Near the Shepherd and Shepherdess
City Road London May 28th 1802
Sir
Your letter and your Poem on so great and so interesting a
subject as 'Bread,' came to hand last week. [1] Highly flattering as such marks of respect must be to me, and
much as they may demand my best acknowledgements, the pleasure of seeing the
Cottager vindicated is more grateful still. To see one class of the community
grow immensely rich at the expence of an other, to me allways argued an
inefficiency in the Laws of this or any country where it happens. If as
Goldsmith says, we are hastning to the rottenness of refinement, [2] and
if such things cannot be avoided, I see no just reason for starving and
contemning the Labourers of the Vinyard, or for keeping from them such degrees
of information as they may be capable of receiving; the well known exclamation
of the Kentish parson when a wreck was announced on the coast has much more
justice in it, 'Let us all start fair'!—You, Sir, go much deeper into the
subject than I am able to follow you; I never could satisfy myself, that,
increase of population and increase of individual comforts are not enemys and
strangers to each other.
The enclosing and appropriating the Waste-Lands may be a great
and wise measure; perhaps it may be want of better information that makes me
dislike it.—
I have read your Work Sir with much real pleasure, and thank you
for the mark'd approbation which you are pleased to bestow on my Rural scetches
of Life as it goes.
I have not the pleasure of being known to the Mr Swann to whom
you apparently allude in your letter. The Mr
James Swan whose name appears in the Farmers Boy writes thus to me
yesterday—
'When you write to Mr
Pratt, I shall be much pleased at your attempting to throw a light on
the person of my name alluded to in his letter, by saying, 'That Mr Swan convey'd his letter and poem to
you from Mr Hood's, and is happy (if
not by mistake) to be class'd among the friends of a Gentleman of so much
celebrity as Mr Pratt.—at any rate
he is glad he has had it in his power, by reading part of his poem to be numberd
among his admirers'—
With similar sentiments I remain Sir, your
Most Obed
Rob Bloomfield
Address: Mr Pratt / Revd Mr Seagrave / Halford near Shipton upon Stour
Notes
* Bodleian MS Eng. Lett.c.461, ff. 6–7; copy in
BL Add. MS 28268, ff. 96–97 BACK
[1] Pratt's Bread; or the Poor: a Poem was
published by Longman and Rees in 1801. It's a politicized Georgic
celebrating the value to the labourer of the cottage garden and the village
common, and attacking the improving farmers and gentry who enclose these
lands. BACK
[2] 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, /
Where wealth accumulates and men decay', lines 51–52 of Oliver Goldsmith's
The Deserted Village: A Poem (London, 1770). BACK
