In a sequence of verse letters, Crabbe describes every corner of a small East Anglian seaport: its church and vicar, its sects, inns, almshouses, schools, prisons, lawyers, physicians and poor. Unsentimental portraits of individual townspeople include the fisherman Peter Grimes and his apprentices, whose story Benjamin Britten later turned into an opera.
Crabbe’s clear-eyed realism makes this 1810 poem a vivid social portrait of Georgian provincial England. Download the free EPUB.