ABSTRACT
In 1771 Crabbe was settled with a Mr Page, a surgeon at Woodbridge. Like Burns he became a member of young men’s discussion society. At Parham Crabbe found another stratum of English life from that which he had known at Aldeburgh, and here again he began to receive impressions, clear and indelible as all his impressions were. inspired by Sarah Elmy, Crabbe wrote a great deal of verse. Some of it reached the poet’s corner of a journal. Crabbe’s work is frankly of the school of Pope. After The Village Crabbe published The Newspaper, a fairly obvious piece of work that any one could have done. Crabbe’s later work deals with another rank of society, and it leaves the impression that the middle classes are no better than the lower; that their ideals are much the same; that pleasure, selfishness and greed rule them too; that life is generally an affair of disappointment, and at its best still dull.
