Poet as Journalist: Dailies, Monthlies, Quarterlies

Abstract

Both Southey and Coleridge had their early verses published in the newspapers (Magnuson 41–2). Southey later told Henry Taylor that in 1798 Daniel Stuart offered him “a guinea a week to supply verses for the Morning Post” (Speck 71). In November 1797, Coleridge had agreed with Stuart to provide “verses or political essays” on a regular basis and at a similar “pittance” of a guinea (CL 1: 360). At the beginning of the third volume of Letters from England, Southey, speaking through the fictitious Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, complains of government-controlled daily newspapers “in which all their measures are defended, their successes exaggerated, their disasters concealed or palliated, and the most flattering prospects constantly held out to the people” (LE 3: 25). Espriella reckons that, if the ministerial wartime estimates of Frenchmen killed were added together, “they would be found equal to all the males in the country capable of bearing arms” (LE 3: 25–6). It was to counter such propagandist reports that, a decade earlier, Coleridge launched his own shortlived weekly journal, the Watchman. Running from March to May 1796, it evaded the 1795 Gagging Acts by reprinting (without comment) articles and news items already published elsewhere—a nd adding editorial emphasis by a liberal use of italics and exclamation marks. The Watchman was distributed largely through the Unitarian network (Andrews 2003: 116–17).