Class prejudice and British poetry : The Quickening Maze

There are lots of elements in Adam Fouldes's brief novel "The Quickening Maze," and he handles the many plot strands efficiently and succinctly. Among the topics are the treatment of the insance in the early 19th century, a tale of unrequited love (somewhat plain daughter of the doctor who runs the asylum falls in love with the much older visitor, Alfred Tennyson, but it's obvious that he is uninterested in her - made all the more poignant by his attraction to her best friend, Annabelle), various delusional characters (including a man obsessed with the national debt, and others - this part the least interesting to me as it always seems to me an easy mark to write about the mad - they can do or say anything and it falls within the bounds of the credible - a much more difficult task is to write about the mad in such a way that they seem at times to be sane). Most intriguing aspect to me, though, is Fouldes's treatment of the British poet John Clare, held in the asylum because of his various delusions, his care paid for by his publisher. Clare was a briefly famous poet who was considered a prodigal genius, not well educated, wrote about country people and their superstitions, some great nature poems. In Maze Fouldes explores the ill-treatment of Clare: had he been a Oxbridge grad, had he settled in London and written a more classical verse, would he have been institutionalized, or just considered an eccentric artist? This viral class prejudice sharpened in the novel by the contrast with Tennyson, who is revered and doted upon, as he struggles through writer's block - and today his work though of course still well known is rarely read except for a few chestnuts (Crossing the Bar, Ulysses).