JOHN CLARE BY HIMSELF

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We welcome the opportunity to bring together in one volume some of Clare's most important autobiographical records, chiefly the Journal, his 'Sketches' and the' Autobiographical fragments'.

In their Prose of John Clare, the Tibbles reconstructed chapters for Clare's 'Autobiography', and it is certainly true that there are chapter numbers and chapter headings here and there in the manuscripts. Thus there are chapter numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 4 has the heading 'My first feelings and attempts at poetry', and chapter 5 is headed 'My first attempts at poetry', so that the subject-matter of these two chapters is not clearly differentiated. Chapter 10 is headed 'My visit to London (I)' and chapter 11 'My visit to London (II)'. It is not clear to us where these chapters begin or end, so we have grouped the 'autobiographical fragments' in what appears to us to be the most logical order. To print the fragments in the order in which they appear in the manuscripts, as catalogued by David Powell and Margaret Grainger, would have been confusing. We always indicate in square brackets the location of a passage in the manuscripts. If the MS is from the Peterborough Museum collection, it is preceded by a capital letter, according to the numbering in Dr Grainger's catalogue. The number after the comma is the page number: [A32, R12], for example, indicates that the material appears upside down on page 12 of Peterborough MS A32. A MS preceded by the letter N denotes that it is to be found in the Northampton collection. BL and Pfz are the abbreviations used for the occasional passage taken from the British Library and the Pforzheimer collection in New York.

We have been able to include Clare's Journal in this volume, very occasionally improving on Margaret Grainger's readings, although we do not have the space to match her wonderful annotations on natural history. Unlike Dr Grainger, however, we have not regularized Clare's dating. The Journal is an essential part of Clare's general autobiographical record, providing evidence of his correspondence, his reading, his relationship with his publishers, and his family affairs. It reveals how much almanacs and xx