ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Goodridge is a writer and academic whose work focuses on recovery research,
public engagement, editorial scholarship and collaborative activities. His special
interests lie in the fields of poetry, working-class writing, Romanticism and science
fiction. He is President of the John Clare Society, Emeritus Professor of English at
Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the English Association.
Single studies include John Clare and Community (Cambridge UP, 2013), Rural Life
in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1994), and (with Kelsey
Thornton) John Clare the Trespasser (Five Leaves, 2016). A former Editorial Director of
Trent Editions, he has edited many volumes of eighteenth-century, Romantic and
Victorian poetry, and related critical writings. These include British Working-Class
and Radical Writing from 1700 (University of London Press, 2025), with Adam
Bridgen; ‘New Essays on Robert Bloomfield’, European Romantic Review, 31, no. 5
(October 2020), and The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield (Romantic Circles, 2019,
online), both with Tim Fulford; A Cambridge History of Working-Class Writing
(Cambridge UP, 2017), and Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters
(Romantic Circles Praxis, 2012, online), both with Bridget Keegan.
He is an editor on the forthcoming multi-volume edition of the Collected
Correspondence of John Clare (Liverpool University Press, due 2030), and was an
advisory editor on the Collected Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle (Romantic
Circles, 2012). He writes and edits two other major online resources, ‘A Catalogue of
Labouring-Class Poetry’, now running at 575,000 words with entries on over 2,400
poets, and a 150-page, lightly annotated, year-by-year critical checklist, ‘Further
Reading: John Clare Studies, 1970-2025’. These and other materials are posted to
academia.edu, Knowledge Commons and Researchgate.
He runs a Facebook Group ‘A History of British Working-Class Literature’, and a
miscellaneous WordPress blog (which will soon be migrated to SubStack). His songs
and settings of poems by Bloomfield, Chatterton and Clare are on SoundCloud; two
to the latter now feature in ‘short films by Mike Hobson set in John Clare Country,
Springtime’ and ‘Fog’ (YouTube, 2025). Recent blogposts include ‘Black Sabbath:
Working-Class Radicals’ (Birmingham Museums web page) and ‘Rowley’s Ghost:
An Evolving Checklist’ (BARS blog).