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President's Address to the John Clare Society, 12 July 2008
John Clare Primary School, Helpston
It might well have all begun with paper. Lots of fine new paper on which to write. A whole bookful of it. A leather-bound book waiting for words. His publishers had sent it to him, presumably in late summer else, had it arrived at the normal diary time, it would have been half-filled by now. It was a journal without dates, the fifth edition of Taylor and Hessey;s Student's Journal which they had been issuing for some years. Clare was thrilled with its emptiness, its marbled boards, its timelessness. Inside a note said that it was arranged, printed and ruled for receiving an account of every day's employment for the space of one year. The year John Clare wrote in it was 1824, the month September. Also inside, and to be expected, was a resolution quoted from Mr Gibbons7 Journal:
I propose from this day (January 1st) to keep an exact Journal of my Actions and Studies, both to assist my Memory, and to accustom me to set a due value on my Time.
Many years before a friend had sent Gilbert White a similar journal and we know what happened to it. When Taylor and Hessey's present arrived the poet wrote 'John Clare / Helpstone / 1824' on the title-page. The entries, with many omissions, would run from Monday 6 September 1824 to 11 September 1825. His resolution was a rural version of Gibbons':
I have determind this day of beginning a sort of journal to give my opinion of things I may read or see & set down any thoughts that may arise either in my reading at home or my musings in the Fields
He could have added a record of his state of health and his garden notes, for each of these subjects crop up over and over again. Clare's Journal will be the chief source of course for what happens in his cottage garden. He was an avid receiver of plants and seeds; cultivated and wild, with a passion for garden-writing.
But to begin at the beginning, which was more than halfway through the year, 1824 was a time of scarcely believable output. A stream...