Yes, By Himself is pretty good, although as ever with Clare editing can be
a thorny issue. There is a good essay by Valerie Pedlar which looks at the
different approaches which have been taken to piecing together the
autobiographical prose.
Although I don't entirely want to doubt the veracity of Clare's account,
it appears to me to take on a slightly different hue when you discover
that the Seasons was frequently represented as being the ideal book for
youthful readers in that period. So, for instance, the 'Critical
Observations' which preface an 1816 edition of the poem (owned by Clare in
a reprint of 1818, but not, I might add, the copy he bought in Stamford,
which seems not to have survived), claim that: 'We read [the poem] with
avidity, and perhaps with enthusiasm, at the period when our imagination
first begins to excercise itself on the objects of poetry; and it retains
much of its interest in after life, from being associated with the scenes
of our youthful pleasures'. In short, it thus couldn't hurt Clare's early
reputation to be associated with Thomson.
Somewhat intriguingly perhaps, Robert Bloomfield -- Clare's immediate
predecessor as a "peasant poet", and a far more interesting figure than
has generally been acknowledged -- also 'spent all his leisure hours in
reading the Seasons', and first encountered it at 16. As in Clare's
account, this book was owned by a religious fanatic who 'did not value'
his copy of the poem.
Since all this information was printed in the introduction to Bloomfield's
best-selling Farmer's Boy, I do sometimes wonder if Clare's discovery of
the Seasons isn't influenced by this to some degree.
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