Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
BL Add. MS 28268, ff. 45–48, extract in BCB, p. 81
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.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard
Dashes have been rendered as —
Bloomfield's spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
It is an old saying and a true one that wonders will never cease.
This reflection is occasioned by seeing your letter to Mr Bloomfield wherein you
assert that no right or title in the Farmers Boy belongs to us. — We could
hardly think that you was serious in this after all that has pass’d Between you,
Mr Hill, and us. But we percieve
that you are not given to joke, and therefore we shall think that you mean to
consider it seriously as you say. In this situation we are very sorry to say
that the Harvest that promised the Author will be blasted by a contest which
neither he, any of his friends here, nor us expected. We have no fear of the
issue of the contest if it is your determination to persist in it as our proofs
are ready to come forward whenever you are pleased to bring it forward. But we
are sorry to say that whatever be the issue of it the poor Author will
ultimately suffer as wel as us, by the stop that will take place in the sale —
for we only wait your determination to guide our conduct. Thus far we assert our
property — but, as fair liberal Tradesmen (a character we never have forfeited)
we shall reason the matter with Mr
Lofft.——In the first place then is it at all probable that we, or any
Bookseller (or Gentleman we will add) would undertake to
print a poem, (which had been handed about to 4 booksellers and offer’d for
nothing) & whose merits were not known, (and to this day contested pro
& con by the literary world), at the enormous expence of £190 without we
had some interest in it — that we should print it at our
own risque, stand the chance of loss, and engage to give the Author 20 guineas
[i] whither it succeeded or not, Or that we should put another Edition to press
before half the first was sold off (259 Quartos are still
in hand) It is not very probable that a selfish Bookseller
should do this, (which no Gentleman of fortune would have done) when he can
every day lay out his money to a good advantage, without risque at all, perhaps
not inferior to what we shall get by the Farmer’s Boy. — Thus far it is not
reasonable to suppose — Another consideration for Mr Lofft is — that the benefit does
not arise to the Author from the merit of the poem merely,
but as much so from the merits of the Booksellers, in bringing
it forward with every advantage in its favour, of ornaments and printing, of
his pushing over England, Scotland, Ireland & America at his own
risque and expense and influence. His selling a large quantity to
Ireland at a reduced price (considerably under what he shall account for) in
order to prevent it from being printed there, and running away with the market.
Of his being oblidged to give credit to the trade to the amount of 11–12ths of
the whole (for we have not received above 1/12 in cash for all the Editions)
and, of course have several Bankrupts accounts in the Book [ii] — That we should
be at this moment £550 out of pocket for a work in which we have no right,
(except the first Edition as you say) and only a commission on what we sell,
when we could lay out that money with the advantage of 25 or 50 pr cent in our
own business — These are ideas that no man acquainted with business would say
were any way probable — It is also necessary to inform Mr Lofft that the universal custom of trade is against him. No Bookseller what ever
prints another mans property & pays for it himself
upon the meer profits of commission, the Author pays for
it, the Bookseller sells, and pays for what he sells at the end of the
year, deducting 10 P Cent for selling. If this does not refer to the first
Edition (suposing the copyright out of the case) it must refer to the other
agreeable to Mr Lofft’s ideas — We
therefore should not have been presumed to print a second, third and fourth
Edition unless we had not been assured that one half of the copyright of the
Farmer’s Boy was ours, & no one could expect us to do it.
We think it necessary to notice what you say respecting the offer
that we made on behalf of another Bookseller (Longmans and Rees) we wrote you that a Bookseller
would give £100 for Mr Bloomfields copy-right in the
Farmer’s Boy after the second Edition; but you cannot surely from that wrest out
a meaning that we considerd the whole copyright as his,
Longmans & Rees will set you right in this respect
by informing you of the matter of our conversation — And I have to say that I
thought their offer not unworthy of mentioning to you, and I promised them as
much as to mention it, although I told them I would not advise it to be sold.
Now Sir we will be free to say that after what has been done by
us — After giving the Author £100 — which he could not expect or demand, we
think ourselves most unhandsomely used by his friends; for
we find that Mr Swan has been rather
medling, more than his literary knowledge gave us reason to
expect for however honest a man he may be, we are confident his knowledge of
literary bargains cannot entitle his opinion to much consideration. Other
friends of the Author were perfectly satisfied with what we had done, we were
satisfied in our own minds that we had done only what was right, and the Author
was so far satisfied [iii] of it, that he said it was beyond what he had any
right to expect, and Mr Swan was
present upon the occasion. — Now Sir, we will maintain our
right as agreed to by the Author, and in the meantime till this is
settled, we shall hold ourselves bound to act with the Book as heretofore as one half of our property, and sell accordingly, as we
are unwilling that a worthy man should suffer from an Idle despute Between us.
The receipt or assignment which we gave Mr B to copy is a meer matter of form used by Booksellers in conveying
copyright from one to another. We can assure Mr Lofft that were the copyright a thousand times more valuable than it is we should not be
guilty of such a piece of Villainy as he is afraid of and
if he will take the trouble to enquire we think that he will find that we have
done more than we were oblidged to perform in our engagements with Authors, and
never less — One thing we are determined to do in
future, and that is, that we shall have no concern with any Author’s work that is not our own property. For we find that if we were
to give all there is still some cause for dissatisfaction.
[In Bloomfield’s hand]:
[i] This part of the agreement I never heard of till now. R. Bloomfield
[ii] An Author situated like myself suffers nothing from Bankrupts, but receives his full share of profits on all Books sold, by his publisher whither they be paid for or not. R.B.
[iii] Take notice, that at this crisis of the business the question of
copyright was not started!! Therefore a Gift of £100
was what I had no right to expect R.B.