George Crabbe

George Crabbe (born December 24, 1754, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England—died February 3, 1832, Trowbridge, Wiltshire) was an English writer of poems and verse tales memorable for their realistic details of everyday life.

Crabbe grew up in the then-impoverished seacoast village of Aldeburgh, where his father was collector of salt duties, and he was apprenticed to a surgeon at 14. Hating his mean surroundings and unsuccessful occupation, he abandoned both in 1780 and went to London. In 1781 he wrote a desperate letter of appeal to Edmund Burke, who read Crabbe’s writings and persuaded James Dodsley to publish one of his didactic, descriptive poems, The Library (1781). Burke also used his influence to have Crabbe accepted for ordination, and in 1782 he became chaplain to the duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle.

In 1783 Crabbe demonstrated his full powers as a poet with The Village. Written in part as a protest against Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), which Crabbe thought too sentimental and idyllic, the poem was his attempt to portray realistically the misery and degradation of rural poverty. Crabbe made good use in The Village of his detailed observation of life in the bleak countryside from which he himself came. The Village was popular but was followed by an unworthy successor, The Newspaper (1785), and after that Crabbe published no poetry for the next 22 years. He did continue to write, contributing to John Nichols’s The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester (1795–1815) and other works of local history; he also wrote a treatise on botany and three novels, all of which he later burned.

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Crabbe married in 1783. His wife, Sarah, gave birth to seven children as they moved through a succession of parishes; five died in infancy, and Sarah was affected by mental illness from the late 1790s until her death in 1813. In 1807 Crabbe began to publish poetry again. He reprinted his poems, together with a new work, The Parish Register, a poem of more than 2,000 lines in which he made use of a register of births, deaths, and marriages to create a compassionate depiction of the life of a rural community. Other works followed, including The Borough (1810), another long poem; Tales in Verse (1812); and Tales of the Hall (1819).

Crabbe is often called the last of the Augustan poets because he followed John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson in using the heroic couplet, which he came to handle with great skill. Like the Romantics, who esteemed his work, he was a rebel against the realms of genteel fancy that poets of his day were forced to inhabit, and he pleaded for the poet’s right to describe the commonplace realities and miseries of human life. Another Aldeburgh resident, Benjamin Britten, based his opera Peter Grimes (1945) on one of Crabbe’s grim verse tales in The Borough.