Abstract
When Stephen Duck’s poem ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ was published without his permission in 1730, the publicity surrounding Queen Caroline’s patronage of a thresher-poet attracted more attention than the verses. Duck was rescued from his station as an agricultural labourer struggling to support a wife and three children, was soon elevated to keeper of the Queen’s Grotto and set upon a path of study and composition that would lead eventually to a comfortable parsonage. Jennifer Batt examines the aesthetic, social and material effects of that transformation on the poet and the circles of Hanoverian society that he moved through. Her treatment of that journey is resourceful, authoritative and engaging.
Attention to Duck has waxed and waned over 300 years as society’s attitudes about class fluctuated. In the late twentieth century, scholars such as Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson called attention to ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ as a realistic voice for those workers who in pastoral tradition are usually stylised into silent, photogenic swains or playful lyric shepherds. Batt, however, goes beyond reducing Duck to quick exemplum and inspects his poems and career with a respect for human complication that dispenses with caricatures and partisans. She considers Duck’s poems on their own terms, follows the impact of shifting social status and job description and tries to articulate what remains constant in the poetic voice throughout. As she does so, she respects merit more than canon, widening her perspective beyond anthologised successes to a generous immersion in the literature of the period. She doesn’t underestimate the prominence of Addison and Pope but considers anonymous journalists and aspiring amateurs to place Duck’s poems within a wide cultural landscape.
Batt’s reading of ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ recognises the poem’s virtues of spirited diction, attentive observation, sincerity, concision and fresh point of view. Joseph Spence, loyal friend and correspondent of both Duck and Alexander Pope, is an important mediating figure in Batt’s telling of Duck’s life. Spence wrote a brief biography for the first authorised edition of Duck’s poems (after the publication of seven or more pirated editions). In his essay on the poet, Spence emphasised that Duck, though untutored, made substantial sacrifices to obtain books while working as a thresher. He read much of Joseph Addison and The Spectator, seven plays of Shakespeare, translations of works by Epictetus and Seneca and could recite extensively from Paradise Lost. Batt adds to the list other resources, including a translation of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. She stresses the importance of Spence’s biography in establishing the literary inspiration of Duck’s poems. As she follows Duck to the Queen’s Grotto, to chaplain of a cavalry regiment and finally to a parsonage in Byfleet, near where his friend Spence dwelt, she attends to other books Duck reads along the way, the lessons in Latin that lead him to emulate Horace and his increasing familiarity with the writings of contemporary poets and theologians. To the disappointment of critics such as Raymond Williams, his poems grow more distant from his ‘thresher in a barn’ (p. 60) origins, into occasional poems celebrating the birthdays, marriages and military achievements of his royal patrons, and then into more conventional effusions of a Christian gentleman of leisure (e.g. Every Man in His Own Way, Caesar’s Camp).
The author condenses her extensive scholarship so efficiently that there is not a chapter in the monograph from which we do not learn something new. But I would call attention to two chapters that shed particular light on the vexing problems that persist in reading these 300-year-old poems and also demonstrate the generous sympathetic imagination with which Batt approaches them. In Chapter Six (‘Various Beauties Overpay my Toil’) Batt compares the version of the rural landscape presented in ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (the poem Duck wrote as a thresher working in a barn) to the version presented in ‘On Richmond Park and Rural Gardens’, a poem celebrating the gardens of his patron, Queen Caroline. The transformation in point of view, from sweaty, fatigued, agricultural subordinate to privileged tourist, changes his representation of the landscape. Batt follows this enlightening comparison with a reading of Duck’s ‘A Description of a Journey to Marlborough, Bath, Portsmouth, &c.’, a poem Duck wrote about returning on summer vacation to the Wiltshire fields in which he laboured a mere few years ago. Duck is hosted by a literate friend, then attends a thresher’s feast that was established in his name by one of his patrons, Lord Palmerston. Unlike the harvest feast described from the vantage of a farm worker in ‘The Thresher’s Labour’, this is described by an outsider who lauds the patron’s generosity instead of resenting the sponsoring farmer’s condescension. When the workers return to the harvest on the day following the meal, Duck is moved to pick up a scythe to demonstrate his prowess. But now labour has become exercise, begun and ended at Duck’s whim, long before suffering exhaustion. We can only imagine what the workers felt about this demonstration. It is a sign of Duck’s sincerity and art (and Batt’s sensitive reading) that a poignant feeling of loss and distance mingles in this poem with a recognition of his acquired privilege.
Chapter Seven considers the intersection of gender and class that poet Mary Collier, contemporary and admirer of Duck’s poems, pointed out as distortion soon after they were first published. Collier addresses the poet’s resentment towards women workers, who maintained a more collaborative, chatty and manifold approach to their labour than that of the surly, focused, competitive men. Batt acknowledges the thresher’s mean-spirited portrait of the working women, then complicates the matter by considering the poet’s fealty to his patron Queen and the patriarchal assumptions Duck later adopted as a gentleman.
Throughout her book Batt resists temptations to render Duck as working-class hero or melancholy metaphor for the perils of social mobility, but accommodates complexity, even indeterminacy, without reducing poems or life to binary judgment. For all Duck’s changes in station and domestic situation, she portrays him as consistent aspirant to a life of study, moderation and self-discipline. Unlike many admirers of ‘The Thresher’s Labour’, she doesn’t condemn his late verse but does read it closely and notes the transformations in his station that it reflects. As for Batt’s own prose, it is a joy when a book of such intense scholarship is written in such graceful, felicitous sentences. One likes to think that her stylishness results in part from wide reading in Addison and Swift, but also in Duck and other labourer poets of the eighteenth century.