Poetry for historians

Or, W. H. Auden and history

Carolyn Steedman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526125231
• eBook ISBN: 9781526125248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

What is the point of poetry for historians? The answer lies in this new 'history of history', which looks at the question through the prism of W. H. Auden's Cold War history poems and of poetry and history education from the eighteenth century to the present day.

PART I

History

1

Servant poets: An Ode on a Dishclout

‘A servant write verses!’ says Madam Du Bloom:

‘Pray what is the subject – a Mop, or a Broom?’

‘He, he, he,” says Miss Flounce: ‘I suppose we shall see

An ode on a Dishclout – what else can it be?’ …

‘I once had a servant myself’, says Miss Pines

‘That wrote on a wedding some very good lines’.

Says Mrs Domestic, ‘And when they done,

I can’t see for my part what use they were on;

Had she wrote a receipt, to’ve instructed you how

To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragout,

Or to make cowslip wine, that would pass for Champagne,

It might have been useful, again and again’.

Elizabeth Hands, ‘A Poem, On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Maid’, 1789.

Christian Tousey his My Naime and England his My Naishan

and Solsbury my Dwelling plas and Christ His My Salvaton

Mrs Christian Tousey, Hir Book, 1748.

Christian Tousey’s Book, deposited in Wiltshire County Record Office, is folded and hand-sewn, about 10 cm square, probably put together in the kitchen out of some kind of wrapping paper; it contains undated lists of spending on foodstuffs day by day.¹ Discussing the twentieth-century development of recording and writing systems among the Vai people of Liberia, the anthropologist Jack Goody noted that several of the Vai records he consulted had been compiled by men who had worked as cooks at some point in their life, and who had thus, like Mrs Tousey, become familiar with elementary forms of bookkeeping.² In eighteenth-century England, if you wanted writing abilities (‘graphic-linguistic abilities’ is Goody’s term) that had some use in a household servant, then it was the cook you wanted them in, as Elizabeth Hands’ Mrs Domestic points out in the first epigraph to this chapter. In modest households, in a cash-short economy, the kitchen door was egress for most small coin; it needed to be accounted for on a daily basis. Your cook was likely to be your one domestic servant, a multi-tasking young woman, who took charge of the kitchen and the household cleaning, milked the house cow if there was one, and washed the baby’s nappies.³ Tousey’s Book was compiled by two hands, the second probably the mistress’s (or master’s) detailing payment to unspecified others, probably charwomen, or bought-in work-boys. The way in which a single-servant household was managed and maintained by the supplementary employment of a steady stream of casual domestic workers or ‘helpers’, the calculations necessary for paying them, as well as records of daily marketing, meant that an account book like Tousey’s was likely to come under regular scrutiny by the employer.⁴

Someone else had access to Christian Tousey’s Book; but she called it her own. Once, there was a disparaging little note on its catalogue card in the record office at Trowbridge, in a hand nearly as faded as Tousey’s own (but which must have been made in the 1950s or 1960s), wondering why such triviality had ever been thought worth preserving. But the inside cover of ‘Hir Book’ belies inconsequentiality: she places herself within a history of literacy and many accounts of the social and psychological consequences of writing.⁵ This woman knew what a book was and how organised, with cover, title, and epigraph. Her inscription suggests the form of schooling she experienced: limited though it may have been, it was in all likelihood conducted in a parochial school, where first steps in reading were to do with the God-given identity the Catechism inquires into (‘What is your Name?’ ‘Who gave you this Name?’).⁶ This inferred experience suggests that she could read simple literature of the faith, and probably a great deal more besides. By whatever method she had been taught to read (the syllabic method and its implications for prosody will be discussed shortly) she had been given the means to make the discovery that letters, syllables, and words represent the sounds of spoken language, and so had the resources to spell some of the words she used (‘his’ for ‘is’, ‘Solsbury’ for ‘Salisbury’) from speech, as well as from (sometimes imperfect) visual recall of the words on page or slate. Her little verse inscribes a geography and a cosmology. The writer knows that Salisbury is smaller than England. She knows that both of them exist in a much vaster order of things.⁷ The inscription also registers a particular form of Protestant Christianity, which many histories of its educational project from the sixteenth century onwards, tell of the construction of particular kinds of social and religious subject shaped by access to the written word.⁸ The inscription is also in doggerel, which no child is or ever has been taught in school, but which the exercise books of even modern schoolchildren show is acquired there.

Poetical maids were fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century, their popularity sometimes attributed to a proto-Romantic taste for humble genius – for plebeian literary creativity – and to the edifying consequences of contemplating talents that might, without your charitable donation to the subscription list of a Mary Leapor or an Ann Yearsley, be doomed to disperse themselves upon the desert air of a provincial village or a gentleman’s back kitchen.⁹ Some have more unkindly said that ‘natural poets’ made ‘splendid household pets who could fawn in words’, usually having in mind the long half-career of the thresher poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756) whose talents were thought to have flourished in inverse proportion to his climb up the ladder of patronage.¹⁰

Mary Leapor (1722–1746) served in at least two Northamptonshire gentry households during her brief life, producing there a corpus of poetry which was first published posthumously in 1748 and which achieved its first critical edition some 250 years later.¹¹ The Works of Mary Leapor (2003) was heralded by a flurry of articles, provoked as her modern editors suggest, by a feminism that ‘created an environment in which writers like [her] could be re-examined’.¹² The relationship between the servant poet and her patroness Bridget Fremantle has been particularly well described, leaving room for modern scholars to imagine the recognition by a rector’s daughter of true poetic talent in a subordinate and the development of an Enlightened friendship around the making of poetry – as well as the tensions and impossibilities of one attempted across a vast social divide. It is for those impossibilities that the relationship between the philanthropist Hannah More and Ann Yearsley (‘Lactilla’–‘The Milkwoman of Bristol’) is now usually discussed. The record of Yearsley’s creative independence and More’s anxieties about it are well preserved.¹³ Even in More’s fraught correspondence with friends about Yearsley’s insistence on writing the poetry she wanted to write, reaping the financial rewards of its publication, and spending the money on what she wanted, not on what More thought proper for a milkwoman, her patroness’ acknowledgment of Lactilla’s talents and abilities is discernable.

Ann Yearsley was not More’s servant, though she had much to do with More’s cook and kitchen: her poetry came into More’s life through the kitchen door. Collecting kitchen waste for her pigs from More’s cook, Yearsley showed the woman her poetry, and she showed it to her mistress. The pigswill was in fact the most difficult and perplexing factor in the relationship between poet and patron, for Lactilla had an arrangement for it with the cook. More attempted to override what Yearsley called a ‘contract’ at the high point of one of their quarrels about the subscription money and as a way of punishing Yearsley for her ingratitude and insubordination.¹⁴ Both cook and milkwoman knew that in doing so More had transgressed the boundaries of customary practice and the law that ‘everyone’ knew. As Yearsley pointed out, at length and in print, More had no grounds on which to be offended by the kitchen-door arrangement, for the pigswill was the perquisite of the cook, and the whole world knew it.¹⁵

Mary Leapor was a cook among a household retinue of servants (or part of a ‘menial Train’, as she put it); not a jobbing girl in a single-servant household turning her hand to dusting and the dinner; but, rather, hired in the capacity of cook to a gentry family, and in no other.¹⁶ In ‘Crumble Hall’ the servant-poet wanders the corridors and grounds of the country house (at sun-up it appears, truly the servant’s hour) for the purposes of nostalgia (its ‘hospitable Door/Has fed the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor’) and for the purposes of aesthetic judgement, for the grounds are being cleared for a new landscape garden – ancient oaks uprooted ‘to clear the Way for Slopes and modern Whims’.¹⁷ The poet spends longest in the kitchen, visiting it twice in the course of her tour. She describes its larder store of ‘good old English Fare’, sketches out a recipe (for cheese cakes), admires the skill (her own) that went into the ‘soft Jellies’ stored in the larder, and gives the menu for the servants’ dinner (boiled beef and cabbage).

Jeannie Dalporto has suggested how disconcerting it might be for a member of the employing classes to see depicted ‘servants who have lost sight of their servitude’, behaving as if their place in the big house is assured by affective relationships – not by contract or hiring agreement, or by the system of landownership, rent, and investment that the country estate represented.¹⁸ But there is more to it – to the affront – than this. The servants carry on their complex lives as if the family of the house simply does not exist; affective relationships are between themselves, not between servant and employer. The kitchen is a social universe presented as completely independent of the economic structures actually inscribed in ‘Crumble Hall’. In this poem, labour, and the objects and products of labour, belong entirely to the workers. The ploughman resting by the kitchen fire dreams of ‘his Oxen’, and when rain threatens worries for ‘his new-mown Hay’. Urs’la the kitchen maid, in love with the unresponsive Roger, works entirely for him, not for the Family on the other side of the door. ‘For you my Pigs resign their morning due’, she cries to his snoring form slumped across the kitchen table (emphases except for Roger’s name added):

My hungry Chickens lose their Meat for you:

And was it not, Ah! Was it not for thee,

No goodly Pottage would be dress’d by me.

For thee these Hands wind up the whirling Jack,

Or place the Spit across the sloping Rack.

I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart,

Because I know my Roger will have a part.

To employ a poetical maid was a fashionable thing to do and literacy in a cook was certainly a useful commodity; but perhaps these factors did not outweigh the discomfort of realising that the servants might live an autonomous life in your kitchen, quite independent of what law and legal theory said they were: mere aspects of your own personality, exercising your own (unused) capacity to turn spits and collect eggs, as kinds of proxy.¹⁹ And as for the cultural clout associated with the possession of a literary servant, perhaps many less-elevated employers than Lady Kingsborough discovered that it was all very well sending to London for a glamorous and recently published philosophical governess to tutor her daughters on the Irish estates; you might indeed be doing your best by the girls in employing Mary Wollstonecraft; but she would turn out to be obdurately and infuriatingly her Self, alienating the affections of the children, unassailably disapproving of your fondness for pugdogs, flirtatious with the gentlemen in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: History
• PART II: Historiography
• Conclusion
• Permissions
• Bibliography
• Index