The Triumph of the Gander and Power Relations in The Farmer’s Boy, by Simon J. White

The gander was and still is renowned for its truculence and aggression. Bloomfield’s account of his confrontations with other farmyard animals is mock-heroic:

The poet signals quite explicitly that the gander’s posturing should be taken as an allegory for human behaviour that is similarly disruptive: ‘Thus fools and bravoes kindred pranks pursue; / As savage quite, and oft as fatal too.’ (Summer, lines 241-42). On one level this is an attempt to foreground the kind of motivational factors which often lay behind human folly and ambition. But the allegory could also refer to the human chaos that the poet would have confronted in the London of the late eighteenth century. Even admirers of London such as Samuel Johnson acknowledged that life in the great city could be unpleasant: ‘Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire, / And now a rabble rages, now a fire; / Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, / And here the fell attorney prowls for prey; / Here falling houses thunder on your head, / And here a female atheist talks you dead’. [1]  This is clearly a rhetorically exaggerated representation of life in the metropolis, but the multifarious spectacle of Georgian London shocked foreign visitors such as Cesar de Saussure. [2] 

Beyond these general connections, the career of the gander might have had more personal resonances for Bloomfield. As a shoemaker he would have been exposed to the libertine culture which increasingly dominated artisan trades in late eighteenth-century London, partly in response to the threat presented by female and ‘dishonourable’ labour. [3]  In his autobiography Francis Place offers a first-hand account of the ‘debauchery’ of young apprentices during the seventeen-eighties and -nineties. [4]  It was not only apprentices who behaved in this way; the journeymen did too, both before and after marriage. This kind of behaviour placed families under a great deal of pressure: ‘drinking … sapped funds needed for family life, and it [often] engendered violence.’ [5]  Bloomfield would have had little time for behaviour which had such a destructive effect upon the family. The need for loving and responsible conduct within the family was a recurrent theme in his later poetry. In the context of the posturing and theatrical gander, the interesting aspect of this culture of resistance is the fact that it ‘focused on consumption and display, spending rather than saving, excess rather than control.’ [6]  In other words, the honourable apprentices and journeymen, like the gander, felt their position to be insecure, and created the impression, through immoderate and intemperate display, that they still possessed their lost power and dominance.

Bloomfield’s poetry offers a particular point of view in respect of relations within the family. In ‘Summer’ the ‘Harvest-home’ passage provides an insight into his views upon community relations. The feast described in the poem is about shared joy at the successful completion of the most significant task in the agricultural year. It is also about reasserting and cementing relations between the different orders of the rural community. The ‘Harvest-home’ scene represents a kind of equality within inequality: ‘Here once a year Distinction low’rs its crest, / The master, servant, and the merry guest, / Are equal all’ (Summer, lines 323-25). Of course, the power imbalance is still there, but it is veiled by a sense of camaraderie in a common cause. The easy way in which ‘Pride gave place to mirth’ (Summer, line 334) in the conduct of the higher orders, also suggests that relations between all members of the community were marked by an inclusive cordiality. Ironically the ‘unaffected Freedom’ (Summer, line 377) of older rural communities, and Bloomfield does locate his feast specifically in the past, was dependent upon the presence and acceptance by all of certain constraints. It depended upon a network of customary responsibilities and duties which placed a burden of responsibility of some kind upon everyone. The word ‘Custom’ is ordinarily an indicator of the durability of social relations, but these lines reveal the way in which customs are marked by both strength and fragility. If the attitudes which underpin them decline new ‘tyrant customs’, underpinned by different attitudes, such as a trend towards greater ‘refinement’ amongst farmers, can replace the older customs. By ‘tyrant customs’ Bloomfield probably has in mind the world view of those that had risen to prominence through the accumulation of capital, mainly in London, but also in the other expanding cities. [7] 

This is just one more way in which London casts its dark shadow over the rural labouring poor. A quarter of a century later William Cobbett would remark of the same development: farm-houses which were formerly the ‘scene of plain manners and plentiful living’ had become cluttered with ‘decanters, … glasses, the “dinner set” of crockery ware, and all just in the true stock-jobber style.’ [8]  He would also attribute the poverty of the labouring poor to this change, and locate its source in the ‘stock-jobber’s’ London suburbs. In a way the posturing of the gander finds an echo too in the behaviour of the new kind of farmer because their ‘Refinement’ is just another kind of display. Like the gander’s behaviour it is destructive; it ‘Destroys life’s intercourse; the social plan / That rank to rank cements, as man to man’ (Summer, lines 341-42). Here ‘intercourse’ has a double meaning because it refers to communication between individuals and between social groupings within communities. Like the gander’s antics, the social ‘display’ of this new kind of farmer is of questionable value: ‘Wealth flows around him, Fashion lordly reigns; / Yet poverty is his, and mental pains’ (Summer, line 344). In destroying the wider community, the empty posturing also destroys the individuals within it. The labourer is impoverished materially to a greater extent than the farmer, but the farmer’s mental and social impoverishment is greater. The labourer is left with the vestiges of an admittedly declining popular culture, while the farmer is left isolated in his new Parlour’. [9] 

Notes

[1] Samuel Johnson, ‘London’ in The Oxford Authors Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 2. BACK

[2] Richard B. Schwartz, Daily Life in Johnson’s London (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 167, p. 169. See also Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images of the City in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 80-118. BACK

[3] Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 30-34. Bloomfield himself, who had never been apprenticed, became involved in a dispute about the employment of workers who had learned the trade without undertaking an apprenticeship. Both his employer and George Bloomfield were threatened with prosecution by the Committee of the Lawful Crafts, and Bloomfield had to return to Suffolk for a time as a consequence of fears about his personal safety. BACK

[4] The Autobiography of Francis Place, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 75. BACK

[5] Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, p. 30. BACK

[6] Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, p. 31. BACK

[7] Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 85. BACK

[8] William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 226 and p. 227. BACK

[9] Cobbett, Rural Rides, p. 227. BACK

Simon White’s book Robert Bloomfield: Romanticism and the Poetry of Community appeared from Ashgate Publishing in 2007.