Did John Clare and Eliza Emmerson have an 'affair' ?

When I was in London the first time   Lord Radstock introduced me to Mrs Emmerson     she has been known as a very pretty woman & [it] is not a miss still     & a woman's pretty face is often very dangerous to her common sense   for the notion she has received in her young days throws affectation about her feelings   which she has not got shot of yet   for she fancys that her friends are admirers of her person as a matter of course & act accordingly     which happens in the eyes of a stranger as delicious enough   but the grotesque wears off on becoming acquainted with better qualities   & better qualities she certainly has to counter ballance them    

          She at once woud [be] the best friend I found    & my expectations are looking no further then correspondence with me early in my public life   & grew pretty thick as it went on     I fancyd it a pretty [thing] to correspond with a lady   & by degrees I grew up into an admirer   sometimes foolishly when I could not account for what I did   & I then after requested her portrait     & then I reccollect ridiculously enough   alluding to Lord Nelsons Lady Hamilton     she sent it & flattered my vanity in return     It was beautifully drawn by Behnes the sculptor     But bye & bye my knowledge of the world weakened my romantic feelings     I gave up in friendship & lost in flattery

          afterwards she took to patronizing one of Colridges   who had written a visionary ode on Beauty in Knights Quarterly Magazine in whom she discovered much genius     she called him   On that strike   one of the first Lyne poets in England --

          she soon wisht for her picture agen & I readily agreed to part with it   for the artificial flower of folly had run to seed

Pet MS B3 p82

Riches, Poverty and Slavery


Clare writing nearly 200 hundred years ago of what we observe all around us:

"Slavery originates with the luxury of tyranny & forced to submit to the crueltys [only] of oppression until the effeminancy of its oppressions grow into dotage     it then rises & regains its liberty like as the lion in his strength overawes the lesser beasts into unjust subjugation     but in the season of age when he looses his teeth [& needs] friends     they oppress him in turn [with injustice] & regain their former freedom     thus Tyrany generally gets paid with its own coin

Tyrants hate liberty the more bitterly because they themselves can enjoy every thing but liberty         they persecute their slaves into obedience but never consciliate them into friends     there for fear makes them the slave of slav[es]   for as they are dreaded by others      yet it is only as one tyrant to many of the oppressed so they more bitterly feel the dreaded vengance of the many enemys which their crueltys have made   recoiling upon themselves"

Pet MS A49 p1

"What a time we live in -- one class have been compaining & from complaints I fear have been encouraging the lower orders to break away from their own intention     this class complain of poverty but show no appearance of it   while the other is so destitute that one almost wonders they should have been silent so long"

Pet MS B5 p5