The Lowers, as a family that had provided Alfriston with three successive Parish Clerks, fully understood the value of literacy, a skill not possessed by some fifty percent of their fellow Alfristoners. Richard’s mother, Sarah, had been able to sign her own name in the parish register after her marriage to John, although Mary Hartfield, John’s first wife, had not possessed this skill. Being literate, however, did not mean that Sarah Lower did not retain an earthy, rural distrust of writing as a means to making a living, an opinion she early on made quite clear to her son, as Richard later recalled:

Ah, well I recollect the time
    (With something like contrition)
When I first breathed, in infant rhyme,
    My puny composition;
E’en then, as if by instinct taught,
    I, wanting paper, chalked the door;
Ambitious to record a thought:
    (“Poets, you know are always poor!”)

My mother took me by surprise,
    And soon she talked of fighting;
“Heigh, Dick, what now, you rogue!” she cries,
    “I vow I’ll spoil your writing!”
The dish cloth soon to work was set,
    She boxed my ears and made me roar;
Thus she addressed me in a fret:
    “Poets, you know are always poor!”

No wild prognosticator she,
    Nor dealt in dreams and visions;
She only thus admonished me,
    With one of her traditions;
Yet oft it comes before my view,
    While I survey my scanty store;
And proves the declaration true,
    “Poets, you know are always poor!”

Me thinks some connoisseur will cry:
    “WhyDick, you are no poet!”
While I as readily reply:
    “’Tis true, my friend, I know it.”
Yet still the sage prediction’s true,
    As none can contradict, I’m sure;
Who knew me then, who know me now,
    Poet or not, was always poor.