SOURCE: Wade, Michael. “Object as Image in Crabbe's Portrait of Catherine Lloyd.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 17, no. 4 (October 1981): 337-50.

In the following essay, Wade examines Crabbe's poem “Catherine Lloyd,” arguing the poet uses descriptions of details of her life as a way to reveal her character.

George Crabbe's one-hundred-line portrait of “Catherine Lloyd” (“The Parish Register: Burials,” 1807)¹ has engaged the attention of a number of scholars and critics, notably Lilian Haddakin, Robert Chamberlain, John Speirs, Peter New, and Terence Bareham,² largely because it possesses similarities with Procrastination (1812). Consequently Catherine Lloyd has found herself pressed into an unkind comparison with one of the finest of Crabbe's mature Tales.³ This apparently slight sketch of an English spinster has strengths and felicities which such a comparison tends to overlook and which are sufficient to justify a less divided attention.

Certainly the passage lends itself to consideration in its own right...