THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The poem illustrates Crabbe’s skill in creating a poetry of mood, using dislocated images and details in order to
suggest a mind whirled towards incoherence. Crabbe creates a related effect in his description of the isolation of Peter
Grimes, perhaps the most impressive of the stories in The Borough. Grimes, an unhappy rebel against his rigid father,
and a man known to be an abuser of the apprentices placed in his charge, is gradually driven out of his community to
live in a boat on the dreary mud-flats where he views ‘the lazy tide | In its hot slimy channels slowly glide’. If Grimes
is the most notable of Crabbe’s outsiders, both The Borough and the Tales of 1812 suggest a critical interest in those
insiders who foster conventional moral and religious values, the unremarkable parish priests and their equally
unremarkable curates, and magistrates such as the ‘impetuous, warm and loud’ Justice Bolt. In the first of the Tales,
‘The Dumb Orators, or the Benefit of Society’, Justice Bolt is shown as disconcerted and silenced by a group of freethinkers,
and then later as embarrassingly vocal in his triumph over a single supposed foe of order, the sceptical
Hammond. In many ways, the poem allows for Hammond’s moral victory as a representative of a free conscience
faced with a blustering assertion of the status quo (albeit a status quo that Crabbe himself represented). Despite such
gestures to religious
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and social questioning, the moral sensibility of Crabbe’s narrative poetry is generally derived from a loyally Anglican
understanding of the nature of society, its ranks, relationships, and responsibilities. The representation of nature in his
poetry is likewise confined to a picture of a co-operative working environment, conditioned by the shifting moods and
patterns of the sea. It offers a picture of a peopled landscape observed, as Coleridge was prepared to concede, with a
‘power of a certain kind’, yet constricted by what many of Crabbe’s younger contemporaries saw damningly as ‘an
absolute defect of the high imagination’.
Austen, the ‘Regional’ Novel, and Scott
Wordsworth, goaded by the high poetic standing accorded to Crabbe by the critics of the great early nineteenthcentury
journals, consistently denigrated his rival’s work. In one of his sharper asides he even ventured to compare
Crabbe’s poetry to Jane Austen’s fiction. Though he admitted that her novels were ‘an admirable copy of life’, he
nevertheless insisted that he could not be interested in ‘productions of that kind’ and, he protested, ‘unless the truth of
nature were presented to him clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination, it had scarce any attraction in
his eyes’. Wordsworth’s comment suggests something of the breadth of the gulf which seemed to separate the new
poetry from the staid, older fashion of a literature which aspired merely to represent nature by copying it. The idea of
the transforming power of the imagination, which was to become so much a commonplace of subsequent criticism,
cannot uniformly be applied to the literature of the English ‘Romantic’ period, nor can the absence of visionary
gleams or pervading lights be now seen as crucially detrimental to a substantial portion of the poetry and the fiction of
the period. Jane Austen (1775-1817) was, according to her first biographer, an admirer of Johnson in prose, Crabbe in
verse, and Cowper in both; she ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ Crabbe’s work and would sometimes say ‘in jest’ that if ever she
married at all ‘she could fancy being Mrs Crabbe’. Such conservative tastes in matrimony and literature should not be
viewed as inconsistent either with Austen’s own work or with the opinions of many of her original readers.
J. E. Austen-Leigh’s memoir of his unmarried aunt assumes that she shared the feeling of ‘moderate Toryism
which prevailed in her family’. Austen’s novels ostensibly suggest little active political commitment or deep
involvement in national and international affairs. The class to which she belonged, and which her fiction almost
exclusively describes, had largely remained unruffled and unthreatened by the ructions across the Channel, but the
immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, the long-drawn-out conflict between Britain and France and the active
risk of a French invasion, left few families untouched by the Napoleonic Empire and the domestic and foreign
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policies of the succession of repressive Tory governments. Although a well-connected cousin of the Austens had died
on the scaffold in France, and although the novelist’s two younger brothers served as officers in the navy in the great
campaign against Napoleon, any discussion of revolutionary politics is eschewed and the war remains a relatively
marginal (or at least, largely male) concern even in novels such as Mansfield Park and Persuasion which introduce
naval officers as characters. The desperate domestic measures introduced by British governments to counter political
dissent, notably the frequent suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act (which secured the liberty of the citizen against
arbitrary imprisonment) and the emergency legislation aimed against all kinds of ‘sedition’ (such as the enforcement
of the Combination Acts), are passed over silently. The agricultural depression which left many farm labourers