George Crabbe's Suffolk Scenes

In a history of English literature, George Crabbe (1754–1832) stands apart from his contemporaries. ¹ He was an Augustan poet who rhymed couplets in the manner of Pope, Gray and Dyer, but his verses destroyed the pastoral idyll and depicted village life, ‘as Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not’. ² He rejected Thomson’s progressive view of the seasonal round and Goldsmith’s nostalgic vision of the deserted village. The countryside which Crabbe knew most intimately was not an Elysium where swains and shepherdesses idly disported themselves, but a stretch of ‘burning sand’ where men and women struggled ceaselessly to wrest a meagre subsistence from the soil. The land was cultivated by dint of back-breaking toil, the harvest was paid for in sweat, and work continued in fair weather and foul. Crabbe spared no harrowing detail in exposing the sufferings of ‘the poor laborious natives of the place’ and he explicitly connected the degradation of the labourer with exploitation by farmers and landowners: Where Plenty smiles – alas! she smiles for few – And those who taste not, yet behold her store, Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore, – The wealth around them makes them doubly poor. ³