John Close

John Close, also known as Poet Close, was born on 11 August 1816 at Gunnerside and died at Kirkby Stephen on 15 February 1891. He was an enterprising and prolific writer of working class origin who catered to the English Lake District tourist trade. Of only local significance before 1860, what brought him national notoriety was his being granted and then stripped of a Civil List pension that year.

'Poet Close' was born in the Yorkshire Swaledale as the son of Jarvis Close, a butcher who was well known as a Wesleyan local preacher. Soon after 1830, while still working for his father, Close began issuing fly-sheets of verse which he sold at markets, his first substantial prose work being The Satirist, written when he was sixteen. Both the 1841 and 1851 census record John as still living with his parents in Kirkby Stephen. In 1842 he published The Book of the Chronicles: Winter Evening Tales of Westmorland. This was a miscellany of prose and verse, featuring Kirkby Stephen under the name “Little-Town” and his own poems ascribed to one of his many aliases, Tom Dowell. It was printed in Appleby and the many typographical errors and omissions so annoyed him that in 1846 he established himself as a printer.

The Dictionary of National Biography remarked of Close that “he may be termed a survival of the old packman-poet” or itinerant ballad seller. His published broadsides and ballads on local subjects were not always appreciated, however. In 1856 he was sued for libel, resulting in £300 damages being awarded against him, leaving him in reduced circumstances. It was now his assiduity in including his friends and neighbours in his verse, and more especially the gentry of the district, bore fruit in a petition to remedy his poverty with a Civil List pension on the grounds of his contribution to literature. This was granted in April 1860 and resulted in questions being asked in Parliament about the bestowal of such recognition on a hitherto unknown Lake Poet and the pension was rescinded. Close received instead a royal grant of £100 in compensation and continued for the next thirty years to issue printed statements relating to his wrongs.

The case was widely reported, not only in Great Britain but also in the United States and in colonial papers, where he was attacked particularly on the basis of his recently published The Poetical Works of J. Close. The main accusations were that his poetry was no more than doggerel; that he wrote for venal reasons; and that his claim to be appointed laureate “Under Royal Patronage” by a West African chief made him appear a buffoon (as he was described in Punch) or, as The Caledonian put it, “the privileged idiot of a county”. According to his own account (writing under one of his aliases), Close's poem on “The Sorrows of Royalty” had so impressed King William Dappa Pepple, the temporarily deposed monarch of the West African Kingdom of Bonny, that he made Close his poet laureate and drew up an official paper to confirm it. Close's egalitarian sympathy was later manifested by his account of an amicable meeting with the former slave James Watkins during his lecturing tour of Britain in 1861.

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Wikipedia