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John
Goodridge and Bridget Keegan | Tim
Fulford | Peter Denney | Ian Haywood | Bridget Keegan
This introduction argues for the importance of a scholarly consideration of Robert Bloomfield's interesting and extensive correspondence. It then offers a brief overview of the four essays including in this special number.
This essay places Bloomfield in his social world—the world of Georgian London and of rural Suffolk and Wales. It makes extensive use of his correspondence to offer new insights into such issues as patronage and publishing, the book market, radical politics, Cockney London, and the picturesque tour. It shows Bloomfield to be a witty commentator on his time as well as an astute reader of the poetry of his contemporaries.
This article takes as its point of departure Bloomfield’s repeated and insistent claim that he was a poet, not a politician. Drawing on the fascinating recently published correspondence of Bloomfield and his circle, it examines how the dissociation of poetry and politics in the post-revolutionary decades affected the poet’s public and private identities. In the first instance, the article explores how the ideology of natural genius exerted pressure on Bloomfield and other laboring-class poets to think about poetry as a cultural form that was incompatible with the public sphere of politics, especially the combative world of artisan radicalism. But the article also shows that the polarization of political culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution debate had the effect of politicizing even the most private aspects of Bloomfield’s life and literary productions. Much to the poet’s profound vexation, his public persona was appropriated by radicals, liberals, and loyalists alike, depriving him of the privacy the theory of natural genius assumed he should embrace.
This article argues that Robert Bloomfield’s seminal text
Robert Bloomfield twice wrote works explicitly for a juvenile audience.