After encountering serious financial difficulty and being unable to have his work published, he wrote to the statesman and author Edmund Burke for assistance.

Burke introduced Crabbe to the literary and artistic society of London, including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson, who read The Village before its publication and made some minor changes.

The elder George Crabbe had been a teacher at a village school in Orford, Suffolk, and later in Norton, near Loddon, Norfolk; he later became a tax collector for salt duties, a position that his own father had held.

He continued to practise as a surgeon after returning to Aldeburgh, but as his surgical skills remained deficient, he attracted only the poorest patients, and his fees were small and undependable.

He later told Walter Scott and John Gibson Lockhart that "during many months when he was toiling in early life in London he hardly ever tasted butchermeat except on a Sunday, when he dined usually with a tradesman's family, and thought their leg of mutton, baked in the pan, the perfection of luxury."

[18][19] A short time after their first meeting Burke told his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds that Crabbe had "the mind and feelings of a gentleman."

The time he spent with Burke and his family helped by enlarging his knowledge and ideas, and introducing him to many new and valuable friends including Charles James Fox and Samuel Johnson.

With Burke's help, Crabbe was able to leave Aldeburgh the next year, to become chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire.

[21] This was an unusual move on Burke's part, as this kind of preferment would usually have been given to a family member or personal friend of the Duke or through political interest.

In 1792, through the death of one of Sarah's relations and soon after of her older sister, the Crabbe family came into possession of an estate in Parham in Suffolk, which removed all of their financial worries.

Included in this volume were The Library, The Newspaper, and The Village; the principal new poem was The Parish Register, to which were added Sir Eustace Grey and The Hall of Justice.

An interval of 22 years had passed since Crabbe's last appearance as an author, and he explained in the preface to this volume the reasons for this lapse as being his higher calling as a clergyman and his slow progress in poetical ability.

Scott told Crabbe "how for more than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of a personal introduction to him, and how, as a lad of eighteen, he had met with selections from The Village and The Library in The Annual Register."

The Borough was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, continued at Muston after his return in 1805, and finally completed during a long visit to Aldeburgh in the autumn of 1809.

Nearby at Bremhill was the poet William Lisle Bowles, who introduced Crabbe to the noble family at Bowood House,[55] home of the Marquess of Lansdowne, who was always ready to welcome those distinguished in literature and the arts.

In 1817, on the recommendation of Rogers, Crabbe stayed in London from the middle of June to the end of July in order to enjoy the literary society of the capital.

Around 1820 Crabbe began suffering from frequent severe attacks of neuralgia, and this illness, together with his age, made him less and less able to travel to London.

The royal gift was forgotten—the ample skirt of the coat within which it had been packed, and which he had hitherto held cautiously in front of his person, slipped back to its more usual position—he sat down beside Crabbe, and the glass was crushed to atoms.

[66] John Wilson wrote that "Crabbe is confessedly the most original and vivid painter of the vast varieties of common life that England has ever produced;" and that "In all the poetry of this extraordinary man, we see a constant display of the passions as they are excited and exacerbated by the customs, laws, and institutions of society.

[68] Although Augustan literature played an important role in Crabbe's life and poetical career, his body of work is unique and difficult to classify.

Crabbe also broke with Augustan tradition by not dealing with exalted and aristocratic characters, but rather choosing people from middle and working-class society.

This latter opinion was also held by William Hazlitt, who complained that Crabbe's characters "remind one of anatomical preservations; or may be said to bear the same relation to actual life that a stuffed cat in a glass-case does to the real one purring on the hearth."

Byron, besides what he said in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, declared, in 1816, that he considered Crabbe and Coleridge "the first of these times in point of power and genius."

Byron had felt that English poetry had been steadily on the decline since the depreciation of Pope, and pointed to Crabbe as the last remaining hope of a degenerate age.

[72][73][74] Other admirers included Jane Austen, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Sir Walter Scott, who used numerous quotes from Crabbe's poems in his novels.

"[78] His early poems, which were non-narrative essays in poetical form, gained him the approval of literary men like Samuel Johnson, followed by a period of 20 years in which he wrote much, destroying most of it, and published nothing.

Whitehead states that this narrative poetry, which occupies the bulk of Crabbe's output, should be at the centre of modern critical attention.

The critic F. L. Lucas summed up Crabbe's qualities: "naïve, yet shrewd; straightforward, yet sardonic; blunt, yet tender; quiet, yet passionate; realistic, yet romantic."

[83] He published an essay on the Natural History of the Vale of Belvoir in John Nichols's, Bibliotheca Topographia Britannica, VIII, Antiquities in Leicestershire, 1790.

[86] Charles Lamb's verse play The Wife's Trial; or, The Intruding Widow, written in 1827 and published the following year in Blackwood's Magazine, was based on Crabbe's tale "The Confidant".