An extract from a letter written by Burns to Thomson on the 19th of July, 1796, says:
"After all my boasted independence, cursed necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process and will infallibly put me in jail. Do for God's sake send me that sum, and by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness; but the horrors of a jail have made me half disheartened; I do not ask all this gratuitously; for upon returning health I promise, and engage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen."
Robert Bloomfield did not find those generous and helpful friends of genius whom the imagination of Thackeray created to people the eighteenth century. He, like Burns, was a farmer's boy, who afterward became a shoemaker's errand-boy, living in a garret at 7, Fisher's Court, Coleman Street, in which he and four others, one being his brother, worked, and slept on "turn-up" beds. There he fetched the dinners from the cookshop, did the inferior part of the work, and ran errands; taught himself to read by the aid of borrowed newspapers and a little dictionary, bought for him at a second-hand stall, for fourpence, by one of his fellow-workers, and by listening to an eloquent dissenting minister named Fawcett, acquired the proper pronunciation of words. He began verse-writing at sixteen, and at that age also began to instruct his brother and his partners in the Fisher's Court garret (for which they paid five shillings a week), and in another "parlour next the sky" in Blue Hart Court, Bell Alley, where a fellow-lodger made him inexpressibly happy by the loan of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Thomson's 'Seasons.' When he fell in love with a young woman named Church, daughter of a boat-builder in the Government Yard at Woolwich, he sold his most precious possession (to purchase which he had practised much self-denial), his fiddle, on which he had taught himself to play. Writing to his brother, he said, "I have sold my fiddle and got a wife."
His brother says, "Like most poor men, he got a wife first, and had to get household stuff afterwards." It took him some years to get out of ready furnished lodgings. At length, by hard working, etc., he acquired a bed of his own, and hired the room up one pair of stairs at 14, Bell Alley, Coleman Street; and there, as he worked unaided by costly writing materials, amongst the noise and bustle of seven other workmen who, conjointly with himself, had hired a garret in the same house as their work-room, he composed his famous poem 'The Farmer's Boy,' the latter portion of his 'Autumn,' and the whole of his 'Winter.' Not a line of either was committed to paper before each was corrected, altered, improved, and finally completed.