[In the following essay, Lucas argues that Bloomfield's “poetry was a means of securing a social identity at odds with his own origins.” He also interprets Clare's praise for Bloomfield's poetry as praise for the depiction of an ideal, uncorrupted rural life.]

[John] Clare's intense admiration for Bloomfield is well known. ‘The English Theocritus & the first of the Rural Bards in this country’, he called him. He also said that in his opinion Bloomfield was ‘our best Pastoral poet’. Johanne Clare rather questions Clare's motives in piling up such exaggerated praise, as she thinks it to be. Clare, she says, ‘must have recognized that by rallying to Bloomfield's reputation he was to some extent helping to lay the foundations for his own’ (John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance, p. 62). This is almost certainly unfair. True, Clare closely identified with Bloomfield, and this is hardly to be wondered at. But his warmest praise tends to occur in letters, which can hardly be thought of as a form of ‘rallying’, with all that implies of a public concern; and anyway, had he been so intent as Johanne Clare argues on using Bloomfield to help build his own reputation, he would surely have made at least some effort to write that life of Bloomfield which at one time he projected. Instead, soon after hearing of Bloomfield's death, he wrote three sonnets in his memory, one of which ends with a great line about how the fame of then fashionable poets would come to lie ‘A dead wreck on the shore of dark posterity’. And he noted in his Journal that Bloomfield's ‘dying neglected’ is ‘the common lot of genius’.

In a different essay I would want to argue that this assertion rather takes for granted the reality of a myth assiduously fed by the earlier generation of Romantic poets, for whom the death of Chatterton provided the archetypal instance of such neglect, suffering, and indeed of ‘genius’ itself. Here, I will note that Clare's claim that the neglect of Bloomfield was only to be expected must have a good deal to do with his conviction that he and Bloomfield both came from unprivileged circumstances; and that as Bloomfield's first and huge success with The Farmer's Boy was never repeated, so the heady reception given to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, followed as it was by the comparatively poor sales of The Village Minstrel, between them provided evidence of how ‘The tide of fashion is a stream too strong / For pastoral brooks that gently flow and sing’ (to quote from another of the sonnets to Bloomfield).

There is, however, a problem about all this, one unwittingly touched on by Johanne Clare when she remarks that ‘Clare could hardly have been indifferent to the fact, that because of his background and because he pushed that background into the foreground of his poems, Bloomfield was seen by others as an unusual case, an exception to those genteel, educated and sophisticated men who had always been able to assume that participation in the literary life of the nation was theirs by right’ (p. 63). Bloomfield was certainly an exception to the rule of cultural orthodoxy. But in fact in his writings he says very little about his origins, his education, his early life and work. There's more acknowledgement of rough early years in Crabbe's poetry than ever there is in Bloomfield's. (A point to make because Clare unfairly attacks Crabbe for being ignorant of the agricultural poor: ‘Whats he know of the distresses of the poor musing over a coal fire in his parsonage box’: answer, a great deal, as anyone who has read The Village and The Borough knows, and as Clare, who had certainly read them, chose to forget.) By comparison, very little of that suffering gets into Bloomfield's poetry, and to say this leads me to my subject.

In what follows I think I may be describing someone for whom poetry was a means of securing a social identity at odds with his own origins. Or perhaps it's better to say that poetry allowed Bloomfield to shift from one set of possibilities—cultural, social, political—to another, and that this shift went hand-in-hand with what I will call the poetry of reconciliation. At all events, we know that after the success of The Farmer's Boy Bloomfield for some years earned a reasonable living from his writing; and from the writings themselves we can see that the poet is characteristically set on producing narratives that endorse ‘Amity and social love’. The phrase comes from the opening lines of ‘Winter’, in the fourth book of The Farmer's Boy, that poem which, when it was published in 1800, brought him both fame and money, and which, while it may well be based on incidents and observations of Bloomfield's own youth, was, we must note, written in the late 1790s, by which time he had been living in London for some fifteen years, earning a living as a shoemaker. I need, then, to provide a brief resumé of his life.

Bloomfield was born in 1766, in Honington, Suffolk. His father, who died in Robert's infancy, was a tailor, his mother, left to look after six small children, was, so he says in “To A Spindle,” his beautiful elegy to her, a village schoolmistress. She taught him to read and write, and with the help of friends found the money to give all her children some schooling. Not that this amounted to much; and Robert's in particular lasted no more than a few months. His removal from school seems to have coincided with his mother's remarriage, and when ‘Robert was not above eleven years old, the late Mr W Austin, of Sapiston, took him. And though it is customary for farmers to pay such boys only 1s. 6d a week, yet he generously took him into the house. This relieved his mother of any other expense than only of finding him a few things to wear: and this was more than she knew well how to do’.¹

Four years later—we are now at the beginning of the 1780s—Robert moved to London. According to his mother, writing to her sons Nat and George, the youth was ‘so small of his age that Mr Austin said he was not likely to get his living by hard labour’. George was earning his living as a shoe-maker; and his younger brother, who now joined him in London, began to learn the same craft. Now comes what is surely a crucial moment. According to George's account:

One Sunday, after a whole day's stroll in the country, we by accident went into a dissenting Meeting-house in the old Jewry, where a gentleman was lecturing. This man filled Robert with astonishment. The house was amazingly crowded with the most genteel people: though we were forced to stand in the aisle, and were much pressed, yet Robert always quickened his steps to get into the town on Sunday evening soon enough to attend this lecture. The preacher's name was Fawcet [sic].

At this point, the unidentified editor of the 1867 edition offers a footnote on Fawcett: ‘Author of a justly-esteemed poem on War’. If ever a foonote was intended to mislead, this is it. Fawcett was certainly the author of the poem mentioned, but he was also, and far more importantly, one of the great voices of radical dissent of his time, although oddly E. P. Thompson doesn't include him in The Making of the English Working Class, nor is he thought worth a mention in Iain McCalman's Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840. There is, however, an illuminating discussion of Fawcett by M. Ray Adams in his neglected Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism (With Special Reference to the French Revolution) (1947). In a chapter called ‘Joseph Fawcett and Wordsworth's Solitary’, Adams quotes Godwin's admission that it was Fawcett who turned his attention to literature and politics. The two men first met at the very end of the 1770s, when Godwin had begun to preach as a dissenting minister at Ware, while Fawcett, who had been trained for the Unitarian ministry at the Dissenting academy at Daventry, was preaching at Walthamstow. Then, in 1783, ‘Fawcett was engaged as a Sunday evening lecturer at the Old Jewry meeting-house, a position he retained for twelve years. He resigned his pastoral work in 1787’. Adams adds that ‘he had evidently been more and more drawn from theology to politics’, and he further notes that ‘According to a contemporary record, his oratorical gifts attracted to the Old Jewry “the largest and most genteel audience that ever assembled in a dissenting place of worship”’. Among Fawcett's audience was the young Wordsworth. And, as we have seen, so was Bloomfield.

Not for long, however. Sometime in 1784 George fell out with fellow shoe-makers and Robert, ‘naturally fond of peace, and fearful for my personal safety begged to be suffered to retire from the storm’. The words are George's and he goes on to say that Robert was once again taken into Austin's house at Sapiston and that while working there he read Thomson's The Seasons and, ‘free from the smoke, the noise, the contention of the city, he imbibed that love of rural simplicity and rural innocence, which fitted him in great degree, to be the writer of such things as The Farmer's Boy’. Leave aside the non sequitur of Robert feeling so worried for George's safety that he quits London, and what we have here is, I am certain, a statement of the greatest importance. It implies that Bloomfield the poet sets himself to be a chronicler of rural virtues, ‘simplicity and innocence’, against the city's ‘contention’. And this will go far to explaining why The Farmer's Boy should have been so rapturously received in 1800. Its backward-glancing presentation of rural circumstance provides us with a vision of tranquillity, of human comfort and harmony, a kind of discreetly utopian account of the ‘natural’ world very far removed from the contentious actualities of the moment, in the country as well as the city, including newly energised arguments about labour's rights. From the mid 1790s onwards the most eloquent spokespeople for these were the Spencean radicals who, though they were centred on the city, had as their two main demands the Rights of Man and the insistence that the land should be held in common.² It will have been their predecessors with whom George Bloomfield had come into contention in 1784.

I had here better admit that I am in no position to disentangle what actually went on between the Bloomfields, their employer, a Mr Chamberlayne, of Cheapside, and those with whom they fell out, and who seem to have threatened them with physical violence. But from George's own account—which is all I have to go on—it seems that Chamberlayne and the Bloomfields decided to resist the demand that work be given only to a ‘closed shop’ of shoemakers who had been apprenticed to the trade. This demand appears to have been put by ‘The lawful journeyman of shoemakers’, who must therefore have composed a union of skilled craftsmen; and we should not find this surprising, given that shoemakers were always at the forefront of radical thought, closely identified with, and often belonging to, the Spenceans. In The Making of the English Working Class Thompson notes of surviving Jacobin traditions that ‘as late as 1849 a shrewd Yorkshire satirist published a sketch of such a “Village Politician” which has a feel of authenticity. He is, typically, a cobbler, an old man and the sage of his industrial village’. Thompson then quotes part of the sketch:

He has a library that he rather prides himself upon. It is a strange collection … There is ‘The Pearl of Great Price’, and Cobbett's ‘Twopenny Trash’: ‘The Pilgrim's Progress …’ and ‘The Go-a-head Journal’. ‘The Wrongs of Labour’ and ‘The Rights of Man’. ‘The History of the French Revolution’ and Bunyan's ‘Holy War …’ ‘The Age of Reason’, and a superannuated Bible

(pp. 183-4).

Iain McCalman also notes that shoemakers were among the most prominent of radicals in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, and he mentions, inter alia, Robert Charles Fair, a shoemaker poet, Thomas Preston, shoemaker, Thomas Pemberton, boot-closer, and William Curry and Joseph Bacon, both of whom were shoemakers.

There is, therefore, nothing odd about shoemakers attending Joseph Fawcett's Meeting House. What is odd is George's decision to turn against ‘The Lawful Crafts’. Perhaps his employer insisted on this, as the price for keeping his job. George says that Chamberlayne ‘took an active part against the journeymen; and even went so far as to pay off every man that worked for him that had joined their clubs’. It will clearly take more work to unravel the politics and commitments of that moment as they affected George and Robert Bloomfield. Here, I can do no more than note that this is the moment when, according to his brother, Robert Bloomfield conceives the idea of The Farmer's Boy.

Does that mean some of the poem was written earlier than the late 1790s? Possibly. But what is certain is that when it was published Bloomfield was once again employed as a shoemaker in London. By then he was a married man and he may well have hoped that the publication of the poem, supposing it could be arranged, would bring in some useful money. (There was a tradition of shoemaker poets which stretched back at least as far as James Woodhouse and ‘the cobler poet’ John Lucas.) As it happened, the immediate and lasting success of The Farmer's Boy put sufficient money in Bloomfield's pocket for him to be able to exchange his cheap garret lodgings for a house on the City Road. There, he wrote and published at regular intervals, and although none of his publications repeated the runaway success of The Farmer's Boy, each sold pretty well. First, in 1802, came Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs, which included ‘Richard and Kate: or Fair Day’, the ballad poem Clare so admired. This was followed in 1804 by Good Tidings (about Jenner's small-pox vaccine—perhaps Bloomfield's attempt to emulate Erasmus Darwin?), then, in 1806, by Wild Flowers (among them the famous ‘Broken Crutch’, and such fine poems as ‘The Horkey’ and ‘My Old Oak Table’), and then, in 1811, The Banks of Wye.

A year later Bloomfield left London for the small town of Shefford, in Bedfordshire, where he bought a pleasant house and where he wrote what was to be the final volume to appear in his lifetime, May Day with the Muses. But by the time that appeared, in 1822, he was in deep financial trouble and had come to hate Shefford—‘this vile town’ he called it. The following year he died a bankrupt. I suspect that Bloomfield's move from London was a self-conscious declaration that he now considered himself to be a country gentleman, and this would be consistent with his poetry, which typically endorses and celebrates a vision of rural circumstance as beneficent, its politics essentially feudal or at all events pre-capitalist in that relationships between master and men are based on mutual respect and acceptance of assigned function within a known structure of social and working life. We can see this if we look at the poetry itself.

The Farmer's Boy follows the procedure of the poem Clare so loved, Thomson's The Seasons—from Spring through to Winter—although in so doing it is inevitably drawn towards the Virgilian tradition of the Georgic rather than the Theocritean. (Bloomfield even finds room to praise ‘improved’ agricultural farming methods, and provides a detailed account of the making of Suffolk cheese, which is very much in the eighteenth-century Georgic tradition of exact description and advice to farmers and husbandmen as adopted by Mason, Smart, Dyer, Philips and others.) But in ‘Summer’ Bloomfield reveals that all is not well with this world. He does so by contrasting past and present, the household to which Giles, his protagonist, belongs, with other, newer, more fashionable farmers' houses:

Here once a year Distinction low'rs its crest,
The master, servant, and the merry guest,
Are equal all; and round the happy ring
The reaper's eyes exulting glances fling,
And warm'd with gratitude, he quits his place,
With sunburnt hands, and ale-enliven'd face,
Refills the jug his honour'd host to tend,
To serve at once the master and the friend …
Such were the days,—of days long past I sing,
When pride gave place to mirth without a sting:
Ere tyrant custom strength sufficient bore
To violate the feelings of the poor;
To leave them distanced in the maddening race,
Where'er refinement shows its hated face:
Nor causeless hated;—‘tis the peasant's curse,
That hourly makes his wretched station worse;
Destroys life's intercourse, the social plan
That rank to rank cements, as man to man:
Wealth flows around him, Fashion lordly reigns;
Yet poverty is his, and mental pains.

In my recent short monograph on Clare I have shown how in both The Parish and The Shepherd's Calendar he contrasts the old style farmers, ‘who used their servants toils to share’, with the newer ‘refined’ farmer, who will go to any length to separate himself from his workers.³ Whether the change was as absolute as both Bloomfield and Clare declare it to have been cannot easily be decided, although I'm more inclined to believe them than those economic historians, of right and left, who insist that the idea of the older ‘mutuality’ is a sentimental delusion; but what cannot be denied is that both poets are keenly aware of the hurts and insults of the newer arrangements, which break what Alun Howkins and Ian Dyck call ‘the old order’, where social harmony was achieved because ‘men were bound together by their “words” into a society of mutuality’.⁴ Nor is it necessary to suppose that this society of mutuality was always and everywhere achieved, although there seems no reason to doubt that Bloomfield found something very like it at Sapiston. I want to suggest no more than that his eager endorsement of ‘the old order’ comes to him at least partly as a result of his exposure to the clash between Chamberlayne and the lawful journeymen, which he would inevitably identify with the newer, starkly divisive class-relationships of the city. It is, after all, remarkable that although he spent thirty years of his life in London he never writes about it. Instead, he always returns to the country of his upbringing or imagination: it is the great good place which, because it is identifiable as upholding the ‘bond of amity and social love’, by implication offers a preferable alternative to the legally-binding relations of city employer and employee. Bloomfield had been forced to earn his living in the city, but he quit London as soon as he could. (And in moving to Shefford he plays out the role of man of independent means which Clare yearned to take on when he left Helpston for Northborough; and like Clare, he finds his dream crashes about him, although in his case the crash is much longer in coming.)

Put it rather differently. Clare, I suggest, loved Bloomfield's poetry because he could find in it a pre-lapsarian rural world, one that is innocent of enclosure, that has not been laid waste by the brutal power of axe and plough. Bloomfield is therefore the English Theocritus because he writes about a first world of rural circumstance, one now gone. The English re-discovery of Theocritus in the latter half of the seventeenth century had been accompanied by the belief that the Greek poet was the true founder of pastoral poetry, was in that sense an original, was primitive (not that the word would have been so used), was more earthy and actual than Virgil, was, in a word, more natural. When Richard Polwhele came to add a Dissertation and Notes to his two-volume translation of the Idyllia, Epigrams and Fragments of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, with the Elegies of Tyrtaeus, he remarked that ‘The pieces of Theocritus are the result of his own accurate observation. He described what he saw and felt. His characters, as well as his scenes, are the immediate transcript of nature’ (vol. 2, p. 6, 1692 edition). This reading of Theocritus became an accepted and lasting commonplace. And so we find Clare, in his ‘Essay on Landscape’, claiming of the ‘living pastorals of Rippingille’ that ‘Rippingille is the Theocritus of English painting—there they are as true as if nature had just left them and none of the ridiculous imaginings of fashion hung about them … we see nothing but natural objects not placed for effect or set off by other dictates of the painters fancys but they are just as nature placed them’. And Bloomfield, Clare says, is ‘the English Theocritus’. He wants Bloomfield's poems to be the truth about rural circumstances, at all events about past rural circumstances.

This, I am certain, must be the reason Clare so praised ‘Richard and Kate’ and ‘The Broken Crutch’, to name two of his favourite Bloomfield poems. The first, sub-titled ‘A Suffolk Ballad’, tells the story of an old couple who have been married forty years and who take the day off from their labours to go to the fair:

‘For I'm resolved once more to see
That place where we so often met;
Though few have had more cares than we,
We've none just now to make us fret.’

So says Richard, and although we hear no more of their cares, we know that he must be a hedger (‘His mattock he behind the door / And hedging-gloves again replaced’), we hear snippets of Suffolk idiom (‘When once a giggling mawther you’—a footnote tells us that Mawther means ‘girl, in the East Anglian dialect’); and we meet their children and grandchildren, who have also gone to the fair:

Kate viewed her blooming daughters round,
And sons, who shook her wither'd hand;
Her features spoke what joy she found;
But utterance had made a stand.
The children toppled on the green,
And bowl'd their fairings down the hill;
Richard with pride beheld the scene,
Nor could he for his life keep still.

Richard then makes the assembled family a speech, saying how proud he is of them all, drinks their health, and the ballad ends with the old couple at close of day gaining ‘once more their more lowly rest’.

‘Richard and Kate’ is a charming poem, but we shall not understand Clare's passionate championing of it unless we realise that what must have appealed to him about it was Bloomfield's depiction of untroubled rural harmony—the fair—and contented and fruitful family life among the rural poor. In other words, the poem is precisely an idyll. And although ‘idyll’ was well on the way to acquiring its newer meaning, of ‘idealised description of “rustic” life’, (and the use of the word rustic is itself part of the idealising) Clare would have fastened onto Bloomfield's use of dialect and his not ‘looking down for a rural theme’—as Burns had famously noted in the Preface to his poems that he himself was incapable of doing—in order to endorse the poem's essential truthfulness. That was how it used to be. The improbability of such a claim is evident as soon as you reflect on the high incidence of infant mortality and early death among the rural poor, but such considerations are beside the point. They certainly don't offset Clare's identification with the joys of a world that for him have to characterise the past because they can't be thought of as typifying the present. This, then, affects his equally passionate attachment to ‘The Broken Crutch’.

Clare admired this poem enough to make mention of it in one of his own, ‘Opening of the Pasture—Love & Flattery’, which Robinson, Powell and Dawson date to 1823-4 (see their edition of Clare's Cottage Tales, Ashington and Manchester, 1993). The poem is a dialogue between two young women, Mary and Lucy, and at one point Mary tells her friend of a youth who tries to woo her by offering her ‘Bloomfield's Poems’, which were ‘sweet indeed’, she says, adding that the young man had

… turned a leaf down where he bid me read
It was a story called ‘The Broken Crutch’
Theres luck said he your face might get as much
—I loved the poems & the story too.

Bloomfield's tale is about a young girl of humble origin whose face is her fortune. She leaves home to work for a squire, Herbert, one of the old school: he keeps a ‘kitchen table, never clear of beef, / Where hunger found its solace and relief’. Herbert falls in love with the girl and the news reaches her guardian who decides that her virtue must be in danger. Off he goes to confront the squire, arriving at his house in time to discover that the young couple have just married and that a wedding feast is under way. Peggy may have come from ‘the unpolished walks of humble life’, Herbert tells her guardian, but his love for her is nevertheless sincere. To this her guardian replies, in words the poet italicises:

My blessings on you: I am lame and old,
I can't make speeches and I won't be bold;
But from my soul I wish, and wish with pain,
That brave good gentlemen would not disdain
The poor, because they're poor …

The poem's narrative opens door after door into a receding way of life. It begins with the poet lamenting the destruction of a ‘dear green valley’ he'd known as a youth. The axe has cut down ‘In Gain's rude service and in Pity's spite / Thy clustering alders’, and has even invaded and levelled ‘The last, last poplars, that compose thy shade’. Cowper's generalised lament for fallen poplars is here replaced by a specific criticism of ‘gain’; and Bloomfield's poem looks not down but back for a rural theme. (In passing I will note that a sizeable essay could be written on the theme of fallen or toppled trees as symbol or indicator of social change.) At the end of ‘The Broken Crutch’ the old man, Peggy's guardian, voices his regret for a lost way of life, of the once upheld social responsibilities of ‘brave good gentlemen’. Yet he himself is part of an already old tale. In a now lost past, ‘The Broken Crutch’ implies, there was a world of amity characterised by the absence of social disdain and, even, by the acceptability of marriage between social unequals. You have only to think of Clare's perpetual grieving over his broken relationship with Mary Joyce and the way that came to stand for him as a particularly brutal instance of the power of class, the process of separation, to realise why he might well think ‘The Broken Crutch’ a poem ‘above praise’, as he told Allan Cunningham. Perhaps he persuaded himself that this lost past had been Bloomfield's present. If so, it only serves to emphasise how from often stated grievances (in Clare's case) and less often stated ones (in Bloomfield's) both poets ‘are borne back ceaselessly into the past’ as a later writer noted of those who grieve for the lost dreams of a good society.

And what of other poems? May Day with the Muses, the last volume of Bloomfield's to be published in his lifetime, is his most sustained vision of ‘amity and social love’. Given that at the time he was writing it he was growing increasingly disenchanted with his life as would-be man of independent means, the poem can therefore be seen as a compensatory act to set against the reality of a life beset by money difficulties and, I suspect, estrangement from the townspeople of Shefford. (For how else explain the venomous ‘This vile town’ than by assuming that Bloomfield felt himself spurned by neighbours and acquaintances?) There is no space here to comment at length on what is certainly a most beautiful poem, but I need to note that yet again it is set in the past. Its protagonist, the very old Sir Ambrose Higham of Oakley Hall, decides to exact payment of tithes from his tenants, not by taking their money, but by asking each of them to tell a tale in verse for the delight of the assembled company. They agree, and when they have finished Sir Ambrose's wife appears in the dress which ‘sixty years before, / had sparkled on her sunshine bridal morn’, to usher in the May Day evening celebrations: ‘She came to grace the triumph of her Lord, / And pay him honours at his festive board’. Sir Ambrose then makes a speech in which he tells his listeners that

Your verses shall not die as heretofore;
Your local tales shall not be thrown away,
Nor war remain the theme of every lay

and the poem ends with the closing of the revels: ‘The owl awoke, but dared not yet complain, / And banish'd Silence reassumed her reign’.

Clare of course knew May Day with the Muses. In his own tale ‘Valentine Eve’ he names the ancient house where the story is set as Oakley Hall, which can hardly be coincidence, although ‘Valentine Eve’ is still closer to ‘The Broken Crutch’ in that both poems deal with the marriage of social unequals. There is probably a common source at work here: Edward Drury told Clare about the ‘actual circumstances of the present Marquess of Exeter's grandfather marrying a country girl of humblest life’. But ‘Valentine Eve’ has something of that powerful feeling for a lost past which makes May Day with the Muses so distinctive a performance. Early on, as Sir Ambrose's tenants gather, Bloomfield remarks that:

                              Not a face was there
But for May Day at least had banished care:
No cringing looks, no pauper tales to tell,
No timid glance, they knew their host too well,—
Freedom was there, and joy in every eye:
Such scenes were England's boast in days gone by.

Bloomfield's use of narrative couplet aligns his tale with Goldsmith's ‘The Deserted Village’ as well as with those numerous picturesque poems of the mid to late eighteenth century, all of which provide or imply a comparison between past and present, or which, in the case of the picturesque, underwrite, as I have argued elsewhere, the sad inevitability of change.⁵ Clare would challenge such apparent inevitability. Hence, his great anti-enclosure poems. Bloomfield doesn't, although we have seen that in some lines in ‘Summer’ of The Farmer's Boy, and elsewhere for that matter, he comes close to it. But the ending of May Day with the Muses is haunted by a sense of irretrievable loss, a grieving for a way of life gone now into the reign of silence. So much so that in his closing couplet Bloomfield may well be intending an ironic reminder of Pope's famous consolatory vision of the goddess of Harvest overriding the folly of grand, comfortless buildings; those products of new, ostentatious wealth spreading out from London:

Deep harvests bury all [their] pride has plann'd
And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.

(‘Fourth Moral Essay: On the Use of Riches’)

Pope foresees a future of rural peace and plenty for all, and this social vision is implicit in the generous enthusiasm of Thomson's The Seasons, that mid-century report on the health of the nation. But by the time Bloomfield was writing May Day with the Muses it was a widely-protested scandal that those who controlled the harvests withheld through their cornlaws bread from the poor. Bloomfield doesn't mention the hated cornlaws but that he should set his poem in the past and once again focus on old people makes it inevitable that we should read May Day with the Muses as an elegy for a lost way of life, a vision of mutuality long faded, one that relied on kinship, trusted relations rooted in place. Whether he believed that a way of life in which all could rejoice in deep harvests had ever truly existed, at all events in quite the uninflected manner his poems suppose, I don't know. Probably not. But anyway this matters less than his asserting the value of ‘local tales’, of local language, and of those social arrangements in which there could be no room for disdain or timid glances or refinement's hated face, and in which a shared abundance could be taken for granted. No wonder Clare so admired him.

Notes

1. This and other quotations are taken from ‘The Life of Robert Bloomfield’, which introduces the 1867 edition of The Works of Robert Bloomfield, published by George Routledge and Sons. The ‘Life’ contains numerous quotations from George Bloomfield's memoir, including the above, and from Capel Lofft, Bloomfield's patron.

2. For this see David Worrall's Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1795-1820 (1983).

3. John Lucas, John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House, Writers and Their Work Series, 1994).

4. Alun Howkins and Ian Dyck, ‘“The Time's Alterations”: Popular Ballads, Rural Radicals and William Cobbett’, History Workshop, 23 (Spring 1987).

5. John Lucas, ‘Wordsworth and the Anti-Picturesque’, Romantic to Modern, 1982.