About this edition

Throughout the edition, letters are presented in chronological order, each letter being assigned its own number. Unpublished letters have all been newly transcribed from manuscript. Where letters have been previously published, we have returned to and transcribed the original manuscript when it survives. In cases where we have been unable to locate the manuscript of a published letter, copy-text is taken from the published version and this is recorded in the editorial headnote.

All letters are transcribed in full and editorial intervention in the text has been kept to a minimum. Bloomfield's original spelling, and mis-spelling, grammar and punctuation has been retained. Deletions are indicated by striking through the deleted word or phrase, but without any attempt to indicate the heaviness of the deletion. Throughout the text, 'x' is used to indicate an illegible character: e.g. 'he xxid'. Underlining is indicated by italics: e.g. 'he said'. Editorial [...] within the text of an individual letter are used to indicate issues relating to the manuscript: a tear, cut, missing section or area obscured by a seal mark or blot, or a substantial section of a letter in the hand of a co-correspondent. Editorial <...> are used to indicate an authorial insertion of text above or below the line.

Each letter has an editorial headnote which records the manuscript location and any previous instances of publication. This edition provides new information about when many of Bloomfield's letters were written, and re-dates letters that have been misdated or misleadingly dated by previous editors; '?' is used to indicate a dating about which there remains some uncertainty.

Detailed information about Bloomfield's correspondents, along with other important figures in his letters, can be found in the 'People' section. Information about where Bloomfield lived and places that were significant to him is provided in the 'Places' section of this edition.

Editorial notes to the text are used to clarify references to persons, books, places, and events within the main body of each individual letter. They also identify quotations and provide translations of foreign language material.

People

Tim Fulford is a Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He has published several monographs and articles in which Bloomfield features, including Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (2004). He edited Thalaba the Destroyer, vol. 3 of Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793-1810 (2004) and is co-general editor, with Lynda Pratt, of the forthcoming Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838. Pratt and Fulford's edition The Collected Letters of Robert Southey is also online at Romantic Circles.

Lynda Pratt is a Reader in Romanticism and Director of the Centre for Regional Literature and Culture at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on Southey and his circle. She was general editor of Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793-1810, 5 vols (2004) and is co-general editor, with Tim Fulford, of the forthcoming Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838, 4 vols (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). Her edited collection Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism was published in 2006.

Carol Bolton is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her monograph Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism was published in 2007. She has published widely on Romantic period writing and is a volume editor of Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838.

Averill Buchanan is an AHRC-funded research fellow on The Collected Letters of Robert Southey and is based at the University of Nottingham. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Queen's University Belfast in 2004 on the Anglo-Irish writer Mary Tighe. Her monograph Mary Tighe, 1772-1810: The Irish Psyche will be published by Ashgate in 2011.

John Goodridge is a Professor at Nottingham Trent University. Among his publications are Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems (2007), Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (2006, with S. White and B. Keegan), Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800 (2003, with W. Christmas, B. Keegan and T. Burke) and John Dyer, The Fleece: a Poem in Four Books (1757) (2007, with J. C. Pellicer).

Sam Ward is an AHRC-funded research fellow on The Collected Letters of Robert Southey and is based at the University of Nottingham. He completed a PhD at Nottingham Trent University in 2006. He has published essays on John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. His research interests also include James Montgomery.

Contact

The editors welcome comments and corrections. Please contact:

Tim Fulford: Tim.Fulford@ntu.ac.uk

About the Design

This electronic edition was TEI-encoded by Averill Buchanan under the supervision of Laura Mandell and her team at Miami University of Ohio, and with the assistance of David Rettenmaier and Mike Quilligan at the University of Maryland. Mandell transformed the TEI files into HTML by using modified versions of the transforms provided by the TEI. The HTML pages do not use frames but rather make extensive use of tables and stylesheets for layout and presentation. The site works best when viewed with Mozilla Firefox v. 3, Netscape 4.0, Internet Explorer 4.0, or higher, or a comparable browser; earlier browsers may not display everything properly.