BARS Stephen Copley Bursary Report
Adam White
I used the Stephen Copley Bursary to make trips to the British Library and the
Deansgate Library (Manchester), carrying out vital research related to my PhD thesis
– ‘“The Fancy Painting Eye”: the Aesthetic in John Clare’s Poetry’ – which was
submitted in late 2011. Clare’s poetry is the subject of an ongoing editorial debate and
it is evident that the current preference in Clare Studies is for the uncorrected, ‘raw’
versions of the poems from manuscript, as contained in the nine-volume Oxford
English Texts edition. My thesis argues for Clare’s self-conscious ‘literariness’ and
unlike much modern scholarship my preference is for using ‘modernised’ or corrected
(regular spelling and punctuation) versions of Clare’s texts. However, due to the
complicated nature of the editorial debate, it was necessary for me to consult the
original editions of the poems published in Clare’s lifetime – this enabled me in most
cases in my thesis to quote texts of poems which Clare would have authorised (as
opposed to modern reprints) and that readers have had access to since publication.
During my visit to the British and Deansgate libraries I consulted editions of
the four volumes published in Clare’s lifetime – Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and
Scenery, The Village Minstrel, The Shepherd’s Calendar, and The Rural Muse. I
checked the relevant poems in these collections against each of the relevant quotations
used in my thesis. I did not find a great deal of difference between the poems in the
original editions and most of the corrected versions found in modern editions of
Clare’s poetry. The key thing was, however, that the series of close comparisons and
checks that I undertook at both of these libraries enabled me to proceed on a surer
footing in regard to the quotations in my thesis, as well as getting an improved sense
of editorial approaches to Clare’s texts more generally. Due the research that I
undertook at the British and Deansgate libraries, I was also able to more clearly
identify the divisions and running order of the poems in these original editions – in so
doing I was able to get a clear sense of the way in which Clare was presented as a
poet to his contemporary readers – this was important given the deep anxieties in
Clare’s letters about the way in which his work was received. I am grateful to the
British Association for Romantic Studies and the Stephen Copley Bursary for the
research funding.