Talk:Stephen Duck

Joseph Spence
The "Joseph Spence" link is incorrect. However, until we can get some research on the proper fellow, there is no good way to distinguish a proper link. Soon, I hope, we will have an article on the very important Augustan professor of poetry (famous to even casual scholars as "Spence's anecdotes"). Geogre 12:32, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Looking at Special:Whatlinkshere/Joseph_Spence, and Spence we need a disambiguation page there anyway. Luckily we have Joe Spence, as three is a minimum for dabbing really. Do you think you can correct the literary links to 'Joseph Spence' to point to the article when it is created? Carcharoth 15:27, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * OK. Joseph Spence is fixed. I've suggested Joseph Spence (literary scholar) Joseph Spence (author), but if you want something different say so. I think your Spence is mentioned on the following pages:
 * Durham
 * John Arbuthnot
 * 1726 in literature
 * 1747 in literature
 * 1699 in literature
 * Oxford Professor of Poetry
 * WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/English Lit Bio Dict
 * Stephen Duck
 * Hope that helps. Carcharoth 16:02, 25 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Links 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all pointing at the professor. I didn't create even a stub on Spence already for two reasons.  First, I don't do stubs.  Second, I can't think of what to call him.  He is famous to us solely as an anecdotalist, if that's even a word.  Spence's Anecdotes, Mainly Literary, of Men and Letters is important, very important, as a treasure trove of primary material on everyone, and I mean everyone, of import from 1710-1750.  Furthermore, he was a professor of poetry, which made him one of the very first professors to believe that "modern" (i.e. after the Fall of Rome) poets were worth monuments, so he dug up information about dead poets.  However, if Spence's Anecdotes were never published, he'd still be a name we'd need to know for his work on establishing the idea of a canon of English literature.  So...professor? memoirist? author?  Author is bland and boring, but at least it's a common guess, and neither of the other two would be "author."  Let's go with that, at least as a stop gap.  Geogre 21:39, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * According to this, he was in Durham as well. I've fixed all those links to point at Joseph Spence (author), so there are 7 juicy redlinks begging to be turned blue. Carcharoth 22:08, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Duck!
Why don't we know when he was born? His parents were illiterate and poor to a point that contemporary Englishmen might not even be able to imagine. Read The Thresher's Labour, and you'll get a feel. So, Duck himself didn't know when he was born, but he knew how old he was, but he didn't write it down. Parish records usually tell us, but the extremely poor simply didn't get registered all the time. I don't believe there has been a biography in the 20th century, so I doubt anyone has gone picking through the school archives to try to find out exactly, either. So, he was about 51 when he killed himself. He was born in 1705, probably. Geogre 21:42, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * How sad. The suicide I mean. Anyway, I added some links with this edit. Note that I've linked Genius (literature) twice - I need you to check that this is the right article to link to in both cases. I tried to find an article on the Queen's library, but only found the later Royal Library, Windsor. This Merlin's Cave in Richmond sounds fascinating! I threw in social class (what did that even mean back then - something very different to what it means now, probably), Oxford Professor of Poetry, Richmond and Yeoman of the Guard for free. Was the latter a ceremonial award, or was Spence dressed up in silly clothes and told to guard the tower? :-) Carcharoth 21:59, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The easy question is what class meant. It meant in 1730 about what it meant in 1900, which we know from our filmed entertainments. It meant that a "low born" person who could write poetry was something of a lussus naturae. The link to Genius is probably right. We have the problem of Genius-person and Genius-faculty, and I think the article is about the latter but mentions the development of the former. Generally we think of the cult of the "natural" as coming later, as it generally did, but the early fawning over Duck seems to have been half exploitative and half sincere admiration. However, they sought to quickly educate him and get him writing polished verse, which he did. Compare that to Robert Burns, where the critical thing was to keep writing in dialect (despite masterful technique). Another thing was reading Leslie Stephens's Victorian biography of Duck. He mourns, vocally, the polish Duck achieved. He thinks it's only Thresher's Labour and Shunammite that are great, and yet, in Duck's own day, the cult of the natural wasn't yet there, so they thought those poems were his worst (and so did he). Stephen Duck to Robert Burns (with maybe Jane Collier in the interim...I think it's Jane...The Milkmaid Poet) is a miniature lesson in reception aesthetics and literary history and the development of Romanticism's cultus of the genius. ¶The hard question to answer is the Yeoman of the Guard. I think it's one of those, "If the Queen drops by and demands a viewing, you have to dress up and stand there (and she's not going to do that)." Geogre 22:06, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Oops. I had the Yeoman of the Guard thing mixed up with Yeomen Warders. I guess the really hard question was Merlin's Cave, as you missed that entirely... :-) Carcharoth 22:18, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I know of it, in the form of multiple mentions, but it's mentioned in the context of the people I don't like -- the silly people near Horace Walpole and all that folly architecture. I think, though, of all the red links, that is the one I would most quickly throw on the altar of Wikipedia and somebody else's problem.  I think my contempt for it would show.  (I think there were several Merlin's Caves, including one that was associated with...uh...one of the Hell Fire Club dudes.)  Anyway, I will definitely research Dr. Spence and blue him.  Geogre 22:24, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Oops. too late... Carcharoth 22:51, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Merlin's Cave now given a reference.--217.155.32.221 (talk) 07:00, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Pre-emtive clarification
The 1898 DNB entry, which has been largely reprinted in 2004, states that Duck began to work in the fields, leaving school, "in his fourteenth year." Headnotes found in various anthologies will often make the fundamental mistake of saying that he began working when he was 14. As soon as one has one's thirteenth birthday, one is "in one's fourteenth year." At the 14th birthday, he would have been in his fifteenth year. Thus, he left school at 13, not 14. I doubt anyone will ask about this soon, but, eventually, it will come up and someone will wonder. It's possible that Leslie Stephens got it wrong, but not that I got what he wrote wrong. Geogre 02:58, 29 July 2007 (UTC)