George Crabbe (1) (1754–1832)

Following on from his earlier The village and The parish register, this is a composite portrait in verse of a small town in 24 "letters". The unnamed town is obviously based on Crabbe's native Aldeburgh (although possibly also with elements of Woodbridge, where Crabbe worked for a time). Each letter focusses on a particular aspect of the life of the town, usually describing a single representative main character each time. The best-known of these, of course, are the unhappy single mother Ellen Orford and the doomed fisherman Peter Grimes, who feature in Benjamin Britten's opera. But there are also pictures of magistrates, doctors, publicans, actors, prostitutes, shopkeepers, clergymen, teachers, poor-law governors, gamblers, and many others.

Crabbe's descriptions range from the sardonic to the sympathetic. He has no tolerance for hypocrisy or religious dissent, but he is prepared to go a long way to understand the mixture of bad luck and human failings that land people in poverty and crime, and he argues strongly against the inhumanity of the poor relief system as it operated in Georgian times. Sometimes this brings him into odd collisions of utilitarian common-sense and romantic sympathy, but his efforts to put poor people — as individuals — into the centre of the story have a lot in common with what Wordsworth was doing.… (meer)