Crabbe, GEORGE, poet, was born on Christmas Eve of 1754, at Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk seaboard. His father, 'salt-master' and warehouse-keeper, was a clever, strong, violent man; the mother, a meek, religious woman; and of three brothers, one perished captain of a slaver, another was lost sight of in Honduras. George, the eldest, got some schooling at Bungay and Stowmarket, then from 1768 to 1774 was surgeon's apprentice at Wickham-Brook and at Woodbridge. In his first place he had to help the ploughboy; in his second he fell in love with Sarah Elmy ('Mira'), who lived with her uncle, a wealthy yeoman, at the old moated hall of Parham. A spell of drudgery in his father's warehouse—nine months in London, picking up surgery cheaply—some three years' struggling practice at Aldeburgh—at last in April 1780, with £3 in his pocket, he sailed again for London, resolved to try his fortune in literature. Eight years before he had written verses for Wheble's Magazine; he had published Inebriety, a Poem (Ipswich, 1775); and now his Candidate soon found a publisher, unluckily a bankrupt one. A season of penury, dire as Chatterton's, was borne by Crabbe with pions bravery; he had to pawn clothes and instruments; appeals to Lords Thurlow, North, Shelburne, met no response; and early in 1781 he saw himself threatened with arrest for debt, when he made his case known to Burke. Forty-one years later he told Lockhart at Edinburgh, how, having delivered the letter at Burke's door, he paced Westminster Bridge all night long until daybreak. Burke proved a generous patron; from the hour of their meeting Crabbe was a 'made man.' He stayed at Beaconsfield; he met Fox, Johnson, and Reynolds; Thurlow gave him a bank-note for £100; Doddsley brought out his Library; and the very next winter he was ordained to the curacy of his native town. He resided as domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle (1782-85); married Miss Elmy (1783); held four livings in Dorset, Leicester, and Lincoln shires, but spent thirteen happy years in Suffolk, at Parham, Great Glemham, and Rendham (1792-1805); returned to Muston, his Leicestershire rectory; and his wife having died there in 1813, exchanged it the next year for Trowbridge in Wiltshire. His gentle, kindly life, in which botanising had given place to fossil-hunting, was broken now and again by visits to London and its best society; he witnessed the Bristol riots (1831), as fifty-one years before he had witnessed those of Lord George Gordon; and on 3d February 1832 he died at Trowbridge.
Three novels, a treatise on botany, and poems untold all perished in grand yearly 'incrementations;' but still, Crabbe published The Village (1783), The Newspaper (1785), The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), for which last and the earlier copyrights Murray paid him £3000. Of these poems Words- worth wrote in 1832, 'They will last full as long as anything expressed in verse since first they made their appearance;' and Jane Austen said Crabbe was the only man whom she would care to marry. Byron, too, Scott, Jeffrey, Wilson, Lord Tennyson, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, and, above all, Edward Fitzgerald, must be reckoned among his few votaries. 'Though nature's sternest painter, yet the best,' Byron's verdict upon him, is truer than Horace Smith's, 'a Pope in worsted stockings,' for this refers but to the accident of metre—the rhyming heroics, which, thirty per diem, Crabbe ground out anywhere. Their subject-matter, though, is all Crabbe's own. He is as much the poet of East Anglia as Scott of the Borderland or Wordsworth of the Lake Country. Its scenery and the life of its fisher-folk and peasantry he described with a realism greater than Zola's, if sometimes almost as tedious. Zola! nay, Crabbe has closer kinship to Balzac; and his strong, sombre pictures of sin and suffering are ever and again lit up with homely pathos and shrewd, Dutch-like humour. 'The tragic power of Crabbe,' Mr Swinburne says, 'is as much above the reach of Byron, as his singularly vivid, though curiously limited, insight into certain shades of character.' And in old John Murray's words, 'Crabbe said uncommon things in so common a way as to escape notice;' surely he claims notice from such as rank thought higher than expression.
An admirable Life by his son, the Rev. George Crabbe (1785-1857), for twenty-three years vicar of Bredfield, Suffolk, is prefixed to Crabbe's Works (8 vols. 1834). See also Mr Leslie Stephen's 'Hours in a Library' (2d series, 1876); Mr Fitzgerald's Readings in 'Tales of the Hall' (1882); the essay on Crabbe by Mr W. J. Courthope in vol. iii. of Ward's English Poets (1884); and T. E. Kebbels's Crabbe (1888).