12,288 research outputs found
The Meeting: Reading and Writing through John Clare
No full textThis book is a testament to the continuing power of the poet John Clare (1793–1864) to inspire creativity in other artists. It is the product of a project launched at Oxford Brookes University in 2019, aimed at getting Clare to places and people he’d not quite reached before, to explore how and why he remains such an inspiration to creative artists of all kinds, and to celebrate 200 years since his first book Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery was published. Celebrated poets led John Clare poetry workshops in public libraries in four corners of England – Bradford, Manchester, London, and Peterborough – and the poems collected here are the product of those workshops. Funded by Arts Council England, the John Clare Society and Oxford Brookes University, our project and this book is a meeting of poems and poets, poems and song, poems, and performance
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A study of John Clare in his historical and political context
No full textAs the title indicates, the basis of the thesis is to set John Clare’s life and work within the context of the social and political history of his time. It is a study that is long overdue. The manner in which topical and political matters were mediated to him and were reflected in his work are analysed. His introduction to the literary and social worlds of Stamford and London is evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of patronage assessed. The active and complex political culture of Stamford has been taken into account as this may have affected his later political statements and a growing awareness of his audience. His antagonism to enclosure and the social changes that it engendered are considered. Three major questions that arise from this are addressed. The two local newspapers that Clare is known to have read are used throughout. His correspondence with friends, colleagues and casual correspondents has provided valuable insights as have his poetry and prose writings. Research in the Northamptonshire Record Office has revealed important new information in the form of one book of Enclosure Commissioners’ Minutes dated 1809-14, the first five years of the enclosure of Helpstone, Clare’s native village
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Now wenches, listen, and let lovers lie: women's storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare
No full textThis essay involves two ‘borders’. The first is the border of gender, between male poet and female subject. The second is a cultural border, much criss-crossed in the early modern period, but still tricky for the nineteenth-century ‘labouring-class’ poets to negotiate: the border between oral and printed culture. If I do not on this occasion cross the river Tweed, I am nevertheless keenly aware here that John Clare’s ‘absent’ grandfather was an itinerant Scottish schoolmaster, and that Scotland itself in the period was, as Hamish Henderson reminds us, the very powerhouse of British balladry and folk culture
Clare Lakey
No full text"S.F. 83964 Sigwn Clare Lakey (Nee John) A.W.A.S. Darwin - 1944-45."S.F. 83964 Signalwoman Clare Lakey (Nee John). Australian Women's Army Service, Darwin - 1944-45
Progress and Distress on the Stratford Estate in Clare during the Eighteen Forties
No full textIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author acquired about 30,000 letters written mainly in the 1840s. These pertained to estates throughout Ireland managed by James Robert Stewart and Joseph Kincaid, hereafter denoted SK. Until the letters - called the SK correspondence in what follows - became the author’s property, they had not seen light of day since the 1840s. Addressed mainly to the SK office in Dublin, they were written mainly by landlords, tenants, the partners in SK, local agents, etc. After about 200 years in operation as a land agency, the firm in which members of the Stewart family were the principal partners - Messrs J. R. Stewart & Son(s) from the mid-1880s onwards -- ceased business in the mid-1980s. Since 1994 the author has been researching the SK correspondence of the 1840s. It gives many new insights into economic and social conditions in Ireland during the decade of the great famine, and into the operation of Ireland’s most important land agency during those years. It is intended ultimately to publish details on several of the estates managed by SK in book form. The proposed title is Landlords, Tenants, Famine: Business of an Irish Land Agency in the 1840s, a draft of which has now been completed. A majority of the letters in the larger study from which the present article is drawn are on themes some of which one might expect - rents, distraint (seizure of assets in lieu of rent) ; ‘voluntary’ surrender of land in return for ‘compensation’ upon peacefully quitting; formal ejectment (a matter of last resort on estates managed by SK); landlord-assisted emigration (on a scale much more extensive than most historians of Ireland in the 1840s appear to believe); petitions from tenants; complaints by tenants, both about other tenants and local agents; major works of improvement (on almost all of the estates managed by SK); applications by SK, on behalf of proprietors, for government loans to finance improvements; recommendations of agricultural advisers hired by SK, ete. Thus, most of the SK correspondence is about aspects of estate management. It seems, in the 1840s, that the only estate in Clare managed by SK was that of the elderly Col. Stratford. Although the files on the relatively small Stratford estate are much less extensive than those on some of the estates investigated in detail in the draft of Landlords, Tenants, Famine, they do refer to most of the core aspects of estate management mentioned above. But in the case of the Clare estate, the material on some of those themes is extremely thin.
Statement by Helen Farr and Clare Skinner regarding John Sloan's resignation as President of the Art Students League
No full text1 leafStatement by Helen Farr and Clare Skinner regarding John Sloan's resignation as President of the Art Students Leagu
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Identity, authenticity, class: John Clare and the mask of Chatterton
No full textToby Jones reads John Clare
No full textIn response to a query from a participant in a workshop in Bradford, who wanted to hear the poems as she read them, we asked actor and life-long John Clare reader, Toby Jones, to read a selection of poems, and a couple of sections of prose. These poems were recorded at Oxford Brookes University on 3 July 2019. The sound engineer was Joseph Carr. Most of these poems are available in RKR Thornton’s Everyman selection of the poetry. The prose can be found in various places, including Carcanet’s By Himself edition of collected prose. These recordings can be listened to on our media player below, or via a podcast on iTunes
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