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 . . . Truth is the best companion for it levels all distinctions in pretentions . . . Truth, wether it enters the Ring or the Hall of Justice, shows a plain Man that is not to be scared at shadows or big words . . .’

Clare’s targets are marital deceit, political deceit, social deceit: Wigs offered him both a pun on Whigs and also an emblem of the deceitful disguise of the powerful. His pugilistic challenge was issued on 1 May 1841:

Jack Randall’s Challange to All the World Jack Randall The Champion Of The Prize Ring Begs Leave To Inform the Sporting World That He Is Ready To Meet Any Customer In The Ring Or On The Stage To Fight For The Sum Of £500 Or £1000 A Side A Fair Stand Up Fight half Minute Time Win Or Loose he Is Not Particular As to Weight Colour Or Country All He Wishes Is To Meet With a Customer Who Has Pluck Enough To Come To The Scratch

Jack Randall

May 1st 1841

His Byronic challenge was ‘Old Wigs and Sundries’.

p. 216 And I of blunt: money.

p. 217 beaten hollow: in the election, July 1841. Noble Lord John: in June and July 1841, the newspapers announced the forthcoming marriage of Lord John Russell and Lady Fanny Elliot. Victoria and Albert were married in February 1840, and Albert first left her to visit the Continent in March 1844. Clare, it seems, was revising this poem in that year.

p. 218 And so resign: Melbourne resigned in August 1841.