He went to University College, Oxford in January 1794 to study, but never completed a degree.
[1] Buckland helped to bring the poem to the attention of a publisher, greatly expanding the print run of the later editions.
[5] In 1820, A Geological Primer in Verse With A Poetical Geognosy, Or, Feasting and Fighting and Sundry Right Pleasant Poems, with Notes to which is Added a Critical Dissertation on King Coal's Levee was published, anonymously, as a critique of Scafe's poem.
The primer was later ascribed to the geologist Robert Bakewell,[4] but is sometimes misattributed to Scafe himself.
[6] Literary scholar Kent Linthicum has argued that the brief popularity of Scafe's King Coal helped to elevate the status of coal as an economic resource, and facilitate Britain’s transformation to fossil-fuel dependence in the early 19th century.