Richard wrote this poem when he was 33. It is not in the language of his childhood. Words like “prognosticator” and “connoisseur” were rarely if ever heard in the Lower household or bandied about by his playmates. Their parents and his own, wishing to praise someone’s learning would have been more likely to have said: “Ya be deep larnt.” Disparagingly of a man, they might comment: “He’s a blear-eyed, dra-latched, spla-footed fellow!” or “You’re a slammicking toad!” Listening to a farmer bawling out to an unsatisfactory labourer, Richard as a boy might have heard – as he certainly wrote later – “Ya idle rip, I’ve had anuf of yow! Pack up yer kit and bodge away airly tomorrow mornin.”

This speech, the language of Richard’s childhood, was the old Sussex dialect that traced its origins back to the South Saxons when they first rowed their boats up the Cuckmere. The mystery is – since he never attended any other school than his native village – how did he acquire that other dialect in which he became skilled and fluent, the language of the educated upper classes that we now call Standard English?

He met it first, probably, in books at home, but not as a spoken language until his turn came to attend Mr. Thomas Susan’s school in the village. In Thomas Susan he found an excellent teacher. “I had a very good education,” he later told his own children. But other Alfriston boys passed through Susan’s school, Richard’s brothers among them, without developing the vocabulary, grasp of grammar and desire to write exhibited by Richard. He was that schoolteacher’s joy: that truly willing, receptive pupil. Susan fanned to a flame the spark of learning that Richard brought with him to school. He must have introduced his pupil to literature and Richard must have read voluminously, for in no other way could he have acquired the vocabulary he later possessed. When Thomas Susan died, somewhere around 1820, Richard wrote

When boyhood bloomed and sparkled in my eyes,
    Ah, well does recollection tell me still –
Thy frown was death – thy smile my greatest prize,
    I loved thee then and strove to do thy will.

No more thy counsels shall beguile my cares,
    They friendly admonitions guard my way;
No more thy voice salute my listening ears,
    Till that tremendous last great rising day!