Crabbe is known from a small number of unsentimentally realist works written across 40 years; he owes his contemporary significance mainly to Britten’s reworking of one of his tales. He often visited Reynolds, at whose house he met Johnson, who famously contributed some lines to the poem that first got him noticed. Both Scott and Leadbeater enjoyed long correspondences with him. Wordsworth, who shared a publisher, thought he had no imagination, and puzzled that he didn’t take more pride in his workmanship. Southey, Edgeworth and Wilberforce, as well as Wordsworth, were met in London late in his life.