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The Labouring-Class Bird

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Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which eighteenth-century labouring-class poets adapt the bird-bard trope to portray the robin as a symbol of plebeian life and poetic sensitivity and to demonstrate a variety of patron-client relationships characterised by an admixture of dependence and independence. It argues that plebeian bird poetry is one literary strategy among many that foregrounds social position, exposes political relations, cooperates with and modifies generic conventions, and ventures class-specific aesthetic formulations. After situating this approach within extant critical accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring-class nature poetry and recent developments in animal studies, this chapter proceeds by analysing a variety of symbolic bird appropriations—by John Jones, Elizabeth Bentley, Robert Anderson, William Lane, Ann Yearsley, Edward Rushton, and John Clare—to show a continuum of attitudes towards author visibility and the conditions of literary reception for working-class authors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quoted in Robert Southey, The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), 2.

  2. 2.

    Ibid., 12, viii, 12.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 1–2.

  4. 4.

    Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also Bridget Keegan, introduction to Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700–1800, vol. 2: 1740–1780, ed. Bridget Keegan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003).

  5. 5.

    Jeremy Mynott, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 34.

  6. 6.

    Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 4.

  7. 7.

    Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 76.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 83.

  9. 9.

    Tobias Menely quoted in Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 213.

  10. 10.

    Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 21. Donna Landry points out that Keenleyside’s account overlooks labouring-class voices, particularly ‘Thomson’s opposite number,’ John Clare (23). Donna Landry, ‘Book Review of Animals and Other People,’ Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 9, no. 1 (2017): 23.

  11. 11.

    Lucinda Cole, ‘Introduction: Human-Animal Studies and the Eighteenth Century,’ The Eighteenth Century 52, no. 1 (2011): 2, 5.

  12. 12.

    John Clare is a noted exception. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 6.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 16.

  14. 14.

    Ibid.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 76.

  17. 17.

    Andrew Lack, Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature (Pulborough: SMH Books, 2008), 90.

  18. 18.

    See Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Keegan, British Labouring-Class.

  19. 19.

    Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 39.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 175, 4, and 4.

  21. 21.

    British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 89–90.

  22. 22.

    Eighteenth Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700–1800, vol. 3: 1780–1800, ed. Tim Burke (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 200–1.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 194.

  24. 24.

    Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 3, 318.

  25. 25.

    Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1785), 107–27, lines 23–30.

  26. 26.

    Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 78.

  27. 27.

    Ann Yearsley, Poems, on Various Subjects (London, 1787), 77–82, lines 33–41.

  28. 28.

    William Lane, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1795), title page.

  29. 29.

    Quoted in Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 91.

  30. 30.

    Ibid.

  31. 31.

    Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, ‘The Romantic “Peasant” Poets and their Patrons,’ The Wordsworth Circle 26, no. 2 (1995): 78.

  32. 32.

    Betty Rizzo, ‘The Patron as Poet Maker: The Politics of Benefaction,’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991): 241. Cafarelli, ‘Romantic “Peasant,”’ 81.

  33. 33.

    Cafarelli, ‘Romantic “Peasant,”’ 81.

  34. 34.

    Rizzo, ‘The Patron,’ 254, 242, and 260.

  35. 35.

    Cafarelli, ‘Romantic “Peasant,”’ 79.

  36. 36.

    Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 3, 15–16, lines 32 and 11–12.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 32–34, lines 7 and 74. The ‘storm-cock’ is the mistle thrush (Turdus viscivorus).

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 34, lines 81–82.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 16, lines 43–48.

  40. 40.

    Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 2.

  41. 41.

    Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 3, 28.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 35.

  43. 43.

    The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822, vol. 1, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 125, line 35.

  44. 44.

    John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, vol. 3, eds. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 534, line 67. Early Poems, vol. 1, 124, lines 5–8.

  45. 45.

    ‘The Robin,’ Early Poems, vol. 1, 124. ‘The Robin’s Nest,’ Middle Period, vol. 3, 534, line 50.

  46. 46.

    Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), Part II, Sections III–IV.

  47. 47.

    John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings, 1793–1864, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 281.

  48. 48.

    Adam Phillips, ‘The Exposure of John Clare,’ in John Clare in Context, eds. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 181.

  49. 49.

    Middle Period, vol. 3, 291–92, lines 73–77 and 81–82.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 290, lines 44, 53, and 56.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 292–93, lines 89–96.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 293, lines 97–104.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., lines 105–8.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 294, lines 111–12.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 294–95, lines 113–20.

  56. 56.

    Early Poems, vol. 1, 157–58, lines 23–46.

  57. 57.

    Mynott, Birdscapes, 58–59.

  58. 58.

    William J. Christmas, ‘Introduction: An Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Tradition,’ The Eighteenth Century 42, no. 3 (2001): 187.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    Nancy M. Derbyshire

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  1. Nancy M. Derbyshire
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Correspondence to Nancy M. Derbyshire .

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  1. Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Brycchan Carey

  2. Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA

    Sayre Greenfield

  3. Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Anne Milne

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Derbyshire, N.M. (2020). The Labouring-Class Bird. In: Carey, B., Greenfield, S., Milne, A. (eds) Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_6

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