The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

174 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

Morning Post in December 1789 and January 1790 (and reportedly in

other papers as well). So, when Stuart hired Robinson, the first thing

she did was to take on the Bramble mantle from Macdonald, whom

she likely had read in the Morning Post because of his series of Odes

to Actors, which appeared just as she was getting started writing for

The World and then for The Oracle. On the day before the first poem

appeared, Stuart announced in the Post that “We have received the first

number of a series of Odes, by Tabitha Bramble, a relation of the late

Matthew Bramble, and a promise is made that the Morning Post shall

be favoured with the remainder” (7 December 1797). Stuart unmis-

takably here refers to Macdonald as the “late Matthew Bramble.” The

Tabitha Bramble pseudonym, therefore, likely emerged as an inside

joke among Stuart, Wolcot, and Robinson, and became an homage

to Macdonald and to the paper’s heyday as an opposition broadsheet.

Stuart later recalled that Macdonald worked for his brother Peter at the

Star, but that the Post lured him away (25). If so, it may have been John

Taylor, another close friend of Robinson and the Post’s editor at the

time, who employed Macdonald. Lucyle Werkmeister, moreover, locates

Daniel Stuart, Wolcot, and Macdonald working together at the Post

in the second half of 1789, along with Stuart’s brother- in- law, James

Mackintosh, who later engaged Coleridge on behalf of Stuart (322). And

even though Macdonald died seven years prior to these poems, earlier

in 1797, Wolcot had republished Macdonald’s poems as A Supplement

to the Works of Peter Pindar. As we can see, then, Robinson here is not

portraying the character from Smollett’s novel; instead, she is perform-

ing as a female “Peter Pindar” or a female “Matthew Bramble”—that

is, as a satirical writer explicitly employing a pen- name and not really a

novelistic character at all.

As the first poem proceeds, Robinson’s Tabitha follows “a pure

effulgent star” (and if anything can verify Robinson’s authorship it

is her penchant for the word effulgent) that promises to lead her to

poetic fame:

Still shall a bough from MATTHEW’S wreathe divine,

About my throbbing temples twine;

No thing uncommon in these pilf’ring days,

To shade an empty brow, beneath another’s bays! (1: 347; 23–6)

Here she uses what is probably the most prominent motif in her

poetry—the transfer of the laurel wreath from the poetic predeces-

sor to herself. But it would seem that here she satirizes the gesture as

plagiarism, and some of this may be a parody of women poets, given

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1749780230100251_06_ch04.indd 174 12/28/2010 11:08:52 AM12/28/2010 11:08:52 AM

10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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