Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters

"Bloomfield in His Letters: The Social World of a London Shoemaker Turned Suffolk Poet"

Tim Fulford
Nottingham Trent University

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1.        The publication of Bloomfield’s collected letters gives us for the first time a chance to see him as a writer of intimate prose—prose in which he reveals his inner feelings and deepest desires, prose in which he comes to understand what he stands for, as a poet and as a man. Bloomfield’s letters, spanning the thirty and more years of his adult life, let us chart his progress from London shoemaker, living in an East End slum, through the best-selling poet of the early 1800s, to the impoverished villager living in obscure retirement. But they also show the development of a mind full of penetrating observation of himself, his acquaintances, and the world around him, and the emergence of a character endowed with generous humor, quiet determination, and exceptional sensitivity. These qualities made Bloomfield a wonderful correspondent: he never concealed himself from the person to whom he was writing, always offering them intimacy and thoughtfulness (resembling Keats in this) and always registering the nuances of events with a playful perceptiveness that escapes most. As a consequence, he was a fascinating social commentator (although social commentary is not the chief element of his letters), a perspicuous critic of other poets, and a forthright maintainer of his beliefs about writing against the interference of patrons, well-meaning or brow-beating.

2.         Many themes emerge from the letters: I shall concentrate in what follows on illustrating those which most sharply change our understanding of the writer, of his times, and of the business of being a laboring-class poet.

3.        First, then, the letters reveal with a new vividness what remains obscure in Bloomfield’s verse: that he was not a farmhand living in one of Britain’s thousands of villages. Despite his self-characterization in his poems as “Giles” the “farmer’s boy,” Bloomfield was, when he wrote, a Londoner working in one of the capital’s hundreds of cramped workshops. He was, in fact, a member of the wave after wave of immigrants that, in the late eighteenth century, flowed from the country to work in London’s burgeoning trades and industries, exchanging a boyhood spent herding animals and tending crops for an adolescence manufacturing items for the expanding consumer market. The change in circumstances this move produced is revealed by his first surviving letter of 1788, in which he invites a Suffolk friend to visit him:

Bloomfield’s description reminds us of Blake’s “London,” or Wordsworth’s Prelude description of “Private courts, / Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes / Thrilled by some female vendor’s scream, belike / The very shrillest of all London cries” (1805, 7: 196-9). East End poverty, cramped living conditions, endemic disease, “low lived places”: Bloomfield was writing from experience as one of the new class of “mechanics” about which Wordsworth spoke in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, one of the nascent proletariat, in Marxist terms. It was this class that Wordsworth diagnosed as having acquired debased cravings for stimulation as a means of escape from their repetitive labor and that Marxists saw as being dosed with the opiates of popular religion and mass culture. Yet Bloomfield belies the Wordsworthian and the Marxist analysis: he suggests that, for first-generation migrants from country to city, it was not novel forms of urban entertainment, but the recollection and celebration of village community and customs, that was the goal. This is shown by a letter which he wrote in 1806 about his first encounter with Italian opera:

4.        Bloomfield’s village—whether the village encountered in the opera-house or that of his own writing—is not the agricultural world seen by a laborer who works in it: it is, rather, a new country—the country seen from exile by an urbanite who has nostalgic desires to reconstitute, in memory and on paper, the rural community he associates with childhood. It is family and village togetherness, imagined as innocent by comparison with the experienced world of urban sophistication, that Bloomfield seeks—as Wordsworth himself did. This suggests that it was not, as Wordsworth thought, urban life and labor that destroyed respect for the values and taste of the older, rural world. Rather, urban exile from the country produced an intense idealization of the rural just as Wordsworth’s continental exile did. Exile, rather than city life per se, stimulated the major Romantic themes of idealization of the rural and fear for its loss. For Bloomfield, as for Wordsworth, it was the recollection of rural society and morality that he had, in practice, left behind that gave him a standard against which to judge the novel culture available in London’s metropolitan and cosmopolitan milieu.

5.        But he had not left it completely behind: in the early 1800s, the letters show, the urban and rural poor were not discrete, mutually unknowing populations. Bloomfield’s letters reveal the constant interchange between city and country-dwellers: Bloomfield’s family was typical in having some siblings who worked in the city while others remained in the home village—typical too in the frequent interchange between them. Letters carried news, invitations, and banknotes; parcels carried pheasants, leather-samples, and cheese. The foodstuffs traveled in both directions, Bloomfield taking advantage of his position in Europe’s largest commercial center to send to Suffolk better rural produce than could be found locally: “I send my Mother a piece of cheese such as she could not get at Honington if she had money” he wrote on 30 November 1801 (letter 70), enclosing a Leicester cheese far superior to that of Suffolk (the best milk being sent out of Suffolk to supply London’s market).

6.        People went back and forth too: Bloomfield returned to Suffolk to visit; his brothers, drawn to London’s commercial magnet, came to make their fortunes from music and from inventions, themselves returning. The laboring-classes, on the evidence of Bloomfield’s family, were simply not rigidly divided between shrinking rural and expanding urban populations: it was normal for families from the home counties to spend some of their lives in London, some back in the country, as did his brother George who grew up in Honington, worked as a shoemaker in London, and moved back to Suffolk, or his brother Nat, who moved from Suffolk to London, or Isaac, who lived in Suffolk but came to London to sell his musical settings of Robert’s poems, or Robert himself, who moved out of London to a Bedfordshire village in 1811. His sister Bet, meanwhile, emigrated to America. The Bloomfield family is revealed in Robert’s letters as being on the move to a degree that would have been extraordinary fifty years earlier, but nevertheless strenuously keeping in touch using the literacy with which their mother, a village schooldame, had endowed them. The causes of their peripatetic life illustrate the changes in rural society brought about by the combination of increased population, the development of “improved” capitalist agriculture, economic recessions, and a more centralized market economy. Brothers George and Isaac both had many children and found it impossible to provide for them from the proceeds of shoemaking. London, and the opportunity of selling poems and tunes there, offered the prospect of a way out of poverty.

7.        Bloomfield’s letters show his most abiding concern to have been the creation and preservation, in a more and more hostile social and political climate, of village and family rootedness. While he still enjoyed royalties from his poems, he used this income to try to recreate rural community from the distance of London. Thus he sent his London-reared daughter Hannah to Suffolk to give her experience of village life. Hannah was charged with retrieving the very rocks and stones Bloomfield remembered by their local names, so strong was his desire to have a bit of his boyhood about him:

Wanting his daughter to know him by reliving his own childhood, Bloomfield was excited when she witnessed the harvest-home festival that was customary in the area and which he had celebrated in his poem “The Horkey,” even preserving Suffolk dialect in an effort “to tell the rising race of mankind” of the customs “going fast out of use” that, in his boyhood, ritualized the communal interdependence of farmers, reapers and womenfolk: Bloomfield’s letter on the subject is full of quiet satisfaction at rural life experienced vicariously at the consequent reunion of his family: Here rural, trade, and family celebrations coincide: in Honington Hannah participates in the horkey; in London Robert celebrates St. Crispin’s day with other cordwainers; also in London brother Nat’s family bring the Bloomfields together for a party. The reality behind such rural poems as “The Horkey,” is a family straddling city and country and occupying the social habitus of each.

8.         It was a brief moment. Dispersed across town and village, the Bloomfields were rarely able to, in his words, “kill more than two birds with one stone.” The letters show Bloomfield instead, like Wordsworth, attempting to repossess his rural childhood home. He did this by using the wealth poetry brought him to buy the cottage his mother had rented, letting his relatives live there. This scheme made little economic sense: what drove Bloomfield was the emotional pull of his home village and his need for a family togetherness he had lost when sent away to London as a youth. This need was not met: after his mother’s death Bloomfield found, predictably, that the house made him an absentee landlord, embroiled in legal disputes with once-friendly neighbors over rights to the garden and charged with ever-mounting repair bills while his resident relatives seemed ungrateful or begged for more financial help. Eventually, as relations soured under the pressure of the financial strain Bloomfield suffered after his booksellers’ bankruptcy, he felt reluctant to revisit the place: he could no longer sustain its image as a symbol of boyhood and familial community; it now spoke of his relatives’ expectation that he, having made money, would provide for them, of his own sadness that they were now his clients rather than his peers, and of his disappointment that he could no longer afford to maintain it.

9.         If Bloomfield could not return to Honington, he could get as near as was possible given the necessity of being in London to attend to his publications. Almost the first thing he did when the poetry began to sell was to quit the crowded East End, retire from shoemaking, and become one of a social class that mushroomed in this period—a suburbanite. The suburbs as we know them today were a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, producing a tamed and domesticated simulacrum of the remembered countryside, leisure-time idylls of green in miniature garden-plots that were both retired and accessible from the city, where the suburbanites worked. The outlook of the growing class of people who lived like this—the clerks who, like Charles Lamb and Dickens’s Wemmick, worked in the increasing number of counting houses, offices, and chambers of the imperial and governmental city—found expression in a new kind of verse, ornamental and decorative, that eschewed the full-blown classicism of the epic and the large-scale loco-description of the georgic (both styles associated with the landowning gentry and aristocracy). The suburban was pretty, sentimental, bejeweled, representing the democratization of taste in a class that read magazines and novels rather than Latin and Greek poetry.

10.         Bloomfield was not Keats or Leigh Hunt, two poets whose early writing, Nicholas Roe shows, was criticized as the suburban work of writers who had never known the real countryside. He avoided excessive ornamentation, garden settings, and tricked-out diction—all facets of Leigh Hunt’s verse that aroused the ire of traditionalist critics. Nevertheless, his letters reveal that he set out to choose a home that relocated the idealized virtues and pleasures of the country in miniature at the edge of the city. His cottage next to the Shepherd and Shepherdess Inn on the City Road, was situated at commercial London’s margin, where workhouses and almshouses ran out into smallholdings, gardens, and fields. Bloomfield cultivated the garden there, and ensured his family learnt to do so too, as a letter from his daughter Mary to her older sister reveals: “the first thing I have to tell you,” she wrote, “is of the garden, our lobernam will not blow so much as we thought it would, we have got two mugs full of butterflowers, and we have some beans coming up, this is holiday work and many people are crowding by our gate” (letter 163, 3 June 1805). She returned to the subject a week later, “You wanted to know about the garden. I first tell you the beans are growing very high, a good deal of your sweet Williams is dead, and your nut tree is very well, we are going to have a crop of scarlet beans over the grass plat, my father’s thistle will not thrive; Charlesis Cherry tree grows very well, shot has got a nut tree and some butter flowers” (letter 166, 10 June 1805).

11.         Bloomfield’s position on the margin gave him a double knowledge that neither East Enders nor Suffolk villagers possessed—a double knowledge that helped make his poetry unique. He used this double knowledge not just to drive his yearning to articulate a rural world he knew to be fragile, but also to demand realism about country and city. It allowed him to achieve a conscious recollection of country customs in plain, rustic language, before these customs were submerged by urban fashions and capitalist agriculture. In a letter of 2 September 1802, for instance, he criticized affected diction and uncolloquial word order in poetry (much like Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads), extending his argument to cover pictorial representations of the rustic:

Had Bloomfield not, as a youth, read the magazines available in the shoemakers’ workshop (but unlikely to have come his way on a Suffolk farm) he would not have learnt to compose verse at all. He was, in fact, in the rare position of being able to benefit from both city and country: his rural tales benefited from his knowledge of contemporary taste as set out in town-based periodicals as well as from the authenticity that stemmed from his early upbringing on the land.

12.         Bloomfield’s suburban cottage was, nonetheless, a retreat from the city proper. In moving to London’s fringe, he was retiring from business—from the trade of shoemaking and from the incessant visitors who, keen to view the phenomenon of a laboring-class poet, had troubled him in his cheap lodgings. From the edge of London, he could supervise his works through the press and call on his literary acquaintances, without becoming a celebrity and having to appear on demand for any gentleman who wished to satisfy his curiosity and advise him what to read. The suburbs for Bloomfield—and here he was proleptic of the phenomenon Dickens fictionalized in Wemmick—were a daily retreat from an urban intercourse from which he could not altogether withdraw, an intercourse he found inimical not just for its crowdedness (although certainly for that) but also for the demeaning of human relationships by the pressures of market-driven work-discipline. Matters came to a head when the Duke of Grafton, his Suffolk patron, found him a job in the busy Seal Office, sealing legal contracts and charters (in a form of tax collection). Bloomfield’s letter on the subject (to his brother George, 29 February 1803)—a cry of desperation—reads as if written by the narrator of Blake’s “London” imprisoned by “each chartered street,” for it highlights the mental toll taken by the binding of self to bureaucratic and commercial institutions—the lack of privacy and self-command, the need to prepare a public face, the slavery to the new discipline of clock-time and office-hours, the reduction of human interaction to overworked clerk and demanding client:

Charles Lamb wrote of his clerk’s work in Leadenhall Street as a form of slavery to the East India Company; for Bloomfield less than a mile away at Temple Bar, the situation was exacerbated by his dislike of being a celebrity and having his private feelings and actions tattled about in the London and Suffolk newspapers and his name used by quack doctors in their advertisements.

13.         Beyond the suburbs lay solace in the hills. When depressed by the city’s demands, Bloomfield took to making solitary walking tours, refreshing himself with a leisured consumption of nature in which he was, for a few days, his own master, his time and space his own. These tours were a reaction against his lack of a stable place in which independence, self-respect, and rural community could be sustained, when even the suburban retreat on the City Road became prey to the pressure of business and when his boyhood home in Honington seemed polluted by disputes with family and patron. So Bloomfield went to Dover and to Dorking, recording his trips in intimate and informal letters that bear comparison with Coleridge’s descriptions of his 1802 walking tour in the Lakes and with Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. They represent, that is to say, a new kind of tour-journalism reflecting a new social practice: the pedestrian tour was the creation of a class of writers (Romantics, as they were later called) who, dissociating themselves from gentleman and women tourists for reasons of poverty and politics, eschewed the horse and carriage and asserted their liberty and independence as solitary wanderers in nature. Like Wordsworth, Bloomfield was an urbanite visiting countryside places he felt emotionally connected to by virtue of his rural upbringing but in which he had no present-day social or economic place. Like Coleridge, he was self-conscious of this anomalous status and was ready to record the funny side of being out of place wherever he visited. As such he was an unwitting pioneer of a practice of nature recreation and nature writing that became, and remains, one of the main pursuits of Britain’s suburban masses—a practice of countryside rambling that still has its dedicated organizations and magazines. The description he made of his Surrey tour in 1803, for instance, has the features we have come to see as familiar to the genre—unexpected adventures, hill country, romantic views, and assertions about nature’s restorative powers:

Bread and cheese was to be Bloomfield’s dinner increasingly in later years. After Wild Flowers (1806) his output declined and sales of his publications tailed off. In 1812 his booksellers went bankrupt, depriving him of his income. Much money went to supporting relatives and as donations made by his wife to the prophetess Joanna Southcott. In 1811 he moved from the City Road to the Bedfordshire village of Shefford, seeking to reduce his expenses and to rediscover the placedness in village life that he recalled in his Suffolk youth—a placedness impossible for him to reconstitute in Suffolk because that place had become vitiated by disputes. Some of his early letters from Shefford revel in finding it there instead. In July 1814, for instance, he sent his daughter Hannah (2-3 July 1814) a description of the village celebration of Napoleon’s defeat that is a comic masterpiece, Dickensian in its celebratory yet humorous portrait of village life as a teeming cavalcade in which all are united in sensual enjoyment. Here Bloomfield’s evocation plays upon the shared knowledge he and Hannah, his daughter and correspondent, have of the people involved. If there is an occasional touch of sentimentality, this is because Bloomfield has a lot invested in his own and his family’s incorporation in the rural community. As the comparisons with London’s Vauxhall Gardens suggest, metropolitan entertainment remains a reference point: the country is engaged with and judged against the city. The country festival—the social expression of that community—and his description—its literary realization—dramatize the incorporation of incomers from London: they show the Bloomfields are at home, accepted in the village where the traditions of rural Englishness still flourish. Quietly in play in the letter is a self-consciousness about national identity: to be English, Bloomfield suggests, is to appreciate and participate in such bucolic communal pleasures. Hogarth’s “March of the Guards to Finchley,” Hone’s Every Day Book, and Cobbett’s Rural Rides present a similar comic vision of national character, in which ale-drinking figures loom large. As a small farmer, Cobbett would organize traditional rural sports on the village green, seeking to renew traditional English customs in which all rural classes participated, as a counterweight to the increasing class hostility between landlords and farmers on the one side and their laborers on the other. Bloomfield is delighted to discover what Cobbett tried to revive, common customs both licensing and limiting the expression of appetite and eccentricity, ensuring the patriotic occasion remains jovial rather than riotous.

14.        Things changed after 1815. The depressions experienced nationwide by a newly centralized economy left Bloomfield and his family dependent on charity and poor relief, as they did so many others. Their era of mobility ended by poverty, Shefford became a place that Bloomfield often could not afford to leave: he stayed there isolated by ill-health and depression. Likewise his brother George became trapped in Suffolk, as is revealed in a late autobiographical letter sent by George some years after Robert died (to W. Weston, circa 1830). George’s response to his pauperdom is Uriah Heepish humility towards the gentlemen who gave him charity. His anger at the poverty he movingly describes is displaced instead onto other would-be laboring-class writers who come to visit him:

Too poor to travel, reluctant to criticize the gentlemen landowners whom the Napoleonic wars had enriched, George Bloomfield found himself lonely and broken, regretting his literary ambitions but still compliant enough to write, at his patrons’ request, a poem condemning those of his class who, starving, were burning ricks to protest at the price of corn, kept high to profit landowners: George wrote these lines in 1831: they are a testament to the failure of the traditional rural community, its local paternalism shrunk to an empty gesture. They are also symptoms of changed times, as was Robert’s own correspondence with the husband of his friend and admirer, the gentlewoman Mary Lloyd Baker with whom he had toured the Wye valley in 1807. Mary having died in 1812, Lloyd Baker remarried and spent a fortune on building a new country seat for himself. He reentered Bloomfield’s life in 1821, sending a banknote to a poet now impoverished by his bookseller’s bankruptcy, but also in order to police him ideologically so as to ensure he did not agitate his fellow poor villagers: One-off aid comes with the threat of its withdrawal if Bloomfield does not agree to have his private life monitored to ensure its compliance with Tory and Evangelical, Church and State, conservatism. Bloomfield’s reply was dignified but firm: Lloyd Baker was not satisfied. He wrote again, applying more pressure: if Bloomfield would declare he was “not hostile to the Church or Government of this country as each now exists, I am inclined to hope that something may yet be done for you” (letter 353, 29 May 1821). Bloomfield’s reply to this, a vindication of his private views, was, between the lines, furious:

15.         Letters of the Lloyd Baker kind are grim evidence of the ideological strife of post-war Britain: they place in stark illumination the repression by which the ruling classes maintained their grip on power, all the while fearing revolution. Bloomfield remembered the disinterested patronage of the old Duke of Grafton, Prime Minister in an earlier era, who had supported him as a fellow Suffolk man without ever expecting political or religious conformity to his views, or even public praise of his beneficence. He knew he was living through a reactionary era, in which the classes were polarized, and his public response was to create, in his final collection of poems May Day with the Muses (1822), an ideal scenario in which, to celebrate the traditional May Day festivities, a squire invites the villagers to recite poems about village life. The squire thus renews old customs and patronizes, in the best sense, rustics who are able to voice their rural experience as verse. Clearly, this is wish-fulfillment on Bloomfield’s part: not only does he imagine that to be a rural poet is to be a cherished villager and vice versa, but also that poetry is a face-to-face oral activity of a united community. The benevolent squire, moreover, respects tradition and exacts no political toll for his benevolence, which he in fact regards as his duty. Meanwhile, the individual poems that the villagers recite also tell of a traditional community in which authority is vested in a single figure who can therefore be addressed, appealed to, and even, potentially, rebuked and chastised face to face. In the earlier verse-tale “The Broken Crutch,” Bloomfield had contemplated the possibility of just such a rebuke, should the squire turn out to be abusing the innocence of a village girl. In the event, the squire’s intentions are pure: he marries her, and her uncle does not need to beat him. The ideal village, for Bloomfield, is self-policing: the squire respects his tenants and they him. This was an old-fashioned and forlorn hope, perhaps, in face of the capitalization of farming, but it was one to which the conservative Wordsworth, Southey, and Gilpin, also subscribed as did the radical Cobbett—a Romantic rural paternalism.

16.        Bloomfield’s only public political discourse was his poetry. His claim to Lloyd Baker that he had kept a vow to make no declarations of opinion was true. Not a political thinker, he refused to become involved in radical writing and publishing, not necessarily through lack of sympathy but because radicals’ forthright and frank avowals seemed to him too exclusive of doubt, difference, and ambiguity, too easily certain and too egotistic. Like Clare in “To a Fallen Elm,” he resented radical campaigners’ assumption that because they were of his class they necessarily spoke for him, and he suspected their motives might include self-promotion. Despite, therefore, his private conversations with Horne Tooke and Hardy, men tried for treason for their radical campaigning, he was sharply critical of Thomas Paine when Paine’s disciple and bookseller, Thomas Clio Rickman, presumed, in an over-familiar way, that he would be keen to have him sell his poems:

17.        The abiding theme of Bloomfield’s correspondence is the control of his own words—the very issue that most plagued his admirer John Clare. Writing freed him from wage labor for sixteen hours per day as a shoemaker. In terms of time, life habits, and money it gave him a precarious independence as an agent on a newly capitalized popular publishing market. It also subjected him to the pressures of the market while at the same time he was not free from the expectations of the patrons who had helped get The Farmer’s Boy published. His most hands-on patron was the Suffolk gentleman Capel Lofft, who expected, as the price for the advice and literary connections he made available to Bloomfield, to have his own views published in the form of prefaces and notes to the poems. These views embarrassed Bloomfield: Lofft included irrelevant and vain justifications of his own political conduct in the Preface to The Farmer’s Boy and added ridiculously fulsome and insipid commentary in footnotes to Rural Tales. The booksellers responded to public demand and sought the removal of these notes in the second edition; Lofft, insulted, insisted they remain. Bloomfield, caught between patron and market, tried in letter after letter to negotiate with both, while maintaining his own dignity. Ultimately, to his own anguish, he failed: Lofft chose to sulk, regarding himself as betrayed, and Bloomfield lost his first supporter, despite a willingness to compromise to a degree. But he would neither simply acquiesce to Lofft’s will nor toady to him: he retained his independence but at a cost that showed him forcefully that his writing was the subject of competition by others. Bloomfield was, his letters reveal, caught in what we now know was a transitional stage from the eighteenth-century norm of publishing under patronage, with subscribers funding the work, to the nineteenth-century convention of selling via publishers to a mass market. Caught between patrons’ and booksellers’ demands, he struggled to retain possession of his own writerly self, to avoid becoming alienated from his own dearest words. Even well-meaning patrons pressured him, assuming it their prerogative to intervene on his behalf (as they thought) without first asking him. Thus the wealthy patron Lord Buchan, whose salon Bloomfield had visited in 1802, sent in 1806 to Bloomfield’s publishers, a private letter Bloomfield had written to him after the visit, in which Bloomfield confesses his shyness in polite company and apologizes for breaking down into tears. Buchan requested the publishers to include it in Wild Flowers along with Buchan’s own description of the occasion, so as to promote the sale. The private letter reveals Bloomfield’s insecurity about appearing before his social superiors:

When Bloomfield heard from the publishers of Buchan’s request to publish their private correspondence, he politely insisted on retaining control of his own words and on succeeding on his own merits, without the cachet provided by publishing letters of recommendation from the socially powerful. He would not risk appearing to be a creature of a Lord who had solicited for favor—an honorable decision which it required considerable temerity, considering the disparity in rank between Buchan and himself, to make: Independence was indeed a delicate matter, almost impossible for the laboring-class writer to sustain. But Bloomfield was adamant, reserving his contempt for his elder brother George, on whom he had once depended, when George would not stand up for him but instead toadied to Capel Lofft: After this, a once frequent and friendly correspondence between the brothers lapsed for seventeen years. Bloomfield wrote again only when he knew he was gravely ill. He had not been able to preserve his family intact in face of the social pressures that authorship produced.

18.        He found compensation—for some years—in the friendship of a gentle family of an unusual kind. The Sharp family was a philanthropic one, the best known of whom was Granville, the anti-slavery campaigner. It was, however, through the younger generation, a network of sisters and wives, that Bloomfield entered the extended circle. The married sister, Mary Lloyd Baker, wrote to him admiringly of his poetry and soon he was invited to the family’s houses in Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Northamptonshire. There he was delighted to find admiring female company that made no demands upon him. The Sharp women neither sought to ride on the back of his writing nor to make him perform for them. In their company he relaxed, flirting and joking at their country houses. And since the women were not heads of the households they did not concern themselves with money and social authority as gentlemen did. Bloomfield was able to feel valued as part of sisterly and feminine world based on nature-love. The women appreciated poetry; they sketched; they toured the Wye valley, taking Bloomfield with them. In accessing the rural world through them, Bloomfield experienced it differently: it was not the countryside he met on his solitary pedestrian tours, nor the Suffolk village world of work and customs that he hoped to rediscover in Shefford, but a feminized world of beauty disinterestedly appreciated and shared at leisure. Bloomfield flourished in it, and was freed to exercise his talent for flirtatious humour, as a letter of 22 June 1804 reveals:

The many letters to the Sharp sisters may prompt us to a new perspective on Bloomfield in particular and laboring-class poets in general—a perspective showing that he and they flourished in a feminized literary and social milieu that was itself growing rapidly, as female readers valued nature-writing and as more and more female poets popularized a kind of poetry that was not associated with the kind favored by ruling-class men—neither with classical genres, nor political satire, nor the representation of patrons’ country estates. Bloomfield, as revealed for the first time by his correspondence, was not simply a “peasant poet” chiefly valuable for his portrait of labor and for his symbolic position as the voice of the laboring classes. He was a varied—and often comic—writer of intimate prose and verse whose articulations of the struggles he faced are valuable not simply as symptoms of the dilemmas faced by laboring-class writers, or as illustrations of the social world he inhabited, but also—and principally—as sensitive, honest, innovative, and successful negotiations of the consequences, for one in his marginal position on the edge of both, of the changing relationship between country and city, and masters and markets.