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The character of Grimes was said to be based on the real figure of an Aldeburgh fisherman Tom Brown, but as Neil Powell has recently argued in his biography George Crabbe: an English Life, the character may have been drawn from more than one biographical source. Crabbe’s Peter Grimes also results from an amalgamation of literary traditions and devices, one that drew writers to focus upon the personality and career of the outcast. The poet was not that far removed from the age of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and he was a near contemporary of William Cowper, whose poem The Castaway and touching account of Crazy Kate (from Book I of The Task, 1785) both illustrate an awareness of the effect that loneliness could have upon the mind. He was familiar with the Gothic Romances of Sir Walter Scott (whom he admired and eventually met) whose poem of six cantos Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field (1808) is a study of the way in which a man draws himself apart from noble characters through moral decline. Scott was also the creator of eccentric yet benign characters such as Davie Gellatley (Waverley), Meg Merrilies (Guy Mannering) and Madge Wildfire (The Heart of Midlothian), all differing versions of the madman or woman in the wilderness. In the cases of Davie, Meg and Madge isolation (whether self-imposed or otherwise) and insanity are paired together. Crabbe’s Grimes, however, is a much more sinister figure. It is no coincidence that the poet prefaces his study of ‘Peter Grimes’ with epigrammatic quotations from Scott’s Marmion, and Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth: each one a reference to experiences of madness, murder and isolation. Crabbe investigates the complex workings of the character’s mind to produce ‘a Madman’s Tale, with gleams of waking sense’. |
