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Updated: May 19, 2025
Returned to Helpston, Clare made immediate preparations for carrying out Mr. Taylor's project to become a hawker. He sorted the little parcel of books which he had brought from London, and having divided the volumes into sets, each containing the 'Rural Poems, 'Village Minstrel, and 'Shepherd's Calendar, he set out in regular pedlar fashion.
Their conclusions were fully justified from their own point of view, in a material sense. The hawkers who passed through Helpston were mostly men of substance, putting-up at the 'Blue Bell, and ordering the best of everything from kitchen and cellar; while the poet among them was a starving wretch, over head and ears in debt, and with one foot in the workhouse.
John Clare read the letter on the roadside, between Stamford and Helpston; he read it over again and again, and his burning tears fell upon the little sheet of paper. A fierce conflict of passions and desires arose within his soul.
Day after day he kept walking through fields and woods among his old haunts, with wild haggard look, muttering incoherent language. The people of the village began to whisper that he was going mad. At Milton Park they heard of it, and Artis and Henderson hurried to Helpston to look after their friend. They found him sitting on a moss-grown stone, at the end of the village nearest the heath.
John Clare was lost, as to many other things, so to the Royal Artillery. In a very uncertain mood, his head still somewhat heavy, John Clare took his way back to Helpston. He congratulated himself of having had a very lucky escape from a kind of servitude for which, of all others, he was most unfit; and yet, notwithstanding this piece of good fortune, he felt by no means easy in his mind.
Heaven certainly had not gifted John Clare with a genius for cookery, any more than with the higher faculty of money-making. The visit of worthy Monsieur Grill to Helpston had the good result that henceforth Clare's diet and mode of living became greatly improved.
The man in plush carefully advanced to the cottage door, and holding a silk handkerchief before his fine Roman nose, summoned John before him. Old Parker Clare thereupon hobbled forward, trembling all over, and, in a faint voice, told the great man that his son was mowing corn, in a field close to Helpston Heath.
'John Clare of the Parish of Helpston Bachelor and Martha Turner of this Parish Spinster were married in this Church by banns this 16th day of March in the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty by me Richard Lucas. And underneath: 'This marriage was solemnized between us, her mark. Little more than a month after the wedding, a child was born to Clare; a little girl, baptized Anna Maria.
To leave Helpston, and leave it immediately, was a point at once agreed upon; but next came the more difficult matter, as to subsequent proceedings.
But there being not a page, nor even a line, in the whole book in praise of the elder branch of the Cecils, showed a deplorable want of feeling proper to a farm labourer living on his lordship's estate. It was clear that the Helpston poet was, on the whole, a silly, foolish man.
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