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Author: Bloomfield, Nathaniel

Biography:

BLOOMFIELD, Nathaniel (c. 1759-1831: findmypast.co.uk)

No record of his birth has been located but his age at the time of his death in 1831 was 72. He was the son of George Bloomfield and his wife Elizabeth Manby, a schoolmistress, and was probably born in Honington, Suffolk. George and Robert Bloomfield (qq.v.) were his brothers. His father died of smallpox in 1767 and, having received some education from his mother, Bloomfield was bound apprentice by his maternal grandfather to a tailor, Mr. Haylett, of Market Harling, Norfolk. He moved to London with his brothers George and Isaac in about 1779 and worked as a journeyman tailor. He married Charlotte Noble on 4 Mar. 1787 in St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, in the City of London. They had five children but three of them died in infancy of smallpox. The preface to his book of verse is by Capel Lofft (q.v.) who had corrected the manuscript and helped with the publication as he had helped with Robert Bloomfield’s Farmer’s Boy. At the time Bloomfield was living in Moorfields, London. Although it went to a second edition, Nathaniel Bloomfield’s book met with criticism: MR recommended that the poet should not relinquish “his usual habits of honest industry” in hopes of a literary career and took exception to Lofft’s fulsome praise of the verse. He died probably in Sept. 1831 and was buried on 2 Oct. at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch. (ODNB [for Robert Bloomfield] 7 June 2023; ancestry.co.uk 7 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 7 June 2023; Capel Lofft, “Preface,” in N. Bloomfield, An Essay on War…And Other Poems, On Various Subjects [1803]; Goodridge)

 

Books written (2):

2nd edn. Bury/ London: printed by P. Gedge/ Thos. Hurst, and Vernor and Hood, 1803