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Robert Bloomfield (3 December 1766 – 19 August 1823) was an English labouring class poet whose work is appreciated in the context of other self-educated writers such as Stephen Duck, Mary Collier and John Clare. ==Life== Robert Bloomfield was born of a poor family in the village of Honington, Suffolk.〔David Kaloustian, ‘Bloomfield, Robert (1766–1823)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 4 March 2012 )〕 His father was a tailor and died of smallpox when the son was a year old.〔 It was from his mother Elizabeth, who kept the village school, that he received the rudiments of education.〔 Apprenticed at the age of eleven to his mother's brother-in-law, he worked on a farm which was part of the estate of the Duke of Grafton, his future patron.〔 Four years later, owing to his small and weak stature (in adulthood Bloomfield was just five feet tall) he was sent to London to work as a shoemaker under his elder brother George.〔 One of his early duties was to read the papers aloud while the others in the workshop were working and he became particularly interested in the poetry section of The London Magazine.〔’’Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties’’, New York, 1860, pp.104-6; Google Books ()〕 He had his first poem, "The Village Girl", published in 1786.〔 When his brother George returned to Suffolk in that year, he set up on his own as a cobbler and in 1790 married Mary Ann Church, by whom he was to have five children. The poem that made his reputation, ''The Farmer's Boy'', was composed in a garret in Bell Alley,〔 Coleman Street.〔 It was influenced by James Thomson's poem ''The Seasons''.〔 Bloomfield was able to carry some fifty to a hundred finished lines of it in his head at a time until there was opportunity to write them down. The manuscript was declined by several publishers and was eventually shown by his brother George to Capel Lofft, a radical Suffolk squire of literary tastes, who arranged for its publication with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick in 1800.〔 The success of the poem was remarkable, over 25,000 copies being sold in the next two years. Also reprinted in several American editions, it appeared in German translation in Leipzig, translated into French as ''Le Valet du Fermier'' in Paris, and in Italian translation in Milan; there was even a Latin translation of parts of it, ''De Agricolae Puero, Anglicano Poemate celeberrimo excerptum, et in morem Latini Georgice redditum'', by the lively Suffolk vicar William Clubbe.〔See ''Illustrations of the literary history of the 18th century'' on Google Books ()〕 The poem was particularly admired by the Suffolk-born painter John Constable who used couplets from it as tags to two paintings: a 'Ploughing Scene' (shown at the Royal Academy in 1814) and 'A Harvest Field, Reapers, Gleaners' (shown at the British Institution in 1817), which he noted as deriving from 'Bloomfield's poem'.〔〔The Letters of |Robert Bloomfield and his Circle", (Romantic Circles )〕 It was also admired by Robert Southey, a Romantic poet and future poet laureate.〔 While this success helped reduce his poverty for a while, it also took him away from his work. As a result, the Duke of Grafton, who lived at Euston Hall near the village of Bloomfield's birth, settled on him a small annuity of £15 and used his influence to gain him employment in the Seal Office to the King’s Bench Court and then at Somerset House, but he worked in neither for long.〔 Meanwhile, Bloomfield's reputation was increased by the appearance of his ''Rural Tales'' (1802), several poems of which were set to music by his brother Isaac. Another of them, "The Miller's Maid", was made an opera by John Davy (1763–1824) in 1804 and formed the basis for a two-act melodrama by John Faucit Saville (1807–1855) in 1821.〔(Open Library )〕 Other publications by Bloomfield included ''Good Tidings'' (written in praise of inoculation at the instigation of Edward Jenner, 1804); ''Wild Flowers or Pastoral and Local Poetry'' (1806); and ''The Banks of the Wye'' (the poetic journal of a walking tour in the footsteps of Wordsworth, 1811). Unfortunately Vernor and Hood, his publishers, went bankrupt and in 1812 Bloomfield was forced to move from London into a cottage rented to him by a friend in the Bedfordshire village of Shefford. There one of his daughters died in 1814 and his wife became insane. In order to support himself he tried to carry on business as a bookseller but failed, and in his later years was reduced to making Aeolian harps which he sold among his friends.〔Chamber’s ''Cyclopaedia of English Literature'', Edinburgh, 1844, vol.2, pp.283-4, at Google Books, ()〕 With failing eyesight, his own reason threatened by depression, he died in great poverty on 19 August 1823.〔 In order to pay his debts and cover the funeral expenses, his collection of books and manuscripts, and his household effects, had to be auctioned. Allied to this fund-raising was the publication that year of his drama, ''Hazlewood Hall'', and in the following year of ''The Remains of Robert Bloomfield'', which included writing for children on which he had been working for some years and a selection of his correspondence. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Bloomfield」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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