9 July 2025

John Clare espoused the rights of all God’s creatures. His love of the natural world set him against badger-baiting and cock-fighting. He was sympathetic to the plight of gypsies who found it increasingly difficult to find space to set up camp.

‘Slavery is an abominable traffic!’ he declared well before Wilberforce and the abolitionists had won their cause. And he raged against another political act, the enclosure of Helpstone and its neighbouring parishes. The act of Parliament was passed in 1809 when Care was sixteen.

 It was completed in 1820 when every parcel of land was given a designated owner. The common lands disappeared. Fences and gates physically enclosed the land. Streams were stopped to straighten ditches. ‘No Trespass’ signs appeared. Rights of way were abolished and the rights of the common man subverted.

Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds

Of field and meadow, large as garden grounds,

In little parcels little minds to please

With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease. (The Moors)

As a result, the poet becomes alienated from the countryside of his youth. in ‘Remembrances’, he lovingly remembers all the names given to the smallest corners of his parish – Langley Bush, Lea Close Oak, Old Crossberry Way, Swordy Well, Sneap Green.

It was yet another alienation. As a peasant poet, he felt uncomfortable in the literary circles of London. As a writer of published verse, he felt an outsider within his own community. His twin sister died before his baptism. He reflects on grief never assuaged.

Ah had we gone together, had I been

Strange with the world as thou thy mother’s love,

What years of sorrow I had never seen.

Fullness of joy that leaves no hearts to bleed

Had then with thine been purchased cheap indeed. (To an Infant Sister in Heaven)