocence and Experience, the tensions seen in pastoral poetry: the ‘dialectic between voice and written word’.97 The opening poem of Innocence establishes the pastoral and theological positioning of Songs with regard to this dialectic, associating the importance of the physical inscription of song with the Word. The piper meets a child, who requests ‘a song about a Lamb’ (‘Introduction’, l. 5). This scene implies both the easeful life of a classical shepherd in springtime, and the calling of a devoted evangelist to sing of the Lamb of God. The child’s tears, in response to the song, suggest the joy and sorrow of the Passion. The idea of the poet as musician is succeeded by his representation as a writer (or even artist) when the pipe is exchanged for a reed, with which the speaker makes a ‘rural pen’. Blake puns on the word for animal enclosure and for the writing implement with which he records (or encloses) his bucolic scene (‘Introduction’, l. 17). Experience begins with a call to listen to the voice of the prophetic Bard who sees ‘Present, Past & Future’ (l. 2) and whose ears have heard ‘The Holy Word / That walk’d among the ancient trees’ (ll. 4–5). The opening stanzas suggest a confusion of the senses, through metaphorical play on seeing and hearing, echoing the verbal play of ‘Introduction’ (Innocence). Blake emphasizes, in ‘Introduction’ (Experience), the power of language to be emblematized through his reference to Christ as Word. The Word walks ‘among the ancient trees’ (l. 5). The Bard calls out to ‘the lapsed Soul’ (l. 6), and weeps at its loss. His role recalls the Shepherd of Innocence, who ‘hears the lamb’s innocent call’ (l. 5). The more overtly theological introduction to Experience engages with the theological pastoralism of the equivalent poem from Innocence. The poet’s acknowledgement of the uncertainties of polysemic language in Songs, and his discussion of the meaning of Christian-pastoral symbols, indicate that he works within the pastoral tradition: ‘Pastoral involves play through and about language, and the genre takes form around language games’.98 The ludic nature of Songs plays out in the spring imagery. Spring unites the Songs of Innocence, through its associated pastoral and theological imagery. Lambs, shepherds, buds, blossom, village green (as locus amoenus), morning dew, youth and Easter are pastoral motifs which connect the poems. The salvi c symbolism of spring permeates Songs of Innocence. The signi cance of the lamb as a symbol of Christ is teased out by the child-speaker of ‘The Lamb’. The child informs the Lamb that he or she has recognized the animal’s signi cance as a Christian symbol. The child’s mimicking of the role of the religious instructor points to the poem’s self-re exivity in that the poet draws attention to his own use of Christian allegory. The infant, in turn, becomes a Christian symbol in ‘A Cradle Song’:

96 Hirsch, p. 39. 97 Schur, p. 6. 98 Ibid., p. 5.

106

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition Sweet babe in thy face, Holy image I can trace. Sweet babe once like thee, Thy maker lay and wept for me (ll. 21–4).

This Christian symbolism is consolidated by the priest-like shepherd whose ‘sweet lot’ (‘The Shepherd’, l. 1) is to look after his ock, and whose ‘tongue shall be lled with praise’ (l. 4). The May Day celebration on the village green is a central pastoral image in Innocence – a paradise recurring in moments of extreme happiness and security. ‘The Ecchoing Green’ depicts a harmonious May Day scene. Here, the musical sounds of nature combine with the sound of bells rung with ‘chearful sound’ (l. 8) to ‘welcome the Spring’ (l. 4). The poet stresses continuity between the simple rural pleasures of the present and those of the past. In a scene that anticipates Wat Tyler, the ‘old folk’ (l. 14) remember how they used to celebrate on the green; the children ‘echo’ the pursuits of the older generation. In harmony with the elements, the children’s sport concludes only when the day ends and the sun descends on ‘the darkening green’ (l. 30). The details of the sports are left unspeci c in the poem, but the main illustration on the panel accompanying the rst two stanzas shows one group of boys playing with a bat and a ball, while others to the right of the painting observe them. They are watched by a man and several women with babies and young children, who are sitting on a circular seat that surrounds the trunk of a sheltering oak tree. The seated women recall the iconography of the Madonna and child; again, the pastoral implies a sense of religious assurance. The ‘oaken seat’ also makes an appearance in ‘I love the jocund dance’, as a central place ‘where all the old villagers meet, / And laugh our sports to see’ (ll. 15–16). This song is clearly an earlier version of ‘The Ecchoing Green’. ‘I love the jocund dance’ similarly celebrates the pastoral space, alluding to the ‘laughing vale’ (l. 5), ‘ecchoing hill’ (l. 6), ‘pleasant cot’ (l. 9), ‘innocent bow’r’ (l. 10), ‘oaken seat’ (l. 13), ‘oaken tree’ (l. 14). In the panel beneath the main painting accompanying ‘The Ecchoing Green’, a boy stands with a bat and another plays with a hoop and stick. A vine holding a large bunch of black grapes curls itself around and between the stanzas and the children. As has been noted elsewhere, the grapes are out of season and thus likely to be symbolic.99 The illustrations accompanying the second two stanzas show two boys abandoning their games in order to pick the grapes from the vines. One of them hands bunches to the retiring group which is heading home as the sun sets; the group is led by an old man who shepherds them home. Zachary Leader proposes that the plucking of the grapes indicates the dawning of ‘youthful sexuality’, and that the boy secretly hands the grapes to the group of girls away from the gaze of the adults.100 They are, Geoffrey Keynes argues, ‘on the road to Experience, passing from the Age of Innocence to that of sexual awareness’.101 Andrew Lincoln casts doubt on this, 99 Tolley, p. 110. 100 Zachary Leader, Reading Blake’s ‘Songs’ (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 86. 101 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pl. 6.

May Day in the City

107

however, because ‘there seems to be no secrecy concerning the grapes’.102 Blake suggested that children playing were akin to Heaven; and so it seems likely the scene is to be interpreted as a religious symbol. There seems to be no reason to suppose that the grapes do not have their usual symbolism of the blood of Christ. The river at the bottom of the panel suggests Baptism and Christ as ‘the Water of Life’.103 Blake continues, here, the application of the season as a metaphor for salvation that we see in ‘To Spring’ (Poetical Sketches). The green site is coupled with celebration in Innocence, and is often associated with social activity, and, in particular, children. ‘The Ecchoing Green’ resounds with ‘chearful sound’ of sports (l. 9). In ‘Nurse’s Song’, ‘the voices of children are heard on the green / And laughing is heard on the hill’ (ll. 1–2). ‘Laughing Song’ tells of ‘the green woods’ which ‘laugh with the voice of joy’ (l. 1) and the meadows which ‘laugh with lively green’ (l. 5). It comes as no surprise that the sweep’s vision of happiness is a green space: ‘then down a green plain leaping laughing they run’ (l. 15). The ‘green elds and happy groves, / where ocks have took delight’ and ‘silent moves / The feet of angels bright’ are silent at the end of the day in ‘Night’ (ll. 11–13). The pastoral and Christian symbols of peace are combined, in this poem, with the image of the lion, who like the wolf in Isaiah (11.6 and 65.25), lies down ‘beside the bleating lamb’ (l. 41). In ‘The Garden of Love’ (Experience), the green space is also the location of a church: ‘A Chapel was built in the midst’ of the garden ‘Where I used to play on the green’ (ll. 3–4). The poet condemns, however, the chapel’s prohibitive sign: ‘Thou shalt not’ (l. 6). The garden’s ‘sweet owers’ are replaced by ‘graves, / And tombstones where owers should be’ (ll. 9–10). The songs of Experience either lament the inaccessibility of the green space, or recast it as a dangerous or ruined environment. In Songs, the escape from oppression to a spring paradise is a liberational trope for both the little black boy and the chimney sweeps. Humanitarian literature often employs the pastoral mode, and indeed Christian-pastoral signi cance, to exemplify moments of comfort and consolation. Barbauld’s ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce’ (1792), for example, expresses a yearning for ‘A new Astrean reign, an age of gold’ (l. 14). Here it is hoped that Astrea, the goddess of Justice, will return. Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose (1781) similarly idealize the rural scene: ‘There is a land, where the roses are without thorns, where the owers are not mixed with brambles. In that land there is eternal spring and light without any cloud’.104 Songs laments the loss of an Hesiodian spring paradise that equates to the Fall. Paradise, according to ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (Experience), was an ‘Age of Gold, / Free from winter’s cold’ (ll. 1–2), where ‘Once a youthful pair / Fill’d with softest care: / Met in garden bright’ (ll. 10–12). Blake’s letters reveal an early enthusiasm for classical subjects, though this cooled later. Blake writes in 1799 that his aim is ‘to renew the lost Art of the 102 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, ed. by Andrew Lincoln (Princeton, New Jersey: 1991), p. 147. 103 Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 413. 104 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children, 4th edn (London: T. Bensley, 1787), p. 97.

108

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Greeks’.105 Furthermore, he describes his work in A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810) as ‘an Endeavour to Restore what the Ancients called the Golden Age’.106 The golden age pastoral paradise is associated in Songs with youth and springtime. ‘The School-Boy’ (Experience) sings of the reluctant scholar who is obliged to forget ‘his youthful spring’ and study (l. 20). The narrator of the poem appeals to the boy’s parents to think of the future damage this will cause: O! father & mother, if buds are nip’d, And blossoms blown away, And if the tender plants are strip’d Of their joy in the springing day, By sorrow and care’s dismay, How shall the summer arise in joy? Or the summer fruits appear? (ll. 21–6).

Blake, who thanked God that he never went to school, argues, using a spring metaphor, that freedom should be granted to the young in order that they be allowed to blossom. The lost or blighted golden age is lamented, but a future paradise is to come. The eternal spring recurs as a symbol of a future Heaven throughout Innocence and Experience. The little black boy looks forward to a time when ‘round the tent of God like lambs we joy’ (l. 24), and the chimney sweep of Innocence envisions a future paradise, a sunny ‘green plain’ (l. 15). Blake’s Songs is preoccupied with children who are lost or have suppressed identities and who are hopeful of rescue by God or a father gure. Given the prevalence of tales of lost boy-sweeps in the eighteenth century, it is likely that Blake had heard of them and that their tales resonate here. Benita Cullingford suggests that Blake may have been inspired to write about sweeps after hearing the story of Isaac Ware, a cockney sweep who was discovered on the street by Lord Burlington.107 The boy, who was fond of drawing chalk pictures on the pavement, was found to be of good character, and was subsequently released from his apprenticeship and educated to become an architect. ‘The Little Boy Lost’ (Innocence) is less hopeful. Here the brisk-walking father is as ethereal as gas: ‘away the vapour ew’ (l. 8), leaving the child in the deep ‘mire’ (l. 7). ‘The Little Boy Found’ (Innocence) is rescued by God who ‘Appeard like his father in white’ (l. 4). The stripping of the boy in ‘A Little Boy Lost’ (Experience) recasts the trope of identity revelation as a punishment scene: ‘They strip’d him to his little shirt, /And bound him in an iron chain’ (ll. 19–20). The boy is stripped because he mistakes his devotional teaching. The priest, objecting to the boy’s assumption that animals are on a par with humans, reprimands the boy for misconstruing his catechism. The boy’s candour is punished, ironically, by an unmasking, and he is metaphorically blackened by being ‘burn’d’ in ‘a holy place’ 105 The Letters of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), p. 27. 106 Johnson and Grant, p. 410. 107 Benita Cullingford, British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeping (Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 2000), p. 216.

May Day in the City

109

(l. 21). Blake reverses the expected progression of the lost boy tale: the movement from harm to safety, from blackness to whiteness, from slavery to freedom, from unwelcome disguise to restorative disclosure. Here the boy encounters a priest who condemns him to be spiritually burnt, enslaves him in an ‘iron chain’ and reveals his body in order to reinforce his subjection. Blake’s An Island in the Moon (1784) similarly displaces the city celebration with a rural May Day. The authoritarian Mr Lawgiver sings of a rural, but not Christian, paradise: As I walkd forth one May morning To see the elds so pleasant & so gay, O there did I spy a young maiden sweet, Among the Violets that smell so sweet, Smell so sweet, Smell so sweet, Among the Violets that smell so sweet (chapter 9).

This song is juxtaposed with the ‘great confusion & disorder’ of London street criers and merrymakers who idealize ‘Maidens dancing’ and ‘country folks, a-courting’ (chapter 8). Mr Lawgiver’s ideal is rejected by Tilly Lally who cries ‘Hang your Violets’ and offers him rum and water. The allusions to commodities produced by slaves – rum, sugar and treacle – further disparage urban life at the expense of the rural. Tilly recounts her brief tale: ‘Joe Bradley & I was going along one day in the Sugar-house. Joe Bradley saw – for he had but one eye – saw a treacle Jar. So he goes of his blind side & dips his hand up to the shoulder in treacle. “Here, lick, lick, lick!’ said her. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! For he had but one eye. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ho!”’ (chapter 9).

In his unrestrained t of greed, Bradley immerses his body in a product of the slave trade, his blind eye suggesting that he turns a blind eye to its origins. An Island in the Moon exempli es Blake’s particular brand of pastoralism: the urban May Day seems to be inseparable from a tempting sweetness which implicates the taster in sin; the rural May Day, contrariwise, represents a liberation from the chains of the urban common sphere. Although the city masquerade is absent, Blake’s chimney sweeper poems are, nevertheless, concerned with disguise. Tom is, earlier in the Innocence poem, a lamb in disguise: his white hair is sheared and soon covered in black soot. The lamb image, used extensively throughout Songs, alludes to innocence and to the sacri cial status of the working boys. Tom’s vision in the middle of the sweep poem in Innocence rehearses the rescue stories in common currency at the time. He dreams that he is released from blackness into whiteness, from death to life. Instead of the aristocrat, the boy is transformed into a soul rising upon clouds. From the beginning of Songs, Blake manipulates colour. The piper stains ‘the water clear’ with ink from his makeshift pen. The clarity of the water suggests both the washing away of sins, and the purity of the poet’s words. The word ‘stain’d’, in spite of its negation at

110

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

the end of the line, is evocative enough to hint at the later uses of blackness, in the chimney sweep poems, to signify alienation, dirt, death and sorrow. ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ in Innocence gives an account of his life in a simple ballad form. The climbing-boy, the narrator of the poem, describes the early loss of his mother and being apprenticed to a sweep, by his father, while still very young. He uses the word ‘sold’, to suggest the slavery of the apprenticeship. He addresses the reader (‘your chimneys I sweep’), implicating us in the ongoing oppression of child labourers. When the rst stanza has set the scene, the boy goes on to tell us about his friend. The narrator encourages his friend not to mind about his hair, because at least it will not be ruined by the soot. After his hair is cut off, Tom dreams that thousands of sweeps had been locked up in back cof ns. The cof n symbolizes death, but it is also reminiscent of the chimney, a con ned place which can lead to death. The locking in of the boys inside the cof ns or chimneys suggests their powerlessness and enslavement. The nightmare is relieved by an Angel with a bright key, who unlocks the cof ns and frees the boys. The boys celebrate on the ‘green plain’, wash in the river and they shine in the sun, abandoning their bags of soot. The scene is reminiscent of rural May Day celebrations: ‘Then down a green plain leaping, laughing they run, / And was in a river and shine in the Sun’. The description has a natural happiness about it, and is less staged than the London processions of Blake’s time. The progression the boys make from darkness to light, following the Platonic and Christian traditions, appears frequently in the volume. Their nakedness, furthermore, recalls the innocence of Adam and Eve. The Angel tells Tom to be good and his reward will come in Heaven. In the nal stanza, Tom wakes up from his dream and the two boys get up in the dark (again reminding us that they have not yet made their journey into the light) and get their tools ready for work. Tom, heartened by his vision, is determined to get on with his life and accept the path laid out for him. The illustration that accompanies this poem is more positive, showing the boys being resurrected from their cof ns by the angel and dancing on the green plain. In the nal stanza of the poem, we are reminded of the self-absorbed Miss Larolles. The speaker states in the nal line that ‘if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’ (l. 24). ‘All’ and ‘Their’ may refer to the boys who must ful l their duty in order to obtain Heavenly reward or to avoid punishment by their masters. The words may also imply the reader, who has a duty to encourage the reform of legislation to protect the boys from harm. In order to come to this conclusion, the reader is required to think of himself or herself as morally at fault. Blake disguises this humanitarian message as a trite maxim. The three-stanza companion poem in Experience is not narrated by a climbingboy. Instead, an unidenti ed, concerned narrator records a conversation with a boy-sweep, whom he has met on a snowy day. The cold implies that his services will be in demand, and contrasts with the happy spring vision seen in Innocence. The poem is very much concerned with the sweep’s work. The boy is calling the streets, crying out ‘’weep ’weep’ (Experience, l. 2; Innocence, l. 3), like the boy in the companion poem, suggesting that he is young and cannot accurately pronounce the word ‘sweep’. The contemporaneous May Day: A Poem in Four Parts alights on the same call: ‘With “Weep! weep! weep!” about they go, / In Summer’s heat,

May Day in the City

111

or Winter’s snow’.108 The crying recalls ‘Holy Thursday’, ‘Is that trembling cry a song?’ (l. 5), and ‘London’: In every cry of every Man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear (ll. 5–8).

Here ‘the Chimney-sweeper’s cry / Every blackening Church appalls’ (ll. 9–10). The boy suggests that he was happy before he became a sweep, and that it was because of his happiness that his parents made him become a sweep. He draws illogical conclusions, as a young child might, that he has been punished for being happy. The boy explains that his parents have concluded that, because he has retained his optimism, he has not been harmed by his apprenticeship. It is suggested that God, the Priest and King, by not intervening, condones the miserable lot of the sweep. In the accompanying illustration, the boy’s eyes are raised heavenward, though it is dif cult to determine whether in supplication or condemnation. The poem is less equivocal: God, Priest and King stand as a powerful Trinity (echoing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) ‘who make up a Heaven of our misery’ (l. 12). The concerned narrator does not become the benefactor, as is often the case in humanitarian literature. Blake leaves the charitable act to be performed instead by the reader. Blake’s emphasis on the poverty, isolation and misery of the sweeps accords with the humanitarian literature of later years, much of which is inspired by his poems, but his depiction of the physical and spiritual oppression of the sweeps suppresses their usual cultural context. Blake may have avoided suggesting a present-day respite from city life (that is, the temporary freedom that the city May Day implies) in order to generate more sympathy for the sweeps. Furthermore, he may be adopting the discourse of the sentimental encounter and the personal testimonial in order to appeal to the moral sense of the reader. The sentimental strategies and the racial connotations of some of the words used in the poem suggest that this is possible. Instead of the ‘disguise’ of May Day nery, which, though disturbing to many, makes the sweep acceptable to the public gaze, Blake, radically, chooses to represent the sweeps solely as workers. May Day thus retains its integrity as a spring paradise which offers physical comfort and, through the theological imagery, the hope of spiritual consolation. Blake does not draw on the accounts and pictures of the London May Day which show the disguised sweeps, rattling their brushes and shovels as part of the merry-making – the scene which his engraving of Collings’s picture illustrates. Instead, the poet is concerned with the sweep undisguised by super cial adornments. Blake depicts the sweep as a symbol of indigence and oppression, set apart from the joys of spring. In avoiding direct mention of May Day’s role as a temporary release from hardship, in the sweep poems, Blake forces the reader into a direct encounter with the sweep as a social problem. ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ comes then as an abrupt interlude. Like Miss Larolles, we are confronted with undisguised soot. Blake prefers the vision of a Christian-pastoral paradise: the laughing on the plain is a more tting 108 Anon, May-Day: A Poem in Four Parts, p. 16.

112

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

May Day than that of contemporary London. The absence of the city festival, with its less than ideal associations, reinforces the pastoral ideal as a legitimate goal. Blake’s chimney sweep poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience are not simply a digression on an issue of contemporary humanitarian concern, but are part of the dialectical interplay between city and country which operates in the pastoral mode. The spring paradise is clearly represented in its Christian-pastoral form throughout Songs. Spring is, variously in Blake’s poetry, a golden age, a period of innocence, a reminder of the continuation of indigenous rural customs, and an indication of the glorious and inevitable return of Christ. Spring is present in Songs of Experience, though less prominent. Here, the harsher extremes of summer and winter are more pertinent to the discussion of the fallen state, and operate as part of the dialectical play. Winter suggests sadness, danger and Christ’s absence, and implies distance from the celebration of Spring. The contrastive function of the sweep poems enhances the idealism of the pastoral. Although it has been widely acknowledged that the ‘Chimney Sweeper’ poems are different from the spring poems of Songs, in that they present an ‘urgent contemporary occasion’, the sweeps, part of the Londoner’s experience of May Day, are far from being out of place in a collection of literature with a prominent spring theme.109 Blake, nevertheless, displaces the sweeps’ cultural signi cance as May Day revellers, sublimating the hope represented by the green site into a liberational dream. Importantly, he perceives the cultural ambiguity of the sweeps: they are connected with spring, but are emblematic of the lth of the city; they are black, yet white; they are children but not happy. Blake uses blackness in Songs as a guise for earthly despair and oppression; whiteness and springtime counterbalance these, implying rescue and relief. Like the sweep, the little black boy longs to remove his earthly disguise and abandon the social inferiority that his colour implies. Both anticipate a future spring paradise where ‘ owers and trees and beasts and men receive / Comfort in morning, joy in the noon day’ (ll. 11–12); the guise of blackness is removed from sweep and slave in the Christian-pastoral paradise. The urban pastoral sphere is to be superseded by its rural and pastoral counterpart. The London May Day festival is a locus for a number of concerns which exercise those with social consciences in the Romantic era. Accounts of the festivities, both literary and antiquarian, use the occasion to challenge conventional capitalist economics and established social boundaries. The occasion, and its folklore, exposes anxieties concerning the use of the urban public space. The distinction between the bourgeois observer and the plebeian participant is particularly marked in the case of the chimney-sweep festival, though there are ways in which these boundaries are contested in the literature of the time. At the centre of these disruptions is the disguised aristocrat narrative. This gives the bourgeois observer the tantalising hope that the destitute boy belongs to his own sphere, or even above that sphere. Another strong reaction to this festival is the desire to see it abolished. This seems to be fuelled by the dissatisfaction with the working conditions of the sweeps and the festival’s status as a reminder of their plight. Blake’s chimney-sweep poems are clearly the 109 Morris Eaves, ‘On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 58 (1996), 413–39 (p. 429).

May Day in the City

113

most sophisticated of the humanitarian responses, yet it is important not to see these poems solely in a political context. Our understanding of the pastoral aesthetics of Songs is deepened by the strong folkloric connections that Blake suppresses in his account.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’ John Clare and Common Fame

It has frequently been suggested that one of Clare’s identities is that of the recoverer and recorder of declining folkloric practices, and that this distinguishes him from other poets of the Romantic era. Clare, it is often argued, is ‘the custodian of a memory becoming divorced from social practice’, and he is typically placed at the centre of the emerging literary interest in folklore.1 Clare’s custodianship of popular culture is often linked to his positioning as someone who both originates from this culture and is, to some extent, set apart from it. He is seen as ‘poised uneasily between two cultures, the oral culture of his native village and the literate culture to which as a writer he aspired’.2 Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson regard Clare’s record of folklore as having a ‘memorializing function […] designed to commemorate rather than perpetuate a communal way of life’.3 They view his interaction with antiquarians and historians of customary culture, such as William Hone, as catering to ‘a genteel curiosity about vanishing local customs’, and as demonstrating that he had an ‘awareness of the distance between the genteel audience he addresses and the oral ‘roots’ of his [own] poetry’.4 This chapter sets out to question whether Clare, as a poet of common life, in some sense preserves the traditions he writes about, and to examine more closely Clare’s ambiguous place within the cultural landscape. Clare’s identity as a poet has traditionally been viewed in terms of cultural polarization. The way in which his work reached the public domain, being ‘corrected’, edited and marketed as a peasant poet, has directed the discussions of his place in the literary sphere towards the tensions between bourgeois impositions on his work (or his imitations of bourgeois discourses) and his peasant naturalness. John Barrell makes the case that Clare’s poetry comes out of a dependence on a sense of place which, when it was transformed by enclosure, forced him to reassess his identity.5 Clare’s 1 John Clare, Cottage Tales, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), p. xvii. 2 Ibid., p. xvi. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. xvi and p. xvii. 5 John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

116

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

faithfulness to the local characteristics of landscape puts him, in Barrell’s estimation, at odds with eighteenth-century aesthetics. Conversely, Timothy Brownlow, in John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (1983), attributes to Clare a direct engagement with fashionable high art. Brownlow views Clare’s absorption and modi cation of eighteenth-century literary techniques as part of a struggle ‘to nd his own voice within the topographical tradition which he inherited’.6 Brownlow places Clare in a cultural no-man’s land facing ‘on the one hand, the suspicious glances of his fellowvillagers, and on the other, the of cious supervision of his editors’.7 Mina Gorji picks up where Brownlow left off. She argues that Clare replaces the lost village community with ‘literary sociability’ evidenced in the ‘intertextual’ relationship his work has with that of other poets.8 Elizabeth Helsinger continues the tradition of reading Clare’s use of the commonplace in terms of an oppositional relationship with bourgeois aesthetics. ‘In writing of the commonplace’, she suggests, ‘Clare apparently avoids the politically awkward position of the hidden observer, but the contradictory locations of “peasant” and “poet” continue to complicate his relation to sight and to poetic language’.9 Helsinger again emphasizes Clare’s separateness: ‘As he became increasingly conscious of the differences that divided him from the middle-class audience he once hoped to approach as a professional poet, he remained no less conscious of the differences that had long set him apart from his rural community’.10 The emphasis on the polarization of culture in these discussions, however, does not do justice to the complexity of Clare’s cultural location and, in particular, his self-description. Because of these aesthetic preoccupations in this body of criticism, Clare’s own concept of common culture in relation to his poetic output, and more generally, has not yet been fully examined by critics.11 This chapter is not concerned with how Clare was perceived by the public of his day; this has been discussed by others elsewhere.12 It is concerned with exploring Clare’s idea of the common public sphere (the space where common people produce 6 Timothy Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 9. 7 Ibid., p. 4. 8 Mina Gorji, ‘Clare and Community: The “Old Poets” and the London Magazine’, in John Clare: New Approaches, ed. by John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi (Helpston, Peterborough: The John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 47–63 (p. 48). 9 Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet’, Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987), 509–31 (p. 523). 10 Ibid. 11 Tim Chilcott is closer to the mark when he suggests that Clare tried ‘to preserve a selfhood not predicated upon the world’s recognition’, but he is concerned here with Clare’s madness rather than with his understanding of common culture. ‘A Real World and a Doubting Mind’: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare (Pickering: Hull University Press, 1985), p. 195. 12 Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003); Mark Storey, The Poetry of Clare: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1974); Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Mark Storey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Mark Storey, ‘Clare and the Critics’, in John Clare in Context, ed. by Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips, Geoffrey Summer eld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 28–50.

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

117

their culture collectively) and the importance of customary culture (rural rituals that are tied to the calendar or are performed regularly) for this concept. I shall argue that in writing about peasant life Clare does not see himself as bridging a gap between bourgeois and peasant, as many commentators suggest, but aims rather to establish himself in a public realm that has a different value system from that of the bourgeois literary sphere, and that these values are derived from his understanding of the signi cance of customary culture, local knowledge and literary transmission amongst the peasant class. This is not to place Clare’s work in opposition to bourgeois concerns. Clare’s place in the bourgeois literary world is not so much that of the peasant who is governed by bourgeois dominance, as that of the individual who demonstrates facility with bourgeois discourses when he deems it appropriate to the material. Clare’s important contribution to the discursive formation that becomes folklore studies is to delineate the folkloric subject (common culture) as capable of achieving and surpassing the success of commercial culture.13 He rejects the bourgeois public sphere when it is synonymous with conspicuous culture consumption in order to promote his own ideal of publicity which is characterized by familiarity and ordinariness. Accordingly, the ideal writer must retain his integrity when creating, and the work should be circulated to an uncommercial public. But Clare’s disapproval of popularity should by no means be understood to extend to all ‘high art’, and the popular is not coextensive with the bourgeois. It is important to emphasize here that Clare’s relationships with his friends and supporters were socially complex. The descriptions of his daily activities in his journal for 1824–26, for example, imply that he did not perceive himself to be restricted to the peasant class. In December 1824, Clare describes a visit to Milton Hall, the seat of Lord Milton, during which he looked over a book by Linnaeus and found his friend Edmund Tyrell Artis, Lord Milton’s steward, ‘busy over his “fossil plants” and “Roman Antiquitys”’.14 Artis was an archaeologist and antiquarian who shared Clare’s ‘complaints of the deceptions of publishers’.15 Clare’s autobiographical fragments reveal, furthermore, a sincere admiration for the Miltons and the Exeters, two noble families who supported his work, maintaining that they neither insulted ‘dependants with oppression’ nor treated their ‘poverty with cruelty’.16 This was proof to Clare ‘that nobility is the chief support to industry and that their power is strongest protection’.17 In September of the same year, Clare records that he attended and wrote a song for the wedding of local gypsies Israel and Lettyce Smith, again revealing the ease with which he felt able to move between social ranks.18 Clare’s friendships extended to those of a more academic bent too. Joseph Henderson was one of Clare’s closest friends during the 1820s and his journal reveals that they talked 13 I take the term ‘discursive formation’ from Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1989). 14 Eric Robinson and David Powell, eds, John Clare By Himself (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 202. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 48. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 176.

118

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

of ‘books and owers and Butter yes’.19 Henderson, a middle-class Scot educated at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the Royal Society, was the Head Gardener at the Fitzwilliam estate. This social exibility is seen in the life of another of Clare’s friends, John Cue. An entry on the funeral of John Cue of Ufford recalls that Cue possessed ‘many curious’ books on owers of which ‘he [Cue] was fond’.20 Cue, who achieved local fame as a turnip hoer, had been Head Gardener for Lord Manners of Ufford Hall. Cue’s interests in natural history and his ascent to the top of his profession, entitle him to a bourgeois identity. These brief examples of Clare’s friendships with those across a broad and uid class spectrum suggest that amongst those with similar interests boundaries were not as rigid as the model of cultural polarization implies. In positioning Clare, we can observe a few stable points of departure, however. Firstly, Clare understood his main subject matter to be the life of the rural peasant; his own assessment of the cultural signi cance of other work on this subject gives us some indication of how he viewed his own work, and, as I shall argue here, how we should view his work. Secondly, Clare does not worry about the authenticity of portraits of rural life as much as one might think; he is more concerned with whether an author panders to the ‘puling fastidiousness of literary fashions’, often referring to commercialism disapprovingly.21 For Clare, mimesis is less important than sincerity. The self-conscious creation of literature to satisfy current literary tastes is condemned by Clare as a modus operandi which, even if it yields temporary popularity, will ultimately lead only to obscurity. Common fame, the bourgeois public sphere and popular antiquarianism The value which Clare places on the work of the ‘unconscious poet of little name [who] writes a tri e as he feels without thinking of others & […] becomes a common name’ reveals his fundamental reluctance to cultivate a public persona in the commercial sense.22 Commercial popularity is ‘super cial’ and ‘branded’, whereas common fame is achieved by stories such as ‘cock robin’, ‘little red riding hood’, and ‘Babes in the wood’. Common fame, an important subject in his concept of writing which has been left undiscussed by critics, operates on a substantially different understanding of publicity from that of the bourgeois public sphere, though it shares some points of contact: the inhabitants of both spheres, for instance, aim at attaining freedom of expression through detachment from commercialism. Clare’s ideal of publicity incorporates an extensive and socially varied shared domain, and often a desire for, or achievement of, both publicity and anonymity. In attempting to demarcate a common sphere as a separate kind of publicity, Clare promotes the idea of common culture expressed through folklore. This common culture is attractive because it already exists, has a long history and shrouds its originators in privacy. 19 Ibid., p. 174. 20 Ibid., p. 210. 21 Storey, John Clare: The Critical Heritage, p. 212. 22 John Clare, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1851), pp. 206–10 (p. 208), my italics.

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

119

He uses the example of the untraceable ballad: ‘The ballad in the ploughmans pocket wears / A greater fame than poets ever knew’.23 Clare’s self-fashioning as a reluctant and private poet is a key part of his struggle to overthrow hegemonic de nitions of literary value that exclude peasant culture. Clare’s concept of the oral nature of common publicity obviously has its roots in the orality of text transmission in peasant culture, but Clare also recognizes the orality of the bourgeois public sphere. False fame is like an echo ‘delaying / When he that woke it into life is vanished’.24 ‘Popularity’, a term Clare seems to equate with the bourgeois public sphere or world of letters, is a ‘busy talker’ who is not concerned with truth or falsehood and is driven by the consumer (like a young lady eager to read the latest novel or a ‘tavern-haunter’ who reads the newspapers).25 This is not fame, however, and public report does not entail a high reputation: ‘very slender names come to be popular from many causes with which merit or genius has no sort of connection or kindred’.26 Clare asserts that popularity is as chaotic as the mob, and will eventually be silenced: ‘fashionable pretentions with all her mob of public applause cannot pass but shrinketh into insigni cance & silent nothingness from their just derision like shadows from a sunbeam’.27 Fashion is similarly illusory. Clare suggests that it is a ‘ ne dog’ which falsely ‘barks at shadows & lets monsters of every description pass by into its ladys library without a growl’.28 The orality of these images of bourgeois fame undermine it, making it seem less substantial than it really is; ironically, this is precisely the appropriate mode of transmission for common fame. Clare stresses the modernity of the bourgeois public sphere in characterizing the situation of an imaginary author who has become popular because of matters connected with his personal life. He concludes that gossip ‘often macadamized the way to popularity’.29 This road to popularity is easier for those with money and connections. Wealth makes the world ‘as smooth as a bowling green and as easy as a velvet cushion’, and ‘if they become authors they are Bacons and Miltons and Shakespears and Newtons, in a twinkling’.30 Nevertheless,

23 John Clare, Northborough Sonnets, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), p. 101. The editors note that the sonnets were written between 1832 and 1837 (p. vii). 24 Clare, ‘Fame’, Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), IV, 180 (ll. 9–10). 25 Clare, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, p. 206. 26 Ibid. 27 John Clare, ‘For Essay on Criticism & Fashion’, in The Prose of John Clare, pp. 217–18 (p. 218). 28 The Letters of John Clare, ed. by Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 463. 29 Clare, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, p. 206. 30 John Clare: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, The Oxford Authors, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 451.

120

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition A literary man might enquire after the names of Spenser and Milton in vain in half the villages in England even among what are called its gentry but I believe it would be dif cult to nd a corner in any county were the others [cock robin etc] are not known.31

Clare’s reaction to seeing a group of ‘common people collected together’ on a London street talking about Byron’s funeral reveals the extent of his antipathy to the usual methods of acquiring literary fame. An ordinary girl’s sigh and sympathy for Byron’s untimely death is ‘worth all the News paper puffs and Magazine Mournings that ever was paraded after the death of a poet since attery and hypoc[ris]y was babtizd in the name of truth and sincerity’.32 The common people, Clare adds, felt Byron’s merits and his power and the common people of a country are the best feelings of a prophecy of futurity – they are below […] the prejudices and atterys the fancys of likes and dislikes of fashion – they are the feelings of natures sympathies unadulterated with the pretentions of art and pride they are the veins and arterys that feed and quiken the heart of living fame the breathings of eternity and the soul of time are indicated in that prophecy.33

Byron’s popularity is admirable because it entered into the popular consciousness and not because of the media interest which surrounded him. Clare’s interest in cultural and linguistic ingenuousness puts him in line with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads. Clare’s assertions that the intrinsic value of a work is more important than its status relative to literary fashion and commercial success derive from his desire to achieve and validate common fame. The circulation of indigenous tales and the perpetuation of local customs indicated to Clare the transmission of culture within an authentic public sphere which is at once private (in that the author is obscure) and public (in that the tale is distributed widely). Contrasting bourgeois popularity with common fame Clare argues that the commercially-minded author who is able to supply ‘drossy puffs & praises’ in support of his reputation is unlikely to win common fame.34 FASHION and Folly always follow Fame, Which Merit, slowly paced, is slow to claim, The gaudy and the mean men love to praise, But quiet Merit lives for other days.35

31 Clare, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, p. 208. 32 John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 147. 33 Ibid., pp. 147–8. 34 Clare, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, p. 210. 35 John Clare, ‘On the Neglect of True Merit’, The Later Poems of John Clare 1837– 1864, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), I, 21 (ll. 1–4).

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

121

Common fame describes that which is familiar to ordinary people, who may or may not value what they see, hear or read, or even have a deep acquaintance with it; common fame outlives ‘centuries of popularity’, and ‘the trumpeting clamor of public praise is not to be relied on as the creditor for the future’.36 Clare’s identi cation of literary fame with a common sphere characterized by anti-commercialism highlights the value which should be placed on ‘artless things how mean so ere they be’.37 In discussions of customs and local knowledge, initiated by antiquarians such as William Hone, literate peasants, including Clare, take on an important role in evaluating and recording contemporary culture, expressing for themselves a common culture that is valued by antiquarians. As Clare writes in ‘The Village Minstrel’ (1821), although ‘little skilld in antiquated books’, the ‘shepherds leaning oer their hooks’ possess a profound knowledge of ‘the ruins’ near their homes.38 Clare values folk knowledge highly, attributing to it a similar authority to that disseminated by antiquarians. His correspondence with William Hone on the subject of May Day, for instance, suggests that he believed his experiences of local customs to be worth reporting and that he understood Hone’s solicitation of information on the subject to be genuine. Clare had written to Hone outlining the May Day customs of his region in April 1825: On may day a multiplicity of sports & customs are still observed but some of them are so popular that they need no mention yet they differ in places — about us the rst cow that is turnd upon the pasture gets the Garland & the last has the mawkin a large branch of thorns tyd to her tail the young men who wish to win the favour of their favourites wait on the green till a late hour & then drive out the cows of the maiden whom they love who of course wins the garland & in the evening she is considered the Queen of the May & the man wether her favourite or not claims her as his partner for the dance at night a custom that she dare not refuse to comply with as she woud loose her reputation & sweet heart into the bargain & grow into a byeword for a shrew & be shund accordingly.39

In their introduction to Clare’s Early Poems, Eric Robinson and David Powell distance Clare’s treatment of folklore from that of the antiquarian folklorists on the grounds that it ‘grows out of popular culture not narrowly de ned by the professional folklorists but re ective of the wide gamut of popular taste in his period’.40 Distinguishing polite culture from popular culture in this way, however, makes it dif cult to consider Clare’s work in ways other than as in con ict with bourgeois culture or as appropriated by it. While con ict and appropriation may form part of Clare’s understanding and use of popular culture, we need to bring into focus a stronger sense of the collaborative and non-antagonistic relationships Clare maintained with folklore scholars, and the extent to which he felt himself to 36 Clare, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, p. 208 and p. 210. 37 John Clare, ‘The Village Minstrel’, The Early Poems of John Clare 1804–1822, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), II, 123 (l. 9). 38 Clare, Early Poems, II, 162, (ll. 926, 924, 925). 39 Clare, Cottage Tales, pp. 139–40. Much of the letter appears in Hone’s Every-Day Book on April 25. Hone, II, 523–5. 40 Clare, Early Poems, I, xiv.

122

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

be a legitimate part of this group and was held by scholars of folklore to be part of the conversation. For example, Clare’s comments on Northamptonshire customs were cited in William Hone’s, Every-Day Book (1826).41 Clare’s poetry was cited in George Soane’s The Book of the Months and Circle of the Seasons (1844). Soane was, however, more interested in Clare as a close observer of spring than as a recorder of customs.42 By the 1850s, Clare was widely referenced in books about Northamptonshire customs and dialect. Thomas Sternberg, in The Dialect and FolkLore of Northamptonshire (1851), commented on Clare’s pioneering work in this area, and quotes his poetry extensively.43 Anne Elizabeth Baker commissioned one of Clare’s poems on May Day for the appendix to her Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases (1854), and drew on his knowledge extensively. Baker, whose glossary owes something to those of Sternberg and Clare, suggests that the customs outlined in the poem were observed in the neighbourhood of Helpstone, and that the poem was ‘written expressly for the present work’, but no date is given. Baker integrates the poem into her discussion of May Day customs, picking up on Clare’s use of important local words, and suggesting other Northamptonshire variants on the customs described. In asserting an authoritative function for customary culture, Clare advances a theory that the lasting public acknowledgement of writing or events owes nothing to fashion (which merely indicates immediate popularity among the commercial classes) and everything to the intrinsic value which it demonstrates. Clare’s writing on custom reveals his distrust of what he saw as a metropolitan acceptance of the synonymity of the public world of fame with fashion and commercialism. When Allan Cunningham suggested that Clare pay more attention to national literary tastes, Clare responded angrily, casting doubt on his ability to judge, and commenting that Cunningham’s ‘observation that Poets should conform their thoughts or style to the taste of the country by which he means fashion – is humbug & shows that he has no foundation of judgment for a critic that might be relyed on’.44 A successful Scottish poet-antiquarian of humble origins (he had been a sculptor’s assistant and a stonemason), Cunningham always had his eye on the literary market. Clare, however, disapproved of being marketed on the basis of his peasant identity, although he allowed it to happen. He writes of The Midsummer Cushion, ‘I wished to be judged 41 Hone, I, 523–5. 42 George Soane, The Book of the Months and Circle of the Seasons (London: David Bogue, 1844). Soane cites, in his chapter on May, ‘Each hedge is covered thick with green [...] He wakes from all his dreary joys’ (p. 88) and ‘How lovely now are lanes and balks [...] Had woo’d the sun and changed to owers!’ (p. 91). 43 Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (London: John Russell Smith; Northampton: Abel & Sons; G. N. Welton; Oundle: R. Todd; Brackley: A. Green, 1851; rept. East Ardsley, Wake eld, Yorkshire: S. R., 1971). Sternberg comments that ‘The curious dialects of Northamptonshire have hitherto escaped investigation; and with the exception of two short glossaries appended to the Village Minstrel, and Poems Illustrative of Rural Life and Scenery, of John Clare, the subjoined collections are now, for the rst time, printed’, p. iii. The introduction also notes that this is the rst book to appear with the ‘good Saxon compound, Folklore’ in the title. 44 Clare, Letters, p. 207.

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

123

of by the book itself without any appeals to want of education lowness of origin or any foil that of ciousness chuses to encumber my path with’.45 In problematizing popularity and carving out an authentic public space or common sphere for peasant literature and culture, Clare understands public success as separate from bourgeois publicity, and argues that real fame, common fame, is achieved by anonymous texts that are known by everyone. Clare’s is a more nebulous popularity in which a community experiences a collective response that is unmanipulated by advertising or commercial trends. The signi cance of authenticity has been recognized by other writers, Clare observes, because poetry whic mimics that which achieves common fame has become fashionable. Clare argues, however, that when ‘poets [are] anxious after common fame as some of the “naturals” seem to be’ and ‘imitate’ the unaffected simplicity of ballads ‘by affecting simplicity’, they ‘become unnatural’.46 Poetry that attains common fame should be, he asserts, ‘as common in every memory as the seasons’.47 Importantly, Clare regarded himself as participating in a dialogue with other commentators on public customs, and rejected the separateness that Scott articulates in his characterization of the variety of historical perspectives in The Antiquary. Clare, then, offers an understanding of the nature of publicity which is connected to his perception of common culture. Clare and customary culture Clare began writing poetry anonymously and according to the tastes of his semiliterate parents. His rst principle was that ‘[…] if they coud not understand me my taste shoud be wrong founded’.48 Initially, Clare kept his authorship secret from them: ‘I wrote my pieces according to their criticisms, little thinking when they heard me read them that I was the author’.49 His early brush with publicity, even in a narrow sense, embarrassed him: I felt ashamd to expose them on paper & after I venturd to write them down my second thoughts blushd over them & [I] burnt them for a long while but as my feelings grew into song I felt a desire to preserve some & usd to correct them over & over till the last copy had lost all kindred to the rst even in the title.50

Clare began as a private poet, unambitious and unviewed by a public gaze: ‘I now venturd to commit my musings readily to paper, but with all secrecy possible, hiding them when written, in an old unused cubbard in the chamber’.51 His nancial need, 45 Ibid., p. 594. 46 The Prose of John Clare. The ‘naturals’ is a term used for the Lake poets. It is doubtful that Clare means to criticize Wordsworth here. Clare laments Wordsworth’s general lack of popularity in this essay and admires his ‘beautiful simple ballad of “We are seven”’, which he has ‘seen hawked about in penny ballads’, p. 208. 47 Ibid. 48 Clare, Autobiographical Writings, p. 12. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 82. 51 Cited in Deacon, p. 47.

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

124

however, impelled a change of heart and he began ‘to consider about the method of revealing the Secret of my poetry’.52 Much of Clare’s earliest unpublished poetry reveals his suspicion of others’ ideas of authorship and publicity. ‘Something New’ (1819) portrays the ckleness of human wishes, declaring that man is ‘Still eager to pursue / That ever pleasing novelty / In meeting something new’.53 This is a ‘rage’ that begins with the desire for new toys, and ‘if not catch’d in time’ (l. 13) continues into courtship, with a constant lust for new suitors. Various professions are prone to the search for novelty, including medicine and the law, the poem suggests. Here, poets are poor victims who ‘vainly priz’d / by the discerning few / Still rhyme in hope o’ better days / & dwell on somthing new’ (l. 29–32). The poem ends with a satirical assertion that the author of the poem ‘wishes every taste to please’ in order to make his ‘Tri e’ something new (l. 49). In his untitled and unpublished poem beginning ‘No hailing curry favouring tothers Muses’ (1819), Clare attacks enforced insincerity which aims to please fashions and patrons. Here, the speaker looks back to the regal contentment he felt ‘while earning / A shilling mong my neighbours / Unknown to books unknown to learning’, when ‘peace then crownd my labours’.54 He rues That evil day I came your laky & laugh stock for a century When vain subscriptions fussd poor Jacky To ’pear among the gentry.55

Becoming a public laughingstock troubles the poet. Even when writing ‘To the Memory of James Merrishaw A Village Schoolmaster’ (c1816–19), Clare is cautious of employing the expected genre of verse, arguing that the humble schoolmaster is more appropriately lamented not with ‘the elegiac reed’ but with the sincere peasant’s voice: And tho rough language points the vulgar way It still shall boast this honorable part Of having its origin from the heart. Flattry shall never tempt my homely lays, I neither want reward nor yet the praise.56

The speaker writes his elegy in the knowledge that if his schoolmaster had become wealthy his memory would have been subjected to ‘the atterer’s verse’ (l. 94). The humble poet, stressing his sincerity, however, memorializes with honour. Poetry which is written merely for payment is similarly frowned upon. ‘The Poet’s Wish’ (1818), tells of a bard who is forced to write in order to feed himself:

52 53 54 55 56

Clare, Autobiographical Writings, p. 82. Clare, Early Poems, II, 13, ll. 1–4. Ibid., I, 15, ll. 26–8. Ibid., ll. 9–12. Ibid., 56, ll. 29–32.

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

125

He heavd a sigh & scratchd his head & Credits mouth wi’ promise fed Then Set in terror down again Invok’d the muse & scrig’d a strain A tri ing somthing glad to get To earn a dinner & discharge the debt.57

Clare thinks of poetry produced in such conditions as worthless, reacting with horror at the process of writing in this way. Representing local culture enables Clare to move from private to public poet with greater integrity than he believes is shown by many writers. ‘The Death of Dobbin’ (1808–1809) remarks of the local fame of a good horse that ‘The rural Muse is glad at heart to nd / ’Mong thy old friends thy memory still survive’.58 As for the horse, so for the poet. Clare’s focus on the traditions, events and stories of the common people, and their methods of transmitting narratives, is both an undertaking to achieve the unstigmatized common fame that he so admired and an attempt to de ne the terms by which he was to be judged as a poet. ‘The Authors Address to His Book’ (1819) deals with the problem of emerging into the public sphere. Here Clare presents his book as the clownish-peasant son of its author, with unpolished manners, who seeks preferment in a bourgeois world. He suggests that though the book is humbly produced, it will gain favour: ‘Worth tho drest mean they’ll still regard it’.59 Common fame is achievable through an ‘unaffected’ use of familiar subject matter: ‘things as old as England that has outlived centuries of popularity’.60 ‘To the Memory of Bloom eld’ (1823) suggests that Bloom eld’s poetry is capable of achieving common fame.61 The ‘singing ploughman’ (l. 32), the ‘shepherd musing’ (l. 29) and the ‘may day wild owers’ (l. 30) all ‘live in the summer of’ (l. 33) Bloom eld’s ‘rural themes’ (l. 33) and ‘green memorials’ (l. 34).62 Bloom eld’s poems are successful, Clare asserts, because his subjects live and ‘ever may /shall nd a native “Giles” beside his plough / Joining the sky larks song at early day’ (ll. 35–7). While undeserving poets ride in ‘that gay ship popularity’ (l. 2) ‘sweet unassuming’ (l. 15) Bloom eld, whose ‘rural themes’ (l. 33) surpassed ‘the cobweb praise of fashion’ (l. 35), did not subscribe to ‘The dazzling fashions of the day’ (l. 16). The fashionable poet, although he appears to be popular, is metaphorically driven by ‘bladder puffs of common air’ (l. 8) and his fame ‘must share / A mortals fate’ (ll. 12–13) and ‘lie / A dead wreck on the shore

57 Ibid., 491, ll. 79–84. 58 Ibid., 85, ll. 20–1. 59 Ibid., 430, l. 161. 60 The Prose of John Clare, p. 208. 61 Clare, “To The Memory of Bloom eld,” Middle Poems, IV, 181–2. 62 Eric Miller suggests that ‘Simply by continuing to exist, those resources of land and rural culture which Bloom eld celebrated will eternize the poet whom they once inspired’. Eric Miller, ‘Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare’, Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900, 40 (2000), 635–57 (p. 640).

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

126

of dark posterity’ (ll. 13–14). Clare lamented that Bloom eld died in neglect and suggested that this was ‘the common lot of genius’.63 Clare often writes of the road to achieving common fame as shrouded in shadow. The ‘Essay on Popularity’ suggests, sanguinely, that the ‘quiet progress of a name gaining its ground by gentle degrees in the world’s esteem is the best living shadow of fame to follow’.64 ‘The Farewell’ (1820) sees a rustic leaving for the city in search of ‘renown’, and comments that in doing so he is ‘vainly pursuing the shadow of pleasure’.65 The shade of common fame is, frustratingly, also the shadow of obscurity in ‘The Author’s Address to His Book’ (1819). Here, the speaker asks his book to tell people how it left its author ‘moping / Thro oblivions darkness’ (ll. 181–2). If the book makes money, then its author might gain ‘that ne place ycleped fame’.66 ‘The Village Minstrel’ similarly situates the humble, though unsuccessful, rustic poet ‘Far in the swail [shadow]’, and in ‘To the Memory of James Merrishaw’, the poet gure aims to ‘snatch’ the schoolmaster’s memory ‘from oblivions shade’.67 ‘To Obscurity’ (1818) again uses shade negatively. The unknown poet is ‘buried’ beneath ‘shade of deep disguise’ even though he is one of the ‘sons of Merit’.68 The shadow of obscurity enables the retention of integrity; merit, however, is not always rewarded. This shadow is often contrasted with the light and sun of fame. For example, although William Blake’s poetry was neglected, Clare asserts, his glory will be kindled ‘like the sea / Shining in light’ (‘Blake’ [1819–32]).69 Fame is ‘a sun displaying / A solitary glory’ (‘Fame’ [1824]), lingering behind in the world, and which will inevitably set.70 Clare reinforces the close connection between common fame and obscurity in ‘Vanity of Fame’ (1825–26). This poem reveals Clare’s doubts about achieving common fame, and his conviction of the certainty of its longevity. What boots the toil to follow common fame With youths wild visions of anxiety & waste a life to win a feeble claim Upon her page which she so soon turns bye To make new votaries room who share the same Rewards – & with her faded memories lie Neighbours to shadows – tis a sorry game To play in earnest with – to think ones name

Buoyant with visions of eternity & as familiar now in the worlds ear As owers & sunshine to the summers eye Shall be forgot with other things that were 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

John Clare By Himself, p. 194. The Prose of John Clare, p. 210. My italics. Clare, Early Poems, I, 473, ll. 12–13. Ibid., 431, l. 192. Ibid., 56, l. 35. Ibid., 386, ll. 7–8. Clare, Middle Poems, IV, 289, ll. 10–11. Ibid., 179, ll. 3–4.

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

127

& like old words grown out of use thrown by In the confused lap of still obscurity71

He laments here that while his name is known temporarily, it will soon be forgotten and wonders whether the toil after common fame is worth it. Clare’s May Day It is worth looking in more detail at an example of the kind of common custom that interested Clare, in order to particularize his encounter with the common sphere. Clare’s perception of the decline of folkloric practices prompts his analysis of the special role of the poet. His poetry refers extensively to the local customs associated with May Day, such as festivities involving shepherds, milkmaids and sugar drinks made from well water. These customs are, however, not always presented as alive. For instance, in Clare’s early manuscript poem ‘Dobson and Judie or The Cottage’ (1808–19), the speaker recalls that custom did these sports dispel Long ere old dob or judie where Yet still posterity can tell And still the tale they love to hear.72

Importantly, it is custom which caused these sports to disappear before Dobson and Judie were born. Clare acknowledges that customs change; nevertheless the song of the custom remains ‘still the tale they love to hear’ (l. 204). These events have achieved common fame through the songs that recall them. The anonymous echo of the custom, retained in a song sung by villagers, is the kind of poetry Clare implies should be aspired to, and it circulates in the common sphere. His attitude to poetry which circulates in the bourgeois public sphere (i.e. poetry that recalls customs) is slightly different, as I will show when I come to discuss ‘The Village Minstrel’. All of Clare’s poetry on May Day falls into the latter category. Before I come to these issues I want to rst outline Clare’s personal experience of the May Day festival. Clare’s experiences of May Day are rsthand and accord with other folkloric records. Clare rst encountered May Day rituals as a boy. Recalling this later, he stresses that the games were primarily for adults. It is likely that Clare refers here to the late 1790s and early 1800s: then there was the rst of may we were too young to be claimants in the upgrown sports but we joined our little interferances with them and run under the extended hankerchiefs at duck under water with the rest unmolested […] ah what a paradise begins with the ignorance of life and what a wilderness the knowledge of the world discloses Surely the

71 Ibid., 174–5, ll. 1–14. 72 Clare, Early Poems, I, 172–80, ll. 197–204.

128

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition garden of den was nothing more then our rst parents entrance upon life and the loss of it their knowledge of the world.73

While Clare is clearly drawing on his personal knowledge of May Day rituals, it is also possible that he engages with literary accounts of the festival. ‘May-Day (Now happy swains)’ (The Village Minstrel, 1821), the earliest of Clare’s May Day published poems, possibly contains echoes of Wat Tyler (1817).74 ‘The First of May A Ballad’ (1817–19), Clare’s second poem on the subject, may have been inspired by Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s gone a Maying’ (Hesperides, 1648), which Clare had de nitely read in Hone’s Every-Day Book (1825), and may well have come across earlier. Here Hone calls Herrick the ‘sweetest of all British bards that sing of our customs’.75 Clare wrote to Hone in 1825 expressing his admiration for Herrick’s poetry: I am a ‘constant reader’ of your every day book & was delighted to read in your prospectus your intention of reviving the taste for substantial poetry by inserting scraps […] from your old favourite Herrick & others of the olden time.76

Herrick was considered to be an authority on May Day by the Shakespeare scholar Nathan Drake in 1804, and his poetry underwent something of a revival in the rst two decades of the nineteenth century.77 The narrative of Clare’s 1817 ballad exhibits some resemblance to Herrick’s May Day poem. In Herrick’s poem the speaker exhorts Corinna to ‘Get up, get up for shame’ as the morning has begun and ‘a thousand Virgins on this day / Spring sooner then the lark, to fetch in May’ (ll. 13–14). Clare’s poem describes an equally eager admirer who wishes for his love to wake up and 73 Clare, Autobiographical Writings, pp. 30–31. ‘Duck under water’ is described by the Victorian folklorist Anne Elizabeth Baker as a Northamptonshire game ‘in which the players run, two and two, in rapid succession, under a handkerchief held up aloft by two persons standing apart with extended arms. Formerly, in the northern part of this county, even married women on May Day played at this game, under the garland which was extended from chimney to chimney across the village street’. Baker, Glossary, I, 204. Robinson and Powell note that Clare provided ‘one half of the strictly Northamptonshire words’ in this dictionary. Clare, Later Poems, II, 1107. 74 Early Poems, II, 26–7. 75 Hone, Every-Day Book, I, 546. 76 Clare, Letters, p. 340. 77 John Nott brought out an edition of Select Poems from the Hesperides in 1810, the rst collection since 1648. Drake discusses Herrick further in Shakespeare and His Times (1817), describing him as an important witness of May Day festivities. L. C. Martin notes that this was rst volume to be devoted to Herrick’s poetry since it was rst published, and that it was followed by Thomas Maitland’s Edinburgh edition of The Works of Robert Herrick (1823). L. C. Martin, ed., The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. xix. Herrick’s poem also found its way into later editions of John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities as part of the canon of May Day sources. Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, 2 vols (London: Charles Knight, 1841–42), I, 130.

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

129

join in the festivities. The ‘lark has rais’d his song’ (l. 26) before the belated maid has arrived, and the ‘ owerets fade, the pleasures bloom, / All hastening to decay’ (ll. 29–30), before she appears. Herrick and Clare are both concerned with transience. Clare’s ‘May-Day’ (1821) celebrates the day, like Blake’s ‘The Ecchoing Green’, as a festival of laughter. The poem shares much with Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode (1802–1804). May Day’s familiarity gives it the role, in Clare’s poem, of uniting the community, so that ‘every soul is gay’ (l. 4) ‘every brow seems laughing now’ (l. 15), ‘All swains resort to join the sport’ (l. 17) and ‘rural mirth’ is ‘share[d]’ (l. 22). The interjection of mortality, when Collin, ‘the village pride’, dies, cuts the mourner off from the celebration: ‘then sports adieu with him they ew’ (l. 27). Collin’s loss alienates Lubin from the joyousness of the festival. There are many points of contact with the Intimations Ode in this narrative turn. Like Wordsworth’s child, Collin has ‘left the green’ (l. 37). For Lubin ‘May-days may return / But never more can they restore / Their rural sports to me’ (ll. 40–42). He suffers a personal loss that estranges him from a sense of community joy. In Clare’s poem, peasant rituals continue, but they have lost the pleasure that Wordsworth’s ‘immortal’ child and Clare’s nonmourners experience. ‘May-Day’ is concerned not with the decline of the festival, but with an abrupt dislocation from it. Here Clare makes a point that is signi cant for his own situation: he associates personal loss with cultural loss.78 ‘The Village Minstrel’ (1821) is one of Clare’s major poems on peasant culture, and it is clearly in uenced by both literary and local versions of the May Day festival.79 Signi cantly, Clare’s engagement with customary culture here draws on sophisticated language and aesthetics. Clare’s unnamed narrator employs a meta-discourse that is capable of integrating bourgeois discourses into the common sphere without satirizing them or rendering them antagonistic. Clare’s subtlety can be perceived in the sleight of hand which allows the narrator to use multiple discourses and to closely associate himself with his subject, but restricts the language of his subject, Lubin, to that of an uncultivated peasant poet. The narrator’s use of the picturesque aesthetic in the descriptions of shepherds deliberating on the origins of the ruins of Woodford Castle, for instance, implies that bourgeois discourse is not necessarily at odds with less socially elevated conceptions of antiquarian history. Clare satirizes the picturesque in this poem only when the emotional reaction that accompanies the experience of it lacks authenticity. The narrator is critical of ‘artless maidens who romances read’ and imagine, like Catherine Morland in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), that ‘Each ruind heap was castles now discryd’ (ll. 1045–6). Real familiarity

78 There is very little reference to May Day customs in the later verse. Clare suggests that the May Day festivities have been destroyed by enclosure in ‘May’ (The Shepherd’s Calendar, 1827). Like his other May Day poems, there are literary in uences on this poem. ‘Sang’ (1845) contains a brief reference to May Day bonnets. Clare, Later Poems, I, 164. Spring, however, and May, in particular, continue to have an important association with happiness in Clare’s later poetry, much of which details the natural landscape during the season. 79 Clare, Early Poems, II, 123–79.

130

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

with such places enables the untroubled coexistence of the shepherds’ description of the scene and the picturesque discourse used by the poet. The narrator uses sensibility, another sophisticated discourse, as a natural way to describe excess. For Clare, bourgeois discourse is a tool which can be discarded at will; he lets the subject matter dictate the form. The narrator speaks of his subject as being ‘Enraptured’ (253), and often stresses the extent to which Lubin’s sensibility emotionally engages with the natural landscape and the stories of the villagers. Surrounded thus a paradise as sweet Enthusiasm made his soul to glow His heart wi wild sensations usd to beat As nature seemly sung his mutterings usd repeat (ll. 169–72)

But Lubin himself is unable to soar to this kind of language in his poem on the pauper (ll. 295–339). The narrator characterizes him as a poet of sensibility but Lubin does not express himself as such. The two main descriptions of May Day in this poem highlight the differences between Lubin and the narrator. The rst describes the occasion from Lubin’s point of view: & dear to him the rural sports of may When each cot threshold mounts its hailing bough & ruddy milk maids weave their garlands gay Upon the green to crown the earliest cow When mirth & pleasure wears its joyful brow & joins the tumult wi unbounded glee (l. 184–7)

This is a close observation of the activities of the day, with emphasis on the speci c regional customs, such as cow-garlanding. The second description comes from the perspective of the narrator and is written in more elevated language: O who can tell the sweets of maydays morn To waken rapture in a feeling mind When the gilt east unveils its dappld dawn & the gay wood lark has its nest resignd As slow the sun creeps up the hill behind Morn reddning round & day lights spotless hue As seemly sweet wi rose & lily lind While all the prospect round beams fair to view As the sweet opening ower wi its unsullied dew (ll. 200–208)

This is more general and concentrates on conventional descriptions of the natural world. In effect, the narrator, and Clare, as author, distances himself from the rudimentary language of the aspiring peasant poet. The question here is: what is Clare ultimately telling us about how he views the peasant poet? We may suppose that the sophisticated narrator of ‘The Village Minstrel’ values peasant culture. The peasant who aspires to language beyond his sphere and feels like a poet, but does not actualize multiple discourses, is clearly another model of

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

131

a poet. But the dislocation of Lubin from much of community life makes it clear that Lubin is not straightforwardly an example of a peasant poet integrated into the common sphere. Lubin is solitary because he is ‘natures child’ (l. 436), but his solitariness is intermittent – something which critical responses to the poem tend to overlook. His appetite for common folklore about fairy rings, haunted ponds and for the tales of Tom Hickathrift, a popular hero of hawkers’ pamphlets, is immense (l. 529). Lubin’s place in the village is one of observer and collector of stories, but he does not create a story which enters the common sphere. The villagers sing together and exchange other stories which will be kept alive for as long as ‘rural manners will survive’ or ‘wild rusticity has birth / To spread their wonders round the cottage hearth’ (ll. 120–21). These stories ‘On lubins mind oft deeply they imprest’ (l. 123), but Lubin’s own song echod on the even gale All by the brook the pasture owers among But ah such tri es are of no avail Theres few to notice him or hear his simple tale (ll. 241–4)

The thousands of tales which the ‘village keeps alive’ (l. 118) represent the common sphere, whereas the peasant red with ‘Ambitions prospects’ (l. 35), although he ‘sings what nature & what truth inspires’ (l. 5), is destined for isolation and obscurity. Lubin’s aspiration to be a true peasant poet, achieving poetic immortality through his work entering the common sphere, is unful lled. Clare expresses, through Lubin, his fears of being forgotten – oblivion is, Clare suggests, the ultimate fate of all but a few who circulate their work in the bourgeois public sphere. Stephen Colclough suggests that ‘[…] the idea of authorship [in this poem] is secured by the mirrored relationship of Lubin and the narrator. Lubin maintains a distance between himself and the crowd which the narration desires to form him as an author’.80 While I agree that acknowledged authorship requires distance from the subject, I would question the assumption that the narrator privileges his own model of authorship over that of the peasant participating in the common sphere. Lubin’s aspiration to become more than a peasant poet is seen as an attempt to attain a socially elevated language which will perhaps take him out of the poverty in which he languishes: Folks much may wonder how the thing may be That lubins taste shoud seek re ned joys & court the ’chanting smiles of poesy Bred in a village full of strife & noise[.]81

The language of the peasant is characterized at this point in the narrative as merely functional; it allows for little more than talk of ‘who were like to dye ere while & who were like to wed’ (l. 393). Having described at length the entertaining qualities 80 Stephen Colclough, ‘Voicing Loss: Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of John Clare, 1817–1832’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Keele University, 1996), p. 79. 81 Clare, Early Poems, II, 139, ll. 385–8.

132

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

of the reside stories told by the villagers, this reduction of peasant discourse to mere functionality seems disingenuous. Of Lubin’s response to village tales of Jack the giant killer, we are told Which still the same enchanting power supplyd The stagnant tear amazement wipd away & jacks exploits were felt for many an after day (ll. 543–5)

The villagers’ ‘gabbling talk’ (l. 522) has the power to ‘beguile’ Lubin’s povertyinduced worries; it possesses an enchanting power to make the unbelievable seem ‘As true as gospel revealations’ (l. 83). This is hardly merely functional talk. If the village stories are the poetry which achieves the much-prized common fame, then where does this leave the narrator? His is, after all, the dominant voice. The answer lies in Lubin’s reaction to the enclosure of common land. The threat to peasant culture, in this poem, is from land enclosure – which is powerful enough to change the seasons: ‘Spring more resembles winter now then spring’ (l. 1082); enclosure is the instrument of ‘oppresions power’ (l. 1071) which has caused a major deterioration in the natural world, and the death of customary events. Lubin’s consolation after enclosure has damaged both the landscape and the culture of the region lies in remembering the village life that has passed: Mixd wi his friends around the cottage hearth Relating all the travels he had known & that hed seen no spot so lovly as his own (ll. 1270–73)

Lubin returns to the cottage hearth to tell stories of his own. The shepherds also have a role in memorializing this culture. Lubin talks […] oer wi them the rural feats of may Who got the blossoms neath the morning dew That the last garland made & where such blossoms grew (ll. 1126–8)

Enclosure enables the peasant-poet to attain relevance within his community as a preserver of its culture, and dislocates the villagers from their cultural activities to the extent that some of these events are transformed into stories of ‘past delights of many a by gone day’ (l. 1121). In memorializing Lubin, the narrator is able to perpetuate the village songs. The narrator’s role, then, is to use the knowledge he has of peasant culture and his facility with multiple discourses to perpetuate the culture of the village and counteract the effects of enclosure. His use of these sophisticated discourses makes the material of interest to the bourgeois class. The narrator cannot achieve common fame in the same way that the villagers can with their songs, but he is able to ght against the erosion of this culture, which has been characterized as resulting from the destruction of common land. Bourgeois discourses, then, are not antagonistic to peasant culture; they are part of the method by which it can be preserved. It is necessary that the stories and customs of the village be recorded as literature because the common sphere (oral culture) which perpetuates them is being destroyed by, amongst other things, the enclosure of common space. We can

‘A greater fame than poets ever knew’

133

interpret this as bridging a gap between bourgeois and common culture, but there is more to be gained by understanding Clare’s cultural position exibly. In Clare’s work customary culture appears to con ict with bourgeois culture when bourgeois power suppresses folk voices. This is not the same as attacking high culture, however; it is an attack on the suppression of common culture. Children, he writes in The Parish (1820–27), are ‘taught at school their stations to despise / & view old customs with disdainful eyes’.82 Clare’s attention is focused on countering the erosion of customary culture by representing enactments of rural rituals which are sometimes resilient and sometimes in gradual decline. Public events sustain the common culture of which Clare approves. In ‘May’ (1826), the sad thresher observes ‘Young childern at the self same games / And hears the self same simple names / Still oating on each happy tongue’.83 Clare’s antipathy to school and book-learning may go some way to explaining this con ict between school and custom, but it is also likely that in focussing on the removal of customs from peasant consciousness, Clare is lamenting the erosion of rural public space. Critics have responded to the complexity of ‘The Village Minstrel’ unenthusiastically. John Lucas interprets the multiple perspectives offered in the poem negatively, suggesting that they derive from a disingenuous indecision on Clare’s part: ‘on occasions he [Clare] will align himself with those who condescend. He wants to show that he is above the society in which he grew. Hence “Lubin”, “clown”, “swain”’.84 Lucas argues that in ‘The Village Minstrel’ Clare tries to snap the bonds that tie him to the image of ‘peasant poet’ which [John] Taylor [his publisher] had by and large created […]. The poem wants to have it both ways. What is celebrated is also kept at a distance; condescended to as Clare loathed being condescended to.85

Lucas reads the multiple discourses as confusion: ‘Clare can’t decide where he stands in relation to Lubin’.86 Johanne Clare is similarly negative. She argues that Clare’s ‘emphasis upon the artless, nature-inspired character of his poet-hero could […] be construed as a gesture of deference’.87 The poem, however, appears to tolerate multiple perspectives more positively than this. The culture of the village is not threatened by bourgeois literary culture, but is threatened by bourgeois legislation. The narrator mediates between the bourgeois and peasant cultures, in the sense that he presents himself as understanding both cultures, but he does not ally himself to Clare’s understanding of bourgeois popularity. He is not the ‘learned genius’ who rushes ‘to bold extremes’ in the opening lines (l. 1). Clare’s narrator allows us to see the ‘unconscious poet of little name’ without allowing the poet, Lubin, to become self-conscious: ‘He unambitious looks at no renown’ (l. 11). The narrator capitalizes 82 Clare, Early Poems, II, 704, ll. 154–5. 83 Clare, ‘May’, The Shepherds Calendar, Middle Poems, I, 69. ll. 313–15. 84 John Lucas, John Clare, Writers and Their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), p. 7. 85 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 86 Ibid., p. 30. 87 Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1987), p. 96.

134

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

on bourgeois literary discourses, such as sensibility and the picturesque, but is able to satirize them in the same poem. His multiple roles permit the poem to become a collaboration between the observers of peasant culture (such as the narrator) and the peasants themselves (Lubin and the villagers), displaying levels of authenticity and alienation from peasant culture, but nevertheless promoting this culture. Lubin is occasionally removed from his cultural context, the educated narrator clearly is, and the villagers eventually are, through the decay of their customs. Clare implies that the most authentic songs, those of the villagers, are, nevertheless, more likely to retain their popularity than Lubin’s or those of the narrator. Clare’s preoccupation with the effects of enclosure suggests that he was deeply troubled by the disappearance of common public space and the effect of this on customary culture. He attributed this decline to legislation rather than an oppressive higher culture. His concept of a common culture which is less in opposition to bourgeois culture (which he makes use of) than to literary fashion, and his exchanges with antiquarians on the subject of common culture (folk traditions, stories and songs) should be read as part of his attempt to de ne his role within a declining common public sphere (where common culture is publicly carried out). Clare is revolutionary because he argues against his own assimilation into the bourgeois literary sphere. By conceptualizing literary fame as commonplace he refuses to represent the interests of the bourgeois class; his acute awareness that popular culture was being turned into a literary fashion prompts this defence of the sincerity of the truly rural poet. Clare neither sees himself as mediating between high and low culture, a role that is frequently imputed to him, nor as attacking high culture; Clare does not conceive of culture in this oppositional way. Clare’s work focuses, rather, on the relative sincerity of the public and private personas of the poet. He understands himself in the context of a new conception of what it means to be a public poet: a private person who seeks common fame.

Conclusion Romantic literature has for a long time been read in the context of national political upheaval, but the attention that has been given to local cultures has been meagre. I want to suggest that folklore is signi cant for Romantic-era writing and that it has been in a critical blind spot for too long. The object of this study has been to provide a particularized account of the way in which the common sphere refracts through the literature of the Romantic era through focussing on one set of cultural practices. From this we can conclude that there is a widespread interest in assessing the power of the common sphere and a conviction that the commercial world endangers it. This sphere is an important in uence on all of the writers whom I consider here, and, through an examination of just one of its ritual practices, we can see how the idea of it impacts on literary culture. Needless to say, the reactions to it are nuanced and complex, and vary widely from author to author. The common sphere is marked by its failure to constitute an independent realm of rational re ection or discussion: for the most part, such intellectualization and analysis is conducted by bourgeois writers from outside the sphere itself, be they poets or antiquarians. A possible exception to this is the somewhat ambiguous gure of Clare, who provides the most sustained commentary on the function of the common sphere and on its dialectical place relative to bourgeois society. Clare dialogues both with antiquarians and with the wider bourgeois public in a way which signals a possible integration of the two spheres. For Hunt, too, the objective of his discussion of the common sphere is to break down the barriers between the common sphere and the bourgeois public sphere – speci cally by prioritizing the practices of the common sphere (with its close connection to nature) over those of the bourgeois and/or urban realm. For other writers, the relationship between the two spheres is in various ways more oppositional. Of course, to recount the professed opinion of a past writer on a matter of interest to him or her does not entail that the opinion is itself trustworthy; it may be that Clare’s analysis of the complex overlapping between different spheres is more plausible than the views of those writers who apparently offer a more straightforwardly polarized account of the relation. To some extent this problematizes the theoretical task of considering the common sphere as a discrete context for bourgeois (and other) literary production. But I have tried in the discussions offered above to remain faithful to the insights of the individual writers, using their own discussions of the issues as the springboard for an analysis of the role of folklore in their own literary work. The extent and nature of the reference to the cultural practices of the common sphere in literature suggest that this sphere became more socially acceptable in bourgeois writing, and that it was a recognisable form of public activity which had an important social and literary function for Romantic-era writers. The distress shown by some of the writers discussed here over the decline of the common sphere is, in the case of Clare, linked to the erosion of public common space.

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

136

While Clare’s interpretation of the decline of customary culture is not shared by the other writers under discussion, it is clear that there are points on which these authors come closer to agreeing. For example, Clare, like Wordsworth and others, places the common sphere in competition with bourgeois commercial publicity. Wordsworth emphasizes, through his use of authentic markers, that the common sphere is superior to bourgeois commercialism and its degenerate cultures; Clare argues for the longevity of common fame and the ephemeral nature of art which is generated for the bourgeois commercial market. Oppositional politics play a part in both of these accounts, but it is important to stress that this is not the whole picture. Importantly, common culture is not shown in Romantic-era accounts of the common sphere as necessarily in con ict with a bourgeois agenda of promoting the universal values of ‘love, freedom and cultivation’.1 Depictions of the common sphere in the poetry of the period suggest community activity which expresses love and freedom in sophisticated literature even when, as in the case of Clare’s ‘The Village Minstrel’, that literature originates from close contact with the common sphere. Furthermore, antiquarian accounts of customary culture participate in making the activities of the common sphere of legitimate public interest and emphasize their value for the cultivated mind. I must stress here that a more inclusive de nition of antiquarian interest, one that embraces contributions from the peasant class, is of more use when understanding the complexities of the common sphere and how it is manifest in bourgeois literature. The degree to which the writers included in this study depict the particularities of local May Day celebrations varies considerably, and there is often signi cant development in the reaction to May Day and the common sphere within an individual writer’s work. Initially, Wordsworth was concerned with the particularities of localized cultural practices and in establishing that there is a cultural distance between the participant in these practices and the observers of them. He stressed that customary culture signi ed the close link between nature and humankind, and between place and people. The question of authenticity becomes signi cant for him when these practices are indicative of the common sphere. In The Prelude, however, Wordsworth’s treatment of the common sphere is sentimentalized. Rural culture is used as a foil for the decadent commercialism of bourgeois culture, and Wordsworth’s concern seems to be more with a past golden age than with either nature or the intrinsic value of the common sphere. Wordsworth’s lament for the loss of the connection between nature and humankind in the later odes plays less subtly with the great and little traditions than, for example, the Intimations Ode – in effect, the common sphere has disappeared. Blake’s engagement with pastoral aesthetics is more sophisticated than that offered by Wordsworth in the later odes. Blake re ects the nuances of classical pastoralism by exploiting the tensions between the sophistication of the speaker and the naive subject. He extends this dialectic to the tensions between the urban May Day, which he associates with hardship, and the rural May Day, which represents liberation. The urban May Day festival is conspicuous in Songs because of its absence. Blake casts aside the idea of the urban May Day as a temporary respite which may appease the consciences of bystanders, and preserves, 1

Habermas, p. 51.

Conclusion

137

in its place, the spring paradise as a spiritual aspiration for the festival’s participants. It is striking that the urban May Day is tainted in several of the accounts offered by writers of the Romantic era. Redemption narratives take the victims of the city to the rural common sphere where conditions are better, socially and theologically. In some ways, Blake is simpler than some of his contemporaries who comment on the city festival in that he, like Hunt, is not so concerned with the residual feudalism which Southey, for example, suggests is associated with May Day. As I mentioned in my introduction, Rosemary Sweet has hinted that local culture became more interesting to historians of the eighteenth century because of more general literary trends towards emotional self-expression and biography. While the analysis offered in my study cannot con rm this theory, and it has not been my intention to set out to do this, it is worth attempting to answer the related question of why local culture becomes more interesting to creative writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and indeed continues to be of interest for some time). I have argued here that the increased interest in antiquarianism encouraged the literary interest in local culture, and that this is especially true of writers for whom the experiences of the festival were less direct (for example Southey, Coleridge and Hunt). The close contact that Blake and Clare maintained with the common sphere clearly in uenced their attitude towards including local culture in their writing. An interest in emotional self-expression and biography does not suf ciently explain the literary fascination for the cultural practices of the common sphere. Rather, this interest is generated by a genuine belief in the signi cance of this form of public activity – a belief which I have shown to be variegated and to have originated in various ways and for a variety of motivations.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography Primary Sources Alcock, Mary, Poems etc etc By the Late Mrs Mary Alcock (London: C. Dilly, 1799) Anon., May-Day: A Poem in Four Parts (London: H. Turpin, 1790) ——, A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes in Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland, By A Rambler (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1792) ——, ‘Old May-Day (Last Wednesday)’, Westmorland Advertiser and Kendal Chronicle, 16 May 1818, p. 2 ——, ‘May’, The Whitehaven Gazette, 14 May 1819, p. 4 ——, ‘Notes and Queries’, Notes and Queries, 1 (1849), 1–3 Baines, Paul, and Edward Burns, eds, Five Romantic Plays 1768–1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Baker, Anne Elizabeth, Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases, 2 vols (London: John Russell Smith, 1854) Barbauld, Anna Letitia, Hymns in Prose for Children, 4th edn (London: T. Bensley, 1787) ——, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. by William McCarthy Kraft and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002) Blake, William, The Letters of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968) ——, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) ——, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) ——, Songs of Innocence and Experience, ed. by Andrew Lincoln (Princeton, New Jersey: 1991) Brand, John, Observations on Popular Antiquities Including the Whole of Mr Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: J. Johnson, 1777) ——, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chie y Illustrating the Origin of our Vulgar Customs, and Superstitions, 3 vols (London: Charles Knight, 1841–42) Bray, Anna Eliza, A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on The Tamar and the Tavy; its Natural History, Manners, Customs, Superstitions, Scenery, Antiquities, Biography of Eminent Persons […] In a series of Letters to Robert Southey, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1836) Burke, Edward, ‘Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’, in The Works of Edmund Burke, ed. by F. W. Raffety, 6 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1906– 1907), V, pp. 1–135 Burney, Frances, Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

140

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Chambers, Robert, ed., The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, 2 vols (London: W. and R. Chambers, 1863–64) Chapman, George, May-Day, A Comedie (London: I. Browne, 1611) Clare, John, The Village Minstrel (London: Taylor and Hessey; Stamford: E. Drury, 1821) ——, ‘Essay on Popularity’, in The Prose of John Clare, ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1851), pp. 206–10 ——, John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) ——, John Clare: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, The Oxford Authors, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) ——, The Later Poems of John Clare 1837–1864, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) ——, The Letters of John Clare, ed. by Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) ——, The Early Poems of John Clare 1804–1822, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) ——, Cottage Tales, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993) ——, Northborough Sonnets, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995) ——, Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–98) Clarke, James, A Survey of the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland, and Lancashire: Together with an Account, Historical, Topographical, and Descriptive, of the Adjacent Country. To which is added a sketch of the Border Laws and Customs (London: J. Robson and J. Faulder, 1787) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘The Origin of the Maypole’, The Monthly Magazine, 1 (1796), 29 ——, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1807–1814, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) ——, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion ed. by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Bollingen Series, 75 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) ——, Biographia Literaria, Bollingen Series, 54, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) ——, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, repr. 2000) Collings, Samuel, ‘May-Day in London’, The Wit’s Magazine, May 1784, pp. 190– 91 Dickens, Charles, Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, ed. by Thea Holme (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) ——, Bleak House, Penguin Classics, ed. by Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1985) Douce, Francis, Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807)

Bibliography

141

Drake, Nathan, Shakespeare and His Times (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1817) Faunthorpe, J. P., ‘A May Queen Festival with Letters from Mr. Ruskin’, The Nineteenth Century, 37 (1895), 734–7 Gibson, A. Craig, ‘Ancient Customs and Superstitions in Cumberland’, Transactions of the History Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 10 (1858), 97–110 Groseley, Peter J., A Tour to London; or New Observations on England and its Inhabitants, trans. by Thomas Nugent, 2 vols (London: Lockyear Davis, 1772) Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Herrick, Robert, The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. by L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) Hazlitt, William, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34) Hitchins, Fortescue, The History of Cornwall, from the Earliest Records and Traditions to the Present Time, ed. by Samuel Drew, 2 vols (Helston: W. Penaluna, 1824) Holloway, William, The Chimney-Sweeper’s Complaint (London: J. Harris, 1806) Hone, William, The Every-Day Book; or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusement, 2 vols (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826–27) ——, The Every-Day Book, 3 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1831) Hood, Thomas, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed. by Walter Jerrold (London: Henry Frowde, 1906) Howitt, William, The Rural Life of England, 2 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans,1838) Hughes, Anne, The Diary of a Farmer’s Wife 1796–1797, ed. By Jeanne Preston (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981) Hunt, J. H. Leigh, ‘May Weather’, The Examiner, 20 May 1813, pp. 350–1 ——, ‘Old May-Day’, The Examiner, 10 May 1818, pp. 289–91 ——, Foliage: Or Poems Original and Translated (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818) ——, ‘May-Day’, The Indicator, 26 April 1820, pp. 225–32 ——, ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, The Companion, 7 May 1828, pp. 241–3 ——, ‘Life in May. – Butter ies, Bees andc. – With the Consideration of a Curious Argument, drawn from the Government of the Hive’, The Indicator, 1 May 1832, pp. 457–68 ——, ‘A Year of Honeymoons’, Court Magazine, June 1833, pp. 304–9 ——, The Indicator and The Companion: A Miscellany for the Fields and the Fireside, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1834) ——, ‘Tomorrow The First of May’, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, 30 April 1834, pp. 33–4 ——, Table-Talk: To Which are Added Imaginary Conversation of Pope and Swift (London: Smith, Elder, 1851) ——, The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events (London: Smith and Elder, 1870) ——, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. by H. S. Milford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923)

142

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

——, The Months: Descriptive of the Successive Beauties of the Year (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936) ——, Men, Women and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, And Critical Memoirs from his Uncollected Prose Writings ed. by L. Stanley Jast (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1943) ——, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. by J. E. Morpurgo (London: The Cresset Press, 1948) ——, Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. by Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956) ——, Essays by Leigh Hunt, ed. by Arthur Symons (London: Walter Scott, 1887) Hutchinson, William, The History of the County of Cumberland, 2 vols (Carlisle: F. Jollie, 1794–97; repr. Ilkley, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1974) Irving, Washington, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories [The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.] (London: Penguin, 2000) Johnston, Charles, The History of John Juniper, Esq., Alias Juniper Jack, 3 vols (London: R. Baldwin, 1781) Lamb, Charles, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 6 vols (London: Methuen, 1912) Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford University Press, 1924) ——, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb 1821–1842, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1912) ——, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. by Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–78) Lockhart, John Gibson, [‘Z’], ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818), 519–24 Lovibond, Edward, The Poetical Works of Edward Lovibond (Edinburgh: Mundell, 1795) Martineau, Harriet, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes (London: Whittaker, 1855) Milton, Marmaduke, St. James’s Street. A Poem. In Blank Verse (London: J. Debrett and E. Harlow, 1790) Montgomery, James, ed., The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing-Boys Album (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824) More, Hannah, Village Politics 1793, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995) Ovid, Fasti, trans. by A. J. Boyle and R. D. Woodard, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2000) Paine, Thomas, The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. by Michael Foot and Isaac Kramner (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987) Peacock, Thomas Love, The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. by H. F. B. BrettSmith and C. E. Jones, The Halliford Edition, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1974) Polwhele, Richard, The History of Cornwall, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1803)

Bibliography

143

Scott, Walter, The Antiquary, ed. by Nicola J. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Scott, William Bell, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott; And Notices of His Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends, 1830 to 1882 (London: James R. Osgood, McIlvane, 1892) Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982) Smith, John Thomas, Vagabondiana; or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers Through the Streets of London; with portraits of the most remarkable, Drawn from the life by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of the Prints in the British Museum (London: J. and A. Arch, Hatchard and Clarke, 1817) Soane, George, The Book of the Months and Circle of the Seasons (London: David Bogue, 1844) Sternberg, Thomas, The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (London: John Russell Smith; Northampton: Abel and Sons; G. N. Welton; Oundle: R. Todd; Brackley: A. Green, 1851; repr. East Ardsley, Wake eld, Yorkshire: S. R., 1971) Stevenson, William, Original Poems on Several Subjects, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson and J. Reid, 1765) Strutt, Joseph, Glig-gamena Angel-ðeod, or, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May-Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions, and Pompous Spectacles, from the earliest Period to the Present Time (London: J. White, 1801) ——, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ed. by Charles J. Fox (London: Methuen, 1903) Southey, Robert, The Book of the Church, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1824) ——, Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1830) ——, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected By Himself, 10 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843) ——, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. by Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849–50) ——, Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. by John Wood Warter (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851) ——, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. ed. by Cuthbert Southey, 4 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856) ——, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press: 1965) ——, Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, ed. by Jack Simmons (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984) ——, Wat Tyler in Five Romantic Plays 1768–1821, ed. by Paul Baines and Edward Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 71–101 Spenser, Edmund, The Works of Edmund Spencer: A Variorum Edition, The Minor Poems, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, and Ray Heffner, 2 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943–47)

144

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Sullivan, Jeremiah, Cumberland and Westmorland, Ancient and Modern: The People, Dialect, Superstitions and Customs (London: Whittaker, 1857) Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair, ed. by Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (London: Methuen, 1963) Wordsworth, William, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949) ——, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism ed. by Nowell C. Smith and Howard Mills (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1980) ——, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems 1800–1807, ed. by Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) ——, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992) Secondary Literature Ackroyd, Peter, Blake (London: Vintage, 1995) Adlard, John, The Sports of Cruelty: Fairies, Folk-Songs, Charms and Other Country Matters in the Work of William Blake (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1972) Alexander, Marc, A Companion to the Folklore, Myths and Customs of Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 2002) Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) Bate, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991) ——, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003) Blackburn, Bonnie and Leofranc Holford-Stevens, eds, The Oxford Book of Days (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Brownlow, Timothy, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Buchan, David, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978) Butler, Marilyn, ‘Antiquarianism (Popular)’, in An Oxford Companion to The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, ed. by Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 328–38 Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992) Chaney, David, Fictions and Ceremonies: Representations of Popular Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) Chilcott, Tim, ‘A Real World and a Doubting Mind’: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare (Pickering: Hull University Press, 1985) Clare, Johanne, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1987) Colclough, Stephen, ‘Voicing Loss: Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of John Clare, 1817–1832’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Keele, 1996)

Bibliography

145

Cullingford, Benita, British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeping (Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 2000) Deacon, George, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983) Dean, William, ‘Chapman’s May Day: A Comedy of Social Reformation’, Parergon, 16 (1976), 47–55 Dorson, Richard M., The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968) Eaves, Morris, ‘On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 58 (1996), 413–39 Ehrenpreis, Anne Henry, ed., The Literary Ballad (London: Edward Arnold, 1966) Erdman, David, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New York: Dover, 1977) Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1989) Frye, Northrop, ed., Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966) Fulford, Tim, ed., Romanticism and Millenarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2002) Gifford, Terry, Pastoral, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 1999) Gillham, D. G., Blake’s Contrary States: The ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ As Dramatic Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) Gleckner, Robert F., The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959) Goodridge, John and Simon Kövesi, John Clare: New Approaches, (Helpston, Peterborough: The John Clare Society, 2000) Gorji, Mina, ‘Clare and Community: The “Old Poets” and the London Magazine’, in John Clare: New Approaches, ed. by John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi (Helpston, Peterborough: The John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 47–63 Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) Harris, Tim, Popular Culture in England c1500–1850 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995) ——, ed. The Politics of the Excluded: c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) Haughton, Hugh, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summer eld, eds, John Clare in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Hazlitt, William Carew, Faiths and Folklore, 2 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1905) Helsinger, Elizabeth, ‘Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet’, Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987), 509–31 Hirsch, E. D., Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964) Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989) Hutton, Ronald, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

146

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Ireland, Alexander, ed., List of the Writings of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt […] Preceded by Charles Lamb, Bibliography and Reference Series, 299 (London: John Russell Smith, 1868; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970) James, E. O., Seasonal Feasts and Festivals (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961) Johnson, Richard Brimley, Leigh Hunt (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1896) Judge, Roy, ‘Changing Attitudes to May Day, 1844–1914, With Particular Reference to Oxfordshire’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 1987) ——, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, Folklore, 102 (1991), 131–48 ——, ‘Fact and Fancy in Tennyson’s “May Queen” and in Flora Thompson’s “May Day”’, in Aspects of British Calendar Customs, ed. by Theresa Buckland and Juliette Wood, The Folklore Society Mistletoe Series, 22 (Shef eld: Shef eld Academic Press, 1993), pp.167–83 ——, May Day in England: An Introductory Bibliography, FLS Books Bibliographies 1, 3rd edn (London: The Folklore Society, 1999) ——, Jack-in-the-Green: A May-Day Custom (London: D. S. Brewer and Rowman and Little eld, Folklore Society, 2000) Kightly, Charles, The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain: An Encyclopedia of Living Traditions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986) Kroeber, Karl, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) Laws, G. Malcolm, The British Literary Ballad (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972) Leader, Zachary, Reading Blake’s ‘Songs’ (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) Lemprière, John, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, ed. by F. A. Wright (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) Levinson, Marjorie, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Lucas, John, John Clare, Writers and Their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994) MacIntire, Walter T., Lakeland and the Borders of Long Ago, ed. by Thomas Gray (Carlisle: Charles Thurnam, 1948) Malcolmson, Robert W., Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973) Marsh, Nicholas, William Blake: The Poems (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001) Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Frank Cass, 1961– 62) McCalman, Iain, ed., An Oxford Companion to The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) McCann, Andrew, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (London: Macmillan, 1999) McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983) McGlynn, Paul D. ‘Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence)’, The Explicator, 27 (1968), 20

Bibliography

147

Miller, Clarence H., ‘The May-Day Celebration in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 27 (1987), 571–9 Miller, Eric, ‘Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 40 (2000), , 635–57 Mullan, John, and Christopher Reid, eds, Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Nurmi, Martin K., ‘Fact and Symbol in “The Chimney Sweeper” of Blake’s Songs of Innocence’, in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 15–22 Paley, Morton, William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) ——, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Perkin, Joan, ‘Beauclerk, Harriot, Duchess of St Albans (1777?–1837)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www. oxforddnb.com/ view/article/18533, accessed 25 August 2005]. Phillips, George L., England’s Climbing Boys: The History of the Long Struggle to Abolish Child Labor in Chimney-Sweeping (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1949) ——, ‘Mrs Montagu and the Climbing Boys’, Review of English Studies, 25 (1949), 237–44 Poole, Robert, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London: UCL Press, 1998) Primeau, Ronald ‘Blake’s Chimney Sweeper as Afro-American Minstrel’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1974–75), 418–30 Raine, Kathleen, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) Reay, Barry, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1998) Reed, James, Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: Athlone, 1980) Reed, Mark L., Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years 1800–1815 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975) Robinson, F. N., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mif in, 1987) Rogers, Lorena Blanche, The May-Day Festival in Literature (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1932) Rogers, Nicholas, ‘Crowds and Political Festival in Georgian England’, in The Politics of the Excluded: c.1500–1850, ed. by Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) pp. 233–64 Rogers, Pat, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985) Rollinson, William, Life and Tradition in the Lake District (Lancaster: Dalesman Books, 1987) Rowling, Margaret, The Folklore of the Lake District (London: B. T. Batsford, 1926) William Ruddick, ‘Liberty Trees and Loyal Oaks: Emblematic Presences in Some English Poems of the French Revolutionary Period’ in Re ections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. by Alison Yarrington (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 59–67

148

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

Sales, Roger, English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (New York: St Martin’s, 1983) Schur, Owen, Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1989) Scullard, H. H., Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981) Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud, eds, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Storch, Robert D., Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982) Storey, Mark, The Poetry of Clare: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1974) ——, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) ——, ed., Clare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) Strange, K. H., Climbing Boys: A Study of Sweep’s Apprentices 1773–1875 (London: Allison and Busby, 1992) Sweet, Rosemary, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004) Tatchell, Molly, Leigh Hunt and his Family in Hammersmith (London: Hammersmith Local History Group, 1969) Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London: Merlin, 1991) Tolley, Michael J., ‘Blake’s Songs of Spring’, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. by Morton D. Paley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 96–128 Trumpener, Kate, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) Whitaker, Wilfred Barnett, Sunday in Tudor and Stuart Times (London: Houghton, 1933) Williams, Porter, ‘“Duty” in Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” of Songs of Innocence’, English Language Notes, 12 (1974), 92–6 Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973) ——, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) Wilson, James, The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Cumberland, 2 vols (London: Archibald Constable, 1905) Wilson, John Larrymore, ‘Folklore in the Long Narrative Poems of Robert Southey’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1947) Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England: 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Wordsworth, Jonathan, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) Yarrington, Alison, ed., Re ections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism (London: Routledge, 1993)

Index

Anglo-Saxon 18, 22, 46, 64, 65, 66, 67 antiquarianism 1–4, 9–11, 13–14, 16, 27– 31, 34, 36, 48, 53, 64, 67, 89, 94, 95, 112, 115, 117, 118, 121–2, 123, 128, 129, 134, 136–7 aristocracy see public spheres Baker, Anne Elizabeth 122, 128 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 102–3, 107 Bate, Jonathan 52n75, 71–2, 73, 79–82, 87 beltane 17, 48 Blake, William 15, 36, 78, 89–113, 126, 129, 136–7 An Island in the Moon 109 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 100 Milton 103 Poetical Sketches 100–101, 107 ‘Song by an Old Shepherd’ 101 ‘Song: Fresh from the dewy hill’ 104 ‘Song: I love the jocund dance’ 106 ‘To Spring’ 100, 103–4, 107 Songs of Innocence and Experience 1, 15, 36, 94, 97–113, 136–7 ‘A Cradle Song (I)’ 105–6 ‘The Chimney Sweeper (E)’ 110–13 ‘The Chimney Sweeper (I)’ 98, 101, 109–13 ‘The Ecchoing Green (I)’ 100, 103, 106–7, 129 ‘The Garden of Love (E)’ 107 ‘Holy Thursday (E)’ 101 ‘Holy Thursday (I)’ 111 ‘Introduction (E)’ 105 ‘Introduction (I)’ 105, 109–10 ‘The Lamb (I)’ 105 ‘Laughing Song (I)’107 ‘The Little Black Boy (I)’ 108, 112 ‘The Little Boy Found (I)’ 108 ‘A Little Boy Lost (E)’ 108–9 ‘The Little Boy Lost (I)’ 108 ‘The Little Girl Lost (E)’ 107 ‘The Little Vagabond’ (E)’ 101 ‘London (E)’ 111

‘Night (I)’ 107 ‘Nurses Song (I)’ 107 ‘The School-Boy (E)’ 108 ‘The Shepherd (I)’ 106 ‘Spring (I)’ 103–5 A Vision of the Last Judgment 108 Bloom eld, Robert 125–6 bona dea 17 bon res see beltane; May Day and res Bowles, William Lisle 94 Brand, John 27–9, 30, 90, 128n77 Bray, Anna Eliza 53, 54 Burke, Edmund 60, 72, 89 Burney, Fanny 92–3 Byron, George Gordon 76, 120 calendar change 23, 76 Catholicism see May Day and Catholicism Chambers, Robert 19, 95 Chartism 59 Chaucer, Geoffrey 37, 74, 76, 78, 85, 86 chimney sweeps see May day and chimney sweeps Clare, John 4, 7–8, 12, 14, 15, 30, 31, 115–137 ‘The Author’s Address to His Book’ 125, 126 Autobiographical Writings 123–4, 128 ‘Blake’ 126 Cottage Tales 121 ‘The Death of Dobbin’ 125 ‘Dobson and Judie or The Cottage’ 127 ‘Essay on Popularity’ 118–21, 126 ‘Fame’ 119, 126 ‘The Farewell’ 126 ‘The First of May A Ballad’ 128 ‘May-Day’ 129 ‘May-Day (Now happy Swains)’ 128 ‘To the Memory of Bloom eld’ 125 ‘To the Memory of James Merrishaw A Village Schoolmaster’ 124, 126 The Midsummer Cushion 122 ‘On the Neglect of True Merit’ 120

150

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

‘No hailing curry favouring tothers Muses’ 124 Northborough Sonnets 119 ‘To Obscurity’ 126 The Parish 133 ‘The Poet’s Wish’ 124–5 ‘Sang’ 129n78 The Shepherd’s Calendar ‘May’ 129n78, 133 ‘Something New’ 124 ‘Vanity of Fame’ 126–7 ‘The Village Minstrel’ 1, 121, 126, 127, 128, 129–34, 136 Clarke, James 30, 46, 47 classical literature see May Day and classical literature Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 15, 27, 34–9, 64–7, 85 Biographia Literaria 37 Conciones ad Populum 65 ‘Dejection’ 37–8 ‘Destiny of Nations’ 63 The Friend 35 ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ 38 ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ 73 ‘To Mathilda Betham’ 37 ‘The Nightingale’ 74, 82 ‘The Origin of the Maypole’ 64–7 Religious Musings 58, 63, 104–5 Collings, Samuel 98, 99, 111 common sphere see public spheres Cornwall see May Day in England coronals see May Day and coronals cow-garlanding see May Day and garlanding Cunningham, Allan 53, 122 Deacon, John 7–8, 9 Dickens, Charles 70, 82, 86, 96 Bleak House 70 ‘The First of May’ see Sketches by Boz Oliver Twist 89, 90 Sketches by Boz 70–71, 90, 91, 92 Douce, Francis 20, 29, 30, 53 eco-criticism 71–3, 75, 76, 79, 80–82, 84, 87–8 enclosure, 8, 15, 132 fairy rings 131 Fenwick, Isabella 34, 39

owers see May Day and owers folklore de nition of 2, 4, 6, 54; see also antiquarianism green man 20, 22 Groom, Nick 1, 4, 9 Habermas, Jürgen 1, 9–13, 24, 27, 33, 34; see also public spheres Hardy, Thomas 5 Hazlitt, William 42,73, 95, 96 Herrick, Robert 7, 128–9 Hirsch, E. D. 101–2, 103,105 hobby horse see May Day and the hobby horse Hone, William 19–21, 48, 49, 53, 89–90, 115, 121, 122, 128 Hood, Robin see Robin Hood Hood, Thomas 96 Howitt, William 23, 70, 71 Hughes Anne 22 Hunt, Leigh, J. H. 4, 15, 19, 50, 52n75, 69–88, 96–7, 135, 137 Autobiography 72, 78, 86 The Companion 74, 79, 83–4 The Examiner 74, 75, 76, 77 Foliage 77, 87 ‘To Hampstead’ 73 The Indicator 74, 75, 85 Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 74, 82 ‘Life in May’ 75, 81 Literary Pocket-Book 73 ‘To Lord Byron on his Departure for Italy and Greece’ 76 ‘To May’ 77–8 ‘May-Day’ 85 ‘May Day at Holly Lodge’, 79, 82–5 ‘May Weather’ 73–7 Men, Women and Books 83, 86 ‘The Month of May’ 83 The Months 74, 75, 77 ‘New May-Day’ 85, 86, 97 ‘New May-Day and Old May-Day’ 79, 86, 97 New Monthly Magazine 79 ‘The Song of the Nightingale’ 74 ‘Specimens of British Poetesses’ 86 ‘Spring and Daisies’ 83 Table-Talk 74, 75 ‘Tomorrow the First of May’ 82, 96–7

Index ‘Wild Flowers, Furze and Wimbledon’ 75 ‘To William Hazlitt’ 73 Hutchinson, William 17, 32n24, 48, 49 Hutton, Ronald 6, 17 Ireland, see May Day in Ireland Irving, Washington 23 jack in the green, see May Day and the jack in the green Judge, Roy 6–7, 9 Keats, John 50–51, 72 lake district see May Day in England Lamb, Charles 15, 22, 53, 92, 94, 95, 96 Lamb, Mary 22 liberty trees see May Day and trees Lockhart, John Gibson 72, 73 London, see May Day in England Maia 16, 17 Martineau, Harriet 46, 50 May Day and Catholicism 23, 48, 58 and chimney sweeps 15, 20–21, 23, 54, 55, 69, 70, 89–113 and classical literature 5, 16–17, 35–6, 39, 41, 43, 49, 50, 53, 61, 64, 65, 66–7, 73, 78, 107 and coronals 31, 33, 37–8, 40, 44, 52, 53, 89 and dew 21–2, 77, 104, 105, 130,132 and dolls 23, 49 and duck under water 127–8 in England Burton-in-Kendal 47 Cornwall 2–4, 18; see also Padstow Devonshire 53–4 Farns eld 23 Grasmere 46–8 Keswick 46 lake district 8, 17, 20, 22, 27, 31–67; see also Burton-in-Kendal; Grasmere; Keswick; Wetheral; Whitehaven Linby 23 London 15, 18–19, 20, 23, 45, 46, 47, 54, 69, 72, 73, 74, 82, 85, 89–113, 120

151 St Andrew Undershaft 18 Minehead, Somerset 22 Newstead Abbey 23 Northamptonshire 7–8, 115–37 Oxford 18, 23 Padstow 22 Wanstead 20 Wetheral 20, 49 Whitehaven 47, 49 Whitelands 17n79 and res 17, 49 and ags 19, 20 and owers 17, 18, 20, 44, 47, 51, 56–7, 60–61, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90 and food 83, 91 cakes 22–3 custard 22 hasty pudding 22 in France 3, 42–4, 49, 52, 57–60, 63–6, 72, 86, 87 and garlanding 7, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 37–8, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 82, 121, 128n73, 130, 132 and the hobby horse 3, 22 in Ireland 17, 22 and the jack in the green 20, 71 and keyholes 17 and marriage 16, 20 and may geslings 47 and may kings 20, 36, 54, 64 and maypoles 7, 15, 17, 18–20, 23, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 60–61, 64, 67, 82, 98 and may queens 6, 7, 17, 20, 36, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54, 62, 64, 66–7, 121 and milkmaids 20–21, 23, 49, 97, 98, 127 and moss decoration 32–9 and music 18, 36, 37, 38, 40, 45, 48, 51, 60–66 and racing 22 and revivals 2, 69–71, 75, 83–7 and riots 46 in Scotland 17, 23 and trees 23, 36, 42, 45, 67 ash 17,18, 48 birch 18 hawthorn 17, 18, 64 liberty trees 15, 43, 64, 65 oak 32, 58, 64, 106 rowan 49

152

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

sycamore 18, 36 witch-wood 17, 49 and the Victorian period 5, 6, 7, 16–17, 47, 70 in Wales 17, 22, 38 and wells 22, 45–7, 127 and wigs 89–90, 97, 98; see also beltane; bona dea; calendar change; green man; misrule; morris dancing; rush bearing Milton, John 43, 76, 78, 86, 98,103, 119–20 misrule 33 Montagu, Edward 91–2 Montagu, Elizabeth 91–2, 95 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 91–2 Montgomery, James 15, 94 morris dancing 20, 97 Morris, William 73 Newton, Isaac 19–20, 119 Northamptonshire see May Day in England oak apple day 18 Ovid see May Day and classical literature Paine, Thomas 59, 60, 65–6 Peacock, Thomas Love 29–30 peasant’s revolt 59–64 Polwhele, Richard 2–3,18 Pope, Alexander 19 public spheres 66, 69, 112 aristocratic 14, 33, 44, 57, 59, 64, 66 bourgeois 9–15, 24, 27, 30–31, 34, 36–7, 41, 44, 46, 66, 69, 87, 89, 112, 115–37 common 12–15, 30–31, 34–7, 41, 44, 46, 50, 66, 69, 75, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 96, 97, 102, 109, 115–37 literary 10–11 plebeian 9–10, 13–14, 23, 28, 33, 66, 69, 96, 112 Reformation, the 18, 48 revivals see May Day and revivals Robin Hood 22, 54, 74 rush bearing 47–8 Sales, Roger 8, 9, 50 Schur, Owen 101–2, 103 Scotland, see May Day in Scotland Scott, Walter 13–14, 123

Shakespeare, William 4, 43, 61, 77, 85, 86, 119 shaking-bottle day see May Day and wells slavery 95–6, 109, 112 Southey, Robert 15, 27, 34, 35, 37–9, 48, 53–64, 66, 67, 84–5, 87, 96, 137 Book of the Church 48 Common-place Book 53 ‘To Edith May Southey’ see A Tale of Paraguay Joan of Arc 57–9, 61, 64 Letters from England 54, 95 Madoc 38 A Tale of Paraguay 55, 64, 67 Thalaba 56 Wat Tyler 15, 46n51, 58, 59–64, 84–5, 106, 128 Spanish water see May Day and wells Spenser Edmund 7, 32, 36–7, 40, 43, 45, 46, 69, 76, 77, 78–80, 85, 86, 87, 120 Strutt, Joseph 20, 28, 30, 53 Sullivan, Jeremiah 22, 46–7 Swedenborg, Emanuel 103, 104, 105 sweeps see May Day and chimney sweeps Sweet, Rosemary 2–4, 137 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 6–7 Thackeray William 97–8, 110, 111 Thompson, Flora 6–7, 23 Wales, see May Day in Wales Whitsun 64, 66 Williams, Raymond 5, 84 Wilson, Kathleen 3–4 Wordsworth, Dorothy 35 Wordsworth, William 8–9, 14–15, 22, 27–52, 52n75, 53, 55–6, 59, 63, 66–7, 70, 71–2, 73, 75, 78, 80–82, 85, 87, 123, 129, 136 Ecclesiastical Sonnets 48 The Excursion 27, 42, 50, 63, 66 ‘To a Friend, Composed Near Calais’ 43–4 ‘The Green Linnet’ 52 Intimations Ode 1, 14, 31, 36, 39–44, 49, 50–52, 55, 80, 129, 136 Lyrical Ballads, 28–9, 31, 36–7, 44, 120 ‘‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ 80 ‘Michael’ 30–31 ‘The Oak and the Broom’ 32 ‘To May’ 52

Index ‘Ode Composed on May Morning’ 50–52 The Prelude 1, 8–9, 22, 27, 31, 36–7, 42–6, 49, 50–52, 66, 72, 80, 85, 136

153 ‘They called thee Merry England’ 52 ‘Upon Epitaphs’ 41