SOURCE: “John Clare's London Journal: A Peasant Poet Encounters the Metropolis,” in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XXIII, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 172-5.

In the following essay, McKusick discusses Clare's reaction as a rural poet to London and its populace. (The critic's mentions of Clare's “London Journal” simply refer to the poet's own prose writings on his time in London.)

Ever since Elizabethan times, when London became a center of commercial activity, the hectic pace of city life has been contrasted with the pastoral seclusion of the countryside. With the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, London became the hub of a mercantile empire and the largest city in Europe, a population well over one million by 1800. No longer exempt from the pressures of urban life, the surrounding countryside was radically transformed by the inexhaustible demand for food and other resources, leading to capital-intensive agriculture, deep-pit coal mining, and the...