John Clare's career, "Keats's publisher," and the early nineteenth-century English book trade.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-06

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I. Interconnections

THE RECENT COMPLETION OF THE NINE-VOLUME OXFORD ENGLISH TEXTS edition of Clare s poetry provides the most richly detailed portrait possible of Clare the solitary writer-at-work, producing his poems over six decades. The Oxford edition rejects the published poems in favor of their manuscript versions, ignoring the emendations that Clare solicited from his editor, John Taylor, and the editorial interventions of others. (1) Shifting attention away from skirmishes over editing the poems to Clare's and Taylor's financial and professional interdependence in the literary marketplace, this essay pursues instead the Clare who appeared in print--the poet his contemporaries knew, and to whom they responded. Our focus, then, is the public poet represented in the four collections he published, in his periodical writings, and in the critical reviews that re-presented his poems to a buying readership. Because print was the public medium of Clare's private ambitions, it remains the key to understanding the contemporary reception of the poet and his poems. Unlike Clare in composition, Clare in print is not a solitary figure; the presentation of his poems should be understood principally as a series of collaborative efforts by the poet and his publishers--most importantly, Taylor and his business partner, James Hessey.

It is a critical commonplace that Clare was unfortunate because he strove to become a successful poet in a decade that was unpropitious for the careers of fledgling writers of verse. There has been little close scrutiny, however, of the economic climate in which he and Taylor operated, nor has there been a sustained interpretation of the Clare-Taylor publishing relationship in light of the difficulties they faced. We attempt to do both. Moreover, because critical considerations of Taylor's agency have overwhelmingly focused on his role as the editor of Clare's verses, there has, until now, been almost no analysis of the Taylor-and-Hessey bookselling business and its effect on the performance of Clare's poetry in the market. Repeated--and often perfunctory--gestures toward both the publishing climate of the 1820s and Taylor's role as editor-publisher have beguiled students of Clare into thinking they already know all there is to know about this crucial phase of his career. We undertake a re-examination of the salient facts in view of fresh and more detailed evidence.

Clare's literary persona as peasant poet has received significant critical attention. Reinterpreting the Clare-Taylor relationship principally in terms of the business of books highlights instead Clare's active efforts to operate as one agent among others in a literary market that he studied carefully and read as best he could. Although the careers of Taylor and Clare have been amply considered, they have not been read as mutually interdependent, as we contend they ought to be. (2) By aligning Clare with Taylor and Hessey in a cooperative (and sometimes contentious) attempt to direct the public course of his poetic career, we seek to demonstrate that Clare and his publishers chose to make a mutual investment in each other's fortunes as a key to their common success in an unpredictable literary marketplace. This decision had far-reaching consequences for both parties.

Our analysis principally emphasizes the early stages of their collaboration to bring Clare's poetry into public view, the period in which the first two volumes--Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821)--appeared in quick succession. Clare's reception by the reading public was largely determined by the image projected in these first two collections; by the time his third, The Shepherd's Calendar, appeared in 1827, both Clare's high hopes and the partnership of Taylor and Hessey had dissolved. These early years had a profound effect on what was to follow, in the unfolding of the choices made by Clare and his publishers as they introduced him to readers and critics, and sought to shape the reading public's responses to his work.

Clare's career can only be adequately understood in light of Taylor's own, because the poet thoroughly aligned his fortunes with the bookseller as his editor and publisher. Taylor, in turn, made an unprecedented personal and professional commitment in electing to invest so heavily in presenting Clare's work to the reading public. (3) The success of Taylor and Hessey's house largely depended upon Taylor's ability to develop the firm's list. (Hessey was in charge of the retail business, which principally focused on vending the wares of other publishers, while Taylor had full control over the publishing operation.) As we shall demonstrate, Clare was for a time a disproportionately important figure in Taylor's small roster of writers. Once Taylor decided to dedicate such a substantial portion of his energies and financial resources to the success of Clare's career--and the poet, in turn, chose Taylor's guidance over that of Edmund Drury, the Stamford bookseller who "discovered" him--the professional destinies of Taylor and Clare were inextricably linked, leading first to popular success for both and eventually to the dissolution of their mutual aspirations to become major figures in the London literary marketplace.

2. The Bookselling Business of Taylor & Hessey and its Impact on Clare's Fortunes

In considering the trajectory of Clare's career, insufficient attention has been paid to the behavior of the market for books in the 1820s and to the performance of Taylor as a commercial actor in that market. Let us consider several aspects of the book trade during the years that Clare was being published, before offering a representative analysis of Taylor and Hessey's business operation. The 1820s was a decade for novels, rather than poetry. Peter Garside, who--with Rainer Showerling--has documented the vast extent of fiction publishing from 1800 to 1829, notes that the production of novels "rose by more than 25 per cent in four years" between 1820 and 1824, and reports, "Often years with 80 titles or more in evidence, all but four occur in the 1820s." (4) Clare himself perceived that he was working at a time when fiction sales were marginalizing the market for poetry; in August 1827 he wrote to Taylor, "I hope for your sake that the Poems [The Shepherd's Calendar] may turn the tide and sell better[,] for Novels and such rubbish were in as bad repute once as Poetry now & may be again." (5) This contrast between the robust sales of fiction and the feeble performance of poetry books as a saleable commodity occasioned Benjamin Disraeli's declaration in Vivian Grey (1826-27) that "The reign of Poesy is over." (6) Taylor himself readily acknowledged that the popular market for poetry had become a thing of the past. Writing to Clare in November 1827, he assessed the situation: "The Poems have not yet sold much, but I can't say how many are disposed of. All the old Poetry Buyers seem to be dead, the new Race have no Taste for it." (7)

According to Richard Altick, aside from Scott and Byron, the only poetry blockbusters published during the first thirty years of the century were two religious works: John Keble's anonymous collection, The Christian Year (1827), published in part by the Rivingtons, and Robert Pollok's epic, The Course of Time, first published by Blackwood in 1827. (8) To Altick's list we should add Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy (1800) and several volumes by Felicia Hemans: The Forest Sanctuary (1826), Records of Woman (1828), and Songs of the Affections (1830). Thomas Moore too enjoyed broad appeal, but not one volume of Keats's poetry--Poems (1817), and the Taylor and Hessey publications Endymion (1818) and Lamia, Isabella, and Other Poems (1820)--went into a second edition. P. B. Shelley also suffered a similar fate: "none of Shelley's poems published with C. and J. Ollier," Lee Erickson reminds us, "went into a second edition, and all lost money" (33). In fact, Shelley's only work to reach a second edition in his lifetime was his tragedy, The Cenci (1819, 1821).

It is true that John Murray II paid George Crabbe 3,000 [pounds sterling] in copy money for Tales of the Hall (1819) and the rights to his earlier poems, but Crabbe proved to be a financial liability and the usually shrewd bookseller never recovered his investment. Although he retained Crabbe because of their friendship, Murray soon refused to publish any contemporary poetry and gradually sold off the copyrights to all the other poets on his list. (9) For the vast majority of publishers, poetry was not profitable. Those who did remain in the market increasingly required the poets themselves to assume a portion of the financial risk involved (Erickson 33). Faced with further economic difficulties in 1825-26--precipitated by the crash of Constable's London associates, Hurst, Robinson and Co.--many...

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