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BL Add. MS 28266, ff. 85–8 (autograph copy); published in 1809, as accompanying the Farmer’s Boy MS, pp. xx–xxii
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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I gave you a hint long ago that I was making rhymes. I now send the poem as a present to my Mother. It coming through your hands you will be at liberty to detain it as long as you please, and I have no doubt but some parts of it will please you. I would wish you to observe well the following remarks, and I wish you to be candid, if it should ever draw any remarks from you.
When I began it, I thought to myself that I could compleat it in a twelvemonth, allowing myself three months for each quarter; but I soon found that I could not, and indeed I made it longer than I at first intended.* Nine tenths of it was put together as I sat at work, where there are usually six of us; no one in the house have any knowledge of what I have employed my thoughts about when I did not talk.
I chose to do it in rhime for this reason; because I found allways that when I put two or three lines together in blank verse, or something that sounded like it, it was a great chance if it stood right when it came to be wrote down, for blank verse have ten syllables in a line, and this particular I could not adjust, nor bear in memory as I could rhimes. Winter, and half of Autumn were done long before I could find leisure to write them. In the Harvest Home you will find the essence of letters you have wrote formerly to London.
When I had nearly done it, it came strongly into my mind that
very silly things are somtimes printed, but by what means I know not. To try and
get at this knowledge I resolved to make some efforts of the sort; and what
encouraged me to go through with it was, that if I got laugh’d at, no one that I
cared for could know it, unless I myself told them. I somtimes thought of
venturing it into the house of some person above a Bookseller; but I never could
find impudence enough to do it. So I carried it, accompanied with the following
letter, to your magazine man. He kept it eight or ten days, and then sent a
sober-looking, book-faced man back with it, sending therewith the little note
which follows the letter.
* The parts of the poem first composed, before any thought was entertained of
going through with the Seasons, were the morning scene in Spring, beginning
‘This task had Giles,’ and the description of the lambs at
play. And if it be lawful for an author to tell his opinion, they have never
lost an inch of ground from that day to this. —