The farmer’s boy and the Irish soldier go to market: Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Dermody

The first labouring-class poet to achieve mass circulation was Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823). Having started life as a farmhand in rural Suffolk, Bloomfield was, by his adulthood, a shoemaker in London’s East End. While making shoes, he composed, in his head, a four-book georgic poem seen from the point of view of a working youth – The Farmer’s Boy. Eventually he wrote this poem down in manuscript and tried, in 1798, to get it published. Booksellers rejected it until his brother George took it to a Suffolk gentleman who was unknown to Bloomfield – Capel Lofft (1751–1824). Lofft was a radical Whig, and as such believed himself to be a ‘friend of the people’, an opinion that recommended the poem to him. He was not simply a traditional patron, prepared to offer a local man of talent a small pension, but also an author and editor himself. If in this respect he resembled some of the female patrons of the recent past – Hannah More, Ann Yearsley’s patron, and Elizabeth Montagu, James Woodhouse’s mentor – he also had considerable influence in the new magazines and journals. He had commercial experience as well as the paternalist attitudes of a country squire or bluestocking intellectual. Lofft sent the poem to Thomas Hill (1760–1840), a businessman and connoisseur who was well connected on the London literary scene. Hill arranged to have it published by the firm of Vernor and Hood, publishers of the magazine he edited, The Monthly Mirror (to which Lofft was a frequent contributor). Hill’s endorsement assured Vernor and Hood that it would find a sale sufficient to repay their costs. It came out in 1800.

What was notable in the publication of Bloomfield was a move away from a traditional aristocratic patron supporting the publication with his money or his name. Nor was there a subscription list – none of that eighteenth-century method of enabling publication by an obscure writer (Griffin). Insiders were crucial: Lofft and Hill were the forebears of today’s literary agents. They had connections; they had experience of poetry publishing. They had an ‘in’ with a publishing firm and an existing media outlet to publicise the new poet – their magazine, in which excerpts, poems, reviews and news items were placed. Popular magazines were themselves rapidly expanding in the period; The Monthly Mirror was one of several that regularly included verse and aimed at a female readership. The publicity campaign that promoted Bloomfield in its pages gave a new impact to a not-unprecedented feature of the first volumes of labouring-class writers – a biographical Preface. Lofft added to The Farmer’s Boy an emotionally engaging life story that created a print persona for a writer he hardly knew. This told Bloomfield’s life-story emphasising his rural naïveté and natural gentility. It prepared book buyers to encounter a work of natural genius by a humble family man who had been a tender, sensitive boy. Lofft’s prefatory framing condescended to Bloomfield but thereby made him suitable for both aristocratic patrons of the deserving poor and middle-class patrons of booksellers’ shops. The biography left Bloomfield embarrassed, however, because it put his private life on parade and used the rural naïveté that he had shown when he first came to London as a boy to define his character as a man. The first Bloomfield saw of this narrative was when the book reached print. He had no say in it and was thus doubly infantilised by it: he was material being moulded to appeal to the public’s sentimentality (Robert Bloomfield, 2025b, editors’ introduction to The Farmer’s Boy).

Lofft’s publicity strategy worked: the reviews followed the lead of the preface. They relayed the story of Bloomfield’s deserving life. The public’s sympathies were engaged and it began to buy the poem in larger numbers than any labouring-class poet had ever sold – or than any contemporary poet was then selling. Bloomfield became the first publishing sensation of the nineteenth-century mass-market press. Vernor and Hood astutely catered to different income levels, selling The Farmer’s Boy in large quartos on fine paper for the wealthy, in quartos (at half a guinea), and in smaller octavos for those with more modest means. The book’s success, then, owed much to commercial acumen on its editors’ and publishers’ parts. Second and third editions followed later in 1800, at different price points. Demand was so great that over 26,000 copies of The Farmer’s Boy and its follow-up volumes had been printed when, in 1809, Bloomfield’s Collected Works were given the benefit of the latest technology used for popular titles – stereotyping, which allowed new editions to be struck off without the need to set up type again. Then, after copyright expired in 1828, Bloomfield’s poems were picked up by other publishers in cheap, large print-run editions. As a result of these, it is likely that Bloomfield sold at least 280,000 copies before 1900 (St Clair, pp. 217, 720; B.C. Bloomfield). The mass production and enormous circulation of this labouring-class poet perfectly illustrate the nineteenth-century development of a competitive scramble in the expanded publishing market to issue lucrative books quickly and cheaply.

The unprecedented commercial success of Bloomfield changed the conditions of production for labouring-class writers. The wide circulation of magazines and volumes containing Bloomfield’s poems at cheap prices meant that people from poor backgrounds could more easily read him – John Clare is one example – and both learn from his writing and, having read his biography, view him as a role model (Clare–Bloomfield, 7 March 1825, Robert Bloomfield, 2025a, no. 399). An aspiring young writer now had easier access to an example of someone like him- or herself forging a commercial career – and a successful career at that – without the need to attract patronage from a nobleman or to finance their volume by seeking subscriptions from the wealthy (see Christmas). Meanwhile, booksellers now had a far stronger financial incentive to publish poets from humble backgrounds, especially if they could be presented as boys or youths whom readers could feel sorry for as well as admire. As a result, there was a premium on poets of this kind and on editors capable of producing their work in ways that had public appeal. Indeed, such editors were in demand from both sides. They were middlemen: not only the publishers but also the writers needed men with experience of the literary market to fit them for print – to make them published poets.

In 1800, Lofft and Hill brought the last verse of the Irish boy-turned-beggar Thomas Dermody (1775–1802) to Vernor and Hood. Published as Poems Moral and Descriptive, this verse gave prominence to a young, often destitute, poet who had run away from home and then lived a feckless life, deserting all of the many patrons who had tried to assist him. The publication lacked a biographical narrative such as that which established Bloomfield’s reputation but in 1802, after Dermody’s untimely death, Hill and Lofft devoted many pages of The Monthly Mirror to making him, posthumously, an example of the tragic fate of poetic genius. There, in a ‘biographical sketch’, it is observed that:

Still is genius doomed to droop in sorrow – again the tear of sensibility must fall for the sufferings of an unhappy minstrel – and yet another name is to be added to the gloomy list which groans with those of Chatterton, of Savage, and of Otway. Poor Dermody! he is now deaf alike to the voice of censure and of praise; the former he often heard in his life time – the latter cannot penetrate the grave. […] No one will hear of his untimely death without regret: many will sorrow at his sorrows, and there will not be wanting some to weep over his grave! (p. 75)

Here Dermody’s rough edges – his drunkenness, dirtiness and dishonesty – are omitted. The reimagined Dermody would no longer bite the hand that fed him. Now safely dead, he is aligned with a canon of boy geniuses and refurbished for readers’ pity (see Cook). The function of this account is to make interest in labouring-class poetry a mark of refined, disinterested sentiment and so to promote sales: to buy his book – published by the same firm as the magazine – would now be a noble act of charity and sympathy. To strengthen this message, the Mirror carried sentimental elegies. ‘Lines on Visiting the Tomb of Dermody, in Lewisham Churchyard’ modelled the wished-for reaction to the poet:

And Pity, with a beaming eye,

Forgot the faults that laid thee low,

O’er thy cold grave shall deeply sigh,

And mourn thy pilgrimage of woe. (stanza 6, p. 197)

The desired response was further indicated by the inclusion of a letter from Bloomfield: ‘The news of Dermody’s death is truly afflicting; and glad am I to find the literary worthies were not backward in relieving his distress, however his distress came’ (p. 195). This statement, prefacing Bloomfield’s new poem ‘Mary’s Evening Sigh’, reflected back upon its author – reminding readers that the author of The Farmer’s Boy was himself a poet of sensibility. Implicitly, to buy Bloomfield’s work would also be an act of charitably relieving a poor genius. Thus the endorsement of Dermody by a poet whom readers already admired promoted both Dermody and Bloomfield himself; they were, moreover, shown to be from the same stable – that of Vernor and Hood. So was William Holloway (1761–1854), whose The Peasant’s Fate: A Rural Tale (1802) Vernor and Hood were currently publishing at Lofft’s behest. This poem was a follow-up project to The Farmer’s Boy – another piece about rural labour that lamented the distance of real-life agricultural work from its pastoral idealisation. The Mirror printed Holloway’s tribute to Dermody, which mourned the plight of poor poets:

Is it for this the Muse her gifts bestows? –

Is it for this the fire of Genius glows? –

[…]

Wild Passion’s slave – the victim of Despair;

Then, whelm’d in woes frail nature fears to brave,

To sink, dejected, to a timeless grave?

Bend, letter’d Pride, o’er DERMODY’s sad urn

Die! Envy, die! – eternal Pity mourn! (p. 197)

Although Holloway is more strident, his conclusion that pity is the proper response echoes Bloomfield’s and positions him as another of the poor lower-class poets that the magazine supports. In the pages of The Mirror the Vernor and Hood ‘boys’ are assembled as a group, both pitying and to be pitied, with pity, implicitly, taking the form of purchase of their works of ‘genius’ by the ‘letter’d’ reader. Here book buying becomes a form of crowdfunding, and not just of a single writer but of the many who, because they were born into poverty, form a collective deserving case – the labouring-class geniuses.

Even if their writing was being used to puff Dermody, and simultaneously to advertise their own work and to create a marketable group (cf. the Beat poets or the Mersey poets), there is little doubt that Holloway’s and Bloomfield’s admiration was genuine. Because they could easily access labouring-class poetry in magazine and mass-produced book, they could envisage becoming published writers themselves, while learning versifying by example. They learnt from Dermody, from Chatterton and from each other, making common cause – recognising each other as ‘brother bard[s]’ (Bloomfield’s address to John Clare in his letter of 25 July 1820, Robert Bloomfield, 2025a, no. 349). Poetry’s ready availability in magazines and papers allowed them to do this, despite their physical isolation from others like themselves: it was the periodical press, more than local oral tradition, that made them poets and that then promoted their work and sold their books.

Death by numbers: Nathaniel Bloomfield, Henry Kirke White and the perils of promotion

The Nottingham butcher’s boy turned stocking-maker turned lawyer’s clerk Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) is a case in point. In 1802, when Dermody died, Kirke White was a seventeen-year-old beginning to publish verse in The Monthly Mirror (see Fulford). Encouraged by Lofft, he produced for the Mirror a remarkable elegy that treated Dermody as the defining case of youthful genius – his early death the price that juvenile poets paid for following the Muse. ‘On the Death of Dermody the Poet’ anticipates a similar premature end for Kirke White himself, claiming with both confidence and relish the status of a marked man:

Say, didst thou mark the brilliant poet’s death?

Saw’st thou an anxious father by his bed,

Or pitying friends around him stand:

Or didst thou see a mother’s hand

Support his languid head?

Oh none of these – no friend o’er him

The balm of pity shed.

Now come around, ye flippant sons of wealth,

Sarcastic smile on genius fallen low;

Now come around who pant for fame,

And learn from hence, a poet’s name

Is purchased but by woe:

And when ambition prompts to rise,

Oh think of him below.

For me, poor moralizer, I will run,

Dejected, to some solitary state:

The muse has set her seal on me,

She set her seal on Dermody,

It is the seal of fate:

In some lone spot my bones may lie,

Secure from human hate.

Yet ere I go I’ll drop one silent tear,

Where lies unwept the poet’s fallen head:

May peace her banners o’er him wave;

For me in my deserted grave

No friend a tear shall shed:

Yet may the lily and the rose

Bloom on my grassy bed. (p. 271)

Developing a Romantic motif already applied to Thomas Chatterton (see Groom), Kirke White here suggests that to be a poet is to be ostracised and doomed. But this is, he implies, a fate he embraces, as Dermody did, and a fate rewarded posthumously by ‘peace’ and by the lily and the rose – symbols of purity and love. Byron’s similar romanticisation of the poet as a deep-feeling outcast is anticipated here, although Byron, the aristocrat, could not make common cause, as Kirke White does, with a boy-poet born to poverty and ‘misfortune’. If desertion and lonely death are the fate of poets, nonetheless, he suggests, poor and socially disadvantaged poets meet that fate earlier than others. The identification with the alienated, impoverished poet that Kirke White here displays seemed all the more tragically prophetic when read after his early death in 1806, which was just as lonely as he imagined Dermody’s to have been.

As published in 1802 in The Monthly Mirror, the poem took its place alongside the other sentimental tributes to Dermody marshalled by Lofft and Hill, albeit more vivid, macabre, and personal than they. For the young Kirke White (yet to publish a volume) it was a means both of exploring, in Dermody’s image, what being a poet might demand of him and of recommending himself to two influential middlemen (he also exchanged sonnets with Lofft in the magazine’s pages). The poem may have been heartfelt but it was also an astute career move. In the following year, Vernor and Hood published his debut collection Clifton Grove (1803) with Lofft and Hill advising him and using their contacts to gain him the endorsement of the Duchess of Devonshire. Kirke White had now arrived: he was a fully fledged member of the group of labouring-class writers whose work he had admired in Vernor and Hood’s magazine and books.

Kirke White wrote, but did not himself publish, another response to Dermody – this time to the Irish poet’s ‘On my own Character’, which Kirke White had read in the pages of The Monthly Mirror (p. 79). Dermody’s poem humorously asserts his independence, despite his indigent lifestyle:

A Poet, a soldier, a coxcomb, a stoic;

[…]

Now, full of devotion, and loyal dispute;

A democrat, now, and a deist to boot;

Now, a frown on my front, and a leer in my eye;

Now, heaving unfeign’d sensibility’s sigh;

Now, weighing with care each elaborate word;

Now, the jest of a tavern, as drunk as a lord;

By imminent woes, now, unmov’d as a stone;

And, now, tenderly thrill’d by a grief not my own.

Celebrating his own contradictory variety, Dermody demonstrates his vitality as a poet and a man: he is the adherent of no system and the lackey of no one. Reading this tour de force of self-fashioning, Kirke White forged his own poetic character in direct imitation, declaring, in his own ‘My own Character’,

my breast is a chaos of all contradiction;

Religious – Deistic – now loyal and warm;

Then a dagger-drawn Democrat hot for reform;

This moment a fop, that, sententious as Titus;

Democritus now, and anon Heraclitus;

Now laughing and pleased, like a child with a rattle;

Then vex’d to the soul with impertinent tattle;

Now moody and sad, now unthinking and gay,

To all points of the compass I veer in a day. (Kirke White, vol. 1, pp. 27–9)

Ultimately Kirke White was diligent, studious, polite and pious, very unlike Dermody. But here he is inspired by Dermody’s boldness (scarcely cloaked by jokiness) to find a poetic persona that embodies liberty and candour: he will not proceed as a poet by flattering a patron:

I’m proud and disdainful to Fortune’s gay child,

But to Poverty’s offspring submissive and mild;

As rude as a Boor, and as rough in dispute;

Then as for politeness – oh! Dear – I’m a brute!

I shew no respect where I never can feel it[.]

Thus the publication of Dermody’s poetic declaration of independence in the magazine enables Kirke White, in solidarity, to voice his own conception of the poet as an independent despite the pressures of poverty and disadvantage. He achieves class consciousness with a discourse that refuses the deference expected from the ‘lower orders’.

Kirke White’s class consciousness had been reinforced by the reception of Clifton Grove, for it turned out that not all the reviewers were as impressed by his talents as Lofft and Hill had been; in consequence the volume sold a few hundred copies rather than the tens of thousands of Bloomfield’s collections. Part of the reason for its relative failure was the absence of a commercial strategy such as that used for Bloomfield. The traditional endorsement by an aristocrat – the Duchess – did not compensate for the lack of a biographical introduction that made the youthful author appeal to readers’ (especially female readers’) sentimentality. Nor was there a concerted publicity campaign in The Monthly Mirror, although Kirke White had previously published several pieces there. Instead, the volume began with a naïve declaration by the author that he was publishing because he was in need of money to fund his ambition of studying at Cambridge. This was too openly akin to begging, and led to hostility from The Monthly Review, which treated the volume condescendingly as the work of a jumped-up youth who was too ignorant to realise that his rhymes were incorrect (see Kirke White, vol. 1, pp. 17–23). Charitable readers might buy it to help a poor boy get on in the world but were not to expect literary merit. Stung by this patronising treatment, Kirke White sent a letter of protest; this caused the journal to soften its tone but reiterate its judgement. Kirke White then received a letter from Robert Southey – an experienced poet and reviewer and also the editor of the juvenile poet Chatterton (Kirke White, vol. 1, p. 24; Southey–Kirke White, 18 May 1804, Southey, 2016, no. 942). Southey, who came from a similar poor, shopkeeping background to Kirke White, commended the poetry, commiserated about the Monthly Review’s treatment and suggested that it was not untypical for writers of humble origins to meet condescension, especially if young. He offered to use his influence in the literary world to help Kirke White get a scholarship at Cambridge. Kirke White, while replying that others were assisting him in this goal, was led to reflect on the special difficulty that being badly reviewed posed for writers who were, like himself, from the ‘lower orders’. He would now be suspected of dishonourable panhandling – like a busker whom householders paid to go away (Kirke White, vol. 1, pp. 25, 98). Embarrassed and aggrieved, Kirke White was led to understand that the increased publicity given to labouring-class writers by their new prominence in magazines and books exposed them to prejudice as much as it offered them reputation. It was necessary to be carefully pitched to book buyers by people who knew how to pique their interest and appeal to their feelings – as Lofft and Hill had done, in prefaces, introductions and magazine tributes in the cases of Bloomfield, Dermody and their stable of poets.

The case of Nathaniel Bloomfield – Robert Bloomfield’s brother – was salutary in this respect. In 1803 Vernor and Hood published Nathaniel’s collection An Essay on War, complete with a preface in which Lofft, now carried away by his previous success in launching poets on the public, declared ‘I regard it as a Poem of extraordinary vigor and originality: in Thought, Plan, Conduct, Language, and Versification. I think it has much indeed of the philosophic character, poetic spirit, force of coloring, energy and pathos, which distinguish LUCRETIUS’. Referring to both Bloomfields, Lofft concluded that ‘It remains then for Prejudice to vanish like Mists before the Sun: while the two BROTHERS Sociably ascend PARNASSUS together; higher than ever Brothers have climbed before: I might add, each of them to an height which but few have ever reached’ (Nathaniel Bloomfield, 1803, pp. xvii, xxviii). Kirke White also greeted Nathaniel’s publication with admiration, but with a far more nuanced view of the production and consumption of labouring-class writing than Lofft now displayed. He realised that prejudice did not just vanish in the face of merit and that a labouring-class writer’s reputation was conditional upon fashion, novelty and effective presentation.

The author of the Farmer’s Boy hath already received the applause he justly deserved. It yet remains for the Essay on War to enjoy all the distinction it so richly merits, as well from its sterling worth, as from the circumstances of its author. Whether the present age will be inclined to do it full justice, may indeed be feared. Had Mr. Nathaniel Bloomfield made his appearance in the horizon of letters prior to his brother, he would undoubtedly have been considered as a meteor of uncommon attraction; the critics would have admired, because it would have been the fashion to admire. But it is to be apprehended that our countrymen become enured to phenomena: – it is to be apprehended, that the frivolity of the age cannot endure a repetition of the uncommon: – that it will no longer be the rage to patronize indigent merit: that the beau monde will therefore neglect, and that, by a necessary consequence, the critics will sneer!! (Kirke White, vol. 2, p. 253)

Nathaniel is here a monitory example; Kirke White learns from his fate that writers like him are at the mercy of both traditional class prejudice and recent commercial influences such as the commodification of novelty and the disproportionate effect of influencers, which bring about market saturation and compassion fatigue. New labouring-class poetry will not, he predicts, be welcomed, and this prediction, which prepares him to expect neglect as the lot of the ‘indigent’ poet (indeed to treat that neglect as a badge of honour) was not simply sour grapes because Clifton Grove had been sneered at: Nathaniel’s book was indeed damned with faint praise, not least because critics were becoming tired by the frequency with which Lofft hailed new geniuses with fulsome praise. The PR had become, by exaggeration and repetition, counter-productive, and Nathaniel experienced the diminishing returns of publishing in the wake of his brother and of the other labouring-class writers heralded by Lofft. Byron summed up this reaction in his satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers when he called Lofft ‘a preface-writer-general to distressed versemen; a kind of gratis accoucheur to those who wish to be delivered of rhyme, but do not know how to bring it forth’ (Byron, 1861, vol. 2, p. 53). Arrogant and condescending, the entitled Byron mocked a process that Nathaniel’s reception led Kirke White to portray with empathy from the class perspective of a fellow labourer:

If the art of writing be of difficult attainment to those who make it the study of their lives, what must it be to him, who, perhaps, for the first forty years of his life, never entertained a thought that any thing he could write would be deemed worthy of the attention of the public! – whose only time for rumination was such as a sedentary and sickly employment would allow; on the tailor’s board, surrounded with men, perhaps, of depraved and rude habits, and impure conversation! (Kirke White, vol. 2, p. 254)

Writing, Kirke White perceives, is a learned labour, difficult in itself and still more difficult for a man who is also required to labour at his trade. In these circumstances it is not surprising that an editor such as Lofft is needed: the context of the labourer’s literary production requires it. This is perceptive analysis: by reflecting on a fellow labourer-poet’s reception he is able to understand the conditions of production and consumption not just for that poet but also for himself and for labourer-poets in general. He comprehends the labour value involved in being a self-taught poet and measures the gap between it and the value placed on the end product in the capitalised market.

Kirke White’s prophecy of neglect was an astute response to his diagnosis of the problems inherent in the promotional techniques employed by Lofft and Hill. If he had cultivated Lofft and been cultivated by him so as to become one of the Vernor and Hood stable, he had arrived too late to win the rewards that Robert Bloomfield had garnered. Lofft’s hype invited disbelief, while the repetition of the Bloomfield pitch – more labourer-poets and more boy-geniuses produced in short order – made each seem less extraordinary than the last. If their new accessibility in magazine and book had inspired him and others to write, it had tired middle-class readers looking for new stimulation. Extensive circulation had reduced the value of the currency. The market was over-supplied.

Dead poets resurrected: editorial curation and niche marketing

So far, I have shown that labouring-class poets achieved wide popularity in the conditions of production and consumption that characterised a rapidly expanding print culture in which affordable magazines and books circulated in greater number than ever before. This situation brought new opportunities: would-be writers more easily encountered, in print, poets from similar walks of life as themselves and were encouraged to write and to get published. They were able to make common cause and boost each other. They were, at least for a while, marketable enough for editors and booksellers to mould them – their works and their lives – into commodities that possessed more widespread public appeal than before. Indeed, they were among the first writers for whom PR marketing strategy was developed, and this worked well enough for sales to rocket and print culture to expand still further. But this commercialism also produced new versions of old problems: the poets met class contempt if the PR campaign missed the mark and also experienced, to an unprecedented extent, the downside of the fetishisation of novelty and commodification of pity. As the dust settled after the initial sales explosion of the Vernor and Hood labourer-poets, it became clear that careful curation of the verse and life-stories would be vital if poets from the ‘lower orders’ were not, in future, to enjoy meteoric success followed by a plunge into obscurity as their novelty value wore off.

This curation required a class of middlemen capable of understanding from the inside the pressures of trying to make a living from writing who were also experienced enough in publishing to accurately gauge readers’ tastes and feelings. Lofft and Hill were rapidly superseded in this role by more astute and credible editors; Southey, whom Byron termed Britain’s ‘only existing entire man of letters’, was one of the first and became a role model for others by virtue of his presentation of Kirke White (Byron, 1973–4, vol. 3, p. 214). After Kirke White’s early death from consumption, Southey edited his writings for publication in 1807. The Remains of Henry Kirke White became a huge hit for Vernor and Hood, making the dead author one of the bestselling poets of the entire nineteenth century. It was Southey’s dual understanding of the labour of verse-writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the feelings, views and tastes of the book-buying public that made it so successful. He was able to appeal to readers’ discernment – to convince them of the poet’s lasting literary and personal merits and assure them that their approval would be an exercise of judgement rather than the following of fashion. This was niche marketing that flattered buyers’ sense of their superior taste. It helped that, like Chatterton, the poet had died young: this aroused pity and cleared him of any suspicion of writing to beg money. Southey’s experience as a writer and editor enabled him to turn a mass of manuscript drafts into comprehensible published texts and, unlike Lofft, to make credible claims about their merits; his understanding of public taste allowed him to write a biographical narrative that was emotionally engaging without being mawkish. Readers admired and pitied the poor boy as they had when Lofft had presented Bloomfield’s life; they were fascinated by the poetry because, Southey showed, it evinced the pathetic drama of a young man contemplating, with fear and horror but also clarity and dignity, his own coming demise (see Langbauer). Movingly, as Southey represented it, that demise was the result of a tragic flaw. Kirke White’s main virtue was his determination to study his way out of poverty by educating himself, but this determination, which brought his success as a scholarship boy in the Cambridge exams, exhausted mind and body. Years of overwork, anxiety and sleep deprivation left him prey to desperation and disease. What made him an exemplary young man for middle-class readers who valued hard work, self-reliance and social advancement was also what killed him. He seemed the reader’s favourite son or brother – an ordinary yet noble youth brought down by taking to an extreme course that every aspiring person might approve of – labouring with his mind to escape a life in shop or factory labouring with his body.

What Southey did for Kirke White, others tried to do for the next generation of poets. Thus Keats and Clare were edited and promoted by an experienced man of letters who, as a young man, had worked for the publisher of The Monthly Mirror, The Farmer’s Boy and The Remains of Kirke White (see Barnard, 1996; and Fulford, 2022, ‘Kirke White and Keats’, ‘Kirke White, John Clare and Labouring-class Poetry’). This was John Taylor, proprietor of The London Magazine and editor/publisher of Endymion and The Village Minstrel, who consciously repeated the roles of Lofft, Southey, and Vernor and Hood. Clare and Keats trusted him to present their work to the public and Taylor had learned from the presentation of Bloomfield and Kirke White how to do so. Thus the production line of labouring-class poets continued operating because it was managed, and seen to be managed, by an established family business that was trusted by its workers and by its niche market to provide reliably high-quality products. Nevertheless it still helped if the labourer-poet concerned could be seen to have suffered – Keats’s early death and Clare’s village poverty were facets of their popular appeal. The popularity of poetry was, at least in part, in the pity.

Works cited

• Barnard, John, ‘Keats Echoes Kirke White’, Review of English Studies, 47 (1996), pp. 389–92.
• Bloomfield, B.C., ‘The Publication of The Farmer’s Boy by Robert Bloomfield’, The Library, sixth series, 15, no. 2 (1993), pp. 75–94.
• Bloomfield, Nathaniel, An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; the Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems (London: Thos. Hurst, and Vernor and Hood, 1803).
• Bloomfield, Robert, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, with the assistance of Sara Slinn, [2009] 2025a. https://beddoes.dmu.ac.uk/BloomfieldPages/TextsLettersmenu.html.
• Bloomfield, Robert, The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield, ed. Tim Fulford, John Goodridge and Sam Ward, with the assistance of Sara Slinn, [2019] 2025b. https://beddoes.dmu.ac.uk/BloomfieldPages/home.html.
• Byron, George Gordon, Lord, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron: In Ten Volumes (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1861).
• Byron, George Gordon, Lord, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973–4), 13 volumes.
• Christmas, William J., The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2001).
• Cook, Daniel, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830 (London: Palgrave, 2013).
• Fulford, Tim (ed.), Henry Kirke White, 1785–1806: An Exploration of a Once Popular and Now Neglected Poet by Tim Fulford, 2022. https://kirkewhitecom.wordpress.com
• Griffin, Dustin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• Groom, Nick, ‘ “With Certain Grand Cottleisms”: Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey and the 1803 Works of Thomas Chatterton’, Romanticism, 15 (2009), pp. 225–38.
• Kirke White, Henry, The Remains of Henry Kirke White, ed. Robert Southey (London: Vernor and Hood, 1807), two volumes.
• Langbauer, Laurie, ‘Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey’, PMLA, 128 (2013), pp. 888–906.
• Southey, Robert, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer (2016). Romantic Circles Electronic Edition. https://romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_letters.
• St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Periodicals

• The Monthly Mirror, 14 (1802).
• The Monthly Review, 43 (1804).