Robert Southey and Mary Robinson in Dialogue

Abstract

On February 12, 1798, there appeared in The Morning Post and Gazetteer the following announcement: is remarkable as the birth-place of POETIC GENIUS: The names of CHATTERTON, Mrs. ROBINSON, Mr. SOUTHEY, Miss MORE, and Mrs. YEARSLEY, will prove the assertion. Implying the existence of a Bristol school of writers, the announcement also suggested that the editor, Daniel Stuart, was intent on advertising the quality of the paper's poetical department. He sought to capitalize on the popularity of well-known writers Yearsley and More, and on Chatterton's sensational and tragic story of genius, to puff his young house-poets, Robinson and Southey--his chief poetic correspondents between 1797 and 1800. Stuart had good reason to remind his readers of the verse to which the Morning Post gave them access: its poetry, much of it published pseudonymously, was one of the chief features giving it an advantage over rival papers. (By 1803, the paper's circulation at 3500 was bigger than any other London newspaper [Curry 1]). At the start of 1798, Robinson, who had been writing for Stuart regularly since he hired her and Coleridge in November, 1797, had become ill. While the Post kept its readers informed of Robinson's indisposition and her reputation as the English Sappho, it also wanted to build up its poet's reputation, one Stuart felt that needed defending after the Anti-Jacobin attacks on Southey's style. As Daniel Robinson suggests in his essay in this issue, Southey stepped in at first as a replacement for Robinson, and then became the predominant contributor from early 1798 until December 1799, when he left for Portugal. At that point, Robinson took over as primary contributor and continued in that role, despite poor health, until November, 1800, right before her death. The attempt to link Robinson and Southey was more than a marketing move. Stuart was a savvy businessman and hired poets because he admired their ability to generate the his readers enjoyed. He needed poets who could produce regularly and who could negotiate the tension between commodity status and aesthetic value, between daily consumption and transcendent worth, which writing for his newspaper demanded. As Judith Pascoe argues in Romantic Theatricality, the columns of the Morning Post had the double agenda of pleasing a substantial and diverse audience and shaping them into a select group of elite readers eager to buy and consume books (Pascoe 169). The poems had to be rapidly made and variously shaped--in multiple genres and styles, from the witty and satiric, to the romantic and melancholy, and to the sharply political. They had to combine metrical technique with generic diversity, narrative twists with lyrical moments, and ironic wit with emotional sensibility. In short, a poet writing one to two poems weekly for the Post had to embody a theatricality that was the basis of the paper's variety. Robinson and Southey adapted their writing for this task: both used pseudonyms to create regular characters with their own identities and styles--personas that readers came to identify and expect. And they were prolific: Southey produced upwards of two hundred poems during his stint; although Robinson's time was shorter, she published more than one hundred poems in a year (Southey 2004, xxii; Curran 20). Publication m the newspaper shaped the production and consumption of Southey's and Robinson's work--connected them with each other, as in Stuart's advertisement, as Bristol poets and poets of the Post----the most popular antiministerial paper of the day. But little critical attention has been given to the significance of their newspaper writing to explain the dialogues and circles through which the discourse of Romantic was pioneered (but see Curran, Daniel Robinson, Wiley). Until current revaluations of their significance for Romantic culture (as indicated by the recent Pickering and Chatto editions of their work), Southey's and Robinson's roles in what Stuart Curran calls Joseph Cottle's new school of poetry (17) has been overshadowed by those of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the more canonical Romantic poets and the other key players at the Morning Post. …