In the preface to this book we read-
[S]urely what I can say, ...on subjects of country life, would gain little by the seriousness of a preacher, or by exhibiting fallacious representations of what has long been termed Rural Innocence......With such sentiments, and with a lively sense of the high honour, and a hope of the bright recompense, of applause from the good, when heightened by the self-approving voice of my own conscience, I commit the book to its fate.
Surely someone who can place a comma so delicately, is not just a 'minor' poet.
Surely someone who can place a comma so delicately, is not just a 'minor' poet.
We quote a few lines from a poem titled "The Horkey, a Provincial Ballad." A horkey is a word for a harvest home feast, a big event in the rural calendar, of, given the hints in the text, 17th century England. The 'hake' below, is a hook.
...
Twas sitch a merry day!
The butcher whistled at the door,
And brought a load of meat;
The butcher whistled at the door,
And brought a load of meat;
Boys rubb'dtheir hands, and cried, 'there's more,
Dogs wagg'd their tails to see't.
On went the boilers till the hake *
Had much ado to bear 'em;
Dogs wagg'd their tails to see't.
On went the boilers till the hake *
Had much ado to bear 'em;
The magpie talk'd for talking sake,
Birds sung ;—but who could hear 'em?
Creak went the jack; the cats were scar'd,
Birds sung ;—but who could hear 'em?
Creak went the jack; the cats were scar'd,
We had not time to heed 'em;
The owd hins cackled in the yard,
The owd hins cackled in the yard,
For we forgot to feed 'em!
....
I am quoting at some length form the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since his story is both familiar and yet not so much. Let's start with the London years when young Robert is learning a craft.
About 1783, apparently unsettled by the epileptic fits of a new lodger at Pitcher's Court, Robert and George [his brother] decamped and took up residence at Blue Hart Court, Bell Alley. Another lodger there, James Kay generously lent Robert a number of books, among them Paradise Lost and James Thomson's The Seasons, the latter of which became his favourite reading material. Over the years Bloomfield developed a prodigious memory for poetry and could recite any passage from The Seasons or Thomson's The Castle of Indolence, as well as large swathes of Burns...
It was also about this time that the earliest evidence that Bloomfield was composing poetry surfaces. Poems that he had apparently composed in his mind while engaged in cobbling and later copied down were dispatched to the London Magazine for publication in the 'Poet's corner', but his earliest published poem, 'A Village Girl', appeared in Mary Say's Gazetter for 24 May 1786. Bloomfield also acquired a violin and a taste for music. In an act rich with symbolism for a nature poet living during the Romantic period, he also began hand-crafting aeolian harps, an avocation which eventually afforded him a small income.
..... On 12 December 1790 Bloomfield married Mary-Anne Church, the daughter of a shipbuilder from Woolwich. Their first child, Hannah, was born on 25 October 1791. In the following year the Bloomfields took up residence at 14 Bell Alley, Coleman Street, where the growing family lived and struggled to make ends meet for the next seven years....
In May 1796 Bloomfield began composing a poem that he at first intended only to be a present for his mother, but which eventually grew into The Farmer's Boy, the poem on which his reputation as a minor poet of the period chiefly rests. Like Thomson's The Seasons, The Farmer's Boy (nearly 1500 lines in heroic couplets) is divided into four parts, with each part corresponding to one of the seasons. ... After three publishers in London had rejected the work (even when, after the first rejection, Bloomfield offered to underwrite the publication costs), Bloomfield gave up trying to get the poem published and presented the manuscript to his brother George for his personal enjoyment and that of his friends. In November 1798, however, George showed the manuscript to Capel Lofft, the radical editor and writer and a prominent figure in Suffolk society, who liked it well enough to make grammatical and orthographical amendments to the text and shepherd the poem into print along with his own evaluative preface. ...
The publishers Vernor and Hood agreed to publish The Farmer's Boy, but it did not begin to appear in shops until March 1800. It was immediately popular and even achieved critical success, such as Bloomfield never managed to achieve with subsequent works. It brought him to the attention of Robert Southey, who gave the book a favourable review and who remained Bloomfield's greatest champion among the Romantics. ..
Given his predominant themes of nature and the common man, it is also understandable that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge initially reacted with plaudits (in 1802 Coleridge reckoned Bloomfield among the major contemporary poets), but this laudatory reception lapsed over the years into indifference. Other authors of the period, such as Lord Byron and Charles Lamb, were less than charitable in their assessments of his poetic worth. In any event, the success of The Farmer's Boy thrust the cobbler-poet into a limelight which proved to be simultaneously gratifying and irksome to a man who was by nature modest and retiring. ....
About 1783, apparently unsettled by the epileptic fits of a new lodger at Pitcher's Court, Robert and George [his brother] decamped and took up residence at Blue Hart Court, Bell Alley. Another lodger there, James Kay generously lent Robert a number of books, among them Paradise Lost and James Thomson's The Seasons, the latter of which became his favourite reading material. Over the years Bloomfield developed a prodigious memory for poetry and could recite any passage from The Seasons or Thomson's The Castle of Indolence, as well as large swathes of Burns...
It was also about this time that the earliest evidence that Bloomfield was composing poetry surfaces. Poems that he had apparently composed in his mind while engaged in cobbling and later copied down were dispatched to the London Magazine for publication in the 'Poet's corner', but his earliest published poem, 'A Village Girl', appeared in Mary Say's Gazetter for 24 May 1786. Bloomfield also acquired a violin and a taste for music. In an act rich with symbolism for a nature poet living during the Romantic period, he also began hand-crafting aeolian harps, an avocation which eventually afforded him a small income.
..... On 12 December 1790 Bloomfield married Mary-Anne Church, the daughter of a shipbuilder from Woolwich. Their first child, Hannah, was born on 25 October 1791. In the following year the Bloomfields took up residence at 14 Bell Alley, Coleman Street, where the growing family lived and struggled to make ends meet for the next seven years....
In May 1796 Bloomfield began composing a poem that he at first intended only to be a present for his mother, but which eventually grew into The Farmer's Boy, the poem on which his reputation as a minor poet of the period chiefly rests. Like Thomson's The Seasons, The Farmer's Boy (nearly 1500 lines in heroic couplets) is divided into four parts, with each part corresponding to one of the seasons. ... After three publishers in London had rejected the work (even when, after the first rejection, Bloomfield offered to underwrite the publication costs), Bloomfield gave up trying to get the poem published and presented the manuscript to his brother George for his personal enjoyment and that of his friends. In November 1798, however, George showed the manuscript to Capel Lofft, the radical editor and writer and a prominent figure in Suffolk society, who liked it well enough to make grammatical and orthographical amendments to the text and shepherd the poem into print along with his own evaluative preface. ...
The publishers Vernor and Hood agreed to publish The Farmer's Boy, but it did not begin to appear in shops until March 1800. It was immediately popular and even achieved critical success, such as Bloomfield never managed to achieve with subsequent works. It brought him to the attention of Robert Southey, who gave the book a favourable review and who remained Bloomfield's greatest champion among the Romantics. ..
Given his predominant themes of nature and the common man, it is also understandable that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge initially reacted with plaudits (in 1802 Coleridge reckoned Bloomfield among the major contemporary poets), but this laudatory reception lapsed over the years into indifference. Other authors of the period, such as Lord Byron and Charles Lamb, were less than charitable in their assessments of his poetic worth. In any event, the success of The Farmer's Boy thrust the cobbler-poet into a limelight which proved to be simultaneously gratifying and irksome to a man who was by nature modest and retiring. ....
After a brief respite, however, Bloomfield continued to experience financial difficulties, exacerbated by the demands his celebrity placed on his time. Sitting for portraits, visiting in high society, and otherwise satisfying the public's curiosity about his person and poem detracted from the time he spent cobbling, which was still his main source of income. ....
In addition to his income from his two books, his cobbling, and his manufacture of aeolian harps, Bloomfield also began to receive an annuity of £15 from the duke of Grafton. Characteristically, Bloomfield generously shared his income with his brother George and his mother. Bloomfield's good financial fortunes seemed to wax even further when in late 1802 the duke of Grafton appointed him to the position of undersealer in the king's bench court. But Bloomfield, who always craved more peaceful surroundings, found the hustle and bustle of the court noxious and resolved in the spring of 1803 to resign his post at the seal office.....
Bloomfield's mother died at the end of 1803, and Bloomfield's extraordinary generosity to her heirs and his stepfather, as well as expenditures on his mother's care in her decline and her funeral again landed him in financial difficulties. Bloomfield was also coping at this time with the illness of his son Charles, who had issued into the world about the same time as The Farmer's Boy. Charles had developed a swelling on his knee and suffered from convulsions, a condition that lingered over the following three years and left the boy disabled. His son's illness had a profound impact on Bloomfield and he resolved to do what he could to keep his family healthy. Bloomfield, who had befriended Dr Edward Jenner, had for some time been interested in Jenner's controversial smallpox vaccine. When his brother Nathaniel lost a third child in 1802 to the disease which had also killed their father, Bloomfield decided to have his family inoculated. He even championed Jenner's cause in a poem at once didactic and melodramatic called 'Good Tidings', which was published in 1804, but did not do well.
In 1806 Bloomfield published a new book of poems dedicated to his by then disabled son, entitled Wild Flowers, or, Pastoral and Local Poetry....
Despite the cheer brought by [other publication and] .... in keeping with the pattern his life had taken on, Bloomfield was beset with other sadnesses and difficulties. First, there was the death of his patron the old duke of Grafton, who was succeeded by his son Lord Charles Fitzroy. ..
The new duke of Grafton did not share his father's enthusiasm for cobbler-poets, and Bloomfield had to enlist the services of Capel Lofft to petition the new duke for his £15 annuity, which Fitzroy eventually granted but was thereafter sometimes desultory in supplying.
The second blow came when Mr Hood, the most active member of Bloomfield's publishers, died, and the business passed into the hands of another partner, named, appropriately enough, Sharpe. By 1812 Sharpe had brought the firm near to bankruptcy and decided to bail out. He sold 4500 copies of Bloomfield's books to another bookseller and although he received £509 and a line of credit for himself, he refused to give Bloomfield his due.
The Bloomfield family, now consisting of five children, was forced to borrow money, leave the expensive city, and retire to Shefford in Bedfordshire. Bloomfield returned to London in October 1812 to attend to his business matters, and although he was eventually able to secure an advance from Crosby, the bookseller to whom Sharpe had sold Bloomfield's lot, Bloomfield was by this time disgusted with the publishing business; he wrote a letter saying as much to his family, and signed it 'Your cheated and bamboozled Father'.... Nor was London conducive to the production of poetry, for in another letter he complained, 'I can write only as Rabbits S-t, in little bits, for the cart wheels roar, and the waiters are noisy, and there is a chimney on fire within sight, and a brave crowd' ....
Despite numerous journeys to London, efforts over the next few years to secure revenues from the sales and copyrights of his books were not very successful, and the Bloomfield family suffered for it. In 1814 Bloomfield's daughter Mary Anne died. In the next year, Bloomfield was forced to find Charles an apprenticeship and also placed Charlotte at a milliner's. The publication of a children's book, The History of Little Davy's New Hat, did not bring much relief, and the Bloomfields were forced to move to a less expensive house. By 1816 Bloomfield's health, never robust, was failing, and his financial distress so great that it prompted Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and other supporters to issue a subscription on his behalf. This small income, along with what the duke of Grafton begrudgingly supplied, was augmented when in 1817 Bloomfield found Charles a position as a schoolmaster, and the Bloomfield family were able to pay off some debts. ....
Bloomfield was also contending in the last years of his life with attacks on his reputation. He had heard a report from Thomas Baker that rumours concerning his political and religious beliefs and his associates were in circulation-rumours which might estrange the poet's patrons and conservative audience. In short, he was rumoured to be 'Deistical and Republican' in outlook ...[in response]. Bloomfield further noted that political liberals had also attempted to besmirch his name; apparently William Cobbett had accused Bloomfield of following a governmental directive to avoid writing about commoners in an ennobling light. Bloomfield's last word on the topic came in the 'Preface' to the first edition of May-Day, where he obliquely denied the rumours about him: 'I have been reported to be dead; but I can assure the reader this, like many other reports, is not true' ...
Although Bloomfield found some happiness in the final year of his life through a reawakened interest in John Clare's poetry and by attempting to finish some poetical projects he had begun years before, his deteriorating health and financial situation made composition of new material difficult. Still, his chief anxieties were for his children, and for their sake he continued working until the very last months of his life. Bloomfield died on 19 August 1823 in Bloomfield House, Bedford Street, Shefford. Sadly, his family were left so destitute that they
The second blow came when Mr Hood, the most active member of Bloomfield's publishers, died, and the business passed into the hands of another partner, named, appropriately enough, Sharpe. By 1812 Sharpe had brought the firm near to bankruptcy and decided to bail out. He sold 4500 copies of Bloomfield's books to another bookseller and although he received £509 and a line of credit for himself, he refused to give Bloomfield his due.
The Bloomfield family, now consisting of five children, was forced to borrow money, leave the expensive city, and retire to Shefford in Bedfordshire. Bloomfield returned to London in October 1812 to attend to his business matters, and although he was eventually able to secure an advance from Crosby, the bookseller to whom Sharpe had sold Bloomfield's lot, Bloomfield was by this time disgusted with the publishing business; he wrote a letter saying as much to his family, and signed it 'Your cheated and bamboozled Father'.... Nor was London conducive to the production of poetry, for in another letter he complained, 'I can write only as Rabbits S-t, in little bits, for the cart wheels roar, and the waiters are noisy, and there is a chimney on fire within sight, and a brave crowd' ....
Despite numerous journeys to London, efforts over the next few years to secure revenues from the sales and copyrights of his books were not very successful, and the Bloomfield family suffered for it. In 1814 Bloomfield's daughter Mary Anne died. In the next year, Bloomfield was forced to find Charles an apprenticeship and also placed Charlotte at a milliner's. The publication of a children's book, The History of Little Davy's New Hat, did not bring much relief, and the Bloomfields were forced to move to a less expensive house. By 1816 Bloomfield's health, never robust, was failing, and his financial distress so great that it prompted Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and other supporters to issue a subscription on his behalf. This small income, along with what the duke of Grafton begrudgingly supplied, was augmented when in 1817 Bloomfield found Charles a position as a schoolmaster, and the Bloomfield family were able to pay off some debts. ....
Bloomfield was also contending in the last years of his life with attacks on his reputation. He had heard a report from Thomas Baker that rumours concerning his political and religious beliefs and his associates were in circulation-rumours which might estrange the poet's patrons and conservative audience. In short, he was rumoured to be 'Deistical and Republican' in outlook ...[in response]. Bloomfield further noted that political liberals had also attempted to besmirch his name; apparently William Cobbett had accused Bloomfield of following a governmental directive to avoid writing about commoners in an ennobling light. Bloomfield's last word on the topic came in the 'Preface' to the first edition of May-Day, where he obliquely denied the rumours about him: 'I have been reported to be dead; but I can assure the reader this, like many other reports, is not true' ...
Although Bloomfield found some happiness in the final year of his life through a reawakened interest in John Clare's poetry and by attempting to finish some poetical projects he had begun years before, his deteriorating health and financial situation made composition of new material difficult. Still, his chief anxieties were for his children, and for their sake he continued working until the very last months of his life. Bloomfield died on 19 August 1823 in Bloomfield House, Bedford Street, Shefford. Sadly, his family were left so destitute that they
The last line of the last poem in Wild Flowers, is - "and at the feet of science strew thy flowers."
That last poem,"Good Tidings" is in praise of inoculating against small pox. The poet's own father had died of it when his son was a year old. Thus innocently the 18th and 19th century are joined in the writing of Robert Bloomfield.
That last poem,"Good Tidings" is in praise of inoculating against small pox. The poet's own father had died of it when his son was a year old. Thus innocently the 18th and 19th century are joined in the writing of Robert Bloomfield.
All of Bloomfield's work is available at books.google.com for no cost. You could read the whole text of "Horkey" there. If Robert Bloomfield is indeed a "minor poet," this is because a whole class, a whole way of life, described in his poetry, is vanished.
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