Stephen Duck

Duck was born at Charlton, near Pewsey, in Wiltshire. Little is known about his family, whether from Duck himself or from contemporary records, except that they were labourers and very poor. Duck attended a charity school and left at the age of thirteen to begin working in the fields. Around 1724, he married as his first wife Ann, and began to attempt to better himself in order to escape the toil and poverty of agricultural work. Encouraged by the village squire, schoolmaster and rector, he read Milton, Dryden, Prior, and The Spectator, as well as the Holy Bible, according to Joseph Spence.

He was "discovered" by Alured Clarke, a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, who introduced him to high society. Clarke and Spence (the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and friend of Alexander Pope) promoted Duck as a sincerely pious man of sober wit. Clarke and Spence saw poetry that Duck was writing, but none of this verse was published. Between 1724 and 1730, he and his wife Ann had three children. In 1730, Duck combined some of the poetic pieces he had been writing into The Thresher's Labour, a poem that described the difficulty of field work. The poem was celebrated throughout London society, and he soon wrote The Shunammite, which reflected Duck's piety and religious imagination. The poet was taken to meet Queen Caroline, and, while he was there, word came of the death of his wife, but Clarke kept the news from Duck until after the interview with the queen. For her part, she was pleased and gave Duck an annuity and a small house in Richmond Park. Duck continued to write and to be seen as both a paradigm of self-improvement and the natural poet. In 1733, Duck was made a Yeoman of the Guard by the queen, and that year he met and married Sarah Big, Caroline's housekeeper at Kew. In 1735, Caroline made him keeper of Merlin's Cave (a thatched folly containing waxworks) in Richmond Park, where he had previously worked as a gardener. During this period, Duck wrote many poems, with increasing polish and urbanity. His Poems in 1736 had both Pope and Jonathan Swift as subscribers.

• The Thresher's Labour (1730) • Poems on Several Occasions (1736), reprinted.