THE CHIEF END HERE IS TO ANNOTATE AND PRESENT A
CHECK LIST of those poems of Wordsworth that appeared in Daniel
Stuart's papers, the Morning Post and the
Courier,
during the six years, December 1797 to December 1803.[1] I have found that the list of
appearances
can be extended to well over 40. Although some 20 poems (all from the
Morning Post) are noted in the Oxford
Wordsworth,
over a dozen of these need correction in either date or collation. Several
poems, moreover, poems which are not simply reprints, are outside the
main corpus of Wordsworth's work, and they were therefore presented in
the Oxford Edition with little textual apparatus. Thus, it is from the
manuscripts as well as from newspapers that I am able to supplement that
distinguished work. It is convenient that all newspapers known to contain
Wordsworth poems are to be found in the British Museum files (with the
exception of the Morning Post for April 2,
1802, which is in the Newberry Library, Chicago). However, after
checking libraries in England and North America, I find that the following
issues of the Morning Post are missing: January 3, April 5,
May 15, and December 8, 1798; the first three of these might well contain
Wordsworth (or Coleridge) items. The missing copies of the
Courier cause less concern, for Mr. D. V. Erdman, after
searching the files from 1797 to 1803, tells me that there are gaps in only
the first two of these years.[2] It is
unlikely that these conceal anything, since the
Courier did not belong to Stuart at that time, and no
Wordsworth or Coleridge poem has been recorded in that paper before
April, 1800. As a necessary introduction to the annotated check list, I
comment on the varied nature of Wordsworth's contact with the
newspapers, and attempt an explanation of some poetic pseudonyms.
