University of Virginia Library

Introduction

The story of Wordsworth's connexion with the Morning Post has generally been seen as part of Coleridge's, and, indeed, so the story begins. With possibly one exception, all the verse of Wordsworth's to be printed in Stuart's newspapers before February, 1802, seems to have been included amongst Coleridge's own contributions. After this date, however, Wordsworth sends material on his own account and on one occasion at least the motive was to pay off a debt to Stuart. There was no question of Wordsworth's being the journalist that Coleridge had become, nor of his prostituting his poetry for a newspaper as Coleridge and Southey had done. He generally made the paper serve his purpose, allowing it to publish translations which he took seriously but considered of no great importance, using it for political sonnets, his moral hortatives to the country in a time of peril. His memory of this early activity seems to have become faint, but we have no need to feel that Wordsworth was being devious when forty years later, on May 17, 1838, he wrote to Stuart:

Wordsworth forgets here that with his poetry he paid off both moral and financial debts. Yet though his statement needs correction, its general truth is indisputable: he never wrote poetry for Stuart's hire, he was not paid by the column and thus he could be concerned with the quality rather than the length of his newspaper poems.

But it is clear from the lists that follow that half the new appearances noted were sent by neither poet; they were reprintings from the Lyrical Ballads inserted presumably on Stuart's initiative. Naturally, there are no significant textual variants but the numerous misprints here serve to warn us that many minor variants discovered in other newspaper texts may equally have little authority. The misprints further prove what a comparison of dates would suggest, that the reprintings of Wordsworth's poems in the influential Lady's Magazine (with a circulation of at least 10,000)[4] in 1798, 1800, 1801 are themselves based upon Stuart's reprinting in the newspaper. Stuart seems to have begun his campaign on Wordsworth's behalf on April 2, 1800, with the reprinting in the Morning Post of "The Mad Mother" and he introduced the poem with the following note:

This could have been from Coleridge's pen before he left for the North of England at the end of March, but just as likely it was one of Stuart's many attempts to express ideas taken from Coleridge's conversation. In the Courier, accompanied by suitable puffs, three other poems appeared in April, and one of these ("The Female Vagrant") was 30 stanzas long and occupied three columns. None of this activity was missed in Grasmere, and hence we have Coleridge writing to Stuart on July 15: That Wordsworth had been able to report to his brother, Richard, on June 8: "the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads is sold off, and another is called for by the Booksellers" is some proof of the success of Stuart's advertisement. Indeed, Longman's attitude changed most probably as a result of the public notices. Cottle relates that Longman had not been interested in the copyright of the Lyrical Ballads at the end of 1799 and that thus he had been able to recover it for Wordsworth. Yet only six months later Longman and Rees were prepared to reprint the first edition and to publish a second volume.

Stuart perhaps was not entirely disinterested. To support this volume was to support not only Wordsworth's work but that of his difficult and admired contributor, Coleridge. Further, Stuart must have entertained hopes of persuading Wordsworth to write regularly for the paper. By the middle of 1800 he must have been in real need of more poetry. Two years earlier, on April 17, 1798, he had been able to make some claim for the paper's literary pretensions:

To the end of 1799 the claim was in some way justified, for Southey and Mary Robinson were employed as principal contributors of poetry; Southey submitted on an average one or two poems a week, and, except for the winter of 1798-99, Mrs. Robinson's industry was equal to this. Stuart no doubt expected like things of Coleridge, especially when, at the end of 1799 Southey ceased to contribute and Coleridge became one of Stuart's London staff. Coleridge began with a spurt of poetic activity in December, 1799, but submitted only two epigrams for the first three months of 1800. (There were, however, some 40 items of prose.) Mrs. Robinson fortunately surpassed herself and supplied over 45 poems in the first eighteen weeks of the new year. Yet Stuart must have been well aware of the precariousness of her health—she died in December of that year. He was aware too that a "literary" paper required more than one poet, even though she should use some dozen signatures,[5] and thus, early in July, he apparently asked Coleridge if Wordsworth would care to contribute poetry. He may even have asked for prose. Coleridge returned him, however, a discouraging reply; in a letter of July 15, he wrote : "Wordsworth's state of Health at the present time is such as to preclude all possibility of writing for a paper." Yet strangely enough in less than one week Wordsworth's "Farmer of Tilsbury Vale" made its appearance in the Morning Post. In 1835, as we saw from the letter quoted above, this was the only poem, besides the political sonnets of 1803, whose newspaper appearance Wordsworth acknowledged; such acknowledgement does not mean that Wordsworth was responsible for submitting the poem, and indeed a sentence in Coleridge's letter of July 15, 1800, suggests that it was Coleridge who sent it : "On Thursday I will set to, & will not leave off, on my word & honor, till I have done a second part of Pitt, & Buonaparte—." But no such essay appeared in the following weeks (nor to Stuart's disappointment in the following years); instead, Coleridge seems to have substituted the Wordsworth poem. It is proper to warn here against a second explanation which might be suggested by the conclusion of Coleridge's letter to Stuart. "We have never," he complained, "had the newspaper with the verses I sent you from Bristol." It is improbable that these verses were Wordsworth's, for although, as we know from Wordsworth's letter to Davy of July 28, Coleridge did have a manuscript copy of Wordsworth's poems with him in Bristol, he would hardly send any of these to Stuart before the two poets had compiled the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. More likely the verses were Coleridge's own, the same that appeared in the Courier for June 21 ("I ask'd my fair, one happy day") and August 22 ("Last Monday all the Papers said"). These two poems had already been printed in the Morning Post on August 27 and September 18 of the previous year, and as the 1800 texts were somewhat different, it was clearly Coleridge who was responsible for submitting them again. Stuart presumably felt they could best be used in his second paper, the Courier, and thus they were not noticed in the lake district, for Stuart seems to have sent only the Morning Post to his friends there.

Not until early 1802 can we feel certain that Wordsworth himself sent poems to Stuart. The three Wordsworth poems that appeared in October and November 1800 were probably, as the notes below will show, submitted by Coleridge. Two of them were turned into compliments to Mrs. Robinson ("The Solitude of Binnorie" by means of a long introductory note, and "Alcæus to Sappho" by the coining of the title); this surely was the act of her friend, Coleridge The full existence and problem of the 1802 Wordsworth poems in the Morning Post has not hitherto been conclusively explored. It would seem from Coleridge's correspondence that he positively intended to supply Stuart

plentifully at the start of 1802, but it has been thought that he failed in his promises and that he sent little or nothing to the Morning Post between December 26, 1801 (paltry epigrams) and September 6, 1802 ("The Picture"). Some of Coleridge's honour has recently been retrieved by the discovery of two essays by him on the subject of Mr. Addington's Administration[6] and as we know, from announcements in the paper, that Stuart had these essays by February 15 and February 24, it would not be impossible for the Wordsworth poems of February 2, 12, 13, and perhaps March 9 to make up the remainder of Coleridge's promised contribution. It was not so, however. The poems are without signatures and this fact alone suggests they were not borrowed by Coleridge. Secondly, Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal points to Wordsworth's responsibility. She writes on January 27, 1802: ". . . Wm. wrote to Stuart. I copied out sonnets for him". Two of the February poems are sonnets and the doubtful item in March is a quinzain. Wordsworth's reason for writing to Stuart is found in an earlier letter of December 21, 1801, presumably the first direct communication between the two men. Wordsworth had found himself in need of £10 and, as Coleridge had precipitately left London for Nether Stowey that Christmas, he had applied instead to Stuart: Wordsworth was obviously well aware that Stuart was prepared to value him as a contributor. He no doubt remembered Stuart's request for work in 1800 and he must have known of Coleridge's suggestion to Stuart of September 19, 1801—that free copies of the Morning Post should be sent to Sara Hutchinson: Yet if, as seems probable, the £10 debt was to be paid off by means of "articles . . . in value to that amount", it is questionable whether the three or four short poems so far discovered were sufficient to do this. If ever there was a time when one might expect an early Wordsworth prose contribution in the Morning Post, the first quarter of 1802 would be it.[7]

By the end of 1802 Wordsworth's contact with Stuart had become very much stronger and in 1803 we find him using the Morning Post quite extensively. The sonnet "I griev'd for Bonaparte", published in the newspaper on Thursday, September 16, 1802, was probably handed to Stuart directly. In a letter begun on September 20 and finished three days afterwards, Stuart wrote to Coleridge: "Wordsworth dined with me last week. I don't know if he has left town not having seen him since."[8] This meeting perhaps led Wordsworth to think more seriously of the newspaper. Dorothy remarks twice on the Wordsworths' activity for Stuart. In a letter to John on December 25, she writes: "William has written some more Sonnets—Perhaps you may see them in the Morning Post—If they do not appear there we will send them to you." On January 11, 1803, she comments in her Journal: "Since tea Mary has been down stairs copying out Italian poems for Stuart."

The sonnets we will deal with first. Now, we can be fairly positive, Coleridge had nothing to do with Wordsworth's communication with Stuart; even the introductory notes accompanying the sonnets indicate in their plainness Stuart rather than Coleridge. The first of those halfpromised by Dorothy in her letter to John appeared on January 13, 1803, and on January 29 this sonnet, "Is it a reed that's shaken by the wind", was republished together with that of the previous September, "I griev'd for Bonaparte". The two poems were now signed "W. L. D." and were the beginning of a formal plan which Stuart ushered in with the following announcement:

The five sonnets that followed were also signed "W. L. D.", but there were no more than five. Only seven of the promised dozen appeared.

There is first, then, the problem of the missing poems. Perhaps the answer is simply that Wordsworth had written no more sonnets that were really suitable. At first glance it might seem that he had plenty of such sonnets available. Mrs. Moorman has counted six (William Wordsworth I, 572), but there are, in fact, ten in the same category, sonnets which were later classified under poems "Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty", and which could have been written by January, 1803. These are listed below with the information furnished by the Oxford Wordsworth (Volume III); I append an "M" if the sonnet is among Mrs. Moorman's six.

• 1. Composed by the sea-side, near Calais, August, 1802. "Fair Star of evening, Splendour of the West" (Composed August, 1802.) M.
• 2. Composed near Calais, on the road leading to Ardres, August 7, 1802. "Jones! as from Calais southward you and I" (Composed August, 1802.)
• 3. On the extinction of the Venetian Republic. "Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee" (Composed probably August, 1802.) M.
• 4. The King of Sweden. "The voice of song from distant lands shall call" (Composed probably August, 1802.)
• 5. Composed in the valley near Dover, on the day of landing. "Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more" (Composed August 30, 1802.)
• 6. September, 1802. Near Dover. "Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood" (Composed September, 1802.)
• 7. Written in London, September, 1802. "O Friend! I know not which way I must look" (Composed September, 1802.) M.
• 8. London, 1802. "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour" (Composed September, 1802.) M.
• 9. "Great men have been among us; hands that penned" (Composed probably 1802.) M.
• 10. "England! the time is come when thou should'st wean" (Composed probably 1803.) M. I assume Mrs. Moorman has extra information which allows her to include this poem amongst those written probably before 1803.

But, despite such a spacious list of sonnets, we have no certainty that these were available to Wordsworth for the newspaper. First, numbers 3, 4, 9 and 10 are not certainly written by January, 1803, and others of the list are patently not fitting for the mood of 1803. Some are not topical or general enough; others, perhaps, are too harshly critical of England.

Thus the failure to make up the sonnets of a political nature to the promised dozen can possibly be attributed to Wordsworth, either to his mood or to his inactivity. Stuart did little to help; delay cannot have

been encouraging to Wordsworth. Sonnet VI was published on April 16, and Sonnet VII not until September 17. Undoubtedly Stuart had had Sonnet VII for some time, possibly even from January, and surely from before August 14 when Wordsworth set out on his tour of Scotland. And this was not the only delay. The Italian poems that Mary copied out for Stuart on January 11 (see above) are most probably those that did make an appearance in the Morning Post from October to December, 1803. It is not difficult to account for such delays. In the summer of 1803 the national fear was of invasion from France, and a newspaper's best response obviously was patriotic fervour. Whatever Stuart might say about the literary quality of his paper, public needs and an extensive circulation dominated his policy. This had always been true. He explained his attitude clearly enough in 1798 when he rejected (on second thoughts) an essay by Rusticus (Thomas Poole), which attacked the fashion for men servants: Stuart's concern had not changed in 1803; he gave space to an increasing number of advertisers who took advantage of the Morning Post's high circulation; he printed more news and less verse, and even had difficulty in fitting in the patriotic verse he desired. An announcement on July 16 indicates his dilemma (the dates inserted in brackets are those of eventual publication): Even Wordsworth's Sonnet VII, "When I have borne in memory what has tamed / Great nations", could scarcely compete with such enthusiasm. It survived the paper's change of ownership in late August, and made its appearance on September 17. The Italian translations had to wait till October. Wordsworth did, however, make one fulsome response to the public mood, and this was his sonnet, "Anticipation", which was published in the Courier on October 28. Unrestrained patriotism was here at last, and significantly enough, this sonnet (though apparently not submitted by Wordsworth himself) found immediate publication.