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. the young princess: Victoria Adelaide, born November 1841.

p. 219I’ve never seen: i.e. animals, unlike humans, cannot practise deceit or disguise.

Ponders End: three miles from High Beech.

‘Cease your funning’: from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.

Eliza Phillips: the text of the poem in M S 8 is followed by this letter:

My dear Eliza Phillips

Having been cooped up in this Hell of a Madhouse till I seem to be disowned by my friends and even forgot by my enemies for there is none to accept my challanges which I have from time to time given to the public I am almost mad in waiting for a better place and better company and all to no purpose It is well known that I am a prize fighter by profession and a man that never feared anybody in my life either in the ring or out of it - I do not much like to write love letters but this which I am now writing to you is a true one — you know that we have met before and the first oppertunity that offers we will meet again - I am now writing a New Canto of Don Juan which I have taken the liberty to dedicate to you in remembrance of Days gone bye and when I have finished it I would send you the vol if I knew how in which is a new Canto of Child Harold also — I am my dear Elize

yours sincerely

John Clare

p. 220 Doctor Bottle: Allen would collect urine samples from the patients for analysis, especially for signs of V D: cf.. ‘Some p-x-d ...’

To see red hell, and further on, the white one: there were three separate houses at High Beech asylum: Fairmead, Springfield and Leopard’s (or Leppit’s) Hill. If Fairmead was Allen’s residence, then the two ‘hells’ would be Springfield and Leopard’s Hill, where the patients lived, women in the first and men in the second: the colours may simply be a reference to the colours of brick and stucco.

p. 221 Next Tuesday: Clare’s birthday was 13 July.

Lord Byron? Poh: this seems to be intended as the voice of an intrusive Cockney interlocutor, dismissing Byron; Clare’s response to this dismissal seems to begin at line 3. The choice of a Cockney dialect is entirely appropriate, since most of Allen’s patients would be from London and the home counties.

Who wed two wives: Byron’s sexual adventures here connect with Clare’s delusion that he himself was ‘imprisoned’ for ‘bigamy’.

And buy the book: Clare ends with his abiding preoccupation — how to sustain his vocation as poet and make a living by it.

p. 222 Prison Amusements, or Child Harold: in about 1848, Clare wrote to Mary Howitt: ‘I have poetical sweethearts too, which my fancy dwells on as it did when I was single. So, in writing of these as my fancy dictates, they grow imperceptibly into a Vol. and then I call it “Child Harold”, of which I wrote much both in Essex and here, which 1 did and do merely to kill time, and whose more proper title might be “Prison Amusements”.’ He used the title again in a letter to Knight in July 1850.

Many are poets: cf. Byron: ‘Many are poets who have never penn’d . . .’ (‘The Prophecy of Dante’).

No zeal: Clare explicitly turns away from the political matters of ‘Old Wigs and Sundries’.

Great little minds: i. e. small-minded people who are economically or socially powerful. Cf.