‘From the Author’s own Original Manuscript’

This chapter explores the frantic burst of publishing activity that followed Queen Caroline’s patronage of Stephen Duck. This activity was instrumental in shaping how Duck and his work would be viewed during his life and beyond. Duck’s verse was initially published without his, or his patrons’, consent; as it quickly became a bestseller, it was followed onto the market by a slew of rival, pirated, and spurious pamphlets. Duck and his patrons had very little control over how work issued in his name was presented to the reading public, and, as this chapter reveals, their complaints very quickly became embroiled in a fiercely contested dispute about authority, authenticity, and accuracy. Duck’s patrons and supporters found it difficult to gain a hearing; their sincere statements were crowded out by competing assertions issued by energetic, innovative, and financially motivated booksellers and printers. As this chapter argues, the more that Duck’s supporters tried to object to the unauthorized reproduction of Duck’s verse, the more opportunities they created for others to raise doubts about Duck’s capabilities as a poet.

‘For Duck can thresh, you know, as well as write’

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck’s public identity as ‘the famous Threshing Poet’ was forged as much by what was written about him as it was by anything he wrote himself. In the weeks and months after Queen Caroline’s patronage was announced, the poetic abilities of the agricultural labourer were debated in pamphlets, newspaper articles, poems, essays, and even dramatic scenes. What did the emergence of such a poet mean for contemporary literary culture? Could a labourer really merit the extraordinary acclaim that Duck had received, or was his present fame a symptom of a worrying decline in standards? Was he an isolated and unique case, or just the most visible exemplar of a growing group of ambitious and talented labouring-class men and women? And if there were more labouring-class poets like him, was that prospect to be welcomed or feared? This chapter explores how Duck’s contemporaries sought to answer these questions. For some, the thresher poet was an ill-educated rustic whose startling rise to fame was symptomatic of a debased literary sphere; for others, though, Duck was an important figurehead of an emerging movement of labouring-class writing.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter explores how the narratives that developed around Stephen Duck’s life and works impacted upon subsequent labouring-class writers. As the eighteenth century progressed and increasing numbers of labouring-class men and women sought to publish their own verse and develop their own literary careers, Duck’s example was invoked again and again, by the poets themselves, their patrons, their reviewers, and their readers. Although the comparison was seldom intended as a compliment, these repeated references back to Duck cemented his position at the head of a developing tradition of labouring-class poetry. As Duck had throughout his life, so too after his death did he provide both opportunity and provocation for thinking through the contested and complex relationships that existed between class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England.

‘A very agreeable Conversation’

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck used his increasing proficiency in classical learning to position himself in relation to male patrons and friends, including Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston, and Joseph Spence. The various models offered by Horace were particularly useful to Duck in this process. Initially, by imitating Horace’s odes Duck crafted non-threatening reflections on his achievements which were couched in a language of contentment and moderation. Later, with more daring, Duck adopted the Horatian satirical mode in order to reflect on his place in literary culture. The example of Horace enabled Duck to develop a confident poetic voice. By the early 1740s, his earlier, earnest sincerity was displaced by a witty willingness to make fun of his labouring-class origins.

‘The Duty of a grateful Muse’

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck adapted to life as a poet at the court of George II and Queen Caroline. The patronage that Queen Caroline extended to Duck in 1730 transformed his life and opened up remarkable new opportunities to him. This chapter explores how Duck strove to repay her generosity. Tentatively at first, and then with more confidence, Duck developed into a reliable Hanoverian panegyrist, ready and able to dispense verse on royal birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Duck performed this role with increasing ambition until the Queen’s death in 1737 brought his close association with courtly pageantry to an abrupt end.

‘A Man…grown up into an Excellent Poet all at once’

This chapter explores the early life of Stephen Duck, revealing how it was that an agricultural labourer from Wiltshire came to write verse which attracted the attention of Queen Caroline. It draws on contemporary biographies, together with material from letters, manuscript notes, contemporary reviews, and Duck’s own writing, in order to reveal what can be recovered about Duck’s early life and initial progress as a writer. It gives account of Duck’s working life and domestic circumstances; his education; how he was first introduced to literary texts; how he began to write and what his processes in writing were; and how he found his first readers and earliest patrons. The evidence on which this chapter draws is, at times, contested and contradictory; writing about Duck could often reveal as much about attitudes to class as about the poet himself. This chapter shows that from the very beginning of Duck’s career as a writer there were those who sincerely believed that a farm labourer could succeed as a poet, while others, more suspicious of the possibilities of social mobility, anticipated such a man’s inevitable failure.

‘Some Gentleman-like Title, as that of The Revd’

This chapter focuses on the career change that defined the last decade or so of Stephen Duck’s life: his decision to join the clergy. This decision, and the advancements that Duck subsequently received in the Church, were controversial to those onlookers who had always viewed him and his talents sceptically. Even some of those who had been able to tolerate a thresher having pretensions to poetry found Duck’s new ambition to be a priest to be risible. As this chapter explores, though Duck did have his supporters as he pursued this new career, his progress was not always smooth. He was involved in a protracted and highly personal row which focused on his class position; he discovered that advancement in the Church was as tied to patronage as anything in the literary realm; and the career that must have seemed at the beginning to offer him such possibilities may, possibly, have contributed to his death. This chapter concludes by exploring the narratives that developed to explain Duck’s probable suicide.

‘Various Beauties overpay my Toil’

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck’s approach to writing about rural landscapes and labour changed in the years after he was awarded patronage by Queen Caroline. The Queen’s support meant that Duck moved from the agricultural fields of Wiltshire to the polite and royal gardens of Richmond and Kew. This chapter traces Duck’s journey from a landscape of labour to a landscape of leisure. How far was it possible for the former farm labourer to reimagine his relationship with the agricultural environment? As this chapter argues, Duck’s writing of the 1730s was preoccupied with examining his newly transformed relationship to agricultural landscapes and polite gardens, and to work and leisure. This was a key means by which he attempted to demonstrate his gratitude to his patrons: he used his writing about labour and landscapes to show how well he had taken advantage of the opportunities they had made available to him.

Introduction

This book begins by exploring how the labouring-class poet Stephen Duck came to be used as a cautionary tale to warn against the dangers of social mobility. Duck’s story was a remarkable one: he was an agricultural labourer from Wiltshire whose writing, in 1730, won him the patronage of Queen Caroline. He wrote repeatedly about the pleasures of finding contentment in one’s current position, as well as of the dangers of ambition, but the circumstances of his life and death suggest he lived at odds with such ideas. This introduction explores how Duck’s life and writing have been read from the eighteenth century through to the present day, and sketches out the ways in which this book’s arguments complicate and challenge the accepted narratives of Duck’s life and death.

‘Too Severe on the Female Sex’?

This chapter explores how Stephen Duck negotiated the competing hierarchies of gender and class as he sought to establish himself as a poet who moved in courtly circles. In both his narrative and occasional verse, Duck’s writing about, and addressed to, women was informed by his own unique and unprecedented position as a former thresher who had been brought to live at the periphery of the royal court. As several contemporary commentators noted, women and labouring-class men were often considered to be similarly—though not equally—circumscribed when it came to accessing literary and intellectual culture. Duck repeatedly made use of this supposed equivalence in order to bolster his own position against that of women who were, by birth, above him in the Georgian social strata. Now a labourer no more, Duck used the hierarchy of gender to trump the hierarchy of class. As this chapter shows, Duck’s misogyny was a product of the culture in which he was writing, but it was also a tool that he could strategically deploy in a variety of circumstances in the service of establishing his own credentials as a would-be gentleman.