The tendency to associate the value of a particular literary work with the
personal probity of its author had characterized the polite reception of
laboring-class poetry ever since Oxford professor Joseph Spence wrote his
influential account of Stephen Duck in the early eighteenth century. Emphasizing
his industriousness, contentment, and piety, Spence praised the way that Duck
displayed “so many Merits, and so much Humility join’d together,” evincing, for
example, a preference for the religious and moral writings of Addison rather than
the low burlesques of street literature (27). From Stephen Duck to John Clare, the
laboring-class poet was expected by the polite to conform to a model of exemplary
private virtue, diligent, dutiful, and suitably distanced from what were perceived
to be the vulgar elements of collective plebeian life.For the polite reception of plebeian poetry in these terms, see
Christmas 48-49. But this image acquired a new urgency with the growth
of popular radicalism in the late eighteenth century, and especially amidst the
counter-revolutionary climate that witnessed, with the publication of
The Farmer’s Boy in 1800, the transformation of Robert
Bloomfield from anonymous shoemaker to literary celebrity.
Indeed, shortly after Bloomfield’s death in 1823, the editor of his
Remains, his friend Joseph Weston, sought to establish the
poet’s posthumous reputation by commending not only the excellence of his verse,
but also the spotlessness of his character. And it was precisely to counter
damaging rumors concerning his allegedly irregular religious beliefs, at a time
when such beliefs were regarded as potential accessories of insurrection, that
Weston set about to defend the poet’s personal morality. “The virtues . . . of
this excellent man,” proclaimed Weston, “did not protect him from the shafts of
calumny; on a point too, which . . . must have wounded his sensitive heart, for it
chilled the affection of his earliest friends. The world will learn with
astonishment, that Bloomfield has been traduced on the subject of religion!—Robert
Bloomfield!—whose life was one pure and gentle stream of overflowing kindness;—in
whose meek and quiet spirit there was ‘
indeed no guile;’ whose
conversations and writings were ever filled with incentives to piety” (1: xx-xxi).
As several contributors to this issue point out, among those friends most troubled
by rumors of Bloomfield’s dangerous religious and political views was T. J. Lloyd
Baker. In a series of letters of 1821, Lloyd Baker demanded that the poet, then
experiencing severe poverty and ill health, clarify his beliefs for the peace of
mind of his supporters. The letters implied that Bloomfield’s wife’s devotion to
the provincial servant-prophetess, Joanna Southcott, had somehow rubbed off on the
poet, leading him to forgo church attendance, as if religious heterodoxy were a
natural stepping stone to infidelity. Worse still, Lloyd Baker had heard rumors
that Bloomfield had got into the habit of reading radical periodical publications,
which aimed to overthrow the established government. And from these “two
circumstances,” Lloyd Baker concluded, “the idea” had spread that Bloomfield had
“imbibed Deistical & Republican principles”—beliefs “frequently united in the
same persons” (letter 351, 23 May 1821). Such rumors had apparently led many of
Bloomfield’s polite friends—and it was only the friendship of the affluent that
Lloyd Baker thought it was worthwhile preserving—to withdraw their support,
respect, and financial aid. But although professing to write with the intention of
restoring the goodwill of his polite friends, this was conditional on an
appropriately conservative response, and Lloyd Baker later conceded that it would
be “highly wrong in any person . . . to associate with, & to give countenance
to a man” desirous of undermining the “Church or Government of this country”
(letter 353, 29 May 1821). Understandably, Bloomfield was offended by the letter,
not least because none of these supposed friends were presently providing any
financial assistance whatsoever. He was also clearly incensed at the assumption
that his personal life was the proper object of surveillance by people of a
superior social class, a feeling that had plagued him throughout his literary
career, whether he was regarded as a “curiosity” or, as in this instance, a
“dangerous man” (letter 351). But perhaps what infuriated Bloomfield most of all
was the fact that the letters forced him to compromise his independence by
explicating his views on two subjects, religion and politics, which, in the year
he first entered the polite literary scene, he had resolved not to discuss either
in his intimate letters or in his public writings.
This essay takes as its point of departure Bloomfield’s repeated and strenuous
claim in his correspondence that he saw himself as a poet, not a politician. It
should be stressed that this was a position Bloomfield maintained to people of all
political persuasions: radical, liberal, and conservative. As he wrote in 1804 to
the bookseller, poet and republican, Thomas Clio Rickman, “I . . . have four years
past made a determination to be nutral in Politicks and Religion . . . I
must and will be as private a Man as pastoral poetry will
permit me to be, or subjects that involve not creeds and systems of which all the
world knows I have had small means of judging” (letter 129, 29 May 1804). Such a
comment apparently endorsed the age-old dictum that those engaged in manual work
did not possess the leisure necessary for formulating accurate political
judgments, an idea endlessly repeated in loyalist propaganda from the 1790s
onward. “How can we expect to receive pure instruction,” asked one clergyman, “if
we . . . draw our notions of national policy from the lips of a labourer or
mechanic?” (Hurdis 41). But Bloomfield had a deep respect for the intellectual
capacity of rural and urban workers, and he was contemptuous of the tendency of
the rich and polite to denigrate the experiences, expressions, and aspirations of
laboring people. “I have heard more sense and truth in a tap-room, than I have
sometimes heard in better company; and there is nothing more striking to me . . .
than that total ignorance of the manner of living among
the poor . . . of what they talk, and of what they think! Nothing to me has
appeared more strange or more disgusting, than finding amongst those ranks, raised
above the mechanic and labourer, such a mean opinion of the poor!” (
Remains 2: 71-72). Furthermore, as this comment attests,
Bloomfield did express strong beliefs on a range of social and economic questions,
though these did not fit neatly into the polarized political culture
characteristic of the post-revolutionary period.
All this seems to support the view that Bloomfield pandered to the conservative
impulses of the polite reading public by disingenuously representing himself as an
exclusively pastoral poet, as unconcerned with political subjects as the rural
laboring people he idealized in his poetry (Sales 18-22). And it is true that
throughout Bloomfield’s career, both detractors and sympathizers often described
him simply as “the Farmer’s Boy.” For William Hazlitt, for example, this
appellation aptly reflected the fact that “his Muse has something not only rustic,
but menial in her aspect . . . Bloomfield never gets beyond his own experience;
and that is somewhat confined” (145). But Bloomfield’s poetry has recently been
shown to disclose a complex engagement with contemporary political debate, drawing
eclectically on the wide variety of radical discourses to which he had been
exposed during his long association with urban artisan culture (Christmas 27-48;
White 10-25, 132-42). Even so, the distinction Bloomfield made between poetry and
politics deserves to be taken seriously, for his correspondence reveals this to be
more than just a marketing ploy, and it sheds much light on the difficulties faced
by plebeian autodidacts during this era of political agitation and reaction. While
for obvious reasons this particular laboring-class poet clearly felt more
comfortable commenting on political subjects in his private letters than in his
literary publications, it is of enormous interest, I think, that his letters
nevertheless communicate a general desire to find in poetry a space apart from
divisive political debate, even when it might have been safe to admit
otherwise.
Before examining these issues, it is important to recall that the concept of
natural genius flourished in polite society at the same time as the political
horizons of plebeians were broadening, a development initiated by the Wilkes
affair and then massively escalated by the British response to the French
Revolution.For an unrivalled account of
this long view of the development of popular radicalism, see Clark
141-57. The rehabilitation of Shakespeare and the cult of Ossian,
together with a new degree of emphasis on the primitivism of “peasant” poetry, all
occurred against a background of polite anxiety about the increasing political
activity of laboring people. In the 1770s, for example, the author of
The Minstrel lamented that “All ranks are run mad with
politics”; and Elizabeth Montagu—patron of plebeian poetry and author of an
important essay on original genius—despaired that “Treason was talked in every
Alehouse, and sung in every street” (Forbes 1: 158; Blunt 2: 76). Unlike these
debating, ballad-singing plebeian patriots, the embodiment of original genius was
imagined as a quiet individual, whose strong sensibility and powerful imagination
ideally found succor in domestic and natural spaces, away from the tumult of
collective popular leisure or public political action. To quote one aesthetician,
such a person conceived poetry as a “sanctuary from which the noise and folly of
mankind are excluded,” a “refuge from the numerous perplexities of human life”
(Duff 363). In this context, given that every laboring-class poet had to identify
as a natural genius in order to satisfy polite taste, secure patronage, and
therefore get into print, this theory provided a potential vehicle for drawing
upwardly aspiring artisans away from the expanding sphere of popular radicalism.
The significance of this is reinforced by the fact that not only did many plebeian
reformers have literary aspirations, but, besides politics, poetry was the primary
means by which artisans could satisfy their intellectual ambitions.
Perhaps the most intriguing example of the literary
aspirations of plebeian political activists is the case of the London
Corresponding Society member Richard “Citizen” Lee, as described by Mee
151-66. Well before the shoemaker Allen Davenport embarked on his career
as a Spencean and Chartist radical, for example, he was fantasizing about cutting
a figure in the world of literature, seeking to climb “Mount Parnassus” and
envisioning himself as a “little rustic bard” (5).
To a large extent, Bloomfield genuinely embraced the idea of natural genius and
gained much confidence from its privileging of feeling, inspiration, and
simplicity over learning and artifice. Plebeian autodidacts characteristically
experienced great discouragement in their literary endeavors as they confronted
the aesthetic standards and other invisible boundaries that had formerly policed
access to polite culture. As Davenport wrote, reading the poetry of Pope operated
to all but “extinguish every spark of my poetic genius. I felt ashamed of my own,
as I now thought, wretched doggerel” (15-16). Likewise, in the year before
Bloomfield would be buoyed up by the overwhelmingly positive reception of his
first published poem, he remarked of the supreme arbiter of neoclassical taste
that “Dr. Johnson . . . is a ‘Thwackum’ amongst criticks; I allways look at him
and his abilities with a mixture of reverence and anger” (letter 16, 8 September -
6 October 1799). This anger was at least partly informed by Bloomfield’s rejection
of the assumption that the republic of letters was the exclusive preserve of
classically educated men of leisure, a notion evidenced by Johnson’s condescending
dismissal of an earlier shoemaker poet James Woodhouse: “better . . . furnish the
man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems. He
may make an excellent shoemaker, but can never make a good poet” (Boswell
444).
By contrast, while Wordsworth had in some measure simply placed the authority of
men of leisure on a different footing, Bloomfield was greatly encouraged by the
polite Romantic poet’s attempt “to come near,” if not actually speak, “the
language of Men” (letter 94, 2 September 1804). After reading
Lyrical Ballads in 1801, he wrote excitedly to his brother, George,
“if there is no poetry in them I will give up my pretension to feeling and Nature.
I can trust you I think to be struck with them, first with the extreem simplicity,
and then for what I before mentioned, NATURE” (letter 52, 19 April 1801). The
potentially leveling implications of this conception of poetry were not lost on
Bloomfield, and, in his first address to the public, his preface to
Rural Tales, he declared “I feel peculiarly gratified in
finding that a poor man in England may assert the dignity of Virtue, and speak of
the imperishable beauties of Nature, and be heard, and heard, perhaps, with
greater attention for his being poor” (iv). In this sense, Bloomfield found the
theory of natural genius immensely attractive, for it popularized an aesthetic
which enabled him to circumvent at least some of the obstacles to polite literary
culture.
But if the idea of natural genius permitted plebeian poets to enter the republic
of letters, it did so under terms that emphatically excluded their participation
in the public sphere of politics. In an early issue of the official journal of the
London Corresponding Society, a contributor argued that it was “once the
distinguished office of poetry to awaken and cherish [the] heroic virtues,” before
suggesting that, like liberty, such a function no longer prevailed in the present
“degenerate age” (
Moral and Political Magazine 1 [1796]:
26). And one of the aims of the journal was to reclaim for an artisan occupational
group the public purpose of poetry against what was perceived to be its
increasingly private range of concerns. For most commentators, however, the
qualities attributed to the natural genius—enthusiasm, imagination, simplicity,
sensibility, impetuosity, and wildness—remained a source of enormous value in the
context of poetic production. It was just that these qualities were conceived as
thoroughly incompatible with the more overtly rational skills thought necessary
for effective participation in political debate (Barrell 11-13).
Most famously, in a critique of the sentimental language of Edmund Burke, Mary
Wollstonecraft asserted that the natural genius was a figure too impulsive and too
controlled by the imagination to qualify for citizenship. Although Wollstonecraft
admired the “genuine enthusiasm of genius,” she consigned it to the “infancy of
civilization” for, in modern Britain, liberty was possible precisely because
“reason” had clipped the “wing of fancy” and the “youth” had become a “man” (28).
Small wonder, then, that Thomas Paine decided to pursue a course of self-education
in natural and social philosophy, noting that “I had some turn . . . for poetry;
but this I rather repressed than encouraged, as leading too much into the field of
imagination” (49). Nor is it surprising that John Thelwall would justify his
literary endeavors to a reading public still largely hostile to his former career
as a radical orator on the grounds that his proven failure in politics would mean
probable success in poetry. With a heavy dose of irony, Thelwall announced that
“since he has proved so bad a politician as to plunge himself and his family in
ruin . . . it ought to be regarded as an argument a priori in
favour of his poetical talent: that species of imprudence . . . having always been
considered as a distinguishing characteristic of those whom Apollo and the Muse
inspire” (xliv). To put it simply, what were thought to be assets in poetry
acquired a largely pejorative connotation when carried over to the sphere of
politics. This was particularly true for the prototypical plebeian poet, who was
routinely represented as a child of nature, a figure unassisted by civilization,
and therefore implicitly deficient in such mature, masculine attributes as reason,
self-command, and foresight.For an
excellent analysis of the way in which the “Child of Nature” trope restricted
the autonomy and authority of laboring-class poets, see Richardson
247-59.
Accordingly, the
British Critic began its review of
Bloomfield’s second publication,
Rural Tales, with an
acknowledgement that the periodical’s focus had shifted from a serious to a
trivial, if still gratifying, subject. “We are pleasingly called away from our
abstruser studies, by these productions of a genuine Child of Nature”; and the
review concluded by praising this “original genius” as the “genuine inspiration of
a mind, whose thoughts and feelings turn naturally to poetry” (
British Critic 19 [1802]: 338). Similarly infantilizing was the
conclusion of another critic that “if we behold in Thomson an elegant scholar
adorning the simple beauties of nature from the stores of a cultivated mind, we
see in Robert Bloomfield, a simple farmer’s boy, painting such scenes as no poet
need be ashamed” (Anderson 3: 391). The implication is that a laborer could be a
poet but not a poet and a scholar, a distinction which ensured that laboring-class
poetry was regarded as a relatively superficial, even childish, pursuit, permitted
to please but not to please and instruct. As Charles Lamb very bluntly put it, “I
have had the felicity of hearing George Dyer read out one book of ‘The Farmer’s
Boy.’ I thought it rather childish. No doubt there is originality in it . . . but
no
selection” (1: 162).
Bloomfield was surprised at receiving such a positive response from the
conservative press, primarily because his patron, Capel Lofft, was a prominent
radical figure and a member of the polite reform association, the Society for
Constitutional Information. In fact, Lofft had used the preface to
The Farmer’s Boy to express a number of political views, much
to the poet’s frustration. In a letter to his brother George, Bloomfield wrote of
the
British Critic and the
Anti-Jacobin
Review in the context of their admiration for
Rural
Tales, “they are
avowd partizans on the side of existing
Systems, and existing abuses, and . . . I may think
myself well off
to have escaped their lash” (letter 83, 3 May 1802). But the representation of the
plebeian poet as a natural genius found a congenial home in conservative culture,
undoubtedly because it enabled a talented and aspiring laborer to be celebrated
for possessing qualities which disqualified him from participating in the public
realm of politics.
In its review of
The Farmer’s Boy, for example, the
British Critic drew from the preface of the poem to
emphasize the fact that Bloomfield had conscientiously avoided a “combination
among . . . journeymen shoemakers,” projecting an image of a sensitive individual,
opposed to collective artisan activity (15 [1800]: 602). Yet, like most shoemaker
poets, Bloomfield remained proud of his artisan heritage, and he greatly admired
the socialized forms of knowledge generated in the workshop, an environment which
played a formative role in nurturing his intellectual and poetic endeavors.
The public orientation of much shoemaker
poetry, along with its expression of craft pride, often defied the model of
natural genius, as revealed by Keegan 195-217. “In our trade,” he wrote,
“when any one reads the newspapers or a book, by the neighbourly custom of sitting
all in one room . . . we have nothing to do, but to discuss the subject.
Community, is perhaps the point, to which those who say that
‘shoemakers are politicians,’ might trace the solution of their wonder” (
Remains 2: 91-92). Equally significant, he added, this custom
not only fostered the acquisition of political knowledge, but also intellectual
reflection of all sorts, again underscoring his belief in the dignity of the “talk
of the tap-room.” If the
British Critic sought to
distance Bloomfield from what was perceived as a vulgar and dangerous artisan
milieu, however, it simultaneously denied his ability to join the ranks of the
polite and to write poetry of a public or political character. “The writer’s
observations will not be found to have been very extensive . . . and he appears to
have attended to many minute circumstances, which would probably have escaped a
loftier mind” (
British Critic 15 [1800]: 602). Similarly,
the poem had “various errors and defects,” as if to confirm that Bloomfield
possessed genius, but not the authoritative rationality of the man of taste;
nevertheless, such blemishes, the review suggested, were outweighed by the
expression of “poetical feeling” and “warm and vigorous imagination,” with the
accompanying implication that
The Farmer’s Boy should be
read for its sentimental rather than its intellectual content (
British Critic 15 [1800]: 601). And this appeal to sensibility enabled
the
British Critic to subsequently disregard as an
irrelevance those “melancholy” “reflections” on the harvest home, which indicated
that the “author [had] received some impressions, probably at the
debating-society, of a questionable kind” (15 [1800]: 604).
But the idea of natural genius could also serve a decidedly radical purpose, and
George Dyer, for one, claimed to delight in those very “questionable” reflections
on the harvest home, which did, indeed, highlight the injustice and degeneracy of
contemporary society.This is not
surprising, given that Dyer had recently written a pamphlet, frequently quoted
in the plebeian radical press, which listed many of the same developments that
Bloomfield identified in the harvest home passage as causes of the oppression
of the poor: “the reduction of small farms . . . the extravagant appearance and
profits of farmers” and “the extravagancies and luxuries of individuals”
(103). A friend of Wordsworth, Dyer combined the identities of poet and
political activist during the 1790s, publishing several radical pamphlets and
actively participating in the democratic reform movement.For an account of Dyer’s literary and political activities and
preoccupations during the 1790s, see Roe 19-42. Through Capel Lofft, he
met and became friends with Bloomfield, whom he introduced into his polite
literary circles in the early 1800s. Of
The Farmer’s Boy,
Dyer described in a letter to Lofft how “it recalled to my mind those ages and
those countries in which the Poet and the Shepherd were more naturally united . .
. . Your Shepherd’s Boy with the poetical character that he undoubtedly possesses,
requires indeed no other name; poetry is more immediately the language of nature .
. . I can truly say I have been charmed with his Seasons, and that my heart echoes
back every thing said by you in the preface” (letter 51, 19 April 1801). This
conception of poetry as a literary form that had been debased by the advance of
commercial refinement constituted a cultural version of the age-old condemnation
of luxury, which became a staple of radical argument in the post-revolutionary
period. To quote Thelwall, “let us . . . labour to abolish luxury. . . . Let us .
. . persuade mankind to discard those tinsel ornaments and ridiculous
superfluities, which enfeeble our minds, and entail voluptuous diseases on the
affluent, while diseases of a more calamitous description overwhelm the oppressed
orders of society from the scarcity resulting from this extravagance” (Claeys 67).
In the process of increasing social inequality, so the logic ran, luxury corrupted
the taste of the polite, leading to the predominance of a form of literature
governed by the shallow imperatives of fashion. But if the theory of natural
genius could be hitched to a radical political argument, Dyer implicitly imagined
its embodiment, Bloomfield, as a pre-political subject, a “Shepherd’s Boy,” as
deficient in the mature, masculine virtue of reason as he was free from the
modern, feminine vice of sensuality.
And yet the image of the natural genius was also invoked in radical polemic as a
herald of revolutionary ardor, whose lack of exposure to polite learning and other
sorts of cultural refinement provided the basis for an authentic critique of the
subservience of the literary establishment to an aristocratic political system. In
an untitled poem he contributed to the
Moral and Political
Magazine, for example, Dyer proclaimed that the “poet’s untaught lays”
were essential to the extension of “Justice,” part of a “purer song” of “Freedom”
which served “Virtue’s cause” (1 [1796]: 95). The iconic figure in this respect,
of course, was Burns. Indeed, the “ploughboy poet” was celebrated in the same
magazine as an oppressed genius, whose neglect exemplified the prejudice of polite
culture and its associated refusal to encourage talent in and diffuse knowledge
among laboring people (
Moral and Political Magazine 2
[1797]: 48).
For the contradictory image of
Burns in radical culture, see Janowitz 67-69. But such an argument was
even more fraught with ambivalence. For it focused on the talent of the
“untaught,” “primitive” poet in order to justify an enlightenment belief in the
need to advance the improvement of laboring people, through the provision of
polite forms of knowledge no less than the support of plebeian varieties of
self-education, from reading groups to political associations.
In the biography of Bloomfield, written by his brother, George, and included in
the preface to
The Farmer’s Boy, it was noted that the
poet’s literary ambitions were fostered by a range of cultural institutions
available to artisan men in late eighteenth-century London, including newspapers,
periodicals, dissenting meeting houses, and debating societies.
For some reflections on the kind of ideas Bloomfield
encountered in these institutions, see Lucas 58-61. But in a footnote,
Lofft glossed the present state of one of these institutions after the passing of
the Gagging Acts in the mid-1790s: “It is another of the Constitutional
Refinements of these times to have fettered, and as to every valuable purpose,
silenced, these Debating Societies. They were at least, to say the lowest of them,
far better amusements than drunkenness, gambling, or fighting. They were no
useless Schools to some of our very celebrated Speakers at the Bar and in
Parliament; and, what is of infinitely more importance, they contributed to the
diffusion of Political Knowledge and Public Sentiment” (Bloomfield,
Farmer’s Boy vii). In this way, Bloomfield was held up by
Lofft to support the radical and liberal notion that the present climate of
surveillance and censorship threatened to stifle the moral and intellectual
improvement of laboring people, thereby leading to the growth of those brutish,
vulgar pastimes which had long been considered by individuals of all political
persuasions to be a lamentable hallmark of plebeian culture.
On the issues of refinement, poetic liberty, and popular education, Bloomfield
clearly shared many of these radical views, though he maintained a far less
censorious attitude to the demotic culture of laboring people. He certainly
welcomed at least some of the effects of the French Revolution and subscribed to
the principle that the freedom of the press was a vital index of liberty,
presently under assault by the government. “I still think that the general system
of instruction, and the downfall of the feudal rights of families, with the
present religious toleration &c are fruits of the revolution not to be
despised” he wrote to George, his most trusted correspondent during the early
stages of his career; and he then added “I should like to gossip with you face to
face . . . particularly on the subject of englands boast ‘the liberty of the
press’” (letter 133, 10 June 1804).Of
course, the notion of the freedom of the press as the “palladium of British
liberty” had a manifold range of political alignments and uses, as examined by
Keen 25-75. But Bloomfield was a pragmatist rather than an ideologue,
neither embracing a utopian or party political program nor envisioning the reform
of parliament as the primary solution to social and economic injustice.
Something of his general outlook may be indicated by his letter to the minor poet,
Samuel Jackson Pratt. In Pratt’s protest poem
Bread, the
poverty that became so controversial during the famine years of 1795-1796 and
1800-1801 was represented not simply as the result of a series of bad harvests,
but as the consequence of an array of unjust human developments, including
enclosure, monopolization, the deregulation of the grain trade, and the
introduction of the gentleman farmer, leaving the poor “robb’d of each right that
God bestows on man” (14). After receiving an adulatory letter and copy of the poem
from Pratt, Bloomfield replied:
Your letter and your Poem on so great and
so interesting a subject as Bread, came to hand last
week. 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, 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 . . . . You, Sir, go much deeper into the subject than I
am able to follow you; I could never satisfy myself, that, increase of
population and increase of individual comforts are not enemys and strangers to
each other. (letter 87, 28 May 1802)
Such a position did not fit
comfortably within the dividing lines of contemporary political debate. Most
obviously, it combined the Malthusian notion that a growing population inevitably
led to a rise in inequality with the rough agrarian egalitarianism of Goldsmith,
which was based on the contrary belief that a large, increasing rural population
was absolutely essential to the health of the nation. To some extent, this was
characteristic of the way Bloomfield, perhaps drawing on his artisan heritage,
felt confident to assert an independence of viewpoint on social and economic
questions, even to people of a superior class. As he wrote to his mother, “Don’t
be alarm’d for my safety I am no politician . . . I am my own master yet, and mean
to remain so” (letter 42, 3 November 1800).
But the reference to Goldsmith is particularly revealing in light of Bloomfield’s
claim that the discussion of political issues was inappropriate in pastoral
poetry. For not only did
The Deserted Village directly
address such subjects, but Goldsmith’s poem became thoroughly politicized during
the 1790s and beyond, giving expression to the grievances of rural and urban
workers alike. Accordingly, it was extracted in a number of radical plebeian
periodicals, from
Pig’s Meat (1 [1795]: 33-36) to the
Moral and Political Magazine (1 [1796]: 320), as well
as in later pamphlets on the condition of the rural laboring poor. In fact, in
1807, the author of one of these pamphlets argued, as Bloomfield everywhere
implied in his poetry, that a terrible decline in the condition of the rural
laboring poor had occurred “within the last half century,” and that, as a
consequence, rural leisure practices had to be respected and agricultural wages
had to be raised: “let the Peasant’s labour have its due” (Brewer 6, 14). On the
other hand, Bloomfield’s friend, the Devonshire poet, William Holloway, published
an anti-pastoral poem,
The Peasants Fate, in 1802, which
was lambasted in the conservative press, in part for borrowing its imagery and
subject matter from
The Deserted Village. To quote the
British Critic, just as the author was “full of
particular discontent and
universal benevolence,” so the poem lacked
feeling, failing to “raise it above flatness” (19 [1802]: 533-34). As evident in
an 1802 letter, Bloomfield followed the reviews of Holloway’s poetry, so he would
almost certainly have known that his friend was given short shrift for being one
of those writers who “profess to illuminate as well as to delight the public by
their poetical productions; and who think that questions of statistical and
political œconomy can be advantageously discussed in a series of descriptive
couplets” (
Monthly Review 40 [1803]: 98).
The reviewer ridiculed the basic premise of The Peasants Fate, as described in the poem’s preface:
“The drift of this little attempt is principally designed, (without adverting
to political argument,) to shadow forth the evils arising to the peasantry of
this country, from the system of engrossing small farms, and driving the
hereditary occupiers to the necessity of embracing a maritime or military life
for support, or being reduced to the most abject state of dependence, and
submitting to the galling hardship of becoming servants on the
spot where they once had been masters” (Holloway vi-vii). These
were also “evils” which Bloomfield criticized, directly or indirectly, in his
poetry and correspondence. Paradoxically, therefore, while Bloomfield’s
political opinions were informed by his reading of the poetry of rural complaint,
he must have become acutely aware that he was writing at a time when pastoral
poetry had been reclassified as an index of personal feeling, even as it was being
increasingly politicized.
Bloomfield was conscious of the fact that, particularly given his laboring-class
status, his poetry would be expected to have a purely private function. In his
first attempt to get
The Farmer’s Boy published, he wrote
to an unidentified bookseller that he intended the manuscript simply as an attempt
to put the “little events of my boyage into metre” and to present the result as a
gift to his mother (letter 6, before 21 June 1798). And this was reiterated by
Lofft in his preface to the first published version of the poem, to show that the
“Author, with a spirit amiable at all times,” was motivated by “duty and
affection” rather than “Fame or Advantage” (Bloomfield,
Farmer’s
Boy xvi). But Lofft seemed to ascribe to the older view of poetry as a
suitable arena for addressing public issues, though he may well have had
reservations about a laboring-class poet claiming to instruct, as well as to
please, people of higher social standing. After Bloomfield had repeatedly
requested his patron to remove or relocate some footnotes and other paratextual
comments from future publications, for example, Lofft resorted to the language of
class privilege, “renouncing . . . all future correspondence & conversation
with a clown who would so forget himself to me” (letter 197, 16 November 1806).
The quarrel began when Bloomfield, under pressure from acquaintances in the London
publishing scene, sought Lofft’s permission to omit from future editions some
radical remarks concerning the suppression of newspapers and debating societies.
“In his notes respecting Newspapers and Debating societies,” the poet later wrote
of his patron, “he had originally written and pertinaciously retained a downright
attack upon Government. . . . I still wish it was not there, for, I am not a
politician, nor never shall be” (letter 198, 19 November 1806).Bloomfield had also included a political gloss on
the harvest home passage in The Farmer’s Boy in the
form of a paratextual quotation from the work of the naturalist on Cook’s
second voyage to the Pacific, which comprised a denunciation of luxury, with
distinct leveling connotations. But this was before, he declared, “I had
considered the consequence of introducing even the appearance of politics into
a Rural production (let my own private notions be what they may)” (letter 62,
29 October 1801). For Bloomfield, however, the key principle at stake
was that such political remarks would take away from his work’s poetical
character. As he first explained to Lofft, without apparently pretending “to
dictate,” there was “a very general, if not universal opinion, that political
thoughts and references (however just in themselves) ought not to be seen . . .
where rural poetry only should be found” (letter 63, before 31 October 1801). Of
course, Bloomfield did write about rural subjects such as cruelty to animals in
ways which carried quite specific political connotations, as several critics have
recently identified (Christmas 27-48; White 10-25). But whatever he actually
believed about the relationship between politics and rural poetry, he was clearly
conscious that polite taste was predicated on the incompatibility of these two
discourses. At the same time, Bloomfield was also troubled by the fact that, in
the present climate of political polarization, Lofft’s radical sentiments would
inevitably cause controversy, alienating a large section of his polite readership.
In addition, he could hardly have failed to be incensed by the way in which the
polite political reformer was using his poem to demonstrate his credentials as a
disinterested citizen, while silencing the demands of his plebeian protégé. And in
this context, Bloomfield was quite right to think that the best method for
maintaining his cherished sense of independence was to avoid the topic of politics
altogether.
Indeed, Bloomfield’s worst fear was realized in dramatic fashion in 1802 when the
prominent conservative politician William Windham cited the preface of
The Farmer’s Boy in parliament during a debate on the
Bull-Baiting Act. The speech was part of an attack on the movement to reform the
manners of the poor; and to this end, Windham recited the descriptions of
Bloomfield reading newspapers and attending debating societies, together with
Lofft’s radical remarks on these subjects, to illustrate the malign effects of
promoting the intellectual pursuits of laboring people. More specifically, he
maintained that giving the “lower orders a character of greater seriousness and
gravity” by restricting “what were termed idle sports and useless amusements”
fertilized the growth of Jacobinism and Methodism, political radicalism, and
religious enthusiasm (
Parliamentary History 36 [1820]:
833). Needless to say, after reading an account of the speech, Bloomfield was
angry at having been used as a pawn in a political conflict he had hoped to avoid,
which amply confirmed his prediction that “some publick notice would be taken of
Mr. Lofft’s reflections in the prefatory part of the Farmer’s Boy. The lot has
fallen to Mr. W” (letter 88, 30 May 1802).
But Bloomfield was even more enraged by Windham’s denigration of the intellectual
capacity of the laboring poor. Of the former Secretary at War, he communicated to
his brother “I think the poor people of England have very little cause to thank
him for his compliment on the score of their capabilities and pursuits. We might
as well be totally without minds, for he seems to doubt the propriety of exerting
them, or of making an inward store of pleasure for ourselves. So much
of this speech is the most unadulterated aristocracy that I have ever heard”; and
with characteristic wit, he then inquired “where is the wisdom of saying that the
little sons of a little Taylor should amuse themselves with athletic
exercises? If we happen to think a moral page a better object to admire
than the frizzled forehead of a bull, and like the ascending of a lark in
preference to the mounting of a bull-dog, what has Mr. W to do with it?” (letter
88). This distinction between inward pleasure and collective leisure seems to
suggest that Bloomfield saw himself as a model of self-improvement, whose literary
talents and endeavors elevated him above his fellow artisans and laborers. Yet,
even though Bloomfield demonstrated an ambivalent attitude to popular
culture,See, for example, letter 199:
“I cannot help observing the great difference between an illdresst and a
well-dresst mob, and I must indeed be unfeeling and ungenerous to acknowledge
it. In our National Theatres I have often sided so far with the Patricians as
to wish the Plebeans at the Devel, not because they were such, (that I leave to
those who are weak enough, that is, proud enough,) but merely because they
would not be quiet.” he did not generally hold a pejorative view of
plebeian habits and recreations or sanction the polite movement to reform or
abolish the customs of laboring people.
In fact, Bloomfield conceived at least some of his poetry as an attempt to resist
this movement. Announcing his intention to avoid the “seriousness of a preacher,”
for example, he described his third publication,
Wild
Flowers, as a collection of “more . . . mirth . . . than many who know
me would expect, or than the severe will be inclined to approve” (x-xi). For
Windham, of course, the promotion of robust, manly pastimes and festivities was an
unabashed mode of social control, aimed at securing the contentment of the
laboring poor.
To some extent, Windham’s
perception of laboring people as an army in reserve might well have added to
Bloomfield’s anger. For he expressed frequent opposition to war and, in 1803,
when an upsurge in chauvinism witnessed even radicals support the war with
France, he strongly criticized the mobilization of the militia: “The measures
persued by Government are such as to cause here the greatest consternation and
alarm. Great numbers are entering as Vollunteers without knowing I doubt, what
they have to trust to, or what will be their privilidges. . . . As to real
invasion we deem it less threatening than an appeal to the exercise of rights
by those of our own land. . . . I detest, I had allmost said scorn the
profession of Soldier” (letter 112, 31 July-[2 August] 1803). In
response, Bloomfield wrote “the
common people of his native country,
are a rough set no doubt, but I dislike the doctrine of keeping them in their
dirt. . . . how can we consistently praise the inestimable blessing of letters and
not wish to extend it? Or why should the great and the wealthy confine the
probable production of intellectual excellence to their own class, and exclude, by
withholding the polish, all that might amongst the poor by nature be intended to
be Newtons and Lockes?” (letter 88). And yet, as evident in his last poem,
May Day with the Muses, this progressive commitment to
democratizing the republic of letters, to spreading the “
Empire of the
Mind,” as he called it, could and did coexist with a belief in the
dignity of the culture of laboring people.
For an illuminating analysis of May Day with the
Muses in these terms, see White 121-46.
Given these views, it is perhaps surprising that William Cobbett, who also
respected the intellectual abilities and recreational customs of the laboring
poor, would later condemn Bloomfield for turning conservative and writing against
the interests of his class of origin. The accusation came in the course of an
attempt to show that the virtues and talents formerly used to justify the
political authority of the patrician class were now only manifest in the populace,
with the result being that laborers had both the right and capacity to govern
themselves. Cobbett began by asserting that he was “willing to trust to the
talent, the justice and loyalty of the great mass of the people, and especially
that part of them, who raise the food, the raiment and the buildings, and who
fight the battles”; but he then cautioned that the “cause of the people has been
betrayed by hundreds of men . . . whom a love of ease and of the indulgence of
empty vanity have seduced into the service of bribing usurpers”; and among those
men he listed Bloomfield, “the Farmer’s-Boy author” who, so it was claimed, had
been “taken in tow, and pensioned for fear he should write for the
people” (
Political Register 34 [1819]: 980-81). The
allegation was remarkable not only for being untrue, but because Bloomfield had
largely made good on his resolution to avoid taking an explicit political position
in any of his public writings. To add insult to injury, Cobbett again pilloried
Bloomfield in a later work, arguing that if the poet “had placed no reliance on
the faithless Muses, his unfortunate . . . family would . . . have not been in a
state to solicit relief from charity. I remember that this loyal shoemaker was
flattered to the skies, and (ominous sign, if he had understood it) feasted at the
tables of some of the great. Have, I beseech you, no hope of this sort; and, if
you find it creeping towards your heart, drive it instantly away as the mortal foe
of your independence and your peace” (43-44). The assumption here was that to
participate in any form of polite culture, particularly one such as poetry which
privileged imagination over fact, was inevitably to weaken the resolve, distort
the mind, and so endorse the progress of refinement, with all its attendant evils
of luxury, corruption, and social inequality.
For Cobbett’s privileging of fact over imagination, along with
his associated skepticism of polite culture, see Whale 141-47. For
Cobbett, then, any decision Bloomfield might have made not to include politics in
his poetry was irrelevant, since poetic production was itself destructive of
political integrity, of industriousness, utility, and fairness.
To some extent, poetry did offer an attractive alternative to politics for many
plebeian autodidacts. In particular, it provided opportunities for personal
expression which enabled the laboring-class poet to feel a sense of freedom,
however partially or briefly, from the restraints on individual thought and
conduct characteristic of many areas of collective plebeian life, including, of
course, political organization. Perhaps this was why John Clare, who, like
Bloomfield, had strong political views, distrusted Cobbett for being a
propagandist with “no principles” and argued against “party matters” and the
“reform of mobs,” while claiming “I am no politician” (
Letters 560). And though Clare, again like Bloomfield, revered rural
popular culture, his solitary ways and literary ambitions were derided by his
neighbors, leading him to contend that “Scandal and Fame are cheaply purchased in
a Village the first is a nimble tongud gossip and the latter a credoulous and
ready believer who . . . believd any thing” (
By Himself
78). Bloomfield similarly felt that his literary celebrity alienated him from the
community at Shefford, and, when T. J. Lloyd Baker forced the poet to declare his
political hand amidst rumors of his dangerous radicalism, he denounced the
“slander” that circulated in “this vile little town” (letter 352, 25 May
1821).
But Bloomfield also had the disadvantage of writing in the three decades after the
French Revolution, when virtually every aspect of culture had become highly
politicized. Throughout his career, his work and public image were appropriated to
serve a political cause by people of a radical as well as a conservative
persuasion, and this must have reinforced the poet’s sense that politics was
utterly incompatible with the independence he so much wanted to preserve.
According to Bloomfield, even his fleeting encounters and birthplace were
scrutinized for their political implications. As he expressed to Lloyd Baker in a
brilliant attempt to highlight the unreasonableness, intrusiveness, and even
pettiness of his correspondent’s demands, not only had he kept company with
bastions of conservatism and radicalism alike, the Bishops Watson and Porteous no
less than the survivors of the treason trials, the polite reformer John Horne
Tooke and the plebeian dissident Thomas Hardy, but he had the “misfortune to be
born only six miles from the birthplace of Tom Paine!” (letter 354, 31 May-1 June
1821).