Author: Bloomfield, Robert
Biography:
BLOOMFIELD, Robert (1766-1823: ODNB)
He was born at in Honington, Suffolk, on 3 Dec. 1766, and baptised there on 7 Sept. 1767, the son of George Bloomfield, a tailor, and Elizabeth Manby, a schoolmistress. His brothers George and Nathaniel, qq.v., also became poets. 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 of his brothers. On 12 Dec. 1790 he married Mary Ann Church at Christ Church, Newgate, and they went on to have seven children, of whom four grew to maturity. 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 on 19 Aug. 1823 at his home at Shefford, Buckinghamshire; he was buried at All Saints, Compton, on 23 Aug. He did not apply on his own account but was recommended for assistance to the RLF in 1818, when he had lost the sight of one eye and could not read or write; and again in 1822. The RLF granted £60 altogether. His widow applied for relief in Nov. 1823 and was granted £30. (ODNB 14 Dec. 2017; ancestry.com 4 Feb. 2025; RLF #382; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [2004], 219) HJ