Surprisingly, Clare manages to turn the conclusion of ‘The Flitting’ to a positive note: whatever time and change do to us, nature will survive. Molehills and rabbit-tracks: MC reads ‘tracts’.

p. 207A make-believe on April-day: i.e. April Fools’ Day.

p. 208 in Clare’s memory: in the 1820s Clare had idolized Byron; in 1824, he wrote an eloquent account of Byron’s funeral, which he witnessed during a visit to London that also included some exposure to the city’s low-life: the French Playhouse, with its ‘smoke, smocks, smirks, smells and smutty doings’; displays of pugilism at the Fives Court; and The Hole in the Wall, in Chancery Lane, run by the most celebrated ex-pugilist, Jack Randall.

Clare’s library contained J. H. Reynolds’s The Fancy (1820), a spoof-memoir of a poet apparently modelled on Clare, in which Byron and the dubious world of pugilism were closely associated: ‘Of all the great men of this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendant talent as Randall . . . Lord Byron is a wonderful poet, with a mind weighing fourteen stone; but he is too sombre a hitter, and is apt to lose his temper. Randall has no defect . . .’

In the same year, Taylor’s London Magazine published a review of Thomas Medwin’s Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, which featured Byron’s promiscuity, his contempt for women and a simple tribute that must have caught Clare’s fancy: ‘Of all my schoolfellows, I know no one for whom I have retained so much friendship as for Lord Clare’; and it was Byron who had written: ‘I have a passion for the name of “Mary”’ (Don Juan, Canto 5, stanza IV); who had treated of bigamy (stanza XX); who had written of ‘hopes which will not deceive’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanza CXIV); and even of ‘bedlamites broke loose’ (Don Juan, Canto 6, stanza XXXIV). Again in 1820, in his second Letter to John Murray, Byron had come to John Clare’s defence.

p. 211 Maid of Walkherd: clearly modelled on Byron’s ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part’.

p. 212The Gipsy Camp: it was the local gypsies who showed Clare the road leading north out of Epping Forest, prior to his escape in July 1841.

Nigh Leopard’s Hill: in 1837, John Taylor, who had published Clare’s first three volumes, sought the advice of Dr George Darling, who had treated Clare’s ailments during his visits to London. Darling recommended that Clare be placed in the care of Dr Matthew Allen, at his private asylum, Fairmead House, High Beech, in Epping Forest, north of London. In 1830, Taylor had published Dr John Conolly’s Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity,and, like Conolly, Allen was committed to the humane treatment of the insane. His Cases of Insanity, with Medical,Moral and Philosophical Observations had been published in 1831, and Taylor published his Essay on the Classification of the Insane in 1838. Allen’s mental science was an odd mixture of good sense, animal magnetism, phrenology and the influences of weather. Clare was admitted in June 1837, and Allen found his mind ‘not so much lost and deranged as suspended in its movements by the oppressive and permanent state of anxiety, and fear, and vexation, produced by the excitement of excessive flattery at one time, and neglect at another, his extreme poverty and over-exertion of mind, and no wonder that his feeble bodily frame . . . was overcome.’

p. 214 Ballad: the capitalization of every word occurs in Clare’s manuscripts sporadically, and is seemingly an attempt to achieve emphasis so as to be attended to.

Don Juan: after Byron’s death in 1824, a fashionable literary game was to write ‘continuations’ of his Don Juan: one of them, published in 1825, was in Clare’s library. Clare himself drafted an advertisement for his poem, thus: ‘Speedily will be published / The sale of Old Wigs and Sundries/ A Poem by Lord Byron’ ( MSS6 and 8).

The central theme of Clare’s ‘Old Wigs . . .’ is the pervasiveness of deceit: in a remarkable letter to his wife, he remarks: ‘I am in Prison because I won’t leave my family and tell a falsehood . . .