Uncategorized
-
On 5 October 1800 Robert wrote to his brother George as follows: Sunday Night, October 5 Dear George, One of the enclosed papers is a discontinued journal, it may contain some information. The other paper your good sence will teach you to Burn. My portrait was taken some time ago by a miniature painter named…
-
The birds of England’s eastern shires have been well served by poets. Quite apart from Clare, there is Crabbe, whose observation of Suffolk’s shorebirds and waders, while they don’t match in detail his studies of its flora, are memorably acute; there is Lincolnshire’s Tennyson, who, after modernized plumbing had been introduced to his house, apparently…
-
In the spring of 1812 Robert Bloomfield and his family left London and rented a house in the Bedfordshire town of Shefford, opposite the Green Man in Bedford Street.[i] We currently know little of Bloomfield’s final eleven years there. Although initially enthusiastic about the move to Shefford, by the 1820s he appears to have become…
-
Here is a quiz question: what is the connection between the following nursery rhyme or popular song and Robert Bloomfield? Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel. Up and down the City road, In and out the Eagle, That’s the way…
-
Simon J. White When Robert Bloomfield published his long poem The Farmer’s Boy in March 1800 he included, as an appendix, an account of Otaheite from what he thought was Cook’s journal of his voyage to the South Seas. He prefaced the extract with a very short citation from ‘Summer’: ‘Destroys life’s intercourse; the social…
-
Yet poverty is his, and mental pains. (Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy) Darkness o’er hangs thy origins and mine. (Bloomfield, ‘To My Old Oak Table’) …piety, sensibility and the most engaging and artless simplicity breathe throughout the whole, and irresistibly attack the feelings of the reader. (Nathan Drake, Literary Hours, 1800)[1] ‘Not inspiration, but a mind…
-
‘The very principal light, a capital feature of my journey was the river Wye, which I descended in a boat for near forty miles, from Ross to Chepstow. Its banks are a succession of nameless beauties.’ Thomas Gray (1770). 1. From Dursley to Chepstow. ‘Upon the Sparkling Stream’ On Monday 17th August 1807, Robert Bloomfield…
-
The gander was and still is renowned for its truculence and aggression. Bloomfield’s account of his confrontations with other farmyard animals is mock-heroic: At the colt’s footlock [he] takes his daring hold:There, serpent like, escapes a dreadful blow;And straight attacks a poor defenceless cow;Each booby Goose th’unworthy strife enjoys,And hails his prowess with redoubled noise.Then…
-
Although John Clare’s admiration for Robert Bloomfield is well known, his most detailed comments on Bloomfield’s passing date from a year after the event.[1] In letters to Thomas Inskip – on whom see Philip Hoskins’s article in Newsletter No. 8 (Autumn, 2004) – and Allan Cunningham Clare expressed his high regard for Bloomfield’s writing describing…
-
I want to begin by quoting John Goodridge in his essay “‘Now Wenches, Listen, and Let Lovers Lie”: Women’s Storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare’. ‘Clare and Bloomfield,’ he says, ‘focus on women’s skills as story-tellers able to command an audience, construct and dramatise a story, control pace and timing, character and speech, humour and pathos.’[1]…