ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the puzzling annexation of the Manners tribute to Crabbe’s The Village. This panegyric to Crabbe’s patron and Crabbe’s patron’s brother, criticized upon the poem’s publication and regularly omitted from anthologized extracts, raises trenchant questions about Crabbe’s attitude towards the amelioration of social ills. In pursuing his project of reform, Crabbe’s emphasis is unremittingly on truth, on bearing witness to the direful socio-economic plight of the poor. Pastoral verse, he argues, has damaged that program by serving up anodyne and false versions of rural life, portrayals that require remediation through direct observations of country affairs. To this command to see, Crabbe appends a compelling thesis that environment and character are interfused, that the depletion in moral health of the village’s inhabitants is attributable in no small way to the hostility and sterility of the Suffolk coast. The degradation of the rural populace is thereby explained by its political, social, and geographical environment and by an artistic tradition that turns a blind eye to such matters. Crabbe finds, finally, no solution to this dilemma except through reversion to the power of the noble elite, a reversion that sits uneasily with his condemnation of the upper classes elsewhere in the poem.
