Bonaparte in Robert Bloomfield’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream: or, Fairies’ Masquerade’, by Angus Whitehead

Despite the publication over the last decade or so of an unprecedented number of academic publications concerning the labouring-class poet as well as several annotated editions of his writings, Robert Bloomfield’s position in Romantic scholarship over the last two decades has remained a tentative one. Although not awarded an entry of his own, in an entry on peasant poets in the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (2001), Jon Mee devotes half a paragraph to Bloomfield. In the same volume lain McCalman and Maureen Perkins briefly allude to Bloomfield as the inaugurator of ‘a dangerously ephemeral fashion’, that of the initially successful (but ultimately doomed) peasant poet.’ [1]  In the first and second editions of his Romanticism: an Anthology (1994, 1998), Duncan Wu includes two fairly generous excerpts from Bloomfield’s bestselling poem of 1800, The Farmer’s Boy. However, following the pioneering 1998 Trent Edition of a selection of Bloomfield poems, Wu curiously excised all selections from The Farmer’s Boy from the third edition (2006) of Romanticism.

The farmer’s boy, shoemaker, poet, composer and Aeolian harpmaker’s later volumes of poetry have, until very recently, remained in almost total obscurity. William St Clair in The Reading Nation (2004) makes no reference to Bloomfield’s last volume of poetry May Day with the Muses. In his Foreword to Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan’s Robert Bloomfield; Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (2006), the first volume of rigorously critical essays to explore Bloomfield’s life, work and contexts, John Barrell reflects on twentieth to twenty-first century neglect of Bloomfield and his own earlier (c 1970s) expectations in reading Bloomfield, and consequent lack of interest in the labouring-class poet’s work post 1800: ‘I wanted Bloomfield to remain the farmer’s boy of my first acquaintance, negotiating under pressure with Thomson on behalf of the working class.’ [2]  Here Barrell’s recollection echoes at least one contemporary reader of the first edition of Bloomfield’s fourth volume of poetry The Banks of Wye (1811):

Truth to be pleasing in a poet must be embellished by fancy and recommended by elegance It gains nothing by the ornament of rusticity. The ruins of ancient castles and the remains of magnificence which Tintern abbey yet exhibits, the feelings they must excite and the reflections they give birth to, required to be painted by another hand than the author of the Farmers boy. If B is desirous of pleasing he must be contented to describe Suffolk scenery and to tell the virtues of Suffolk Cheese. Yet the Gleaners song will not prove his title [?] even to this adaption [sic?] of his powers. Why should the burden of the song lie on the paltry pleasure derived from putting on a new gown. If he gives us such minutiae of the mind, what would he tell us on less interesting subjects? Why if he was describing a farm yard we should not only be gratified by the capering of colts, the clucking of poultry, the gambols of the lambs and the playful vivacity of the little pigs, but for our further amusement he would probably grope in the mud of the horsepond or lead us to wallow in the filth of the stye. [3] 

Revisiting Bloomfield via Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon’s unprecedentedly careful readings of Bloomfield’s work from The Farmer’s Boy (1800) to May Day with the Muses (1822), Barrell poses a pertinent question concerning how we should now read Bloomfield as a poet of his time: ‘is he best understood as a romantic […] or as a poet who reminds us of another tradition of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century poetry that is permanently in danger of being forgotten in our concentration on romanticism?’ [4]  In this paper I discuss Regency reviewers’ sympathetic, vigorous but diverse, and often contradictory, responses to Bloomfield’s last volume of poetry, a collection until recently neglected even by Bloomfield scholars. Building on Simon White’s 2007 reappraisal of Bloomfield’s later poetry, I attempt to demonstrate that despite Bloomfield’s near decade-long silence after the revised second edition of The Banks of Wye (1813), a volume of poetry so profoundly unlike The Farmer’s Boy, or the two succeeding volumes Rural Tales and Wild Flowers, Regency reviewers and readers continued to read and praise his later, and as I will argue often politically engaged, work. I will go on to suggest how such responses to later poetry by Bloomfield might inform our twentyfirst-century readings of a poetry that cannot only be identified as Romantic, but which also draws upon other, lesser known traditions.

May Day with the Muses (1822) was Bloomfield’s fifth (sixth if we count Good Tidings) and final volume of poetry. Like James Hogg’s The Queen’s Wake, published nine years earlier, the work is framed as a series of performances by a variety of poets. [5]  However, in Bloomfield’s work the poems are composed and performed not by medieval court bards but by contemporary labouring-class poets in a visibly early nineteenth-century rural context. These rural poets perform in response to the aged lord of the manor at Oakly Hall, Sir Ambrose Higham’s request for poems in lieu of rent. [6]  Throughout the twentieth century (The Banks of Wye aside), May Day with the Muses remained the most neglected of Bloomfield’s five volumes of poetry published in the poet’s lifetime. Rayner Unwin, writing in 1954, asserted the poem ‘did nothing to advance [Bloomfield’s] reputation. Sentiment drifted with little thought into sentimentality, and rhyming became a laborious technique without the urgency of self-expression.’ [7]  But William Wickett and Nicholas Duval, writing in 1971 offered a more nuanced reading. While acceding that ‘It is in this work that the trivialities of sentimentality occur more frequently than anywhere else in his writings’, Wickett and Duval note that,

…most of this is in a way intentional since the story-tellers were only passionate and could not be expected to rise to any great poetical heights. The title has a wisp of humour about it, and the whole poem is replete with a nostalgic happiness, with Bloomfield, as ever, back in his homeland. [8] 

For Wickett and Duval ‘There is […] something almost Chaucerian about the way in which he weaves these quite ordinary tales of country life into a most fascinating and appealing narrative.’ [9]  As Jonathan Lawson recognizes, the poem was ‘a moderate success’ on publication: two editions appeared in the space of a year. [10]  Lawson also notes the ‘surprisingly high’ quality of the poetry, often `exceed[ing] the quality of the [earlier] songs and ballads themselves’. [11]  More recently, John Lucas has demonstrated how a close reading of May Day reveals `the depth and heterogeneity of [Bloomfield’s] skill as a poet’. [12]  Simon White agrees with Lucas: May Day ‘contains some of Bloomfield’s best poetry, and the collection is perhaps his most imaginative in overall conception.’ [13]  White also draws attention to May Day’s engagements with contemporary events through Bloomfield’s complex allusion and allegory. [14] 

However, Lucas and White’s recent readings of May Day are constrained by our lack of detailed historical-biographical information concerning Bloomfield, especially after his move from Shepherdess Walk in London (just off the City Road) to Shefford, Bedfordshire, in the spring of 1812. [15]  In its absence White suggests that May Day `has been neglected because, unlike The Farmer’s Boy, it was not a best-seller and received no attention from contemporary reviewers.’ [16]  In fact May Day was eagerly anticipated, and between May 1822 and early 1823 at least 11 reviews of May Day appeared. Bloomfield’s bibliography has remained in incomplete and fragmentary form since the sudden death of his collateral descendant B C Bloomfield in 2002, but I suspect that there are more reviews for May Day than for any other of Bloomfield’s works. [17]  Two reviews of May Day were admittedly lukewarm: a review in Josiah Conder’s dissenting, highly literate Eclectic Review (June 1822), perhaps by James Montgomery, reads Bloomfield in this last volume as victim of a critical ebb-tide following acclaim for The Farmer’s Boy, his own weak frame, perpetual ill health and anxieties, and an 1820s taste for daintiness; the poems themselves are described as the fragile results of a poet long in poor health, but which, if approached sympathetically will yield rewards: ‘he must be a ruthless and a heartless critic who would by rough handling doom them to fade a moment before their time.’ [18]  In the highly influential The Literary Gazette (11 May 1822) Irish critic William Paulet Carey, unimpressed by the volume’s conception and its perceived vulgarisms, gave an uncharacteristically subdued response: ‘its merits are not, in truth, very striking, and we can only say that it contains some natural sketches of rural life, inferior to, though not inconsistent with, those in the Farmer’s Boy.’ [19]  However, eight other reviews were uniformly enthusiastic. The General Weekly Register (12 May 1822) asserted that Bloomfield’s new poem was pleasant, did not injure the poet’s reputation, and surpassed the poetry of John Clare. La Belle Assemblee (June 1822) praised the volume as ‘lively […] enchanting [and] delightful’. [20]  The Monthly Magazine (June 1822) admired Bloomfield’s ‘straight forward and candid dealing with his reader, which establishes between them a perfect understanding and community of feeling’ [21]  and noted the ‘materials of a very agreeable nature in this pretty little poem.’ [22]  For the writer of the review of May Day included in The Monthly Censor, or, General Review of Domestic and Foreign Literature, the poem recalls that

careless period when we listened with no fastidious judgment to the rustic melody of the ‘Farmer’s Boy,’ and thought he discoursed most eloquent music. Whatever we there found in him to please, rises in association from the perusal of this little volume; we have the same characteristic touches of simplicity, the same occasional outbreakings of nature; and, if it must be said, the same coarseness of incident, the same rudeness of versification. [23] 

Of most interest, is the extensive (10 page) review in the conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (June 1822), in which John Wilson described May Day as ‘one of the most agreeable [poems Bloomfield] has ever written, and one that shews that his powers are in noways impaired.’ [24]  Praise from Blackwoods and other influential journals suggests, contra White, a largely positive and popular critical reception of May Day with the Muses which must have influenced the Regency reading public during the second half of 1822. [25]  Yet one section of May Day troubled a number of reviewers, provoking various, animated responses.

‘The Shepherd’s Dream: or, Fairies’ Masquerade’, the third poem in the May Day with the Muses cycle, is recited by John Armstrong, an ageing shepherd. [26]  Armstrong, after folding his sheep at sunset, his heart overflowing, rests by a lake and in a dream-like state (‘forgetfulness rather than sleep’) observes countless fairies enacting a warlike narrative. A ‘stripling’ leads a group of fairies in numerous ambitious campaigns until ultimately vanquished by the fairies of the north, though mourned and admired by a significant number in defeat and death. The shepherd ‘awakes’ invigorated and empowered: ‘took up my staff, as a knight would his lance, / and said ‘Here’s my scepter, my baton, my spear,/ And there’s my prime minister far in advance / Who serves me in truth for his food by the year.’ [27]  From the mid nineteenth century until 2006 the poem received scant attention. Lawson, enthusiastic about much of May Day, merely notes ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ has little to recommend it.’ [28]  John Lucas has recently suggested that the poem reflects Bloomfield’s approval of the status quo in spite of the agricultural distress of the early 1820s, and compares it to Hannah More’s ‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain’. [29]  White, however, provides a careful and illuminating reading of ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, drawing attention to the poem’s unusual and difficult anapestic metre, and its medieval imagery. As White demonstrates, the poem is clearly not what it initially seems. [30]  But White’s reading, illuminating as it is, only takes us so far. Despite admirable attempts to link the poem to dream vision poetry, Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’, ‘Paradise Lost’, Thomas Parnell’s translation of ‘Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice’, Gulliver’s Travels, contemporary Jacobin politics, Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’, and Keats’ Fall of Hyperion’, White’s reading lacks substantially illuminating context.

Building on White’s findings, I now want to suggest two further contexts which may help to illuminate ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’.

1. Dream

In his choice of title for John Armstrong’s poem, ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, Bloomfield appears to draw on a less than obvious Elizabethan source, Chapter 91 of William Warner’s epic fourteen-syllable lined poem Albion’s England (1589). The work would not have been widely available to early nineteenth-century readers, but Bloomfield could perhaps have accessed a copy via the libraries of his affluent friends and patrons, such as Capel Lofft, Nathan Drake and Thomas Park. In this section of Warner’s poem, sometimes referred to as ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, a shepherd, like John Armstrong ‘twixt sleep and waking’ has a dream vision of fairies, the chief of whom, sitting bare-bottomed on the shepherd’s face, discusses the then current state of England, notably the introduction of Protestantism, tobacco, and carriages, before suggesting an emigration to still Catholic and fairy-friendly Ireland. The episode was reprinted in Joseph Ritson’s Fairy Tales; Now First Collected (1831). Ritson died in 1803. Perhaps Bloomfield encountered the poem or at least this section in an earlier anthology? Chapter 91 begins:

A SHEPHEARD whilst his flock did feed
     him in his cloke did wrap,
Bids Patch his dog stand sentenell,
     both to secure a nap,
And, lest his bagpipe, sheephoke, skrip,
    and bottel (most his wealth)
By vagrants (more then, many now)
    might suffer of their stealth.
As he twixte sleepe and waking lay,
     against a greene banks side,
A round of fairies-elves and Larres
     of other kind, he spide:
Who, in their dancing, him so charm’d,
    that though he wakt he slept,
Now pincht they him, antickt about,
    and on, and off him lept, [31] 

The source seems illuminating. In the verse preamble to Bloomfield’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, Bloomfield’s description of Armstrong, his hat, and decorated staff (a section of the poem Regency reviewer John Wilson highlighted as most excellent) simultaneously suggests a shepherd both of and not of contemporary England and antiquity. The parallels between Warner and Bloomfield’s poems suggest that Bloomfield’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ also functions as a far less benign form of social commentary than Lucas’ reading suggests. However, Bloomfield’s poem’s full title ‘The Shepherd’s Dream: or, Fairies’ Masquerade’ suggests that the poet is also drawing upon a more modern, less English source of inspiration. [32] 

Surprisingly, although White comes tantalizingly close in his 2007 reading, no modern Bloomfield scholar has hitherto drawn specific attention to the contemporary context of ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, and its distinctive lexis of ‘stripling’, ‘cockleshell’ (can cockleshells be discovered by English freshwater lakes?), and ‘lily’. However, about 2000, Stuart Semmel stumbled on the key to the poem after entering the term ‘fallen greatness’ into the search engine of Chadwyck-Healy’s English Poetry Full Text Database. [33]  In Bloomfield’s poem, after the fairies of the North vanquish the stripling, they send him in a cockle shell to a stone in the middle of the lake ‘where they mocked fallen greatness and left him to die’ (May Day, 52). At this it seems to the shepherd that several fairies ‘bewail’d him that fell, / And liked not his victors so gallant, so clever’ (May Day, 53). As Semmel observes, ‘fallen greatness’ is a peculiarly telling phrase regularly used during and after the period of Napoleon’s second exile to St Helena in the Summer of 1815 and his death in early May 1821. [34]  Armed with the information that the Shepherd’s Dream and the fairies’ masquerade is an allegory of the overreach and ultimate fate of Bonaparte, at the hands of his victorious allied adversaries, the poem takes on new dimensions. Initially incomprehensible imagery can be seen to derive from specific allusions to Napoleon’s military career. For instance, the ‘silver birds upon poles’ of stanza 2 are Napoleonic Eagle-topped standards, the ‘bird split in two’ displayed on the ‘Colour’d rags upon sticks’ (May Day, 51) of the fairies of the north are now less a reference to pagan augury as White suggests but to the flags of the Austrian and German (but, significantly, not British) forces at Waterloo.

Unlike modern Bloomfield scholars, Regency reviewers of May Day with the Muses, quickly recognized the allusion to the recent threat, defeat, exile and death of Napoleon in ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’. [35]  That recognition perhaps explains the momentary check in several Regency reviewers’ enthusiasm in discussing May Day. Several reviews deploy silent censure. For instance, Carey in the Literary Gazette mentions the poem, but declares that he will not wish to quote any line from it. Similarly, the unknown reviewer in the General Weekly Register mentions the poem, but makes no comment or quote. The Monthly Magazine’s reviewer, after identifying the allegory in detail, concludes that while the versification is ‘pretty’ the poem is ‘very unpleasant, and a violation of that modest propriety and suitable choice of subjects, for which we have before bestowed praise on the poet’, and will not quote a line. [36]  Yet most reviews neither condemn nor ignore the poem. A reviewer in Thomas Campbell’s The New Monthly Magazine praises the poem’s ‘lively and playful manner’, ‘wherein the poet slyly interweaves the fortunes and downfall of Bonaparte’. [37]  The Monthly Review describes Armstrong’s poem as ‘a very fanciful dream which is in fact an allegorical description of the French Revolution and the great political events that have followed it.’ [38]  John Wilson in his Blackwood’s review provides a detailed commentary on the poem:

It must have puzzled the audience not a little, and on first reading it was to us an enigma. It is no less an affair than a poetical summary of some of the principal events in the latter part of Napoleon’s life – the Russian expedition – his subsequent campaigns, his banishment to Elba – return to Paris – Waterloo – and St Helena. – It will be remembered, that Mr Bloomfield was the protégé of Capel Loft, a gentleman who believed with Sir Richard Phillips, that Napoleon was a man of pacific disposition, fond of home-comforts, and an empassioned lover of freedom. It is extremely laughable to observe honest Robert Bloomfield adopting such insane absurdities: but the poem, notwithstanding, is excellent, and we cannot help quoting it. By excellent, we mean spirited, poetical, and imaginative. [39] 

Wilson, merely amused that Bloomfield should express such sentiments, and far from sharing the reticence of several the other reviewers just cited, reproduces ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ in its entirety. In so doing Wilson not only reveals an early critical appreciation of Bloomfield’s late poetry, but also a calm dismissal of Bloomfield’s supposed ‘insane’ admiration for Napoleon. Reports of spontaneous illuminations in London windows at the inaccurate news of Napoleon’s escape from St Helena reported in the Times in 1818 suggest a ready, sympathetic readership for Bloomfield’s oblique, nuanced elegy for Bonaparte. [40]  For Wilson the excellent poetry outweighs the ‘insane absurdities’ of the allegory. [41] 

This is intriguing, especially when we notice that Bloomfield’s principal moral focus in the poem is not so much Napoleon’s life and defeat as his treatment by the allied powers in 1814 and 1815. As Tim Fulford has recently observed Bloomfield ‘was present at Dover in 1814 when the generals and diplomats disembarked, fresh from the defeat of Buonaparte.’ [42]  In ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ these figures in miniature (and we should note that it is not merely Napoleon and his forces but also their adversaries who are ridiculed in diminutive form) are portrayed as having initially defeated Napoleon through sleight of hand rather than by courageous performance in battle and Napoleon is portrayed as a Christ-like (or should that be Prometheus-like?) lost leader, betrayed by Pharisaic, Roman, or perhaps Druidic authorities: ‘they found a large stone which they fix’d him upon,/ And threaten’d, and coax’d him, and bade him be quiet’ (May Day, 52). [43] 

The recovery of a Napoleonic reading of ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ also helps us appreciate Bloomfield’s careful overarching schema for May Day. The preceding Forester’s tale of the fallen oak with its allusion to Princess Charlotte’s death at Clermont in 1817, clearly has a domestic republican message, as several contemporary reviewers (including Wilson) noted, as does White. The detail suggests the forester and perhaps his enthusiastic audience are radically disposed, and not necessarily peacefully so. The succeeding poem, ‘The Soldier’s Home’, might be read as offering, like ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, a negotiated critique of England’s overseas involvement in the Napoleonic wars. [44] 

As Wilson observes in his review, Bloomfield was initially a protégé of Capel Lofft, a radical and supporter of Napoleon. Lofft’s support and interference in the publication of The Farmer’s Boy and Rural Tales is well documented. What is less well known is the role of another supporter of Napoleon, Bedfordshire neighbour and later patron of Bloomfield c. 1810-15, Samuel Whitbread II. In this context, May Day with the Muses’ setting, Sir Ambrose Higham’s democratized garden party, resembles Whitbread’s own festivities at his Bedfordshire seat at Southill. [45]  Perhaps, more tellingly, Bloomfield’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ also may have been influenced by a masquerade that formed part of the peace celebrations at Shefford in early July 1814. As Bloomfield reported in a letter to his daughter Hannah:

the Herald was follow’d by a Band, but to accommodate that Band a Boat was procured from Chicksands, placed upon a carriage, and surmounted by boughs of Oak and Laurel, and in the front rode Judy Basterfield in White, and crown’d with a wreath, as the emblem of Peace. In the procession rode Mr Williamson &c, Mr Walker, (two church parsons,) Mr Potier, the Catholick priest, and Briggs the Methodist preacher, and all who could procure Horses, or wish’d to join the Cavalcade, In the rear of which appeard an old black Horse decorated with an enormous pair of Bullock’s horns place’d near his ears. On his back rode the Devel with a monstrous Mask and horns to corispond, and drest in a black cloak. Behind him rode (riding backwards both on a Horse) a lad with a pale Mask, and in the utmost trembling and destress, to represent the fallen Emperor. Both these perform’d their parts extreemly well, and cause’d the utmost laughter. [46] 

Whitbread was profoundly affected by the initial defeat of Napoleon in 1814, and committed suicide on 6 June 1815, during the period of the Hundred Days, just twelve days before Waterloo. Whitbread’s death must have adversely affected Bloomfield’s already precarious financial and social position at Shefford.

In October 1819 John Clare told Isaiah Knowles Holland ‘[Bloomfield] is coming out again this Winter but what poem I know not.’ [47]  Bloomfield had not published anything since his children’s story The History of Little Davy’s New Hat in 1815, and no poetry since the second, revised edition of the Banks of Wye in 1813. He would not publish May Day with the Muses until mid-1822. Clare is therefore probably belatedly referring to rumours of Bloomfield’s ‘work in progress’ ‘a descriptive poem of Southill’, widely reported in papers and journals during the spring of 1818. [48]  In an 1821 letter replying to Granville Sharp’s son-in-law, Thomas John Lloyd Baker’s request that the poet contradict circulating rumours of his radicalism, Bloomfield suggested that the former radical shoemaker Thomas Hardy, whom Bloomfield had met under duress in Bedfordshire, was the origin of ‘the report that I was writing a poem on Southill and Whitbread.’ [49]  Nevertheless, it seems strange that Hardy’s ‘false’ report of the poem complete with name should have spread so widely in the press: at least seven magazines reported that the poem was in preparation in the spring of 1818. The excitement generated by rumours of Bloomfield returning to print, surely bear witness to Bloomfield’s fame and popularity as a poet even two decades after the publication of The Farmer’s Boy. Conversely, Bloomfield might indeed have experimented with such a poem describing the seat of his late Napoleon-supporting patron and dedicated to Whitbread. ‘Southill’ could therefore have contained more overtly radical sentiments than either ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ or ‘The Forester’. [50]  As Bloomfield observes in The Banks of Wye (1811), ‘The pen [can potentially] lead[..] to fame – or jail.’ [51]  Is it possible that it was ‘Southill’, rather than May Day, that Bloomfield failed to find a publisher for c. 1820? Or perhaps Bloomfield censored himself, as he had done in 1809 in revising his 1806 Suffolk dialect poem, ‘The Horkey’ for his two-volume stereotype edition of The Poems of Robert Bloomfield. Whatever happened, something of the spirit of that suppressed, untraced, or perhaps merely imagined poem, as well as Bloomfield’s esteem for Whitbread, lives on in Bloomfield’s reworking of Warner’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ as elegy for Bonaparte as well as ‘The Forester’, both published in May Day with the Muses in May 1822 and welcomed by a significant audience of Regency reviewers and readers; poetry which continued to be widely read far into the Victorian era.

An earlier draft of this paper was read at the ‘Reworking the Regency’ conference, University of Melbourne, 8-10 October 2009. My thanks to Keri Davies for his invaluable advice and generous assistance.

[1] lain McCalman and Maureen Perkins, ‘Popular Culture’, Ian McCalman ed, Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford, 2001), 222. BACK

[2] John Barrell, Foreword, in Simon White, Robert Bloomfield; Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 11. Barrell also recalls his 1960s responses to post Farmer’s Boy Bloomfield when reading him: ‘too relaxed, too anecdotal’ (ibid). BACK

[3] Unknown contemporary annotations on a copy of the first edition of The Banks of Wye, c. 1811, private collection. BACK

[4] Barrell, 12. More recently, Tim Fulford has plausibly attempted to place Bloomfield firmly within the Romantic tradition. See Tim Fulford, ‘To “crown with glory the romantick scene”: Robert Bloomfield’s “To lmmagination” and the Discourse of Romanticism’, Romanticism, Volume 15 (2009), 181-200. BACK

[5] Higham has determined to devote himself to his estate and tenants and retire from town, where `[i]n streets a roaring mob with flags unfurl’d/ And all the senseless discord of the world.’ Robert Bloomfield, May Day with the Muses (London: Printed for the author and for Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1822), 5. BACK

[6] Contemporary reviewers expressed their amusement at this as a possible solution to England’s social and economic problems, c. 1822-3. See for example La Belle Assemblee, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Saturday 1 June 1822, 5; Monthly Magazine, June 1822, 420. BACK

[7] Rayner Unwin, The Rural Muse (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1954), 108. Unwin does not even bother to list The Banks of Wye and May Day with the Muses in his bibliography. BACK

[8] William Wickett and Nicholas Duval, The Farmer’s Boy; the Story of a Suffolk Poet (Lavenham: Terence Dalton Ltd, 1971), 59. BACK

[9] Wickett and Duval, 58. BACK

[10] Jonathan Lawson, Robert Bloomfield (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 46. As Lawson notes, ‘a second edition was called for the same year.’ (ibid.). BACK

BACK

[11] Lawson, 126. For Lawson, May Day is ‘not the worst of Bloomfield’s verse’ (ibid). BACK

[12] John Lucas, ‘Hospitality and the Rural Tradition’, in Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, eds., Robert Bloomfield; Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon, 22-3. BACK

[13] Simon White, Robert Bloomfield, Romanticism and the Poetry of Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 5. White’s unprecedentedly careful reading of May Day draws attention to its playful tone, and democratized Romanticism. See White, 121 ff. BACK

[14] See White, 121 ff. BACK

[15] Careful, focused archival historicist research would help to illuminate May Day in the way Barrell throws light on Clare’s poetry and Bloomfield’s own Farmer’s Boy in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: an Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972). BACK

[16] White, 5. BACK

[17] Though more research is required in this area, I suspect that the reviews for May Day are not quite as uneven as they were for its predecessors, Wild Flowers and The Banks of Wye. BACK

[18] [James Montgomery?] ‘Art. VII. May Day with the Muses. By Robert Bloomfield’ [review], Eclectic Review, June 1822, 549. BACK

[19] The Literary Gazette, No. 277, Saturday 11 May 1822, 289. BACK

[20] La Belle Assemblee (June 1822). BACK

[21] Monthly Magazine (June 1822), 420. BACK

[22] Monthly Magazine (June 1822), 423. BACK

[23] ‘Art. XXXVII. May Day with the Muses. By Robert Bloomfield, Author of the Farmer’s Boy, Rural Tales, &c.’ 12mo. pp. 100. 4s. Baldwin and Co. 1822., The Monthly Censor, or, General Review of Domestic and Foreign Literature Vol. 1 (June 1822), 457-8. BACK

[24] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (June 1822), 725. The review was reprinted in its entirety in the Parisian journal Galignani’s Literary Gazette (Paris, 1822), 347-55. Other reviews appeared in Colbourne’s The New Monthly Magazine (August 1822), Rivington’s The Monthly Censor (August 1822), the Monthly Review (September 1822), and the Brighton Magazine (1823). There are indications that May Day was eagerly anticipated as early as April 1821 in the London Magazine (April 1821), 431. That a second edition was being prepared is mentioned in the London Magazine (December 1822), 691. BACK

[25] Sections of May Day regularly appeared in anthologies during the nineteenth century. See for example Remember Me! New Years Gift or Christmas Present (London: J. Poole, 1826): ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, 68-70; A Poetical Melange (Edinburgh: George A. Douglas, 1828): ‘The Soldier’s Home’, Vol. I, 67-70; Classic Cullings and Fugitive Gatherings (London: M. Arnold, 1831): ‘My ‘Favourite Child’ [first section of ‘Alfred and Jennet’], 89; Sam Weller’s Budget of Recitations (London: J. Clements, 1838): ‘The Soldier’s Return’ [‘The Soldier’s Home’] [unattributed], 211-2; D. Barton Ross, The Rhetorical Manual, or Southern Fifth Reader (New Orleans: J. B. Steel, 1854): ‘The Soldier’s Return’ [‘The Soldier’s Home’], 367-9; John Seely Hart, Class Book of Poetry (Philadelphia: E. A. Butler and Co., 1857): ‘The Soldier’s Return’ [‘The Soldier’s Home’], 326-8; J. S. Laurie, The Fifth `Standard’ Reader; or, Poetry and Adventure (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1863): ‘The Soldier’s Home’, 146-8. BACK

[26] It is interesting to note that four out of the six poems included in the May Day with the Muses cycle are recited by middle-aged or elderly men. This detail perhaps problematizes John Goodridge’s suggestion that women are the predominant story tellers in Bloomfield’s poetry. See John Goodridge, ‘“The only Privilege our sex enjoy”: Women’s Storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare’, White et al (2006), 159-77. BACK

[27] May Day, 53. BACK

[28] Lawson, 128. BACK

[29] See Lucas, 135. BACK

[30] See White 138ff. BACK

[31] William Warner, ‘The Shepherds Dream’, in Joseph Ritson, Fairy Tales: Now First Collected (London: Payne and Foss, 1831), 79.BACK

[32] Warner’s and Bloomfield’s fairies are not the ‘harmless fairies’ described by Lawson, or indeed those expected by the patrician Sir Ambrose Higham, but the mischievously vindictive fairies of traditional English folklore. See John Dover Wilson, Life in Shakespeare’s England (Penguin, 1944), 40-5. Bloomfield’s appropriation of Warner may explain the initial strangeness of the form and content of Bloomfield’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’. Bloomfield also deploys fairies or allusions to fairies in ‘The Broken Crutch’, the ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’ sections of ‘The Farmer’s Boy’, ‘Barnham Water’, ‘The Miller’s Maid’, `Whittlebury Forest’ (in which Bloomfield applies the phrase ‘fairies’ to his children), and The Banks of Wye (1811, 117-9). See also Bloomfield’s letters: to William Vaughan, 22 July 1800 (where Vauxhall is described as a gathering of hundreds of fairies), to John Lloyd Baker (4 October 1814), Mary Lloyd Baker (16 January 1808) and Hannah Bloomfield (8 October 1808). In the latter Bloomfield refers to stones called ‘fairy cakes’ and still prevalent belief in fairies at the rural village of his childhood Honington, Suffolk. Interestingly The Eclectic Review reviewer places Sir Ambrose in `fairyland’ (p. 549). BACK

[33] See Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 225. Semmel, email to author, 1 September 2009. Semmel describes ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ as ‘an oddly affecting poem’ (Semmel, 225).BACK

[34] See Semmel, 225. Thus Napoleon died a year before publication of May Day with the Muses. Passages at least of ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ must therefore have been composed quite soon after Napoleon’s death. The poem then functions as a mediated elegy to Napoleon. It must have also been one of the last poems composed for the collection. In 1823 Bloomfield was reading the memoirs of Mann Joseph Emmanuel Auguste Dieudonne, Count De Las Casas, Comprising a Letter from Count De Las Casas at St. Helena to Lucien Bonaparte, Giving a Faithful Account of the Voyage of Napoleon to St. Helena, the Residence, Manner of Living, and Treatment on that Island. Also a Letter Addressed by Count De Las Casas to Lord Bathurst (London, 1815) (see letter to Charles Bloomfield, 2 May 1823). Bloomfield may have consulted the book when writing ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’. As Semmel demonstrates, there was considerable British sympathy and admiration for Napoleon in defeat and exile during the late 1810s and early 1820s (see Semmel, 221-39). In the summer of 1822, having read Napoleon’s surgeon Barry O’Meara’s account of Napoleon’s captivity, Carlyle wrote,

Since the days of Prometheus vinctus, I recollect of no spectacle more moving and sublime, than that of this great man in his dreary prison-house; given over to the very scum of the species to be tormented by every sort of indignity, which the heart most revolts against; – captive, sick, despised, forsaken; – yet rising above it all, by the stern force of his own unconquerable spirit, and hurling back on his mean oppressors the ignominy they strove to load him with (c. 1 August 1822, cited Semmel, 225).

Bloomfield’s fairy Napoleon is similarly Prometheus-like and ultimately triumphant over his gleeful in victory and mocking adversaries. In 1822 Bernard Barton also published his Napoleon, and Other Poems. BACK

[35] We therefore encounter here Bloomfield’s criticism of France and England post Bonaparte during the summer of 1822 precisely at a time of rapprochement. BACK

[36] Monthly Magazine (June 1822), 422. However, in September 1823 the Monthly Magazine’s obituary to Bloomfield, described ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ and ‘The Soldier’s Home’ as the poem’s ‘great merit’ Monthly Magazine (September 1823), 376. BACK

[37] New Monthly Magazine (August 1822), 365.BACK

[38] Monthly Review (September 1822), 94. BACK

[39] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (June 1822), 727. BACK

[40] The Times, Saturday, Nov 21, 1818; pg. 2 reports the supposed escape of Napoleon. BACK

[41] Details in the poem can perhaps be plotted against events in Napoleon’s later career: for example, the confusion over who set the fairies’ woodstack on fire (see May Day, 50) recalls the burning of Moscow after the Battle of Borodino in September 1812. Bloomfield’s earlier ‘On Repairing a Miniature Bust of Buonaparte’ might be paralleled with ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ in their respective nuanced, mediated treatment of Napoleon. The thrust is of an exciting leader seemingly initially right — but subsequently going tragically wrong. In his use of ‘stripling’ and ‘fallen genius’ to describe the fairy playing Napoleon in ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, Bloomfield seems to be drawing upon a contemporary British body of literature about Napoleon. In the preface to ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’, John Armstrong is introduced as Sir Ambrose Higham’s shepherd-employee (see May Day, 45). Yet by the end of the poem, via his dream, Armstrong seems to have become a truly independent figure — monarch of his own republic: ‘My minister heard as he bounded away, / And we led forth our sheep to their pastures again.’ (May Day, 53). This seems to have much to do with the fairies’ re-enactment of Napoleon’s behaviour in defeat, and the ‘moral’ drawn towards the end of the poem, which the shepherd seems enlightened by and acts upon: ‘a fairy step’d forward, and blew through a shell, / ‘Bear misfortune with firmness, you’ll triumph for ever’ (May Day, 53). BACK

[42] Fulford, ‘Introduction’, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle. BACK

[43] Bloomfield is clearly part of a wider strain of writing about Napoleon, c 1822. BACK

[44] Bloomfield’s tales such as ‘The Broken Crutch’ and the later ‘Alfred and Jennet’ included in May Day recount members of the gentry enthusiastically courting and marrying labouring-class women, perhaps echoing the marriage of Bloomfield’s Whig patron Sir Charles Bunbury to a woman from the lower classes. See also the denouement of ‘Hazelwood Hall’ in which the newly gentrified Mary Maythorn does not forsake her wheelwright sweetheart Joel Spokeum. BACK

[45] See Roger Fulford, Samuel Whitbread, 1764-1815: a study in opposition (Macmillan, 1967), 231; A E Richardson et al. Southill; A Regency House (London: Faber & Faber, 1951). BACK

[46] Letter to Hannah Bloomfield, 4 July 1814. BACK

[47] Mark Storey, ed., The Letters of John Clare (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1985), 17. Storey is confused by Clare’s remark (see Letters, 241). Clare’s letter to James Augustus Hessey, 11 May 1822 indicates that May Day had been published by that date (see Letters, 239). BACK

[48] For example, in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine (March 1818), 145; Eclectic Magazine, European Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine (February 1818), 585, The Literary Panorama and National Register, Vol. 7 (March 1818), 958; The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol 88, Part I (February 1818), 158; New Monthly Magazine. The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, &c, Volume 5, no. 27 (March 1818), 189; The Christian Observer (February 1818), 124. BACK

[49] Bloomfield’s mock heraldic bookplate. c. 1813, features the motto, ‘Friends in Need and a Fig for the Heralds’. See Bruce Graver, ‘Illustrating The Farmer’s Boy’, White et al, Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon, fig. 16. BACK

[50] The Banks of Wye (London: Vernor and Hood, 1811), 123. BACK

[51] If it ever existed, Joseph Weston and Bloomfield’s daughter Hannah may have encountered the Southill MS, when editing the posthumous Remains. But with Weston already countering criticism of Bloomfield they could not afford to include anything too controversial, such as Bloomfield’s attack on Lord Ongley. See ‘“The Poet Angling”: an Anecdote Concerning Robert Bloomfield and a Previously Unrecorded Epigram’, BACK