Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In 1800 Robert Bloomfield, a cobbler from Suffolk, became the most successful labouring-class poet of the Romantic period with the publication of his enormously popular debut poem The Farmer's Boy . Within three years 26 000 copies of the poem were sold, a level of success which would be beyond the likes of William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, now much better remembered than Bloomfield, until after their deaths. Bloomfield was born in 1766 to George Bloomfield, a tailor, and his schoolmistress wife Elizabeth. Despite the family's straitened circumstances after George Bloomfield's death, which came soon after his son's birth, Robert was taught to read and write, first by his mother, then for three months at a school in a nearby village. At 12 Robert Bloomfield was sent to work with his mother's brother-in-law, William Austin, on the Duke of Grafton's farm in Sapiston, north Suffolk. Bloomfield's time with Austin would become the source material for The Farmer's Boy , published nearly 20 years after Bloomfield had left Suffolk for London; the poem was full of fond memories of Bloomfield's experiences on the farm. In 1781 Bloomfield, who was never physically strong or imposing, standing only just five feet high, was taken by his mother to London to be cared for and trained by his cobbler brothers George and Nathaniel. In London Bloomfield was able to educate himself further, ... log in or subscribe to read full text