Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'. Christopher Stokes W.

Edward FitzGerald (translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) ensured his work remained culturally visible after his death in 1849, but by the time of E. V. Lucas’s biography in 1893, his star was waning – before being eclipsed entirely. This occlusion is a shame. His is a unique nineteenth-century poetic voice: one of sun-dappled Suffolk woodland and heath; gentle reflections on history, time and loss; and affectionately painted domestic scenes. It is influenced by Wordsworth, Cowper and Pope; the sentimental conventions of late Romantic writing; and fellow county poets such as George Crabbe and Robert Bloomfield. Nor is he limited to one strain: across his work one finds devotional verse, political writing, ekphrasis and even zesty satire.

One special and distinctive element that shapes this poetic voice is Quakerism. Southey’s rhetorical question was asked in the context of a remarkable emergence: in 1815, William Hazlitt had concluded that ‘a Quaker poet would be a literary phenomenon’ and almost a contradiction in terms.³ The Society of Friends, a once revolutionary seventeenth-century sect that had retreated into quietism in the eighteenth century, appeared quintessentially unpoetic. They eschewed fashion and decoration, never attended concerts or dances, proscribed novels and tightly controlled practices of reading among members. They were plain, pious and, on their own account, ‘peculiar’. Although it is not true to say there were no Quaker poets whatsoever – Thomas Ellwood, John Scott of Amwell and the Lake District writer Thomas Wilkinson are three examples – the not entirely invalid perception was that Quakers had no poetic tradition of which to speak.⁴ Barton was therefore a trailblazer and helped lay the ground for a striking proliferation of Quaker poetry in the nineteenth century, such as that of William, Mary and Richard Howitt; Hannah Mary Rathbone; Jeremiah Wiffen; Sarah Hoare; Amelia Opie and others (including John Greenleaf Whittier in America). This volume aims to understand and present Barton as both a serious Romantic writer and a seminal Quaker poet – and indeed a Quaker Romantic – by collecting a modern selection of his verse for the first time.

      ‘A Maker of Literary Luxuries’: Barton’s Life

Barton was born on 31 January 1784 in Carlisle. He knew little of his parents, John and Mary (née Done) Barton. Mary died days after giving birth, and indeed Barton only learnt at school that his father’s second wife, Elizabeth Horne (1760–1833), was not his biological mother, although this appears to have had no traumatic effect whatsoever. His father – a manufacturer who had married into the Friends, and one of nine Quakers among those who founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade – died in 1789. Elizabeth moved to be close to her parents in Tottenham, and the young Barton hence spent his days between London and a short-lived but well-respected Quaker boarding school in Ipswich.⁵ At 14, he was apprenticed to an Essex shopkeeper, Samuel Jesup, and in 1807 married his master’s niece, Lucy Jesup (1781–1808). By this time, he had moved to Woodbridge in Suffolk, the small town that would effectively define his life: most of his poems refer no further than a 15-mile radius around it. However, tragedy struck and history repeated itself when his wife died giving birth to their daughter, also named Lucy. Grief-stricken, he dissolved his commercial interests (a corn and coal business with his brother-in-law Benjamin Jesup) and left to become a private tutor in Liverpool. When he returned, a year later, he became a clerk in a bank run by the Quaker Alexander family, a position he would hold until his death 40 years later.

      It is about this time that Barton began to write. Initially, this appears to have been in the provincial press under the curious pen name ‘Marcus’: the earliest poem I have identified is ‘To Walter Scott, Esq., On Perusing His Lady of the Lake’, in the Suffolk Chronicle of 9 June 1810. By 1812 he had enough verses to compile his first volume Metrical Effusions; this was followed in 1818 by Poems, by an Amateur, printed for the author by subscription. Both these volumes were anonymous, as was all his work of this decade (or under the initials B.B.). The 1818 list of subscribers is a good indication of the poet’s social networks and the type of friendships he cultivated throughout his career, as well as his life in the 1810s specifically – the latter a period for which evidence like letters is scant. They include extended family, Quaker connections near and far, clergymen from Suffolk villages, individuals from Woodbridge and Ipswich (some of whom are also the subjects of poems in the volume), and influential gentry and other county worthies. Poets William Wordsworth, Thomas Moore and Robert Southey are also included. Yet the print run of Poems, by an Amateur was extremely limited at around 150 copies. It was only in the following decade that his poetic career truly prospered and he was catapulted into prominence, spurred by the first volume under his own name – Poems (1820), which gathered much of his best earlier verse with new material, and eventually ran to four editions with revisions and additions.

      It was the beginning of a prolonged and prolific phase in his literary life. Across the 1820s, he published no fewer than six major volumes. He became a frequent contributor to the newly relaunched London Magazine, which printed Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and many other major figures. Not only did his contributions to the London raise his literary profile, but some accounts also suggest that he met one of his closest correspondents, Charles Lamb, at one of its dinners. The decade also saw the first of the literary annuals, Frederic Shoberl’s Forget-Me-Not, quickly followed by a slew of imitators. These were popular commercial offerings, released for Christmas and New Year, dominated by sentimental poetry and interspersed with engravings. Barton would go on to publish much of his poetry in such gift books. He was reviewed well, reprinted regularly and even received a generous annuity to support his work organised by sympathetic Quakers led by Joseph John Gurney. Although he followed some famous advice from Charles Lamb not to abandon his clerkship at the bank, his poetic labour was intensive: letters from the time are abuzz with concern about reviews and royalties, and Robert Southey even counsels him to avoid the fate of Henry Kirke White, the consumptive, proto-Keatsian genius supposedly destroyed by overwork.

His pace slackened in the 1830s. Although he never ceased to write, his late phase includes only two major volumes: The Reliquary (1836), jointly authored with his daughter, and 1845’s Household Verses. He continued living in Woodbridge, now in more spacious accommodation (his first cottage, which still stands, is a conspicuously narrow timber-framed house). He deepened old social connections and formed new ones, one of the most important being with Edward FitzGerald, who would go on to enter into an entirely unsuitable and short-lived marriage with Barton’s daughter Lucy after the Quaker poet’s death. Barton had been a keen walker, but was increasingly sedentary, grumbling half-comically about exercise – although he never lost his love for the local landscape and seascape. He rarely left Woodbridge and was an amiable fixture in town life. An 1855 article recalls his kind and cheerful demeanour on making a local visit, describing a deceptively young-looking man on whose knee the house’s cat, Stalker, was enthusiastically purring.⁶ We have a richer picture of his life and opinions at this time, due to the survival of far more letters now scattered across various archives. In 1849, after a few months of worsening health, he rang the bell from his room having gone to bed with a candle: a friend and his daughter ran upstairs to find him having a heart spasm, and he was laid to rest in the same Woodbridge burial ground where Lucy Jesup had been buried some four decades earlier. He was 65.

      ‘Light winds sweeping o’er a late-reap’d field’: Barton’s Style

The judgements of Romantic-era contemporaries on Barton’s style are relatively consistent. He writes many different kinds of poems, and is surprisingly experimental in his variety of forms: rolling anapaestic rhythms broadly based on three syllable units (e.g. ‘On its sides no proud forests, their foliage waving’), polysyllabic or ‘feminine’ rhymes, and considerable variety in sonnet structure are just three stylistic traits he favours repeatedly. Despite this, the perception of Barton overall is clear. He does not aspire towards the force or ambition characteristic of ‘Romantic genius’, and there is a tendency to thematic repetition