A Time and a Place
George Crabbe, Aldeburgh and Suffolk
by Frances Gibb
Paperback (No longer our product)
(April 2022)
ISBN: 9780718896119
Price: $30.00
In stock
The influence of Aldeburgh and the Suffolk Coast on the poet behind ‘Peter Grimes’.
George Crabbe, 18th-century poet, clergyman and surgeon-apothecary, is best known for ‘Peter Grimes’, the tale of a sadistic fisherman that inspired Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name. The brutal crimes and ‘tortur’d guilt’ of Grimes play out within the bleak, improbably beautiful setting of Aldeburgh. While Crabbe has fallen in and out of fashion, the Suffolk town and its landscape have continued to captivate writers and artists, including Britten, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill and Maggi Hambling – all drawn to the stark coastline, eerie mudflats and open skies. In A Time and a Place, Frances Gibb engages afresh with Crabbe’s writing – tracing, for the first time, the resonance of this place in his life and work. She delves into his creative struggles, religious faith, romantic loves and opium addiction. Above all, she explores the continual lure – for Crabbe and those who have followed – of the ‘little venal borough’, and the land and sea beyond.
Frances Gibb is an award-winning journalist and former Legal Editor of The Times. She contributes to publications including The Times and Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, as well as to national radio. She read English at the University of East Anglia and has an honorary masters degree from the Open University. Her family has been connected with Aldeburgh and Suffolk for more than fifty years.
- By (author) Frances Gibb
"It is fascinating to rediscover Crabbe - then and now. Beautifully researched, A Time and a Place takes us into the intimacy of Crabbe's life as he lived it and re-establishes him into the everyday life of all of us who love, live and work here. A triumph!" Maggi Hambling, artist "An insightful account of the life and psyche of George Crabbe, whose poetry inspired Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes and whose career was defined by a love-hate relationship with Aldeburgh. Anyone interested in the history of the town, or Suffolk generally, will find it fascinating." Blake Morrison, poet, novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University "Frances Gibb has vividly rolled back the centuries in the Suffolk landscape, bringing George Crabbe to life in the same hard streets, mud banks and sea slime that so inspired England's great pioneer poet of the poor." Peter Stothard, author of Alexandria and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement "For at its heart A Time and a Place is an exercise in psychogeography, a study of Crabbe's poems that not only tethers them to the place in which they were written but emphasises the centrality of the location to their achievement." DJ Taylor, The Times, May 2022 "A Time and a Place benefits greatly from Gibb's knowledge of and feeling for Aldeburgh, to which her family first came in the 1960sGibb's book evokes both the literal and psychological landscapes of the poet's life and work, notably those places of 'moral reckoning' to which his characters are broughtGibb recognises that Britten has 'the bigger name, the louder voice', but her book is a useful reminder that it was Crabbe who had first claim on Aldeburgh, and that his poems provide an unsettling and enduring portrait of a time and a place and its people." Peter Parker, The Spectator, June 2022
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