Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
Remains, II, pp. 198–203
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard
Dashes have been rendered as —
Bloomfield's spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I beg leave to say I received your letter, dated Shefford, June 5th. The magazine man mentioned by my brother Robert, was Mr. W. Bent, successor to S. A. Cumberlege, at the Kings Arms, Paternoster-row, London; but who was the editor of the magazine, I am ignorant. Mr. Bent was the publisher. His was the Universal Magazine; I read it more than twenty years. Mr. Bent kept the MS. a week or two, and sent it back to my brother by a grave book-faced looking man, who said it did not suit Mr. Bent, &c. My brother offered it to Mr. Lane, the great wholesale novel manufacturer. He returned it almost immediately with a note of two lines, to say, it was not in his line. My brother afterwards left it with Mr. Dilly in the Poultry. Mr. Dilly, when my brother afterwards called for the MS. said it wanted revisal, &c. My brother then sent it to me here, at Bury, and it was on my own petition, without my brother’s knowledge, that Mr. Lofft took it under his patronage. But I have lived near seventy years in the world, and have seen enough of mankind to know, that the wretch who has once vouched a falsehood, will invent fifty more to make it good. Still, however, Mr. Lofft* is yet living, and will certainly prove he had no letter of recommendation. But then the calumniator may still say he gave my brother such letter. Should he do this, though I would stake my salvation on its being false, how could it be disproved? The coward staid till the death of poor Robert ere he dared make his attack. O, sir, if you could conceive how it hurt my mind when I read the statement in the monthly Magazine for September 1823! ...
The tale is told as if my brother’s misfortunes arose from his talents—as if his success had done no good—C. Bloomfield Esq. did not know there was such a man as me in existence till Robert’s success brought me to his knowledge on Robert’s account—for whose sake he, Mr. B., took me and mine into his protection. His great benevolence and charity have conferred favours on me it would fill a sheet to detail, and at this moment his bounty nearly feeds me; but for Robert’s success I should have been unknown to this gentleman and, consequently, must have wanted bread, and have been in a workhouse. And poor brother Isaac, who was in his youth a gay lad, and on a footing with the young farmers of the village must, when weighed down with a family of nine children, have trembled at a vestry to those he once deemed his equals. But Robert took him up, and was his true friend—took him and his family to London, and placed them in a shop. The scheme failed—he sent them down again and gave them the rent in the cottage for twenty years, clothed the boys, &c. The rent alone must have been sixty pounds. My brother Nat, I doubt not, had often his assistance. Nat had thirteen or fourteen children. All the comforts myself and brothers enjoyed, evidently sprung from the success of Robert. This sneaking assassin without a name, who wrote the article for the Monthly Magazine for September, 1823, keeps all this positive good—these real blessings out of sight— and tells us how happy Robert might have been had he continued to be a journeyman shoemaker. Even here he acts with cruel duplicity. He does not tell his readers that Robert was for the last twenty years seldom capable of bodily labour. He leaves the reader to think he was a man capable of hard exertion, whereas, the reverse was the case; the suppression of truth is, in this case, as much a calumny as the fabrication of falsehood.
While his resources lasted, Robert was always ready to prove by his conduct that he acted to others as he would
have wished them to have acted towards him had they been in
his place and he in theirs. Here it may be objected, how came he to get into
debt? He certainly, while his income was good, had not that cold, prudential
caution which men of the world possess. I am willing to admit with that
calumniator, his ambition was disappointed. It would have been his ambition to
keep Isaac’s family from
the parish; to keep his brother Nat from trouble, &c. &c. This he could not do. But
to read the article in the Monthly Magazine, the reader might be led to think
that he was ambitious of aping the man of ‘pecuniary
independence, &c.’
The only luxury I ever knew him indulge in, was a Cockney garden;
and here he was more to be pitied than blamed. He staid some time after he came
into money in his old lodgings in Mulberry-court, till he was literally hunted out of it. Persons of
consideration, who came in great numbers to see him, complained of the place
being disagreeable. Mr Peter Gedge,
the printer, called on him—gave him half-a-guinea, and advised him to get into a
better situation. Robert then hired a respectable lodging in Short-street,
Moorfields. His landlord put the key under the door in the night, and left
Robert to pay £9 rent to the proprietor of the house, or lose his goods. He then
hired a very small house near the Shepherd
and Shepherdess, in the City Road. Here he had, what was certainly, a
large Cockney garden! When his income became reduced, he retired to Shefford, where his rent, &c.
was comparatively small. He never kept a servant, or a horse, as many a one
would have done. His whole conduct in prosperity proved his fraternal love, his
filial affection, and his readiness to assist to the utmost of his power those
who applied to him. Those who knew him best will wonder how a man so inoffensive
and unobtrusive can be charged with ambition. But the writer of the article
above alluded to, says by inference, that the poor man of talents should not dare to enter the fields of
literature, but leave them to the men of ‘pecuniary
independence.’
I hope, sir, you will not tire in the glorious work you have begun. You cannot please every body—you cannot produce a perfect book:
But to endeavour to rescue the character of him who is not here to defend himself, is, I repeat it, a glorious task, and all the wise and good will applaud the design, whatever impediments the interested and the wicked, may throw in your way.
* The account of this gentleman’s death had not then
arrived.