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Bloomfield’s third major publication, Good Tidings; or, News from the Farm (1804), was a poem on the new medical treatment—vaccination—promoted since 1798 by the country doctor Edward Jenner.  If this was unexpected from the poet of The Farmer’s Boy and Rural Tales, its form and content turned out to be familiar.   In iambic pentameter couplets,…

See[1] this layered sandstone in the short mountain grass. Place your right hand on it, palm downwards. See where the summer sun rises and where it stands at noon. Direct your index finger midway between them. Spread your fingers, not widely. You now hold this place in your hand.      (Raymond Williams, People of the…

George Bloomfield to an Unknown Correspondent [probably James Burrell Faux], undated [late summer/autumn 1820?] Free Thoughts on the Humours of the chase and the Park In the year 1769 our Esquire at Honington (Mr Quince) had a party of Gentlemen Boys at his House On a Visit to Master Quince, the Young Norfords from Bury…

George’s 1822 poem is far less radical than Robert’s and Nathaniel’s rural verse. Though himself very poor, George counsels his fellow rural labourers against protesting about their starvation wages. The poem was solicited and published by Suffolk gentlemen – property-owners who wanted to quell the unrest sweeping the county and threatening their livelihoods. It is…

1766:   (3 December).  Robert Bloomfield born in Honington, Suffolk.  His father George was a poor tailor, his mother Elizabeth a village schoolteacher. George Colman, sen., & David Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield: a Tale. 1767:  Bloomfield’s father dies of smallpox.  William Duff, Essay on Original Genius. Richard Farmer, Essay on…

This four-book poem revolutionised the English Georgic by depicting rural life from below, from the perspective of ‘Giles’, a child labourer. It was completed in manuscript in 1798 and published, as emended by the well-meaning but interfering patron and editor Capel Lofft, in 1800 (with the London bookselling firm Vernor and Hood). It was a…

According to Henry Kirke White (writing soon after the publication of Nathaniel Bloomfield’s Essay on War (1803)), ‘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…

In the wake of the enormous popularity of Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy (1800) and Rural Tales (1802), a collection of poems by his brother Nathaniel (1759-1831) was published in 1803. Entitled An Essay on War: In Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad, it was published by Robert’s publisher, Vernor and Hood, assisted by Capel…

This account by Bloomfield of the men and women with whom he lived and worked as a shoemaker in the 1780s and 90s dramatically expands the information we have on his life and contacts during this crucial period in his development as a poet, and extends our understanding of the importance that urban, and above…