ROBERT BLOOMFIELD BY A. H. R. FAIRCHILD Rummaging about, a few years ago, in a side-street, Oxford bookshop, I came upon a stall marked, "3d each." The books were battered and scarred; they had served their human ends; and now, derelicts of an earlier day, they were cheapened into such insignificance that only the curious granted them a moment's inspection. As I gave the rows a cursory glance, about to pass on, my eye fell upon what had once been a handsome binding. Suspecting some unusual bit of human interest, I drew the volume out. It was polished full-calf, artistically tooled. Turning the volume over for a moment, I speculated on the hand that once had treasured the little work. Then I read the title-page: The Farmer's Boy; A Rural Poem. By Robert Bloomfield. The Fifth Edition, London, MDCCCI. Robert Bloomfield! Who was he? His name I had seen, but never a line of his had I read. A glance at the contents of the little volume showed that he aspired to be a nature poet, and that he followed Thomson's division of the seasons. A score of questions crowded my mind. Where did he live? Under what circumstances did he write his poems? Who of the greater men of the day, especially poets, knew anything of Bloomfield and his work? The fifth edition! Probably there were more. Was Bloomfield one of those poets of the people, read, appreciated, even beloved in his day, while others, later grouped among the great, gained but a grudging contemporary acknowledgment of presumptive genius? Was this a poet who gripped the heart of the common people, while others of greater merit went unread? If so, why had Bloomfield fallen into such fateful neglect? I bought the volume, gratified to learn later in a well-regulated bookshop up town that my neglected poet, in the same edition and binding, was esteemed at four shillings. Since then I have picked up, here and there, copies of practically all Bloomfield's work, with a book or two about him and his country, produced in his own day; 1 1 1One of these is E. W. Brayley's Views in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Northamptonshire Illustrative of the Works of Robert Bloomfield, Accompanied and, in odd hours, I have attempted to build up something of the background of the author's life. Without question a minor poet, not of the second but of the third or fourth rank, Bloomfield has yet fallen into a neglect in some degree unmerited. His Farmer's Boy once brought cheer and happiness to thousands of hearts; and his songs and lyrics, though far from the best, have occasional notes of genuine sweetness. Yet Bloomfield not only goes unread today; he is quite unknown to most students of literature. In his day he was known to Coleridge, Lamb, Nathan Drake, Byron, Hazlitt, John Wilson of Blackwood's, and other prominent men of letters; and though Byron 2 did not look upon his work with favor, Coleridge, Lamb (eventually), and others did, some even extending him extravagant praise. Chambers, in his Cyclopaedia (1842), represents the beginning of the more recent notice of Bloomfield. Stopford Brooke, Thomas Arnold, Mr. Saintsbury, and Mr. Gosse follow, each with more or less notice and criticism; and Mr. Bullen has a brief article in the Dictionary of National Biography. With the exception of Mr. Bullen, these later critics appear merely to have read the excerpts and the discussion given by Chambers; they have repeated most of Chambers' errors; and they have added others of their own.4 Mr. Bullen, whose obligations involved both thoroughness and accuracy, seems to have given Bloomfield's work, especially the later part of it, merely a cursory examination; his article, succinct though it is, with Descriptions, etc., London, 1818. Plates, and handsomely printed. Similar volumes had been issued for Cowper and Burns. 2 * English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, p. 120, Ox. edit. Byron rounds up with Him too the mania, not the muse, has seized; Bullen, (op. cit.) says Byron "referred to Bloomfield in complimentary terms." I have been unable to find any such passage. 'A Primer of English Literature; A Manual of English Literature; A History of Nineteenth Century Literature; and Modern English Literature, respectively. Chambers implies that the date for The Farmer's Boy is 1798, when he says that Bloomfield was thirty-two on its publication. The correct date is 1800. Brooke and Gosse, apparently following Chambers, also give the wrong date, 1798. Saintsbury gives 1760, instead of 1766, as the date of the poet's birth. Arnold says Bloomfield's father, who was a tailor, was a shoemaker. contains several errors and lacks in discriminating appreciation. However insignificant Bloomfield may be, he has the common right to be read, if he is to be judged, especially if he is to be judged unfavorably. And with the exception of Chambers, all critics are distinctly adverse in attitude. Among recent critics Bloomfield has not only fallen into neglect; he has fallen into disfayor. Possibly a reconsideration of his life and his poetry may win him a little more recognition and a more just estimate of his work. I Robert Bloomfield, youngest in a family of six children, was born in the village of Honington, Suffolk, on December 3, 1766.5 His father, George Bloomfield, who was a tailor, died of smallpox when Robert was less than a year old. His mother, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Manby, was the village schoolmistress. Lacking a school building, Mrs. Bloomfield taught Robert and her older children, along with others belonging to neighbors, at her home, so that Robert's formal instruction was confined to what he there received, except for two or three months' instruction in writing at the school of a Mr. Rodwell of Ixworth Thorp. Other ascertainable facts of Robert's childhood are without special significance or importance." The humble occupation of Robert's mother and the number of her children, increased by the issue of a second marriage in 1773,8 made acute the problem of providing for all. Accordingly, in 1777, at the early age of eleven years, Robert was sent to an uncle, William Austin, a tenant of the Duke of Grafton and farmer of Sapiston, which adjoined Honington. Here Robert slept in the garret, and labored as farm boy. He was not unhappy, however. Though classed with the servant boys, he yet received, in common with them, the same treatment as Mr. Austin's sons; and he later entertained the kindliest memories of his life at Sapiston and of his uncle: The account here given is based primarily upon material contained in Bloomfield's works. The burial at midnight, the family distress, and the horror inspired by the fell disease are all described in Good Tidings. 'Chief of these was his mother's reading of Goody-two-Shoes, the precepts of which made a life-long impression. v. Remains, II, pp. 120-21. Fourteen children blessed this marriage,-a total of twenty! By deeds of hospitality endear'd Served from affection, for his worth rever'd. (Farmer's Boy, p. 6).o It was, indeed, in these years at Sapiston that Robert acquired a body of experience which was later to be the foundation of his poetical work. As compared with those about him, he had keen sensibilities; and if his perceptive powers never carried him very deep into the heart of nature, he at least acquired an intimate knowledge of rural occupations and manners that subsequently was recognized by others in his station as true to life: " The fields his study, nature was his book. (Ib., p. 5). As Robert was frail in physique and small of stature, Mr. Austin soon realized that he was ill-equipped for earning his living by hard labor, and he had the good sense to inform the boy's mother. Mrs. Bloomfield thereupon wrote to her sons, George and Nathaniel, who were living in London, soliciting their aid. An arrangement was made, accordingly, whereby Robert should live with George, who was a shoemaker, and learn his trade, and that Nathaniel, who was a tailor, should furnish his clothes. On the receipt of this offer, Mrs. Bloomfield prepared to take Robert to London, and the first significant turning point in the poet's career had been reached. On Friday, June 29, 1781, at the age of fifteen, Robert was brought to London. Here he lived with his brother George, at Mr. Simm's, 7 Pitcher's Court,10 obscurely tucked away in Bell Alley, Coleman Street. His quarters were a light garret, where five shoemakers worked. Besides being taught the shoemaker's trade, Robert was errand boy, fetching dinners from the cook-shop, and doing whatever else was required: "A Gibeonite, that serves them all by turns." His most common occupation was to read the newspapers to the others. To help Robert with the hard words in the paper, particularly in the speeches of Fox and North, a difficulty of which the boy complained, his brother George bought him a dictionary. On Sundays, after a walk in the country, Robert went to hear the dissenting minister Fawcett at the meeting house in the old Jewry, possibly seeing Wordsworth, who was interested in Fawcett and 'References throughout to the fifth edition. 10 Cf. p. viii, Preface, The Farmer's Boy. Bullen says "Fisher's Court." attended those meetings whenever he came up to London. Occasionally, Robert also went to a debating society at Coachmaker's Hall; and "a few times" he visited Covent Garden Theatre. To the men in the shop he read a history of England, The British Traveller, a geography which came weekly, and the London Magazine, in the Poet's Corner of which he was especially interested. As early as his first coming to London, Robert had begun to try his hand at verse. His brother speaks of his having made smooth verse to an old tune in 1783, when he was seventeen; but it was not until 1786, when Robert was twenty, that any of his verses were published. One of the first was a poem called The Soldier's Return ; 11 another was one of sixteen anapaestic lines, A Village Girl. At some time between 1781 and 1784, the Bloomfields took new lodgings. Here Robert became acquainted with James Kay of Dundee, "a man of singular character," who had many books, among them Paradise Lost and The Seasons. These he lent to Robert, who, Mr. Brayler tells us, "was particularly delighted with The Seasons, and studied it with peculiar attention." 12 In 1784 trouble arose between Mr. Chamberlayne, by whom George and Robert were employed, and the journeymen shoemakers; and Robert, to avoid the storm, returned, on Mr. Austin's invitation, to the Sapiston farm. Here, for the space of two months,13 he renewed his acquaintance with rural sights, sounds, and occupations, greatly to the satisfaction and joy of his mind and heart. As the shoemaker's trouble remained unsettled, it was arranged that Robert 11 Printed in Remains, I, p. 35. 1 Op. cit., p. 12. For one of literary aspirations, Bloomfield read but little. Besides those named, he seems to have read: Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare; The Task; Burns, in part; The Bard; Pope, in part; Dryden's Virgil; The Lyrical Ballads; Southey's Thalaba, first book; Shenstone; The Gentleman's Magazine; Robinson Crusoe; Hawkin's General History of the Science and Practice of Music; Smollet's Count Fathom; and poems by Mason, Bruce, Park, and others. Bloomfield praised Thomson, and doubtless drew from him the hint to write down his own impressions of "the changing year"; but a careful examination of their poems, contrary to first expectations, reveals practically nothing in the form of direct influence. There are a few not unnatural coincidences; but in details of subject, in diction, and in style the two poems are essentially different. Capel Lofft, Bloomfield's editor, himself found The Farmer's Boy independent of The Seasons. 13 Bullen says three months. |