Clement King Shorter

“ A year later Crabbe installed a deputy in the surgery and paid his first visit to London. He lodged in Whitechapel, took lessons in midwifery and walked the hospitals. Returning to Aldeburgh after nine months—in 1777—he found his practice gone. Even as a doctor for the poor he was an utter failure, poetry having probably taken too firm a hold upon his mind. At times he suffered hunger, so utterly unable was he to earn a livelihood. After three years of this, in 1780 Crabbe paid his second visit to London, enabled thereto by the loan of five pounds from Dudley Lang, a local magnate. ”

“ Crabbe died at Trowbridge on the 3rd of February 1832, and was buried in Trowbridge church, where an ornate monument was placed over his tomb in August 1833.
Never was any poet at the same time so great and continuous a favourite with the critics, and yet so conspicuously allowed to fall into oblivion by the public. ”

“ The Aldeburgh folk could not reverence as priest a man they had known as a day labourer. Crabbe again appealed to Burke, who persuaded the duke of Rutland to make him his chaplain (1782) , and Crabbe took up his residence in Belvoir Castle, accompanying his new patron to London, when Lord Chancellor Thurlow (who told him he was “as like Parson Adams as twelve to the dozen”) gave him the two livings of Frome St Quentin and Evershot in Dorsetshire, worth together about £200 a year. In May 1783 Crabbe’s poem The Village was published by Dodsley, and in December of this year he married Sarah Elmy. ”