ABSTRACT
I think it was in 1918, though my memory may be out by a year either way, that the Saturdcry Westminster Gazette, then a Liberal weekly with a sedately progressive literary outlook, set as one of its weekly competitions 'A short serious poem introducing the word "hatter" '. I have forgotten the winning entry: I remember the competition because it started a group of us at school on a discussion of the poetically mentionable professions which was perhaps our first breath of criticism of those delightful Georgians. Shepherds, blacksmiths, fishermen, ploughmen, all the venerable rural crafts would pass; so would doctors, clergymen, perhaps with more circumspection teachers, but we thought university professors would not, for indefinable reasons not wholly dependent on scansion. Merchants qualified, but not stockbrokers, accountants or typists, though Tennyson could introduce a city clerk (but gently born and bred). Hatters were clearly beyond the pale. Yet any neo-Augustan poetaster could have brought one in without a blush. He might have called hirn something like 'the excellent artificer whose trade protects the pervious head with decent shade' -but the disguise would not have been prompted by that rustic antique poetic snobbery handed down from Wordsworth through the Romantics to our own day. A decade or so later when T. S. Eliot had made his impact on younger writers I doubt if a hatter would have been more poetically improper than a haymaker.
