Biographical dictionary

The famous poet. He was born at Aldborough, Suffolk the eldest of six children. His father was a collector of salt duties. George received some education at Bungay and later at Stowmarket, but was largely self taught. He was employed in a warehouse at Slaughden, before, in 1768, being bound as an apprentice to the village doctor at Wickham Brook, near Bury St. Edmunds, where he also acted as errand boy and farm labourer. In 1771 he transferred to Mr Page, a surgeon at Woodbridge, and it was there that he met Sarah Elmy, the inspiration for his earlypoetry and whom he eventually married in 1783. At the end of 1775 he returned to Aldborough and started practising as a surgeon. His business failed, however, and in April 1780 he moved to London having decided to take up literature professionally. In the following year, under the patronage of Edmund Burke, he determined to take holy orders, and in 1782 he became Chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir, Leicestershire. Subsequently he took up a number of livings in Dorset, Leicestershire and Suffolk before finally moving to Trowbridge in 1814, the year after his wife's death. It is there that he died and is buried.

Between carrying out his professional duties and his writing - the most famous of his works are probably The Candidate, The Village, The Borough, Tales in Verse, and Tales of the Hall - Crabbe is recorded to have lead a very retiring life. In fact, much of his time seems to have been taken up with the study of natural history which he pursued very actively at least as early as 1775 when he moved to Woodbridge. His natural history interests extended to botany in particular, but also included the Coleoptera of which he was an active collector. Marsham (1802) refers to several specimens as being 'Ex mus D.[om] Crabbe', and Stephens, (1828) mentions that Crabbe took the first specimen of Calosoma sycophanta L. to be recorded from Suffolk. This last is probably the same insect to which W. Kirby refers.

But Crabbe's collecting was more systematic than these occasional references might suggest. A little known essay he published on the Natural History of the Vale of Belvoir in John Nichols, Bibliotheca Topopgraphia Britannica, VIII, Antiquities in Leicestershire, 1790, includes what must surely be one of the earliest local lists of Coleoptera (1259-1262). This list, which makes specific and general references to more than seventy species (I am grateful to Derek Lott for pointing out that this total may be incorrect. Other copies of the list in John Nicols Additional Collections towards the History and Antiquities of the town and County of Leicestershire (1790) mention only 421 species (1256-1291)), was reviewed by Donisthorpe in Leics.lit.phil.Soc., 4, 1896, 198-200, as noticed  in ERJV., 44, 1932, 61. In it Crabbe shows not only that he had a broad knowledge of the country in general, but also that he knew the contemporary literature, taking species names from the works of Linnaeus and Fabricius.

The whereabouts of his collection is unknown. An examination of his published writings might well reveal more about his entomological interests. A quick glance at The Borough, 1810, for example, written while Crabbe was in Leicestershire, produced references to a weaver friend who was a collector of butterflies. Crabbe had seven children of which five died young. His two surviving sons both interested themselves in natural history and may have collected beetles. Apart from the works already mentioned the best account of Crabbe is the Life written by his son George, of which there are many editions, the last being published in 1932. There is also a page (2) devoted to him in Lott (2009) (I am grateful Tony Drane for giving me an offprint of his Natural History of the Vale of Belvoir. (MD 4/02, 1/07, 11/09, 1/22)