Author: Bloomfield, George
Biography:
BLOOMFIELD, George (1757-1831: findmypast.co.uk)
He was the elder brother of Robert and Nathaniel Bloomfield (qq.v.). He was baptised in Honington, Suffolk, on 20 June 1757, the first-born son of George Bloomfield and his wife Elizabeth Manby, schoolmistress. They had married in Sapiston, Suffolk, on 1 June 1755. His father died of smallpox in 1767 and his mother counted on him to help with providing for the family. When he was twenty-two, he moved to London with Nathaniel and another brother, Isaac, and worked as a shoemaker. Robert eventually joined them, intending to train as a shoemaker. It was Bloomfield whose action in writing to Capel Lofft (q.v.) in Nov. 1798 ensured that Robert’s The Farmer’s Boy was first published, and he remained an important source of support not only for Robert but also for Nathaniel when he too began writing verse. He married Sarah Stone on 23 Dec. 1788; they had children but no records have been located. His Friendly Hints, Affectionately Addressed by an Old Man, to the Labouring Poor of Suffolk and Norfolk was issued as a broadsheet in 1822 and reprinted, with a letter by Bloomfield, in The Cottager’s Monthly Visitor in 1823. By then Bloomfield was living in Bury St. Edmunds. He died there in 1831, leaving his wife and a large family. (ODNB [for Robert Bloomfield] 7 June 2023; ancestry.co.uk 7 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 7 June 2023; Goodridge; Huntingdon, Bedford, and Peterborough Gazette 29 Jan. 1831; Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, eds. The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle, online at romantic-circles.org/editions/bloomfield_letters; The Cottager’s Monthly Visitor 3 [1823]. 315-24) SR