Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Robert Bloomfield was, and still is, known primarily for his poetry, having enjoyed enormous popularity and celebrity after the publication of his debut poem, The Farmer's Boy , in 1800. The Farmer's Boy brought Bloomfield to the attention of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well it might: more than ten times as many copies of Bloomfield's poem were sold than of Lyrical Ballads . But later in his literary career Bloomfield began to explore other modes of writing, including a prose work for children published in 1815, The History of Little Davy's Hat , and a play, Hazelwood Hall, a Village Drama, in Three Acts , which was published shortly before Bloomfield's death in 1823. Bloomfield was also a keen letter-writer, corresponding with the family he had left behind in rural Suffolk when he moved to become a cobbler in London. If it was poetry which brought Bloomfield fame, it is his prose works and letters which reveal the challenges of creating a lasting literary career in the early nineteenth century. For several years following Bloomfield's emergence as a literary figure of note he continued to publish volumes of poetry, based, as The Farmer's Boy had been, on the quiet goings-on of country life in a rural county. But in 1811 his long-term publishers, Vernor and Hood, went bankrupt. Bloomfield's royalties disappeared in the crisis, and ... log in or subscribe to read full text