George Crabbe (1754-1832) one of the most admired and respected poets of the late Georgian period.
Today he is best remembered for that section of his poem The Borough on which Britten's opera Peter Grimes is based.
He combined three careers: doctor, minister, and writer.
Born in Aldeburgh, a fishing village in Suffolk, he served his apprenticeship to an apothecary, and then set up as a surgeon-apothecary in 1775.
He abandoned this career four years later and went to London to earn his living as a writer.
In 1782 he was ordained priest and became chaplain to the Duke of Rutland. He held several livings thereafter, and finallv in 1814 became rector of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where he spent the rest of his life.
(1754-1832)
Crabbe's long literary career divides into two parts: the poems, — notably 'The Village' (1783), published during or shortly after his early stay in London; and the long series of works beginning with 'Poems' (1807), which includes 'The Parish Register' and 'Sir Eustace Grey';'The Borough' (1810), 'Tales in Verse' (1812), 'Tales of the Hall' (1819), and the inferior 'Posthumous Tales' (1834). This series shows Crabbe moving from static description and portrait toward narrative, until he achieves something which approaches a group of linked short stories in verse. His work, in its low-keyed, realistic, unsentimental picture of rural life, represents less the last gasp of eighteenth-century poetry than a reaction to it different in direction from Wordsworth's. It is indicative of the kind of work Crabbe produced that Thomas Hardy admired and was influenced by him.
The Borough [1804-1809, 1810]
"The Borough" is made up of twenty-four Letters which illustrate various aspects of a small fishing village. "What I thought I could best describe," Crabbe says, "that I attempted: the sea, and the country in the immediate vicinity; the dwellings and the inhabitants; some incidents and characters, with an exhibition of morals and manners, offensive perhaps to those of extremely delicate feelings, but sometimes, I hope, neither unamiable nor unaffecting."
Of Peter Grimes, Crabbe says, "The mind here exhibited is one untouched by pity, unstung by remorse, and uncorrected by shame; yet is this hardihood of temper and spirit broken by want, disease, solitude, and disappointment, and he becomes the victim of a distempered and horror-stricken fancy."
The Borough [1804-1809, 1810] by George Crabbe
1st verse of The Poor Of The Borough
Peter Grimes
Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,
His wife he cabined with him and his boy,
And seemed that life laborious to enjoy:
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
He left his trade upon the Sabbath day,
And took young Peter in his hand to pray;
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,
At first refused, then added his abuse;
His father's love he scorned, his power defied,
But, being drunk, wept sorely when he died.
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