Crabbe, George

Crabbe, George (1754–1832), was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where his father was a collector of salt-duties. He was apprenticed to a doctor and during that time he published Inebriety (1775) and met Sarah Elmy (the ‘Mira’ of his poems and journals), whom he married in 1783. He subsequently practised medicine in Aldeburgh. In 1780 he went to London, where he was generously befriended by Burke. He published The Library (1781), a poem in the manner of Pope containing the author's reflections on books and reading. Burke encouraged him to take orders and in 1781 he became curate at Aldeburgh, then from 1782 to 1785 was chaplain to the duke of Rutland at Belvoir. In 1783, after revision from Burke and Johnson, he published The Village, which established his reputation and made plain his revulsion from the conventions of the pastoral and the myth of the Golden Age, painting instead a grim, detailed picture of rural poverty and of a blighted, infertile landscape described with a botanist's precision.

In 1785 he published a satirical work, The Newspaper. A long interval followed during which he held a living at Muston, Leicestershire, and lived in Suffolk. In 1807 appeared a volume containing among other poems ‘The Parish Register’ (which revealed his gift as a narrative poet), and another atypical narrative in 55 eight-line stanzas, ‘Sir Eustace Grey’, set in a mad-house in which Sir Eustace relates the tale of his guilt and his subsequent demented hallucinations.

In 1810 he published The Borough, a poem in 24 ‘letters’ which includes the tales of ‘Peter Grimes’ and ‘Ellen Orford’. This was followed in 1812 by Tales in Verse. In 1814 he was appointed vicar of Trowbridge, and in 1819 published Tales of the Hall, a series of varied stories. He visited Sir W. Scott in Edinburgh in 1822 and became his friend. He died in Trowbridge and much unpublished work was found, some of which (for instance ‘The Equal Marriage’ and ‘Silford Hall’) was published in a collected edition in 1834; later discoveries appeared in New Poems (1960), ed. A. Pollard.

Throughout the upheaval represented by the Romantic movement, Crabbe persisted in his precise, closely observed, realistic portraits of rural life and landscape, writing mainly in the heroic couplets of the Augustan age.