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

religiosity of much of his other poetry appeared pure and even pleasingly chaste. It probably helped that Barton – an irenically tolerant member of a denomination already known for its toleration – conceived faith in open and generous terms. He had keen friendships with many Anglican clergy, and his poetry could be sympathetic to Roman Catholics, Methodists and others. The long poem ‘Leiston Abbey’, set amongst a Suffolk ruin and written in 1819, is an excellent example of his reflections on religious identity, shared Christianity and the violent upheavals and persecutions of sectarian history.

      A final aspect of Barton’s religion with a clear effect on his poetry is Quakerism’s forceful commitment to social causes of the period. Barton’s politics in the conventional sense were predictable and unassuming: he was a Whig, like most Dissenters, and had close connections with the liberal MP for East Suffolk, Robert Newton Shawe, and his family. He could write direct and even stinging political poetry (e.g. ‘A Clerico-Politico Portrait’). Yet more important and certainly more overt was the larger Quaker humanitarian impulse which shaped poems from 1812’s ‘Stanzas on the Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ onward. The Society of Friends had been at the centre of eighteenth-century opposition to the slave trade and continued to address a range of political and social issues, including the continuation of slavery in the British Empire and elsewhere, the working condition of chimney sweeps, and prison reform. In 1796 they founded the first modern asylum for the mentally ill, the York Retreat, based on William Tuke’s ‘moral treatment’. And the Quakers had maintained the tenet of radical pacifism in their opposition to the long, gruelling Napoleonic Wars. Barton supported many of these causes, and poems involving one or the other of them appear across his many volumes. It is a reminder that quietism in the spiritual sense need not mean retreat from the world in an ethical sense: although no-one would position Barton as a radical, in the sense John Thelwall or Percy Bysshe Shelley were radicals, his instincts were fundamentally humane.

      An Edition of Bernard Barton

      Almost immediately after Barton’s death, Lucy Barton and Edward FitzGerald collaborated on a volume entitled Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton, published by Hall, Virtue & Co. While 1818’s Poems, by an Amateur by the virtually unknown Barton had possessed a short list of subscribers, the list in 1849 goes on for 24 pages and includes Queen Victoria and 10 copies for Sir Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister who had gifted Barton a £100 pension in 1846. It is a fascinating text, containing a useful memoir penned by FitzGerald and many interesting footnotes. As a collection of poetry, however, it is very limited even taking into account its Victorian provenance. Its selection is biased towards the work of the 1840s and one senses poems about local acquaintances and friends have been privileged. Moreover, while its editors have a conscious and perceptive sense of Barton’s aesthetic weaknesses – notably dragging out fine descriptive verses with a somewhat trite moral – they act on this by radically altering and shortening many of the texts included.

      This edition attempts instead to give a selection of Barton’s work underpinned by modern scholarship and a retrospective critical standpoint. Out of over seven hundred poems from his major volumes alone, I have picked out around 80. In making the selection several principles have guided me. Firstly, I have drawn from all periods of his career (albeit with an inevitable concentration on the 1820s) and striven to represent a full range of tonal and thematic variety. This means giving roughly equal weight to his three major modes: nature poetry, religious verse (both specifically Quaker and more generally devotional), and texts of friendship, domesticity and feeling. In addition, I have sought to represent his historical and political engagement (not least via a very substantial extract from his longest work ‘Napoleon’), as well as including several pieces that engage the arts, such as poems on paintings and verses addressed to other writers. Secondly, I have attempted to mirror both nineteenth-century and contemporary interests. On one hand, if a poem appeared especially striking to Barton’s contemporaries or was repeatedly noted by reviewers (e.g. ‘The Ivy’ or ‘A Dream’), I have usually included it. On the other hand, I have also tried to select pieces that will most engage a modern readership and reflect up-to-date scholarly concerns: hence, for example, I give considerable attention to his anti-slavery poetry, and include a generous illustrated selection from the posthumous Natural History of the Holy Land. Last but not least, I have opted for poems that seem aesthetically striking and which I personally enjoy. Barton was not a poet of the first rank, as his contemporaries would put it, but he is a fascinating writer capable of delicately arresting beauty.

      In textual terms, Barton does not present an editor with a vast array of variation. Even at the compositional stage, he preferred the immediacy of the initial expression. As he states apologetically in his preface to Napoleon, and Other Poems (1822):

      It has not been from indolence that the author has not bestowed more elaborate revision on his compositions; nor is it with any affected contempt of refined taste, or in wilful disrespect of critical opinion […] in his judgement, his poetry is not of a description which long and laborious revision would essentially improve (p. xiv).

      It is clear that much the same judgement applied later on in the literary process too. There are inevitably slight changes in wording when multiple versions exist, and the Advertisement to the fourth edition of Poems notes that his publisher had refined its typographical appearance. Nevertheless, it is a relatively simple editorial decision to consistently base reading texts on the first printed appearance of the poem – or at least the first appearance my research has been able to uncover. Not only does this locate the reading text close to each poem’s origin, it better evidences the diverse range of print contexts – literary annuals, periodicals, anthologies, provincial newspapers – in which his work was met and oeuvre evolved. In a few cases, I have departed from this practice and used a later base text, giving further explanation in the head-note. There is a limited set of Barton manuscript poems in archives: I have consulted these wherever possible. My notes indicate any significant variations between versions of a poem: very minor verbal variants and differences in typography and punctuation have not been recorded. Due to the posthumous nature of the 1849 Selections from the Poems and Letters, and the editorial interventions of Lucy Barton and Edward FitzGerald in the preparation of that text, those variants are not noted.

The date of first printed publication also determines the chronological arrangement of the poems, not least because the evidence for when Barton wrote a given piece is usually non-existent. While this does create a few minor anomalies when a date of composition is known – particularly notable where Barton himself has provided one at the foot of the poem, which is reproduced – it is a more consistent approach than trying to combine clashing chronologies. I have attempted to reflect these other dates to some extent when sequencing poems from the same source; in most other cases I simply follow the volume’s own original ordering. The reader is advised to consult the notes if interested in the precise detail of what is known about textual and publication histories. In any case, this volume accurately charts Barton’s unfolding career and can be used to trace what phases do exist in his work. The table of contents has been structured to suggest one fourfold division: the early anonymously published work of the 1810s; the period of emergence between 1820 and 1825 which begins with his contributions to the London Magazine and concludes with the final revised edition of Poems; the intensely productive phase in the late 1820s that encompasses three major volumes and much of his literary annual verse; and finally the less prolific output of the 1830s and 1840s crowned by Household Verses. While it is true that his aesthetic does not develop as radically as some poets, one can detect subtle thematic and stylistic changes: the slow fading of initially raw grief for his wife Lucy, greater imaginative ambition and stylistic range in volumes of the late 1820s, or the emergence of increasingly condensed and allegorical nature poetry, to name but three. Whilst E. V. Lucas, aiming to characterise Barton as an artist out of the flow of time, claimed that his literary identity was utterly static – ‘from the death of his wife in 1808, until his own death in 1849, he lived through one long, level day’ – it is hoped that this selected poems will illustrate a poet whose undoubted continuities do nonetheless contain multitudes.¹²

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