You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The English poet George Crabbe, best known as the author of Peter Grimes and The Village, was also a surgeon, clergyman, botanist, and novelist. An ambitious, resourceful, self-made professional man, he devoted his middle years to his children and his increasingly ill wife, after whose death he embarked, at 60, on an astonishing second life. This new biography charts Crabbe’s progress from an impoverished provincial childhood to the excitement and sophistication of late 18th-century London; through his career as a ducal chaplain and country parson whose addictions included theater-going and opium; to his final years when, as a rector, he traveled widely, met major literary figures, and fell in love with some remarkable young women.
George Crabbe was born on December 24th, 1754 in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. He was sent to school at a very young age and soon developed an avid and precocious interest in books. Crabbe was sent first to a boarding-school at Bungay, and a few years later to a school at Stowmarket, where he learnt mathematics and Latin. His early reading included William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Abraham Cowley, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. Medicine had now been settled on as his future career and, after three years at Stowmarket, in 1768, he was apprenticed to a local doctor at Wickhambrook, near Bury St Edmunds. In 1772, a lady's magazine offered a prize for the best poem on 'hope'. Crabbe entered and...