1800 The Farmer's Boy by Robert Bloomfield First Edition Original Binding

  

The Farmer's Boy; A Rural Poem by Robert Bloomfield Printed for Vernor and Hood, London, 1800, with added? Engravings of the seasons in front, in-text illustrations at heads and tails, First printing, dated January 1st, 1800 on adverts.

102 pp with 2 p of adverts, original publisher's binding, 10 x 8, 8vo. Original blue boards are soiled with staining and heavy wear at tips. Spine perished with binding mesh exposed. Joints flaking with slight loss.

"Spring" engraving loosened from binding. Light toning throughout with minor instances of foxing.

Some thumbing to the margins, as to be expected. Free of known ownership or marginalia. Robert Bloomfield (1766 - 1823) was an English laboring-class poet, whose work is appreciated in the context of other self-educated writers, such as Stephen Duck, Mary Collier and John Clare. 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 in his head some fifty to a hundred finished lines of it at a time, until an opportunity arose 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. It was also reprinted in several American editions, appeared in German translation in Leipzig, in French as Le Valet du Fermier in Paris, and in Italian translation in Milan. There was even a Latin translation of parts of it.