Dr Simon White

This focuses on the polemical writings of John Thelwall, Hannah More, Arthur Young and Thomas Spence, the poetry of Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, John Clare, Susanna Blamire and Ebenezer Elliot, and the fiction of Jane Austen.

Robert Bloomfield, whom John Clare described as 'the most original poet of the age,' was a widely read and critically acclaimed poet throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, and remained popular until the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet until now, no modern critic has undertaken a full-length study of his poetry and its contexts. Simon J. White considers the relationship between Bloomfield's poetry and that of other Romantic poets. For example, her argues that Wordsworth's poetics of rural life was in some respects a response to Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy. White considers Bloomfield's emphasis on the importance of local tradition and community in the lives of labouring people. In challenging the idea that the formal and rhetorical innovation of Wordsworth and Coleridge was principally responsible for the emergence of a new kind of poetry at the turn of the eighteenth century, he also shows that it is impossible to understand how the lyric and the literary ballad evolved during the Romantic period without considering Bloomfield's poetry. White's authoritative study demonstrates that, on the contrary, Bloomfield's poetry was pivotal in the development of Romanticism.

John Lucas has remarked that, "We cannot hope to understand that historical period which is habitually called Romanticism if we do not pay attention to the works of Robert Bloomfield." This collection includes essays that consider how Bloomfield's poetry contributes to an understanding of the predominant issues, forms, and themes of literary Romanticism. Incorporating essays written by established scholars as well as emerging voices in the field, individual chapters provide readings of Bloomfield in the several contexts within which he wrote: political, aesthetic, religious, social, and scientific. In addition, several essays discuss Bloomfield's important contributions to the era's predominant genres: pastoral, georgic, topographical, and narrative, among others. The collection opens with a major overview of Bloomfield's critical history, and includes an extensive bibliographic appendix detailing works by and about the poet. It offers a major critique of a neglected poet, a figure John Clare described as "the most original poet of the age."

This essay will explore the way in which the utopian ideas propagated by Thomas Spence and the Society of Spencean Philanthropists influenced the labouring-class poet John Clare. Clare’s poetry reveals that he was sometimes pessimistic about the ability of humans to live harmoniously alongside other beings. At the same time, some of his best-known poetry reveals a more positive utopian vision of a countryside in which both humans and non-humans can flourish. It is certainly the case that Clare’s view of enclosure is implicated in this tension. This essay will argue that there are other factors at play too, namely the agrarian utopianism that emerges from the writings of Thomas Spence. Spence and his followers, rightly or wrongly, believed that a corollary of fairer settlement for the labouring poor was a fairer settlement for the rest of life on earth. So far, I have not found evidence of any acknowledged debt to Spence and his followers in Clare’s writings, but the Spenceans were at the forefront of the ‘radical threat’ during Clare’s formative years, and, as Alan Vardy has demonstrated, Clare was more politically aware than is implied by the still prevalent stereotype of the peasant poet.