Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'. Christopher Stokes W.
The Sea-Shell
A Negro Mother’s Cradle-Song
The Bible [‘Lamp of our feet!’]
A Clerico-Politico Portrait
First Scripture Lessons
On a Drawing of the Cottage at Aldborough, Where Crabbe Lived in Boyhood
An Epistle to a Phonographic Friend; Or a Few Words on Phonography
To the B.B Schooner, on Seeing Her Sail Down the Deben for Liverpool
Sonnet, to a Friend Never Yet Seen, But Corresponded with for Above Twenty Years
A Postscript to ‘To the Dead in Christ’
The Yellow-Hammer; A Song, by a Suffolk Villager
To E.F. [Elizabeth Fry], On Her Reappearance Among Her Friends at the Yearly Meeting, 1845
Sonnet, to Job’s Three Friends
Sonnets, Written at Burstal
Poetical Illustrations from Natural History of the Holy Land
A Prefatory Appeal for Poetry and Poets
Contextual Material
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Titles and First Lines
2.Philip Doddridge as a child being taught the Old and New Testaments by his mother using ceramic tiles around the fireplace. Engraving by G. Presbury after J. Franklin. Wellcome Collection. Reproduced under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0). https://wellcomecollection.org/works/a62hdt7g. This image was used as the accompanying illustration to ‘First Scripture Lessons’ in Fisher’s Juvenile Scrap-Book (1839)
3.The Elk, engraved by T.[homas?] Dixon. Plate from Lucy Barton, Natural History of the Holy Land (1856). Reproduced from editor’s own copy, with the kind assistance of the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. Photographer: Emma Sherriff
4.The Heron, engraved by T.[homas?] Dixon. Plate from Lucy Barton, Natural History of the Holy Land (1856). Reproduced from editor’s own copy, with the kind assistance of the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. Photographer: Emma Sherriff
5.Butterflies. Plate from Lucy Barton, Natural History of the Holy Land (1856). Reproduced from editor’s own copy, with the kind assistance of the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. Photographer: Emma Sherriff
6.The Serpent of the Isle of Celebes, engraved by T.[homas?] Dixon. Plate from Lucy Barton, Natural History of the Holy Land (1856). Reproduced from editor’s own copy, with the kind assistance of the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. Photographer: Emma Sherriff
7.Barbary Ape & Ouran Outang, engraved by T.[homas?] Dixon. Plate from Lucy Barton, Natural History of the Holy Land (1856). Reproduced from editor’s own copy, with the kind assistance of the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. Photographer: Emma Sherriff
Since first reading Charles Lamb’s account of silent prayer in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ and finding my curiosity so piqued as to go in search of Quaker poets of the Romantic era, this project has grown to absorb considerable amounts of (mostly pleasurable!) time and attention. There are inevitably many acknowledgements.
As it has developed, I have always appreciated the support and ideas of my immediate colleagues at both campuses of the University of Exeter: I owe a general debt to the Penryn Humanities department, but would offer particular thanks (in no particular order) to Jim Kelly, Tim Cooper, Jason Hall, Kate Hext, John Plunkett, Andrew Rudd and Joseph Crawford. For invaluable aid in the archival process, I’d like to thank Elly Babbedge; for research support, Annie Sheen; and for broader help with the project, Ivy Wrogg. Jeremy Greenwood and Melanie Bill both aided a research visit to Woodbridge during which I got to walk in Barton’s footsteps and visit many places mentioned in these poems. My anonymous reviewers, across two stages of manuscript preparation, gave helpful and incisive feedback, and of course I am also grateful to all at Anthem Press.
Preparing this volume has involved the help of many archives and institutions, and I’d like to thank the staff at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham; the British Library; Special Collections at the University of Delaware; the Devon and Exeter Institution, the libraries and Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Exeter; the Gainsborough’s House Museum; Special Collections at the University of Leeds; Senate House Library at the University of London; the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester; the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation in Mänttä, Finland; the New York Public Library and the curators of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle; the Library of the Society of Friends in London; and the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College.
All substantial reproduction of text within this volume is of previously published material where the relevant term of copyright has expired. All archival material has been cited with the permission of the holding archive.
Map 1. Map of Barton’s Suffolk.
| Lamb | The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb 1821–42, ed. E.V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1912) |
| LCBB | The Literary Correspondence of Bernard Barton, ed. James E. Barcus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966) |
| SPL | Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton, ed. Lucy Barton (London: Hall, Virtue, 1849) |
In 1831 the poet laureate Robert Southey wrote simply ‘who has not heard of Bernard Barton?’1 It is an ironic question for the modern reader – or even the modern scholar – for whom his poetry has passed into almost total obscurity. Yet certainly for the reader of the 1820s and 1830s, he would have been immediately familiar as the author of several volumes of verse, a key devotional poet, and a prolific contributor to periodicals and literary annuals. Reputedly, an English actor called Barton was announced in a Paris theatre in 1822 and ‘the audience called out to inquire if it was the Quaker poet’.2 Indeed, one could argue that Barton did not even need to be named: a reference to ‘the Quaker Poet’ or ‘broad brims’ in the pages of a journal was enough to elicit