Sarah Houghton-Walker

Addressing a neglected aspect of John Clare's history, Sarah Houghton-Walker explores Clare's poetry within the framework of his faith and the religious context in which he lived. While Clare expressed affection for the Established Church and other denominations on various occasions, Houghton-Walker brings together a vast array of evidence to show that any exploration of Clare's religious faith must go beyond pulpit and chapel. Phenomena that Clare himself defines as elements of faith include ghosts, witches, and literature, as well as concepts such as selfhood, Eden, eternity, childhood, and evil. Together with more traditional religious expressions, these apparently disparate features of Clare's spirituality are revealed to be of fundamental significance to his poetry, and it becomes evident that Clare's experiences can tell us much about the experience of 'religion', 'faith', and 'belief' in the period more generally. A distinguishing characteristic of Houghton-Walker's approach is her conviction that one must take into account all aspects of Clare's faith or else risk misrepresenting it. Her book thus engages not only with the facts of Clare's religious habits but also with the ways in which he was literally inspired, and with how that inspiration is connected to his intimations of divinity, to his vision of nature, and thus to his poetry. Belief, mediated through the idea of vision, is found to be implicated in Clare's experiences and interpretations of the natural world and is thus shown to be critical to the content of his verse.

John Clare's Religion

In early eighteenth-century texts, the gypsy is frequently figured as an amusing rogue; by the Victorian period, it has begun to take on a nostalgic, romanticized form, abandoning sublimity in favour of the bucolic fantasy propagated by George Borrow and the founding members of the Gypsy Lore Society. Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period argues that, in the gap between these two situations, the figure of the gypsy is exploited by Romantic-period writers and artists, often in unexpected ways. Drawing attention to prominent writers (including Wordsworth, Austen, Clare, Cowper and Brontë) as well as those less well-known, Sarah Houghton-Walker examines representations of gypsies in literature and art from 1780-1830, alongside the contemporary socio-historical events and cultural processes which put pressure on those representations. She argues that, raising troubling questions by its repeated escape from the categories of enlightenment discourses which might seek to 'know' or 'understand' in empirical ways, the gypsy exists both within and outside of conventional English society. The figure of the gypsy is thus available to writers and artists to facilitate the articulation of dilemmas and anxieties taking various forms, and especially as a lens through which questions of knowledge and identity (which is often mutable, and troubling) might be focussed. .

Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period

In the Romantic period, a range of social, cultural, and political changes and events coalesce in such a way as to produce a sudden and significant amount of pressure on general ideas of what a gypsy might be, and thus on representations of gypsies in literature and art. Because of the very particular situation in which Romantic-period gypsies find themselves, for approximately fifty years the figure of the gypsy becomes a peculiarly effective means through whichanxieties about these changes and events might be articulated. This book examines the way in which writers and artists from the Romantic period depict gypsies, showing how various aspects of thecontemporary context influence those depictions, and highlighting the opportunities offered by the figure of the gypsy for the exploration of a range of hopes and fears.

Alan Moore

Essaka Joshua

Ian Waites

Simon J. White

Adam White

M. M. Mahood

Roy Vickery

Robert Heyes

Eric Robinson

Sam Ward

Donna Landry

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

Sarah Houghton-Walker

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