170 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonedition. Erdman’s edition of Essays on His Times shows that Coleridge’s
first poems for the paper appear during December, along with this first
batch of Tabitha Bramble poems (3: 285–6). In fact, the first poem by
Coleridge under this arrangement appears the day before Robinson’s
first Tabitha Bramble poem. On 7 December 1797, Coleridge’s “Lines
to an Unfortunate Woman, in the Back Seats of the Boxes at the
Theatre” appeared with an avatar of his own: Albert, also the name
of the protagonist of Coleridge’s drama Osorio, which he had recently
completed. Significantly, at the start of December, Stuart also began
aggressively promoting Robinson’s Walsingham, which he puffs as
“one of the most entertaining [works] ever published,” and from which
he reprints Robinson’s poems “Penelope’s Epitaph” and “Stanzas on
Jealousy” (2 December 1797). Perhaps to f latter Robinson, perhaps to
f ill space, or perhaps to antagonize the Anti- Jacobin, Stuart fills his col-
umns during three full months, through February 1798, with poems
and prose passages extracted from Walsingham and a heavy amount of
puffing. These run concomitantly with the “Tabitha Bramble” poems,
over the same period of time.
Within a week of the start of Stuart’s Walsingham campaign,
Robinson debuted her “Tabitha Bramble” pseudonym. In the
Memoirs, the “friend” who continues the narrative of Robinson’s life
(Maria Elizabeth Robinson or Pratt) writes that Robinson “com-
menced a series of Satirical Odes, on local and temporary subjects,
to which was affixed the signature of ‘Tabitha Bramble.’ ” The writer
goes on to say that “these lighter compositions” were “considered by
the author as unworthy of a place with her collected poems” (7: 286).
But in this section of the Memoirs, the “friend” is writing specifically
about the final year of Robinson’s life and confuses the “Tabitha,”
“Tabitha Bramble,” “T. B.” poems Robinson wrote in 1800 with the
earlier “Tabitha Bramble” odes that appeared in the w inter of 1797– 8
in the Morning Post; that is, the first batch. To me, these early poems
must be the ones that the writer of the Memoirs refers to as “unwor-
thy” because these, perhaps more than any of her other poems, seem
hastily, even sloppily, composed and were probably written for imme-
diate financial gain more than for any serious literary purpose. And
these poems, not the Tabitha Bramble poems of 1800, are the ones
that Maria Elizabeth excluded from the 1806 Poetical Works, so these
poems were never claimed by Robinson or reprinted by her daughter.
They are so unlike her other poems that I have considered the pos-
sibility that she was not the author.
The signature of a fictional character prima facie cannot guar-
antee the authority of any piece of writing. There is ample proof9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1709780230100251_06_ch04.indd 170 12/28/2010 11:08:51 AM12/28/2010 11:08:51 AM
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