Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), poet

An exploration of a once popular and now neglected poet, edited by Tim Fulford and John Goodridge

Robert Bloomfield was as a boy a Suffolk farm labourer before moving to London and becoming a shoemaker. In a tiny, backstreet East End garret, he learned to compose poetry, silently, in his head, amid his workmates’ chatter. In 1798, he wrote down the verse that he had memorised and set about getting it published. London booksellers took no interest until his brother showed the manuscript to a country gentleman, Capel Lofft, from Robert’s home county. Lofft was a poet and critic with connections in the publishing world. He spruced up the manuscript and got it published, in 1800, as The Farmer’s Boy. Unexpectedly, this four-book Georgic evocation of life and labour on an English farm became a massive hit. In Bloomfield’s lifetime, it went through fourteen official editions, was translated into Latin, and sold an estimated 51000 copies – putting it on a par with Childe Harold and The Lay of the Last Minstrel as one of the bestselling poems of the Romantic era.  This popularity lasted: new editions regularly appeared until 1877; only in the twentieth century did interest decline.   Admired by poets, including Southey and Wordsworth, Bloomfield was also a seminal author for labouring-class writers, including John Clare; his representation of Suffolk, meanwhile, influenced John Constable’s art.

Here,  we present The Farmer’s Boy along with selections from the later volumes Rural Tales, Good Tidings, and Wild Flowers – plus excerpts from Bloomfield’s letters (funny and engaging) and the first-ever publication of his manuscript reminiscence of his shoemaker colleagues (a rare and invaluable primary source about labouring-class lives and opinions in the 1790s). We present responses to Bloomfield by Clare, Southey and fellow labouring-class poet Henry Kirke White as well as a series of essays by recent critics and enthusiasts. In addition we present anti-enclosure and anti-war poetry by Bloomfield’s brother Nathaniel and biographical pieces by his brother George that vividly depict the desperate poverty of nineteenth-century rural labourers.