Author: Bloomfield, Robert
Biography:
BLOOMFIELD, Robert (1766-1823: ODNB)
Born in Honington, Suffolk, son of George Bloomfield, a tailor, and Elizabeth Manby, a schoolmistress. George Bloomfield died of smallpox in 1767, leaving his wife with six children; she remarried five years later, but the family continued to struggle financially. Robert was sent to work on an uncle's farm for three years, then moved to London to practise as a shoemaker with two brothers. The Farmer's Boy (1800), written originally for his mother, was slow to find a publisher, but Robert's brother George found a champion in Capel Lofft (q.v.), who wrote an introduction emphasizing Bloomfield's working-class background and arranged for a high-quality, illustrated edition. It was an immediate success: St. Clair describes it as "the poem which sold the most copies and circulated most widely" in the Romantic period. But Bloomfield's later poems, mostly moral tales, sold less well and he died in poverty. (ODNB 14 Dec. 2017; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [2004], 219)