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.
The Port Folio, N.S. II.1 (July 1809) 60
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.
Should this sheet be fortunate enough to reach your hand, surely you will not fail to write for our mutual satisfaction, and for the pleasure it will give our poor old mother, who is still living, and as well as she has been for many years past.
I sent you a letter directed to Philadelphia long ago. We have heard nothing from you since, nor indeed any ray of information since your letter which gave some account of your voyage to that place. Nat has long entertained a notion that as you have something of the rambler in your disposition you meant to forbear writing that you might one day surprise us with your sudden appearance in London, but I find he now gives you over for dead, thinking that nothing but death could induce you to keep your friends thus in total darkness, both as to your health or sickness, prosperity or poverty; for what if you are as poor as Job, did any of your relations expect you to grow rich? You set out a friendless adventurer, and what if you remain such, is that a reason for your breach of communication with your mother? Dear wench, think of these things, and believe that a letter, directed to ‘Mrs. Bloomfield, to be left at No. 14, Great Bell Alley, Coleman’s-street, London’ will be highly acceptable to us all. You may probably receive this in October, and then, when may we expect a reply?
With respect to myself my ‘Farmer’s Boy’ has run through six editions, and the last publication ‘Rural Tales’ has been reprinted largely. I know, that of the first, you have, on your side of the water, several editions of your own, (American editions) and this circumstance alone makes me wonder that you have not written to me on so great and so interesting a subject to us all. There is a French translation of the Farmer’s Boy at Paris, which is now reprinting in London.
Your brothers and sisters are well, and their families. Katharine is still unmarried. If I have no reply in a reasonable time I will get some of the great and good friends whom fortune has thrown in my way, to employ some person residing in your city to ascertain the truth of your situation, if living; or to transmit the particulars of your demise.
Remaining in anxious uncertainty,
You may, if you like it better, direct to ‘Robert Bloomfield, Seal-Office. Inner Temple, London.’