I've been back to Bibliomania, and found an article by Alex Preston on John Clare, of whom I don't recall ever hearing.
Here is a paragraph from the article, and my questions are 1.) who was Cap't. Swing, and 2.) what is a "rick burning"?:
Clare's poetry gives voice to a 'tormented customary consciousness': in his poetry we see the disintegration of a moral economy - an economy which was still held together by a delicate social fabric based and secured by custom, rather than by the vagaries of money and profit: though this 'moral' economy could be as brutal and unequal as anything that came after it. What Clare laments is the replacement of this order by 'new instrumental and exploitative stance, not only towards labour... but also towards the natural world'. This is important because it shows that the experience of people and nature are not fragmented, but intertwined. This intertwining of the experience of people and nature is starkly represented in an image like that of the hanging moles in 'Remembrances' (the image probably alludes to the labourers hung during the Captain Swing riots and rick burnings that exploded across Southern England during 1830).
