Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England

This book explores the complex and contested relationships that existed between class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England by examining the life and work of Stephen Duck, the ‘famous Threshing Poet’. In 1730, Duck became the most famous agricultural labourer in the nation when his writing won him the patronage of Queen Caroline. The man, and the writing he produced, intrigued contemporaries. How was it possible, they asked, for an agricultural labourer to become a poet? What would a thresher write? Did he really deserve royal patronage, and what would he do with such an honour? How should he be supported? And was he an isolated prodigy, or were there others like him, equally deserving of support? Duck’s remarkable story reveals the tolerances, and intolerances, of the Hanoverian social order. This book sheds new light on the poet’s early life, revealing how the farm labourer developed an interest in poetry; how he wrote his most famous poem, ‘The Thresher’s Labour’; how his public identity as the ‘famous Threshing Poet’ took shape; and how he came to be positioned as a figurehead of labouring-class writing. It explores how the patronage Duck received shaped his writing; how he came to reconceive his relationship with land, labour, and leisure; and how he made use of his newly acquired classical learning to develop new friendships and career opportunities. And it reveals how, after Duck’s death, rumours about his suicide came to overshadow the achievements of his life. Both in life, and in death, this book argues, Duck provided both opportunity and provocation for thinking through the complex interplay of class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England.

‘From the Author’s own Original Manuscript’

This chapter explores the frantic burst of publishing activity that followed Queen Caroline’s patronage of Stephen Duck. This activity was instrumental in shaping how Duck and his work would be viewed during his life and beyond. Duck’s verse was initially published without his, or his patrons’, consent; as it quickly became a bestseller, it was followed onto the market by a slew of rival, pirated, and spurious pamphlets. Duck and his patrons had very little control over how work issued in his name was presented to the reading public, and, as this chapter reveals, their complaints very quickly became embroiled in a fiercely contested dispute about authority, authenticity, and accuracy. Duck’s patrons and supporters found it difficult to gain a hearing; their sincere statements were crowded out by competing assertions issued by energetic, innovative, and financially motivated booksellers and printers. As this chapter argues, the more that Duck’s supporters tried to object to the unauthorized reproduction of Duck’s verse, the more opportunities they created for others to raise doubts about Duck’s capabilities as a poet.

‘A very agreeable Conversation’

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck used his increasing proficiency in classical learning to position himself in relation to male patrons and friends, including Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston, and Joseph Spence. The various models offered by Horace were particularly useful to Duck in this process. Initially, by imitating Horace’s odes Duck crafted non-threatening reflections on his achievements which were couched in a language of contentment and moderation. Later, with more daring, Duck adopted the Horatian satirical mode in order to reflect on his place in literary culture. The example of Horace enabled Duck to develop a confident poetic voice. By the early 1740s, his earlier, earnest sincerity was displaced by a witty willingness to make fun of his labouring-class origins.

‘The Duty of a grateful Muse’

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck adapted to life as a poet at the court of George II and Queen Caroline. The patronage that Queen Caroline extended to Duck in 1730 transformed his life and opened up remarkable new opportunities to him. This chapter explores how Duck strove to repay her generosity. Tentatively at first, and then with more confidence, Duck developed into a reliable Hanoverian panegyrist, ready and able to dispense verse on royal birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Duck performed this role with increasing ambition until the Queen’s death in 1737 brought his close association with courtly pageantry to an abrupt end.

‘A Man…grown up into an Excellent Poet all at once’

This chapter explores the early life of Stephen Duck, revealing how it was that an agricultural labourer from Wiltshire came to write verse which attracted the attention of Queen Caroline. It draws on contemporary biographies, together with material from letters, manuscript notes, contemporary reviews, and Duck’s own writing, in order to reveal what can be recovered about Duck’s early life and initial progress as a writer. It gives account of Duck’s working life and domestic circumstances; his education; how he was first introduced to literary texts; how he began to write and what his processes in writing were; and how he found his first readers and earliest patrons. The evidence on which this chapter draws is, at times, contested and contradictory; writing about Duck could often reveal as much about attitudes to class as about the poet himself. This chapter shows that from the very beginning of Duck’s career as a writer there were those who sincerely believed that a farm labourer could succeed as a poet, while others, more suspicious of the possibilities of social mobility, anticipated such a man’s inevitable failure.

Introduction

This book begins by exploring how the labouring-class poet Stephen Duck came to be used as a cautionary tale to warn against the dangers of social mobility. Duck’s story was a remarkable one: he was an agricultural labourer from Wiltshire whose writing, in 1730, won him the patronage of Queen Caroline. He wrote repeatedly about the pleasures of finding contentment in one’s current position, as well as of the dangers of ambition, but the circumstances of his life and death suggest he lived at odds with such ideas. This introduction explores how Duck’s life and writing have been read from the eighteenth century through to the present day, and sketches out the ways in which this book’s arguments complicate and challenge the accepted narratives of Duck’s life and death.

‘Too Severe on the Female Sex’?

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck negotiated the competing hierarchies of gender and class as he sought to establish himself as a poet who moved in courtly circles. In both his narrative and occasional verse, Duck’s writing about, and addressed to, women was informed by his own unique and unprecedented position as a former thresher who had been brought to live at the periphery of the royal court. As several contemporary commentators noted, women and labouring-class men were often considered to be similarly—though not equally—circumscribed when it came to accessing literary and intellectual culture. Duck repeatedly made use of this supposed equivalence in order to bolster his own position against that of women who were, by birth, above him in the Georgian social strata. Now a labourer no more, Duck used the hierarchy of gender to trump the hierarchy of class. As this chapter shows, Duck’s misogyny was a product of the culture in which he was writing, but it was also a tool that he could strategically deploy in a variety of circumstances in the service of establishing his own credentials as a would-be gentleman.