Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

Question 1

Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

Labouring-class Poets

Answer 1

• RE: literature moving from a genteel hobby for the upper-classes to a paying vocation for all classes
• Sudden introduction of lower-class writers
• Lower-classes suddenly representing themselves in literature instead of being the objects of representation
• Telling their stories, too
• The concept had a ‘faddish’ or ‘modish’ appeal to it: ‘natural’ poet
  Romanticized, but also patronizing

Question 2

Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

Form

Answer 2

• Heroic couplets
• Close relative of topographical or prospect poetry
• The country house poem

Question 3

Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

The Country House Poem

Answer 3

• Praises a particular country house / owner
  An identity between the two
  House’s oneness with the place (landscape, tenants) reflects the owner’s & class’s ‘proper place’ in the social hierarchy (harmonious social order)
• Typically celebrates ‘the English way of life’
  ‘Olde England’, noblesse oblige
• The country house poem in Leapor’s time
  As “Epistle to Burlington” suggests, the form has shifted
  Ideal depicted in Jonson’s is now the obscured ideal that is the implied (but absent) corrective contrast in Pope’s poem
  Leapor is writing back directly to Pope’s poem

Question 4

Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

Summary - Part One

Answer 4

• A commentary on the shifting structures that underpin British society
• The concept of noblesse oblige lies in ruins, but what will replace it is uncertain
• Crumble Hall & the concept of “Olde England” it embodies now looks rude, disordered, & irregular to modern eyes
• Much variety here & very maze-like, but no discernable order or plan

Question 5

Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

Summary - Part Two

Answer 5

• Lord Biron, representative the ruling classes, supposed proponent of civic humanism & noblesse oblige
  Supine, inactive, unread, uneducated
  Caught up in the same fashions as Timon
  Contrasts sharply with the productivity & industry of the labouring-class figures in the poem

Question 6

Mary Leapor - Crumble Hall

Summary - Part Three

Answer 6

• Arguably, Leapor wants to see the ‘grand order’ Pope does, still longs for the values Pope lauds—but simply can’t see them operating in her culture anymore
  “Crumble Hall” denies us the affirmation of order typical of the the forms it draws on (prospect / topographical poetry, country house poetry)