Stuart’s Laureates I 169that appeared in the Morning Post during the final year of her life,
after she became Stuart’s principal poetry contributor in December of
1799, when Southey resigned the position and left for Portugal. She
collected several of these for her final volume, Lyrical Tales, includ-
ing “Mistress Gurton’s Cat,” “Deborah’s Parrot,” and “The Granny
Grey,” which Lisa Vargo has discussed in relation to Wordsworth
and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Other Lyrical Tales such as “Old
Barnard. A Monkish Tale,” “The Confessor,” and “The Fortune
Teller” also first appeared in the Morning Post with the Tabitha
Bramble signature.^6 In December of 1797, however, the Morning Post
began printing an elusive series of poems that I call the first batch of
Tabitha Bramble poems to distinguish them from the more famous
ones collected in Lyrical Tales. Robinson’s first Tabitha Bramble
poem, “Tabitha Bramble Visits the Metropolis by Command of her
Departed Brother,” initiated a series of eight poems that appeared
in the Morning Post during the winter of 1797–8. These poems had
never reappeared in any collections of her work until 2009, when I
included them in my edition of her complete poems. While I tend
to agree with Judith Pascoe that the later Tabitha poems may just
be “bits of comic business meant primarily, if not solely, to amuse”
(181), the first batch of Tabitha poems are particularly interesting to
me because they are among the most explicitly political poems she
ever wrote. Some of them are downright vituperative. And they differ
significantly from the Tabitha Bramble poems of 1800 and raise more
questions than provide answers.
In September of 1797, having already made the Post profitable,
Stuart purchased the Gazetteer and merged it with the Post to form
the Morning Post and Gazetteer. In November, Stuart contracted both
Robinson and Coleridge to write poetry for the newspaper and to give
it more literary cachet (Erdman, “Lost Poem” 253); Robinson’s rela-
tionship with Coleridge will be explored in greater depth in the next
chapter of the present study. As we know from Stuart’s later account, in
a series of letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine in the summer of 1838,
and from Coleridge’s letters, Stuart’s brother- in- law, James Mackintosh,
was the intermediary at first between Coleridge and Stuart, suggesting
to each party that Coleridge contribute. Stuart recalls that he agreed
and “settled him at a small salary” (485). Robinson, who had been only
an occasional contributor to the paper, made a similar agreement with
Stuart. Under the new arrangement, presumably similar to Coleridge’s,
Robinson contributed the seven poems signed “Tabitha Bramble” that
appeared from December 8, 1797 through February 19, 1798, none
of which Robinson or anyone else ever republished until my 20099780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1699780230100251_06_ch04.indd 169 12/28/2010 11:08:51 AM12/28/2010 11:08:51 AM
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