‘A Man…grown up into an Excellent Poet all at once’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the early life of Stephen Duck, revealing how it was that an agricultural labourer from Wiltshire came to write verse which attracted the attention of Queen Caroline. It draws on contemporary biographies, together with material from letters, manuscript notes, contemporary reviews, and Duck’s own writing, in order to reveal what can be recovered about Duck’s early life and initial progress as a writer. It gives account of Duck’s working life and domestic circumstances; his education; how he was first introduced to literary texts; how he began to write and what his processes in writing were; and how he found his first readers and earliest patrons. The evidence on which this chapter draws is, at times, contested and contradictory; writing about Duck could often reveal as much about attitudes to class as about the poet himself. This chapter shows that from the very beginning of Duck’s career as a writer there were those who sincerely believed that a farm labourer could succeed as a poet, while others, more suspicious of the possibilities of social mobility, anticipated such a man’s inevitable failure.