Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield

This interlude situates Dibdin in a milieu that may surprise us today, but that was a key comparison to many contemporaries: that is, alongside rural labouring-class poets, with particular emphasis on Robert Bloomfield. Rather than revisit Raymond Williams (who spares only two pages for Bloomfield in The Country and the City and ignores Dibdin), it interrogates the intersection of metropolis and countryside by locating these two writers’ texts within their working lives, networks, and practices, their music, and their engagement with particular London audiences. These active, commercial, humorous performers are contrasted to the antiquarian idealism of Percy and others, offering a reading of the rustic and the citizen that is knowing, even-handed, and modern.