SOURCE: Nelson, Beth. “Prose Fiction.” In George Crabbe and the Progress of Eighteenth-Century Narrative Verse, pp. 102-26. London: Bucknell University Press, 1976.

In the following essay, Nelson looks at how certain novels and novelists influenced Crabbe, focusing on the narrative aspects of his poetry.

In order to understand Crabbe's narrative art, it is necessary to examine the relation that his work bears to the prose fiction of his time. A number of critics and scholars—chiefly Jeffrey, Sigworth, Speirs, and Kroeber—have observed, though only in passing, that this relationship exists: “many of the stories,” Jeffrey says, “may be ranked by the side of the inimitable tales of Miss Edgeworth; and are calculated to do nearly as much good among that part of the population with which they are principally occupied.”¹ Crabbe was a voracious reader of novels, a not entirely disinterested one; his son recalled that “even from...