“Autumn”: John Clare and the Altered Fenland

The draining of the fens has been described as “England’s greatest ecological disaster.” This article delineates how John Clare’s ‘flitting’ to Northborough in the spring of 1832 fatefully coincided with a new, more efficient—or, in ecological terms, more disastrous— era of wetland drainage projects in the late 1820s and 30s. Focusing on his late (and sadly neglected) prose essay “Autumn” (1841), I explore how Clare recalls and recasts some of the enduring themes of both Romanticism and his own early poetry as he surveys the ecological disaster he had lived to see unfold.