Victorian Bloomsbury by Rosemary Ashton

Author:Rosemary Ashton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300154474
Publisher: Yale University Press

While most of Clough's poetry reflects the events and emotions of his own life, this scene does not really represent his London sojourn. He endured no ‘London lodging’, ‘dingy chop-house’, or friendlessness. Though he did not get on with his masters at University Hall, he enjoyed eight rooms on two floors of the building, where he was able to have friends to stay.45 After his resignation at Christmas 1851, he was offered continued accommodation in Hall until the end of the session; he chose to move out in February 1852 to lodgings in nearby Caroline Street, just off Bedford Square, until leaving Britain in October. These lodgings may have been modest, but here, too, he was not abandoned by his London friends.

One of the first to blame the London experience for Clough's unhappiness was an Oxford contemporary, James Anthony Froude, who resigned his own fellowship a few months after Clough resigned his, also because of religious scruples. Froude later described Clough's shift to London in melodramatic terms. In his widely read biography of Thomas Carlyle, published in the early 1880s, Froude brought to its highest pitch the sanctification of Clough which was being carried on by well-meaning friends, saddened by Clough's early death in 1861 at the age of forty-two and frustrated by what seemed to them his unfulfilled poetic ambitions, not to mention his lack of success in finding a career in either England or America. When Carlyle met Clough in the spring of 1849, Froude wrote, the older man formed the highest opinion of his new acquaintance:

His pure beautiful character, his genial humour, his perfect truthfulness, alike of heart and intellect – an integrity which had led him to sacrifice a distinguished position and brilliant prospects, and had brought him to London to gather a living as he could from under the hoofs of the horses in the streets – these together had recommended Clough to Carlyle as a diamond sifted out of the general rubbish-heap.46

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