The huge sales of The Farmer’s Boy led to a brief vogue for labouring-class, juvenile poets and brought to the fore the role of editors who could bring on such poets and prepare them for market. Capel Lofft and Thomas Hill had – to use music business parlance – ‘discovered’ and ‘produced’ Bloomfield.
His success was also theirs: Bloomfield enhanced their reputation as literary men -editors, critics, poets. It gave them credibility with publishers and they were able to act as a modern literary agent acts. In 1800 they brought to Bloomfield’s publisher, Vernor and Hood, Poems Moral and Descriptive by the Irish indigent boy-poet Thomas Dermody. They followed this, in 1802, with The Peasant’s Fate: A Rural Tale by William Holloway. Like The Farmer’s Boy, this was apoem about rural labour that lamented the distance of real-life agricultural work from its pastoral idealisation. In 1803 Clifton Grove appeared, by the eighteen-year-old Henry Kirke White, Lofft and Hill having encouraged this boy poet by publishing his poems and essays in the magazine they ran – The Monthly Mirror (this was also published by Vernor and Hood). The magazine essays show Kirke White’s appreciation of both Robert and Nathaniel Bloomfield – sincere enthusiasm from a fellow member of the ‘lower orders’ who knew how difficult it was to be a poet without a literary education and while working at one’s trade (Kirke White was the son of a butcher and a former child labourer in a stocking knitting workshop):
The present age, however, has furnished us with two illustrious instances of poverty bursting through the cloud of surrounding impediments, into the full blaze of notoriety and eminence. I allude to the two Bloomfields—bards who may challenge a comparison with the most distinguished favourites of the Muse, and who both passed the day-spring of life in labour, indigence, and obscurity. The author of the Farmer’s Boy hath already received the applause he justly deserved. It yet remains for the Essay on War to enjoy all the distinction it so richly merits, as well from its sterling worth, as from the circumstances of its author. Whether the present age will be inclined to do it full justice, may indeed be feared. Had Mr. Nathaniel Bloomfield made his appearance in the horizon of letters prior to his brother, he would undoubtedly have been considered as a meteor of uncommon attraction; the critics would have admired, because it would have been the fashion to admire. But it is to be apprehended that our countrymen become enured to phenomena:—it is to be apprehended, that the frivolity of the age cannot endure a repetition of the uncommon:—that it will no longer be the rage to patronize indigent merit: that the beau monde will therefore neglect, and that, by a necessary consequence, the critics will sneer!!
Nevertheless, sooner or later, merit will meet with its reward; and though the popularity of Mr. Bloomfield may be delayed, he must, at one time or other, receive the meed due to his deserts. Posterity will judge impartially; and if bold and vivid images, and original conceptions, luminously displayed, and judiciously apposed, have any claim to the regard of mankind, the name of Nathaniel Bloomfield will not be without its high and appropriate honours.
Rousseau very truly observes, that with whatever talent a man may be born, the art of writing is not easily obtained. If this be applicable to men enjoying every advantage of scholastic initiation, how much more forcibly must it apply to the offspring of a poor village tailor, untaught, and destitute both of the means and the time necessary for the cultivation of the mind! If the art of writing be of difficult attainment to those who make it the study of their lives, what must it be to him, who, perhaps, for the first forty years of his life, never entertained a thought that any thing he could write would be deemed worthy of the attention of the public!—whose only time for rumination was such as a sedentary and sickly employment would allow; on the tailor’s board, surrounded with men, perhaps, of depraved and rude habits, and impure conversation! And yet, that Mr. N. Bloomfield’s poems display acuteness of remark, and delicacy of sentiment, combined with much strength, and considerable selection of diction, few will deny. The Pæan to Gunpowder would alone prove both his power of language, and the fertility of his imagination; and the following extract presents him to us in the still higher character of a bold and vivid painter. Describing the field after a battle, he says,
Now here and there, about the horrid field,
Striding across the dying and the dead,
Stalks up a man, by strength superior,
Or skill and prowess in the arduous fight,
Preserv’d alive;—fainting he looks around;
Fearing pursuit—not caring to pursue.
The supplicating voice of bitterest moans,
Contortions of excruciating pain,
The shriek of torture, and the groan of death,
Surround him;—and as Night her mantle spreads,
To veil the horrors of the mourning field,
With cautious step shaping his devious way,
He seeks a covert where to hide and rest:
At every leaf that rustles in the breeze
Starting, he grasps his sword; and ev’ry nerve
Is ready strain’d, for combat or for flight.
(P. 12, Essay on War)
If Mr. Bloomfield had written nothing besides the Elegy on the Enclosure of Honington Green, he would have had a right to be considered as a poet of no mean excellence.
(‘Melancholy Hours’, The Monthly Mirror, 16 (1803), 302-3)
While these remarks show that the Bloomfields were enabling role models for the young and poor Kirke White, they also act as effective product placement. Published in Vernor and Hood’s magazine, they recommend two Vernor and Hood poets whilst reminding readers that Kirke White was also a poet from the same stable whose book was newly available. This was an effective marketing strategy, behind which stood Lofft and Hill.
Lofft and Hill also assisted in the marketing strategy used for Kirke White’s book Clifton Grove. Lofft allowed one of his own sonnets to appear in its pages; Hill used his connections to get permission for to be dedicated to the fashionable ‘influencer’ Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Shaped by them, it appeared to the public as another follow-up to The Farmer’s Boy. Kirke White thought Robert Bloomfield’s ‘descriptions are sometimes little inferior to Thomson’. Their influence on him is apparent in poems about rural labour such as ‘Description of a Summer’s Eve’:
Down the sultry arc of day
The burning wheels have urged their way,
And Eve along the western skies
Sheds her intermingling dyes.
Down the deep, the miry lane,
Creaking comes the empty wain,
And Driver on the shaft-horse sits,
Whistling now and then by fits;
And oft, with his accustom’d call,
Urging on the sluggish Ball.
The barn is still, the master’s gone,
And Thresher puts his jacket on,
While Dick, upon the ladder tall,
Nails the dead kite to the wall.
Here comes shepherd Jack at last,
He has penned the sheep-cote fast,
For ’twas but two nights before,
A lamb was eaten on the moor:
His empty wallet Rover carries,
Nor for Jack, when near home, tarries.
With lolling tongue he runs to try,
If the horse-trough be not dry.
The milk is settled in the pans,
And supper messes in the cans;
In the hovel carts are wheeled,
And both the colts are drove a-field;
The horses are all bedded up,
And the ewe is with the tup.
The snare for Mister Fox is set,
The leaven laid, the thatching wet,
And Bess has slink’d away to talk
With Roger in the holly walk.
Now, on the settle all, but Bess,
Are set to eat their supper mess;
And little Tom and roguish Kate
Are swinging on the meadow-gate.
Now they chat of various things,
Of taxes, ministers, and kings,
Or else tell all the village news,
How madam did the ’squire refuse;
How parson on his tithes was bent,
And landlord oft distrain’d for rent.
Thus do they talk, till in the sky
The pale-ey’d moon is mounted high,
And from the alehouse drunken Ned
Had reel’d—then hasten all to bed.
The mistress sees that lazy Kate
The happing coal on kitchen grate
Has laid—while master goes throughout,
Sees shutters fast, the mastiff out,
The candles safe, the hearths all clear,
And nought from thieves or fire to fear;
Then both to bed together creep,
And join the general troop of sleep.
(The Remains of Henry Kirke White, ed. Robert Southey (London, 1807), II, pp. 71-73)
These are generic, representative figures, in the manner of eighteenth-century Georgic, but their labour and lives are rendered for their own sake and not in order to demonstrate the worth of the great landowner on whose estates they work. Evening tasks in the farmyard are rendered in similarly vivid detail in Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy:
Though Night approaching bids for rest prepare,
Still the flail echoes through the frosty air:
Nor stops till deepest shades of darkness come,
Sending at length the weary laborer home.
From him, with bed and nightly food supplied,
Throughout the yard, hous’d round on every side,
Deep-plunging Cows their rustling feast enjoy,
And snatch sweet mouthfuls from the passing boy,
Who moves unseen beneath his trailing load,
Fills the tall racks, and leaves a scatter’d road;
Where oft the swine from ambush warm and dry,
Bolt out, and scamper headlong to his sty;
When Giles with well known voice, already there,
Deigns them a portion of his evening care.
(‘Winter’ lines 47-60; The Farmer’s Boy)
In both poets, the description is more than a mere list: Kirke White creates mini-dramas from the human (and animal) interactions he notices; he also shapes a narrative arc moving from outdoors to indoors, and from busyness and noise to peace and quiet, leaving the reader with emotional closure. Kirke White’s achievements were not fully appreciated until after his death, aged twenty-one, in 1806. In the following year, Robert Southey edited his works for Vernor and Hood, including a moving biography detailing his struggles to educate himself and lift himself out of poverty. Southey also included endorsements of Kirke White’s verse by some of the leading poets of the day. Gradually, and in part as a result of Southey’s paratexts, this edition – The Remains of Henry Kirke White – became very popular and Kirke White one of the six bestselling poets of the entire nineteenth century. His fame outlasted that of Bloomfield; yet his writing and its publication depended on the success of The Farmer’s Boy. He was Bloomfield’s heir; he was also Vernor and Hood’s and Lofft and Hill’s most successful labouring-class poet.
Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), Poems and Prose 
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