Here is a first look at a new open access website devoted to Bloomfield and labouring-class poetry of the Romantic Era: https://robertbloomfield.co.uk/
The site features editions of Bloomfield’s Selected Poems including his most famous poem, The Farmer’s Boy, and an illustrated edition of his tour poem The Banks of Wye.
It also features essays by critics including Tim Burke, Bridget Keegan, Simon White, John Goodridge, Ian Haywood and Hugh Underhill on such topics as Bloomfield and — ecocriticism, the politics of patronage, the book market, Aeolian Harps, gender, and labour the picturesque tour, narrative tales, vaccination. It discusses Bloomfield’s relationships with writers including Clare, Byron, Dyer, Southey, Kirke White, Allan Cunningham, and Thomas Inskip.
Also included is Bloomfield’s fascinating prose narrative about his colleagues in the London workshop where he plied his trade as a shoemaker. This narrative, an invaluable piece of social history, is one of the few places in which the lives and opinions of labouring people are represented in detail by someone of the same class.