fault of shallow research or worse. We have been informed, for
instance, that drink was a main factor in Clare's mental collapse;
that Clare "pottered in the fields feebly"; that on his income of
"L45 a year ... Clare thought he could live without working"; and all
biographers have tallied in the melodramatic legend; "Neither wife
nor children ever came to see him, except the youngest son, who came
once," during his Asylum days. To these attractive exaggerations there
are the best of grounds for giving the lie.

John Clare was born on the 13th of July, 1793, in a small cottage
degraded in popular tradition to a mud hut of the parish of Helpston,
between Peterborough and Stamford. This cottage is standing to-day,
almost as it was when Clare lived there; so that those who care to do
so may examine Martin's description of "a narrow wretched hut, more
like a prison than a human dwelling," in face of the facts. Clare's
father, a labourer named Parker Clare, was a man with his wits about
him, whether educated or not; and Ann his wife is recorded to have
been a woman of much natural ability and precise habits, who thought
the world of her son John. Of the other children, little is known but
that there were two who died young and one girl who was alive in 1824.
Clare himself wrote a sonnet in the _London Magazine_ for June, 1821,
"To a Twin Sister, Who Died in Infancy."

Parker Clare, a man with some reputation as a wrestler and chosen for
thrashing corn on account of his strength, sometimes shared the fate
of almost all farm labourers of his day and was compelled to accept
parish relief: at no time can he have been many shillings to the good:
but it was his determination to have John educated to the best of his
power. John Clare therefore attended a dame-school until he was seven;
thence, he is believed to have gone to a day-school, where he