Editorial Introduction

Bloomfield’s most famous poem, one of the greatest as well as latest Georgics to be
written in English, was also his most popular. In his lifetime, it went through fourteen
official editions (pirated editions were published in France and America), was translated
into Latin, and sold an estimated 51000 copies – putting it on a par with Childe Harold and The Lay of the Last Minstrel as one of the bestselling poems of the Romantic era. This popularity lasted: new
editions regularly appeared until 1877; only in the twentieth century did interest
decline. Admired by poets, including Southey and Wordsworth, as well as by the public,
the poem was a critical success. It was also a seminal piece for labouring-class writers,
including John Clare; its representation of Suffolk, meanwhile, influenced John Constable’s art.

Composition

Bloomfield himself is the main source concerning the history of the poem’s composition.
In the Preface he wrote for the edition that appeared in the 1809 Poems of Robert Bloomfield, he quoted a letter he had written from London to his brother George in Suffolk on 16 September 1798 sending the manuscript he had completed in June, and declaring

When I began it, I thought to myself that I could compleat it in a twelvemonth, allowing
myself three months for each quarter; but I soon found that I could not, and indeed
I made it longer than I at first intended. Nine tenths of it was put together as I
sat at work, where there are usually six of us; no one in the house have any knowledge
of what I have employed my thoughts about when I did not talk.

I chose to do it in rhime for this reason; because I found allways that when I put
two or three lines together in blank verse, or something that sounded like it, it
was a great chance if it stood right when it came to be wrote down, for blank verse
have ten syllables in a line, and this particular I could not adjust, nor bear in
memory as I could rhimes. Winter, and half of Autumn were done long before I could
find leisure to write them. In the Harvest Home you will find the essence of letters
you have wrote formerly to London.

These remarks date the poem’s origins to between May and December 1796; they also
reveal the extraordinary circumstances of its composition: Bloomfield produced it
not on the farm in Suffolk but in a crowded shoemakers’ garret in London -– the mental
process hindered, or perhaps helped, by the repetitive noises of hammering and stitching,
and by the patterns of his workmates’ conversation. This origin in urban labour and
in labourers’ sociability, so different from the leisure and solitude in which the
typically gentlemanly activity of poetic composition usually occurred, had its effect
on the poem’s form and content: Bloomfield chose rhyming couplets because they helped
him not only to attain prosodic regularity but also to memorise the verse; he depicted
the harvest home not from first hand experience as a reaper but because his brother
George, who had left London for Suffolk in 1784, had described it to him in letters.

Despite its paperless origin, the poem was not affiliated to oral poetry. It was not
based on the work songs or folk ballads that were performed on city street and in
village pub, but on the highly literary form of the Georgic as represented by James
Thomson’s The Seasons (issued in parts between 1725–30 and first collected in 1748) which had been among
Bloomfield’s favourite reading since he had acquired a copy from a fellow London shoemaker
in 1783 or 1784. His poem had, he explained, begun in set-piece episodes:

The parts of the poem first composed, before any thought was entertained of going
through with the Seasons, were the morning scene in Spring, beginning ‘This task had Giles,’ and the description of the lambs at play.

Publication

By November 1798, Bloomfield had already hawked the manuscript around London publishers
without success. One, probably William Bent, declined and suggested magazine publication in instalments; another, most likely
William Lane, refused because he specialized in pulp novels (see letters 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the Letters of Robert Bloomfield)

Frustrated, Bloomfield sent the manuscript to George so that his mother should be
able to read it. George, however, took it to a local 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 an astute choice
on George’s part, for he was not simply a traditional patron, prepared to offer a
local man of talent a small donation or pension as part of his duty, but also an author
and editor with influence in the expanding publishing market in which magazines and
journals—the new means of publicizing books—had begun to flourish. He had commercial
experience as well as the paternalist attitudes of a traditional Whig squire. He wrote
to Bloomfield, declaring that ‘the example, as well as the Poem, may teach the rich,
and the highly born or educated, not unnaturally to urge harsh and overbearing lines
of distinction; but to be more attentive to the gifts bestowed by the common Father
on mankind, than to an overweening conceit of their own privileges and advantages’
(see Preface to the stereotype Poems of Robert Bloomfield, 1809). Impressed by the poem both in its own right and as evidence that the poor
and poorly educated were not naturally inferior, he sent it to Thomas Hill (1760–1840), a man of letters 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 journal he edited, The Monthly Mirror. While little direct information survives as to the terms of the arrangement, a dispute
that arose between Lofft and Hood in November 1800 suggests that the firm spent £190
on the printing, giving Bloomfield £20 as an advance, and taking, it considered, a
half interest in the copyright not just for the first but also for subsequent editions
(meaning that royalties would be split 50/50 with Bloomfield). This, as Hood told
Lofft when Lofft argued that the firm’s half interest did not outlast the first edition,
was a handsome arrangement (see Letter 45, 26 November 1800, of LRB). It was more typical for unknown, first-time writers either to pay the costs of
printing themselves, with the bookseller/publisher handling distribution, or to publish
by subscription. That this was not the case with The Farmer’s Boy must have been a result of Lofft’s strategy of showing the poem to Hill, an experienced
editor of magazine verse with influence over a publishing house. Hill’s imprimatur
assured Vernor and Hood that it would find a sale sufficient to repay their costs
– not least because it could be puffed in the magazines they also published and in
which Hill and Lofft reviewed. It was a bargain that Bloomfield, advised by James Swan (d. 1818), a London printer, accepted at a meeting with Hood.

What Hood published on 1 March 1800 was not quite the manuscript as submitted by George
Bloomfield to Lofft in 1798. Lofft took it upon himself to revise what he read, as
he noted in his Preface to the first edition:

My part has been this, and it has been a very pleasing one: to revise the MS. Making
occasionally corrections with respect to Orthography, and sometimes in the grammatical
construction. The corrections, in point of Grammar, reduce themselves almost wholly
to a circumstance of provincial usage, which even well educated persons in Suffolk
and Norfolk do not wholly avoid; and which may be said, as to general custom, to have
become in these Counties almost an established Dialect:…that of adopting the plural
for the singular termination of verbs, so as to exclude the s. But not a line is added
or substantially alter’d through the whole Poem. (Preface)

Whether Bloomfield knew of these changes while the work was in production, is unclear,
for he did not supervise the printing (by Thomas Bensley, who would print all of the
first six editions), and relied on the press to discover details about the forthcoming
volume. In a letter to George of 8 September–6 October 1799 (Letter 16), he noted

I shall see in what manner the Farmer’s Boy is advertised, not in the papers but on
the covers of the monthly publications from that house, the ‘Monthly Mirror,’ ‘Ladies’
Museum,’ &c. — they insert their advertisements in the Chronicle, &c. — Relative to
its ornamental part, the Cuts, I send the following from the ‘Monthly Magazine.’.
. . ‘That the art of engraving on Woodden Blocks, which formerly constituted the only
ornaments for Books; have lately been revived by the “Bewicks” of Newcastle; one of
them is dead, but the art is not dead; for we understand that a son of Dr. Anderson,
and several other young men have carried the art to very great perfection; their performances
rival in brilliancy and spirit the finest productions on copper. Every one acquainted
with the trouble and delays of printing with plates of Copper is sensible of the advantages
and convenience of this way, as the prints are impressed at the same time with the
letter-press.

The public’s sympathies were engaged and it began to buy the poem in larger numbers
than anyone expected, making Bloomfield 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 Whatman 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, in cheaper demi octavo and octavo sizes. In the third,
Lofft made a major addition to the paratextual material that would turn out to have
severe consequences for his relationship with the poem and its author. He added an
appendix in which he complained at length about his having been removed from his role
as a justice of the peace on the grounds, he suspected, of his radical politics. The
removal had little or nothing to do with Bloomfield’s poem; the appendix therefore
did nothing more than reveal Lofft’s egotism and his proprietorial attitude towards
the work he had brought to public attention. The Farmer’s Boy was, the appendix suggested, a place for Lofft to parade his goodwill and air his
grievances. It was his, the patron’s, work almost as much as that of Bloomfield, who
was his client and was to be approached through him, his verse bracketed by Lofft’s
prose.

The Appendix distressed Bloomfield and the publisher, Hood, because it put Lofft’s
personal affairs between the poet and the reader, and introduced contentious political
matters to a volume they had tried to keep free of radicalism so as not to alarm reviewers
and purchasers. In the fifth edition (1801), they persuaded Lofft to add this note
exculpating Bloomfield:

I wish it to be understood, that neither for my political Sentiments, Opinions, and
Conduct, nor for any thing which I have said that personally concerns myself in the
introductory part of this Appendix, is Mr. Bloomfield in the smallest degree responsible. Those therefore who dislike either the sentiments
or the mode of expression must, in mere justice, impute them to me alone, and in no
respect as any way implicating him. He wishes, I believe, to decline Politics and Controversy altogether; and I wish no man to mix in either farther than he feels it to be a Duty.

A tension was now evident: the power relations of patron and client did not harmonise
with those of editor and author. Lofft’s underlying conception of what and who the
publication was for (fellow Suffolk gentlefolk who bought the book so as to support
worthy local causes) was at odds with Hood’s eye on the wider reading public, whom
he supposed to want uncontroversial pastoral pleasure. The split became wider in October
1801, as Vernor and Hood prepared a sixth edition. Hill and Hood pressured Bloomfield
to gain Lofft’s consent to drop the appendix (Lofft having by this point been restored
to the bench). They also desired the removal of a note approving of the debating societies
that, anti-Jacobins believed, were hotbeds of labouring class radicalism. Lofft’s
reply to the request, Bloomfield reported, made it clear that ‘The infalible result
of any inovation now made in “the Farmer’s Boy”, would infix in the mind of Mr L the deepest and the most
rooted dislike to me’ (Letter 69; see also letters 63, 64, 65 and 67). Lofft let him know that if the cuts were made he would ensure Bloomfield became
known as an ingrate: Bloomfield, having so little social status, could not risk appearing
thus to the gentlemen and aristocrats who had supported the work, and was left pleading
with Hill and Hood to leave the appendix and the note in place. Caught between patron
and publisher, Bloomfield found himself to be the property of others (Hood retained
half the copyright)—his case a symptom of the changes produced by the rapid expansion
of the book market and the concomitant diminution of the role of patron and rise of
that of the bookseller. Although Bloomfield’s plea worked, and Lofft’s embarrassing
grandstanding was left in place in the sixth and seventh editions, printed by James
Swan (1802 and 1803), the difficulty was not resolved. By 1803 he and Lofft were estranged,
Lofft having been offended by the removal of his footnotes commenting on the poems
in Bloomfield’s second collection Rural Tales (1802). In the eighth edition, of 1805, Lofft’s insertions concerning debating societies,
concerning his tenure on the bench, and concerning his marriage were removed; Lofft’s
voice presenting the biographical account of Bloomfield’s early life was replaced
by Bloomfield’s own; some of the flattering commentary on the poem by Lofft’s friends
was deleted. Bloomfield did call another literary gentleman to his aid, including
in the edition a list compiled by Thomas Park (1759–1834; an editor and antiquarian) of all the alterations that Lofft had, in
1799, made to the manuscript of the poem. The aim, apparently, was not just to strip
Lofft from the paratext, but also to chart what he had done to the text. As a result,
Lofft’s words no longer prepared the reader to encounter the boyish rustic poet: that
poet appeared as an intelligent, straightforward man speaking to men (he had by then
read Wordsworth’s preface to that relatively poorly-selling collection of rural poems,
Lyrical Ballads).

The tussle was not over: in the ninth edition (1806) Lofft reasserted himself, adding
notes indicating his displeasure at the omission of his words from the eighth and
again delivering his political opinions. After an earlier remark regretting the restriction
of newspapers and popular print was dropped, Lofft now added ‘I spoke in the former
Editions of the effect of Newspapers, and other means of popular Information; and I now say, I have no doubt that the
opportunity of reading them contributed much to form the mind of the Author of the
Farmer’s Boy. Genius profits greatly by small daily aids and excitements. A wise and good Government
will render those aids as free and as generally accessible as it can. From such sparks
not only the spirit of the former Poet, but of the Artist in various branches, of the future sailor and soldier is awakened’.
He also added a new note endorsing debating societies, after his former one was excised,
and occasional snide comments such as ‘Mr. Bloomfield having omitted in the eighth
Edition what I had said in the seventh, of the satisfaction I had in 1800 in being
made personally acquainted with him here at Troston, I shall not restore it against his will’. Thus the struggle for supervision of Bloomfield’s
verse and biography, and, still more, the resentment of poet and publisher by patron,
was made apparent to all readers. Lofft’s remarks remained in later lifetime stand-alone
editions of the poem (1808, 1810, 1811, 1815, 1820): he had, it might seem, the last
(and first) word.

Not so: in 1809 the Poems of Robert Bloomfield was published – a collection of all the poet’s major publications to that date. Produced
by the new stereotype method, so that it could be reissued again and again without
the need to set up new type, this collected edition was supervised by Bloomfield himself,
and featured a Farmer’s Boy from which Lofft’s voice was largely excised. For the first time, Lofft’s 1799 alterations
of the verse were largely removed in favour of what Bloomfield had written in the
original MS. Poem as well as preface was now in Bloomfield’s words, and these words
were plainer and more colloquial than anything previously published in his name. For
example, in the first edition the phrase about mud, ‘Till dirt usurp the empire of
his shoes’, became ‘dirt adhesive loads his clouted shoes’ (Spring 82)—’clouted’ smacking of Suffolk rustic speech. The ‘shepherd idling’ became the
‘idling shepherd’ (Spring 281)—the poetic inversion gone. The phrase about the sheep longing for familiar fields,
‘Instinctively they haunt the homeward gate’ was changed to ‘Bleating around the homeward
gate they meet’ (Spring 297). Since the stereotype edition was reissued in 1814, 1817 and 1821 there were
effectively two competing versions of The Farmer’s Boy in circulation, vividly demonstrating the contested status of the poem and the inability
of a labouring-class author, even when supported by his publisher, to extricate himself
from a gentleman patron.

Sales

Sales of The Farmer’s Boy were at first good and, soon, enormous and unprecedented. On 29 October 1800 Bloomfield
summarized what it had brought in so far (Letter 41 to George Bloomfield):

for the next three, this hundred pounds is more than I had expected.

The extra payment of £100 for the first six editions, Bloomfield regarded as generous.
But the profits were large. Bloomfield told his brother on 30 November 1801 that ‘The
5th and 6th edition of Giles comprize together 10,000 copies, the new work [Rural Tales] 7,000, so that I have at any rate to share the profits of 17,000 books, for which
(at full price) the publick, if they are goodnaturd enough to buy them, will pay no
less than £36,025!’ (Letter 70). The ninth edition, printed by William Wilson (as were the tenth and eleventh) was
of 4000 copies. This brought the total printed to 26100. This success was important
to Vernor and Hood, but they nonetheless faced increasing financial difficulties and
from the sixth edition of 1802 divided their half share of the profits equally with
Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme (this arrangement was still in operation for the twelfth edition
of 1811). In 1812, after Hood’s death, the firm failed and the surviving partner,
C. Sharpe, sold off his share in the poem to B. Crosby and Co, and unloaded 4500 unsold copies of Bloomfield’s publications at a discount
(thus reducing the value of Bloomfield’s half-share of the profits and making the
volumes inaccessible to him). The bankruptcy, and Sharpe’s death soon afterwards,
meant that Bloomfield, as one of many creditors, received only 4s 6d for each pound
of the £372, 12s and 4d owed him in royalties (23%: and this to be staggered into
four payments stretching from 1813 to 1816). He took legal advice from Lofft and from
the eminent Whig lawyer Samuel Romilly and discovered that copyright for the poem
would revert to him, if living, fourteen years after first publication. He hoped that
this would be worth ‘not less than £2000’ (Letter 273). The reversion occurred in March 1814, and he then sold to London publishers a half
share in the copyright for the next fourteen years, though obtaining only ‘about half
the sum which I suppose their chance is worth’ (Letter 294). The publishers’ half share was in turn divided, so that the risk was spread across
several firms. Thus in 1815 the thirteenth edition, printed by Samuel Hamilton in
Weybridge, was published by a group of booksellers in which Longman, Hurst, Rees,
Orme and Brown took the lead. Both for these editions and for the 1814, 1820 and 1821
stereotype editions of the Poems of Robert Bloomfield Bloomfield kept a half share in the profits; a quarter was held by Longmans, while
the remaining quarter was divided between several booksellers (Crosby was named among
them for the 1814 Poems only—and went bankrupt in that year of recession in the book trade). Of these Baldwin, Cradock and Joy took responsibility for printing, distribution and payment of royalties
(see Letter 310 and Letter 350). They printed 2000 copies of the fourteenth edition of The Farmer’s Boy (1820) and 2000 of the 1821 Poems.

The poem was popular enough for editions to be published beyond the reach of British
copyright law. There were two editions in New York, and others in Philadelphia and
Leipzig, in 1801; in 1802 an edition was published in Dublin; in 1803 editions appeared
in New York, Dublin and Baltimore; further editions came out in Paris in 1804; and
in Albany, N.Y., in 1814. After copyright expired in 1828, the poem, either alone
or combined with editions of other out-of-copyright works by Bloomfield, was frequently
published, throughout the nineteenth century. B. C. Bloomfield reveals that ‘The firm
of Milner, for instance, under its various names and in its various series, sold 65,550
copies of Bloomfield between 1835 and 1895, and he was fifth in popularity, as measured
by sales, during that period. The figures are:

Burns 183,333

Byron 126,514

Milton 85,296

Pope 69,296

Bloomfield 65,550

This Edition

This edition is the first ever to collate all the lifetime editions of the poem. It
also collates the manuscript that Bloomfield wrote out from memory in 1801 (Houghton
Library Eng fMS 776.1) in an effort to recreate the original manuscript that in 1798
he had sent to George Bloomfield, who had passed it to Lofft who emended it and sent
it to Thomas Hill and thence to press (now Houghton Library Eng fMS 776). The press
set up type from this original manuscript, and it was then kept by Hill and not returned
to Bloomfield, who was thus left without a manuscript of his own poem—hence the need
to write out a new one from memory, one free of Lofft’s emendations that had made
their way into the first published edition (1800). Bloomfield explained his reasons
for creating a new manuscript in a letter of 30 November 1801 (Letter 70): ‘I am writing a fair copy of the Farmer’s Boy exactly as you saw it in MS., and
marking the alterations made by Mr Lofft; and adding notes of information, &c., this
I do that as I have not the original, something in my own hand may be found hereafter, and I do it too to improve my handwriting: I shall have it
bound carefully’. By collating this manuscript (fMS 776.1) and all the lifetime editions,
and displaying variants, it is for the first time possible to trace the many alterations
made to the poem and its paratext as a result of the growing tensions between Bloomfield,
Lofft and the publishers Vernor and Hood. We display, in effect, the history of The Farmer’s Boy as a battleground between parties seeking success and authority with an expanded
literary public shaped by a commercial book market.

While our copytext is the 1800 first edition, on the grounds it was this that gave
the poem its major public impact, it is possible to trace the Lofftian emendations
that the 1800 edition made to the original manuscript by examining the variants. Lofft’s
additional remarks in successive editions of the Preface and Appendix, and in notes,
are now traceable; so are the prunings of these remarks in the eighth edition, and
Lofft’s responses to these prunings in the ninth and subsequent editions. The text
and paratext as brought under Bloomfield’s control, with much of Lofft’s input excised,
in the 1809, 1814, 1817 and 1821 stereotype Poems of Robert Bloomfield is also recorded in variants.

Manuscripts

The Houghton Library, Harvard University, holds two manuscripts of the poem.

fMS Eng 776 is the manuscript sent by Bloomfield to George, and taken by George to
Lofft, in 1798. It was then transmitted to Thomas Hill, who kept it after its use
by the printer. A fair copy of the whole poem, it contains emendations in pen and
pencil identified by Bloomfield as the work of Lofft.

MS Eng 776.1 is from 1801. It has no line-numbers, and is of white, laid paper, of
higher quality than fMS Eng 776, measuring 31 x 19cm. It begins with an explanation:

City Road, London. Octr 8th 1801. The Original Manuscript of my ‘Farmer’s Boy’ is
not likely ever to be in my possession again; it being left, by Mr Lofft’s desire,
in the hands of T Hill Esq. of Henrietta Street Covent Garden; where it now remains;
except about two hundred and Sixty lines of the commencement of the Poem which are
lost. Wishing to possess a Manuscript like the Original, I meen that the right hand
page of this Book shall contain a genuine Copy of the Poem As I wrote it at first;
and that the left hand page shall shew the amendments and alterations introduced by
Mr Lofft. This I can do now while my memory retains the deviations; but, some years
hence, I may not be able, and may then wish that I had done it when it was in my power.
Robert Bloomfield

Lofft’s verbal emendations of the original, 1798, manuscript are entered on the verso,
together with several notes, and Bloomfield’s reconstitution from memory of the original
manuscript is written out on the recto.

Editions of The Farmer’s Boy

1st edn London, 1800: Printed for Vernor and Hood, Poultry; by T. Bensley, Bolt-Court,
Fleet-Street.

2nd edn London, 1800: Printed by T. Bensley, Bolt-Court, Fleet-Street, for Vernor
and Hood, Poultry; and Sold by T. C. Rickman, 7 Upper Mary-le-Bone-Street; Ingam,
Bury; Booth, Norwich; Hill, Edinburgh; Archer and Dugdale, Dublin.

3rd edn London, 1800: Printed for Vernor & Hood, Poultry; and Sold by T. C. Rickman,
7 Upper Mary-Le-Bone-Street; Ingram, and Dingle, Bury; Booth, Norwich; Hill, Edinburgh;
Archer and Dugdale, Dublin.

4th edn London, 1801: Printed for Vernor & Hood, Poultry. Sold by T. C. Rickman, Upper
Mary-Le-Bone-Street; Ingram, Dingle, and Rackham, Bury; Booth, Norwich; Hill, Edinburgh;
Archer, and Dugdale, Dublin.

5th edn London, 1801: Printed for Vernor & Hood, Poultry. Sold by T. C. Rickman, Upper
Mary-Le-Bone-Street; Ingram, Dingle, and Rackham, Bury; Booth, Norwich; Hill, Edinburgh;
Archer, and Dugdale, Dublin.

6th edn London, 1802: Printed for Vernor & Hood, Poultry; and Longman & Rees, Paternoster
Row; by James Swan, Angel Street, Newgate Street: London, 1802.

7th edn Dublin, 1803: Printed by P. Wogan, 23 Old-Bridge.

8th edn London, 1805: Printed for Vernor and Hood, Poultry; and Longman, Hurst, Rees,
and Orme, Paternoster Row. By J. Swan, Printer, 76, Fleet Street.

9th edn London, 1806: Printed for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, Poultry; and Longman,
Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster-Row; at the Union Printing Office, St John’s Square,
by W. Wilson.

10th edn London, 1808: Printed for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, Poultry; and Longman,
Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster-Row; at the Union Printing Office, St John’s Square,
by W. Wilson.

The Poems of Robert Bloomfield, London, 1809. 2 vols. Printed for the Author, Vernor, Hood and Sharpe; and Longman,
Hurst, Rees and Orme. Stereotype edition. In all printings of the stereotype edition,
The Farmer’s Boy, together with Good Tidings, make up volume 1.

11th edn London, 1810: Printed for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, Poultry; and Longman,
Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster-Row; at the Union Printing Office, St John’s Square,
by W. Wilson.

12th edn London, 1811: Printed for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, Poultry; and Longman,
Hurst, Rees, and Orme and Browne, Paternoster-Row; by T. Hood & Co, Union Office,
St John’s Square.

The Poems of Robert Bloomfield, London, 1814. 2 vols. Printed for the Author; Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme and
Co; B. and R. Crosby and Co; Darton, Harvey and Darton; Walker; Edwards and Reynolds;
and G, Cowie and Co. Stereotype edition.

13th edn London, 1815: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown; Baldwin,
Cradock, and Joy; Darton, Harvey, and Co; and Walker and Edwards.

The Poems of Robert Bloomfield, London, 1817. 2 vols. Printed for the Author; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown;
Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; Darton, Harvey, and Darton, Walker and Edwards; and J.
Cowie and Co. Stereotype edition.

14th edn London, 1820: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown; Baldwin,
Cradock, and Joy; Darton, Harvey, and Co; G. Cowie and Co; and Edwards and Knibb.

The Poems of Robert Bloomfield, London, 1821. 2 vols. Printed for the Author; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown;
Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; Harvey and Darton; G. Cowie and Co; and Edwards and Knibb.
Stereotype edition.