Rare First Edition

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 26

Rare First Edition

T the forthcoming Fifth Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, to be held at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, from June 12 to 20, an exhibition is being held to mark the bicentenary of the poet George Crabbe, who is mainly remembered these days for writing the poem on which Benjamin Britten based his opera Peter Grimes. The _ Crabbe exhibition has once again pointed to the rarity and value of some of the books held by the Turnbull Library in Wellington, which was asked the other day by those connected with the Festival for information relating to its copy_of the first edition of Crabbe’s first separately published poem, Inebriety. The Turnbull Library has the only known perfect copy of this book in British countries. Two other copies exist, one in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (this copy lacks a title page) and the other in the private possession of J. A. Spoor, of Chicago, though’ the condition of the latter is not known. The Ipswich Public Library, on behalf of the ‘Earl of Cranbrook, who is arranging the Crabbe exhibition, has asked the Turnbull Library for a photostat copy of the title page of Inebriety. It will be included in a bibliography of Crabbe first editions which is being published in connection with the Festival, and which will reproduce the title pages of all Crabbe’s works. The Bodleian Library has also written for a copy of this very rare title page (which is shown at left) in order to complete-its own collection. Crabbe was born in Aldeburgh in 1754, and though he was a minor poet he was famous as a realistic painter of life as he saw it, in all its ugliness. One of his ‘most notorious poems, Sir Eustace Grey, is a hair-raising account of a patient in a madhouse of his decline from worldly prosperity and happiness. Crabbe was apprenticed when young to a doctor in Woodbridge, near Ipswich, where his first work, Inebriety, was published in 1775. In 1780 he went to London and was befriended by Edmund Burke, the orator, who advised him to publish in 1781 The Library,

a poem in heroic couplets. In the same year Crabbe took holy orders and bécame curate of Aldeburgh. After The Village appeared in 1783 Crabbe published nothing for over 20 years. He was a dutiful clergyman for the rest of his life, enjoying the patronage of

several noblemen. It is an indication of the good: market for poetry that in 1819 Jolin Murray, the publisher, paid him £3000 for the rights to his works, Inebriety was published anonymously, and Crabbe may well have regarded it later as a youthful indiscretion, because of the bibulous portrait it contains of a country clergyman. It was printed and sold by C. Punchard, bookseller, in the Butter-Market, and by the rest of the booksellers of Ipswich, at a price of one and sixpence. In a modest preface Crabbe apologised.to the critics for the many liberties he had taken with Alexander Pope, the "Swan of the Thames," and declared’ as a humble disciple of Pope that the passages modelled on the master seemed to him "the best part of the performance." But though the work is imitative in manner, Crabbe’s choice of subject was original and characteristic. The poet asks his readers to follow him into a country inn. It is a winter evening when the blood freezes in the veins, "the tendons stiffen and the spirit cools." The "labouring peasant" enters the inn, sits down by the warm chimney-piece, and disdaining "limpid punch or rosy wine," plunges into "the muddy ecstasies of beer." After a night of drinking and swapping yarns with "Colin, the prince of rural wits," this "jovial savage" staggers home to a midnight quarrel with his wife: Fire in his head and frenzy in his heels, From paths direct the bending hero swerves, And shapes his way in_ ill-proportioned curves. The poem’s third part, describing a subsequent orgy in a private room at the inn which was presided over by a clergyman, was omitted by one of the poet’s biographers for showing disrespect to the cloth which Crabbe himself later wore. Though the poem as a whole has many faults, the realistic character portraits contained in its unsparing analysis of -"the various forms of Bacchic folly" were a preliminary for the more extended studies of his contemporaries which formed the characteristic note of the poems of Crabbe’s maturity, The Parish Register, The Borough, and Tales of the Hall. All of Crabbe’s writings are in the Turnbull collections in Wellington, mainly in original editions. In addition the Library holds the manuscript of Crabbe’s poem Midnight, which remained unpublished until 1905. This manuscript occupies 24 pages, and was never completed. The treatment is characteristically gloomy, and the poem is generally regarded as an early imitation of Young’s Night Thoughts. Its interest lies in the fact that it seems to be Crabbe’s only experiment in blank: verse. The manuscript was formerly in the library of Edward Dowden, the noted literary critic, and was ought by Alexander Turnbull at a sale in London.