George Crabbe
born Dec. 24, 1754, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, Eng.
died Feb. 3, 1832, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
English writer of poems and verse tales
memorable for their realistic details of
everyday life.
Crabbe grew up in the then-impoverished seacoast
village of Aldeburgh, where his father was
collector of salt duties, and he was apprenticed
to a surgeon at 14. Hating his mean surroundings
and unsuccessful occupation, he abandoned both
in 1780 and went to London. In 1781 he wrote a
desperate letter of appeal to Edmund Burke, who
read Crabbe’s writings and persuaded James
Dodsley to publish one of his didactic,
descriptive poems, The Library (1781). Burke
also used his influence to have Crabbe accepted
for ordination, and in 1782 he became chaplain
to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle.
In 1783 Crabbe demonstrated his full powers
as a poet with The Village. Written in part as a
protest against Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted
Village (1770), which Crabbe thought too
sentimental and idyllic, the poem was his
attempt to portray realistically the misery and
degradation of rural poverty. Crabbe made good
use in The Village of his detailed observation
of life in the bleak countryside from which he
himself came. The Village was popular but was
followed by an unworthy successor, The Newspaper
(1785), and after that Crabbe published nothing
for the next 22 years. Apparently happily
married (1783) and the father of a family, he no
longer felt impelled to write poetry.
In 1807, however, spurred by the increasing
expenses associated with his sons’ education,
Crabbe began to publish again. He reprinted his
poems, together with a new work, “The Parish
Register,” in which he made use of the register
of births, deaths, and marriages to create a
compassionate depiction of the life of a rural
community. Other verse tales followed, including
The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and
Tales of the Hall (1819).
Crabbe is often called the last of the
Augustan poets because he followed John Dryden,
Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson in using the
heroic couplet, which he came to handle with
great skill. Like the Romantics, who esteemed
his work, he was a rebel against the realms of
genteel fancy that poets of his day were forced
to inhabit, and he pleaded for the poet’s right
to describe the commonplace realities and
miseries of human life. Another Aldeburgh
resident, Benjamin Britten, based his opera
Peter Grimes (1945) on one of Crabbe’s grim
verse tales in The Borough.
