Stuart’s Laureates I 179one of Wolcot’s “Peter Pindar” odes that I have not yet been able to
trace, or possibly even a collaboration with him. Although the poem
belatedly addresses the Peter Pindar pension scandal of 1795, Wolcot
recently had published his “Admonitory Ode to the Blue- Stocking-
Club,” so the title may be a more or less oblique reference to one of his
poems. Except for one short epigram, Robinson did not use any varia-
tion of the Tabitha Bramble signature again until after she succeeded
Robert Southey as Stuart’s chief poetry contributor in December of- When Tabitha does reappear, she is markedly a softer and more
feminine character with none of the aggressive satirical and political
belligerence of the first batch. This Tabitha Bramble bears no rela-
tion, figurative or otherwise, to Macdonald’s Matthew Bramble or,
for that matter, to the ever- political and vituperative Peter Pindar. The
first Tabitha poem of the second batch is on “The Mince Pie,” with
the humorous apostrophe “HAIL, SAV’RY COMPOUND!” (2: 18). This
is followed by a pair of poems on “Modern Female Fashions” and
“Modern Male Fashions” that burlesque in symmetry the most ridicu-
lous trends, but that also recall the montage technique Robinson used
for her Portia poems. Robinson attached the epithet “Spinster” to the
“Tabitha Bramble” signature for a satirical poem on “The Ingredients
which Compose Modern Love” to highlight the irony of the persona’s
jaded perspective. She deploys this version of Tabitha for poems par-
ticularly skeptical of erotic love and its devastating consequences for
women, such as “Lesbia and Her Lover,” “The Beau’s Remonstrance,”
“A l l For- Lorn,” “When I Was Young,” and “Pretty Susan.”
More often, though, Robinson would use the Tabitha Bramble ava-
tar for comic homespun narrative poems inf luenced by Wordsworth’s
1798 Lyrical Ballads and Southey’s 1799 English Eclogues, which
appeared in the second volume of his Poems. Poems such as “Old
Barnard. A Monkish Tale,” “The Tell Tale; or, Deborah’s Parrot,”
“The Confessor—A Tale,” “The Fortune- Teller—A Tale,” and “The
Granny Grey—A Tale” reveal a new interest in rustic settings, coun-
try folk, and simple plots that accord with the tenor of Southey’s and
Wordsworth’s poems of that period.^8 Under the inf luence of Southey
and Wordsworth, Robinson becomes more interested in narrative
poetry as a vehicle for a similar humanitarian concern for the poor and
disenfranchised—a concern that Robinson had expressed previously
in more ostensibly lyric poetry but which is here apparent in these new
Tabitha Bramble poems, as well as in other pieces Robinson published
under her own name during this year, such as “The Poor Singing
Dame,” “Agnes,” “Poor Ma rguerite,” a nd “The Old Begga r,” which
appeared first in the Morning Post; and “All Alone,” “The Lascar,”
and “The Shepherd’s Dog,” from Lyrical Tales. Based on her previous
9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1799780230100251_06_ch04.indd 179 12/28/2010 11:08:52 AM12/28/2010 11:08:52 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13