George Crabbe: An English Life, 1754-1832

The English poet George Crabbe, best known as the author of Peter Grimes and The Village, was also a surgeon, clergyman, botanist, and novelist. An ambitious, resourceful, self-made professional man, he devoted his middle years to his children and his increasingly ill wife, after whose death he embarked, at 60, on an astonishing second life. This new biography charts Crabbe’s progress from an impoverished provincial childhood to the excitement and sophistication of late 18th-century London; through his career as a ducal chaplain and country parson whose addictions included theater-going and opium; to his final years when, as a rector, he traveled widely, met major literary figures, and fell in love with some remarkable young women.