John Clare’s house move
As a writer in the 21st century, if you have to move house, even for a short period, you just make sure all your output — draft texts, notes, resources, submitted and published pieces — is backed up safely in the cloud, and you can then focus on things.
It was different in early 19th century in rural Northamptonshire, even for a man of self-proclaimed peasant background and upbringing “with six children aged between one and eleven, at least one cat, a large oak bookcase and some three hundred books — not to mention all Clare’s manuscripts, which he had gathered from various nooks and crannies around the old cottage”. Clare later wrote:
‘On flitting from my native place… I hunted over my bundles of paper intending to save the trouble of carriage by destroying those I set least store by… but I read them and paused, thinking of old days and old feelings and, excuse my vanity gentle reader — if I did not think them worthy of your praise, I felt I could not burn them’.
(Jonathan Bate, J. John Clare: a biography, 2003, p363-364).
